Understanding DeFi With Yubo Ruan, Two Times Stanford Dropout & Founder Of $500m Valued Parallel Fi

DeFi has virtually transformed and entered into almost every traditional finance sector that we know of. The idea of decentralizing finance for all stakeholders and giving the power of peer-to-peer finance transactions to everyone is fascinating for the whole world. However, we are in the very early stages of DeFi, and it has not yet reached the broad spectrum of the population that uses numerous centralized financial instruments daily.

Numerous challenges in the current DeFi ecosystem have created friction for its widespread adoption. Yubo Ruan is solving this challenge for the masses with his DeFi venture Parallel Fi, valued at $500m in the recent funding round. He is on a mission of making DeFi accessible for a billion people, and the propositions of Parallel Fi align with making that a reality.

However, to understand what Yubo and Parallel Fi is trying to achieve and the future of DeFi, you need to know how it works.

Uncovering The New Way Of Finance

The traditional world of finance is centralized at multiple levels, with middlemen and gatekeepers regulating and controlling every financial activity. Every end-user who wishes to access any financial service, including loans, mortgages, or trading, must go through a middleman. These middlemen, in the form of lenders, banks, institutions, and others, charge a lot to make even the basic facilities available to the end user.

DeFi changes it completely! DeFi empowers the end-user by giving him/her access to all financial instruments without middlemen. DeFi uses cryptocurrency and blockchain technology to power financial transactions. With proper implementation and technology, DeFi has the power to democratize all financial services sectors. This is precisely what Yubo Ruan is doing with Parallel Fi.

Who Is Yubo Ruan?

Yubo Ruan, at just 25 years of age, has done wonders in his entrepreneurial journey. He has been opening businesses since he was in School. He founded Alisimba Technologies during high school, which was later acquired in 2016.

Yubo won thirteen awards and bagged 5 patents for all his ventures and achievements during high school. All this experience helped him explore disruptive technologies with his 1st VC fund, Skylight Investment.

This was just the start, and in 2017, Yubo launched Eight Decimal Capital, his second VC fund. He used his prior experience in the crypto world (of his high school and early college days) to win big with crypto investments in Eight Decimal Capital (valued at $60 million).

Among many of his successful investments were his Six-figure investment in SOL  when it was valued around 30-33 cents, followed by another $1 million investment in Polkadot (DOT) when it was trading below $1. Not just these, but he also invested in Chainlink, chia, 0X, and Securitize.

Yubo has been the recipient of numerous awards, including being mentioned on the AACYF 30 under 30.

How Is Parallel Fi Making DeFi Mainstream?

Parallel Fi is backed by Sequoia Capital and has grown to a valuation of $500 Million after the recent investment round funded by Section32 capital. It already has 100,000 global users that use its wide range of services, including swaps, staking, crowd loans, wallet, or minting stablecoins, and others.

Parallel Fi has received funding and backing from numerous prominent VC funds. These include Sequoia Capital, Polychain Capital, billionaire Peter Thiel's Founders Fund, Lightspeed Ventures, Pantera Capital, and others.

In the current scenario, users would ideally have to go on 10 different websites and cannot perform all types of financial transactions in one place. The platform is currently built on the Polkadot ecosystem, and Yubo is working on developing it on the Ethereum ecosystem. The platform's use cases have helped it lock $280M in total value locked (TVL), as seen on DefiLlama. DefiLlama is the largest TVL aggregator for DeFi and one of the most reliable sources of data.

Challenges In The DeFi World & How Parallel Fi Is Solving Them

The current world of DeFi is full of scams of different kinds. Parallel Fi is solving this problem by becoming one of the safest options for using different financial services. Yubo is also working on creating a permissioned app store which would further increase the penetration and acceptance of DeFi among the broader sections of society.

The Future Ahead

The Parallel Fi team is working on making the platform even easier to use, efficient, and compliant with all regulatory bodies. The coming months and years will unfold the opportunities and changes DeFi will bring to society.