# Aave Labs acquired savings app Stable, which is now being rebuilt as Aave App Stableminded, a Stabledash show. Jun 25, 2026. Mario Cabrera. https://live.stabledash.com/shows/stableminded/episodes/he-built-a-defi-savings-app-grew-it-to-10-000-users-and-aave-2RX0IwLcLcQ Mario Cabrera, Stable's founder and now VP of Product at Aave, wants DeFi savings to feel so much like ordinary fintech that users can't tell a blockchain is involved. Aave Labs acquired Stable, a consumer savings app built on DeFi, last year. Mario Cabrera, Stable's founder, says the app is now reinventing itself as Aave App. Before the deal, he says, Stable grew to almost 10,000 users. ## From Stable to Aave Stable built only on top of Aave. Mario Cabrera says it was the first way to earn with USDC on Aave across multiple chains. The two companies first worked together on a co-marketing campaign, which he says brought Stable a lot of users and traction. He joined Aave about seven to eight months ago as Director of Product for Aave App. He was recently promoted to VP of Product and now oversees Aave App, Aave Pro and Push, the regulated side of the business. ## The fintech test Mario Cabrera says DeFi's total market is not much larger than it was at the peak of the last bull cycle, because very few net new users have arrived. In his view the experience has stayed the same and still serves a narrow group of highly technical early adopters. He proposes a test: put a user in front of a fintech app, and if the user cannot say with any certainty whether it runs on blockchains, the app passes. ## What Aave App changes Mario Cabrera says Stable users found variable rates "extremely confusing", since savings apps they know pay a round number such as 3% or 3.5%. Aave App vaults will let Aave program a rate for each user and add APY as a reward for actions like referring friends. Deposits arrive on gas-efficient chains and can be routed to wherever Aave is deployed. The app also adds biometric recovery built with CoinCover, and an Aave card is planned that earns until the point of spend. Cabrera argues that giving users more detail about where yield comes from is the wrong fix. If users feel they need to learn more, he says, "there's something missing at the product level." ## Institutions and V4 On the institutional side, Aave launched Aave Horizon, a real-world asset market built on v3. Cabrera says the V4 hub-and-spoke model allows both pooled liquidity and isolated collateral markets. Mario Cabrera is setting goals for the next 12 months. He expects Aave App to onboard hundreds of thousands of net new consumers. He also expects institutional work on V4 to bring billions of dollars in net new capital to Aave. ## Key takeaways 1. Aave Labs acquired Stable last year, and Stable is now reinventing itself as Aave App. 2. Mario Cabrera says DeFi has about 40 million users compared with 4 billion fintech users, which he calls a 100x opportunity. 3. Aave App will offer a stable rate set for each user and balance protection of up to $1 million per customer. ## Chapters - 0:00 Cabrera moved from Director to VP of Product at Aave - 2:51 Stable began as fintech-style savings built on Aave - 8:56 Stable reached 10,000 users before Aave's resources took over - 11:43 Passing the fintech test is the goal for DeFi - 13:50 Aave grew from EthLend to a hub-and-spoke v4 - 18:13 DeFi has stalled because the experience never changed - 25:16 Stable rates and multi-chain vaults fix what confused Stable users - 30:16 Users asking for more explanation point to a product gap - 32:11 Horizon serves institutions while content targets everyday people - 35:20 Founder drive carried into Aave alongside its focus on security - 41:51 The next year depends on net new users and capital ## Transcript **Mario Cabrera** (0:01) The total market for DeFi today is not that much larger than it was at the peak of the last bull cycle. And to really reach mass adoption, you're going to have to radically change what the experience looks like. There's 4 billion people around the world that use fintech products today. There's only, our best estimates say there's about 40 million people that use DeFi today. The best way we have of conceptualizing this is what we call the fintech test. And it goes very similarly. You place a user in front of a fintech application and you ask that user, is this application powered by blockchains or is it not? And if the user isn't able to tell you with any degree of certainty, then it passes the fintech test. So being able to bring DeFi to everybody is a 100x opportunity. And that's what Aave App is doing. And so that's what we're building at Aave. **Drew Rogers** (0:54) Hey, it's Drew. Quick thank you to Altitude for making this episode possible. Altitude is rebuilding business banking for teams on the frontier. They offer the full stack for the modern CFO and founder, a beautifully designed platform for payouts, bill pay, corporate cards, enterprise controls, and so much more. Move money with speed, yield, and total control, all from your stablecoin balance. Operate at Altitude. If your business is on the frontier, your finances should be too. You can learn more at altitude.xyz. I'm so excited for this because you're in a really exciting moment of your career, of your professional journey. I'm excited to dive into, in this conversation, the evolution of you as an entrepreneur and the work that you were doing at Stable