Reimagining Savings: How Blend is Redefining Finance for the Global Economy

GMGM. 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've built.

And today, I'm excited to welcome a couple of DD legends, Manny Narang and Jamie Morris, who are the co-founders of Blend.

So if you don't know, Blend is a global savings account that adapts to your currency, yield, and market exposure.

So, if you stick around for today's episode, you'll get to meet Manny and Jamie, learn about Blend, get a peek at some of the latest alpha around the platform, and how you can get started with them today.

All right, let's get into it.

GMGM, welcome to the show, Jamie and Manny. Uh, excited to have you guys on.

Thanks for having me.

Glad to be here. Yeah, we're excited.

My pleasure, my pleasure. Uh, yeah, I'm, I'm always quite fond of the stories of, uh, DD members, uh, starting their own company. There's been a lot, the DD factory, DD community factory has been speeding out, um, these awesome, uh, awesome startups. And you guys are no different, and I'm excited, excited to have you guys here to, uh, tell the story behind Blend.

Um, but before we get into that, uh, would you guys just like to give a brief introduction about yourselves?

Yeah, I'll kick it off to Jamie first.

Of course.

Hi everyone, I'm Jamie, the CTO of Blend.

I got into crypto in 2014, I spent a long time there, mostly personally.

Um, I made it into crypto professionally in 2022, where I joined UMA and Across. Spent three years there, um, and then I realized why, why not actually make an impact with DeFi and how it works. Uh, we know, I noticed that DeFi is fundamentally, um, there's no common interface, so I wanted to, to be able to actually help that. So.

Yeah, thanks Jamie. For me, um, it's a story of how all Developer DAO members got into crypto, right? Um, and that shout out,

and that's, you know, everyone knows who this person is, shout out to Nader, you know, this beautiful like NFT that appeared, no one really know what to do.

You went to Etherscan, you, you blew way too much gas on this thing.

Um, but then you minted it, you got into this community, it made you feel like home, and it taught you like the first things of smart contract development, we all made NFTs, uh, Developer DAO was an NFT.

You know, classically trained quote unquote educated in like computer science and discrete math, did the whole Web2 thing.

Some one big notable company, I guess, I worked at a few of them but I worked at BlackBerry.

Um, I'm Canadian, so shout out, I love my Canadian companies.

Um, and then there, you know, Developer DAO was a natural fit, I bounced around as like this what's this like cool DAO thing, you know, DAOs were like a way that we thought like you can congregate as a collective and get cool things done and Developer DAO got a lot of cool things done.

And I got to contribute at like a lot of other cool DAOs, Arbitrum, you know, all these other places, um, and then naturally slowly get into like, get away from Web2 and say, hey, I want to stick my feet into this.

Um, and, you know, that's kind of where I lended into a journey of, you know, meeting Jamie at Risk Labs, um, also like the founders, Canadian as well, which also helps, Canadian vibes, everything through.

So that was like my whole story.

Same idea, was super interested on like solving that problem of, you know, I like like prediction market, something powering prediction markets, this was cool, so let me go help grow that. I love like the idea of the bridges are like existing, people are not going to be on one chain, so that kind of made me really like eager to go and contribute in this space.

Amazing, amazing. And yeah, uh, you, you hit it, hit the nail on the head there. It's just like a lot of people that started in the DAO, um, came in there out of curiosity, like, like myself.

Uh, I indeed blew too much gas on those NFTs, but the NFTs were free, uh, I didn't have to pay $100,000 to buy my JPEG, um, but it, it was, um, that gas investment, uh, was one of the best, I think, I I've made in my, in my lifetime so far.

Um, you get to meet a lot of friends, get to learn a lot of interesting, um, interesting technology, and the vibes in the, in the DAO are immaculate, so, um, and, uh, yeah, uh, that's amazing.

And, and you guys mentioned you, you both used to work at the Risk Labs, um, I know, uh, I know, uh, Manny was always, always, uh, tooting the horn of, of UMA and, and, uh, and whatnot.

Hah, hah, hah.

So, um, just curious like, um, from your time, you guys, your guys' time working together, was there ever a point where you're like, oh, I think, um,

I think I can, I can contribute back to the world a little bit more than I can hear and, like what's kind of the inspiration between you guys, um, kind of breaking off, um, from this labs and kind of starting your own thing.

Yeah, I think Manny, you can take that one.

