Stani Kulechov #83

Founder and CEO of Aave and ETHLend

Stani Kulechov & Founder and CEO of Aave and ETHLend & background` Stani Kulechov & Founder and CEO of Aave and ETHLend & poster`
Stani Kulechov & Founder and CEO of Aave and ETHLend
Category DeFi
person-quote
Games becomes more of an economy the same way as we’re spending times sitting in a cafe, workspaces or having dinners or meeting friends.

Biography:

Stani Kulechov is the creator and CEO of Aave and ETHLend. He is a seasoned entrepreneur with a wealth of knowledge in the crypto, blockchain and fintech industries. Kulechov is also a mentor to many crypto-asset and blockchain project founders and advisers, and has given presentations at several fintech, blockchain and cryptocurrency events focusing on Ethereum smart contracts. 

Kulechov earned a master’s degree in law from the University of Helsinki in 2018 and worked in the legal profession until late 2017. He was a member of the Legal Aid Committee of the Pykälä Ry law students’ association while at the University of Helsinki. Later, Ethereum and the concept of smart contracts encouraged him to establish a decentralized financial ecosystem and improve the efficiency of financial products.

Founded by Kulechov in 2017, ETHLend was a peer-to-peer lending and borrowing network for digital assets that was also one of the first decentralized platforms. It was rebranded to Aave in 2018, and its focus shifted away from lending and toward Ethereum. In January 2020, the Aave protocol was officially released on the Ethereum mainnet.

Kulechov’s 2021:

Kulechov and Aave, the decentralized finance money market that he developed, had a fruitful year in 2021. The implementation of a liquidity mining program in April 2021 helped catapult Aave beyond its rival Compound in total value locked, cementing Aave’s position as the dominant lending platform. 

A few weeks later, Kulechov joined Variant Fund as a partner, and has since been mentioned as an advisor and investor in a number of new Web3 projects. Kulechov had a great year as Aave’s hypeman-in-chief in addition to increasing Aave’s venture capital portfolio.

Despite being created on Ethereum, Aave continued to scale its market throughout 2021 and was deployed on various blockchains, including Avalanche, Polygon, Uniswap, Gelato Network and Balancer Labs. Furthermore, the protocol’s team launched a cross-chain governance bridge on Aug. 27 to make it easier for the protocol to be regulated across various networks from the mainnet. Aave also ventured into the Metaverse in October with the establishment of Aavegotchi, which then launched its first land auctions.

Kulechov’s 2022:

Aave has stated that a mobile wallet will be released in 2022. The development of mobile wallets is just one component of a larger plan to see lending protocols expand to SushiSwap and Curve Finance. In reality, extending Aave’s protocol could increase its user base while also encouraging on-chain activities. Because of Uniswap’s dominance in DeFi, the low-hanging fruit assumption is that Aave will start with Uniswap v3 liquidity-pool NFTs as collateral. In addition, Aave’s strategy for 2022 includes gas-free voting and more inclusive governance.

While DeFi is still Aave’s major emphasis, Kulechov sees a lot of potential for similar designs outside of DeFi. While DeFi protocols worked well in finance, Kulechov recognized that a similar architecture might be used to develop a social platform. As a result, Aave will likely work on a Twitter alternative based on Ethereum to provide people more control over their content.