Episode #5: AlphaGrowth

Listen to our latest episode featuring AlphaGrowth and learn why vaults and structured products are the most likely path to DeFi mass adoption.

In this episode, Nertila from Trading Strategy discusses with Kyril from AlphaGrowth. AlphaGrowth is a DeFi growth and execution firm supporting ecosystems, DAOs, investors, and protocols. It describes itself as a gateway to DeFi alpha, combining partners, systems, and institutional-grade execution. Its site highlights growth work for DeFi ecosystems and protocols, research content, deal flow, and solutions such as DeFi in a box, token-as-a-product, private lending, and onchain insurance.

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Transcript:

Welcome to TradingStrategy.ai, the podcast where you can learn more about the essentials of DeFi trading in new worlds. This is your go-to show for automated trading strategies and market insights. Welcome to the conversation, and this is your host, Nertila.

Nertila: Hello, everyone. Welcome to today's podcast with our new guest. His name is Kyril, and, he will tell us about his crypto journey, the project that he's working on, and probably will give us some more insight about the DeFi market. Hello, Kyril. Welcome again, and I'm so excited to have you in our podcast.

Kyril Vlasenko: Hey. Thank you. Thanks a lot for having me. Great to be here

Nertila: So I'd like to get started with, your background, what is your job, your work experience, and what brought you in crypto?

Kyril Vlasenko: I would say my crypto journey started with, me joining my current company, Alpha Growth. So I joined Alpha Growth about four years ago in 2022, and, that's when I started working in crypto. If somebody would tell me five years ago that I would work in a crypto space, I would probably not believe them, personally, initially, I was skeptical of crypto.

Kyril Vlasenko: I guess I just didn't see the fundamental value in cryptocurrency, in Bitcoin, at the beginning, the same type of fundamental value that is present in stocks. Like, stock is a part of a actual business that has actual employees and, revenue. Crypto, initially, it seemed to me that it doesn't have this value, but then as I started, working with Alpha Growth and started working in the industry, learning more about crypto and DeFi, I changed my mind. So now, as I understand more about crypto and DeFi in general, I really, like working in the industry, and I see a big future for it.

Nertila: Would you say that you come from traditional financial background?

Kyril Vlasenko: No, not really. Honestly, I would say I got into building very early. So in my school years, I started building Android apps. I launched a couple of them, and, one of them got some traction on Google Play. So I started building things on my own very, very early. And then, building those Android apps actually got me very, very interested in product, marketing, user acquisition, all of these conversion metrics and, in general how to build products that people will use and can benefit from. And, all of these, skills and knowledge that I learned, turned out to be really handy when I joined Alphagrowth

Nertila: That's quite a story. Currently, what exactly you are working on? Can you tell me a little bit about the current role ?

Kyril Vlasenko: So my current role in Alpha Growth is money market curation. Essentially what I'm doing, my day and my week, split into roughly three activities, I would say. It's research, building, and business development. So research is, I'm looking for new assets that have demand and that we can create custom strategies for, that we can create vaults or money markets for research about the new assets with demand. Building is of course building the actual launching, money markets and structured products for these assets. And business development is, of course, connecting with, collaborating with asset issuers or asset holders of those assets or just regular users and, seeing how can we grow faster together.

Nertila: You did mention that you are working on new vaults that was just launched. Can you tell me a little bit more about it?

Kyril Vlasenko: So our latest launch was vaults that we launched together with, the Balancer protocol about a month ago. So the unique thing about this vault is that they can accept, Balancer pool tokens as collateral. So users who supply liquidity into Balancer pool tokens on, into Balancer pools on Monad can use their Balancer LP tokens as a collateral on our Euler Vaults and borrow AUSD or WMON against them.

Kyril Vlasenko: So this essentially helps user, users unlock liquidity that otherwise would be locked in the liquidity pools on Balancer

Nertila: Which platform you are using for this? You mentioned Monad, I think

Kyril Vlasenko: Yeah. Monad is a chain where we launched Euler vaults.

Kyril Vlasenko: For, the vaults itself are, Euler smart contracts. So yeah, we basically use them

Nertila: Do you have any risk management system in place?

Kyril Vlasenko: That's actually, I guess just to give a little background about Alpha Growth. So right now we're primarily focusing on, risk creation and building structure products. But previously, for many years we were working with big DeFi protocols, chains, and ecosystems, and also gathering a lot of data. So, this data that we gathered over, over the years and, like, all of these data sources that we have in our system right now is what really helps us with analyzing new assets and getting answers to the questions that we as a curator need to have answers for in order to launch new markets or strategies. So right now we have this massive pool of data, everything from price feeds to social sentiment, what people say about, specific asset on socials. But, the issue with that is that this data is currently not distilled, so that's actually part of what I'm doing right now on day-to-day basis. I am building the curator dashboards that would allow us to distill, all of these data points into concrete, answers to the questions that, all need to know answers for. So for example, what's the liquidity for a specific asset on a target chain? Is this asset listed on other money markets, on, PERPs?

