Exploring Agentic AI for DeFi: How ORO Turns Chat into On-Chain Action

GM GM. Welcome to what's going to be another fantastic episode of DevNTell. So if you didn't know, DevNTell is a 30-minute podcast held every week allowing founders, hackers, and anyone in between, the opportunity to come on the show and showcase what they built. And today, I'm ecstatic to welcome Katerina Vdovichenko, who is the co-founder of ORO. So if you don't know, ORO is the AI companion that turns your words into on-chain execution, supporting operations like swaps, staking, lending, and bridging all across every chain. So if you stick around for today's episode, you'll get to get to meet Katerina, learn how you can turn your words into on-chain execution and more. All right, let's get into it.

GM GM, welcome to the show Katerina, I'm ecstatic to have you on today.

Thank you for having me on, excited to to to be here.

Yeah, yeah, likewise. And I'm excited for our audience to learn all about how you've how you guys have co-mingled AI and crypto into a legitimate use case, versus just the a play thing. But, I guess before we get into that, would you just like to give a introduction about yourself.

Of course. Well, I'm Katerina, co-founder of ORO, where I also lead business development departments. I'm a serial entrepreneur myself and have been fortunate to work in various ventures during the last 5 plus years at this point. And my background has always been at the intersection of technology and business growth, and crypto kind of came into my life actually a long time ago, before I even started working as an individual, so I was a teenager. But yeah, that's roughly about me.

Right on. And I'm just curious, like what got you into the technology scene? Like was there a particular moment where you were like, oh yes, computer science, technology, crypto is the thing for me?

Actually, my journey started in 2013, but I did I just, at that point, I started getting around the actual topic, the decentralization, Bitcoin, and at that point there was a boom when people were mining Bitcoin, they were ordering Bitcoin machines and it was in my circle too, so that's why I got into just understanding of what is it, what is it, you know, new, and an exciting area where stepping into, and I started digging deeper. And then at that point, I didn't do much about it, I was just buying something, selling something, and just observing as it was growing and failing and growing again, so I was throughout this rollercoaster as an observer, but then I started working for different companies around 5, 6 years ago.

Gotcha, gotcha. Yeah. I'm always keen to learn everybody's journey in the space and your's is amazing, no different than others that come on the show. And as I understand it, you also host your own podcast. Did you just want to do a plug of that here?

Absolutely, thank you for giving me time for that. Yes, I host X Spaces series every single week on Wednesday. It's called Oro Beats where I welcome exciting founders with amazing projects that actually drive the adoption in the world, and yeah, so it's been already my 11th episode this Wednesday and really excited for the next one, so tune in everyone who who wants to get into the hood of what is brewing up and what is the latest things in crypto.

Amazing, amazing. And yeah, I guess today, the roles are reversed. You're the one being interviewed so to speak. So yeah, I'm really excited about that. We are on the other side of the mic.

I'm really excited about that. On the other side of the mic.

Yeah, for sure. Yeah, so I guess to help set the scene, as we've seen, and I'm sure you've experienced, I know I've experienced this. When people first really get into the on-chain stuff, the DeFi side of things, or maybe not even DeFi yet, just buying their first set of sats or some ETH for the first time through an exchange, a lot of time, when people want to take that next step to actually go into the DeFi side of things, oftentimes, a lot of people are like, oh, I don't know how to do this. Maybe they're not as technically proficient or it's just like the UX isn't there. Even now, maybe in 2026. I guess from your perspective, what are some of the biggest hurdles that the average person might go through, just trying to experience the whole on-chain experience?

This is a great question because actually in this question, you have already an answer because you said it right. The landing curve is just very, very steep and the first step is very easy. You just open an exchange and you buy some as you said, e or bitcoin and I mean, fraction of bitcoin maybe to start with, but you feel, okay, so I've accomplished something. But the moment you want to actually do something with that money, earn yield, sell, lend, borrow, access RWAs, real world assets, it becomes a completely different world. So you're suddenly started dealing with the wallets, with gas fees, with slippage, with bridges, with contract approvals. So the jargon is literally endless, left alone, you know, just to to navigate UX, you know, that comes after that. So there's no, actually, no one that is telling you what you're about, kind of if you're about to make a mistake or lose money to a bad contract. The complexity is the real barrier and for most people, it's just not worth the time, it's not worth the stress to go this curve in order to perform some, maybe basic operations on a blockchain, and that's the exactly the problem that we are solving at Oro.