and how that's evolved into this new role at Aave. So much that we'll cover here. Aave seems to me to be one of the most interesting companies in the world of lending and Drew Rogers, Zach Fowler, Stabledash Live, Stabledash Live, Stabledash Live, Stabledash Live, Stabledash Live, Stabledash Live, Stabledash Live, Stabledash Live, Stabledash Live, Stabledash Live, **Mario Cabrera** (2:03) Sure. So I joined Aave about seven to eight months ago now, and I joined as Director of Product, so specifically working on Aave App, which is our flagship consumer savings application. And we released a waitlist for that late last year during DevConnect in Argentina. And since then, we've had a ton of signups. For the iOS app, we have the Android app that's coming out soon. And then recently, I became VP of Product at Aave, so overseeing all products, including Aave App, Aave Pro, Push, which is the regulated side of our business that allows us to connect natively to banks and do bank deposits, withdrawals, KYC, et cetera, as well as a ton of new products that are coming down the pipeline very soon. **Drew Rogers** (2:51) So exciting. We're going to remember each of those because they all seem to be playing unique roles in the suite of stuff that you guys do. The journey of you entering the business is really interesting. It's one of the main reasons I was really excited to sit down with you because when we first met, you were building Stable. And it felt to me to be one of the most well-designed user experiences around stablecoins, like extremely simple. And you were leading and running that business when we met. What was that for those who either want to know the story of how stable in this journey kind of, how did this all unfold? What's the story of stable? Or if we want to even go back farther, maybe that's a better place to start. **Mario Cabrera** (3:33) So I, before starting my entrepreneurship journey, I was a machine learning engineer at Meta, really interested in artificial intelligence, then obviously got really interested in crypto, and tried to put those two worlds together. So I was briefly for about three or four months exploring how you could bring AI inference and serve decentralized applications. After really investigating that, didn't seem to have as many legs as I thought it did. And so I discovered stablecoins, and I saw that they were growing all over the world, mostly in emerging markets. And I questioned, why are they not growing in the West? Why are they not growing in the US in the same way that they're growing, at least on a consumer basis, across the rest of the world? It really came down to there was not the same need for stablecoins in the US as there was in say like Turkey or Argentina, where you have very high debasement currencies that lose a lot of value against obviously the dollar, but other assets as well, as well as these countries were really in need of better financial settlement rails. And in the US, we have great financial settlement rails. I mean, you could Venmo, Drew Rogers, Zach Fowler, Stabledash Live, Stabledash Live, Stabledash Live, Stabledash Live, Stabledash Live, Stabledash Live, **Mario Cabrera** (5:12) And we really thought, if we can give the same user experience that somebody has when using a major fintech product today, but just have it be powered by stablecoins and blockchains, would that make sense? Would that be powerful? And we found quite a bit of success in that we had a lot of users be really excited about that. And eventually, we partnered with Aave and were acquired last year by Aave Labs, and now Stable is sort of reinventing itself as the Aave app. **Drew Rogers** (5:45) Yeah, okay, so bring us into the build of Stable. So you guys were working, what were those users getting excited about? Obviously, like, great yield makes everyone excited. What was it about Aave, or what was that relationship like at that time that drew you in to want to work with them in the first place? **Mario Cabrera** (6:03) So we did an accelerator called AllianceDAO. **Drew Rogers** (6:09) That's a very Solana-focused one, or is that not true? **Mario Cabrera** (6:11) Enron **Drew Rogers** (6:13) runs that? Is that the name? **Mario Cabrera** (6:14) They also love a ton of other ecosystems. We were building exclusively on top of Aave. So we were the first way you could earn with USDC on Aave across multiple different chains. And so this was a pretty neat solution. And the guys at Alliance were like, well, have you spoken to Aave? And we said, no, we've no contact at Aave, but we'd love to speak to them. Could you intro us? And so they introduced us to Aave and we started speaking. The relationship started with a co-marketing campaign that we did early on. And that did well, was good for Stable, it got us a lot of users, a lot of traction, a lot of views on social media. And as time went on, we developed the relationship further and as we really looked at What it was going to take to onboard the world to Stablecoins and to DeFi, we really realized that it was going to take a ton of resources that we're not going to get by building Stable alone. And so it made the most sense to partner with somebody like Aave, the largest, longest standing lending protocol out there, take advantage of all of the resources that we could have at our disposal there and really achieve the most ambitious version of Stable possible. **Drew Rogers** (7:35) So