My guest today is Scott Stuart, Co-Founder & Chief Product Officer at Kava Labs the team behind Kava and the Kava ecosystem. The Kava platform is a decentralized network purpose built for scalability and security. It provides access to high yield earning opportunities, inclusivity and no-limits in a de-risked DeFi model. At the center of this is a safe, intuitive and complete user experience that creates the base layer for financial service applications. Kava Lend, Kava Mint, and Kava Swap are built on the Kava Platform and come complete with interoperable cross-chain tooling, secure price feeds and institutional-grade safety and reliability. Kava Lend allows users to earn rewards by supplying and borrowing assets from money markets. Kava Mint allows users to take out USDX stablecoin loans using their assets as collateral. Kava Swap allows users to buy and sell tokens across the Kava Blockchain, and earn rewards by providing liquidity to pools. Scott is an experienced product-first entrepreneur. He graduated from Mathematics and Economics from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, while at school and for some time after Scott was professional internet poker player, where he found success growing to be ranked globally. He was first exposed to Bitcoin and crypto through poker tournaments. This was around the time when Bitcoin was trading around $50. He eventually made his way to Ad Tech where he founded and ran a mobile AdTech company. He made his way back to crypto in 2016 - 2017 around when he first heard about Ethereum and saw the opportunity to build decentralized financial services, which led him and his two co-founders to start Kava Labs. In our conversation we discuss Kava and the Kava ecosystem, the evolution of DeFi, the importance of security, and more. Scott explains how Kava approaches DeFi and crypto differently than other projects. Scott stresses the point that for DeFi to gain mainstream adoption security standards need to be dramatically improved. We go onto discuss some of the recent high profile DeFi hacks and how those are indicative of the lack security standards across DeFi. Scott also discusses Kava Swap and how the Kava ecosystem is a positioning itself to be verticalized DeFi ecosystem. We also touch on the importance of improving the user experience of DeFi for the average crypto user. We finish our conversation with a few pieces of advice for people looking to start a career in crypto/web 3. Please enjoy my conversation with Scott Stuart.
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