DeFi UX is Broken: Moonwell Aims to Fix That

Recorded remotely.

Hodl Up: Hello, Luke. Nice to have you with us today.

Luke: Thank you, Atis. It's great to be here.

Hodl Up: We usually go into our guests' backgrounds, but today I really want to know something specific. You have a background in Web2 and in Web3. What fascinates me is that quite a lot of builders pivoted from Web2 to Web3 during their careers. Not all of them stayed, but you're one who did. So what pushed you from Web2 to Web3, and why did you decide to take that step? Everyone knows Web3 is way more chaotic than Web2. Why did you leave that comfort and try something in an industry where no one knows what's going on?

Luke: Great question. Ten years ago I was working at Amazon Web Services as a principal engineer. I helped a lot of Web2 companies, startups and big companies, adopt the cloud, and I was really passionate about cloud in the 2010s. A lot of us were adopting cloud and helping startups build on it. It was sort of an accident that I ended up in Web3. I was an early Bitcoiner and early to Ethereum, but I was mostly just experimenting. My brother and I started building proof-of-stake infrastructure around 2016-2017, and in 2018 I helped the Tezos Foundation launch their network. Maybe you're familiar with Tezos, one of the first proof-of-stake networks. That really brought me into crypto for the first time. I did some consulting work and helped them build all their validator infrastructure on AWS. About a year after the Tezos network launched, Coinbase decided to hire me to help build out staking rewards at Coinbase. So that was my jump from Web2 into Web3. It was sort of an accident. I had never done anything professionally in crypto until about a decade ago, and it was pretty fun for me.

Hodl Up: As an infrastructure engineer, how different is the way you build smart contracts compared to someone who started as a Solidity developer?

Luke: Great question. I've always been pretty deep on the infrastructure side: building a lot of container systems, using Docker, Kubernetes and technologies like that. My first foray was really running nodes, whether a Bitcoin node, an Ethereum node or a Tezos validator node. I brought that expertise, and my brother and I started hacking on smart contract systems in Solidity in the early days, around 2016-2017, but we never made a full application at the time. It was still pretty early. We wanted to build things like decentralized exchanges. I was more infrastructure-heavy, whereas my brother was more software-heavy, so when we started working on Tezos it was a really good combination: he could build some of the monitoring systems, and I could build the low-level node infrastructure. Then, as I transitioned into Coinbase, having that mixed skill set, deep infrastructure on the node side plus the ability to go up the stack and work at the smart contract layer, really helped a lot. The biggest project I worked on at Coinbase, in 2020, was launching the Ethereum Beacon Chain. That's when Ethereum was transitioning from proof of work to proof of stake, and a big part of it was figuring out how to create validators. You basically send 32 ETH to the staking contract, and that creates a validator on the Beacon Chain. Figuring out how to orchestrate thousands of validators, and then using low-level infrastructure providers to run the nodes for us, was a bit of a leap. We were originally running all our own proof-of-stake nodes, but as Coinbase grew and acquired Bison Trails, one of the largest staking companies, we were able to leverage the Bison Trails node infrastructure and other node providers globally to make sure the infrastructure was really solid. It's always been a really good skill to understand how proof of stake works at a deep level, how the layer 1 secures itself, and things like network reorganizations and how they can impact your application, as we've moved into building decentralized apps on top of Ethereum, like Moonwell.

Hodl Up: I agree with you. What many DeFi builders fail to take into account is that they need to learn some retail lessons. In your case, you maybe took retail lessons from Coinbase, and that led to Moonwell's user interface being a lot cleaner than your competitors'. And since we're talking about Coinbase: if I'm not mistaken, most of Moonwell's TVL comes from Base, and Base was incubated by Coinbase. Does that feel like a full-circle moment for you? And does Moonwell's roadmap depend in some way on Coinbase's success in onboarding its next 100 million users?

