The Future Is Now: Derek Alia of Futureswap On How Their Technological Innovation Will Shake Up The Tech Scene
An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis
By building a financial system that increases transparency, openness, and communicates to whoever’s using it so they’re empowered. They’re in full control without hidden terms or the potential for manipulation that has been synonymous with traditional finance. Finance should be free and it shouldn’t be locked up by a privileged group of people.
As a part of our series about cutting edge technological breakthroughs, I had the pleasure of interviewing Derek Alia.
Derek Alia, CEO & Co-Founder at Futureswap, is a full-stack engineer and entrepreneur with a passion for paradigm-shifting technologies. Derek received his degree in Computer Science from the University of Washington, and attended a software engineering program from Hack Reactor, one of the top coding boot camps focused on building autonomous software engineers. Before co-founding Futureswap, Derek worked on frontend development at an early DAO creation company that provides a suite of applications and services to enable new forms of global communities. His early experience in decentralized governance, DAOS, and blockchain technology would set the foundation for his subsequent co-founding of Tribes– a decentralized content platform– before assimilating these concepts to decentralized finance with Futureswap. Derek brings his immense knowledge of programming, decentralized governance, and DAOs to the DeFi derivatives world.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?
Crypto is at the intersection of technology, finance, and community in one industry. Some of the most revolutionary shifts in society have happened along with this transformative technology. Suppose you look at the internet as the revolution of information. In that case, crypto is the revolution in value transfer wherein you could have digital value transfer, which was not something you could have before, especially in a decentralized way. And if you think that is valuable, then you should probably be working in crypto.
In the beginning, you had these small online communities growing exponentially. It was controversial because it seemed to spring up out of nowhere, and at the time it was perceived as having little or no value. When Satoshi’s whitepaper was released, you could see the online communities grow even more, and value begin to develop– so it was basically like watching something come from nothing. Suddenly, it has grown into a phenomenon that contains one of the largest communities on the internet while making positive changes in the real world. It’s been incredible to be a part of it all.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began your career?
I would say the process of developing a valuable product with a nimble team, launching that product, and meeting our users throughout the world has been both an ongoing and interesting story. When I travel, I constantly meet people who tell me the unique ways they’ve used our product that I would never have imagined. We always have a mental image of what a typical user looks like, and then you meet them and realize the spectrum of users is much greater than you could have ever imagined. That’s a beautiful thing.
Can you tell us about the cutting edge technological breakthroughs that you are working on? How do you think that will help people?
I think the breakthroughs are mostly around creating an economically sound protocol that enables people to have exposure to the assets they want in a permission-less way. This means that anyone in the world can have access to these assets and build on top of our protocol without a barrier and without asking permission.
If users want to build on top of it or want to add new pools or new assets to it, they don’t need to ask us if that’s okay– they can just go ahead and do it. That is pretty critical in terms of allowing people to take their vision in their own direction that they see fit.
We’ve seen some excellent examples of this on other web three applications, and I think applying this to what we are building, which is something that enables more exposure on assets than what was previously available, is cutting edge. It’s complex to do, and to do it right is really hard, so we’re proud that we’ve been able to accomplish that.
Furthermore, it’s composable– so people can build on top of it. It’s also primitive, meaning it’s a building block for developers that is safe to build. Creating a foundational building block that the communities can use at their own discretion, while also building on top of it and integrating it into their projects without us having to be involved, is a total breakthrough because it enables other breakthroughs to occur.
How do you think this might change the world?
It’s the democratization of Finance in a way that is accessible globally. I think a lot of people have been missing out on these financial services and financial markets. We’re doing it in such a way that enables the building of products and communities. For instance, there might be a community of NFT builders. they’re a bunch of artists so they have no idea about most of this finance stuff because that’s not where they spend their time. They’re focused on making art. But what they do want is for their art to be valuable so they can sell it.
In this case, their collateral is their art/NFTs for which they utilize to hire out for services/sales/etc. In this niche example, Futureswap enables deeper liquidity markets and more activity for those financial services to be enabled, growing their liquidity and communities at the same time so they can continually fund their passion.
