Diving into DeFi with Mike Taormina

Head of Institutional Business Mike Taormina

Video transcript

I'm Mike Taormina. I'm from New York, New York, and I'm the Co-head of Institutional Business at the Index Cooperative. My career has always been in finance and at this point has hit the three key stops along the finance continuum or ecosystem. The first stop was in traditional finance. I worked in asset management at JP Morgan. The last 10 years of my career have been in start-ups, particularly FinTech start-ups, and most notably co-founding a couple of my own, a student lending platform called commonbond. And now I’m at the third stop, which is DeFi, I'm feeling at home in DeFi it feels like an opportunity to take what I've learned in those two stops, but really change finance for the better.

The way that I found my way to the Cooperative was buying our flagship product DPI. I learned about DeFi and NFTs towards the end of 2020. So it really wasn't that that long ago and started researching the various protocols, found my way in the rabbit hole and had never been so passionate about something truly in my life and found that there was a way to get simple exposure to a lot of the leading protocols in one fell swoop and that's buying DPI. So, I bought DPI. I actually got one of my friends to do the same, and that is Fallow8, Mr. Nate Howard, who I had worked with at my start-up, we started digging in further on various projects and found out that there was an entire community that was behind this product that we had already bought, that led us to buy Index, which then led us to show up one day and start contributing with the group. And then the rest is history.

The Index Coop community I'd describe as inclusive, passionate, fast-paced, aggressive, but also extremely friendly and empathetic. The open-door policy that we have, everyone is welcome to contribute and because it's a DAO. You have self-starters who show up and they just magically find their way to exactly what they should be working on. We have all these super fans that are going out every day, promoting our products. They own a lot of the products. It's something that a BlackRock or a Vanguard or a JP Morgan asset management can't replicate. Start-ups are always trying to encourage and foster some sense of community within their customer base and what makes this so different with a DAO is that you can foster that within your own organisation.

I think the biggest trend that I'm particularly interested in the crypto space is how institutions increasingly come into this ecosystem. So, this is a space that it largely has a lot of retail buyers. You're starting to see more high net worth and family offices jump into the space, but institutions have been hesitant to when they get in, it's been more Bitcoin and maybe a little Ethereum exposure. So that's not too dissimilar from how retail investors and traders get into this space. They get familiar with Bitcoin that kind of gives them the bug.

They come in to Ethereum and they get a bit deeper in the rabbit hole and they they're now diving down into DeFi. I think institutions will be following in suit, you know, there just a little bit behind and our job at the Cooperative is to accelerate that education so that they can familiarize themselves and gain more comfort with this emerging theme.

If you hold the long-term view that this is, these are new financial rails that are going to radically change how finance works globally, you can get by the inevitable ups and downs that we will all experience. The longer you're around, the more likely it is that you're going to experience a major draw down a bear market. That's normal in any industry. It’s probably given how nascent this space is is even more likely to continue to happen for the foreseeable future. But I think the most committed folks seem to be in it for the long run. And so that's how I personally, mentally get through “Okay, this, this could be a bit of a roller coaster, but I think it's a roller coaster worth being on.”

Disclaimer: This content is for informational purposes only and should not be construed as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

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