Repost the original title “a16z CSX, Coinbase participated, understand the potential project Glider of Onchain with one article | CryptoSeed”

The Onchain trading platform Glider is quietly rising.

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

Pain points of on-chain asset management

For traditional financial management institutions, Bitwise, Grayscale and others usually adopt a custody model, where user assets are centrally managed by institutions. In Glider’s view, although traditional asset management institutions provide professional management services to a certain extent, they also sacrifice users’ autonomous control over assets.

Glider co-founder Brian Huang once said that what sets Glider apart is that it does not custodize user assets like traditional finance does, 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 delay risk of cross-chain bridging, and the real-time requirements of rebalancing strategies make manual operations extremely difficult in dealing with market fluctuations.

Serious fragmentation of infrastructure: Lack of standardized interfaces between DeFi protocols, users need to switch frequently between AMM, lending protocols, and options platforms.

Asymmetric returns and risks: Retail investors often fall into the dilemma of ‘strategy disclosure leads to failure’ in the process of strategy replication, while professional institutions build advantages with quantitative models, leading to information asymmetry and causing a few people to control most of the on-chain returns.

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

Intent-driven modular system

Glider co-founder John Johnson said that the establishment of Glider was driven by frustration with the fragmented infrastructure that has long plagued cryptocurrency portfolios, and Glider was created to completely eliminate this friction and achieve precise, automated execution across networks.

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

At the core of Glider’s product is an intent-driven modular architecture. Users only need to set investment goals and strategic intents, and the underlying chain abstraction technology will automatically complete cross-chain operations, asset adjustments, and trade executions, reducing manual operation burdens.
The Glider technical stack adopts modular design, with the following specific features:

Portfolio Construction

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

Automated Execution

Glider will search for liquidity on different chains and manage rebalancing to trigger trades. The system can 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 the need for a new mnemonic phrase.

Integrated Borrowing

Glider automatically borrows and lends through trusted DeFi lending protocols such as AAVE to optimize returns. Users can leverage assets for lending operations without transferring asset ownership, thereby gaining additional earning opportunities.

Collaborative Investment

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

Backtesting Integration

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

Team Background

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

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

Brian Huang holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and has served as the Chief Architect at Anchorage Digital, leading the development of a cross-chain custody system that supports more than 20 public chains.

John Johnson, as an early core developer of the 0x protocol, led the refactoring project of the Matcha aggregation trading engine, which once set an industry record of $1.2 billion in daily trading volume.

Conclusion

At present, 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 invitation-only, and the waitlist is open.

According to Glider builder@marcos_0xDisplay, more features development is in progress for Glider, currently, Glider can display the current value of the user’s investment portfolio as well as the net flow of funds (netflow) (a key visual clue to understand investment performance).

In addition, according to its official disclosure, the future plan is to profit by charging users a certain percentage of management fees based on its AUM.

In the process of the evolution of the cryptocurrency industry from ‘financial experiment’ to ‘value network,’ true decentralization should not be at the expense of user experience, but achieved through technological innovation to internalize complexity.

John Johnson of Gate.io once said, ‘Everyone should be able to adjust their investment portfolios precisely according to their own wishes, automate them, and invest freely within their risk tolerance and risk preference range.’

Perhaps, only when on-chain asset management can be as simple and easy to use as traditional financial ETFs, DeFi may have the hope of transitioning from a geeky toy to mainstream financial infrastructure.

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

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