Yeah, yeah, 100%. I've taken a peek around and yeah, certainly, your guys's company are are indeed solving that issue. I mean, if we think about just using a regular bank, say like a wire payment, right? It's like, if you make a wire, say we're wiring some money from US to Canada or or or wherever, you just know that, oh hey, I just need to input some some fields and tell me tell like who's going to get the money, how much I'm sending, and then all that complexity of of of that operation is like abstracted away from from the person. Interestingly enough, like that hasn't been a thing in the crypto crypto scene, at least until recently. But, but yeah, slowly but surely we're getting there.

Well, hopefully. We'll get there sooner rather than later, but it's definitely on the horizon.

Absolutely. And I think this is a good segue to introduce ORO to the audience. So, I guess what's your elevator pitch so to speak, of ORO?

So ORO is the interface layer for all on-chain finance, that's how we like to think about it. So what Cursor has done for coding, that's what we're doing for on-chain finance. It's basically a personal AI gateway to all the finance that exists on chain. Think of us as a, also, another metaphor, as the Robinhood for DeFi space. We want anyone regardless of their technical background, to be able to access the best investment opportunities on chain without needing to understand any of the underlying complexity that we talked about previously. The user shouldn't feel that they need to first, I don't know, study, studying some sort of courses, and then access it.

The user should just be able to access all the opportunities that are out there, without learning all this, you know, jargon, and all this slang. They should feel like they're, you know, putting their money to work, earning yields through tokenized vaults and lending/borrowing protocols, all of this jazz. We are handling everything on the back end, and under the hood, that's where everything is brewing up. But at the exit, you receive just a very clean UX without any complexity in there.

Awesome. And then, yeah, I mean, people need to take a stab at at at doing this just because it doesn't look like doesn't look like anybody else is is trying to, at least from a wallet perspective, and and whatnot. But, maybe in the age of AI, right, we don't need to because, interestingly enough, all the transactions and the way things work is very nicely set up for a machine to to understand.

So, I guess from an origin story point of view, how how did you end up co-founding ORO? Like what's the what's the story there?

Actually, I have two co-founders that are more technical than me, but we both came from the background where we spent years making complex technology in ways accessible to people themselves, more from AI to health care, to education perspective, me more in scaling ventures and doing strategic execution in various companies. And we kept seeing the same pattern where incredible technology is sitting behind walls that most people could not just access and have an opportunity to test it and try it. And DeFi was the most extreme version of that. There is lots of money that are sitting in assets that are going to be tokenized soon by 2034. We just recently had a keynote speech on ZigChain summit that was happening here in Dubai and we've done additional research, there's 30 trillion dollars that are sitting in assets, and all that's going to be tokenized. So and there's, all of that cannot be accessed by just a simple regular person, because the infrastructure layer is not there. So we decided to build it essentially. We started as being one of the, we decided to be first to penetrate in the first chain that actually supported us amazingly well, it's called ZigChain, and we became their decentralized exchange so we became a main layer, liquidity layer, on ZigChain.

And then after that, we integrated majority of their dApps, lending/borrowing protocol, staking protocol, and we became a super app of that chain. And then we decided, we understood that the opportunity is much, much larger than just being on one chain, and we pushed this vision of ours to become chain agnostic, just recently, one and a half months ago. But that vision was always with us, we just wanted to make this launch of our AI much broader and that's what we've done recently. So developed a new language to interact with the DeFi space and abstract all the complexity that exists currently.

That's certainly quite quite the journey. So starting out from a DEX, and and kind of expanding out, fulfilling fulfilling at least part part of the vision. And you kind of teased at it, but what are exactly all the operations and actions people can perform using ORO?

So at its core, ORO is a conversational AI layer on top of DeFi. So you tell it what you want to do in a simple, plain, human language, say, I want to put 5000 dollars into diversified private credit fund. And we under the hood, we'll find you the best opportunities to do that, with figuring out all the complexity, the optimal route for that, I guess, treat the entire transaction for you and only ask for your signature then. So you have this sense of control, it's not like everything is done for you and you have no idea what is happening. So you have this control you need to sign all the contracts, but then we have a stack of all these dApps, everything that you need to interact with prepared for you so you see what you're interacting with.

But let's say you want to stake something, some sort of ecosystem, but then you understand that the best yield opportunities is in another one, and we show you, and we guide you through this experience. So we cater to everyone from complete new comers to power users, everyone genuinely gets just better experience using our interface, but also becomes some sort of educational platform for people who never interacted with DeFi.

