In 2021, we founded Strips out of frustration with the lack of good places to trade and hedge interest rates in DeFi. We spent months looking for an exchange where we could trade interest rates in an easy, capital-efficient manner and came up empty. After identifying this market gap, we knew we were well-positioned to build the Strips decentralised interest rate derivatives exchange (IRX) in order to serve this underserved marketplace. Today we are excited to share the soft opening of our mainnet beta on Arbitrum mainnet, which is the first of many milestones for the Strips team and platform.
With today’s Strips mainnet beta launch, Arbitrum’s Co-founder and CEO Steven Goldfeder stated: “We are excited to welcome Strips Finance to the Arbitrum ecosystem. Strips Finance’s Interest Rate Swap is a phenomenal tool for investors to hedge against price fluctuation with yield farming and trading leverage.”
It’s abundantly clear to us that DeFi is the next evolution of financial infrastructure due to the fact it allows for openness, transparency, and efficiency. Interest rates markets are the largest and most important market in finance. Therefore, it became evident to us to build an interest rate trading platform to the decentralized ecosystem that is ripe for growth.
To put this market segment into perspective — if DeFi captured just 1% of traditional finance, the DeFi interest rate derivatives market would be worth $4 TRILLION US DOLLARS. While we recognise that we won’t get there overnight, we have taken the first steps with the mainnet beta launch of Strips decentralised IRX.
We are here for generations. That means that our timeline for building Strips is not measured in months or years, but in decades. To build the next generation of financial markets infrastructure, our philosophy is to build the best solutions from first principles thinking and there will be no shortcuts along the way.
To get there, we are extremely blessed to have the perfect team to tackle challenging problems that we will face. This is critical in our mission of building the best-in-class protocol.
Our c-suite of executives hails from various backgrounds ranging from portfolio management, DeFi and high-frequency trading. Our CEO previously worked on the trading desk at Goldman Sachs, before moving to a high-frequency trading fund as head trader at Ingensoma Trading. Our COO previously worked as a trader at BlackRock trading FX, IRS and bonds. Before joining Strips, she managed over $20bn in assets for GIC. Our CTO was previously a technical product lead at one of the world’s largest digital banks, Tinkoff Bank.
Our other core developers are similarly amazing and diverse, having worked in highly technical satellite software, real-time trade clearing and settlement industries. All of which require a strong technical background and a deep understanding of security and risk.
It has become clear that asset prices are highly correlated with interest rates, however retail and professional crypto traders are left without options to properly speculate and hedge against these interest rate movements. Our mission is to bring interest rate markets to everyone. We aim to become the largest interest rate and fixed income exchange in the world by focusing on technology, ecosystem robustness and best-in-class trading experience.
Giving people the power to participate in the most important financial markets. Influence the direction of our financial markets to promote transparency, democracy and discovery. All of this is the reason why we have built out the Strips platform in order to properly serve today’s traders.
You can show support by adding (%, %) to your Twitter bio and if you would like to join us in changing the future of finance, drop us a message in telegram. https://t.me/stripsfi
