DeFi Visions: Solange Gueiros

This post offers the main takeaways from a recent interview with Solange Gueiros, developer advocate at Chainlink Labs, filmed as part of 1inch’s DeFi Visions, a series of video interviews featuring the most prominent projects and personalities in DeFi and crypto.

Solange Gueiros joined the crypto space in 2017 when she bought her first bitcoins. “When I realized what is behind bitcoin — which was blockchain — I was totally in love with it because I believed it was changing the world,” she recalls. “We could not live without blockchain anymore.”

According to Solange, she wanted to be part of that world, but her journey into crypto space was not exactly a cakewalk.

“I wanted to mine bitcoin, and it was not really possible at the time,” she says. “So, I tried to use one of the cloud mining services that existed at the time. But cloud mining was a scam, and I lost one bitcoin in my process of learning.”

Fast-forward to the present time, and we are in a bear market, which, Solange says, is not the first one for her since she entered the space back in 2017, and not exactly a bad thing.

“In a bear market, we talk more about projects and less about prices,” she observes. “And I love it because my focus is on building and teaching, and this is the best moment for that.”

“This is also a good moment to clean the space,” she adds.

Moving on to the subject of stablecoins, which became prominent in the wake of the Terra/Luna disaster earlier this year, Solange stresses that that fiasco was bad not just for the project itself but for the entire ecosystem.

“[But] I still believe in algorithmic stablecoins,” she goes on to say. “This was a terrible way to learn. But I know that we have a lot of excellent people in our blockchain space who are working hard on doing this in a better way.”

Meanwhile, speaking about the issue of scalability, Solange says she hopes we are not far from solving it. “We’ve walked more than half of the way [towards solving it],” she explains, adding that many blockchains, including Ethereum, have been recently focused on scalability.

According to Solange, she finds Layer 2 solutions promising, but they may not work equally well for different tasks.

“When we talk about Layer 2, we talk about fewer validators, which makes them less synchronized than the main chain,” she observes. “That is good for some purposes but not for all of them. You need to choose between having something more secure or faster or more scalable.”

Finally, sharing her thoughts on mass adoption of crypto solutions, Solange says she hopes that someday blockchain will be used by people in the same way the internet is used today.

“People will choose systems that involve blockchain because they will trust those systems more,” she concludes.

Watch the full interview with Solange Gueiros on the 1inch Network’s YouTube channel.