Is the wallet that that's used, by the app, is it managed by the AI or is it a self-custody wallet that you have to connect?

We are not touching anyone's finance, we're not touching anyone's money. So we have integrated already MetaMask, Phantom, and since we started on Cosmos as DK, we already have Kepler, Leap, and also to our other wallets, also are in line, in the pipeline to be integrated. So you just touch your own wallet and you work through that. But also we just recently had an integration with Getpar, which is social login, so you can actually use your Gmail if you want to access our platform.

My gears are turning a bit as you're kind of explaining this. Does ORO support things like Polymarket and Kalshi, like being able to kind of do that on-chain, I guess betting, on the fly using English?

Not yet, not yet, but let's see, let's see where our journey will bring us. I mean, that's a very kind of sexy environment right now because everyone is speaking about it, everyone going in there, they were evaluated recently I think 20 or 30 billion, right? Kalshi, I mean, particularly. So, yeah, I mean everyone is getting into this field, we have not integrated anything of that sort yet.

ORO takes security pretty seriously from from what I've read. You guys have something called Shield Engine. Could you kind of take us through what that does and how that protects people?

Shield Engine is what makes ORO trustworthy and not just easy to use because before any transaction ever reaches yourself for signature, Shield Engine runs a full validation sweep, so it checks your intent, it checks the wallet state, every relevant smart contract involved, and then simulates the entire transaction, including gas, to make sure that nothing unexpected happens along the way and only after all of that clears, it only does after that, your signature. So, by that time you see the signature request, you know it's very, very safe and there's so much that's been performed, you know, on the back end. So we've essentially built a security and sanity layer that stands between the user and the chaos of on-chain operations.

Does this run on every type of operation, correct? Or is it just a select set?

As long as it's on our platform, it runs like that for every single transaction, the engine exists for that to power it.

For our developer audience that's watching today, is it possible for them to integrate ORO into their own dApps if they want to introduce this type of on-chain action?

Well, we have in plans to open ORO up for developers, giving them access to our APIs so they can bring, you know, our intelligent layer and conversational layer into their own apps. I'll also say, without going into too much of a detail, that we are in conversation with a significant Fintech company about integrating ORO's their intelligent and conversational layer for DeFi. So the B2B and developer side is very much a part of our roadmap.

On the topic of AI, I know AI, I mean, we see there's like a new model and everyone's trying to one-up each other like every week basically. In the process of building ORO, how much back and forth did you all have to do to tune the AI model just right so that it wouldn't hallucinate and it would call the right tools?

That's a good question because that's what is going to trigger a person whether they're going to trust our platform or not. We have a proprietary training of our AI. We're not a Fintech or deep tech company, so we have it developed from scratch, the LLM itself. But we trained a model and why I'm saying proprietary training, because my co-founders, they have a background in AI, they were building blockchain AI products for the last 11 years. So they're very, very versed in that. They didn't start just, you know, a year ago when all that became more of a mainstream, let's say one and a half years ago. At that point, they were integral part of this ecosystem for long long time. So we have proprietary way of training it. So right now, it indeed doesn't hallucinate. We tested it quite a lot from all sorts of sides and we had since the test net launch which was last summer, we had a bounty program for people who were testing our AI in order to, you know, not go into the route where it stops or it hallucinates or it stops working.

What can you share about the North Star vision of ORO and kind of what you all have planned for the rest of 2026.

The vision is to be the Robinhood of DeFi, to be the main interface layer for all the finance that sits on chain because finance itself is coming on the chain, that's inevitable, it's happening as we speak. So the question is who is going to be the main layer that makes it feel as natural as using any app on your phone. And we believe that's ourselves, that's ORO. And near term we are focused on expanding our wallet offerings, deepening the Shield Engine and growing our developer ecosystem. We are also in our seed round right now and actively talking to strategic partners to identify who is going to be coming with us unto the this journey together from now onwards.

What's the best way for people to follow along in the journey with ORO, get involved?

Super simple, go to askoro.ai which is our domain, try it yourself and tell us what you think. We are active on socials, and feel free to find us there. I mean, right now people are listening, both on YouTube as you mentioned and X.

All those resources are in the description of the podcast below. So definitely check that out if that's something that interests you. And unfortunately, we've reached time.

Thank you so much for having me, I had a great conversation, a great time with you.