Peter Grosskopf | Building in Crypto Winter | The Curious Learners Ep. 35

Super excited to have Peter Grosskopf on the first episode of the second season. Peter is the co-founder and CTO of Ultimate Money (core product of Unstoppable Finance), which is one of the most exciting DeFi products out there.  His background is unique coming into crypto from a combination of software development and fintech building / operating and incubating. Peter and I had a great conversation about what happened in crypto in 2022, future of DeFi and where Ultimate Money is positioned in that future.

What is a good summary of 2022?
It was a special year. DeFi has proven to be more stable compared to CeFi given the robust performance of infrastructure while we have seen CeFi institutions crashed one after another.

How do you see the path to recovery of crypto markets?
Long-term believers and those who have seen these cycles before are optimistic despite the recent events.  Yet, the noise in the market due to the ongoing CeFi situation (e.g. Gemini x DCG) needs to go away, so that we focus again on the fundamentals. What happened has nothing to do with the original intention of Satoshi and all the builders of crypto.

The usability needs to be improved and it needs to be super easy to use self-custody. For everyday users to use crypto safely, account abstraction and multi-party computation would ensure privacy and compliance at the same time.

How do you define Ultimate Money?
We started Unstoppable Finance, the company and Ultimate Money, the main product to solve the core issue of DeFi, which is usability. We help users trade easily on DEXes and tap into blue chip DeFi protocols.

Who are your users?
We strive to bring new users into DeFi. Globally there are only 2 million DeFi users, which is tiny compared to traditional finance. Next to those, we aim to give  sophisticated users a better experience in  DEX trading by providing professional tooling in the future.

What matters to your users most? How do they engage with the Ultimate Money app so far?
Better mobile experience and frictionless access to DeFi protocols.  They mostly engage with trading these days. And given the increasing interest rate environment, yield farming related activities are not very active in crypto.

What brought you into DeFi?
I have always been super curious about new things and that is what made me move into fintech and banking in the first place.  My move into crypto was driven by this goal of automating as many processes as we could in finance. Then I met blockchain and smart contract, which was revolutionary to achieve 100% automation in financial services.

How do 'your keys, your coins' and 'regulation' co-exist?
It is a matter of properly defining roles and responsibilities of the players in the market. I don't believe that regulation is completely stupid and its scope needs to be defined properly. One important role of it should be to ensure fair markets for entrepreneurs and for users.

How important is MiCA for crypto markets in Europe?
MiCA is a regulation for centralized finance and for centralized exchanges.  It doesn't have much to do with DeFi.  It is our responsibility as the crypto community to speak to regulators to explain the opportunity in DeFi.

What would be a positive surprise for you in 2023 in terms of market developments?
In the first half of the year there might be more negative surprises. On the positive side, it would be politicians and decision makers fully understanding the true potential of DeFi and contributing to the efforts of building a global infrastructure.

What are you most #curious about these days and what are you doing to #learn more about it?
Still learning a lot about crypto everyday!