BNB Chain Project Spotlight: Stargate Finance

Today we're bringing you an interview with one of the most popular DeFi projects in the past few weeks. Stargate caught the public's attention with its fast-growing TVL across multiple blockchains including Ethereum, Avalanche, and BNB Smart Chain.

In this interview, we talked to Primordial, one of the co-founders of Stargate Finance to learn more about their project, meet the team, and explore what awaits in the future.

Spotlight on Stargate Finance

IMPORTANT: Please note the following content does not constitute an endorsement or approval of any of the products or services of the project, organization, or individual.

Hey Primordial! Welcome to Spotlight. As it’s Stargate’s first time here, let’s start with a brief introduction. Could you give us the elevator pitch on Stargate and your role?  
Stargate plays the role of ‘liquidity transfer layer’ for applications looking to go omnichain without needing to focus any further than the immediate contract interactions. I.e. yield aggregator/DEX.

What is the story behind Stargate and how did the idea come about?
Stargate originated actually as BNB Chain was first coming about and every day we were hearing about how BNB Chain had more users and more activity than Ethereum and so we wanted to see what all of the excitement was about and started to design a game that would live across both chains. We quickly realized there were no reliable bridges and then further no reliable transport layers for information and so when we started to make our own we fell down the rabbit hole of solving the problem from first principles and Stargate is ultimately what we landed on (although it took us a few iterations, for instance, we started with it being pairwise chain paths and not unified liquidity)

Can you briefly introduce us to your team? What’s your team's experience?
Myself and my two co-founders have known each other for 16+ years, built multiple companies together, published academic research together, and built tons of different pieces of technology together. I personally played poker professionally for 8 years, started (and sold) a company with Ryan/Caleb, wrote ML models I sold to the pro MLB teams, started a company in the valley with 1st engineer from a16z and a couple of guys from google/comma.ai/etc., that company was acquired by People.ai. Then we published academic research that was picked up and published by Noam Brown & Facebook AI Research and now we’re here doing this. The rest of our team hails from all over, out of AWS, Redhat, Sushiswap (0xmaki), and Child prodigies :).

We’ve seen incredible growth in cross-chain infrastructure and applications. How does Stargate fit into this trend?
Stargate aims to solve the issues that many of the existing systems have created – particularly around fractured liquidity. No more wrapped assets, no more pairwise pathways of liquidity, no more fragmented user processes.

Security in bridging technology has become a key issue in recent weeks. Could you tell us how you think about security?
We have spent a huge amount of time thinking about security. Broadly speaking the two main approaches are middlechain & light node, we invented the ultra-light node. We also take security extremely seriously and have recently introduced the largest bug bounty in history… twice. $15m for both Stargate and LayerZero.

Why did you decide to build on the BNB Chain?
We always prioritize the platforms with the most vibrant ecosystems and BNB Chain has, for a long time now, proven itself to have one of the most active ecosystems of any chain and a pretty vibrant ecosystem of apps both for DeFi and NFTs. It was an obvious choice.

And as we’re getting to the end of the interview, let’s talk about the future. What do you see as the main challenge for the future of DeFi? What new features can we expect from you in the upcoming months?We hope to see a complete shift in the way applications are developed. To see composability really start to play a core piece in how applications interact with each other and really hope to see applications themselves develop new design flows now that it’s so easy to be everywhere and communicate seamlessly.

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