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Block by Block: A Show on Web3 Growth Marketing
[PODCAST] From REN Protocol to Garden Finance: Susruth on Fixing Fragmentation in DeFi
Summary
Susruth, CEO of Garden Finance, shares how his background in cybersecurity and early work in DeFi led him to launch a cross-chain liquidity protocol focused on user custody and seamless UX. He explains how Garden leverages atomic swaps and HTLCs to enable trustless trading across blockchains, with a special focus on Bitcoin. Susruth emphasizes the need to simplify user workflows, listen to community feedback, and target specific user profiles to drive product-market fit and sustainable growth. The conversation also dives into the competitive DeFi landscape, Garden’s philosophy of building fundamental rails, and plans to expand across chains.
Takeaways
– Susruth’s crypto journey started with a cybersecurity interest and early exposure to Ethereum and DeFi
– He worked on foundational DeFi projects like Republic Protocol and REN before founding Garden
– Garden Finance focuses on solving cross-chain liquidity fragmentation while preserving user custody
– Atomic swaps and HTLCs are key primitives for enabling trustless trades, especially with Bitcoin
– The Garden philosophy draws from global financial systems, emphasizing interoperability
– A great user experience and safe, simple workflows are core to the product vision
– Differentiation in the crowded DeFi space comes from targeting niche users and building defensible rails
– Community feedback is crucial to iterating the product and identifying the “one ideal user”
– Sustained volume growth depends on strong customer engagement and retention
– Garden aims to expand to multiple chains and become a core infrastructure layer in DeFi
Timeline
(00:00) Intro to Susruth and Garden Finance
(03:09) How cybersecurity led him into crypto
(06:10) Early work in DeFi with REN and Republic Protocol
(09:02) Founding Garden to address cross-chain fragmentation
(12:07) Global finance as inspiration for Garden’s design
(15:00) Designing a better DeFi user experience
(18:01) Bridging Bitcoin and other assets trustlessly
(22:40) Improving HTLCs for UX and security
(24:02) Competing in a crowded DeFi ecosystem
(25:40) Building safe and simple infrastructure
(27:32) Finding product-market fit through niche audiences
(31:04) Engaging users to grow volume
(33:53) Defining the ideal user to guide development
(37:05) Using community input to shape the roadmap
(39:58) Long-term vision: expansion and ecosystem growth
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Susruth co-founder and CEO of Garden Finance. Welcome. Hey, good to be here. um Let's begin with, uh well, first of all, I first learned about garden finance when I spoke with Orkun at at Citria. um He was telling me about some of the projects that were part of the Origins program. And one of the projects is garden finance. And so that's what first led me to learn about you guys and what you are up to. uh And I'm always very interested in projects that are focused in the Bitcoin ecosystem, because I think we need more of them. But maybe we can start with a little bit about you, how you got into crypto and what led you to building Garden Finance. Yeah, that's good. So actually, when I was doing my bachelor's, I was very interested in cybersecurity. So I was doing this internship after my second year of engineering in a cybersecurity firm. And my final project at the internship was to figure out how to use blockchain to improve security. So, and this was when Ethereum was trading at 20 bucks and I still thought that it was too expensive and then ever since it kind of proved me wrong. But yeah, like I mean, when I was like researching about blockchain for my final project at my internship, I just like got like really interested in like the whole technology, like what it stands for and everything like that. So I slowly like got into Ethereum. I started my own like Ethereum miner, which I just like built it, built in my like Tom Goon, used like like free electricity and actually like my Ethereum stuff back in the day. And then like in 2017, actually like joined as one of the first engineers at Thread Protocol. It was called Tabless back then. The idea was like we'll build like five base for blockchain. That was the pitch that we are like selling to people. But the thing was like we actually built everything. Like in eight months we had everything like working product. like we launched it, but there were no developers. So it was like too early for like any developers to actually exist in the space. So like all the dev tools that we built kind of are not like super useful. But during the time we actually had like a strong team of five who had like really understood like what blockchain means and how to build on blockchain. So we decided that instead of building dev tools, let's actually build products. And we actually started like working on uh a dark pool for like the whole like DeFi space. was like we will actually build like a completely decentralized app, which is completely trustless, completely verifiable, completely secure, ah using an SMTC protocol. So the idea was like everyone can submit their orders, like even large orders. No one will be able to look at the order book. And if an order match happens, then you would actually settle peer to peer. So we actually built our whole order matching engine on top of an SMTC system. and the settlement was happening using this thing called atomic swaps. So that was our first protocol. It was called Republic Protocol and we actually like raised capital for it. We did like an ICO and like we had like $40 million in funds raised for that project. And that eventually, so we built like a dark pool. It was working again, fully functional, but we couldn't get like users to use it because there was no liquidity in the DeFi space back then. Uniswap was still a very small project. No one was using Uniswap at this point. no one believed that Texas can do anything. This was when EtherDelta was the only DEX, which was a limit order book, literally on Ethereum. Super expensive. But that was the only DEX back then. AMs were still a very new thing. So we tried to actually get it to market. We tried to knock to a lot of trading desks like Amber