This interview is the first in a series called "Building Ethereum from Latam." In this series of Kipu Impact Notes, I will interview local builders to bring their perspectives on the Ethereum ecosystem. In this installment, I interview Alejo Amiras, co-founder of Balmy, an on-chain product born and built in Argentina.

Balmy, originally named "Mean Finance,” launched in mid-2021 on the Optimism blockchain as a decentralized application for DCA (dollar cost averaging). At that time, its co-founders focused on providing a tool for users who wanted to buy Bitcoin or Ethereum periodically but did not know about trading or felt uncertain when purchasing.

Over more than three years, the idea evolved from a prototype into a product. Today, under the name Balmy, we find a mature application that allows users to invest in synthetic stocks and bonds.

What did the Mean Finance team need to transform into Balmy? What lessons did they learn? In the following interview, we explore these answers and the vision of Alejo Amiras, co-founder and director of Balmy:

Romina (Kipu Impact): You started building this on-chain application 3 years ago. Why did you choose to create your product?

Alejo (Balmy): The reality is that Mean Finance started as a summer project among friends who wanted to see if they could create a new type of product that we wanted to use but didn’t exist yet: a decentralized DCA. After starting, we understood that it didn’t exist because it posed a significant technical challenge on how to scale some things in Solidity, but that only made it more fun and challenging.

This summer project started to take up more and more of our time, so at one point, we had to decide whether to leave our jobs to dedicate ourselves full-time or stop Mean Finance. It's clear which decision we made.

R.: Why didn't you put your workforce and knowledge at the service of an existing DAO, exchange, or protocol?

A.: Implicitly, by deciding to move forward with Mean Finance, we said we wouldn’t continue working (individually) for DAOs, exchanges, protocols, etc. Why? I will speak from my particular case, although my co-founders (Nicolás Chamo and Fiboape) strongly align with me.

I think it’s a mix of things that could take us a long time to discuss: from believing that most DAOs are charades to avoid legal trouble in the USA or lawsuits from the SEC but are essentially a board of five people deciding in their own best interests, to the majority of protocols (and therefore DAOs?) really shouldn’t exist but survive only because of the "token" instrument that gives them "users" (in many quotes) or "profit" (in many more quotes). So, the decision to continue with Mean Finance (now Balmy) was to create an application that truly adds value to the end-user through this new technology... And not working to create another Ponzi scheme.

R.: Were you mindful of the “market fit”?

A.: Yes, we were and still are mindful of the market fit. This is particularly a complex question for an application like ours, even more so if you have no incentives (tokens/points) on it. We could have a very long conversation about whether there is a "market" in crypto today or not, and if it exists, what it is, what it seeks, which is artificial, and which is real. To polemicize a bit and go to the extreme: Is there any product market fit other than stablecoins? I'm sure you could name Aave, Compound, Uniswap... Ultimately, they all become protocols created to speculate more or generate more returns in crypto assets... How much of this truly reaches end-users in value?

R.: How did you finance yourselves?

A.: One of the co-founders - even when everything was a hobby - dedicated a lot of time to the product, so we tried to request some grants from some DAOs we were integrating to be able to pay him a somewhat decent salary. For example: we developed an ERC4626 contract and integrated Aave as a source of yields for assets that weren’t being swapped, and we asked Aave for a grant. Later, when we decided to go full-in, we raised an investment round.

R.: What was it like to build a protocol post-DeFi Summer? What was it like to create a product after the hype of COMP, YFI, YAM distribution/accumulation, and TVLs of protocols soaring?

A.: Our timing with DeFi Summer was a bit strange... We came into DeFi Summer with the protocol as a hobby and kept it that way throughout DeFi Summer. At the same time, an investor offered to lead a $1.5 million investment round at a $15 million valuation, which took us around two weeks to organize, and we decided not to take it because the idea and protocol lacked a lot of maturity for it to make sense. Many months later, after DeFi Summer had passed and the bear market had set in, we decided to raise an investment round for much less money and valuation, which took us around 3-4 months to complete. This basically demonstrates the madness that was experienced during DeFi Summer.

“An investor offered to lead a $1.5 million investment round at a $15 million valuation, and we decided not to take it because the idea and protocol lacked a lot of maturity for it to make sense”.

R.: The protocol is native to Optimism. What was it like deploying on new chains?

