The duo built a product to ease crypto trading. Now they want to ease the pain points of DeFi.
Decentralized Finance aka DeFi is the buzzword of 2020 in crypto space. Removing an intermediary from financial transactions, a distant dream, seems to have gained enough traction that it has moved from ideation to experimentation within a short span of time.
But of course, it is not easy. Ethereum network, on top of which most of these DeFi experiments are held, is clogged. The transactions are expensive, not friendly to small ticket retail traders and require a certain set of skills that would put Liam Neeson to shame – google “Liam Neeson’s set of skills” if you didn’t get it.
Ethereum network’s drawback has opened doors for other networks, both layer 1 and layer 2 to swoop in and try to save the day-Fi world. In short, Ethereum is like Bengaluru’s auto rickshaws, the rates are random- generally depending on the demand and supply, the vehicle is not comfortable, and most importantly, you feel like you paid a lot all the time. Layer 2 solutions like Matic are the Ola Cabs of the Blockchain world. Reasonable rates, reaches faster, is comfortable and accessible.
With this vision of solving the DeFi problems, the two protagonists of this story launched EasyFi – a DeFi platform built on the Matic network. This article is about the people behind EasyFi and what a proud moment it is for us, that these products are being built in India, by Indians.
Meet the Makers of EasyFi
Ankitt Gaur and Anshul Dhir are the names we hear commonly in the Indian Crypto universe. They are the co-founders of Koinfox, an innovative trading terminal allowing users to place advanced orders on multiple exchanges from one window. Koinfox expanded its prime brokerage service for fund managers, institutional investors and traders with a goal to become “India’s first global prime broker” for digital assets. According to the company, Koinfox is currently having 75,000+ users from 30+ countries “automating their trades”.
After building Koinfox, the two have come together to build EasyFi – to ease DeFi.
Ankitt Gaur has consulted global companies across 30 countries in the space of enterprise applications in the last 17 years. One of the companies he founded, Tradelink.network is a platform built on top of blockchain. It enables business processes of geographically distributed businesses and enterprises to be on a blockchain based unified platform, thereby simplifying process automation, application integration and infrastructure management. Tradelink has also received a grant from Matic Network.
I was introduced to Ankitt when I read his book “Blockchain unwrapped for Non techies” on Blockchain focused for non-technical and CXO level people to be able to understand Blockchain without having to go too in-depth into the technicalities of it.
Ankitt, along with other passionate entrepreneurs Anshul Dhir and Opinder Preet created Koinfox. Now this author is collaborating with his Koinfox co-founder and crypto mining expert Anshul Dhir.
Anshul Dhir’s experience as an entrepreneur and a consultant spans over 16 years, dedicated to building companies across Financial markets, Real estate, alternative Investments, Internet & Media. He is a certified finance professional & trader with experience in managing portfolios globally.
Anshul is a regular panelist, speaker to international forums & featured on numerous global publications like Coindesk, CNBC crypto & more. He also advises, consults various international projects, startup accelerators, and global associations.
Anshul is Gold Medalist in entrepreneurship & finance from India’s prestigious B-school XLRI Jamshedpur, has served under the Ministry of Communications & IT, Govt. of India on various administrative posts. He has founded Exuberant FinServ, Qadcore, Ethix Ventures, and of course Koinfox and EasyFi.
He also holds a certification in Bitcoin and cryptocurrency technologies at Princeton University. The team behind Koinfox, led by these co-founders have also built a blockchain based scoring and ranking tool TrustScore, which can be used to rank fund managers, signal providers, borrowers in an immutable and decentralized manner.
Building the DeFi ecosystem in India
The team behind Koinfox has created TrustScore, TradeLink and EasyFi. These products are being built in India. The first two have received a grant from Matic Network, which once again, have many Indians at the helm of it. Matic’s success has proven that Indians are ahead in Blockchain space and are quickly catching up to the west.
“DeFi empowers individuals with access to a borderless, open alternative to every financial service imaginable – savings, insurance, lending, trading to name a few”. Says Anshul adding that the fundamental shift from traditional finance is only visible to those with an open mind.
“Smart contracts have the power to address inefficiencies of the existing banking and financial system by providing almost realtime clearance & settlement. With EasyFi, we intend to bring smart financial products in lending markets and create alternative open financial system for real-world use cases”
Anshul Dhir, Co-founder – EasyFi
Speaking about the painpoints with DeFi on Ethereum, Ankitt Gaur says, “Skyrocketing Ethereum Gas fees and slow transaction speed are factors still keeping a common user away from being part of this revolution we call Decentralized Finance”. Ankitt further said that building a new DeFi platform on another blockchain infrastructure was a no-brainer.
Talking about choosing Matic to build EasyFi on, Ankitt added:
“Ethereum having the largest developer ecosystem, any infrastructure closer to Ethereum code base was an inevitable choice we were looking for while deciding upon the tech stack to start the EasyFi development. During the process of exploration, Matic ticked all the boxes and hence we decided to start the next journey of DeFi mass adoption with Matic. Solving the problems of transaction speed, efficiency and composability once & for all. “
Ankitt Gaur, Co-founder – EasyFi
Matic Network solves the Ethereum network problems by building a decentralized platform using an adapted version of Plasma framework that provides a solution for faster and extremely low-cost transactions with finality on the main chain.
The system ensures liveliness using PoS checkpoints which are pushed to the Ethereum mainchain. This enables a single Matic sidechain to theoretically achieve 2 16 transactions per block, and possibly millions of transactions on multiple chains in the future.
Will Matic and EasyFi along with several other up and coming Blockchain projects originating from India lead the revolution in Decentralized protocols? We can’t say now, but it does look promising.
Let us know what you think about DeFi in India in the comments below.
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