DeFi Visions: Kirill Arutyunov

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 Kirill Arutyunov, CTO at NearPay.

Kirill’s crypto journey started at a hackathon back in 2017 when he met a few people interested in blockchain and joined a relevant track.

“We spent two days trying to install Hyperledger Fabric on a MacBook,” he recalls. “Basically, we didn’t build anything, we just spent time talking about blockchain.”

Still, that hackathon prompted Kirill to dive deeper into crypto, and, a few months later, he began helping a developer team working on a mining app for gamers.

Working with that team, Kirill experienced what he believes to be one of the craziest situations in his entire career in crypto.

“It was the end of December,” he recalls. “A lot of people were already preparing for holidays. And one of our developers was fixing a bug, and he made a mistake in a formula, adding some extra zeros, or something like that. Ten minutes later, we realized that we had sent our users a few millions of our tokens. We fixed it quickly, and most of our users hadn’t really used the tokens yet, but some had, and we ended up losing a few thousand dollars.”

Kirill’s current project, NearPay, is focused on building bridges between crypto and fiat. “We provide users with an easy way to receive, send or spend crypto by issuing Visa prepaid cards to our users,” he explains. “They can top up their cards with crypto and make payments anywhere.”

Kirill says he strongly believes in decentralized finances and sees clear advantages that DeFi is bringing to users in those areas where the traditional financial system is lagging behind.

“For example, if I want to send money to a freelancer based in Brazil, the first idea for doing it will be crypto rather than traditional finance,” he notes. “With crypto, it will take just a few minutes to transfer money, fees would be low, and there would be no need to pass KYC.”

Meanwhile, the problems that the entire world’s economy is facing are making crypto even more relevant, according to Kirill.

“In these turbulent times, people just want to save their money against inflation,” he says. “These days, many DeFi protocols and many dApps allow people to get high yields on their savings, up to 10% or 12% a year, which is a good way to fight inflation.”

Still, Kirill admits, one of the main issues for the DeFi space is the fact that many open-source protocols have vulnerabilities. “I think this is a big problem and developers should pay [more] attention to protecting users’ money,” he says.

When it comes to crypto regulation, Kirill’s view is that it’s vital to achieve a balance between protecting users’ assets and maintaining the user-friendly nature of the space.

“When regulations come into crypto, they shouldn’t disrupt this market, because users like simple ways,” he charges.

Sharing his thoughts on the prospects of mass adoption of crypto for payments, Kirill says he is overall optimistic.

“I think mass adoption of crypto will come in the next three to five years,” he says. “But we need time to educate users and help them understand how crypto works.”

Watch the full interview with Kirill Arutyunov on 1inch’s YouTube channel.