and all these guys back then. But like whatever we did, was like super hard to actually get people to use it. oh So then our thinking actually went to uh saying like, where is liquidity? Where is liquidity in this world? Then we thought like, liquidity is in Bitcoin. Because Bitcoin has 80 % of the or 80 % or more of all the TBL back then. And even now, it's like the most liquid chain. So we thought like, how can we bring Bitcoin to our system? Because initially it was actually built mainly for the EVM chains. So we were trying to figure out how do we actually do it for Bitcoin. uh started doing research and figured out the BTC side of things where we actually created one of the first trustless Bitcoin wrappers called RunBTC. So this is when we actually rebranded from RunBit protocol to Run. And then we launched Run. So then we actually built the first cross-chain protocol. We actually had this very big uh custodian SMBC network, one of the biggest in the world, ever deployed, using ah our own like algorithms back then. And then we actually like migrated to Frost when it actually got like live and like when we actually like vetted it's like security and stuff. and on this system, we actually had like more than $1.5 billion like DVL, which was crazy back then because like we were just like five engineers, like literally one year order for like university. And we had like this like $1.5 billion literally sitting there. And like, he's on our system that we wrote, right? Like it was crazy. And it was like and there was almost like 18 billion dollars in like volume like being bridged between like VTC and like Ethereum and like still the experience was not like super smooth. It was like decently cluttered and like our uh S &P network which was like a it is almost a blockchain right like it has like more moving parts than a blockchain because it is purely cross-chain in nature and I think that's also the main reason why a lot of cross-chain protocols get hacked right because like there are like so many moving parts and there are like so many blockchains that you with and like if something happens like wrong one one chain like all your systems are like kind of like corrupted and like you will lose money. So it was super hard for us to keep it safe. we had this extremely big code base that is our SMBC network. And we had an equally big code base, which actually literally monitored our actual blockchain, which was literally looking at every single log that is coming out, every single transaction that is going, doing analysis on, it malicious? Is it unexpected? If it is unexpected, used to us an alert to our phones at midnight, all that stuff. So uh from the beginning, actually, our whole team had this like really like security first mindset where we really wanted to ensure that like if people are using our system, they cannot lose a dollar of money when they are using our system because like at the end of the day, we are building finance, right? We can't be like, you know, like, how to like any less standard than losing nothing. So we were like, it was a crazy time because it was like very hectic because of all the funds, because of the size of the magnitude of funds and like the early stage of like all of our team like because we were only like two years experienced we were like still learning like a lot we were trying to just like build extremely robust systems but we were still early in our like careers so that's that's like where my career started and I gradually became like the lead engineer at like RAN and then like one of like when we were like doing all this stuff like one other thing that was like interesting was happening so we actually had this like you In our company, used to do hackathons once every quarter where we actually tried to something completely new that is not our business just to see what we can do. And in one of those hackathons, actually built an NAD liquidation pot, which was something that was just very early. This was back in 2018, 1990. So this was when Compound was launched and Arvai was like, he'd lend back them and all the liquidation market was extremely small. So we kind of thought that liquidations are interesting because there are Texas like you do for that are like very liquid and you have liquidations happening here and that are inefficient. So there is like a lot of value to be captured by actually like writing very extremely efficient automated bots that could actually liquidate and actually make money. So we actually built like some sample bots and then we actually started liquidating like positions on compound and like uh mostly compound back then. And then once we actually were like, we thought that there might be something here. There might be like a vertical that we could actually launch across like this MEV kind of like space. So we got more and more into it. I kind of like more from Grand Protocol to like this MEV project that we started. And we continued on that line where we actually like built a protocol called Keep It Down back then, which eventually was called like Rook. Yeah. Yeah, so that was like our uh project. I mean, this was like before Flashbots, right? It was like almost around the same time as when Flashbots got launched. So we were kind of taking a different approach to MEV back then. We were trying to figure out how to do MEV by actually creating this meta layer uh between users and exchanges, where we actually captured all the MEV and actually refunded 75 % back to our users. So that was our system. actually said that like MEV will be abstracted by someone. So we'll ensure that like we are the people who will extract it and will actually give you a cashback whenever you do a trade on us. It was like super popular back then we actually like built like a hundred million dollar treasury and within like eight months, it was just crazy. And again, like this was like the early days of MEV. So it was like very small number of like people who were actually participating in it. So this was like, how much like two years like we were like building it, like enhancing it and improving it. We launched like a few very interesting products called the hiding game for like tech trading. And we also quickly some product for like lending where you would actually lend to us and like we will actually protect you