Thread by @mrjasonchoi

🚨 This week: the rise of the DeFi "super app"

@AlphaFinanceLab is one of the projects I'm most excited for in DeFi today.

Founder @tascha_panpan joins me to talk all things $ALPHA.

apple.co/3ogto4K
spoti.fi/36sHFVL

.@AlphaFinanceLab is a team of young and driven DeFi coders + operators focusing on shipping synergistic products.

Imo this is where many DeFi protocols are heading, culminating in the rise of DeFi "super apps".

More on this in a bit.

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Alpha first came to market with a simple product: a way for people to lever up on their DeFi yields.

With Alpha Homora, users can lever up 3x to farm assets like $SUSHI and $UNI.

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Side note: this proved to be quite attractive for projects like @Kp3r1Network, which voted to use Alpha Homora to manage its treasury earlier this week.

blog.alphafinance.io/9-270-eth-migr…

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The leverage comes from people borrowing from Alpha's user-contributed $ETH pools.

However, as users of Alpha Homora are de facto short ETH, there needs to be a way to hedge in case $ETH goes on a lunar mission...

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That's part of the reason why the next Alpha product is an onchain perpetual swap protocol.

With a few clicks, users can hedge their ETH risk by placing an offsetting long on Alpha. Beyond hedging, perpetuals are also a massive market in CeFi today.

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In the future, Alpha has plans to create volatility markets for LPs in various protocols to hedge out their impermanent losses as well.

So where is this all leading to...?

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While Alpha takes advantage of DeFi's composability (e.g. using @UniswapProtocol and @SushiSwap , integrating with @AaveAave today), it chose to vertically integrate products in house.

This enables faster execution and ease of implementing value capture later on.

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If successful, I can see Alpha being home to a suite of products, all of which produce fees that accrue to $ALPHA holders.

Enriching early adopters and users can be a good way to create network effects.

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Imo this trend of vertical integration is already taking place in DeFi:

@1inchExchange started as an aggregator, now building its own AMM (and other products)

@SushiSwap started as an AMM, now incorporating margin trading and lending.

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My hypothesis is that the "one project = one product" idea in DeFi will be challenged by the all-in-one super app familiar to Chinese mobile users.

Projects will still GTM with one product, but will be forced to vertically integrate when scaling.

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@tascha_panpan and I explore some of these ideas on @theBlockcrunch - and cover more details around $ALPHA.

You can tune in to our 30m convo here:

apple.co/3ogto4K
spoti.fi/36sHFVL

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Thank you to @NexoFinance and @radixdlt for making this show possible!

/fin