Quicknode

August 23, 2024 — 4 min read

Welcome back to Feature Fridays! This week, we’re thrilled to highlight Demether, a pioneering protocol in the DeFi space that’s breaking down barriers for Web3 users. Kartik Swaminathan, the founder of Rolling Thunder Labs and a core contributor to Demether, brings extensive experience from his roles at Animoca Brands and in investment banking.

Check out Demether

Q & A with Demether 👇

Could you introduce yourself by sharing your name, prior experience, and current role within your company? Additionally, please briefly explain your company's mission and what it offers to its customers.

My name is Kartik Swaminathan. I am the founder of Rolling Thunder Labs, a core contributor to the Demether protocol.

I worked at various roles within the Animoca Brands Corporate Development team and at Animoca Capital (the late-stage investment fund of Animoca Brands) as a Director of Investments and Blockchain Relations. Prior to that, I spent 15 years in investment banking across the usual suspects (Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, etc.), with a couple of entrepreneurial gaps.

Rolling Thunder Labs was founded to build DeFi protocols to lower the barriers of entry into the space and onboard the next generation of Web3 users. Our most important initiative is Demether, a protocol we are building to solve for capital fragmentation between blockchains and the cold start problem that many face in creating that flywheel effect of growing users, capital and dapps to form a sustainable ecosystem.

In a nutshell, Demether is a B2B2C protocol. We partner with Blockchain Foundations (the entities developing a blockchain ecosystem) to run bridging campaigns and drive user interest to the chain. Think of us as providing ‘TVL-as-a-Service’ for Blockchains. For users, we provide a suite of yield-bearing tokens designed to simplify access to passive yield products. The first of these products is an Ethereum-based liquid restaking token. While a simple idea, the secret sauce rests in how our token incentive system can align both the blockchains and the users. Importantly, this means Blockchain Foundations can access our TVL services at zero cost.

How has your company grown and changed since its inception, and what do you have planned for its future?

Our company has grown from myself and a pitch deck back in March of this year to a headcount of 12, consisting of myself, CPO Juan Dorado, an incoming CTO (yet to be made public), an incoming Head of Growth (yet to be made public) and several engineering and support staff.

We’re still executing the original plan we conceived back in March, but as market trends continually evolve, we have expanded and refined our roadmap to service Blockchains’ requirements in pursuit of that ever-tighter product-market fit.

Two factors inspired our thinking: the first was my privilege to have been appointed the head of blockchain relations while at Animoca Brands, where I learned a lot about the commercial strategies and pain points of blockchains, and the second was observing the success of Blast’s L2 project and EigenLayer’s rise to prominence. The unifying factor here was users' interest in gaining access to yield - and their apparent lack of aversion to the associated risks.

We realized there might be potential to launch a platform to mechanize or productize the process of onboarding users. Still, we needed to solve the core problem of sustaining user interest over the medium to long term. Having analyzed several bridging campaigns, we knew that the incentives needed to attract even one ETH of capital were astronomical—and if we could solve it, the economic impact would be huge.

Demether is designed to attract capital to chains with sustainable incentives and zero the cost to the blockchain foundations.

Can you provide insight into Demether’s progress by sharing any metrics or milestones indicating its traction?

We’re at a very early stage of development (and pre-launch!), but in just a short space of time, we have substantially completed the development of our first product and experienced an excellent level of commercial traction: we already have a number of foundations committed to deploying Demeter.

How does Demether utilize Quicknode?

Demether uses Quicknode’s lightning-fast, stable, and secure RPC nodes to connect our app to the various blockchains on which we plan to launch. Quicknode’s breadth of coverage is hard to beat, making it a natural choice for our partnership with nascent chain ecosystems. We look forward to advancing our partnership and using more of Quicknode’s growing functionality over time.