I am the other co-owner of Cake DeFi. Cake DeFi is not any more of Julian's company than it is mine. Julian and I each own an equal share of Cake DeFi (50/50). He's the CEO, and I'm the CTO. We run the company together, and we make all key decisions together. I run the product and engineering team at Cake DeFi, which consists of more than 2/3 of our entire staff strength (50 and growing).
Cake DeFi came about from an initial conversion with Julian that I initiated in 2019. The original idea was to become the most transparent staking service where all nodes are fully disclosed, and rewards are paid in real-time. While node rewards are no longer paid in real-time because of the database thrashing that it causes with our rapidly growing userbase, the transparency part is still very true.
I have been in blockchain engineering since 2010, ran my own blockchain tech consultancy (Zynesis) and have been involved in various projects, most notably, and quite recent ones are that I co-founded and architected the world's first CBDC for The Central Bank of The Bahamas. I have since left the company to focus 100% of my time on Cake DeFi and DeFiChain, where I play the role of Chief Researcher. I was also the first Smart Nation Fellow of Singapore contributing to a blockchain project for open governance. https://www.tech.gov.sg/careers/smart-nation-fellowship-programme/#uzyn-chua
You've done oustanding research yourself on Cake DeFi, the returns are indeed high. None of that are paid out from our funds, except the sign-up bonus (from our marketing budget). In fact we charge a fee to our users to use Cake – around 15% fee for most services in exchange for the convenience that we provide for cashflow generation through DeFi. All of the rewards are yield from DeFi services themselves, hence the name "DeFi" on our name. You are also correct that Cake DeFi is not DeFi. It is a centralized custodian service, providing easy and transparent access to DeFi.
DeFiChain, on the other hand, is doing something different in the world of DeFi. We are taking the hard path to providing a more secure and more "basic" (down-to-earth) platform where DeFi does not run on virtual machine layer but directly on the consensus layer itself. More info: https://blog.defichain.com/use-native-defi/ I do feel jealous occasionally looking at other DeFi projects out there with easy access to toolchains that EVM-based blockchains enjoyed and have built for many years, such as MetaMask, while we have to build everything from scratch. Things have started to show its worth now and projects and integrations are starting to form now. A web3-like SDK is well under way and it's super clean (check out DeFiChain Jellyfish). Also, today we have just put out the largest upgrade for our blockchain node to date - v1.7.0-rc.2 (see release note https://github.com/DeFiCh/ain/releases/tag/v1.7.0-rc.2) that brings forward a lot more NativeDeFi features, especially cross-chain exchange allowing fully trustless, intermediary-free and notary-free atomic swap with BTC on Bitcoin blockchain.
We are very new, and we are growing super fast, especially in Asia. We are based in Singapore, where 50% of our team members are located, including Julian and me. I notice that you are an engineer. Coincidentally I am one myself. I'm happy to have a conversation with you if you would like to learn more. You can reach me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/uzyn or LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/uzynchua/ and we can set up a video call if you like.
Thanks, Adam, for your blog and for sharing your research on Cake DeFi and DeFiChain. Again, happy to chat, engineer to engineer. Let's connect.