Yeah, you want me to take that one? Okay, um,

I it it the Risk Labs like, you know, great company.

Great culture, all that great stuff there, um, but what lended landed me and Jamie closer is like this common thing of like camaraderie, so we hung out, played a lot of Fortnite together.

And it was just like, it just started off as like very humble like friends and say, hey, what are you doing in the evening after work? Like, like the DAO, right?

What are you doing, let's play some Fortnite.

And then it just like, hey, I made this, I made that, where you staking in DeFi?

And it's like, oh, this is so like, this experience is like really horrible, can we like do something here?

And we're like, yeah, like we work at a product that's so like cryptonative, what have we thought about like this awesome promise of bringing normal people into DeFi?

Like, we like, like it's almost like a fundamental right for us, um, to have like savings, like how do we move humanity past like day-to-day paychecks and like, and like not worry about like, oh my God, is this like centralized body going to take my money?

We have this like decentralized body, so like why not take our expertise?

Mine is growth, Jamie's is like building these really robust DeFi systems and like, let's start conquering this world.

It was all fun and games on Fortnite, we played we we like tinkered around and talked about it, and then we just got serious about it and said like, okay, like.

There's a one point of like dreaming about it, and then the other point of it is putting pen to paper or code the smart contracts and say, let's push something out and let's talk to early customers, is there interest in this? And then it was just this natural curiosity, um, and you'll see me quote this a lot, like action provides information.

Uh, shout out to Brian Armstrong from Coinbase, and I just keep, that's like the motto of Blend.

Yeah, and yeah, I, I I have that quote stapled in my mind, um, every day, it's just like, you got to do things and after you do things, you'll, you'll get information.

Um, and, uh, yeah, and I guess you touched on it briefly, um, a lot of the, um, a lot of DeFi ecosystem, um, it's it's getting better now, um, but it's very tough to go from that zero to one of like, oh, I've bought my first sats, bought my first ETH.

Um, in your, in your guys' opinion, um, what are some of the, the core issues maybe still at play that are hindering a lot of people from, um, going past that, that first stage?

I think a lot of it is accessibility. It's hard to reason about connecting to an application when you need to have an ex, like an extension to even to even get started. Um, it's also hard to get money onto a service in the first place if in order to get money into an an economy is is a YouTube tutorial on how to even connect and where to send money and how to send money and all of the the steps in between. So I I'm confident that the improvement of UX there is is really going to come from people being able to connect directly to the the systems that they trust, and where Web3 acts almost as a companion to start to these Web2 technologies, so that people can more easily onboard.

So I think it's in general an onboarding problem. Yeah, I would agree, I would agree with that. Um, onboarding, and then, you know, we're we're trying to like shift the paradigm and we can go deeper in the technology how do you build like in this newer paradigm, but one thing you'll realize is that like we tried to make sure that you can come on to Blend the most comfortable way.

And so, we like to think ourselves as like a Web2.5 company, Google, log in, um, come from your Coinbase like SE, you can do other like, you know, Revolut coming on, you know, other like onboarding products.

That's just because like the demographic that we're chasing our people that are comfortable with these services.

They may not even want to connect their bank account, because that's always like a little bit iffy, you'll connect your Revolut or your Cash App or your other like app into the thing, but you don't want to collect your bank account as like your sacred like spot.

So that's what we kind of been focused on.

It's just onboarding, um, and then meeting the users where they are, um, yeah.

Excellent, excellent.

And, uh, yeah, well said. Uh, I, I, I've been, uh, playing around with Blend a little bit.

Uh, deposited a little bit of money there just to see the, the look and feel and, and to support, uh, the friends here.

Um, and, uh,

Hah, hah, hah.

Yes, uh,

Hah, hah, hah.

I would love to kind of see this in action and I would love our audience to kind of see this in action as well, um, if you guys want to bring up your screen and kind of take us, uh, on a tour of Blend and, uh, some of the features.

Do you want me to do that, Jamie? Or you want to do that?

Yeah, I think that would be great.

Let me do it.

You might have a better, better balance than I do right now.

Hah, hah, hah.

Hah, hah.

I've got the dev account.

Hah, hah, hah.

All right, let me know when you see my screen.

Uh, can you zoom in just a bit, uh, on your screen, Manny?

I can't.

That's how's that?

That's good. Yeah.

