Glider, a new on-chain asset management player led by a16z and CoinBase: solving custody and yield challenges with intent-driven architecture.

Author: Patti, ChainCatcher

Editor: TB, ChainCatcher

The on-chain trading platform Glider is quietly rising.

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

On-chain asset management pain points

In terms of traditional financial asset management institutions, Bitwise, Grayscale, and others usually 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, has stated that what sets Glider apart is that it will not custody users’ assets like traditional finance, and this will be achieved through blockchain technology.

But even on the chain, portfolio management faces many challenges:

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

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

Asymmetry of returns and risks: Retail investors often fall into the dilemma of “strategy becoming ineffective once disclosed” during the process of strategy replication, whereas professional institutions build advantages through quantitative models. This information gap results in a minority of people holding the majority of on-chain returns.

In response to the above issues, Glider has proposed a new concept based on the balance between the automation execution layer and user control.

intent-driven modular system

John Johnson, co-founder of Glider, stated that the creation of Glider stemmed from frustration with the fragmented infrastructure that has long plagued cryptocurrency portfolios, and the birth of Glider aims to completely eliminate this friction, achieving precise and automated execution across networks.

The core idea is to construct “middleware” for on-chain asset management, decoupling the processes of strategy formulation, execution, and risk control into programmable modules. Users can self-configure parameters according to their needs or choose from the intelligent 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 customize investment strategies using intuitive asset allocation tools or selected templates.

Automated Execution

Glider will search for liquidity across different chains and manage rebalancing to trigger trades, allowing 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.

Integrated Lending

Glider automatically borrows and lends through trusted DeFi lending protocols like AAVE, optimizing returns. Users can leverage their assets for lending operations to gain additional profit opportunities without transferring ownership of the assets.

Collaborative Investment

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

Integrated Backtesting

Users can test strategies using historical data on the Glider interface and compare performance against BTC, ETH, and other benchmarks. The backtesting feature allows them to understand the performance of the strategy in advance.

Team Background

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

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

Brian Huang holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from MIT and previously served as the Chief Architect at Anchorage Digital, where he led 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 reconstruction project of the Matcha aggregation trading engine, which set an industry record of $1.2 billion in trading volume in a single day.

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 using an invitation system, 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 users’ portfolios as well as net flow (netflow), which is a key visual cue 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 the assets under management.

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

Lianchuang’s John Johnson once stated: “Everyone should be able to precisely adjust their investment portfolio according to their own wishes, automate it, 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, can DeFi hope to transform from a geek toy into mainstream financial infrastructure.

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