1/🎧I'm calling this episode: From REN Protocol to Garden Finance: Susruth on Fixing Fragmentation in DeFi. I enjoyed this conversation with @nsusruth from @garden_finance because he taught me something very important about customer personas: Focus on meeting the needs of 1 customer. Do it really well. Please let us know your thoughts in the comments. Like, Follow, and RT's are appreciated. Enjoy. Summary Susruth, CEO of Garden Finance, shares how his background in cybersecurity and early work in DeFi led him to launch a cross-chain liquidity protocol focused on user custody and seamless UX. He explains how Garden leverages atomic swaps and HTLCs to enable trustless trading across blockchains, with a special focus on Bitcoin. Susruth emphasizes the need to simplify user workflows, listen to community feedback, and target specific user profiles to drive product-market fit and sustainable growth. The conversation also dives into the competitive DeFi landscape, Garden’s philosophy of building fundamental rails, and plans to expand across chains. Takeaways – Susruth’s crypto journey started with a cybersecurity interest and early exposure to Ethereum and DeFi – He worked on foundational DeFi projects like Republic Protocol and REN before founding Garden – Garden Finance focuses on solving cross-chain liquidity fragmentation while preserving user custody – Atomic swaps and HTLCs are key primitives for enabling trustless trades, especially with Bitcoin – The Garden philosophy draws from global financial systems, emphasizing interoperability – A great user experience and safe, simple workflows are core to the product vision – Differentiation in the crowded DeFi space comes from targeting niche users and building defensible rails – Community feedback is crucial to iterating the product and identifying the “one ideal user” – Sustained volume growth depends on strong customer engagement and retention – Garden aims to expand to multiple chains and become a core infrastructure layer in DeFi Timeline (00:00) Intro to Susruth and Garden Finance (03:09) How cybersecurity led him into crypto (06:10) Early work in DeFi with REN and Republic Protocol (09:02) Founding Garden to address cross-chain fragmentation (12:07) Global finance as inspiration for Garden’s design (15:00) Designing a better DeFi user experience (18:01) Bridging Bitcoin and other assets trustlessly (22:40) Improving HTLCs for UX and security (24:02) Competing in a crowded DeFi ecosystem (25:40) Building safe and simple infrastructure (27:32) Finding product-market fit through niche audiences (31:04) Engaging users to grow volume (33:53) Defining the ideal user to guide development (37:05) Using community input to shape the roadmap (39:58) Long-term vision: expansion and ecosystem growth ---------- Episode is brought to you by @infinex. Experience crypto designed for humans:

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