Okay. So we can start with Blend on like a logged-out state, we talked about this and I'll go pretty quickly, the logged-out state is like, we still want you to feel Web3-ish, which means like, you can still feel preview of the app without actually signing up.

I think that's like come a de facto thing that we've learned, a lot of people hide that away, but users still want to see what they're going to play with.

But what we do is we allow you to see all the types of accounts that you can create.

We let you do all the fun things because like long-term savings and like healthy habits, which is deposits and like time in market.

So we let you play with this, you can see that I love for demos to think in Brazilian reals, because I think it's a really fun currency to kind of think about.

Um, so when I come in and my positions are my dashboard's already set up, but you can set it up,

it what we call the USD protection, this is the soft, this is the launch on the USD protection, these are some of the weaker currencies that potentially want, uh, to come in and save their money in US dollars, but they still think in day-to-day Brazilian reals, which is completely fine.

You sign in, we want to give you like a very nice sign-in experience.

Uh, you can sign in with your Google account, which is nice.

Um, make it really easy for the users to come in.

That it automatically generates you a Privy, uh, wallet.

And then what you don't see right now is because I'm already user, you can create, it'll let you create what we call a one-to-one Gnosis Safe.

So that's what we said, these are all individually singly managed accounts, so my Gnosis Safe is already created and this wallet is the owner of that Gnosis Safe.

So you have all that abstraction, um, but right now we're offering USDC and all these one native pairs will come on board and then we'll keep going into other markets, gold, natural gas, Spy.

The list will go on for the types of exposures that you can create on Blend.

You can, you can deposit via debit card or, um, bank, that's all seamless, you pick your onramp.

Bing it all comes in with one click.

Um, external wallet for people that have wallets that they have money outside of, uh, like you know, already a crypto wallet and then they can bring that into Blend.

And when it comes into Blend, it sits in your Blend wallet, so what we said is like, we understand from our users that you don't want to keep your external wallet always connected to the website.

You just want to bring in maybe 50 bucks a week and you'll drip it in the way you please.

And so you can do that, so here I have $10 of USD, I want to bring, I have that in, I want to bring that into Blend.

Everything is gas sponsored, everything is taking care of, you don't really think about this.

We can even keep extracting this further, but for now we're in this like nice, like state, uh, of like crypto.

Uh, people still want information and so that all is going to be allocated, the funds are in transit.

You can see all the allocations that we're going, we're very clear, one thing that Blend is, is that we have a full quant shop that does a full due diligence report.

Transparency, transparency, if you think of like ETFs, you think of other things.

They publish reports, what are they doing, what's their risk profile, that's all available here in this due diligence report.

Which will just take a little second to load up as it's it's like.

Uh, it ties into our back end here and you can see everything that from risk profile, um, you can see change logs, you can see what the quants are thinking, you can see all those things.

Like Blend is very, very on top of everything, it even caught like Stream Finance stuff three, four days and the users were all.

Like everybody with like, you know, already knew that something was acting funky, so it's like from like we said, everything is positioned for long-term savings.

You should be able to press that withdrawal button any time you want, no constraints.

Um, yeah, and so then we go into more gamification.

You can have your daily rewards, which people love, you can come and spin for more like points.

There's a dashboard as well.

Um, so there's a.

Manny, maybe bring up the Blend Intelligence.

Yeah, in a second.

Um, and we'll go through this like leader board, you can have all the leader board here for the users, they can see all that.

Another thing that we're working closely with Base is like local stablecoins, so you can swap into your Brazilian real.

Cheaper than you can do on on like offline off-chain products, um, you can do your Euros, uh, Singaporean dollars.

And we'll keep adding more and more currencies for your global FX and then you can offramp them directly to your bank, so you're gonna go visit Brazil, take your USDC, swap to Brazilian real, offramp it in your Brazilian real access.

Um, and then one step further.

Is how do we bring this normy feeling, everyone loves their LLMs, every LLM, whether it's Claude or it's ChatGPT.

And now we've gone further and so you can you can just say like, talk to Blend.

You can ask things like how do you manage risk.

And so that's like a pre-defined one, but you can ask him more things like, you know,

I want to swap and it's like, okay, what do you want to swap and it'll walk you through the whole process, so we want to like normalize DeFi in a nice, comfortable way so that people that don't really want to know all the nitty gritty stuff can just go to the Blend intelligence, ask it to do things like withdrawal, deposit, what is this Euler earn, what is this thing, ask tell me in normy languages.