A.: We were part of an initiative led by Kain (founder of Synthetix and investor in Optimism) where he gave several classes on various topics of how to create/found a web3 company. As part of that initiative, or as a thank you to that community, we decided Optimism would be our first native network for version 2. This allowed us to iterate faster, cheaper, and be part of a nascent community (very important). Later, moving to other chains had its challenges, both economic (in infrastructure costs) and in terms of strategy. The one that received us the best, without a doubt, also due to having a very thriving community, was Arbitrum (paradoxical, isn’t it?)

R.: What metrics did you adopt to measure success?

A.: I think at first, the most naive metric was always TVL. Then, we evolved to consider active users on our page and volume as important metrics. Especially after our change to Balmy, what matters to us are active users, their retention, their time on the page, and the number of actions they take within it.

R.: You started as “Mean Finance” but announced the new name “Balmy” on April 30: What was it like to tackle rebranding? Why did you do it?

A.: As first-time founders and three technical co-founders, it presented a big challenge: finding the core of why you’re doing what you’re doing and what you want to create and aligning that with a market need is not necessarily simple or a safe path. It's a gamble. Balmy is that. A very strong bet on the belief that this technology we love and believe enables so much (blockchain/web3) will only truly change the world and how we relate to money if we manage to make it completely invisible. The reason we decided to rebrand was that the Mean Finance brand and design started to feel very restrictive, and we wanted the internal change and focus to be reflected externally as well. The transformation from being just a tool for DCA to a completely decentralized bank.

https://x.com/balmy_xyz/status/1785324575011512520

R.: Do you feel there is a difference in building from Argentina? From Latin America? How do you perceive builders from other regions?

A.: I think it depends on what we call building... Maybe it's the quirks of my trade as a programmer, but I think building in terms of programming, infrastructure, and smart contracts... It's the same in Argentina as anywhere else. Even in Argentina, you have the benefit of lower living costs. Or you had. It depends on when you read this. Now, if we talk about building as creating an application, brand, partnerships, doing BD... I think it's really complex to do from Argentina. Many of these things (even though we love to talk about how crypto happens on Twitter, or anons this, anons that) happen through "known contacts", "acquaintances", or ultimately establishing a relationship in person. This is not insignificant when many important actors in DAOs and companies live in the USA or EU and attend conferences there. This last topic in particular: attending conferences, is not trivial at all for teams based in Latin America. The cost of a ticket for a BD in Europe can be at most 400/500 USD... From Argentina, to get to any conference, you already know that the base cost is at least 1200 USD. The difference is abysmal, so your chances of networking are reduced. This situation that happens with BD also happens with funding. In our case, maybe 60% of investors are Argentine... And I think that says a lot. I know not all Argentine projects experience this... It would be interesting to review the capabilities of Exactly, the guys from Mimic, etc.

R.: How do you manage the product vision of the builder himself versus external demands? (Industry timing, ecosystem trends, and new feature requirements from users).

A.: This is complicated... I think we can discuss the real size of the audience, or what audience is real (which is different). To be honest, external demands in our ecosystem are not very clear... The only thing the community and Twitter say is "points" and "airdrops". It’s worth clarifying that I'm particularly talking about products aimed at retail. I think there are some products (like lending markets) that have much clearer demands from the ecosystem. Maybe I would even dare to say that there are clearer demands for protocols than for applications.

R: What gave you the most satisfaction?

A.: The execution (and design) of the rebranding. Not only because in my entire work history I never had such a big production release in such an organized and tidy manner, but also because of all the prior work we did. From the first moment we started working on Balmy, we decided to prioritize user experience, dedicating weeks to user research, user testing, and other things that crypto applications usually don’t do, since their users -whales- don’t really care and just look to optimize every fee in their transaction.

R.: What did you hate the most?

A.: Raising an investment round for the first time was a really exhausting task. Especially if you don't have a clear mentor or someone who has done it before helping you improve the deck, telling you the "do's" and "don'ts” For example, at first, I shared the company's deck via a Google Drive link. Mistake! You need to use something like DocSend (hope they pay me for the promo) to have analytics, for instance, on which page each investor spent the most time, where they opened the deck from, etc. Running a company (at least as a first-time founder) and being the final decision-maker is a constant challenge in many aspects.

