a16z and CoinBase led the investment in the on-chain asset management newcomer Glider: using intent-driven architecture to solve the problems of custody and yield.

Editor: TB, ChainCatcher

The on-chain trading platform Glider is quietly rising.

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

on-chain asset management pain points

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

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

However, even on-chain, portfolio management faces numerous 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, 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 becomes ineffective once public” during the strategy replication process, while professional institutions build advantages through quantitative models. This information gap leads to a few individuals controlling the majority of on-chain profits.

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

intention-driven modular system

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

The core idea is to build “middleware” for on-chain asset management, decoupling aspects such as 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 customize their 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 to optimize returns. Users can leverage their assets for lending operations without transferring ownership of the assets, gaining additional profit 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. The backtesting feature allows users to understand the performance of strategies in advance.

Team Background

From the current disclosed information about the founding team, the team members are mainly Brian Huang and John Johnson.

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

Brian Huang holds a PhD in Computer Science from MIT and has 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 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 of Glider are currently under development. At present, Glider can display the current value of users’ portfolios and net flow (a key visual 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 the assets under management.

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 rather should be achieved through the internalization of complexity via technological innovation.

John Johnson from Lianchuang once stated: “Everyone should be able to precisely adjust their investment portfolio according to their own wishes, achieve automation, and make investment operations 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 transition from a geek toy to mainstream financial infrastructure.

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