A New Paradigm for DeFi Wealth Management: Simplifying On-Chain Activities and Reshaping Opportunities

As the technological infrastructure matures, complex on-chain activities are being simplified. This trend presents historic opportunities to reshape old models while also giving rise to new development opportunities. Whether it's Intent, on-chain robots, or AI agents, addressing the key issue of authorization is essential.

Recently, Glider completed a $4 million financing round, led by a well-known venture accelerator. Glider is able to secure a place in the seemingly simple yet actually complex on-chain investment field, thanks to the development of technologies such as Intent and large language models. However, the overall Decentralized Finance still needs to be restructured to lower the investment threshold.

Decentralized Finance is transitioning from the Lego era to a new era of secure coupling in wealth management.

Glider started as an internal startup project of a certain company at the end of 2023, initially in the form of an on-chain robot, aimed at combining different operational steps to facilitate user investment and usage. Although helping users manage their finances is a long-term business, Glider is currently still in the internal development stage. From publicly available information, it can be seen that Glider's main ideas include:

1. Connect existing DeFi tools through API integration, including leading protocols and emerging projects in various sectors, to build customer acquisition logic for institutional and individual users.

2. Allow users to build investment strategies and support sharing, promoting follow-up investments, copy trading, or collective investments to achieve higher returns.

With the support of technologies such as AI agents, large language models, intent capture, and on-chain abstraction, building such a tech stack is not difficult. The real challenge lies in traffic operation and establishing a trust mechanism.

Businesses involving the flow of user funds are always sensitive. This is also the main reason why on-chain products have not yet replaced centralized exchanges. Most users can accept decentralization in exchange for fund security, but they can hardly accept that decentralization increases security risks.

In 2020, a certain on-chain yield aggregation tool received investment, aimed at helping users cope with the complexity of DeFi strategies. However, most users did not use the tool for the long term. On-chain yield strategies are an open market where retail investors find it difficult to compete with large players in terms of server performance and capital, making it hard to capture most profit opportunities.

Compared to the unsustainability of returns, security issues and strategy optimization are secondary. In an era of high returns, it is difficult for stable financial management to find a foothold.

The Era of Democratization of Asset Management

Rich people use ETFs, while retail investors prefer ETS. ETF tools are not only suitable for the stock market; some exchanges began experimenting with them as early as 2021. From a technical perspective, asset tokenization ultimately gave rise to the physical asset (RWA) paradigm.

Further explore how to bring ETF tools on-chain to become a startup hotspot. From the calculation and display of annualized returns on a certain data platform to the continuous operation of a certain strategy platform, it all indicates that there is demand in the market.

Strictly speaking, some strategy platforms are more like a marketplace for strategy sales and showcases. A vast number of professional and precise calculations, human and AI-assisted strategy decisions, but on-chain transparency makes it difficult to hide efficient strategies from being imitated and modified, leading to an arms race and ultimately causing returns to tend towards equilibrium.

This has evolved into a boring game of big fish eating small fish.

However, such projects have never been standardized and have not developed into projects that redefine the market like some well-known decentralized exchanges or prediction markets.

After the meme coin craze ends, it will be difficult for the old forms of Decentralized Finance to revive. Has the industry already peaked? Is this temporary or permanent? This relates to whether Web3 is truly the next evolution of the internet or a version 2.0 of fintech. If it is the former, the way human information flow and capital flow operates will be reshaped; if it is the latter, then traditional payment giants combined with internet brokerages might be the end point.

From Glider's strategy, it can be inferred that on-chain yields are about to transform into an era of asset management for the masses. Just like index funds and retirement plans contributed to the long-term bull market of the US stock market, the large amount of capital and numerous retail investors indicate a tremendous demand for stable income.

This is the significance of the next generation of Decentralized Finance. There are other public chains beyond Ethereum, and they still need to undertake the innovative responsibilities of Internet 3.0, while DeFi should become Financial Technology 2.0.

Glider has added AI-assisted features, but from its early days as a DeFi information display platform, to later becoming an on-chain yield aggregation tool, and now a stable operating platform, a stable on-chain yield of around 5% still attracts a user base outside of exchanges.

The On-Chain Future of Yield-Generating Assets

After years of development, only a few types of products in the cryptocurrency field have truly gained market recognition:

• Exchange
• Stablecoin
• Decentralized Finance
• Public Chain

Other product types, including NFTs and meme coins, are merely phase-based asset issuance models, lacking sustainable self-maintenance capability.

However, physical assets ( RWA ) have been taking root and growing since 2022, especially after certain significant events, highlighting their importance even more. As industry insiders say, people do not really care about decentralization, but are more concerned with returns and stability.

Even without the government actively embracing Bitcoin and blockchain, the productization and practical application of RWA are accelerating. If traditional finance can accept digitization and informatization, there is no reason to reject blockchainization.

In this cycle, both the complex asset types and sources, as well as the overwhelming on-chain DeFi strategies, are seriously hindering users of centralized exchanges from migrating to on-chain. Regardless of the authenticity of large-scale adoption, at least the massive liquidity of exchanges can be attracted to on-chain.

• A certain project converts fee income into on-chain income through a benefits alliance.
• Another project has introduced exchange perpetual contracts on-chain through liquidity provider tokens.

These two cases prove that liquidity on-chain is feasible, and RWA proves that asset on-chain is also feasible. It is a peculiar moment for the industry; Ethereum is considered lackluster, but in fact many projects are migrating on-chain. In a sense, overly large protocols are detrimental to the development of applications. Perhaps this is the last night before public chains return to infrastructure and application scenarios shine brightly; dawn is about to come.

In addition to the above products, some open-source annual yield calculation tools have been running for many years. Various yield aggregation platforms have their own focus, showcasing the annual yield of project parties. The focus of yield tools has changed over time, increasingly concentrating on areas such as interest-bearing assets.

Currently, if such tools increase trust in AI, they will face the issue of responsibility allocation; if they strengthen human intervention, it will reduce user experience, making it difficult to achieve both.

A possible solution is to separate the information flow and the capital flow, create a strategy community for user-generated content, foster internal competition among project parties, and benefit retail investors. This may be a better way out.

Conclusion

Glider has attracted market attention due to investments from a well-known institution, but the long-standing issues in this field still persist. Authorization and risk issues are present, where authorization not only refers to wallets and funds, but also includes whether AI has the capability to satisfy humans. If AI investments result in significant losses, how should responsibility be allocated?

This world is still worth exploring the unknown, and cryptocurrency, as a public space in a divided world, will continue to thrive.