Keeping “Black Mirror” in mind, can you see any potential drawbacks about this technology that people should think more deeply about?
We’re moving to the digitalization of a lot of things. With digitalization, especially with crypto, that means that everything is going to be financialized.
This is not necessarily a bad thing. It just means that there is going to be financial services available for just about anything. That can get pretty weird.
The internet’s a tool–you get to share and digest great information, or you could spread conspiracy theories. Because these systems are distributed and decentralized, anyone can create a market on pretty much anything. This is where community and governance become very important because they’ll make sure that the protocol is aligned with the community’s best interest and values.
Was there a “tipping point” that led you to this breakthrough? Can you tell us that story?
I think the tipping point was realizing that there was this massive demand for people to have access to these assets in a noncustodial way that was entirely on-chain. For us, we saw a market for creating something financially dynamic that submarkets could be built on top of in an economically sound way. It was inevitable, and we thought, “if this is going to happen, then we should be the ones to build it.”
What do you need to lead this technology to widespread adoption?
Time. Time plus people using our product and seeing that they can put in a significant amount of money. When they see that the system holds and that it’s been pressure tested, they recognize its resilience and gain confidence.
What have you been doing to publicize this idea? Have you been using any innovative marketing strategies?
We’re very active with our community building on Twitter and Discord. We’re transparent and publicize what we’re working on and the milestones we hit. We don’t do a lot of marketing, we’re very product-focused and organic in our approach. Ultimately, we prioritize making sure we have a very well-built, safe system because people end up using it, and the product sort of speaks for itself.
How have you used your success to bring goodness to the world?
By building a financial system that increases transparency, openness, and communicates to whoever’s using it so they’re empowered. They’re in full control without hidden terms or the potential for manipulation that has been synonymous with traditional finance. Finance should be free and it shouldn’t be locked up by a privileged group of people.
What are your “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me Before I Started” and why. (Please share a story or example for each.)
1. This will be way more difficult than you can imagine
2. It will take longer than anticipated
3. You’re going to need more resources than you initially thought you would
4. Reduce the scope of things you want– put them on the backburner
5. It’s so critical to put a lot of time and thought into the culture, the team, values, and the partners you surround yourself with.
We’ve been fortunate to have gotten lucky in all those categories. Being a founder, you get to work with other startups, and you get to see these other things go off the rails. Of course, this could have very easily been the case for us, but we’re grateful that it wasn’t. Putting serious time, thought, and action into building a culture where people feel empowered is critically important.
You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
If there’s anything I could inspire, it would be for people to create open systems that push people to collaborate and work together and to take those systems and make the world a better place. Increasing open, transparent communication in the world of finance will create transferable value the likes of which we have never seen before. Open systems can impact any sector: social media, politics, finance, you name it. There should be no box that you cannot see into. Ultimately, this shines a light on things that were difficult to see before. And the more light we can put in the world, the better. Crypto epitomizes transparency and openness– and I hope the next generation of founders take full advantage of this revolutionary technology and apply it to as many things as possible.
Some very well known VCs read this column. If you had 60 seconds to make a pitch to a VC, what would you say? He or she might just see this if we tag them 🙂
So much is changing for venture capital. Having worked with traditional and crypto native VCs, I would say that if VCs don’t have these innovative crypto native projects in their portfolio, they’re really not being pushed to innovate themselves. If that remains the case, it’s likely they’ll get pushed out of their own industry. Of course, they can be in more traditional web 2.0 places but, the world of crypto is eating software. We’re happy to be working with our VC partners and letting them know what we’re doing and how they can be helpful. We’re really excited to work with VCs interested in innovating and growing their portfolio because we’re at the forefront of an opportune value transfer.
How can our readers follow you on social media?
Futureswap Twitter: https://twitter.com/futureswapx?s=20
Futureswap Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/futureswap/about/
Derek Twitter: https://twitter.com/derekalia?s=20
Derek Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/derekalia/
Thank you so much for joining us. This was very inspirational.
The Future Is Now: Derek Alia of Futureswap On How Their Technological Innovation Will Shake Up The… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
