6 Questions for Alex O’Donnell about the future of DeFi

Umami Labs CEO Alex O’Donnell grew up on the outskirts of Philadelphia before attending Temple University to study literature and economics. That path led him to devote seven years of his life as a financial journalist at Reuters, where he specialized in M&As IPOs.

He said his academic focus created a “pretty natural synthesis” when it came ot financial journalism. However, he said he became “disenchanted” with his industry while he was cooped up at home during the Covid-19 pandemic. “There really was a three-way alliance between journalists, government officials and technology companies trying to control the flow of information,” O’Donnell said in an interview with Cointelegraph.

He began tinkering with cryptocurrency, which led to his introduction with Umami DAO — and ultimately his creation of Umami Labs.

O’Donnell and his wife, Sanjana, are preparing for a “third, smaller person” to join their family next year. In the meantime, he said he’s also gearing up for another crypto-related venture. The details aren’t fully public yet, but he said he plans to release more information the months ahead.

1) How’d you make the transition from journalism to crypto?

I’d been a journalist for the better part of a decade primarily covering mergers and acquisitions. I always had an interest in finance and tech. But I started becoming a bit disenchanted with the mainstream media around the time of the pandemic. That was the first time I started becoming a bit more cynical about my own industry’s role in the information economy. So I started paying more attention to issues like privacy, censorship and other things I had not taken as much interest in before.

In 2020 I spent most of my time covering the Covid-19 pandemic. There really was a three-way alliance between journalists, government officials and technology companies trying to control the flow of information. It wasn’t even that the official line was wrong. It was that dissent was being stifled in the first place. That really peaked my interest in decentralized platforms.

At that point, I started to become meaningfully interested in crypto. Given that I came from financial journalism, decentralized finance (DeFi) in particular caught my interest. I really started actively investing in different crypto protocols as a retail investor in 2021. I was getting more involved in DeFi communities, and one of them was the predecessor toUmami—ZeroTwOhm.

2) How did that lead to you creating Umami Labs?

I got involved inZeroTwOhmas a regular retail investor aping in as many people did. It was a pretty small community, so I was able to pretty quickly get in contact with the developers building the protocol.

But they didn’t really have a clear sense of direction about what they wanted to do next. They had bootstrapped several millions of dollars in capital that was largely just sitting there. It felt like somebody needed to step in, and the developers were, frankly, more than happy to hand responsibility off to someone else, which ended up being me.

3) What are you focused on now?

What I’m most interested in now is zeroing in on a problem that became very clear to me during my time at Umami. Essentially, asUmami Labsgeared up to launch our first product inearly2023, I was meeting with a lot of crypto-focused hedge funds and large individual investors.There wasthis gaping need for some way to securely earn interest on USDC, USDT, and other stablecoins without having to just completely move off-chain.

Ihavealready focused at Umami on developing another product that was designed to generate returns on stablecoins, butthe real needisfor something thatisas secure and boring and reliable as a conventional savings account, but for people who were holding stablecoins on on-chain wallets. There have been forays into that area by other players, but I have yet to see a complete solution to that problem. It takes a combination of having the right regulated entities off-chain and seamless mechanisms for on- and off-ramping on-chain.

That is something I’mpersonallyfocused on now. I’mcollaboratingwithsome others ondeveloping something, andgetting feedback frompotential early users. We’ll have more details to share within the next couple of months. But for now, it’s still in the early stages.

4) What do you think will be the biggest crypto trends in 2024?

In my personal opinion, I do think that the high point of the…