EtherFi’s Next Act: Stocks, Loans, and Global Banking | Mike Silagadze

**David Hoffman** (0:02)
Bankless Nation, we got Mike Silagadze from EtherFi back on the podcast. Mike, welcome back to the show.

**Mike Silagadze** (0:06)
Okay, thanks for having me on again.

**David Hoffman** (0:10)
So there is something brewing, as I hear, over in EtherFi, EtherFi land. Maybe for just listeners who haven't been paying attention to what's going on in EtherFi, EtherFi really pioneered the Neobank whole revolution that started in 2024 and moved on into 2025 It really kickstarted the whole Neobank platform, I think.
First, just with the whole restaking thing, and then allowing people to do a lot of cool stuff in DeFi, hold assets in EtherFi, deploy them into DeFi and also spend them. Starting to really chip away at the TradFi banking system and allow some of the bankless ideas to manifest into a consumer app. As I hear it, Mike, you guys have a second act coming. Let me know, tell me about this second act coming down the pike for EtherFi.

**Mike Silagadze** (0:59)
Yeah, I mean, I guess it's sort of like the third act, right? Our first product was the yield layer. So it's almost like, okay, we had to like create a version of, this is not a perfect analogy. We had to create a version of T-bills that allowed us to build on top of that, all the other stuff that users come to expect from TradFi. And so staking was the first yield layer, DeFi strategy vaults. We were actually, I think, the first or one of the first protocols to have protocol owned vaults. Now, that's like pretty common. But we introduced our liquid vaults. So that was kind of like, you've got the yield layer, but then you want to deploy it into DeFi to earn higher rewards, higher risk. So we introduced that. Then we launched the sort of the wrapper around that with the crypto credit card that created the first, I guess, proto version of a non-custodial crypto neobank.
And today, I mean, we're still the largest, I think, yeah, if you look at all the crypto card programs, we're by far the largest non-custodial one. And I think that the one that sort of creates the most integrated packaged experience for users that achieves what I think is sort of the holy grail of DeFi, which is truly allowing people to get off of their traditional banking rails to have self-custody over their assets, but not make any sacrifices, but continue to be able to use, you know, interact with the normal financial system while getting the benefits of DeFi and, you know, in self-custody. So that was like the first version of it, but that first version was still very crypto forward, I guess.
What I mean by that is you still needed to know a lot about crypto to use this product, even just the way the app, the product was presented, it was very crypto jargony. And so it was great for DeFi natives, for people that, you know, day to day, you know, use DeFi, they're comfortable depositing into Aave or whatever. Very difficult to use for normies. Very few normies kind of broke through the pain and onboard.
And so what we're releasing now is, not only is it the next generation of that, but more excitingly, the reason I'm excited about it is that it is much more normie friendly. So someone genuinely could not know anything about crypto and should be able to navigate it and get all the benefits without really having to have any familiarity with the sort of the underlying tech. And secondly, it actually allows people to do stuff that they would not be able to do with their traditional financial institutions. So in other words, it's not just like recreating what existed before. It's actually using the power of DeFi to let you do stuff that you previously wouldn't have been able to do. Which is, I mean, that's how you get, I think, crypto adoption. Is A, it has to be normie friendly, and B, there has to be like a Y there, right? Like, okay, I'm pretty happy with my Chase account. Why do I need to use this thing? And so hopefully now we have that for people.

**David Hoffman** (4:20)
What is all of that stuff? What's the meat on the bone? What is the cool things that you guys are adding into the EtherFi product suite?

**Mike Silagadze** (4:28)
Yeah, so there's a bunch of things.
The first thing is, I guess, the current limitations or previous limitations of EtherFi is you could only hold a pretty small number of select crypto assets. Like you could hold stable coins, could hold USDC, USDT, you could hold ETH, you could hold like, you know, a wrapped version of Pipe and Bitcoin, very crypto-y assets. We are now changing that to where you will now be able to hold tokenized stocks. So a huge range of tokenized stocks, you'll be able to hold metals. So gold, silver, all that great stuff. Along with pretty much any token that you want, any like, any of the majors that you'd want to hold. So really is now becoming not just a general crypto wallet, but wrapped in a smart contract safe. But you can actually just hold any of the more tradfied, tokenized tradfied assets. So that's pretty exciting.