from liquidations. I just like paying in 5 % liquidation cost to company you would only be paying 0.5 % to us. So even that system got like 100 million DPL within like few weeks because you were like decent back then. So this was all going good. uh In parallel on the run side of things, uh our co-founders actually decided to like move on and like move to like working on like a biotech based startup. So me and Jazz, who's like my co-founder even now, we actually took over REN. So we decided that like we'll like spend like all our resources on REN and actually make it into like the next generation like in probability protocol. ah So we actually like started work. Yeah, thanks. It's like a very long disc. Yeah. you are, I mean, your history is pretty storied. You were like a, you're a pre-DeFi OG. I mean, you get, it sounds like you got into DeFi before DeFi Summer. So that's pretty, that's pretty amazing. And I remember all these projects and these projects are still around, Keeper, et cetera. um Your story of, you know, how TVL was growing. It reminds me of a story Jeff Bezos from Amazon shared. When they first started Amazon, they had a bell. And so every time someone would order a book, the bell would ring and then it would ring. And then it got to a point where it rang all the time. And so they had to shut it off. And it sounds like you guys watch the TVL numbers go up and then it just kept going up and you're like, my God, what are we doing? What's happening? Which is a great problem to have, you know? Exactly. I think it was like almost like identical, right? Like, mean, that literally happened twice, like once, like during our renders where we actually had this like alert bot. Initially our alerts were actually happening whenever like someone traded on our system. And it was literally like calling us like 10 times a night. So at some point we like, had to like put better metrics. We can't just like wake up whenever like a swap happens and it just like keeps changing. It's crazy. I mean, yeah, it's like, I think I wouldn't trade it for anything in life. I think it's It was like an extremely exciting time to be alive. think it was like before DeFi. it was like so much like, you know, like it was like literally like a very small number of like very deep projects that were like working on like really cool solutions. So I was like, yeah, like super excited and like happy about like everything we did. Well, let's jump to garden finance. Maybe we start with the name. What made you guys come up with the name garden? So it's actually kind of like draws like some parallels from my keep it up experience. during like, I really stay early days in like keep it up. actually, uh think someone actually like wrote this paper called the dark forest that Ethereum is a dark forest and like everyone is out there to get you. So the idea was that like, you know, like there is like so many like bots that are running in the system and everyone is trying to like steal money from you kind of like whole perspective. And there is this other concept that is also called like bald So the idea is that, you know, this is like where you are actually very protected and you are actually like safe and you can be like, you know, no one is actually going to steal from you and like you are super safe. So garden is kind of like derived from that idea of like, you know, like a place where you can actually feel extremely safe, like doing your trades. And like you want to like ensure that like no MBB is extracted from you, no one like malicious can actually, you know, steal money from you whenever you are in like using our garden product. So that's kind of like very kind of it's name. That's cool. Now tell us about garden finance. Like what problem are you guys, you you guys built the garden finance. What problems are you guys focused on solving? So again, the philosophy behind garden finance kind of like draws like a lot of parallels from like international finance as well. So the idea is that, like when like the global economy got like fully opened back in 90s, like when like people actually like started, like when globalization happened, right? When people decided that, you know, like every country is like really good at something and like not every country has to do something. It just kind of like changing now, but like back in 90s, it was like the thing, right? Like we believed that like Germany is like really good at making cars. US is like very good at like creating innovative startups. China is very good at like manufacturing like Japan is very good at like creating like extremely high quality appliances. So back then like we were thinking that you know like all these like countries can do like what they are like really good at and like they can just like ship things across to other people so that like every single human being can actually like experience the best the world has to offer. Instead of trying to just like force people to use something that is bad that is like locally made we were like really open and saying that you know like we will actually use something that is good from each country and actually like you know like live like a better life. So we kind of like believe that that is the same thing in blockchains as well like we believe that like multiple blockchains will always exist like bitcoin will exist ethereum will exist like solana will exist like a few other like blockchains will exist like maybe some some blockchains will die maybe new blockchains will come and like this whole space will continuously like move on but like we would not want to live in a in a world where there is like only two blockchains right because you are kind of like on what you can do because like innovation stalls and like the competition decreases so we want to make sure that like the competition exists and like multiple choices are always present for people but like with multiple choices there are like a lot of issues right like there is liquidity fragmentation maybe like you know you have like $100 here $50 there but you can't do like a $125 transfer because like they are in different blockchains and all that stuff so we believe that like if we want to like make this like world of like multiple blockchains existing side by side like happily possible we need like strong rails between