a16z CSX, Coinbase invested, understand the potential project Glider Onchain in one article

Glider is making new attempts in the on-chain asset management field.

Written by: Patti, ChainCatcher

The on-chain trading platform Glider is quietly rising.

Recently, Glider completed a $4 million funding round led by a16z CSX, with participation from investment firms such as Coinbase Ventures, Uniswap Ventures, and GSR. This strong financing lineup has attracted the attention of the crypto community, sparking widespread interest in the on-chain asset management sector, and Glider’s popularity continues to rise.

On-chain Asset Management Pain Points

In terms of traditional financial asset management institutions, companies like Bitwise and Grayscale typically adopt a custody model, where user assets are centrally managed by the institution. From Glider’s perspective, although traditional asset management institutions provide professional management services to a certain extent, they also sacrifice users’ autonomy over their assets.

Brian Huang, co-founder of Glider, stated that what sets Glider apart is that it will not custody users’ assets like traditional finance; instead, this will be achieved through blockchain technology.

However, even on-chain, portfolio management faces many challenges:

High technical complexity threshold: In a multi-chain ecosystem, the heterogeneity of Gas tokens, the latency risks of cross-chain bridging, and the real-time requirements of rebalancing strategies make manual operations extremely challenging when responding to market fluctuations.

Severe fragmentation of infrastructure: There is a lack of standardized interfaces between DeFi protocols, and users need to frequently switch between AMM, lending protocols, and options platforms.

Asymmetry of returns and risks: Retail investors often fall into the dilemma of “strategy becomes ineffective once disclosed” during the strategy replication process, while professional institutions leverage quantitative models to gain an advantage. This information gap results in a small number of individuals controlling most of the on-chain returns.

To address the aforementioned issues, Glider has proposed a new concept based on the balance between automated execution and user control.

Intent-Driven Modular System

John Johnson, co-founder of Glider, stated that the creation of Glider was driven by frustration over the fragmented infrastructure that has long plagued cryptocurrency portfolios, and the birth of Glider aims to eliminate this friction entirely, achieving precise, automated execution across networks.

The core idea is to build an “middleware” for on-chain asset management, decoupling the processes of strategy formulation, execution, and risk control into programmable modules. Users can configure parameters according to their own needs or choose from the smart templates provided by the platform.

The core of Glider’s product is an intent-driven modular architecture. Users only need to set investment goals and strategy intentions, and the underlying chain abstraction technology will automatically complete cross-chain operations, asset adjustments, and trade executions, reducing the burden of manual operations.

The technology stack of Glider adopts a modular design, with the following specific features:

Portfolio Construction

Users can use intuitive asset allocation tools or curated templates to customize their investment strategies.

Automated execution

Glider will seek liquidity across different chains and manage rebalancing to trigger trades, enabling the system to automatically execute preset strategies when market conditions change.

Non-custodial integration

Users can connect to any existing wallet (such as MetaMask, Rainbow, Safe, WalletConnect, etc.) without needing a new mnemonic phrase.

integrated lending

Glider automatically borrows and lends through trusted DeFi lending protocols like AAVE to optimize returns. Users can utilize their assets for borrowing operations without transferring ownership, gaining additional income opportunities.

Collaborative Investment

Users can share strategies and customize them to continuously optimize their investment portfolios.

Integrated Backtesting

Users can use historical data to test strategies on the Glider interface and compare performance with BTC, ETH, and other benchmarks. Through the backtesting feature, users can understand the performance of the strategy in advance.

Team background

According to the currently disclosed information about the founding team, the main team members are Brian Huang and John Johnson.

As co-founders, Brian Huang and John Johnson have impressive backgrounds, having worked at well-known institutions such as Anchorage Digital, XTX Markets, 0x, and Matcha. Other team members also come from industry-leading companies like Coinbase, MetaMask, 0x, Cega, and PoolTogether.

Brian Huang holds a PhD in Computer Science from MIT and previously served as the Chief Architect at Anchorage Digital, leading the development of a cross-chain custody system that supports over 20 public blockchains.

John Johnson, as an early core developer of the 0x protocol, led the restructuring project of the Matcha aggregation trading engine, which set an industry record for a single-day trading volume of 1.2 billion dollars.

Conclusion

Currently, Glider is still in technical testing, and the product is planned to be launched in the coming months.

According to the official website, the product is currently available by invitation only, and the waitlist is now open.

According to Glider builder @marcos_0x, more features for Glider are currently in development. At present, Glider can display the current value of a user’s investment portfolio and the net flow of funds (netflow), which is a key visualization clue for understanding investment performance.

In addition, according to its official disclosure, it plans to profit in the future by charging users a management fee based on a certain percentage of their managed asset scale.

In the process of evolving from a “financial experiment” to a “value network” in the cryptocurrency industry, true decentralization should not come at the expense of user experience, but should achieve the internalization of complexity through technological innovation.

Lianchuang John Johnson once stated: “Everyone should be able to accurately adjust their investment portfolio according to their own wishes, achieve automation, and invest freely within their risk tolerance and risk preference.”

Perhaps only when on-chain asset management can be as simple and user-friendly as traditional financial ETFs will DeFi have the potential to transform from a geek toy into mainstream financial infrastructure.

Glider is making new attempts in the on-chain asset management field.