Community Conversations: Behind the Scenes with Hugo Renaudin, Co-Founder and CEO of Bender Labs

Hello everyone and welcome to the first installment of our new interview series! As the community manager for TQ Tezos, I am on a journey to interview builders, creatives, and community members from around the Tezos ecosystem. Our first guest is Hugo Renaudin, the Co-Founder and CEO of Bender Labs.

Bender Labs is a technology company building decentralized finance (DeFi) infrastructure on Tezos that is compliant with the standards of traditional capital markets. Their recently released WRAP protocol is the first piece of an open, interoperable and decentralized financial system.

WRAP is a decentralized bridge for transferring ERC-20 and ERC-721 tokens from the Ethereum blockchain into wTokens (“Wrapped Tokens” — FA2 tokens) on the Tezos blockchain. Wrapped Tokens, with their value pegged to the original tokens, can then be seamlessly used throughout the Tezos ecosystem. At the center of WRAP is the WRAP token itself, which is both an ERC20 and an FA2 token. Learn more about the WRAP Protocol by reading its white paper or by visiting the official Bender Labs website.

Check out the interview below!

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Can you tell me a bit about your background before starting Bender Labs and what made you get involved with Tezos?

As early as 2013 I was looking at blockchain as a technology and I was looking into Bitcoin. Around September 2017, you could really feel the excitement and see the community growing. It was a very good time to be in the space and that was when I started my very first company in crypto called LGO.

Founded in 2017, LGO’s goal was to bring transparency to the crypto world by building a provably fair and transparent cryptocurrency exchange for institutions. LGO would go on to be acquired by Voyager Digital in late 2020.

After we were acquired by Voyager Digital, I sat down with my co-founders and core team to discuss plans for the future. We knew two things: we liked DeFi and we liked Tezos. We could feel the same excitement surrounding Tezos that brought us all into the blockchain space in the beginning. We decided to build a DeFi ecosystem on Tezos and the first building block for that was WRAP.

WRAP is the recently launched Ethereum-Tezos bridge made by Bender Labs. It allows users to transfer their ERC20 and ERC721 tokens from Ethereum to the Tezos blockchain as a wrapped asset. WRAP addresses the problem that there are no assets on Tezos to trade with or there are much fewer than Ethereum. We thought [WRAP] was the #1 thing to do to start a healthy DeFi ecosystem on Tezos. WRAP is purely a community project. Everything we do is completely open source and at the end of the day the goal is to give the project over to the community through governance.

What do you like about Tezos in comparison to other blockchains out there?

There’s a ton of things. I think the main one that is important for us is the governance of the protocol. [Tezos] self-amends and upgrades every few months. I think it’s often understated but it’s a huge advantage over other protocols. You know that, as a developer and a company, you are working on steady foundations that can easily adapt. The global blockchain industry moves so fast and if you have technology that cannot adapt then you become antiquated and obsolete. So having these regular, frequent updates of the protocol — I think that’s game changing in the long run. Problems like high gas fees, and other problems down the road… you know are going to be fixed in 3–6 months which is not the case for other blockchains.

I think what I like about Tezos is the fact that Tezos is a real community project. Ethereum has Vitalik, Cardano has Charles Hoskinson… I kind of like the fact that Tezos, with the way it’s done and the way it’s amended, and I think this is the original vision from Arthur, truly belongs to the community of holders. When you work with the tezos community you can see how this is actually decentralization. It’s not just one guy deciding this and that… I think that’s very specific to Tezos and it’s what’s in the original whitepaper.

Okay, so, you mentioned previously that you are trying to construct the DeFi building blocks — establishing the first layer for a DeFi ecosystem and all that with WRAP — so what is the next step for Bender Labs? What do you see in the future?

The idea is to build a decentralized bank using a set of different contracts. The ability to store assets, to invest, to lend, to borrow, to buy — all these different financial primitives that are today done by different DeFi protocols on Ethereum — our goal is to package all that into the Bender ecosystem (to build an AMM, etc.); then all the different protocols will work extremely well together and we can create this real decentralized bank on Tezos. WRAP is the first step. The second step for us is to implement something like Sushiswap, maybe an AMM with strong governance, or something else. We’re still thinking about that internally. However, right now we are just making sure that WRAP works well and the community is satisfied.

There are many blockchains that seek to have some form of on-chain governance. As a developer, how much weight do you place on the fact that Tezos has already established on-chain governance and proven functionality? How important is it to you that you can actually see it working rather than just seeing the idea?

So it’s very important because, like I mentioned, the on-chain governance and the repeatable upgrades have been working so well. That’s one of the main reasons why we are on Tezos. There’s formal verification, security, and all that, but the upgradability is definitely the most important aspect to us.

What would you tell people considering developing on Tezos?

Tezos is a particularly good choice for development because it’s still relatively under the radar when it comes to DeFi, and there’s real usage. Usage is ramping up and the fundamentals are strong. Developers and entrepreneurs can be part of the few people that build on Tezos and they can take advantage of the growth of the blockchain.

I’d also say that they should join the Tezos dev slack because that’s where people building on Tezos are. Just reach out. Six months ago we had to learn everything from the ground up and the community was very supportive. People always find time to talk and explain things to new developers. It’s in everyone’s interest to have new developers and projects coming in so everyone is going to be very helpful. Go on Tezos dev slack, go on Tezos Agora, and 99% of the time your questions will be answered.

If you had a message for the wider Tezos community, what would it be?

Well, first of all, come and use the WRAP protocol.

That’s a fair message! Thank you for your time Hugo!