all these blockchains to actually ensure that movement of funds across these chains is as smooth as possible, as cheap possible and as fast as possible. So that is the problem statement that we really want to solve at Gartner. We want to make sure that every single blockchain that exists is connected to every other blockchain and value transfer happens without users' It's an ambitious problem to solve and it's a big one. mean, the level of liquidity fragmentation, especially in the EVM, in the EVM space with all the roll ups is a really big problem. How does Bitcoin, how does that play a role in garden finance? So almost like all my career like since like last eight years I have been working on Bitcoin like so we were like literally start working on Bitcoin back in 2017. We were like because like Bitcoin was like the most predominant asset that we actually had and RenBDC was one of the biggest assets we actually had in Kibbuta as well. So it was something that we were like working on like for almost eight years now. So we kind of and we do still believe that you know like if I have to like literally hitch my vac to like one single blockchain in this whole world, would be Bitcoin, right? Because like it has existed for so long and it is like secure, like it is like tested by like so many people for so many years like that it is 100 % safe. Similar to like cryptography, right? Like you believe that like it has started, let me say only after five years or like seven years of it actually existing and being safe. Similar to that in blockchain, Bitcoin existed for 10 years and there is nothing that like anyone can take away from it. So we do believe that like Bitcoin would continue to play like fundamentally in life, future of like DeFi as a whole. So that's the reason we wanted to like make sure that like all the things that we build like Bitcoin has access to. Like Bitcoin is literally center, like front end center in our vision. We want to make sure that like whatever we are building, someone who has Bitcoin will be able to use it. Got it. Now, practically as a user, how does that play into, you know, if I'm a user of garden finance, like maybe tell me, maybe walk through what my experience would be like as a user of garden finance. sure. So in garden finance, you can actually, let's say like you have Bitcoin in your wallet trade or you have most of the people will have Bitcoin in their centralized exchanges or hardware wallet. Like these are the three places you can have right like in centralized exchange hardware wallet. So you have your Bitcoin and you want to do something with it right like you either want to let's say earn yield. Let's say you want to earn, let's say you want to sell at USDC or you want to let's say take a stable coin based loan. These are the things you would, you might want to do. And you still want to like hold custody of your assets. You do not want to like give custody to like even a decentralized system, right? Like you want to hold like your Bitcoin like with you. So the idea is that like, you know, like how can we ensure that, you know, like for the maximum amount of time, the user can actually just hold their Bitcoin and only then they actually want to do something. They actually like give, use their Bitcoin and get the other asset. There is like no point in time where we want like people to like lose access to their Bitcoin and say that, you know, like this is like protected by some decentralized protocols and risk protocol or anything. It is in your hardware already. It is in your like software it is in your like 100 % control until unless you want to use it. So when you actually want to use it, you can come to our like garden as a website and you can say that, you know, like I want to like sell my BTC to let you use it. And we actually like find like an atomic swapping partner, like which is like one, which is a solver that would be like running 24 hours on like a badmint server somewhere that would actually like give you like keeps throwing prices at you. It says that, you know, like one BTC is worth like this amount of USDC. And like you're trying to make sure that like this pricing is like best in class. It is already uh really good. When you come back to like any other like decentralized exchanges, it is almost like as good as WBTC to USDC trading on Uniswap interface. So it's like RBTC to USDC pair is competitive with WBTC to USDC on Uniswap. It is considered the gold standard of like Web3 like text trading. uh So you go to our website, you say that I want to trade one BTC to USDC and like and you get a price and you say yes to that price. Once you say yes, we actually create like a... HTLC contract which is a contract that allows you to do a swap without losing control. So you actually transfer money to it and the other person transfers money to a HTLC contract on whichever chain you want your HTC on and they will transfer it and you can go redeem on that other chain and you get your HTC. Let's say no one actually transferred on the other chain and your funds get refunded back to you within 24 hours. That's how the Bitcoin script works. It ensures that only if the other person gives you funds on it different blockchain, you would actually like this one's getting used. And if the other person does not like will feel their side of the deal, then you will get your Bitcoin. So it's like fully trustless. It's like fully like powered by bitcoins, like base layer for like security. And yeah, that's how like a swap works. In in that case where the the counterparty doesn't fulfill you all you lose is the transaction costs in that case. Is that right? Exactly. Yeah. So you would lose like, think, yeah, a cents. How does bridging work? Yeah, how does that work and is Citrea part of the stack? See? How does bridging work? If I wanted to, yeah, maybe explain the, I have BTC, but I want to buy USDC on another chain. How does that work? oh That's what I explained just now. So these are like a cross-chain swapworks. So these are our bridge swapworks. So like you can actually go from Bitcoin to USDC on a different chain or like two assets on the same chain, the flow is always same. So we actually built this like HTLC contract that is symmetric across all chains. So like any kind of like, like interchain or like same chain