- Leshner says his firm Robot Ventures is keen on investing in DeFi on Ripple.
- It's an unusual leap for on of DeFi's earliest founders.
Ripple just won over a DeFi godfather.
Robert Leshner, one of the earliest DeFi founders on Ethereum, is now looking to back crypto entrepreneurs building decentralised applications on Ripple.
With just eight DeFi apps and over five million user accounts on the XRP Ledger, Leshner says the network’s sizable user base is ripe for new products.
“What makes DeFi on Ripple exciting is the massive retail userbase they’ve built, even in the absence of onchain applications,” he told DL News.
“The introduction of DeFi could be met with an extremely active userbase.”
It’s a striking development.
Unlike Ethereum, a decentralised network which hosts nearly $73 billion across hundreds of financial applications, Ripple is a centralised company with roughly 900 employees and a business predicated on penetrating one of the most hidebound traditional networks in finance — cross-border payments.
It sells blockchain solutions powered by the XRP token to financial firms like MoneyGram, PNC Bank, and Santander.
In the last seven days, the token powering Ripple’s suite of technologies has soared 80% and nearly doubled its market capitalisation to $151 billion, according to CoinGecko.
Ethereum, on the other hand, has risen just 7% over that same period.
Indeed, Ethereum and Ripple couldn’t be more antithetical, which makes Leshner’s leap all the more puzzling.
He is, after all, one of the original founders of DeFi on Ethereum.
Leshner launched Compound Finance in 2017, one of the very first lending protocols on the network. That project also invented yield farming — a practice by which users are rewarded in a protocol’s native token simply for using the protocol — onto the market in 2020.
So, is he just hopping on the XRP bandwagon?
Not quite, he says.
Leshner said Ripple’s decentralised future is just getting started.
Solving Ripple’s bottlenecks
One of Ripple’s blockchain solutions is the XRP Ledger, a blockchain akin to Ethereum or Solana.
Unlike those two blockchains, the XRP Ledger has automated market makers, like Uniswap or Raydium, that are natively integrated.
Leshner says this has already shown promise. Trading volumes on the blockchain’s decentralised exchanges soared amid the latest XRP rally.
There’s just one problem.
I’ve been playing around with Ripple DeFi today and I am completely unsure how many IQ points I’ve lost or gained
— Robert Leshner (@rleshner) November 30, 2024
Without generalised smart contract programmability, which essentially lets developers build anything they want on a blockchain, Ripple’s DeFi future is limited.
That’s expected to change with the launch of the Ripple EVM sidechain, and would make the network a lot more like Ethereum.
And Leshner wants to be there long before it arrives.
“We see it as an inflection point for the arrival of DeFi on Ripple,” he said. “We’re interested in meeting teams building for Ripple DeFi in advance of its readiness.”
Liam Kelly is a Berlin-based DL News correspondent. Got a tip? Email at liam@dlnews.com.