Episode 2: Around the Block with Juliun Brabon. DAO’s and DeFi.
03/02/2022
Greetings and welcome to the recap of episode 2 of Around the Block with host Dave Uhryniak, Director of Blockchain Strategy at TRON, and our guest Juliun Brabon, CEO and Co-founder of Unifi Protocol.
Juliun has a background as an executive in the pharmaceutical space, specializing in process development and efficiency. In 2018, he co-founded Sesameseed as a transparent and open community, attracting a team of volunteers who brought a series of groundbreaking products to market. Under the leadership of Juliun, Sesameseed developed Unifi Protocol in 2020, now an established company with over 15 full-time team members and growing.
In this episode streamed live on March 2, 2022, the topic of this discussion is the future of DAO’s and DeFi for TRON. Dave kicked off the conversation, asking Juliun why he chose to be an early adopter of TRON back in 2018 and his overall experience. Juliun explained how it all started with a Reddit post.
It was a concept of how people should join together as a community of volunteers, vote themselves through as a representative on TRON, and provide back to the general community to continue supporting growth. The all-volunteer team began on TRON and started to take the node rewards and deliver them to developers. As the team grew, it expanded to different blockchains, building more complex solutions, and was the only bridge solution on TRON at the time.
“It became this group of like-minded people trying to resolve some of the issues we saw with this new staking system becoming more popular,” Julian said. “That attracted a lot of developers, community members, a lot of criticism, and a lot of positive feedback.”
Juliun also explained what it means to freeze your TRON to use for bandwidth, energy, or you can stake it. When you stake your TRON, you earn more TRON. When you freeze your TRON, you gain bandwidth or energy, and it comes into your account naturally.
They also discussed how developers want to build where there is demand. Juliun said it’s good to recognize where the community is and that feedback and conversation. Developers are listening, and they’re building solutions to the problems the community is facing.
Dave also asked Juliun about what he’s doing at Unifi Protocol and how he sees the staking business moving. Juliun’s company is now on 11 blockchains today, and they operate as a validator on many of those blockchains.
As DeFi took off, staking became less attractive when it came to staking, but he said we’re seeing a shift back now. Juliun said staking is becoming more popular again because there is more education about it.
As the conversation came to an end, Juliun reflected on his time working with TRON for the last four years.
“When I look at TRON itself as a blockchain solution, I see a couple of things that were super interesting for the time and have yet to come to show their true value,” said Juliun.
Taking a look at TRON’s ecosystem, he explained there are many opportunities to take advantage of by a smart developer creating compelling solutions.
Since the release of the talk, Unifi has released a major product to its ecosystem, uBridge. uBridge allows users to move UNFI to new blockchains without wrapped tokens. This is expected to launch on Tron and BTTC in the very near future.
Thank you for reading this short recap of another great episode of Around the Block. We look forward to bringing you another episode soon with our team, engaging experts, and conversations.