Kyril Vlasenko: What's the utility of the token? What should be safe enough supply caps for it? What should be the loan-to-value ratio? So my job right now is to, use the data that we have on our website and distill it into, straightforward, clear dashboards that we can use as a curator

Before we get back to the episode, if you are interested in getting access to over twenty-five thousand Vault datasets, including performance and risk metrics, visit our website tradingstrategy.ai for free data and professional subscriptions. Now, let's get back to the episode

Nertila: What are some of the hard lessons you have learned so far?

Kyril Vlasenko: That's a great question. I would say I will tell you about, , the latest, lesson that we learned. It's not new, but we got a confirmation, another confirmation to it recently. The lesson is distribution is king. So whoever has distribution, whoever has better distribution platform or network, wins. Especially right now when, people can build so many things with artificial intelligence, and feel like the threshold for building new things has become so much lower. Can build things easily, but whoever gets better distribution wins, user adoption. That's one of the lessons that we get confirmation about, recently.

Nertila : You work with so many other people, with the kind of responsibility that you have. Where do you think the capital and risk will accumulate in the future?

Kyril Vlasenko: I think it's definitely going to be vaults and structured products. I think the end game for mass adoption is getting complex financial strategies distilled into an easy-to-use, easy-to-access, Vaults or products that, regular people can use. I guess, to add some color to this, that is basically what, Morpho, for example, is doing right now.

Kyril Vlasenko: So they have their vaults available. They have access to their vaults available through, Coinbase and maybe some other, other centralized exchanges. So people, even without knowing anything about DeFi, can access Morpho Vaults through Coinbase by just up a Coinbase account where, the system will guide them step by step through the onboarding process and, then they can use Morpho on-chain vaults, to borrow dollars against their crypto, for example. So I think, the same will work, but on a much larger scale with, vaults and structured products and, in my opinion, that's probably the most likely way for for the mass adoption. Somebody needs to create a simple entry point for complex, financial DeFi strategies for people to be able to access them easily without having background in finance or DeFi

Nertila: From what I understand, is, average user it's kind of hard to get into this part of DeFi.

Kyril Vlasenko: Yeah. It took me two years to start out understanding DeFi in general. Yeah, that would be a really hard...

Nertila : We have all been there

Kyril Vlasenko: Yeah

Nertila: But actually, based on, what you told me in the beginning, you - went straight for the most hardcore product in crypto because everybody started with the simple stuff like Bitcoin and Ethereum, and you just went, instead of starting from A, you went straight to the Z

Kyril Vlasenko: Yeah. Well, actually I haven't started from vault curation. When I joined AlphaGrowth four years ago, I was doing some basic data collection and throughout these four years I wore a lot of different hats and changed a lot of different roles. this risk curation position is actually, the latest shift that, occurred when the company's focus shifted to, money market, curation and structure products and vaults recently.

Nertila: What do you think about current market efficiency?

Kyril Vlasenko: Honestly, I think we're, we're much better than we were before. You know, if you compare the state of DeFi right now or efficiency of DeFi right now couple of years ago where, whenever you stake a token, for example, , it is staked there and, - you cannot use it in any other way.

Kyril Vlasenko: Liquidity is locked. Whenever you put a token into liquidity pool, it is locked there, so it is dead capital, , independently of, utilization of the pool. think we are in a much better position right now. So like right now we have all of these LRTs, LS- LRSTs, LRTs, LSDs, and, some of the liquidity pool tokens , can be used as collateral.

Kyril Vlasenko: So that's one of the things that we're innovating with this, , recent balancer pools, balancer vaults on Monad. And then, some of the lending market receipt tokens can be also used as collateral. So I think generally we're in a much better place, but there is still lot of room for improvement.

Nertila: What do you think about those improvement? Do you have any specific idea that you wanna talk about?

Kyril Vlasenko: Ecosystem in general Okay, so I have two points. One, I don't feel like data is a problem anymore. So with blockchain, and everything is available on chain, everybody can query data and get all the information. So I feel like the quality of data right now is the ability to distill, all of this myriad of data, points into a specific answers. What brings actual value, and that's what, we can improve on and be more efficient on. Second point, I would say has to change in security because with all of these recent, hacks in the last couple of years, and they're becoming more and more frequent, seems like with, North Korea starting to use artificial intelligence and social engineering, I think that some big shift needs to happen in security space because unless we can, , really make this solid and, secure user funds , in a better way, we will never be able to get, , trust from masses and institutions and, just regular users. So I would say yes, it's two points. Distillation of data, getting clear answers, , the questions based on the data available and a big shift in security. That's what I think needs to happen, in order for to reach mass adoption.

Nertila: Kyril, thank you so much for your insight today. It was a great pleasure to have you in our podcast and, hopefully to get you another time to talk about DeFi in general

Kyril Vlasenko: Thank you. It was great. Thank you for inviting me