why do you think you were the first to do this? It seems unique to me that you would be the only platform or the first platform at that time to integrate and work with Aave across those chains in that way. Was there extreme technical hurdles to doing that well, or are people just not thinking of Aave in this way? What was it that made it so unique for you guys to go build it in this way? And is that still the case? Are there now people who are kind of doing the same thing? So what made **Mario Cabrera** (8:04) Stable unique was the focus on building for Drew Rogers, Zach Fowler, Stabledash Live, Stabledash Live, Stabledash Live, Stabledash Live, Stabledash Live, Stabledash Live, **Mario Cabrera** (8:31) isn't a crypto native somebody who's never made an on-chain transaction in their life and make the experience really mirror what the experience that they're used to from a ux point of view from a safety point of view from a value proposition point of view and yes that's what really made stable unique and there was a lot of really interesting technical stuff that we had to do behind the scenes to really make it safe really make it non-custodial really make it recoverable **Drew Rogers** (8:56) so Based on the what was the total time from like founding to acquisition if you're able to like I'm always interested to hear the story of like how these acquisitions happen like what was what was the first time how long how long was it from founding to acquisition and then I'd love to peel back more of like the story of how the acquisition happened like what was that like um how did that all go down **Mario Cabrera** (9:20) Yes, Stable was started in early 2024. And originally, we were just really excited about Stablecoins. And we were exploring a ton of different ideas from remittances to consumer savings. And eventually, we landed on consumer savings as the way that we thought would be the easiest and best way to acquire users and build a big business. We did Alliance DAO in early 2025, and that's when we met Aave. We then grew stable to almost 10,000 users, around 2,000, 2,500 in average balances. And from speaking to users, we got a sense of What the delta was between what we could deliver with Stable's resources and what it was going to take to really onboard the world. And so that is a lot of the work that we've been doing at Aave now. That includes a brand new vault system. It includes a brand new state-of-the-art recovery system that we're building in partnership with CoinCover. It has biometric recovery, a brand new first-of-its-kind balance protection feature where Your balances are insured up to a million dollars per customer. And so all of these things that really are required for DeFi-powered application to really mirror the experience of using a traditional fintech application were only possible with these expanded resources. And so all of these things, the vault, meaning you need custom smart contracts, you need multiple audits. This is hundreds of thousands of dollars to set up the insurance program. That's, you know, hundreds of thousands, millions of dollars. The same with all of the engineering resources to make this a really good design. So we have an internal design system called Aave Glass. It is beautiful to use. You can see it today in Aave App. So all of these reasons were why we decided to partner with Aave to build Aave App and then other applications as well. **Drew Rogers** (11:24) There was a sense of realizing what was possible, what still needed to be built, and the idea of doing that in partnership with Aave was something that was extremely exciting for you. To go do that with them versus not just as partners, but actually internally as an embedded team, that became a really obvious and attractive option for you, it sounds like. **Mario Cabrera** (11:43) Yeah. For the past two to three years, I've been really starting with account abstraction, making it easier for everyday people to use crypto. It's been a real goal and mission of mine to bring the power of blockchains and stablecoins and noncustodial wallets and software to everybody. To the entire world, to people who have never made an on-chain transaction in their life, to people who cannot explain to you how a blockchain system works. I mean, nobody understands how the financial system works under the hood. Very few people could tell you, and yet everybody uses it. We want to do the exact same thing, but with blockchains. The best way we have of conceptualizing this is what we call the fintech test. It's very similar to a relevant topic in artificial intelligence today called the Turing test. The Turing test is you place a user in front of a messaging application, and you ask that user, are you messaging with a human being, or are you messaging with an AI? If the user can't tell you with any degree of confidence if they're messaging with another human being or an AI, then it passes the Turing Test. And we believe that our industry has a very similar test, and we call it the FinTech Test. And it goes very similarly, you place a user in front of a FinTech application, And you ask that user, is this application powered by blockchains or is it not? And if the user isn't able to tell you with any degree of certainty, then it passes the fintech test. And in many ways, this is what our industry's been working towards since its very inception. It's, let's bring the benefits of our