Luke: Great question. Yes. While I was at Coinbase, for a few years, I launched a bunch of proof-of-stake networks, including Tezos, Cosmos and Ethereum, and I really started getting into DeFi in 2020 and 2021. I think like most of us at Coinbase at the time, during COVID lockdown, we didn't have much to do in the evenings, so we experimented with DeFi protocols like Uniswap, SushiSwap, Compound, Aave and so on. That was my big aha moment: I can not only hold crypto, hold Ethereum or Bitcoin as an investor, I can also leverage it. I can borrow against it and use the tokens I borrow in DeFi. I can borrow stablecoins and use them in DeFi. I can become a market maker on a DEX. That was a big wake-up call, and I decided I wanted to move into building decentralized applications on Ethereum. So in early 2022 I left to launch Moonwell, an open lending and borrowing app. When Jesse and the team reached out in 2023 and told me they were going to launch Base, I decided we had to be there on day one, and we needed to figure out a way to launch Moonwell on Base. We've been on Base since day one, since August 2023, when the network first launched, and it's been a fantastic journey alongside the Base team, creating some of the best lending applications on Base. And to your question about the retail user experience: one thing many of us remember about using Coinbase for the first time is that it was the first app that made it really easy to buy Bitcoin. Those of us who were early understood that's how they got to 100 million retail users. Crypto has been way too hard to use; the user experience has been way too challenging. So I tried to incorporate some of that user experience into the Moonwell application. As we built the front end, we thought about how to make it easier to use, so that a normie, someone who isn't a crypto person, could use it. We've thought a lot about that. It's still not perfect, but we're trying really hard to make it the easiest lending app to use.

Hodl Up: What Dren mentioned and what you just said are true. I don't want to say it, but the UX in crypto is one of the worst of any industry. I've been here since 2020, and I still have a hard time sometimes when I use new protocols. What do you think you're doing better at Moonwell than your competitors to make it easy for the average normie? We know financial tools and instruments like these are aimed at a specific type of user base. But if someone who isn't familiar with crypto wants to use Moonwell's products and services, what's your edge in that case?

Luke: We've thought really hard about the onboarding problem: how do you get someone who has never used an app before to use yours? The first user experience is really important. Say you ask a family member or friend to try Moonwell. The very first thing they'll ask is, "What wallet should I use?" With passkey wallets, you don't even need to download a wallet anymore, which is a big unlock. You simply use your Face ID, Touch ID or another biometric to create a wallet on your phone, and you can start using the app right away. With a passkey wallet you also don't need to back up a seed phrase. Everyone who has onboarded a friend has had the experience where they ask, "What wallet should I use?" and then, "Okay, how do I back it up?" And you say, "Write down these 12 words, never lose them and never show them to anyone, or you'll lose all your money." The third thing we've really tried to solve is: how do I get money into my wallet? We use a wallet provider called thirdweb, which lets you on-ramp from 40 different fiat currencies. If you're in the United States, you can use a Visa debit card, and through a partnership Coinbase has with Visa, you can on-ramp up to $500 without any KYC check. So that's a really simple way to go from, say, Bank of America to having $500 in your wallet on Base, then lending it out and earning a good yield, 4 to 5%. That's a really nice onboarding experience. We tried to smooth out all those rough edges: no apps to download, no seed phrases to back up, and easy on-ramping. The other thing thirdweb does is that if you already have a wallet, say ETH on mainnet in MetaMask, or something in your Solana wallet, you can easily move into Moonwell from a wallet on another chain with very low fees, a couple of cents. They do that with an intent bridge. So I can say I want to deposit 0.01 ETH from mainnet into Moonwell, and a few minutes later I'll have about $20 lent out in my Ethereum position on Moonwell. We tried to make that super easy. The last thing I'd add is that about a year ago we launched a DeFi agent called Momo, designed for people who are brand new to crypto and have never used DeFi apps. Momo makes sure you're always earning the best yield on your stablecoins, ETH or Bitcoin, and it does all the heavy lifting for you: making sure you get the best interest rate, compounding any reward tokens, and keeping you updated on how your position is doing. So we've tried to make it really easy for people who just want to lend their coins and don't want to do more advanced things like borrowing or leverage.

Hodl Up: I wanted to get into Momo, but before that, a question about Moonwell's governance. It includes compliance setups like KYC and AML tied to certain grant processes. How do you defend that to decentralization purists, and on the other hand, how do you defend the decentralization side to partners who are more compliance-minded, if that makes sense?

