Cofounders' walkthrough Saber
Founded by Dylan Macalinao and Ian Macalinao, Saber is the leading stablecoin and wrapped assets exchange on Solana. Its mission is to be the liquidity network for cross-chain DeFi.
Saber’s TVL has just surpassed $700M at the time of this interview - this event makes Saber the second largest app in the Solana ecosystem by TVL according to Defi Llama.
Saber’s Team background?
Dylan - got into crypto in 2017. Got involved in Meetups to learn more about this “programable money”. Worked with Ian at Abacus (startup working on tokenized securities). After that, PM for trading at OKcoin. After that, Product and Design at Pipe.
Ian - got into crypto in 2013 (high school) - a friend sent him .5 BTC, fell into the crypto rabbit hole, and built a script to mine DOGE. Did not touch it for a while - at the time crypto was just a “mine & trade” game. ln 2017, learned smart contracts and realized that they allow doing any TradFi service in crypto. Thus, invested in protocols and started Abacus. Then, joined Pipe and spent a lot of time trading in DeFi. Now spends time building protocols and trading.
What differentiates Saber from other DEXes?
Ian - Saber is optimized for trading pegged assets on Solana. Before, users had to swap these on traditional AMMs and pay high slippage costs. With Saber, users can swap large sums of pegged assets with very low slippage.
Congrats on your clean and self-explanatory UI - the UX is awesome!
Dylan - in crypto, UIs are usually complicated and UX tends to be bad. We started building by asking the question - what is the simplest product that people want to use?
How did you get into Solana?
Dylan - got involved in Metaplex and met amazing people in the Solana community - good opportunity to learn about Solana.
Ian - I was used to developing in EVMs and did not want to change - finally started building Saber in Solana.
Where do you see Saber in 5 years from now?
Team - sees a future where 99% of users think of Saber as a savings account. Expects massive growth coming into DeFi. Institutions are going to look for bridges with security and nowadays Solana is the best candidate - envisions Saber as the main cross-chain liquidity provider.
What are you focusing now on Saber?
Dylan - focusing on cross-chain swaps so people can integrate their DeFi stack with Solana.
What is Wormhole and how it fits into Saber?
Dylan - Wormhole is an ETH/SOL bridge - essential to allow for cross-chain DeFi to happen. People who want to exchange their ETH assets for pegged tokens in Solana can now do it using Wormhole.
Are you SOL maxis or do you see a cross-chain future?
Ian - sees a cross-chain future. Cross-chain is good for the SOL ecosystem (old chains can wrap into Solana with bridges and tools like Saber)
Dylan - not a SOL maxi but sees more adoption coming into Solana because of the UX.
Advice for newcomers?
Dylan - start building. SOL community is very good at onboarding new people - new Hackathon coming up soon. Learn by doing and ask questions!
How did you discover Saber?
Chris McCann - found and checked repo. Phone call. Impressed by the Team’s background (very early at Pipe and worked together for a long time before Saber). Simplicity and necessity of the product. Speed of execution - they were ahead on every release schedule.
The market rewards those who execute and deliver on time - they get traction and succeed in the long run.
(Satosh Satoshi) - What’s going to change in the industry if Saber succeeds?
Ian - there will be more cross-chain liquidity.
(Chris McCann) - Saber just reached $700M in TVL, how does it feel?!
Team - exceeding all its expectations.
Thank you @analyticalali for hosting this interview on Twitter
→ More reads on Saber:
“Solana-based stablecoin exchange Saber raises $7.7 million from Chamath Palihapitiya’s Social Capital and others” by Yogita Khatri at THE BLOCK
The round was led by Race Capital, with participation from Chamath Palihapitiya’s Social Capital, Jump Capital, Multicoin Capital, and the Solana Foundation. Angel investors, including FTX’s Tristan Yver, OKcoin’s Jason Lau, Curve Finance’s Julien Bouteloup, Terraform Labs’ Jeff Kuan, and Stacks’ Ryan Shea, also participated in the round.
“Introducing SBR - the Saber Protocol token” by Saber Labs
The hard cap of SBR is 10 billion tokens. Distribution of SBR is as follows: 3,141,592,653.00 SBR (31.42%) Mining Reserve 2,510,100,000.00 SBR (25.10%) Partnerships & Ecosystem 1,957,900,000.00 SBR (19.58%) Team & Advisors (2 year linear release) 1,548,100,000.00 SBR (15.48%) Strategic Fundraise (2 year linear release) 842,307,347.00 SBR (8.42%) Liquidity Reserve
“Saber launches first Polygon asset stable pool on Solana with Allbridge” by Saber Labs
As the fastest, most scalable blockchain, Solana has found product-market fit as the DeFi powerhouse. With frictionless cross-chain bridges, Solana has the potential to become the hub of all DeFi. We envision Saber becoming the core liquidity foundation for cross-chain settlement with Solana, and by extension, all of future DeFi. Alongside our existing assets bridged from Terra, Ethereum, and Bitcoin, Polygon is a huge addition to this suite boasting 500+ Dapps, $4.5b TVL, ~567M+ txns, and ~6M+ daily txns.