new, open, transparent, global, permissionless, composable financial system to everybody around the world. And what we're doing with this brand new vault, With the insurance program, with the design language we have, with everything we're building with Aave App, this is really the first time that DeFi and stablecoins are going to pass the fintech test. And so I think we're going to see a real explosion in sort of everyday consumer usage of DeFi and stablecoins with Aave App and the other products that we're building. **Drew Rogers** (13:50) So exciting. Okay, so give us a little bit of the history for those who are just now getting to know Aave for the first time. So we've gone into the history of Stable, some of your background. Before we get into all of those things that are next with Aave, give us a little bit of the history of the lending protocol itself, the history that it's been through. What have people historically been using Aave for? And it seems like right now we're entering, as we were even talking before this, it seems like Aave is entering this The Frontier is a new chapter of growth and maturity and going into new places and new institutions. But before we go into those things, where has Aave been? What is some of that history that is important to cover for those who might be just getting to know it for the first time? **Mario Cabrera** (14:31) So Aave started as EthLend, and it was really a pioneer of peer-to-peer lending and borrowing. So back in the day, you could take a loan against your Ethereum as collateral. And over the years, it evolved to Aave v2, v3, and now Aave v4. And it's grown to be the largest, longest-standing, most lindy lending protocol out there in all of DeFi. With tens and tens of billions of dollars in deposits. And there's a ton of different reasons to use Aave. There's a ton of different users who decide to deposit and use their deposits as collateral. These are folks who perhaps want to take out leverage on an Ethereum position. These are folks who potentially have made a lot of money in crypto and they would like to spend some of those gains without incurring a taxable event. And all of that creates yield For the underlying suppliers. So those would be users of Stable, users of Aave App. They would be able to deposit stable coins and in exchange earn pretty sweet yields that have historically been significantly higher than what you could have gone in traditional savings accounts. **Drew Rogers** (15:43) Let's break down a little bit of the lending and borrowing side of this. You have a really interesting supply and demand marketplace that you need to facilitate here, and both, from my understanding, need to exist in a place of health and strength. What are some of these balances that Aave has struck historically? We're on the You have different versions of this. Help us understand maybe some of those economics and how this all works, and then also the improvements that continue to be made over time, or some of these things that have gotten better over time in those ways. **Mario Cabrera** (16:20) Yeah, so the initial version of Aave, or back when it was called Ethland, was very much isolated markets. So there was no shared or pooled liquidity, which meant that you really couldn't access the network effects of many, many borrowers and many, many lenders coming together in this network. With V2 and V3, Aave introduced a pooled model, which really allowed these network effects to flourish. And it meant that No matter where the demand for borrowing a certain asset came from, it meant that it could be pooled with demand for all of the other assets and therefore create a much deeper liquid lending and borrowing market. That has its limits as well, because you perhaps don't want to have all assets in a pool. You're basically doing curation at the pool level, and you would like to have some more flexibility. And so that's really what FOR allows us to have with the hub-and-spoke model. Drew Rogers, Zach Fowler, Stabledash Live, Stabledash Live, Stabledash Live, Stabledash Live, Stabledash Live, Stabledash Live, Stabledash Live, **Mario Cabrera** (17:41) Drew Rogers, Zach Fowler, Stabledash Live, Stabledash Live, Stabledash Live, Stabledash Live, Stabledash Live, Stabledash Live, **Mario Cabrera** (18:09) The North Star End Model for What On-Chain Lending Should Look Like. **Drew Rogers** (18:13) Yeah, so I want to get into the app side of this, and I know that's something that you really are personally involved with. As we think about the individual or the business at the end of this who is maybe making that decision of like, I know I need to be earning money on my money. Where do I go to do that? What does that look like today in the current experience of Aave or the app? vs. what you were kind of inferring was coming next or how you're thinking about the future you're growing the team a lot on the BD side like what is that experience today versus you know in one two five years from now the experience that you're really going into and more of this like embedded version that we were discussing like give us the the current moment versus where you guys might be heading into the future **Mario Cabrera** (18:57) Yeah, so the total market for DeFi today is not that much larger than it was at the peak of the last bull cycle. And that is because there's really a negligible amount of net new users. And that is because the experience has remained