DeFi Visions: Francesco Renzi

In DeFi Visions, a series of video interviews, the 1inch Network talks to the most prominent people in the DeFi space. In this post, you’ll find the main takeaways from a recent interview with Francesco Renzi, co-founder & CEO of Superfluid.

Superfluid, a protocol that enables users to move assets in a decentralized environment, was established two and a half years ago, amidst a bear market.

Regardless of the unfavorable environment, Francesco and two other co-founders took a risk and quit their day jobs to work on the project full-time.

“Everybody told us we were crazy,” he recalls. “Whatever we said, nobody believed, and it sounded stupid, but we believed that was too big to ignore.”

“It was very hard to get people interested,” he adds. “It was very hard to get investors interested. But we pushed forward, and then, obviously, the bull market started.”

Currently, Superfluid’s tech has a number of use cases, such as paying subscriptions, rentals or salaries. But there are many more potential use cases that have not yet been seen, including mortgages, lending and borrowing. And, if they are implemented, a substantially higher proportion of streams of value will be handled by DeFi, according to Francesco.

“In five years, if the industry matures, this should be a significant part of the ecosystem,” Francesco comments.

At this point, however, the crypto space is not in good shape, and the recent Terra/Luna disaster was one of the most significant blows it has faced over the last few months.

“It’s been very painful,” Francesco says. “Personally, I know a lot of people who lost a lot of money. A lot of people now feel very vulnerable. And this fragility is very damaging to the industry.”

Still, Francesco stresses, that situation was inevitable.

“Our industry has a long way to go,” he explains. “And we shouldn’t let this scare us away from the broader mission of bringing financial freedom to everyone in the world. We are gonna keep building.”

When it comes to discussing the future of bitcoin, Francesco says he finds it “quite boring.” “I don’t think it will become a means of payment,” he elaborates, “[But] as a store of value, is it quite strong, and it’s definitely better than gold.”

According to Francesco, anonymity in crypto is extremely important. “There are a lot of examples in history about people who published articles or books using pseudonyms. They couldn’t disclose their identities,” he says.

“People who think anonymity is not important, don’t understand that customs, rules and regulations change over time, and that challenging those by being anonymous is the way that we change those customs,” he goes on to say. “Anonymity in crypto is important because it allows people who are targeted by their governments to escape from those governments.”

As for crypto regulation, Francesco says he has seen regulation fail more often than it has been helpful.

“Unfortunately, regulators often think that they know what they are doing,” he observes. “But realistically, they should mostly focus on protecting outcomes rather than prescribing ways. If a regulator tells you how to do something, the inevitable outcome is that whatever rule they make is going to be obsolete very soon because technology keeps changing.”

“The best regulation is regulation which is not prescriptive, is agnostic to technology and tries to leave as much freedom as possible for technology to evolve, while, if necessary and only when necessary, creating protections for consumers or investors,” he concludes.

Watch the full interview with Francesco Renzi on 1inch’s YouTube channel.