So that's kind of the goal like lower the barrier.

Have a full like bank account feel, um, and just make you have another companion product in your savings journey.

Love that.

Excellent that's amazing.

Uh, a little bit of alpha for for the folks watching, uh, watching today.

Stick around.

Um, stick around, that's right.

Um, and, uh, as we're kind of closing, uh, closing in on time here.

Um, just wanted to, um, I'm always curious, um, to to hear from, um, the founders' perspective.

Like for our audience today, um, if there's someone in the crowd that might be thinking about starting their own project, maybe, maybe with their friend or a group of friends.

Um, what's I guess one key piece of advice, um, you you'd give to them, um, to to help them get on their way?

Um, I can go first Jamie.

And then let you go give your.

Um, hey, find a cool group of people to hang out with, which is like Developer DAO.

Like having a, you like sorry, I got to plug in the, the community that I really think you, you need cool people that understand technology and understand like what's going on to build the right product.

So like I am a pretty sap for this, but build something that solves your own personal problem first.

And then expand from that, that's literally what we did.

I live in I'm I'm Canadian, I wanted to have like yield in Canadian dollars, but and so I was like, how do I do this?

Um, that was like the first thing we wanted to solve and and and then I wanted to say like teach my parents this cool idea of like, what is like crypto and what's the easiest way for them to give in.

It's like, build something that they can use as well.

So I always stand is like, build something cool for yourself.

And if you build something for yourself, then you're much more entitled to keep working on it.

If you're building like, oh, I'm going to raise a billion dollars doing this.

Uh, we've all seen people raise lots and lots of money.

It doesn't mean that the product is going to make things.

Least if it nothing goes further, you build something cool that you're proud of, I think that's like the North Star.

I, I like that.

Right, that's why every developer starts with a calculator.

I think, like, you build something you can use.

Um, genuinely, Narb, I would say my advice to everybody and to anyone who wants to start a, like create a startup, who's in the process of creating a startup, and who's gotten at least their first no, is to really develop, condition yourself to accept no, because that person may or may not just see the vision.

Right, everybody at some point has to be tested on this, and I think the biggest takeaway that we've had with Blend is just to remain highly convicted.

Really be like fueled up by your idea, right, because it's it's kind of what you're hanging your hat on, so, yeah, I would just say, I guess just that, just keep, keep at it, basically.

I I think that's wonderfully said, um, from both of you and, uh, thank you for sharing that.

And hopefully that, uh, ignites a spark under somebody watching today, uh, maybe in the DD community, uh, to get going with their startup.

Um, no better time than now.

Um, and, uh, just before I let you both go, uh, I know you're very busy, um, how can people, um, get started with Blend?

How can they keep up with all the news, I also saw that you guys had, uh, recently launched an ambassador program.

Um, what's the best way for people to get involved?

Yeah, uh, flying, you know, follow the Blend Money account.

Obviously, Discord is a cool place to hang out, um, but if you're not like if Discord is not your thing, you can just follow the account.

Um, we started an ambassador program A because we think that like there's a lot of like DeFi enthusiasts out there and they want to learn about DeFi, so like what's the best place to learn from DeFi?

You you want to like contribute to a project, um, and like I would say a good chunk of everyone that's probably listening that has a job.

You contributed at at some company or some product that you loved and now that expertise turned into a full-time job.

And so that's the key, that's why we built the ambassador program, is curiosity, if DeFi fills you up and you want to learn everything about DeFi.

Then we're one team, you we're happy to like take you under the shadow, be our ambassador, preach what we're building if you think it's great.

And and that's how you actually harden your skills.

We're we're learning in a new society where resumes are built by being participating in and getting your hands dirty and that's why we made the ambassador program.

Well said.

Well said.

And uh all that information will be in the description of um the this episode below.

So definitely check that out. Uh and with that, uh Manny Jamie, uh thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to come chat with us today.

This was really fun. Hope you guys had fun as well, um, and uh, yeah, really looking forward to seeing how Blend evolves, uh, this year and beyond.

Amazing.

Thanks, Narb.

Thank you, Narb.

Take care.

Sure. All right, all, uh hope you have a very, uh great Wednesday, uh Thursday ahead.

And we'll catch you back here this Friday, uh for another episode of DevNTell.

Till then, have a good one, folks.

Cheers.