the same. It is this narrow set of very highly technical, very early adopters that are really passionate and excited about the world of non-custodial software and permissionless markets. **Drew Rogers** (19:26) Aave Acquired, Stabledash Live, Stabledash Live, Stabledash Live, Stabledash Live, Stabledash Live, Stabledash Live, Stabledash **Mario Cabrera** (19:30) Live, Stabledash Live, Stabledash Live, Stabledash Live, **Drew Rogers** (19:53) What is the Pro? Is the more like enterprise institutional version? So **Mario Cabrera** (19:57) Aave Pro is the interface that wraps Aave v4, which is our new improved version of the underlying lending protocol. And it has a brand new interface that Drew Rogers, Zach Fowler, Stabledash Live, Stabledash Live, Stabledash Live, Stabledash Live, Stabledash Live, Stabledash Live, Stabledash Live, Stabledash Live, **Mario Cabrera** (20:28) And interfaces that are able to pass this fintech test that we spoke about earlier is the world, 8 billion people. There's 4 billion people around the world that use fintech products today. Our best estimates say there's about 40 million people that use DeFi today. So being able to bring DeFi to everybody is a 100x opportunity. And so that's what we're building at Aave. **Drew Rogers** (20:57) So today we're currently in this state where like those who might be using this dashboard, this application, people who are in the industry, working in the industry, maybe they're crypto native and wealthy because of that. They've been involved very early in some of these protocols. They know how they work. They are convicted about this stuff and they're willing to go through those user experience hurdles that typically get in the way that prevent most people from getting there. So that's what's currently happening. What are some of these What are some of the things in your guys' minds that get you excited of like, hey, there's going to be a guy in St. Louis who's running a mid-market commercial business. He's going to be getting a small business loan through his payments dashboard, and that is going to be powered by this. Give us a few of these examples that are just kind of simple and how the How are you going to go from the current X to 99 more? What are some of those kind of tail end ones where they start to feel really familiar, where Aave can kind of implant and embed into those situations? **Mario Cabrera** (22:00) Yeah, so I can speak best about Aave app. That's what I've been spending most of my time on. But I think it's less clear the benefit immediately by Drew Rogers, Zach Fowler, Stabledash Live, Stabledash Live, Stabledash Live, Stabledash Live, Stabledash Live, Stabledash Live, **Mario Cabrera** (22:28) In their local currencies, telling them to hold US dollars, earn a high yield on US dollars in a way that is safe. That's not just at the protocol level with Aave, but at the recovery level with being able to always recover your account, no matter if you lose your password, if you lose your phone. I mean, building around non-custodial software is really tough, and there should be no Drew Rogers, Zach Fowler, Stabledash Live, Stabledash Live, Stabledash Live, Stabledash Live, Stabledash Live, Stabledash Live, **Mario Cabrera** (23:13) The balance protection feature, also massive. One of the biggest questions when somebody is thinking about using a brand new financial product is, is this thing safe, right? I've never heard of this before. What is this? How can I know that it's safe? And so with balance protection, we're literally putting our money where our mouth is. And we're saying, we're backing this with everything we've got. This is built to endure. This is built for you to save for your mortgage or built for saving for your kid's education. Yeah, so we're building Aave app starting with the savings application. Then we'll be adding in other features like a card, so you'll be able to earn up until the point at which you spend. So that'll be pretty excited about Aave card coming soon. **Drew Rogers** (23:59) There's a stable coin involved in this as well, if I'm doing this correctly, right? Is that going to be attached to this card strategy too? Or how does that work? **Mario Cabrera** (24:06) So Aave App will work with all major stablecoins. So that's one of the really cool features about this brand new vault is no matter what major stablecoin you have, you deposit that into the Aave App vault and you will get vault shares in return. So you could deposit USDC, USDT, GO, et cetera. Any major stablecoin, you will receive vault shares in return. When you go to spend with your card, all that will happen from like a flow of funds perspective As in the debit card situation, your funds will be debited from your account. You'll convert your shares into stablecoins. Those will be settled with the merchant, and payment will be successful. You'll buy your product or service, and in the event of a credit card, you will settle with the merchant instantly. You will be able to take a loan out using Aave from your Aave app vault balance, and you'll be able to pay that back in Stabledash Global, Stabledash Live, Stabledash Live, Stabledash Live, Stabledash Live, **Drew Rogers** (25:16) If they're thinking through something really similar, I think something like that gets me really excited in terms of practical adoption. In that settlement delay, earning in that window of time to offset spending, things