Hello there!
4 years. That's how long Simon Harman spent building Chainflip while others got rich minting JPEGs.
When the crypto markets were in a frenzy and "absolute dog shit was creating multi-millionaires overnight," Simon and his team were wrestling with a fundamental problem—how to make 150 nodes talk to each other securely. No fancy NFT drops. No meme coins. Just the unglamorous work of building infrastructure.
Why? Because Bitcoin's $1 trillion market cap is effectively locked away from DeFi. Sure, you can wrap it, but that triggers taxable events and introduces counter-party risks. The alternative? Use centralised exchanges, complete KYC, wait for deposits to clear, and pay hefty fees.
Chainflip offers a different path: native cross-chain swaps without wrapping, without accounts, without KYC. Want to swap BTC directly to SOL? 20-30 basis points of slippage, all-inclusive. The secret sauce? A validator network running giant multi-sigs across chains, plus an internal blockchain that optimises execution by eliminating MEV, entirely.
"The limitations of Bitcoin are so severe," Simon argues with characteristic bluntness, dismissing the recent wave of Bitcoin L2s and DeFi solutions. "All you're doing is creating a brand new chain that has absolutely nothing to do with Bitcoin whatsoever."
It's this kind of unvarnished technical honesty that sets the conversation apart. No grandiose promises about revolutionising finance. No marketing fluff about "democratising access." Just a clear-eyed analysis of the problems and trade-offs involved in building cross-chain infrastructure.
The markets are finally noticing. In two weeks, Chainflip's daily volume jumped from $2 million to $18 million. The project that weathered the NFT mania by focusing on fundamentals is finding its moment as the industry matures.
This wide-ranging conversation covers everything from the mechanics of cross-chain swaps to the psychology of crypto markets, with detours into the politics of Bitcoin development and the true meaning of marketing in Web3.
Waiting for a $100 million daily volume on Chainflip,
Saurabh Deshpande
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