Glider Launches out of Private Beta

When my co-founder John and I met a bit over a year ago, we were disappointed with DeFi. We'd both been early to the space, 2013 and 2014 respectively, but had seen almost no innovation since DEXs, lending, and perps.

These protocols and primitives laid the groundwork for onchain finance, but left out what was actually unique about being onchain: the composability of these permissionless protocols and assets. Instead, we have siloed products requiring chrome-extension wallets and no connective tissue or unified view of our portfolio. While Uniswap is a great product, it's user experience is fundamentally no different from a CEX — just swaps. When you think about it, almost every crypto product is just a copy of something you can already do in TradFi — albeit decentralized and smart contract based. That's not interesting to us.

At Glider, we're focused on creating novel user experiences that can only happen onchain. The focus is orchestration. As a simple example, say you have mainnet ETH lent on Aave and want to move it to Base USDC lent on Morpho. Today, this requires ~20 clicks, a chrome extension wallet, two different gas tokens, and an understanding of what Aave, Morpho, networks, and USDC are. Is this really the future we envision for onchain finance?

With Glider, our goal is to make that 1-click or, even better, 0-clicks. The fact is, people know what they want (ie to hold assets and earn yield), but figuring out the how is far too complex, risky, or just outright operationally intensive.

So today, we're publicly launching our first version of Glider. It's focus is simple: rebalancing of assets. It's use case is admittedly limited, but lays the groundwork for something much larger: the seamless movement of any onchain asset.

As the world's assets inevitably move onchain, exact and programmatic movements of these assets will be table stakes. And it won't come from LLMs or agents natively. It will come from building tools and abstractions for AI to consume. Just like ChatGPT uses Zillow to show you houses, financial agents will use Glider to perform onchain actions. Agents handle high level context and then use tools to actually execute. Simple agents today performing "swap" and "lend", while cool as an MVP, are, in our opinion, gimmicks. No one is using Siri or ChatGPT to Venmo their friends. And the reason why they are limited to these simple actions is that no language exists to perform onchain mechanics accurately. We envision a world in which agents provide personalized financial plans and execute those plans precisely with Glider.

Ultimately, we are here to build a product that can grow the onchain wealth of our users. There are plenty of places to trade (many of which are incredibly extractive), but no places to actually invest. Whether it's through an agent, our UI, or a B2B2C integration, Glider simplifies the onchain investment experience. With that, our near term focus is to bring RWAs, onchain stocks, and stablecoins to users. These are real investments with much larger markets than the $4 trillion cryptocurrency market. ETFs, for which you can create any onchain ETF on Glider today, is $15 trillion alone.

The next couple months will focus on bringing yield opportunities and new assets (from new chains) to our users. We have so much to build and are so excited for the foundation we have laid. We've never been more bullish and confident in ourselves to execute for our users.

Let's glide.

— Brian 🦇♾️