Luke: Moonwell is stewarded by the Moonwell Foundation, which is a Cayman foundation. Companies that receive grants to do work for the Moonwell protocol do need to be KYC'd for anti-money-laundering reasons: there are sanctions screenings and things like that. But it's generally a pretty lightweight process. It takes a couple of days to make sure the wallet receiving the funds isn't sanctioned. The protocol itself, though, is governed by WELL token holders. Token holders have to vote for a grant, and any upgrades to the protocol have to go through governance. So governance enforces decentralization at the protocol layer, and the KYC, AML and sanctions screening is really just so the Moonwell Foundation stays safe and doesn't send money to sanctioned individuals or entities. That doesn't prevent anyone in the world from applying for a grant, as long as they're not in a sanctioned country or something like that. I think a lot of foundations are set up that way. They have to make sure they're not sending money to bad actors.

Hodl Up: I didn't want to ask this question until the end, but Dren mentioned decentralization, and since we're talking about it, I think we really need to talk about the decentralization theater we have in crypto. Crypto is promoted as a decentralized industry, but for most protocols and blockchains... Moonwell has its decentralized side with governance, but most companies don't. I'm thinking of when AWS had an outage late last year and many protocols were badly hit. What's the next step? Is it realistic to aim for a fully decentralized industry, everything decentralized? Is it realistic to push for that DeFi world? In my opinion there are a lot of benefits, but also a lot of drawbacks if we really want everything decentralized. I really want your opinion, because I think you're the right person to ask.

Luke: It's a really good question. First of all, I think we need maximal decentralization at the protocol layer. If your smart contracts run on Ethereum or on a layer 2 like Base, they should be as decentralized as possible, meaning governed only by token holders, or in the best case immutable, so they can't be changed at all. Like a Uniswap pool: once you create one, it will live as long as Ethereum lives, forever, and even the Uniswap Foundation or Uniswap Labs can't turn it off. So at the protocol layer we need maximum decentralization. Where we still have centralization is the interface layer: the front end or application used to access the protocol. There are benefits to trying our best to decentralize that, whether with IPFS or some kind of distributed file storage, and keeping a backup interface that can't be taken down by a web provider like AWS is a good thing to have. However, I also think there's value to be added at the interface layer, and that's where things like AI agents can come in and make your life easier. As crypto matures and becomes more widely adopted, I think there will be a lot of companies like Uniswap Labs: if Uniswap makes a really nice mobile wallet, maybe with an AI agent that helps you trade, maybe they deserve to charge a small fee at the interface layer. That doesn't mean the protocol is centralized; it means there's some centralization in how users access it. And that's probably where we need to go to create a world where companies like Uniswap Labs, or Lunar Labs, my company, can build useful things on top of these decentralized protocols. Ultimately it would be nice to decentralize the interface layer too, but that's probably not 100% realistic, because every government in the world has different laws and rules about what's allowed.

Hodl Up: Now I want to go back to Momo. I'm all about the on-chain AI economy and making the user experience seamless, so the average normie can just hop in and start earning or trading without having to learn Blockchain 101, like we had to five years ago. But I always ask this: are there trade-offs that come with this simplicity? Maybe not in security, but in the education users may need at some point. And since we're talking about financial agents: if you had to articulate a kind of Hippocratic oath, what are some non-negotiable principles you would enforce at the contract level?

