Umami Labs CEO Alex O’Donnell grew up within the suburbs of Philadelphia earlier than attending Temple College to check literature and economics. That path led him to spend seven years of his life as a monetary journalist at Reuters, the place he specialised in mergers and acquisitions IPOs.
He mentioned his educational focus created a “fairly pure synthesis” when it got here to monetary journalism. Nonetheless, he mentioned he turned “disenchanted” along with his business whereas cooped up at house through the Covid-19 pandemic. “There was actually a three-way alliance between journalists, authorities officers and expertise corporations making an attempt to regulate the movement of data,” O’Donnell mentioned in an interview with Cointelegraph.
He began tinkering with cryptocurrency, which led to his introduction to Umami DAO and finally his founding of Umami Labs.
O’Donnell and his spouse Sanjana are getting ready for a “third, smaller particular person” to hitch their household subsequent yr. Within the meantime, he mentioned he’s additionally getting ready for an additional crypto-related enterprise. The small print should not but absolutely public, however he mentioned he plans to launch extra info within the coming months.
1) How did you make the transition from journalism to crypto?
I had been a journalist for the higher a part of a decade, primarily protecting mergers and acquisitions. I’ve at all times been taken with finance and expertise. However across the time of the pandemic, I began to grow to be a bit of disenchanted with mainstream media. That was the primary time I began to grow to be a bit of extra cynical concerning the position of my very own sector within the info economic system. So I began paying extra consideration to points like privateness, censorship, and different points that I hadn’t had a lot curiosity in earlier than.
In 2020, I spent most of my time protecting the Covid-19 pandemic. There was really a three-way alliance between journalists, authorities officers and expertise corporations making an attempt to regulate the movement of data. It wasn’t even that the official line was incorrect. It was that dissent was suppressed within the first place. That actually elevated my curiosity in decentralized platforms.
It was then that I began to grow to be meaningfully taken with crypto. Coming from monetary journalism, decentralized finance (DeFi) significantly caught my curiosity. I actually began actively investing in numerous crypto protocols as a non-public investor in 2021. I turned increasingly concerned in DeFi communities, and one in all them was the precursor to UmamiZeroTwOhm.
2) How did that lead you to discovered Umami Labs?
I received concerned with ZeroTwOhmas, an everyday personal investor who participated like many individuals. It was a reasonably small neighborhood, so I used to be in a position to get in contact with the builders constructing the protocol fairly shortly.
However they did not actually have a transparent sense of path about what they wished to do subsequent. They’d raised a number of million {dollars} in capital, a lot of which was nonetheless there. It felt like somebody needed to step in, and the builders, to be sincere, had been more than pleased handy the accountability over to another person, which ended up being me.
3) What are you specializing in now?
What I am most taken with now’s exploring a problem that turned very clear to me throughout my time at Umami. Basically, as Umami Labs ready to launch our first product in early 2023, I met with many crypto-focused hedge funds and enormous particular person traders. There was a gaping want for a approach to safely earn curiosity on USDC, USDT and different stablecoins with out merely going utterly off-chain.
I’ve already centered at Umami on creating one other product designed to generate returns on stablecoins, however the true want is for one thing that’s as protected, boring and dependable as a traditional financial savings account, however for individuals who maintain stablecoins in wallets. There have been forays into that space by different gamers, however I have never seen a whole answer to that downside but. It requires a mix of getting the precise regulated entities off-chain and seamless mechanisms for on- and off-ramping on-chain.
That is one thing I am personally specializing in proper now. I am working with a number of others to develop one thing and getting suggestions from potential early adopters. We’ll share extra particulars within the coming months. However for now it’s nonetheless within the early levels.
4) What do you suppose would be the largest crypto developments in 2024?
In my private opinion, I believe the excessive level of the crypto market in 2021 was actually the excessive water mark of this period of very DIY, unregulated, sort of community-run, bootstrapped protocols. I believe within the coming years, together with now, we’ll see a fairly stark shift the place DeFi not seems a lot like a totally separate ecosystem. It will likely be a subset of TradFi in each respect.
I do not suppose the excellence between DeFi and TradFi will maintain up. Naturally, we see a lot of ETFs present process the registration course of. Within the background, main gamers are acquiring licenses to have interaction in a wider vary of monetary actions within the USCoinbase, which has registered, for instance, as a Futures Fee Service provider and in addition as a Designated Contract Market with the CFTC. That authorizes them to function an trade and open accounts on the futures markets. These will in fact be centered on Bitcoin and Ether.
Coinbase and Circle are placing collectively a number of elements that may permit them to grow to be deeply built-in gamers inside the conventional monetary world. I believe that is very fascinating. In parallel, you’ve individuals like Constancy and Franklin Templeton and BlackRock creatingregulatedcryptocurrencyfundingMerchandise. Franklin Templeton is creating its personal tokenized Treasury Invoice ETF. It is fairly clear that this can be a supply of momentum for the business within the coming years.
5) What’s at present most fascinating to you as an funding?
In truth, the one factor in crypto I am taken with as a long-term funding is Ether and its derivatives. I believe we’re nonetheless at some extent the place the overwhelming majority of potential investments in crypto are extraordinarily speculative. The underlying worth proposition of the tokens continues to be unclear. I believe ETH is among the few exceptions. So I personal ETH, and I am comfy with it as a long-term funding.
I take note of the strike protocols resembling Lido and Eigen Layer. Eigen permits individuals to take the ETH they’ve already staked and re-stake it on a lot of totally different onesassociatedstrike protocols. This considerably expands the vary of actions that may be carried out reliably. I anticipate there can be loads of constructing on prime of Eigen and different related protocols over time. I believe we are going to see a proliferation of mutual funds and ETFs focusing on taking ETH, staking it, and redeploying it.
6) What do you suppose is the primary barrier to mass adoption of blockchain expertise?
There’s a want for an entire convergence of protocols on the intersection of blockchain, and for extra established corporations which might be built-in into the normal monetary sector and in a position to function compliantly from a regulatory perspective. We have to be certain that established gamers combine superior good contracts and take full benefit of blockchain’s potential. Then we begin to see blockchain turning into a part of on a regular basis monetary transactions and actions.