Quicknode

October 11, 2024 — 5 min read

Welcome back to Feature Fridays! This week, we’re excited to spotlight Plug, a groundbreaking automation platform revolutionizing on-chain activity. Led by a team of innovators with deep experience in web3, Plug simplifies the process of composing and automating complex transactions across multiple protocols.

Check out Plug

Q & A with Plug 👇

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.

Hey, I’m Drake—I eat McDonald's and write spec sheets.

You can find me on the internet as danner.eth. I’m the unhinged founder of Plug—a generalized automation framework and platform making it easy to compose protocols and ensure portfolio outcomes. I spend most of my time contributing the craziest product ideas possible to the team and then lead us through the process of bringing them into our users’ reality.

Most recently, I was on the team at Flipside Crypto, where I wore many hats performing functions around product, operations, and data engineering. Prior to coming full-time into crypto, I was the first non-founder team member of a fintech company that built systems to facilitate residential debt sales and servicing.

I’ve spent over a decade working in early-stage startups where I’ve scaled teams and businesses from nothing to something. My roles have covered anything and everything under the sun—from operations, data, product, hiring, sales, investor (and borrower) relations at the retail and institutional level, etc. They even used to let me teach kids about user-centered design and innovation at NYU’s Engineering School.

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

Initially, Plug was designed to act as a generalized automation tool that made it straightforward for end-users to develop and schedule transactions without having to learn how to code. Today, Plug has grown to be the home of your onchain activity.

With all the major protocols at their fingertips, users are able to compose protocols together, creating transaction paths that have not been possible for the average user before. The collaboration between Plug and existing industry giants has resulted in a continually growing set of composable actions that cover nearly every type of onchain transaction.

With a deep set of integrations, users can enjoy the benefits of having their transactions automatically execute when the defined conditions are met. No need to be glued to your device at all times. No need to manage the complexities of a market constantly changing. Simple strategy automation for the entire ecosystem in one place.

What inspired you to develop Plug, and how did you conceive?

Chance, the CEO of Plug, stepped back and assessed the industry's largest problem. It isn’t chain or liquidity fragmentation, gas fees, or the fact that many people love being a degen (thank God).

In reality, the largest problem that exists in this space today is that nearly every single protocol is only accessible in its native application. The promise of programmable money is not realizable for 99% of end users. We’re only sort of using crypto right now—we can do so much more!

The lack of connection between major protocols forces users to understand the complexities of hundreds of things, have strong preferences about what they use, and deal with all the bifurcated risks instead of being able to focus on the one truly important thing: getting the best outcome even when one cannot physically click the buttons.

So, Plug was formed with the strict vision of being the one place that a user can go to get the absolute best outcomes on every transaction, with the lowest amount of effort and the highest amount of control.

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

Plug is currently gearing up for launch, and interested users should add themselves to the waitlist for beta access: https://onplug.io/waitlist

The conversations I’ve been having with prospective users and builders have been invigorating. We’ve already had incredible cases made for various integrations that enable complex strategies that I never would have thought of on my own. The beauty of a generalized framework with open access and deep functionality is that you can never fully predict what users may do.

If you want to discuss which integrations to use and which strategies to automate, reach out to me on Telegram (@danner_eth).

How does your company utilize Quicknode, and what benefits does it bring to your business operations?

Plug uses Quicknode to simulate and execute transactions. Users of Plug sign intents that dictate their desired outcomes, which are solved and simulated by Solvers to determine if the user-defined outcome can be delivered. This is a nonstop ongoing process of making RPC calls to determine transaction feasibility and then to build and execute the final transaction.

Given the volume of transaction simulations we run, we constantly require an extremely fast and reliable way to access on-chain data. This is important for our front-end application but even more important for the network of Solvers we operate, which must land every transaction as early as possible. Quicknode stands to be the perfect solution for this.