Luke: Really good question. We should have a Hippocratic oath, or some kind of ethics oath, for agents. If you've experimented with new things like Clawdbot, or OpenClaw, you've seen that a lot of people are spinning up agents that try to trade and make money, and a lot of those agents are losing their private keys, because they can be socially engineered into giving up their wallets to someone on the internet. That's a big problem we tried to solve with Momo. We developed what I think is the first fully audited smart contract system where the agent can't control your wallet directly. The agent deploys a contract, your wallet is the owner, and only your wallet can deposit and withdraw. The agent has very limited permissions on that contract. It can move you between vaults and markets to make sure you're earning the best rate, and it can compound your rewards by placing sell orders on CoW Swap within a slippage tolerance you set. But its permissions are so limited that it can't be tricked into losing funds. I think most agents need guardrails like that: "can't lose funds" rather than "I hope it doesn't lose funds." That's going to be a big challenge for builders. It's one thing to build an agent that lends out your coins and earns yield, but it's much harder to build a trading agent that doesn't get tricked by other traders. People are pretty sophisticated, and maybe you can trick an agent into buying low-quality coins because a lot of bots on Twitter are pumping them. That's a challenge in and of itself. The way I think about solving it for the average person is, as you said, that there's an education problem. People first need to gain financial literacy, and that's one thing an agent can help with. It can be a tutor that helps you understand where the yield comes from: "Oh, it comes from people borrowing against their Bitcoin on Coinbase." First you understand that lending is a really durable use case where you earn real yield from borrowers. Then, if you want to get into trading: how do I build a portfolio that helps me reach my goals? What are your goals? Are you saving for school, or to buy a house? What's your risk tolerance? With new tokenized stocks and tokenized real-world assets, this will be really powerful, because your agent can work with you to figure out the optimal investment portfolio. Maybe it's a basket of tokenized stocks, some tech stocks so you're invested in the AI revolution, maybe some Bitcoin and some Ethereum. The agent can help you build a really well-balanced portfolio, remind you to save and invest, and rebalance your portfolio for you across the tokenized assets you've chosen. So I'm pretty excited about helping everyone learn more about how to invest, how to dollar-cost average, and the tricks of building and growing wealth. I think that's a pretty powerful thing agents can do.

Hodl Up: The idea of AI agents acting as assistants feels surreal to me. I've been thinking about this concept since I was a kid, and now it's becoming a reality. It's just amazing. You mentioned what you're doing with Momo to limit social engineering attacks and everything else. What's next for Momo? What's the next step you'll take?

Luke: Great question. This week or next, we're launching the ability to install Momo directly on your home screen. It's a progressive web app, so you no longer need Telegram to chat with Momo. You can already chat with it directly in our app, but you'll be able to use it as if it were a mobile app, on iOS, Android and web. I think that's a big part of it: these agents need to feel more like native apps, or even be built directly into your phone, where maybe you chat with your agent through your earbuds. Being able to use it without being a desktop web user, and without needing Telegram to chat with your agent, is pretty important. Then, in the coming weeks and months, we want to add capabilities. We'll build borrowing into the agent; right now it's lending only. We're also going to launch a Visa debit card for the agent, so you can load the card from your portfolio. You just say, "Load $20 onto my card," and the agent takes care of it. And as we integrate more fully... I don't know if you've seen companies like Ondo Finance that recently launched tokenized equities across Ethereum and Solana. We want to give the agent the ability to build those basket portfolios, so you can say, "Buy $100 of the top 10 AI tech stocks on the NASDAQ." With tokenized equities, where you can buy $100 of Nvidia or something like that, you can actually become more like a real robo-advisor. So those are some of the things we want to build into Momo. It's not just lending and borrowing; eventually it becomes your financial everything app.

Hodl Up: Pretty exciting times ahead, and I think it's still quite early. I envision a future where every person has their own AI agent trading for them, tailored to their risk tolerance and needs, because no two people are the same, and no two chains are the same. Which brings me to my next point: have you noticed differences in user behavior between a Polkadot user and a Base user? If I remember correctly, you were quite a big fish in the Moonbeam and Polkadot pond.

Luke: That's right. We were the largest lending app on Polkadot for quite some time after we first launched in early 2022. What we've noticed is that there's way more user activity, and way more smaller retail users, on Base. A lot of the people on Polkadot were early crypto people, and it skewed more toward a European user base, whereas since we launched on Base it's a wide variety, mostly US users, around 90%, because you're reaching more of the Coinbase user persona. And the nice thing about a layer 2 versus a layer 1 is really low transaction costs, less than a cent for most transactions. So people can invest small amounts, $100, a couple hundred, a couple thousand, without worrying about paying a few dollars in gas. That skews our user base toward a lot more small depositors. Instead of 5,000 hardcore Polkadot users, we have 250,000 users on Base, everything from minnows to whales. That's roughly the user breakdown.

Hodl Up: There was a time, a couple of years ago, when I was only on Solana, and my entire Twitter feed was full of degen stuff. Then for a month or two I pivoted to Base, and the whole feed was very wholesome and supportive. So just from marketing and social media posts, you could tell the difference in user behavior, and I'd assume there are differences in how they approach trades and everything in between.

