ApeX DEX Talks With Dmitry Lapidus: Bullish on Human Capital in Crypto

With new innovations, solutions and discussions abuzz, it’s impossible to get bored of the goings on in the world of crypto and, particularly, decentralization. If you haven’t already heard, ApeX Protocol is bringing these conversations right to your doorstep every Wednesday on our official Twitter — and this time, we sat down for a digital huddle with Dmitry Lapidus (@0xDiplomat), Junior Partner at crypto investment fund Dragonfly Capital.

In this episode of ApeX DEX Talks, we delved into the current bear market, the upcoming Eth2 merge, the decentralized finance (DeFi) landscape at present, the privacy dilemma and what a future with DeFi looks like.

For those who didn’t manage to catch the one-hour discussion live, we’ve extracted all the great bits in bite sizes for you right here.

*Some sentences have been edited for clarity.

Look Beyond Day-to-Day Pricing & Focus On Crypto Talents

After an extended period of skyrocketing market gains in 2021, the bear returned this year amidst a sea of reds across both bellwether digital assets and newer but similarly strong tokens that’ve seen steady gains over the past couple of years. As crypto natives hunker down for the long winter with multiple bear market strategies, Lapidus pointed out the “elephant in the room”: the larger macroeconomic picture.

“This is by far the most important thing, in my opinion, as most financial assets tend to be liquidity-driven and crypto hasn’t matured enough to become more than a speculative asset just yet. Liquidity is in the driving seat, but that is clearly being drained from the market due to a combination of wider economic policies and crypto being seen as a risky asset,” he noted. “From inflationary pressures to global energy shortages and more, it has put the world into a difficult situation. Quantitative Easing (QE) is being removed and interest rates will keep rising.”

All in all, this dampens the appeal of crypto as it sits higher up on the risk curve. To that end, in the short to medium term, it may be challenging to be extremely bullish on crypto prices and financial returns. Despite that, if one looks away from the day-to-day pricing of digital assets and focuses on the influx of talent continuing to enter the industry, Lapidus is more bullish on the whole than ever. As a seedbed for tech innovations, solutions and new products that people want to use, the cryptosphere continues to welcome smart people who are deploying capital in intelligent ways.

“If you’re a long-term minded, a fundamentally-driven investor like myself investing in the five to 10-year horizon… I got into crypto thinking of it as something I’d want to pass down to my future children. Now that’s the time horizon I’m looking at,” he concluded.

Decentralization Focused on Preserving Privacy

A financial system that makes a central operator and middleman obsolete restore’s an individual’s control over their funds — the DeFi ecosystem is a young and emerging space that sees its fair share of pros and cons. DeFi is especially relevant for emerging markets where market inefficiencies extremely cripple an individual’s day-to-day financial capabilities. Lapidus raised some examples in current fiat-based systems where exchanges can shut down at any time a person’s ability to trade, short or hedge in times of crisis, or where hyper inflation, financial restrictions and government expropriation are rampant.

There’s no doubt that decentralization is the end goal for many, and above all, the highest standards of privacy must be preserved in any system that is financial.

“I don’t know how many people globally nowadays would feel comfortable transacting using their credit cards online if everyone else out there could see what they were paying for, how much they had in their accounts and other sensitive details,” Lapidus compared. “The world is scary and we deserve to be protected from its dangers. That’s why we need privacy.”

Protecting one’s privacy, however, has almost become synonymous with shady, illegal financial activities in recent narratives. This is possibly one of the biggest challenges decentralization faces — regulatory bodies and authorities not fully grasping the core tenets of decentralization and the complex technology behind it. Using Tornado Cash briefly as an example, Lapidus highlighted that miscategorization and public labeling of new innovations in DeFi, especially those pertaining to privacy protection, will make it harder for everyone to understand the potential of the products and their underlying code infrastructure. As DeFi is still in its nascent stages, Lapidus agreed that governments and leaders will need to learn.

“The price of education is time,” he commented.

New Innovations, Same Vision

In the long DeFi marathon, we continue to build greater products and solutions that solve financial system inefficiencies and create even more value for users — and this is happening with decentralized exchange (DEX) offerings.

The ApeX Pro DEX stands out as we see two traditional items in the same ecosystem: the order book on ApeX Pro and automated market makers (AMMs) on ApeX eAMM. On top of that, with the integration of a credible and reliable Layer 2 scalability engine StarkEx, ApeX Pro currently features some of the best capabilities in the derivatives DEX landscape at the present to deliver security, transparency and privacy with deep liquidity and order efficiency.

Touching briefly also on Soulbound tokens (SBTs) that will soon be revealed on ApeX Pro, Lapidus agreed that SBTs constitute a viable “trust bridge” where entities and individuals interacting in an entirely trustless system are able to automatically trust in a person’s reputation for trading activities. SBTs may very well add a much-needed dimension on top of existing DEX operations to further fortify privacy for users.

ApeX DEX Talks happens every Wednesday on ApeX Protocol’s official Twitter at 2PM UTC. Tune in to stay up-to-date as we continue to build the future of decentralization, day after day.

ApeX Pro is a non-custodial trading platform that delivers limitless cross-margined perpetual contracts to its metacommunity under a new framework. It is primed to deliver limitless access to the perpetual swaps market with its order book model, as it remains committed to the promises of not just speed and efficiency, but also security with transparency on traders’ preferred derivatives trading assets.

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Dmitry Lapidus | Dragonfly Capital