In 2020, decentralized exchange Uniswap airdropped every user that ever interacted with its smart contract with 400 UNI, their newly launch governance token. This was at the peak of a period in the crypto space commonly known as the “DeFi Summer”, the expansion in adoption of a sector that offers users a real use case to become financially independent. A few months after that, the price of Bitcoin and other tokens in the crypto market entered uncharted territory. Many attributed the rally to the fresh affluence of users jumping into DeFi. We sat down with Pavel Shkitin, CEO of crypto exchange Nominex to discuss the rise of decentralized finances, their integration with exchanges, and their potential futures. This is what he told us. Q: Can you tell us a little bit about your background, and about Nominex? Why did you decide to build it and particularly, why offer DeFi products to your users? A: I am a backend developer by profession. For several years, in large companies, I have been developing various corporate systems in Java. In parallel with this, while studying at the university, with a group of like-minded people, we were trying to create our own IT projects in various fields, which were unsuccessful for many reasons. The first development stage of a crypto exchange began at a time when MtGox still existed but we have not even released it yet. As a result, we returned to this idea only in 2017, when the penultimate wave ...
