He has backed Lido, a DeFi and staking protocol Maple, an Australian finance firm with a token-governed platform Slingshot, a crypto swapping protocol Swivel, another yield-generating DeFi protocol and PoolTogether, a crypto savings protocol, among others. Kulechov is an active investor in the DeFi space, providing capital to dozens of projects. The sum of the investment was never disclosed. The project received an investment from FTX Ventures, the venture capital arm of the FTX crypto exchange, prior to the exchange’s collapse in November 2022. Kulechov said that Aave and Lens share the same mission: “We believe that the ownership of content and profiles should belong to you in the way that DeFi belongs to you.” The protocol allows developers to create decentralized social media networks where users own their data. Lens ProtocolĪ few weeks after his Twitter suspension, Aave released The Lens Protocol, a Web3 social media platform built on the Polygon network. Kulechov took the opportunity to highlight the potential of decentralized social networks that allow users more control and less censorship and are run by independent servers rather than a centralized entity. The ban garnered significant publicity and spurred a heated debate on free speech in social media networks. Kulechov was temporarily suspended from Twitter days after Elon Musk’s acquisition for sending tweets joking that he would become the interim CEO. The company also deployed a native stablecoin, GHO, in February 2023. Like many governance tokens, Aave is also traded as a financial asset whose worth was tied to speculation about the value of its protocol. Aave tokensĪave launched its own governance token, AAVE, in October 2020. Described as a non-custodial liquidity market protocol, suppliers supply funds to a liquidity pool to earn rewards, while borrowers draw from the pools to take out a loan. Using smart contracts, Aave lets users lend, borrow, and earn interest on cryptocurrency assets without involving a bank or middleman. The project later rebranded to Aave, which is the Finnish word for “ghost” and was deployed on the Ethereum network in January 2020. A few months later, Kulechov raised $16.2 million in an initial coin offering (ICO). The idea spurred him to create ETHLend in 2017 in the very early days of DeFi applications. Kulechov thought that if users can exchange value on-chain, then they should be able to perform other tasks, such as borrowing funds using assets as collateral. He was particularly keen in building programs that contained a legal agreements that could enforce themselves through smart contracts, bridging his interests in technology, finance, and law. While at university, Kulechov discovered Ethereum and was drawn by the prospect of decentralized finance (DeFi). He wrote his thesis on using tech to make commercial agreements more efficient. Enticed by the legal aspect of finance, he went to the University of Helsinki, eventually earning a master’s in law in 2020. Kulechov noticed the e-commerce, global markets, and crowdfunding sector expanding and wanted to explore the intersection of finance and technology. He then returned to high school to finish his degree. At age 15, he dropped out of high school for a year to work on coding and built an experimentational application for users to buy how-to guides online. He notes that growing up in Finland provided him with a lot of opportunities as well as time to explore his hobbies. As the internet and social media grew in popularity, he moved on to learn Ruby on Rails, a web-application framework that Twitter was originally built upon. By age 12, Kulechov was building web pages using the PHP scripting language. The brothers also started experimenting with the Linux operating system. Kulechov became an avid gamer and was fascinated by the global connectivity that came from the gaming community. His father bought a computer for him and his brother to share in the early days of the internet. He was named on Cointelegraph’s Top 100 for the past three years and CoinDesk’s Most Influential 2021. He is an active seed investor and mentor, providing both funds and advice to numerous DeFi projects. Kulechov is a thought leader and investor in the DeFi space, giving frequent interviews and speaking at conferences. Borrowers get instant loans of cryptocurrency using other crypto they own as collateral while suppliers lend out their crypto and earn rewards. The transactions are executed automatically by smart contracts. Aave allows users to participate as suppliers or borrowers.
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