How to Earn Passive Income With Crypto, Per Firm That Offers 2%-8% APY – Business Insider
- Ben Samaroo is the co-founder and CEO of decentralized finance investing platform WonderFi.
- He shares how he got into the DeFi space and why he is trying to simplify it for retail investors.
- Samaroo also explains how the platform captures the various high-yielding opportunities in DeFi.
As a former securities lawyer at a white-shoe law firm, Ben Samaroo was able to advise some of the first Canadian and US companies that got involved in the crypto space.
While helping companies navigate regulation to help bring crypto products to market, Samaroo himself was drawn to the nascent industry.
In late 2016, he bought his first bitcoin at around $1,000, which sent him down the rabbit hole of devouring any bitcoin-related materials he could get his hands on, and attending crypto meet-ups in Vancouver.
In 2017, he became part of a founding team for blockchain-advisory firm First Coin Capital, which was acquired by crypto billionaire Mike Novogratz’s Galaxy Digital in 2018.
Amid the initial coin offering craze in 2017, Samaroo also discovered decentralized finance. Fascinated by the new ideas coming out of the gate every single day, he began dabbling in decentralized exchanges.
“The decentralized exchanges back then, there wasn’t really any volume on it, it was more like a proof of concept,” he said in an interview. “It wasn’t really until last year that you started to see a lot more activities there.”
Decentralized finance exploded onto the scene when Compound (COMP) — a DeFi lending protocol that allows users to earn double-digit interest on their crypto deposits — started to attract a large number of users to its platform last June. From there, DeFi applications mushroomed in what the industry calls the “DeFi summer.”
“It’s the first time that you are seeing millions and millions of dollars of transactions going through these protocols,” he said. “So they are getting battle-tested not only from a smart-contract perspective but also from a user-experience perspective.”
A $270 billion sector plagued by complexity
Since spring this year, the DeFi sector has been overshadowed by the boom in non-fungible tokens, the rise of play-to-earn gaming, and metaverse-linked tokens.
But the growth of DeFi has shown no signs of slowing. The total value locked across all DeFi platforms has surged from around $22 billion at the beginning of this year to about $276 billion as of Thursday afternoon in New York, according to analytics platform DeFi Llama.
To be sure, TVL is not a perfect measure of the total capital deployed in DeFi as different protocols could measure it differently. Nevertheless, it …….