SotN #42: Ethereum Devs Building DeFi | Preston Van Loon and Will Villanueva

Both Preston Van Loon of Cryptex and Will Willanueva of Element Finance have helped build the Ethereum Protocol, but are now both working on DeFi apps.

In this State of the Nation, we dive into what it's like for Ethereum Devs building DeFi.

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Tremendous work has been (and is still being) done to develop Ethereum 2, and just as much innovation is happening in Ethereum's app layer, DeFi. In this week's State of the Nation, we bring on guys who have done both: Preston Van Loon and Will Villanueva.

Preston Van Loon is a former Google software engineer who switched to crypto full-time after Vitalik put 1000 ETH into Prysmatic Labs, which Preston founded. Prysmatic labs is now the most popular ETH 2 client. Preston is also the co-founder of a brand new DeFi app ‘Cryptex’, which is a collateralized synthetic asset that tracks the total market cap of all crypto-assets.

Will Villanueva is a former team member of the Quilt team at Consensys and contributed to a mountain of R&D on Ethereum sharding. Will is now the CEO of Element, which offers high yield fixed income for DeFi assets. Element works by breaking a single token into two different ones; a yield-bearing token, and a principle token.

We brought both Will and Preston because their unique work histories of first helping build the Ethereum Protocol and now building DeFi apps. We discuss how their experiences have shaped their current projects, the trajectory of Ethereum and its app layer, and the timing of it all.

"The Hardest Problems Draw the Smartest People." - Preston Van Loon

------ Resources:

Cryptex: https://cryptex.finance/ 

Element Finance: https://element.fi/ 

Preston on Twitter: https://twitter.com/preston_vanloon?s=20 

Will on Twitter: https://twitter.com/wjvill?s=20 

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