transactions, like use the same exact code. So which is like the beauty of the whole system that actually makes like, like this whole system like very, So whenever I add a new chain, let's say add Dogecoin in the future, then Dogecoin gets access to every other chain I already support. Because everything uses the exact same spec contract on each chain. And this spec is so simple that you can deploy it on Bitcoin, so you can literally deploy it on each chain. Like now or upcoming. It's fully forwards and backwards compatible. and you guys built this. isn't an existing bridge that you guys integrated. So this concept of HTLCs has existed in the past. In 2014, think there was a research paper explaining how HTLCs work. But one of the biggest drawbacks was the user experience of using HTLC. It was very bad. We tried to implement HTLC-based bridge back in 2018 as well during our R &D days. But the existing technology and existing solutions were not good enough to actually provide a very good experience for our units. But things have changed with the advent of how swap and PUNCH, with their like solver markets and UnisolverX. The expected experience of a user actually has evolved and also like the infrastructure that is available for us to actually build better user experience has also been possible since the last two years. So we kind of like brought back this technology that was invented like almost like 10 years back and we kind of made it like fast, smooth and like very user friendly. Now that's very exciting that crypto infrastructure has caught up and now the user experience is better now. Tell us about the DeFi space. It's very crowded. ah even though there's not a lot of, BTC FI is quite new, but there's some big players in the space. But DeFi in general is very crowded. Lots of... It's easy to create a DEX these days, especially on the EVM side. How does garden finance differentiate itself from, in the larger category of DeFi? Yeah. So I think like one thing about DeFi is that DeFi actually like just like grows and strength like with each market like cycle. So usually when like everything is like bullish, like there are like so many new projects that get launched and like whenever like there are like, you know, their markets, like 90% of the projects, right. Because of funding, because of like, you know, like not good fundamentals because of like a hundred different things. And I kind of like strongly believe that like Uniswap is worth like multi-billion dollars today because it actually likes our like three cycles. it has existed like it persisted through like three different cycles and made sure that like it existed it provided like extremely high value to like its like core user base consistently and consistently like innovated so we believe that's the case for like garden as well we have like a very strong user base like we did like a billion dollars in volume last year we are like playing we believe we would be doing like multiple billion dollars this year like up there on a good track for that like we are working with like some really good integrators like we want to like make sure that like integrated into most of the wallets as like the de facto option to actually convert your BTC to like other assets and stuff and we are in like very close talks to like some of the top wallets. So we believe that like once we actually have this like integration system we believe that like we can become one of the fundamental like defi rail where like people can actually use us to do like like bridging across chains. On top of it we want to ensure that like our system is 100 % safe like it is fully robust and it is like 100 % like uptime. things right like we want to ensure that like people can actually build critical applications on top of garden and still be like very confident that like nothing bad will actually happen with garden itself. So it's like this continuous like passion towards like building something like extremely like user-friendly and like robust that actually you know like continues to exist as like a rail for the 10, 15, 20 years from now. We believe that like this like you know like focus on like building like something like that is really fundamental and like very simple, right? Not that BTC to USDC bridging is like a crazy idea, right? It's not like some like Eureka moment. It's just that, you know, like something that is like extremely simple, but like executed like to like the best, right? Like you continuously like figure out like how do we actually make it better? How do we make like speed better? How do we make the user experience better? How do we make the... price better, like continuously and consistently. So we believe that, know, just like focusing on that and like making sure that we actually like to better than ourselves in the past continuously, we definitely make sure that garden will continue to exist. Yeah. Now, the billion dollars worth of swapping from last year, tell us how you reached those, how did those users and traders find out about Guard Finance? So a lot of the initial users were like from our like earlier days because like people have used like run protocol people have used KeeperDAO in the past. So we had already like a lot of contents in us as like developers like both from like investors and like trading firms and also like from like end users. Everyone knew us like from like our renders everyone knew the quality of like products that we built in the past. So it was like super easy for us to convince people to come try us out. But like again, everything is not always happy. Initially we had a lot of volume because people knew us, were excited about this uh completely new product. And they started using it a lot to do a lot of different things. And slowly the excitement died off, which was there when we just launched the product, which happens to every single Web3 project. When you launch something, everyone is excited. And after three to six months, people find something else that is flashy again. But going through that, like cycle of like going down you know like when we did not have like a lot of body going through our system so we continuously try to like figure out like how can we get volume like what can we do like how can we find like a very small niche of like audience that we can target to make