R: What was the most shocking thing?

A.: How difficult it is to bank a crypto company and how hard it is to get access to financial rails being a crypto company. Something so simple turns out to be not trivial at all.

R.: What are the three main issues you see in the industry?

A.:

1. Very misaligned incentives. Tokens as quick liquidity for VC investments (and maybe for the founders too) destroy any type of incentives. Under the decentralization premise, founders leave the protocols they led or created after 2 or 3 years at most, leaving a half-built organization, perhaps without a real PMF (product-market fit) but having already taken millions along the way. It’s really a shame as an ecosystem.

2. Fragmentation of users and liquidity that makes infrastructure costs or focusing on a network really complex. Particularly for applications like ours.

3. Misaligned incentives to create new things. As programmers, or as a company, we could easily fork CompoundV2, add a token, go to a relatively known network, and make a lot of money. But it’s not what we believe in, nor what we think generates real value.

R.: What advice would you give to a Solidity student?

A.: First, I would ask if they want to study Solidity or if they want to be involved in the web3 world. I’ve been advocating that you don’t need to be a programmer to get into web3 and that you need to get rid of that notion. We need more people in other positions (Marketing, Comms, Design, etc.) who know about web3. Now, if they already know they want to learn Solidity and programming, I would tell them to start by learning the basics of programming and web3. It’s not worth starting to program in Solidity if you don’t fully understand, for example, how transaction prices are composed, or that blocks have gas limits that vary depending on the network where you deploy. Understanding what the mempool is and how it works. All these things will make it so that when you start designing an architecture, you do it in a much more holistic way.

R.: Last question: What expectations do you have for the future?

A.: Soon, we will launch a product to generate returns with a completely innovative feature that we believe can help many people sleep more peacefully when interacting with DeFi protocols. All this will be done transparently and with an excellent user experience, our main goal. Based on this, we will see how that product goes and which of the other available paths we decide to take (yes, I’m being broad on purpose) 😉.

Follow protocol updates on their X profile

Visit their website

Co-founders: Alejo Amiras, Fipoape.eth, Nico Chamo

💟

Romina, Kipu Impact

https://t.me/Cryptochica_arg

This interview is the first in a series called "Building Ethereum from Latam." In this series of Kipu Impact Notes, I will interview local builders to bring their perspectives on the Ethereum ecosystem. In this installment, I interview Alejo Amiras, co-founder of Balmy, an on-chain product born and built in Argentina.

Balmy, originally named "Mean Finance,” launched in mid-2021 on the Optimism blockchain as a decentralized application for DCA (dollar cost averaging). At that time, its co-founders focused on providing a tool for users who wanted to buy Bitcoin or Ethereum periodically but did not know about trading or felt uncertain when purchasing.

Over more than three years, the idea evolved from a prototype into a product. Today, under the name Balmy, we find a mature application that allows users to invest in synthetic stocks and bonds.

What did the Mean Finance team need to transform into Balmy? What lessons did they learn? In the following interview, we explore these answers and the vision of Alejo Amiras, co-founder and director of Balmy:

Romina (Kipu Impact): You started building this on-chain application 3 years ago. Why did you choose to create your product?

Alejo (Balmy): The reality is that Mean Finance started as a summer project among friends who wanted to see if they could create a new type of product that we wanted to use but didn’t exist yet: a decentralized DCA. After starting, we understood that it didn’t exist because it posed a significant technical challenge on how to scale some things in Solidity, but that only made it more fun and challenging.

This summer project started to take up more and more of our time, so at one point, we had to decide whether to leave our jobs to dedicate ourselves full-time or stop Mean Finance. It's clear which decision we made.

R.: Why didn't you put your workforce and knowledge at the service of an existing DAO, exchange, or protocol?

A.: Implicitly, by deciding to move forward with Mean Finance, we said we wouldn’t continue working (individually) for DAOs, exchanges, protocols, etc. Why? I will speak from my particular case, although my co-founders (Nicolás Chamo and Fiboape) strongly align with me.

I think it’s a mix of things that could take us a long time to discuss: from believing that most DAOs are charades to avoid legal trouble in the USA or lawsuits from the SEC but are essentially a board of five people deciding in their own best interests, to the majority of protocols (and therefore DAOs?) really shouldn’t exist but survive only because of the "token" instrument that gives them "users" (in many quotes) or "profit" (in many more quotes). So, the decision to continue with Mean Finance (now Balmy) was to create an application that truly adds value to the end-user through this new technology... And not working to create another Ponzi scheme.