like that are really, really interesting. Even when you're speaking about the design challenges that you faced, building stable, the FinTech test, I can just tell that you are someone who really, really deeply cares about the user experience and the way that design plays into that user experience. Where do you find right now as you're building the app or building just in today's market, given the constraints that we still have building financial products on-chain, what are some of these key areas that are very top of mind for you around designing products that don't feel on-chain native? How are you currently thinking about some of these challenges? What are some solutions that you're finding are working? You obviously did that really successfully at Stable on the more retail product side with the retail app. How are you now bringing that sort of design forwardness into the scale challenges that Aave has? **Mario Cabrera** (26:22) Yeah, so Aave App is a much more ambitious version of what we were building at Stable. Like, much, much, much more ambitious. And that came from speaking to the users at Stable and figuring out, specifically speaking to the folks who were net new users, and asking them, you know, You signed up, you didn't deposit, why was that? Or you deposited and then you withdrew, why was that? And really understanding what worked and what didn't work. And a few things that didn't work were, for example, variable rates. Variable rates are extremely confusing to everyday people. And they simply don't fit the mental model of a traditional savings application they have. If they're using any major savings applications today, they're earning maybe 3%, 3.5%. It's a nice round number. It **Drew Rogers** (27:13) doesn't seem as risky. It is what it is. It **Mario Cabrera** (27:15) is what it is. It allows you to predict how much it's going to grow 6, 12, 24 months from now. And in DeFi, you have these rates where it'll be 8% one day, it'll be like 4% the next day, 3%, 5%. One, it just doesn't fit the mental model. And two, it doesn't allow them to really project. One common question we had as well was, if the rates are this variable, could they ever be negative? And we got that a lot. And so what we're doing with Aave App to fix this We're giving users stable rates and so at the vault level you'll be able to program per user what their rate is and so this is important from the stable rate perspective that mirrors what TradFi applications are giving their users but it also helps from a user incentives point of view because you're able to reward users for For referring friends, for setting up automated deposits, for performing any in-app actions that would constitute a reward in the form of APY. So one of the things that we had to fix was these variable rates. Another thing we had to fix was the ability to be multi-chain. And we also fixed this with the brand new Aave App Vault. And the reason multi-chain is important from a UX perspective is you want Drew Rogers, Zach Fowler, Stabledash Global, Stabledash Live, Stabledash Live, Stabledash Live, Stabledash Live, **Mario Cabrera** (29:04) But then you also don't want to become a victim of your own success in the event that you do attract billions and billions of dollars in deposits and you end up moving the market where you deployed that vault. And so the gold standard for what these vaults should look like for consumer savings is you're able to accept deposits in a gas-efficient chain, and you're able to route those deposits anywhere where Aave's deployed. So it could be Ethereum mainnet, billions and billions and billions of dollars of stablecoin liquidity there. We're able to go to any other chain that launches recently and take advantage of any incentive programs that they may have to help maximize the user's APY. So a lot of these benefits come from the Vault layer, and that's one of the things that we've been investing a lot of time, a lot of resources at over the past five to six months. Other features are super important for onboarding everyday users. We've touched on them, such as the balance protection feature, the recovery feature, making it feel like You know, you're not recovering a non-custodial wallet, but you're just recovering a regular account at any other fintech that you ever had. So these are some of the problems we've been tackling. **Drew Rogers** (30:16) I was talking to another founder. The founder is passing the fintech test in the consumer stablecoin space. The conviction he had was like, we actually need to educate our users more on where this yield is coming from and the Drew Rogers, Zach Fowler, Stabledash Live, Stabledash Live, Stabledash Live, Stabledash Live, Stabledash Live, Stabledash Live, Stabledash Live, **Drew Rogers** (30:56) Where do you fall within the like showing how the sausage is made to users and how are you thinking about that without making it overly complex or overly intimidating? Any thoughts on that from like a design standpoint? **Mario Cabrera** (31:09) Yeah, my read on that is that the experience is probably not mirroring close enough the experience that users have when using a traditional savings account. If a user feels the need to learn more, and they feel like they're not getting enough, there's something missing at the product level. And more information for the user is not going to help. If anything, for the average user, it's going to confuse them