sure that these guys continuously use our system so that we expect at least have like some volume flowing through our system so we kind of like figured out that like there are two target audience that were like still like sporadically using our system one are these like extremely big whales who want to do like you know like 10 to like WTC, 10 BTC to like USDC kind of like transfers like mainly between Bitcoin and like wrapped Bitcoin was like the highest volume they actually see. So, and there were like this other group of people who were like more trying to get onboarded onto like crypto like for example, they have like some Indian rupees or let's say US dollars that they want to actually convert into Bitcoin. But like most of the on-ramps back then did not actually like support ah Bitcoin as an asset. Usually they support all the EVM assets but they never supported Bitcoin. Bitcoin is the most famous asset trade for a normal user. So we kind of figured out these are the two niches we should target and focus our efforts on currently to get our initial volume going through our system. Then we can actually expand more and try to target a bigger audience. So we kind of started talking to a lot of market makers, a lot of people who are running family offices and all these guys figuring out what their like define needs are like how we can actually fit the card into their system and all this stuff. And we actually like talked to enough people that like we started like seeing this sporadic like 10 BTC transfers like 5 BTC transfers through our system. This was like very good volume for us because like every five Bitcoin trade is like 500K right like it's like a high value ticket item. And then like the second thing was like we started like working with like a few bond rams that wanted to support Bitcoin and like we actually like provided like a very good They integrated us and we started seeing a lot of very small transactions. oh And that's where we currently are like we are in a place where like we have like good volume going through our system There are like very big trades that happen that there are like a lot of small trades that are happening and like with our new partnerships that we're doing with like Citria, Stocknet and all these guys and we are getting like more and more like traction and like more people start like knowing about us and like they compare our prices with like other competitors in the space and they find that like we offer like a faster trade at like a better cost than our competition. So this is us to actually like start getting like more and more users into our system. So we believe that you know like just like continuously like pushing it like forward making sure our like prices are right as we do good will get us like more and more traders like we are at a point where we believe that we can do like more than two billion dollars in volume this year somehow we are trying to figure out like how can we get to four how can we get to eight and all these like quotes like start like popping up so that's where we are. um I think the effort you put into talking to customers is something that a lot of projects don't do. ah What led you to start to do that? um I guess what made you think that that would be helpful to you as uh a builder? So yeah, like me and my co-founder, not kind of like think as like the three founders, we kind of are like more like web two founders, like where we kind of like believe that, you we should like build revenue streams, we should be profitable, we should like make sure that we make enough money to like pay all our employees so that they don't have to like, you know, like be anxious and like always looking out for like a new opportunity. Like we want to like make sure that, you know, like we actually create like a very safe environment for people to work and also like we are not at the risk of like you know like not raising enough capital and we just like have to close our company down we want to make sure that like we can actually run our company perpetually like by actually like creating revenue in our company and we have done that like we made like three million dollars in like profit last year like through our like equity partners and stuff so which is like a very good number for us like and like we believe that it is going to grow like from this year onwards so yeah so yeah i mean like when we have to like build profitability right like you can't just like do Like these crazy like a drops you can't just like do just like whatever like you know like all this Create like a lot of like splash by spending a lot of money and all these things So we have to like go back to fundamentals We have to say that you know, like how can we get you like there are ideas like who are ideas like first? Identify who is this like one person in this whole planet who would actually be benefited by actually using that for it and then we started like figuring out who that guy is and then we started like reaching out to people who have like similar profiles asking them questions you know like this is when like FTX happened right we started asking these questions like are you you know like are you feeling safe like holding like your funds in like a centralized exchange why do you not like you know just like keep a lot of your funds on like on your own wallet like you know like why do you keep your funds in it leave your funds in a centralized exchange a lot of people say that you know we want to like trade immediately instantly when like something happens we know about something so like we say that you know like you could do the same thing using our system you just like hold your funds like instantly go to our system Within like 10 minutes you actually get your USTC, boom, you can just swap it to whatever answer. And not everyone who actually says that this is your problem or even if you convince them, goes up using it. But if you keep doing this quads enough, you actually start figuring out parallels between a lot of people's problem statements. You just see commonality between their issues that they're facing on a day-to-day basis. And then you can actually figure out how do I create a solution that actually solves all their or like 80 % of their problems because like everyone has like 100 different problems. You cannot solve