Web3 Leader Spotlight: Barney Chambers
This week, we caught up with Barney Chambers, the creator of Umbria Network, the cross-chain bridge protocol which he and his brother scaled to over $100m TVL & 250,000+ transactions.
Are there any specific areas within DeFi that you believe are currently underdeveloped or have untapped potential?
Fully decentralised scaling solutions are still few and far between, and no one has yet cracked the problem of creating a trustless scaling solution that has high tps, is decentralised and offers cheap interoperability with other blockchains. Polygon is a good example of a great scaling solution that is still semi decentralised. Arbitrum also have plans to reach full decentralisation soon but still implement a centralised sequencer solution.
What’s your take on the issue of user experience in DeFi, which is often criticised for being complex and inaccessible to non-technical users?
We are still in an early era of blockchain in terms of the space’s technical maturity. There is a lot of inefficiencies in the market yet to be ironed out. UX is always the last thing to mature in a new technical landscape, and so I don’t see the blockchain space being accessible to the masses for quite some time!
How can DeFi protocols incorporate real-world assets, such as traditional financial instruments or physical assets, into their platforms?
Tokenising assets is a difficult task from a regulatory perspective, as there are strict laws around the creation of securitised assets. I’m excited to see some of the new EIP standards that will standardise the implementation of exciting new financial instruments like on-chain bonds, futures, commodities and the like.
How do you see the relationship between DeFi and traditional banking systems evolving in the future?
DeFi is in many ways the antithesis of traditional banking, for better or for worse. We have already seen traditional banking organisations make a pivotal shift on the speed of which you can send money between bank accounts, and this is largely in part to the pressure of competition between traditional finance and cryptocurrency.
I believe that as we move into the future, traditional banking systems will slowly adopt some of the technology of blockchain and DeFi, whilst DeFi will simultaneously adopt more regulation that is in line with traditional finance.
