This is a segment from the Empire newsletter. To read full editions, subscribe . A bank, but make it DeFi. Ether.fi is launching the first DeFi bank, a decentralized and non-custodial alternative to traditional banks. Basically, the project is expanding into a new category, “which is not a traditional bank, in the sense that it doesn’t take users’ deposits, but it really is a viable alternative to banks,” CEO Mike Silagadze told me. “Our plan from the beginning was to build this larger platform that really became a bank alternative for users,” Silagadze noted. “I think over the next year…you [will] actually see…half a dozen companies launch something that starts looking a lot like this, where it’s basically like a Revolut or a neobank…but built on DeFi crypto rails.” As anyone who regularly uses DeFi knows, “there’s this…awful dance you have to go through, basically, where you put some stuff onchain, you do stuff there, hopefully you’re in some rewards or yields.” Then, Silagadze continued, “you have to get the money offchain,” so you go to an exchange and sell your crypto for fiat, and the fiat has to go somewhere… and yeah, you get the idea. It’s not an easy process. Ether.fi’s goal is to onboard crypto natives that already use its other products, then work to onboard the less-crypto-native folks who use centralized exchanges or are perhaps crypto-curious. Over the past year, the project has found success in its product launches and currently offers both Ether.fi Stake and Ether.fi Liquid. “Even for myself, I probably do 70 to 80% of my finances now on Ether.fi and…hopefully soon, adding a few features, I’ll really be able to move close to 100%, which is what we want to offer to people. So that’s kind of…the culmination of this vision we had from the early days,” Silagadze told me. But it’s also expanding to the US, with Silagadze noting that the country is “open for business for crypto companies” nowadays. “Specifically, the staking product is opening up, and then the cash product is going to be available for most states in the US. The reason for that is twofold. One is obviously the new SEC. They disbanded the unit that was going after crypto and prosecuting people for all kinds of silly reasons, and now they’re working on the stablecoin bill,” he explained. And the other reason is that the “licensing that we were able to get allows us to operate in the US.” But this new move is something Silagadze and Ether.fi couldn’t have done six months ago. They were looking to launch new products, but he had thought the US was out of the question. Oh, how times have changed. Right now, Ether.fi has roughly 200,000 users. That said, Silagadze noted it’s hard to keep track because folks have different wallets, but they’ll be able to pin down more accurate numbers as folks make accounts for the DeFi bank. “Our internal goal is to get to about 100,000 cards by the end of this year. If we could get to that, we would feel pretty good about it,” he said. I asked Silagadze if the expansion would require any further funding (the firm last raised in February of last year ), but Silagadze told me they haven’t “touched the money.” “We’ve been profitable since almost day one. So in 2024, we did about $22 million in revenue, and we were profitable this year. It depends on a lot of factors, but we’ll probably do…$40 [million] to $90 million in revenue, and very likely [be] comfortably profitable,” he explained. Get the news in your inbox. Explore Blockworks newsletters: Blockworks Daily : Unpacking crypto and the markets. Empire : Crypto news and analysis to start your day. Forward Guidance : The intersection of crypto, macro and policy. 0xResearch : Alpha directly in your inbox. Lightspeed : All things Solana. The Drop : Apps, games, memes and more. Supply Shock : Bitcoin, bitcoin, bitcoin.
