The Crypto Conversation Umee - Surfing the DeFi Wave
Brent Xu is the Founder and CEO of Umee, a Cross Chain DeFi hub designed to operate seamlessly across protocols. Brent has extensive experience in blockchain and venture investments and previously held business strategy roles at ConsenSys and Tendermint and Cosmos.
Why you should listenAfter cutting his teeth working with Tendermint to build Gravity Dex and the Gravity Bridge on the Cosmos network, Brent Xu founded Umee in April 2021 to bring cross-chain DeFi use cases to the Cosmos and Ethereum ecosystems. Umee aspires to create a DeFi experience across blockchain networks and resolve three major issues universal to all DeFi projects: detached yields, concentrated systemic risks, and isolated capital.
Umee was designed to use the IBC protocol, an "internet of blockchains," created from the Cosmos ecosystem. Initially implementing a cross-chain borrowing and lending framework, Umee's vision evolved to include DeFi and open finance more broadly.
To accomplish this, Umee would need to break the existing silos between blockchains with novel bridging solutions — a difficult and critical obstacle to the broad adoption of DeFi.
The native UMEE token is a Proof of=Stake asset that can exist as a Cosmos SDK token and as an ERC20 token on Ethereum. Ab initio, Umee would be built to be interoperable with blockchains such as Terra, Crypto.com, Binance Chain, Osmosis, Secret Network, and many, MANY others. In plain language, users could lend, borrow, stake, delegate, and more, across dozens of chains.
Umee secured its seed round funding led by Polychain, with investors including Coinbase Ventures, Alameda, Ideo CoLab, ConsenSys Ethereal, and others.
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