The Avalanche summit has been nothing short of exhilarating and there is no doubt about it: Nested is taking off.
Introducing you to Rudy Kadoch — our CEO — comes now at a perfect time considering our platform’s positive traction post-summit.
Let us dig more into the life of the man whose vision has laid the foundations of the upcoming DeFi revolution.
HODLing done right
Everyone wants to get into web3 nowadays because the industry is booming, but not everyone knows how, and certainly not everyone is capable of showing as much audacity as Rudy did back in 2016.
“I started by taking a student loan to buy ETH… I took the maximum amount they agreed to give me and it panned out… I haven’t let go since… the rest is history in the making,” he explained.
While handling crypto and classes simultaneously, Rudy started focusing on this trending new technology and looked for professional opportunities in the sector.
It was not long before he managed to land an internship at Ledger where he conducted market research by “processing a lot of data to estimate the number of web3 users worldwide.”
Realizing the magnitude of the changes ahead, he went on to work for some time at Fusion — the company behind the technology of the Anyswap bridge. This was a good role for Rudy to hone his skills in business development and learn how to scale a crypto business.
One thing leading to another, Rudy created Discord and Whatsapp communities that reached thousands of members. “The channels are still active today but I don’t have the time to manage them anymore,” he confessed.
Just like Nested, it seems that democratizing DeFi by helping people to onboard into the cryptosphere has been in Rudy’s agenda from the beginning.
The Genesis
Entrepreneurship 101: if you want to build a business, find a problem and solve it. Rudy did not have to look for any particular issue — it actually found him.
The young CEO would see “the same problems come up over and over again” and realized that they had to be addressed sooner rather than later if crypto was ever to become the norm — and ultimately reach the masses.
Nested was born.
Platforms available then were not exactly user friendly and gave people a hard time trying to figure out what to do and how to do it.
Combine poor user experience with the inherent complexity of volatile crypto markets and the result is a massive bottleneck in the adoption process. To him, “UX should help people and ease them into this new experience” — but it was doing the exact opposite.
Another issue lies in the fact that the market was — and still is — too noisy.
So many new coins and platforms were coming out every other day. “How can you keep up with the constant evolution if you do not devote your whole time to it? The need for guidance was obvious and this is the reason why we ended up with a social trading approach,” said the founder.
The third problem was that monetizing knowledge became increasingly harder.
Nested’s CEO considered it easy two or three years ago “when referral links were a real source of income… centralized exchanges then were investing a lot of money to optimize peer-to-peer onboarding.”
Since decentralized exchanges took so much space, income from the referral links simply disappeared. “There are no such things as referral links on decentralized platforms anymore… that is when the idea of royalties for sharing knowledge emerged.”
Nested is built completely decentralized with the idea of self-incentivization front and center.
The platform rewards a user with royalties every time his or her portfolio gets copied. This is because Rudy and his team believe that anyone who is ready to share a successful investment strategy through a portfolio deserves to get essentially paid for it.
Seazing the moment
After six years in the ecosystem, Rudy understood that there were opportunities that should not be missed — especially considering the cyclical nature of the crypto market.
Fundraising had to be done intelligently, which is a lot easier in a bull market.
Rudy felt that waiting until the end of his degree to launch Nested was not the best idea, and he was right. Bulls led the charge and took over the market, which comforted Nested’s founder in the idea that waiting was not in his best interest.
“It would’ve meant waiting for another 3 to 4 years for these conditions to materialize again, if ever.”
Combined with trustworthy and reliable people around him, all ready to join the adventure, “ the conditions were met to convince me that the moment was right,” he added.
Determined to succeed and finally out of CentralSupelec — one of the best French engineering schools — Rudy decided to focus all of his time and attention on Nested.
The CEO and his co-founders — Adrien Supizet and Aurélien Rousseau — launched the company in May 2021, only two months after onboarding them on the project.
Step by step
Nested is about the democratization of DeFi.
“Basically, we want to onboard the masses.The biggest chunk of the market has yet to start its crypto journey,” he explained.
Nested will give the chance to anyone to buy their first crypto through DeFi instead of CeFi, in a way that does not seem foreign to them. “I want Nested to become a web3 app with a web2 UX so no one feels out of touch,” he added.
The visionary platform will integrate everything that is available in DeFi to become a real one-stop-shop.
The following steps in Nested’s roadmap are to integrate on and off-ramp solutions — fiat to crypto and crypto to fiat. This is key because it will represent the last nail on the coffin to make sure that nothing can stand in the way for anyone to invest.
The other missing piece of the puzzle is the mobile app.
More people have access to smartphones than to computers nowadays — especially in emerging markets.
“We’re aiming for a global reach… the world doesn’t end with Europe and the United States!” Rudy exclaimed.
Further down the road
Nested also means to target traditional DeFi tools such as metamask.
“It is quite too off-putting for a lot of people,” Rudy said. “The 12 word seed phrase is confusing and people end up writing them on compromised websites.”
“Too many users get hacked… we will implement a self-custodian wallet that works with a web2 UX: login and password… we are considering Ambire and Fortmatic for instance.”
Access will be provided to most DeFi projects like Aave, Convex, Yearn, Beefy and many others. Users will have direct access not only to trading but also yield farming, staking, lending and borrowing, collateralizing NFTs and so on.
Up and up
Having launched on Ethereum on April 11, Nested eyeballs other networks now — like Starkware for instance.
Starkware will mean “developing all the smart contracts from scratch in Cairo” — their programming language.
The task will demand some hard work but “the scaling possibilities are astounding and we’ll be able to do so much more for our community,” explained Rudy.
Starkware offers the only layer 2 on the market that allows a seamless UX with very cheap transactions — around a few cents.
“We’re looking to onboard someone who’s going to be fully dedicated to developing these Cairo smart contracts”, Rudy said with hopes that it will happen “before the end of the year.”
Our developers had to limit the capacities of the platform because of the technical limitations of the layer 1 blockchains that we are currently using.
All these limitations will soon fade and Nested will be capable of building an even stronger and more scalable version of the app once it is live on Starknet.
Resilience
Believe it or not but Rudy was born half-deaf.
As a consequence, he spent a good part of his childhood without uttering a word and had to learn how to read using sign language.
Who would’ve thought.
“I admit that it wasn’t an easy start but I am happy to prove to myself that big things are possible if you don’t let opportunities go to waste… if you work hard and surround yourself with the right people.”
“We don’t want people to simply onboard with us, we want them to do it as a community: helping each other grow and learn.”
Rudy’s story is by all means unique and if his team shows half the grit he had to muster throughout his life — there is no limit to what Nested can achieve.
Join us here and follow-us on social media:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/NestedFi
Discord: https://discord.com/invite/VW8ZZsACzd
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/73038554/adm
Telegram: https://t.me/NestedFinanceChannel