Luke: For sure.

Hodl Up: Since you're talking about different chains, regions and user behavior, I want your opinion on the US and Europe. Crypto is moving pretty fast right now; I think it has 10x'd its speed in terms of mass adoption, and even though we're in a bear market, builders are building. Where do you think the US and the EU will be in the next 10 years in terms of building decentralized infrastructure and decentralized finance, and what will the differences be, in your eyes, as an expert in crypto infrastructure who also built in Web2? I really want to know.

Luke: It's hard to predict, but I do think you'll see more and more large US banks integrate with DeFi, and a big reason is the GENIUS Act, which passed last year. It makes it legal for banks to hold stablecoins, and all the big banks have announced they want to launch their own stablecoins, or maybe they'll use Tether or Circle's USDC. That means stablecoins will be very heavily integrated into the financial rails. Banks love this because you give them a dollar, they give you a stablecoin, and they earn a few percent buying US Treasuries, while you get a stablecoin you can send to friends as easily as using Cash App, Venmo or PayPal. So the banks love it: they get trillions of dollars in deposits they can earn on, and all they have to do is give you a stablecoin that maybe doesn't even pay yield. In Europe it's less certain. There are some euro-backed stablecoins, but not as many, and not nearly as much circulating supply, and it's unclear to me whether European banks will integrate stablecoins as much. Maybe Europe has more fear of crypto, I don't know. Today you have what are called eurodollar banks, large European banks that hold Tether's reserves, but you need something like a million US dollars to open an account. They're made for European businesses to accept money from American companies, if you're selling goods and services to America. I think those eurodollar banks may grow, because a lot of stablecoin activity will happen with them, but I'm more skeptical about actual euro-backed stablecoins in the EU. I'm just not sure they'll be as successful. And of course China will probably have a central bank digital currency as well, but I think it will be somewhat cut off from the rest of the world, because people don't want to transact in China's central bank digital currency.

Hodl Up: I think China has been piloting the digital yuan in different regions for a few years now. We're closer to the dystopian world than we think.

Luke: I'm not sure I like a government CBDC, whether it's the US or China, because if they don't like something you're doing, they can just zero out your bank account. That seems bad.

Hodl Up: It is. But still, Europe is even worse. I've done my fair share of research on regtech and compliance, and it's insane. In Europe it sometimes takes up to 18 months to finalize a law on something related to technology, AI or whatever, while the rest of the world moves on and implements things. Europe should take the same approach: implement first, then regulate based on what you can, without hindering innovation. At the same time, I agree that in the US we'll see all these major banks integrating crypto, blockchain and stablecoins, because they already have banking licenses. But that may be a bit unfavorable for smaller players or startups that want to build platforms or protocols that compete with, and maybe aim to replace, banks. Anyway, that's just my take. Now I want to ask about something that might make you a bit uncomfortable: the oracle discrepancy in November 2025. As an engineer, what did that moment teach you about the limits of relying on third-party oracles, and how has Moonwell's approach evolved since?

Luke: Great question. Chainlink is one of the best price feeds around, and they've been really solid for years, so the Chainlink events in October and early November were pretty shocking and surprising to a lot of the industry. In fact, I believe over 30 lending protocols across different networks, including really big ones like Venus on BNB Chain, took on small amounts of bad debt due to inaccurate price feeds. We learned a few things from it. First, about the volume-weighted average price, which is roughly how Chainlink works. Historically that's been a really good measure: you use the price where the most trading volume is happening. That broke on October 10th, because Binance had an issue with its automatic deleveraging, its ADL, so it was doing way more volume than anyone else and liquidating margin at a much lower price than the tokens were trading for on DEXs. So what we learned is that we can't always trust the volume-weighted average price. Right now we're researching things like DEX price anchors: if a DEX is selling a token at 60 cents and the Chainlink price says 30 cents, we should fall back to the DEX price, because otherwise people can create bad debt in your protocol. The good news is that only a couple of million dollars' worth of bad debt was created in the Moonwell protocol, about 1% of TVL, and we've already repaid just under half of it through protocol reserves, and the rest will be paid off soon. Another thing we've already implemented through governance since then is switching some liquid staking tokens, specifically Kelp's rsETH, to exchange-rate price feeds, so they're less subject to manipulation. I think the lesson was about a confluence of events: first, the Balancer protocol got drained through a vulnerability, and second, Chainlink was using the Balancer pool as its primary on-chain price source, which led to the November incident. So there are a lot of lessons, on the Chainlink side and on the Moonwell side. The main one is that we have to trust but verify a little. We can trust the Chainlink price to a certain extent, but if it deviates too much, we need to fall back to the real on-chain price, where it's actually trading on a DEX. That's a big lesson, and I suspect we'll see a lot of other protocols upgrade to incorporate safety mechanisms like these.