all their problems. You can solve like anything that your product can actually solve or like that you are good at solving. So yeah, it was like a con. no, I like the approach that you take in identifying who the target customer is. What most marketing people do is they identify kind of the personas, right? It could be maybe two or three different kind of groups of people or personas. You take the other approach, like who is the one person on the planet that would use our product? And then you expand from there. I think that's a very, very good approach because it forces you to think who the actual user is going to be and then growing from there versus the other approach of looking at the target personas, which kind of still is very abstract, you take it very concrete. And I think that approach works really well. I'm going to take that approach next time. So I learned that from you today. So I appreciate you sharing that. um have. uh No, no, go, go, go. Yeah, so we actually have this like our company Bible, there is this book called One Thing. So it just like talks about like how you actually have to like think about every day you wake up. There is only like one thing that you have to do at any point in time that makes everything else that you have to do like irrelevant or like very easy to finish. So we kind of like take that approach like too hard, like everyone in our company just like gets that book when they join our company and we make them forcefully read it. Because like I think it is extremely important for a startup, which is like small and is like cash trap to actually have like absolute laser focus. Like if you don't focus, then you would actually be like a hundred different things that like no one actually cares about. Only if you can actually like spend all your resources, all your energy, all your hard work into like one single thing, only then you can succeed. So it kind of like translates into everything we do. We do not try to, we never like try to abstract things out. say that we do not say that, you this is a market that we want to target. We always say, you know, who is this person? Who is this person I'm targeting? Who is this exact individual I want to talk to? And then we talk to hundred different people at conferences. We set up calls, do lot of research before we actually decide that yes, this is what we want to do. And once we make a decision, we just get the whole team to completely focus on that single vision and actually get it executed. So yeah, then. I love that. The book, the one thing book as a team, as the founding team, I imagine it was the founding team that created that. What sources of inspiration did you ah have to build that book? Oh no, no, no. So we actually did not write it. We actually like found that book like it's like written by someone else. So we just like, yeah, it was like one of the early books I read in my life and it kind of like dictated a lot of like my early choices in my life as well. And it kind of like slowly became the Bible of our company. It's not written by us. Yeah. It's called the one thing. Yeah. I'll send you a link. Okay. No, that's, that's, that's really, I haven't read it. I, I, I, I think I'm going to, I think that's really, really great. Yeah. We'll put that in the show notes for sure. And for a startup founder, I mean, you need that focus and that the fact that you are, you know, you have all the team members read that, um, you know, it just helps, helps the team overall. Yes. That's awesome. Now, looking to the rest of 2025, what are some of the, guess the, I actually, before we get there, tell us about the community. You know, one, one really important part of a very important part of crypto projects is the community. And I think garden finance is interesting because you actually have users like people that actually use garden finance for some crypto projects. There's primarily retail people that own the token, but there is no product yet. Or the product is not, it's maybe a layer one that normal people wouldn't use, but applications would use or developers. so, Garden Finance, I imagine, has some of your users are actual users, traders. Some are probably not traders, but they just want to be part of the community. Maybe tell us about the types of things people can be involved with if you're not a trader. Yeah, so. Yeah, like I think, yeah, we do definitely have like those two groups of people. Like I think we do have like a lot of like traders who actually use our product consistently give us like consistent feedback where they just like post like screenshots, like ask for like ideas. And some people even like drop like Figma, like, you know, like ideas, like when they said that, Hey guys, like, let's create like this feature. That's like a very like nice like thriving community, would say. I would say like a lot of our people are actually, now I'm thinking about it. I do believe that like 90 % might just be like users. And there is like a very small percentage of people who are like non-users and still community members in our system because we actually launched our product and actually created like our community after like launching a product instead of like a lot of people where they actually like build like a community, hype it up and then launch product. We actually like had a product working like before we actually launched our community. So I would say like most of our like, yeah, people are, yeah. So I like, yeah, go. Yeah, no, you're exactly right. mean, if you look at a lot of test nets right now, the users of these test nets are not going to be users of the product. They're primarily point farmers. But it's also important, right? Because you do want to create some level of hype and level of interest and mindshare. But converting Converting test net users to actual product users is a big challenge because not everybody is going to be a product user. ah But what's interesting about Garden is you guys had a working product and that's really unusual. Plus you guys are making revenue and you're actually like have fundamentals, which is not most crypto projects, which is I think return to fundamentals is going to be the big focus for the next few years. And I'm really happy about that. Yeah. I can't believe that like I do not think like the fear that the space is