We are thrilled to announce the upcoming launch of Topo Finance, an open financial services platform designed to optimize your use of existing Ethereum-based Decentralized Finance (DeFi) protocols.

In the coming months, we will debut a series of products created to help you better leverage the unique and powerful capabilities of Ethereum’s growing DeFi ecosystem in order to maximize your earnings. Our first offering, launching next month, will be a non-custodial lending platform that optimizes users’ interest rates across market-based lending protocols, initially integrated with Compound, dYdX, and Fulcrum.

We enter this space as many of you do, with mission-driven aspirations and a shorter term pragmatism. In the long run, we seek greater financial access; in the short, a refuge from the traditional system. While cryptocurrencies in general promise such access and refuge, DeFi has unique potential due to its composability, which allows for both streamlined and entirely new use cases.

One such use case, employed by Topo, is a new type of aggregator that operates a.) unlike the web2 aggregators and b.) in the historically siloed financial space. Traditional digital aggregators (e.g. Google, Uber, Netflix) upended historical supply and distribution models by modularizing supply (individual pages of content or TV shows) and creating a simple, efficient access point for consumers. The result was an enormous value capture for aggregators, significant value add for users, and major disruption for supplier business models.

DeFi aggregators operate in a totally different way, because DeFi suppliers are modular by nature. This allows aggregators like Topo to act as a natural support mechanism, rather than as a disruptive force, to suppliers’ operations by increasing distribution of their services, while the end user receives the same benefit of a more efficient and unified experience. In other words, the relationship of supplier, aggregator, and end user is able to become mutually beneficial the whole way through.

Not only is DeFi creating a new aggregator paradigm, it is also bringing the end-user benefits of aggregation to an entirely new sector. Traditional finance is reliant upon silos, high switching costs, and minimal user agency. Banks supply capital and financial services, products which have resisted modularization because of regulations that limit distribution. Ethereum’s DeFi has finally brought to the financial world the digital modularization that content, transportation, and lodging have experienced over the past decade. The result is once again increased simplicity and efficiency for the end user. Sure, people still use taxis, hotels, and cable television, but for many users and use cases, there are now more favorable options.

The option that Topo aims to provide is for users to earn more money and to pay less in fees and interest. We will also improve general market efficiency by routing needed supply and demand to existing money market protocols. These existing platforms have already been highly beneficial to traders, miners, hodlers, and general crypto enthusiasts; they support the crypto community’s most established audiences and create value for a much wider group of users. As such, there is powerful on-boarding potential in DeFi’s lending markets commensurate with the value this ecosystem can provide. In integrating these platforms to build Topo, we aim to maximize that value proposition.