Searching for Mana with Lloyd Wahed
May 6, 2025 · 1 hr 13 min · 13 segments
In this episode of Searching for Mana, host Lloyd Wahed sits down with Stani Kulechov, the founder and CEO of Avara, to delve into the transformative impact of decentralised finance. Stani discusses…
Stani KulechovGuest
Lloyd WahedHost
So I built entrant applications all my teen life and early 20s and Early 20s, I actually started to build more FinTech applications when there was this really exciting kind of a boom on crowdfunding, peer-to-peer lending, and just around marketplace economy.
And I was very excited about the idea of, you know, we have so many financial transactions that are happening on paper.
So obviously, to me, it makes sense that if you could just make this work in digital, we get efficiencies and network effects.
And at the point that I was going for my university degree, I didn't go for computer science because I already knew quite a lot about the technologies I was using.
PHP, Ruby on Rails, which was a big kind of like a meme back then to build on.
And I wanted to study a bit more on the regulation and understand compliance.
end of my studies when I stumbled upon or in theory I figured that this is quite interesting because you can have this computer running on the internet and it's technically like it's in theory it's unstoppable so you can build your applications on this operating system and they will be always there in the form that you created.
And that to me was really powerful because that means that you can build something that is very resilient and can't be just turn off and when i was building fintech applications one of the challenges i had is that you had to rely on five to eight different partners uh different vendors um identity verification or some other tooling and you know if something breaks in their apis you have to go to that team and and you have to also ask a permission to to use their endpoints where in the ethereum world you didn't really have this so you could just go and interact with the already smart contracts that are built like let's say Chainlink that provides data of different price sources you can build your product around that and many products even built today on top of Aave and at that date 2016-17 there wasn't a concept of decentralized finance it was just interesting applications.
You put some amount of ETH, let's say, want to ETH, and this is when ETH was very low, for example.
So I built entrant applications all my teen life and early 20s and Early 20s, I actually started to build more FinTech applications when there was this really exciting kind of a boom on crowdfunding, peer-to-peer lending, and just around marketplace economy.
And I was very excited about the idea of, you know, we have so many financial transactions that are happening on paper.
So obviously, to me, it makes sense that if you could just make this work in digital, we get efficiencies and network effects.
And at the point that I was going for my university degree, I didn't go for computer science because I already knew quite a lot about the technologies I was using.
PHP, Ruby on Rails, which was a big kind of like a meme back then to build on.
And I wanted to study a bit more on the regulation and understand compliance.
end of my studies when I stumbled upon or in theory I figured that this is quite interesting because you can have this computer running on the internet and it's technically like it's in theory it's unstoppable so you can build your applications on this operating system and they will be always there in the form that you created.
And that to me was really powerful because that means that you can build something that is very resilient and can't be just turn off and when i was building fintech applications one of the challenges i had is that you had to rely on five to eight different partners uh different vendors um identity verification or some other tooling and you know if something breaks in their apis you have to go to that team and and you have to also ask a permission to to use their endpoints where in the ethereum world you didn't really have this so you could just go and interact with the already smart contracts that are built like let's say Chainlink that provides data of different price sources you can build your product around that and many products even built today on top of Aave and at that date 2016-17 there wasn't a concept of decentralized finance it was just interesting applications.
You put some amount of ETH, let's say, want to ETH, and this is when ETH was very low, for example.
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