Santiago Velez, entrepreneur and digital assets investor for Block Digital Corporation & AD, Inc., sits down with Chris Spadafora, founder of BadgerDAO, to discuss his background, the journey to found BadgerDAO, wrapped digital assets, risk, governance, and his thoughts on the crypto ecosystem. Following several years of investing in the space, Spadafora came to the conclusion that there was a lack of Bitcoin that can be wrapped or ported off of the bitcoin network and used as a utility on other blockchains. Spadafora asked, "How do you build an open community and project that wants to enable Bitcoin to work in a trusted and non-custodial way in addition to having an organization or business that is managed by the people vs a traditional corporate structure?" He recognized that the smart contract capabilities of Ethereum met a lot of the needs he was looking for in trying to utilize the liquidity of Bitcoin. While there are other protocols building on top of the Bitcoin network, Spadafora believes that the robustness of the smart contract technology that Ethereum built, in addition to the lack of liquidity and lack of interoperability in relation to the tools for daily usage, were key to fulfilling that vision. Filmed on May 6, 2021. Key learnings: To date, 1% of Bitcoin has been wrapped to port over to other blockchains. Spadafora believes that, moving forward, there will be anywhere between 20-40% of all Bitcoin will be wrapped and living on other chains because it is the ultimate collateral. While seeing the appreciation of Bitcoin in one’s wallet is good, being able to use it, put it to work, and have access to different financial services and applications that are traditionally reserved to hedge funds brings the power back to the people. Spadafora identifies that DeFi users have access to many great opportunities to gain interest; however, it requires too many steps, knowledge, and fees. Meanwhile, BadgerDAO allows for users to earn anywhere between 5%-30% interest on their Bitcoin while still retaining custody of their digital assets.
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