DeFi Visions: Ruslan Serebriakov

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 Ruslan Serebriakov, senior smart contract engineer at Trust Wallet.

Ruslan’s process of entering the crypto space consisted of three stages, he recalls. He first heard about crypto back at university in Ukraine around 2014 or 2015 when he had a class on bitcoin and mining.

“I was curious but I never really looked into that,” he says. “Around 2017, I heard again about crypto and started researching it and investing a lot [in crypto], but my interest subsided in 2018 when things got quiet.”

The next time Ruslan came in touch with crypto was around 2020–2021. “As I researched different projects, I started to look more into smart contracts, into blockchains and ERC-20 tokens,” Ruslan explains. “That was when I figured how great this technology is, like, 20 lines of code can manage billions in assets, and that’s why I’m still there.”

Ruslan’s crypto journey has been eventful, and he has experienced quite a lot of bizarre things.

“[Around 2021], I found a funny trend that every time Elon Musk tweets something, a fan token is created of that tweet, and it instantly goes 10x,” he recalls. “So, I set a Twitter notification for Elon Musk’s account, and every time he tweeted something, I searched Telegram for a group of the project, as they were about to release a token. I bought it and sold it for 10x two hours later. I did it a few times until it stopped working.”

According to Ruslan, he was among those hit by the Terra/Luna collapse earlier this year. “[In early 2022], I thought, ‘Why do I need to store BUSD with such a low APR, when I can buy UST and stake it for a 20% APR?’ he says. “And you know how it ended.”

Speaking about the future, Ruslan says he is bullish on the overall prospects of decentralization. “The whole point of crypto is decentralization,” he explains. “Centralized exchanges only exist as a quick solution to the issue of the convenience of access.”

“When crypto wallets that are fully decentralized and non-custodial reach the same convenience level as centralized exchanges and offer the same [level of] convenience and the same proposition as centralized exchanges, there will be no need for centralized exchanges,” he adds.

Meanwhile, unlike many on the developing side, Ruslan says he doesn’t enjoy the current bearish cycle.

“I never understood this concept of enjoying a bearish cycle,” he elaborates. “It’s kind of like enjoying chaos. There is only a bear market in terms of price action. In terms of building, lots of things are happening on the blockchain.”

The strongest thing that is likely to come out of the current bear cycle is likely to be increased crypto adoption during the next bull run, Ruslan observes.

“The psychology is simple here,” he concludes. “When the next bull run comes, lots of people who were skeptical about crypto would be, like, okay, this has not died, so it probably has potential, and I need to look into this.”

Watch the full interview with Ruslan Serebriakov on 1inch’s YouTube channel.