How did you get into the world of DeFi and what makes you so passionate about it?
Web3 Leader Spotlight: Előd Varga
This week, we had the pleasure of speaking with Előd Varga, DeFi Lead & Grant Officer at Taraxa.io. Taraxa is a Proof of Stake, blockDAG, and EVM-compatible Layer-1 network, renowned for its ability to handle over 5,000 TPS and achieve near-instant (~3s) finality.
Előd is a curious and proactive professional who excels at simplifying complex technologies for non-technical founders and facilitating decision-making processes. You’ll often find him sharing his insights on these topics at both local and international conferences.
Feel free to follow him on X @VargaElod4.
How did you get into the world of DeFi and what makes you so passionate about it?
I started my career as a classic enterprise software engineer and was always thrilled by parallel economics, so I got bored very very quickly with simply closing tickets and attending daily meetups for a career.
The thrill started when I moved into Web3 freelancing and the first project I did was an NFT marketplace and I quickly realised that manually routing NFTs from one address to another isn’t really satisfying the market, so I we started to hook the protocol into lending and stuff, and that’s when my rodeo started in DeFi.
I love the fact that it is a novel finance branch that has huge potential - also, the fact that you can literally route payments from Hawaii to Nigeria in a matter of seconds independent of how many exchange currencies it needs to go through.
What advantages do you see in Taraxa’s EVM compatibility, and how does it benefit the broader ecosystem?
Taraxa is the endgame of sustainable scalability in EVM premises. It is the only L1 protocol that is able to handle north of 5k TPS and almost instant (~3s) finality. Couple that with the fact that our ETH to TARA bridge will soon be live and you’ll have a potential honest execution layer for all EVM-native chains.
We’ve been in talks with many protocols and all of them struggle with 2 things:
1. They need to tap into the ETH TVL
2. They need cheap & quick execution times
We’ve positioned ourselves as exactly this layer: deploy your Dapp to tap into the ETH TVL, bridge to Taraxa for execution and the bridge back.
How do you see the relationship between regulation and innovation in DeFi evolving over the next few years?
I think we’re past the wild wild west status and even past the regulation war. In the next months or weeks, we’ll see clear regulations coming in every important financial sector of the world.
This is going to create a guideline of what makes sense to do where, like with the DAO regulations coming that caused the majority of DAOs being registered in the Cayman Islands, Marshall Islands and Switzerland. DeFi will not slow down but over time we’re not going to see such a huge difference in TradFi and DeFi: there’ll be only finance with different flavours.
What advice would you give to DeFi projects that are actively building but not getting the recognition they deserve?
Ensure that what you’re building is really solving a problem and there really is a Product / Market fit. If you’re 100% sure on it then just put your head down and keep building - the recognition will come.
Crypto is a narrative heavy market that oftentimes delays attention if your product is not in one of the main narratives. Talk with your community, see its growth, if the community is reacting positively you’ll have traction following sooner or later.