more. And so the solution is really going to be to identify what the points of friction are, what doesn't make sense, what does not mirror what average TradFi savings accounts offer, and try and just attack those from first principles. As opposed to overly explaining what's happening. I think that that's the right approach. **Drew Rogers** (31:58) So it sounds like if users are asking that or feeling that way, there's maybe like an upstream, there may be something broken upstream or something that needs to be fixed from like a trust or user standpoint, it sounds like. **Mario Cabrera** (32:10) Exactly, yeah. **Drew Rogers** (32:11) How are you guys approaching that internally right now? How are you thinking about education going from 1 to 99? What are some of these growth levers that you guys are thinking through? I know you're hiring more people on that side of things. Bring us in a little bit to the growth side of this and what people can expect or what institutions can expect in the next 12 months from the team. **Mario Cabrera** (32:35) So from the institutional side, we last year launched Aave Horizon, which is our real-world asset market. It's built on top of v3, or it's really a clone of the v3 markets on Ethereum mainnet today. And it allows folks to post real-world assets as collateral. and borrow stablecoins. And so this has a number of different use cases today. It allows people to loop their real world assets. It allows folks to access liquidity on real world assets that would otherwise have illiquidity off-chain. And so it's really a glimpse at what the future of real world assets and lending markets looks like. With Aave v4, it is really tailor-built towards the capabilities of real-world assets on lending markets. And so with Aave v4, we also have the hub-and-spoke model, so that will allow for a lot more long-tail assets of real-world assets to also be listed and not impact the overall risk profile What does it mean for people who don't follow Aave yet? What do you mean by that? **Mario Cabrera** (34:11) We have just a really good amount of content that is really understandable and engaging and just really well produced content. We have our main channel, which is we have this smart money series. It takes you through the history of money, starting with ancient civilizations and then with like the gold standard and fiat and then crypto. And it's just really well produced, really short Snippets really well made for Reels or Shorts or TikTok. And then we have these other podcast series that we're launching. It's really tailored not just to crypto people, but really for the same audience that Aave App is targeting, which is everyday people, people who are just interested in money. This is just money. This is just yield. This is just, you know, lending and borrowing. It's no different than what you're doing with major fintech product today. It's the same thing. It's just the back end is different. Backend is powered by blockchains, and that allows you to have all of these benefits of composability, global access, 24-7 access, and the team has been doing a really good job on the social media front. **Drew Rogers** (35:20) It's been, so as we round here, round the corner, eight months into the role, what has been something unexpected that has happened since being in-seat That you didn't really see coming, but you're really grateful for it. Something that you didn't really know you were getting into, but you now look back and you're like, yeah, I'm really grateful that we're going through this, or we're seeing this, or we're building this. It can be a big decision to sell a company or be acquired. Also, a lot of people don't talk about the idea of it's exciting to sell a company, but it's also like it comes with a ton of letting go of a lot. And there's a lot of decision that Probably went into you deciding that that was a good idea and putting yourself in the position of like, I'm not a founder anymore. I still have ownership. I still have the ability to drive this forward. But there comes a lot of open handedness as you enter into a role like this for eight months. So what has that been like maybe compared to what you expected for better or worse? Or how's it been going? **Mario Cabrera** (36:18) Yeah, I would say that being a founder is almost like a mentality, and it's an energy you bring, and it's a drive and a sense of direction and speed. And the entire Stable team has been mirroring that inside of Aave, and I think that's been really awesome. You mentioned what's one thing that was a little unexpected. At Stable, we were fully focused on speed. You have to be, as a startup, Aave is also super, super, super focused on speed, but they have an extreme focus on security as well. You do not become the largest and most successful lending protocol out there by not taking securities seriously. The amount of audits that go into everything we do, not just smart contracts, but backend and frontend, And infrastructure, everything, everything is battled down and has continuous audits going all the time. And I've never seen anything like it. That's been really surprising on the upside, just the emphasis on security. **Drew Rogers** (37:20) Why do you think more internal employees don't have that sort of founder mode direction? It sounds like you guys, the team who's been coming into the fold with Aave, you guys have been able to keep that sense of speed, ownership