Jeremy Black

Product market fit. Network effects. Organic and aligned incentives across all stakeholders and dimensions. Create infinitely more value than you capture.

Excited to be bringing stablecoins to Canada! 🇨🇦 My personal goal is to move my personal Norbert's Gambit volume onchain this year on Tempo.

@luigidemeo @aave Welcome! Let’s make credit as widely available as compute.

Some personal news*  I've recently joined @aave 👻 as Chief Strategy and Business Officer. After ~4 months of rest and reflection regarding the state of the industry, my personal life, and my ambitions, I feel more invigorated and determined than ever to contribute to the crypto space. When I stepped away from @AvaLabs earlier this year, I said I'd take time to think carefully about where I could contribute most. I’m grateful for the awesome opportunities I've been able to consider. The answer became clear over the past months and many conversations with @StaniKulechov and the Aave Labs team. I've long known Stani and Emilio and admired their work. Like them, I believe the future of finance is onchain, and Aave is at the center of this evolution. Aave has the opportunity to provide a better way to borrow and lend, and to build credit markets at internet scale. The legacy financial system is slow, fragmented, and quietly extractive, and most of the world is underserved by it. Aave has spent years proving, in production and across cycles, that an open and programmable alternative works at scale. The next chapter is about turning that foundation into the credit and capital markets layer of the internet. In this new role, I'll lead strategy, business development, and core operational functions,  working closely with Stani and the team to strengthen what's already working while pursuing the next set of opportunities ahead of us. I'm joining at a pivotal moment. The events of the past week have made clear there's real work to be done and lessons to be drawn. I’ve been working non-stop with the team on the recovery effort this past week and I have no doubt that Aave will emerge even stronger. What I've seen up close is grit, focus, and determination under pressure. This is exactly the kind of team I want to build alongside of, and it makes me even more confident about where this is all headed. -Luigi

Aave V4 is now live on @ethereum.

New deployment that puts @aave at then center of the massive @okx user base across @wallet, @XLayerOfficial, and more.

A week later and everyone at EthCC just wants to talk about Whop Treasury. Yield on @aave.

This morning at @EthCC, @StaniKulechov presented our vision for connecting productive, real-world infrastructure assets with onchain capital markets. The programmability, transparency, and openness of DeFi increases access to credit and reduces cost of capital. In the near term, fintechs and their users will be the primary beneficiaries as credit moves onchain and borrowing costs compress by 50-75%. In the long run, DeFi will become the capital allocation layer for financing abundance: water treatment, energy capture, energy storage, robotics, and machine intelligence. Watch the keynote here: youtube.com/live/5FXnlac2k…

Aave is live on @XLayerOfficial and is now part of the @okx ecosystem.

Whop shipped 6% yield to 21M users. Most of them have no idea it's DeFi. If you haven't heard of @whop, they're like Shopify, Patreon, and Udemy rolled into one for the internet generation. 21M users, $3B+ in payouts, growing 255% year over year. Their new Treasury product enables balances to earn up to 6% on @aave through @veda_labs via an integrated self-custodial wallet on @Plasma. The user just sees a number going up every second in their Whop dashboard, with zero crypto friction. Classic DeFi mullet. While congress debates whether stablecoins should be allowed to pay yield, Whop shipped yield through lending markets, sidestepping the debate entirely. Everything is a bank. Any platform with float can offer yield as a feature. This is the same threat to deposits that banks have been lobbying against, except this one is less in their control. Users are on Whop because that's where they earn. Now they can grow their balances there too. It's only a matter of time before Whop enables spend (cards) and credit (they can already see your revenue). This is the consumer equivalent of merchant banking, and banks will need to step up the utility of their offerings in order to compete.

@pythianism Whoa indeed

Whoaaaaa

This Open Door team is a force. There is a big fintech play brewing here. I hope they leap frog straight to onchain capital markets.

Aave quarterly livestream is today at 1:30. This is an incredible moment in time for the Aave community. Join us to learn more about the products we are building to enable DeFi everywhere for everyone.

@elizahvlediani Wow. You’re going to build a lot of value with that kind of capital. Congrats.

We just closed a $14M series A led by @khoslaventures. @chexymoney is building a new way for money to move in Canada. The future of consumer finance will be built here. Stoked to partner with @davidweiden and @rabois to take this to the next level. 🚀🚀🚀 betakit.com/chexy-raises-1…

@devjoshstevens Enjoy the journey my friend!

Excited to join @Polymarket as VP of Engineering. I haven’t seen a hungrier team in my career, the talent density here is insane. We’re building the future of how people understand the world. What should we build next? What’s broken? What’s missing? Drop it below. P.s we are hiring world class people in NYC DMs open

Aave Labs is strengthening its Product and Enterprise Sales teams, and we’re hiring with open roles! Senior Product Designer Staff Design Engineer Senior Design Engineer Staff Smart Contract Engineer Product Marketing Manager Sales Engineer Director of Enterprise Sales and Partnerships Business Development Associate We’re a product-driven company focused on bringing DeFi to millions of users and institutions around the world by building the most compelling DeFi products. Apply at aave.com/careers

Yesterday was another significant stress test to Aave's +$50B onchain lending markets. Aave Protocol liquidated over $140M collateral across multiple networks without any issues, fully automated demontrating (yet again) the market leader protocol resiliency. Aave will win.