Hodl Up: I love what Chainlink has been building in the past few years, and I know other oracle providers have been building as well. But one question has been on my mind for months, since I did some research on how oracles and price feeds work: I don't see much competition between oracles in crypto. I think that's a big issue, because if there's no competition, it's either monopolized or there's no innovation happening. I know Chainlink has been building really fast and has institutional partners too. But why don't we have a way to use, say, five oracles for one specific price, Chainlink plus four other oracle companies, if you know what I mean? I'm a normie when it comes to this kind of infrastructure.

Luke: It's a great question. I think it would be awesome to diversify across oracle providers, between Chainlink, Pyth, RedStone and others, and I think that will eventually happen, but it can be challenging. RedStone is giving Chainlink some pretty good competition now. However, Chainlink still has the vast majority; probably 90%-plus of protocols use Chainlink as their primary feed. Some of the challenges: if you average the price across multiple oracles, which one is right when there are outliers? When they disagree, which one do you fall back to? There are some open questions there. And at the Chainlink level, they already have dozens of node operators, each using different data sources and data providers like Amberdata, so there's already pretty good diversification there. But 10/10 taught us that there are times when almost everyone is wrong: most of the node operators were printing the wrong price for the coins traded on Binance. We knew it was just the coins traded on Binance because, for example, Morpho, Aerodrome and Virtuals, three collateral assets traded on Binance, were impacted, while WELL isn't traded on Binance and wasn't impacted. So you could see that the tokens traded on Binance were the ones mispriced on 10/10. I think all the oracle providers need to get better at how they source data. And you're absolutely right: a great feature would be an aggregator that aggregates prices across multiple oracle providers.

Hodl Up: Now I want to turn the episode 180 degrees. Yes, oracles and projects need to do better at obtaining and sharing data. But communities need to do better too. We've seen crypto become much more institutional in the last couple of years. Do you think any part of crypto culture should be removed, and if so, what? You could argue the whole degeneracy aspect should go, but at the same time, that's what makes us authentic in a way.

Luke: Just because traditional finance and banks are adopting crypto doesn't mean you shouldn't still be able to trade memecoins or whatever. Different assets are interesting to different people. Some people like trading prediction markets, some like trading memecoins, some like trading stocks on the NASDAQ. My philosophy is that we shouldn't judge what people do. As long as it's not illegal, not a scam or a fraud, we should let people trade it. That doesn't mean you'll trade it in your Charles Schwab or E*Trade brokerage account. But Coinbase has the philosophy, and I agree with it, that it should offer everything that's legal to trade without judging whether it's a good or bad thing to trade, because ultimately people will find a way to trade those things anyway. If you can't trade them on the Coinbase app, you'll trade them on Binance, or Hyperliquid, or some other platform. So if we want people to be safe and not get ripped off, we should encourage the more reputable players, the Coinbases and Robinhoods of the world, to offer all those things. Then at least you won't get scammed. You might lose money on a bad investment, but that's on you. And don't treat people like children. Let people decide what they want to invest in, because I don't think anyone knows what's a good investment or not. A lot of American banks are really bad at this. They say, "You can't trade crypto, we won't allow it because we think it's a scam." I even moved one of my retirement accounts: it was at Vanguard, and they wouldn't let people buy the Bitcoin ETFs for a long time, so I moved my money to Fidelity, because I didn't want to keep it somewhere that wouldn't even let people buy Bitcoin ETFs. And they lost a lot of money, because they lost a lot of customers. I think we need to move away from that. Don't treat people like kids; let them invest in whatever they want.