R.: Were you mindful of the “market fit”?

A.: Yes, we were and still are mindful of the market fit. This is particularly a complex question for an application like ours, even more so if you have no incentives (tokens/points) on it. We could have a very long conversation about whether there is a "market" in crypto today or not, and if it exists, what it is, what it seeks, which is artificial, and which is real. To polemicize a bit and go to the extreme: Is there any product market fit other than stablecoins? I'm sure you could name Aave, Compound, Uniswap... Ultimately, they all become protocols created to speculate more or generate more returns in crypto assets... How much of this truly reaches end-users in value?

R.: How did you finance yourselves?

A.: One of the co-founders - even when everything was a hobby - dedicated a lot of time to the product, so we tried to request some grants from some DAOs we were integrating to be able to pay him a somewhat decent salary. For example: we developed an ERC4626 contract and integrated Aave as a source of yields for assets that weren’t being swapped, and we asked Aave for a grant. Later, when we decided to go full-in, we raised an investment round.

R.: What was it like to build a protocol post-DeFi Summer? What was it like to create a product after the hype of COMP, YFI, YAM distribution/accumulation, and TVLs of protocols soaring?

A.: Our timing with DeFi Summer was a bit strange... We came into DeFi Summer with the protocol as a hobby and kept it that way throughout DeFi Summer. At the same time, an investor offered to lead a $1.5 million investment round at a $15 million valuation, which took us around two weeks to organize, and we decided not to take it because the idea and protocol lacked a lot of maturity for it to make sense. Many months later, after DeFi Summer had passed and the bear market had set in, we decided to raise an investment round for much less money and valuation, which took us around 3-4 months to complete. This basically demonstrates the madness that was experienced during DeFi Summer.

“An investor offered to lead a $1.5 million investment round at a $15 million valuation, and we decided not to take it because the idea and protocol lacked a lot of maturity for it to make sense”.

R.: The protocol is native to Optimism. What was it like deploying on new chains?

A.: We were part of an initiative led by Kain (founder of Synthetix and investor in Optimism) where he gave several classes on various topics of how to create/found a web3 company. As part of that initiative, or as a thank you to that community, we decided Optimism would be our first native network for version 2. This allowed us to iterate faster, cheaper, and be part of a nascent community (very important). Later, moving to other chains had its challenges, both economic (in infrastructure costs) and in terms of strategy. The one that received us the best, without a doubt, also due to having a very thriving community, was Arbitrum (paradoxical, isn’t it?)

R.: What metrics did you adopt to measure success?

A.: I think at first, the most naive metric was always TVL. Then, we evolved to consider active users on our page and volume as important metrics. Especially after our change to Balmy, what matters to us are active users, their retention, their time on the page, and the number of actions they take within it.

R.: You started as “Mean Finance” but announced the new name “Balmy” on April 30: What was it like to tackle rebranding? Why did you do it?

A.: As first-time founders and three technical co-founders, it presented a big challenge: finding the core of why you’re doing what you’re doing and what you want to create and aligning that with a market need is not necessarily simple or a safe path. It's a gamble. Balmy is that. A very strong bet on the belief that this technology we love and believe enables so much (blockchain/web3) will only truly change the world and how we relate to money if we manage to make it completely invisible. The reason we decided to rebrand was that the Mean Finance brand and design started to feel very restrictive, and we wanted the internal change and focus to be reflected externally as well. The transformation from being just a tool for DCA to a completely decentralized bank.

https://x.com/balmy_xyz/status/1785324575011512520

R.: Do you feel there is a difference in building from Argentina? From Latin America? How do you perceive builders from other regions?