evolving, right? Like, I mean, has to stop right at some point, like we would have like some like very bad event that would happen and like people will just like start realizing on like what they're doing. Because like as a market, right? We are almost like 80 to 90 in a place where like 80 to 90 percent of all the funds are just like investing in private companies and everyone actually thinks ICO as like exit point, right? No one actually like really invest in projects that are like post ICO. Like everyone just like You know, just like exists when like ICO hits and like the tokens drops from there. Like everything dies, like, you know, like the product like dies. Like everyone is just like kind of like going for this like ICO event and like everyone just like dumps everything after. So that is not like a very great place to be as a company or like as founders because people might believe that, you know, they can actually make a lot of money by doing this thing, but or like long-term, right? Like you are not building anything. You are not creating value. So any kind of amount of money you make is kind of made by luck and it's like same as like gambling or same as like buying a lottery ticket right there is no fundamental like value you built as a founder yourself right like you have you did not experience how to like build like a strong business like until unless you do that like you cannot actually be worth a lot of like value in the future because like only when you actually go through this like journey of like a startup where you're starting at zero and trying to like build like like solve problems and with like not without spending money and just like continuously doing it like for long enough you just like learn so many like extremely valuable lessons and then you can actually like build like strong businesses going into the future as well. So this like short term mindset of you know just like launch an ICO exit is not like something that is gonna help like this space evolve into the future and I do believe that like investors and like VC firms would actually like start doing like more like you know investing teams that are actually consisting, re-building for like longer terms instead of just like pouring all their money into like pre- ICO like companies because like I mean they haven't like figured out BMF yet they haven't figured out like anything at that point like value like investing like billions of dollars into it it's crazy but that's where the space is. I mean, I learned a lot from you today. mean, focus on the one person that will be using your product. I think that's such a good approach. And you guys have product market fit. You actually have users using garden finance. You guys have revenue. It's so refreshing to hear this from a crypto project. Tell us about like the next, you know, next for the rest of 2025. What are some of the goals that you have that you can share? and maybe how the audience can get involved. Yeah. So I think like two main areas of like development that we want to focus on this year are adding like a lot more chains into our system. So like we want to add and support like all chains that like people want to use. And we want to also like enable like almost the lowest price like moment like of value possible. So for that we need to like improve our like solver infrastructure. We currently have one solver who is like doing like most of our solving and like there are like some few others that we are like in talks with who want to like launch their own swabbers in our network so that like our price actually becomes better like in a competitive market you can ensure like the price is continuously like improving so those are like I would say like two big items that we want to like tackle this year just like making our system like super cost efficient and like getting like the prices as low as possible the second thing being uh adding change. And the third thing I would say is like getting it integrated into like all the wallets where like people already have their funds in. We do not want to change people's like current like workflows. We want to like kind of get become part of them like without the user actually like noticing it. Because we want to make sure that you know like at the end of the day right like we are actually serving our users like we want the user to actually have the best experience possible which is only possible by actually making them take as many less steps as possible. If you have a wallet and you want to swap inside the wallet, garden is there. If you have like, you if you are in a centralized exchange and you want to like do a trade, maybe we can just like become like super easy and like super accessible to you and all these things. We want to like consistently make a user's like workflow as simple as trade, as easy as possible. Currently we are on the change side of things. are like targeted on to like the Solana ecosystem. Like we want to like launch on Solana soon. ah And then we want to launch on Sui. Recently we just finished like start and I think like few months back we did launch on Citria. And like once Citria hits their mainnet we'll be like live on their day one. uh So we are like very uh open about like blockchains. We do not actually play like nationalism on like this ecosystem or that ecosystem. We want to ensure that like all these like blockchains that like launch have like a fair chance in the market. They're like there are like strong infrastructure rails for them for like the value to just like going. So yeah, like so for us like the main thing is like more assets, more chains and like more liquidity so that the prices are really good throughout this year. So supporting additional chains, uh business development, integrations with wallets, making it easier for the users, fewer steps, fewer uh things to, what do I want to say? Yeah, fewer steps, just less hassle for the user, um and really just a return to fundamentals. That's kind of the key things I learned today. And I hope the audience listens closely to this interview. I Garden Finance is one of those quiet projects that's adding value. And I appreciate you being on this podcast, Rizruth, and I hope that we help bring more awareness to Garden Finance and users. Thanks. Yeah. Great. talking to you as well. Thank you.