~12M DeFi monthly active users (Dune). With the Aave App, +5M users in the first 12 months doesn’t sound aggressive. Aave will win.

My thoughts on the recent Aave DAO discourse. The recent proposal is framed as decentralization, but in practice it would handicap the entity most responsible for Aave's success, and it looks almost like a coordinated power grab. A large part of why Aave became the largest lending protocol was because of Aave Labs. If Aave had been run as a pure "DAO" from day one, it would have been outcompeted years ago. The protocol operated like a DAO. Labs operated like a company. That division of labor and resources has worked extremely well while competitors with "purer" governance models stalled, failed, or disappeared. Aave the protocol is unconventional - a set of smart contracts governed by a DAO. But because it touches the conventional world, users, regulators, institutions, it does need at least one conventional entity interfacing with that world. Historically that's been Aave Labs. The protocol and Labs each have had distinct jobs, and evidently they've each been doing them *exceptionally* well (see x.com/StaniKulechov/…) DAOs are *structurally incapable* of shipping competitive software, or even being competitive at anything attempting to resemble an actual, real business. Every decision becomes a governance proposal, every move requires token holder consensus, and every fast-moving opportunity dies in a forum thread while competitors are actually executing. And world-class software isn't built by committees of contractors and rotating service providers. It's built by tight-knit, in-house teams with deep context, shared vision, and the continuity to compound their expertise over years. Aave is special as it's succeeded where others failed. They should be very cautious about forcing changes to the naturally evolved relationship and setup that got them there. It has arrived at a natural, high-functioning equilibrium over the course of many, many years. Uprooting that in the name of decentralization poses a major risk to breaking what actually has been working. Also most protocols, literally the vast majority, would kill for a founder who not only has stuck around for 8 years when they could have retired a long time ago, but someone who shows up every day and continues to work hard, experiment, innovate, and advocate every single day. The complete opposite of this is actually the norm. Most founders exit the second they have a chance and they never look back. IMO the DAO's long-term success depends on Labs staying motivated to build. Weakening that relationship doesn't decentralize Aave it actually makes it much worse. Stani said it best "... the best way to actually scale the Aave protocol is to build actual businesses on top of the protocol that leverage the protocol and generate more protocol revenue." This should be the focus, accelerating the application layer, not extracting every cent from every corner of the ecosystem. Hyperliquid did not become successful because they had "the best protocol", they did so because they also had the best application layer, design, and UX (*big* lesson in there). Finally, and importantly, handicapping Labs and treating it like it should not share in any of the upside of the protocol is, in the long run, bad for the DAO itself as well as the Aave token and Aave token holders.

@gothburz This is really funny

Last quarter I rolled out Microsoft Copilot to 4,000 employees. $30 per seat per month. $1.4 million annually. I called it "digital transformation." The board loved that phrase. They approved it in eleven minutes. No one asked what it would actually do. Including me. I told everyone it would "10x productivity." That's not a real number. But it sounds like one. HR asked how we'd measure the 10x. I said we'd "leverage analytics dashboards." They stopped asking. Three months later I checked the usage reports. 47 people had opened it. 12 had used it more than once. One of them was me. I used it to summarize an email I could have read in 30 seconds. It took 45 seconds. Plus the time it took to fix the hallucinations. But I called it a "pilot success." Success means the pilot didn't visibly fail. The CFO asked about ROI. I showed him a graph. The graph went up and to the right. It measured "AI enablement." I made that metric up. He nodded approvingly. We're "AI-enabled" now. I don't know what that means. But it's in our investor deck. A senior developer asked why we didn't use Claude or ChatGPT. I said we needed "enterprise-grade security." He asked what that meant. I said "compliance." He asked which compliance. I said "all of them." He looked skeptical. I scheduled him for a "career development conversation." He stopped asking questions. Microsoft sent a case study team. They wanted to feature us as a success story. I told them we "saved 40,000 hours." I calculated that number by multiplying employees by a number I made up. They didn't verify it. They never do. Now we're on Microsoft's website. "Global enterprise achieves 40,000 hours of productivity gains with Copilot." The CEO shared it on LinkedIn. He got 3,000 likes. He's never used Copilot. None of the executives have. We have an exemption. "Strategic focus requires minimal digital distraction." I wrote that policy. The licenses renew next month. I'm requesting an expansion. 5,000 more seats. We haven't used the first 4,000. But this time we'll "drive adoption." Adoption means mandatory training. Training means a 45-minute webinar no one watches. But completion will be tracked. Completion is a metric. Metrics go in dashboards. Dashboards go in board presentations. Board presentations get me promoted. I'll be SVP by Q3. I still don't know what Copilot does. But I know what it's for. It's for showing we're "investing in AI." Investment means spending. Spending means commitment. Commitment means we're serious about the future. The future is whatever I say it is. As long as the graph goes up and to the right.