Hodl Up: I agree with everything you just said. Now, while doing my due diligence for this episode, I found something I wanted to double-check with you. Is it true you play the saxophone?

Luke: Yes, I do play the saxophone. I don't practice as much as I should, but I played all through high school and college.

Hodl Up: That's amazing. I play the piano myself. I'm not a great player, but I find it very refreshing, and when I'm stressed it helps me unwind and put my thoughts in order. Has it helped you in any way with decision-making in what you've been building, from the engineering side and everything in between?

Luke: Music is an awesome way to unwind, clear your mind and focus on something besides work. Like I said, I don't practice as much as I should, but I try to practice about once a week, and it's a great way to relax and have something you're into that isn't crypto. Everyone should have a good hobby like that, I think.

Hodl Up: Unlike you two, I don't play any instrument, and I don't even have an ear for music. I love listening to music, but I can't make music of any kind. That creative side of me is the worst. To wrap it up, I want to talk about Moonwell again. Do you see Moonwell as the liquidity haven of the next five years, the center of lending, borrowing and everything in between?

Hodl Up: And to make it a double question: beyond metrics like TVL, how would you measure success in five years? What's the endgame for Moonwell?

Luke: Great questions. We'd love to become not just one of the central liquidity hubs on Base; we're also planning to expand to Ethereum mainnet this year. As you probably saw in Vitalik's recent post, we think that as mainnet scales, it will become the center for all DeFi and on-chain liquidity, not just Base, although Base will probably grow to trillions of dollars of stablecoin activity and have its own liquidity hub. We want to be a really compelling, attractive base layer for lending and borrowing against real-world assets. So the way I'd measure success is this: as stocks and equities get tokenized, and real-world assets like precious metals, gold and silver, bonds, Treasury bills and corporate credit all get tokenized, we want to offer lending against all of the best collateral assets, whether that's crypto today or real-world assets, stocks and Treasuries tomorrow. We think that's a huge opportunity for us, because it will democratize access. Today, in traditional finance, basically only wealthy individuals and hedge funds can borrow against their stocks and get margin. We think Moonwell, as a base layer, will let pretty much anyone, from a small retail investor to a large hedge fund or institution, borrow against real-world assets and leverage them to do more with what they have. That's what gets me really excited to wake up in the morning and work on Moonwell every day: we have this opportunity to become the base settlement layer. We've already proven we can have the best collateral assets on Base, we're going to expand that to mainnet, and we're really excited about real-world assets and tokenizing everything. I couldn't be more bullish on that trend in the coming years. And the way we'll know we've succeeded is if we grow to billions of dollars in collateral, billions of dollars in loans and hundreds of millions of users.

Hodl Up: I agree. Crypto should be about bringing the classes together, right? I'm not saying this because I'm part of the lower class or anything, but that's the whole point.

Luke: Exactly.

Hodl Up: All right. Well, thank you so much for your time and for joining us. It was an amazing episode. I don't know if you'll be at EthCC in late March, but if you will and we will, we should definitely do an on-site episode there as well, a physical one.

Luke: That sounds great. I think I'm going; I'm a speaker, so I should be there. We should meet up.

Hodl Up: Perfect. I don't know if I can bring my piano, but bring your saxophone and let's see if we can come up with something.

Luke: Sounds good. Looking forward to it. Have a great day, guys.

Hodl Up: All right, thank you.

Hodl Up: Well, it's all about affirmations. I'm affirming that we'll be at EthCC. Let's pivot a bit into Ethereum, right?

Hodl Up: I love Solana, and I love Ethereum as well. I love crypto as an industry, so I don't think that should be an issue. Let's manifest EthCC. What did you like about Luke?

Hodl Up: He was very straight to the point. No fluff. He addressed every single question right at the pain points. You know how people are PR-trained and beat around the bush to avoid a more uncomfortable question. He didn't hesitate at all, and that's what I liked about him. Shout out to Luke.

Hodl Up: The guy built back end for AWS and for Coinbase, two of the biggest companies in two different industries, if you understand what I'm saying, and now he's building Moonwell with millions and millions in TVL. If he wasn't going to be straight to the point, I don't know who would be. So shout out to Luke. Thank you for joining us today, and thank you to the viewers as well. We wish you a very good day.