A.: I think it depends on what we call building... Maybe it's the quirks of my trade as a programmer, but I think building in terms of programming, infrastructure, and smart contracts... It's the same in Argentina as anywhere else. Even in Argentina, you have the benefit of lower living costs. Or you had. It depends on when you read this. Now, if we talk about building as creating an application, brand, partnerships, doing BD... I think it's really complex to do from Argentina. Many of these things (even though we love to talk about how crypto happens on Twitter, or anons this, anons that) happen through "known contacts", "acquaintances", or ultimately establishing a relationship in person. This is not insignificant when many important actors in DAOs and companies live in the USA or EU and attend conferences there. This last topic in particular: attending conferences, is not trivial at all for teams based in Latin America. The cost of a ticket for a BD in Europe can be at most 400/500 USD... From Argentina, to get to any conference, you already know that the base cost is at least 1200 USD. The difference is abysmal, so your chances of networking are reduced. This situation that happens with BD also happens with funding. In our case, maybe 60% of investors are Argentine... And I think that says a lot. I know not all Argentine projects experience this... It would be interesting to review the capabilities of Exactly, the guys from Mimic, etc.

R.: How do you manage the product vision of the builder himself versus external demands? (Industry timing, ecosystem trends, and new feature requirements from users).

A.: This is complicated... I think we can discuss the real size of the audience, or what audience is real (which is different). To be honest, external demands in our ecosystem are not very clear... The only thing the community and Twitter say is "points" and "airdrops". It’s worth clarifying that I'm particularly talking about products aimed at retail. I think there are some products (like lending markets) that have much clearer demands from the ecosystem. Maybe I would even dare to say that there are clearer demands for protocols than for applications.

R: What gave you the most satisfaction?

A.: The execution (and design) of the rebranding. Not only because in my entire work history I never had such a big production release in such an organized and tidy manner, but also because of all the prior work we did. From the first moment we started working on Balmy, we decided to prioritize user experience, dedicating weeks to user research, user testing, and other things that crypto applications usually don’t do, since their users -whales- don’t really care and just look to optimize every fee in their transaction.

R.: What did you hate the most?

A.: Raising an investment round for the first time was a really exhausting task. Especially if you don't have a clear mentor or someone who has done it before helping you improve the deck, telling you the "do's" and "don'ts” For example, at first, I shared the company's deck via a Google Drive link. Mistake! You need to use something like DocSend (hope they pay me for the promo) to have analytics, for instance, on which page each investor spent the most time, where they opened the deck from, etc. Running a company (at least as a first-time founder) and being the final decision-maker is a constant challenge in many aspects.

R: What was the most shocking thing?

A.: How difficult it is to bank a crypto company and how hard it is to get access to financial rails being a crypto company. Something so simple turns out to be not trivial at all.

R.: What are the three main issues you see in the industry?

A.:

1. Very misaligned incentives. Tokens as quick liquidity for VC investments (and maybe for the founders too) destroy any type of incentives. Under the decentralization premise, founders leave the protocols they led or created after 2 or 3 years at most, leaving a half-built organization, perhaps without a real PMF (product-market fit) but having already taken millions along the way. It’s really a shame as an ecosystem.

2. Fragmentation of users and liquidity that makes infrastructure costs or focusing on a network really complex. Particularly for applications like ours.

3. Misaligned incentives to create new things. As programmers, or as a company, we could easily fork CompoundV2, add a token, go to a relatively known network, and make a lot of money. But it’s not what we believe in, nor what we think generates real value.

R.: What advice would you give to a Solidity student?

A.: First, I would ask if they want to study Solidity or if they want to be involved in the web3 world. I’ve been advocating that you don’t need to be a programmer to get into web3 and that you need to get rid of that notion. We need more people in other positions (Marketing, Comms, Design, etc.) who know about web3. Now, if they already know they want to learn Solidity and programming, I would tell them to start by learning the basics of programming and web3. It’s not worth starting to program in Solidity if you don’t fully understand, for example, how transaction prices are composed, or that blocks have gas limits that vary depending on the network where you deploy. Understanding what the mempool is and how it works. All these things will make it so that when you start designing an architecture, you do it in a much more holistic way.

R.: Last question: What expectations do you have for the future?

A.: Soon, we will launch a product to generate returns with a completely innovative feature that we believe can help many people sleep more peacefully when interacting with DeFi protocols. All this will be done transparently and with an excellent user experience, our main goal. Based on this, we will see how that product goes and which of the other available paths we decide to take (yes, I’m being broad on purpose) 😉.

Follow protocol updates on their X profile

Visit their website

Co-founders: Alejo Amiras, Fipoape.eth, Nico Chamo

💟

Romina, Kipu Impact

https://t.me/Cryptochica_arg