direction. Why isn't that as common for internal employees or internal leaders? What is unique about that and why don't you see that as much? **Mario Cabrera** (37:41) When you start a company and you have a burn rate. It's all on you. You have a death day and you have to build something or die. So that pressure motivates you and really makes you, you have no choice but to just go 100%. And if you've never been in that position, it's tough to understand why the heat is important. And it's really the pressure of, you know, if I don't make it, if I'm not going to build something that people love, then this thing is going to die and I'm going to have to start all over again. And if you haven't gone through that experience, I think it's tough for people to just naturally follow the same principles that you would have to follow as **Drew Rogers** (38:30) a founder. Is that feeling felt most intensely during the stable journey? When was that like sense, like in your entrepreneurial journey, pre-Aave, like when was that feeling of pressure? When was that felt most? **Mario Cabrera** (38:43) I think we were doing a really big rewrite at Stable of the entire codebase. And we were migrating basically from Swift to be based on React Native. And it was a really tough decision because on the one hand, you had existing users, And you had people who relied on your platform and were begging for more and more features and expanded functionality. And you had to basically make a decision of, I'm going to take the short-term pain of not shipping new features, not going as fast on the iteration front, But solving for this longer-term benefit of having cross-platform system, being able to support both users on iOS and Android, it makes recruiting a lot easier. There's very few iOS engineers that are really good at blockchain. Whereas that's less so the case in React Native. This is mostly a legacy reason because crypto applications were mostly web-based until recently. And so a lot of the talent is based amongst the React engineers. **Drew Rogers** (39:49) What was so hard about that? Just the delay of shipping products? Or were users starting to leave? What was the impact of that? **Mario Cabrera** (39:57) Well, it's a competitive space, and you're only as good as your last product, and you have to make this tough decision where you may sacrifice a little bit of short-term growth for more sustainable long-term growth. And when you have a burn, then that can be stressful. **Drew Rogers** (40:17) I've really loved the idea of like, because when we're building our team right now, and we're looking for people to bring into our business, it's hard to put your finger on it. But you kind of want that everyone needs to have that feeling of ownership over something, a direct relationship to like that feeling of burn or that feeling of like, if this goes well, then I'm personally doing great, or if this doesn't go well, like I'm personally at risk. Having that at an individual employee basis is something that I'm thinking about right now as a leader is like, how can I give all of our team that? Is that something that you've found in the Aave fold is something that you're continuing to realize is actually a way that you guys are measured? And it's cool how you can kind of bring the same, literally bringing Stable into this new thing. You're building that, you're leading that, your success is measured by that. Is that where that comes from? Do you think that's why that continues to be felt? There's a pride in like, hey, we want to see what we've originally built continue to be successful? **Mario Cabrera** (41:16) That's definitely the case for me. I think that just in general, I think being extremely generous with equity and sharing the upside with the rest of the folks in the business is extremely important. You want them to feel the same fire that you feel. You want them to understand The problem that they're solving, the same way that you understand it, you want them to share in the same financial upside or similar financial upside as you will have if the business is successful. And so really unifying everybody towards the same mission with equity is super, super, super powerful. **Drew Rogers** (41:51) Last question, 12 months from now, you are still leading product. V4 is cooking. It's doing great. What would you say is like when you think about what success means to you personally a year from now, what does that look like and how are you trying to measure that with the team? **Mario Cabrera** (42:06) We need to get net new users, whether that is consumers with Aave App, whether that is institutions with everything we're doing on the BD side and everything we're doing with, you can do with custom spokes. DeFi needs a net new source of capital, and we're exploring all of the different areas there. We're on the frontier of acquiring new capital. And 12 months from now, I think Aave App is going to be a huge success. I think we're going to onboard hundreds of thousands of net new consumers. And with all of the BD work we're doing and all the institutional work we're doing with V4, we're going to have billions of dollars in net new capital that otherwise wouldn't find a home anywhere else in DeFi. **Drew Rogers** (42:51) On the Frontier, perfect place to end. Mario, thank you for the time. Really appreciate your time today. This was fun. **Mario Cabrera** (42:57) Thank you. Happy to be here.