Jerry Goldfarb

Hello, everyone! Thank you for coming. This is our first AMA with Will Remor from the Real-World Finance CoreUnit here at MakerDAO. We’re having this call today to give them an opportunity to express some of what the Real-World Finance team is up to and give the community a chance to reach out and ask all of their questions and learn a little bit more about the topic.

Without further ado, if you wouldn't mind starting with your background and how you got into Real-World Finance?

William Remor

Thanks for having me and thanks to Jerry and Seth for organizing this call. I'm really excited about being here with everyone. So, I think it’s important to cover how I came to this area and why I think it was relevant and almost like a natural path in my career.

I should get into the specifics, into the Real-World Assets and Real-World Finance team for MakerDAO. So my background story is I originally came from a banking background. Traditional commercial banking, credit risks.

So I got involved in banking doing different kinds of model across New Zealand and Australia. So that's where I'm based, in New Zealand. And then and then after a few years working with data science teams within banking, I moved on to an opportunity to work with a smart contract auditing firm

And that was really exciting because around 2017, 2018, you start actually getting into the low-level Ethereum stuff. And we worked with some interesting projects back then and T-Zero, like ShapeShift and so on, and some of them were already exploring the early stages of securitization.

From there, I spent a couple of years working on engineering stuff with various smart groups of people. Say, okay now I've got like this background in analytics and, and credit risk, and now this low-level Ethereum stuff, what's next?

And I started browsing for teams around the world saying, okay, what team is doing a really interesting project to work with that actually mixes my smart contract experience I've been working on now for a couple of years, and credit risk.

Essentially, back in 2019, when Ashley got in touch with the guys from the Risk team was actually only making the only answer that a Headspace. And, and then as she started engaging with them, you know, Cyrus, and I think Puma's as well, was really involved there, I started to say, “okay, how can I actually work with you guys?”

And they basically said, “Hey, actually, we usually have people that actually come from the career work, risk background or portfolio management background, or on the other side, people that actually come from a smart contracts or developer background, but we have no one then actually can talk both languages. So welcome! Let's start working together.”

And so that's kind of like how I started, I was actually working initially with the Risk team. I think I was the third person, alongside Marco and then, and then there was Cyrus and then I started working with them.

Then we got a few of that in that transition from a single collateral Dai to multi-collateral Dai, and then did a few projects with the team. And then, about 10 months or so back, this dude Sebastian started beating the drums about, Real-World Assets.

I said, “hey! this was really part of the conversations that I had with Cyrus at some point so let's leverage your credit risk and banking background and move into this field.” So now we have a team, let's jump on.

I started shifting between, I think like 30, 30, 40% of my time was dedicated to Real-World Assets and the rest with the crypto-native Risk team. And then that became a thing, and here we are.

Jerry Goldfarb

So speaking of the team, in terms of the composition, how do you guys structure the Real-World Finance team?

William Remor

So originally, originally it was Seb and myself and we were doing a lot of the R&D into the platform and how we can actually use the Maker platform and ecosystem to go into Real-World Finance, Real-World Assets.