Korea’s premier crypto and blockchain event, Korea Blockchain Week, saw crypto enthusiasts from around the world converge in Seoul for inspirational keynotes, panel discussions, pitch competitions, investor meet-ups, and world-class networking opportunities.
In an exclusive FLUID LIVE interview, FLUID’s Head of Marketing and Communications, Matias Jeldrez, spoke to Nick Avramov, Co-Founder of Symbiosis, to gather his thoughts on fragmented liquidity and how it impacts the crypto industry.
Q. How has Korea Blockchain Week been so far?
Despite the rain being a damper, the event has seen quite a massive turnout of dedicated crypto supporters from across the globe. Given the current market volatility, it’s interesting to see that the event gained a lot of traction among NFTs, cross-chain exchanges, and venture capitalists, and that’s positive. Everyone that’s participating or attending is wholly committed to the event.
Q. Could you tell us a bit about what you do? What is Symbiosis?
Symbiosis Finance is a multi-chain liquidity protocol that aggregates decentralized exchange liquidity across all EVM and some non-EVM networks. Symbiosis aims at solving the twofold problem: liquidity fragmentation across different blockchain networks, and poor user experience while working with Defi and web3 economy. Unlike existing DEXs, Symbiosis supports cross-chain swaps between any two blockchains that enable the generation of EdDSA and ECDSA keys. In practice, that means a user could take, say, an ERC-20 token and swap it for Solana, or Polygon, or crypto assets built on Binance Smart Chain.
Q. Fragmented liquidity is a critical issue in the industry, causing prices for a single token to vary widely across exchanges. This leads to oligopolies that are highly powerful entities, siloed liquidity, and the potential for arbitrage, market manipulation, flash crashes, and other activities. Does this remark strike a chord with you? What does it entail to be your own liquidity aggregator?
I completely agree. What we really accomplish stems from issues that we specifically address: fragmented liquidity across various blockchain networks and poor user experience while working with Defi and Web3 economies. To allow accurate communication with the providers of various services, such as wallets, and to take advantage of the free flow of assets, we provide the provisionality to operate with many DEXs in a fluid manner since we have addressed the market efficiency issues that you have already highlighted.
I believe that crypto is the next big thing. This is because a new generation of services will be built on top of the existing infrastructure. We should anticipate that crypto and web3 will go further than offering financial services and drive exponential growth in GameFi and Social. What we are doing is really creating the foundation for a future economy, and I think that is incredible.
Q. One of the things we realized in the market was a lack of education on the retail side, and the big thing is that institutional traders know when to sell. It’s important for liquidity aggregators like Symbiosis and FLUID to exist because we provide one environment where users can have all exit opportunities in one place, to get out of a position for example. Do you think education is needed in the market for retail investors?
In one instance, when I was marketing a different service before I co-founded Symbiosis, we announced on Twitter that we would offer bonuses to users who shared their private keys, and then, all of a sudden, users began posting their private keys unintentionally. We had to make it clear that it was a joke. This actually shows that there is a serious issue since people aren’t really educated on the subject.
Therefore, even though cryptocurrency restores freedom to the hands of the people, as it is their money, we still need to educate people on how to handle this freedom and what they can do to avoid being intimidated by large institutions that are skilled at conducting trades. I think there is work to be done here. It’s extremely important to join forces to first provide educational content, and then collaborate with organisations and universities that have taught courses on blockchain. I also think that education should be mandatory in the content plan of every single product planned for the future.
Q. Do you think regulation is needed in the crypto space? What are your thoughts on that?
When we talk about regulation, we see it as something that’s detrimental to progress, and something literally evil. Regulation is, most of the time, a tool to solve some of the problems we have in the industry and to protect investors across the board. Yes, authorities in Europe and the US are pretty conservative in their approach towards crypto and are, at times, impulsive in decision making and how they implement or impose legislation on the industry as a whole.
That being said, I believe there’s also an angle where the Web3 and crypto community should work with regulators because they need to be educated as well. As an industry, we’re not building a platform for the sake of building. Rather, we’re creating a possibility that can enable a billion users in Africa and emerging economies to benefit from the prosperity of a Web3 economy. It’s a fact that around 2 billion people don’t have access to banking and it presents an opportunity for the crypto industry to solve such problems. The crypto community’s stand shouldn’t be to shun regulation, but to work with regulators and governments to create a framework that is beneficial to the industry.
Q. What’s your perspective, your personal one, on the future of innovation and growth in commerce?
In my opinion, there won’t be a single blockchain champion like Ethereum or Solana since the future will truly be multi-chain. Instead, I believe there will be five general-purpose blockchain networks as well as several special-purpose blockchains that address a variety of purposes. Interoperability has been a key component of blockchain technology from the start. I believe it will materialise in this situation as we observe an increase in the inter-chain communication that aims to provide a pathway for the free exchange of assets and information across various blockchain networks. Therefore, among these professional protocols, we may even see a hundred of them.
Secondly, I believe that NFTs will organically increase and expand beyond merely images. We’ll see NFTs, NFTs for music, and more. I think all of the internet’s material may be contained in an NFT. And lastly, in the coming years, we’ll witness a landmark one billion users in the crypto economy and I honestly believe with the help of FLUID, we can work toward a promising future.
To watch the interview, click here.
