Valentin Pletnev is far from the best-known name in cryptocurrencies, but a scheduling error that kept him away from Donald Trump’s recent Mar-a-Lago NFT gala could have dramatically redirected US cryptocurrency policy.
Only select holders of Trump’s NFT collection were allowed to participate in the exclusive May event. Pletnev bought one of those tickets as soon as he heard about the meeting and cashed in by purchasing 100 Trump “Mugshot Edition” digital trading cards.
“I thought it was hilarious because I’m not American,” Pletnev, the German co-founder of Quasar Labs, which is building a decentralized finance protocol on the Cosmos blockchain, said in an interview with CoinDesk.
When the gala was moved to a time when Pletnev was unavailable, he gave his ticket to Ryan Selkis, the founder of the crypto data and analytics platform Messari and an outspoken proponent of crypto policy.
Selkis ended up on stage praising the crypto revolution. This also applies to Mihailo Bjelic of Polygon.
Trump gave his own full support to crypto at the estate in Palm Beach, Florida. The former US president had previously ridiculed cryptocurrencies as toys “based on thin air.”
Pletnev insists that his NFT purchase – which got Selkis to speak – played a key role in the events that followed: within a few days, a vocal contingent of the crypto and blockchain industry rallied around former President Trump and then the infamous crypto aversion from US Securities. and the Exchange Commission have given surprise approval to the first exchange-traded funds to own Ethereum ether (ETH).
After the gala, a widely circulated meme on a turning point for the merger of digital assets and traditional finance.
While some close to crypto policy say the approval was likely anyway, others saw it as capitulation by Joe Biden’s administration — evidence that the crypto industry was finally being taken seriously as a political force by both parties.
Within two days of the SEC’s passage, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives passed the industry-friendly FIT21 bill, with significant Democratic support. It even received support from Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, a Democrat who had expressed skepticism about the legislation days earlier.
‘What else must have changed? [Schumer’s] in five days,” Pletnev asked, if not “Ryan Selkis on stage with Trump, Trump says ‘I’m pro-crypto, crypto should stay in this country,’ and all of Crypto Twitter realizes they might be team Trump? “
Quasar’s new vision
Buoyed by recent policy hype, Pletnev is unveiling a top-to-bottom rebrand for its Quasar protocol, aimed at simplifying decentralized finance, or DeFi, investing.
“Fundamentally, crypto will only be a great success if we increase the number of beneficiaries compared to traditional financing,” Pletnev told CoinDesk. “If we don’t achieve this, we risk replacing the financial oligarchy with a technocracy, which would be a sad outcome.”
Central to Pletnev’s ‘Yield for All’ vision will be the introduction of tiered staking assets, or LSAs, which will combine staking and DeFi returns into a single token that earns interest.
Staking is one of the most popular DeFi strategies today. It involves parking digital assets with a blockchain to help ‘secure’ them in exchange for a steady stream of interest. Often, users will stake assets and then reinvest them into other return-generating DeFi platforms at the same time. For example, users can stake assets into a platform like Lido, “redeploy” them back into EigenLayer through a platform like EtherFi, and then borrow against their stake as a way to maximize their total returns.
Read more: Crypto Staking 101: What is Staking?
If this all sounds complicated, that’s because it is. Quasar aims to simplify things through its LSAs: assets that represent specific trading strategies and can be traded instantly. Behind each LSA is a basket of crypto assets deployed via various DeFi protocols. The assets can generate returns from these protocols, and they will be managed according to investment strategies built into Quasar’s smart contracts.
“DeFi is complicated. If it continues to fragment, it will become a full-time job,” Pletnev said. “We need to make DeFi work for the people by packaging it in a simple, easy-to-use way.”
Quasar Finance launched its mainnet in 2023 as a ‘decentralized asset management’ protocol based on the Cosmos blockchain ecosystem. The platform used – and will continue to use – Cosmos’ Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC) protocol, which enables interoperability between different blockchains.
Quasar’s approach is not much different from existing return protocols such as Yearn – all-in-one trading platforms that simplify DeFi by deploying user funds into turnkey trading strategies. The current Quasar protocol works similarly: users can deposit crypto into ‘vaults’ that follow certain trading strategies and do not require much active supervision from users.
With its LSAs, Pletnev says Quasar is taking additional steps to add fungibility, decentralization and ease of access to the platform.
Revenue for everyone?
Despite the ‘Yield for All’ talk, Quasar, like many other DeFi protocols concerned about violating US financial regulations, is not available for use in the United States – hence Pletnev’s decision to get involved in the American politics.
“I went to Draper University in the Bay Area, Tim Draper’s private school,” Pletnev said, referring to the Silicon Valley venture capitalist. “Without the United States, I wouldn’t be where I am today. There’s no other way to put it.”
“The fact that the people of this country can’t benefit from what exists because of their country is crazy to me,” he said, “so I bought the [Trump] NFT because I thought someone should advocate for crypto.”
Quasar Labs has raised a total of $11.5 million from investors including Polychain Capital, Blockchain Capital, HASH Capital, CIB and Shima. The most recent funding round, announced in January, valued the company at $70 million. The platform’s QSR governance token is trading at $0.11 cents, with a fully diluted value of $67 million.