nick pai.jpeg

Left my job as a corporate bond trader at Barclays in 2017 to become the first engineer at Carbon-12 Labs. We tried to develop an algorithmic stablecoin (like Basis) but ended up going for the fiat-backed market for Get-to-Market reasons. I developed the smart contracts (on Ethereum, EOS, Hashgraph, BSC, and Tron) for those tokens. To support liquidity for our token we also built a cross chain market making infrastructure. At the end of 2019 when it was clear we didn’t have enough traction, and that there were other very interesting projects in the space, I joined UMA because the founders (Hart and Allison) seemed like trustworthy people with genuinely big dreams to change the world, I wanted to double down on Ethereum, and the smart contract architecture looked like a really hard problem.

At UMA I build mainly smart contracts and supporting infrastructure. I very much believe in UMA because it has the potential to be a low level protocol on top of which other smart contracts can be dependent upon. This harkens back a bit to Joel Monegros “fat protocol thesis”, where value should accrue to the lower layers of the stack.

I’ve been a power Defi user since mid 2020 when Compound started taking off (and kicked off the DeFi summer). My general philosophy is barbell approached where I try to accumulate as much ETH as possible at what I deem to be not-overbought levels. I also hold a healthy amount of stablecoins to yield farm, buy ETH dips, pay bills, and generally sleep comfortably. I treat my non-ETH, non-stablecoin holdings as venture bets, where I’ll make relatively small bets on early defi + metaverse protocols led by strong trustworthy teams who have well documented, smartly architected code. I don’t weight ideas or product nearly as much as the trustworthiness of founding teams. These protocols (like UMA!) have plans and rails to be eventually decentralized, but need to be centralized at the outset to hit exit velocity. So I take a lot of time to determine whether founders have the charisma to evangelize passionate communities, the long-term oriented mindset to not reward early adopters, the nimbleness and flexibility of mind to navigate inevitable obstacles, and the morality and motivational capability to attract top talent.

Finally, as a programmer myself, I check out teams' open source code and make sure it is well commented and organized. Organized code is a reflection of organized minds. I don’t like investing in disorganized people without a plan.