Product Keynote: Glider (Brian Huang)

The frustrating days of manually connecting wallets, hunting for gas tokens, and clicking through endless transaction screens may finally be numbered. At Breakpoint 2024, Glider co-founder Brian Huang announced the launch of their automated portfolio management platform on Solana, promising to revolutionize how users interact with decentralized finance.

Summary

Brian Huang took the stage to address a problem every crypto user knows intimately: the painful complexity of on-chain investing. From the tedious 10+ step wallet onboarding process to the dreaded transaction confirmation screens that most users blindly click through, Huang painted a picture of a Web3 experience that has failed to match the convenience of modern technology.

Glider, backed by heavyweight investors including A16Z, Coinbase, and Uniswap, positions itself as the solution to this fragmented user experience. The platform automates portfolio rebalancing, yield source optimization, liquidation protection, and price-triggered trades—all without requiring users to manage gas, sign transactions, or bridge between chains. The company has built what they call a "chain-agnostic" system that handles the complexities of DeFi behind the scenes.

The startup has already proven its concept on EVM chains, with over 50,000 active users and 30,000 portfolios on Base and Plume over just two months. With the Solana launch, Glider becomes one of the few applications to seamlessly unite both EVM and SVM ecosystems, allowing users to manage assets across multiple blockchain architectures from a single interface.

Huang drew a compelling analogy to autonomous vehicles: while the rest of the world has self-driving cars that safely transport passengers without human intervention, crypto users are still stuck in the "MapQuest era," manually plotting every step of their financial journey. Glider aims to be the Waymo of DeFi—taking users from point A to point B without requiring them to understand the route.

Key Points

The Broken State of Web3 User Experience

Huang's presentation began with a reality check that resonated with the audience: not a single person raised their hand when asked if they enjoy the current process of manually transacting on-chain. The speaker highlighted that even with modern improvements, wallet onboarding remains a minimum 10-step process across all providers. Users must navigate seed phrase management, funding, gas acquisition, app discovery, protocol learning, deposits, and portfolio tracking—a gauntlet that effectively bars mainstream adoption.

Beyond onboarding, the ongoing friction of daily DeFi usage compounds the problem. Users frequently encounter situations where they've bridged to a new chain but lack native gas, or discover an attractive protocol only to find it requires bridging from another network. The transaction confirmation screen, originally designed to provide security assurances, has become an obstacle that most users simply scroll past and approve without reading.

Glider's Vision: Declarative, Automated Investing

Glider's approach represents a fundamental shift from imperative to declarative interaction with DeFi. Instead of users specifying each action step-by-step (swap here, bridge there, deposit into this protocol), users simply declare their desired outcome, and Glider's system determines the optimal execution path. This model eliminates gas management, transaction signing, and bridging decisions from the user experience entirely—while maintaining full non-custodial control of assets.

The platform supports a range of automated strategies including portfolio rebalancing, yield source migration, liquidation protection, and price-triggered actions. Huang even mentioned the ability to execute trades based on social signals, such as buying when someone tweets about a token. This orchestration layer handles complex multi-step operations that would otherwise require 20 or more manual actions across multiple chains and wallets.

Technical Foundation: Account Abstraction with SWIG

Building a chain-agnostic, gas-free system required solving significant technical challenges. Glider leveraged SWIG, another A16Z portfolio company, to implement account abstraction on Solana. This technology enables users to interact with the blockchain without directly managing gas fees or signing each transaction individually, while still maintaining cryptographic control over their assets.

The technical achievement allows Glider to offer consistent user experience across fundamentally different blockchain architectures. Whether assets reside on Base, Plume, or Solana, users interact with a unified interface that abstracts away the underlying complexity. This represents a meaningful step toward the interoperability that the broader crypto ecosystem has long sought.

Market Validation and Growth Metrics

Glider's two-month track record on EVM chains provides concrete evidence of product-market fit. The platform has attracted over 50,000 active users who have created approximately 30,000 portfolios containing real value. Perhaps more importantly, users have developed habitual engagement patterns, returning daily to check their portfolios in the same way traditional investors monitor stock holdings.

The company's stated mission focuses explicitly on growing user wealth—positioning themselves not as another DeFi primitive but as a comprehensive investing service. By emphasizing safety and reliability comparable to traditional financial services, Glider targets users who may have been deterred by DeFi's reputation for complexity and risk.

Solana Launch and Chain-Agnostic Future

The Solana launch represents a significant expansion of Glider's addressable market and technical capabilities. By combining EVM and SVM support, the platform can now orchestrate value flows across two of the most active smart contract ecosystems. Users can create portfolios containing Solana-based assets alongside Ethereum-compatible tokens, with Glider handling cross-chain movements automatically.

This chain-agnostic approach addresses one of DeFi's most persistent user experience problems: the fragmentation of liquidity and opportunity across isolated blockchain networks. Rather than forcing users to choose ecosystems or manually manage multiple wallets, Glider provides a unified layer for portfolio management regardless of where assets or opportunities reside.

Facts + Figures

• Glider is backed by A16Z, Coinbase, Uniswap, and other notable investors
• The platform has been live on EVM (Base and Plume) for approximately two months
• Over 50,000 active users have joined the platform during this period
• Users have created approximately 30,000 portfolios holding real value on the platform
• Current wallet onboarding across all providers requires at least 10 steps
• Glider eliminates the need for gas management, transaction signing, and manual bridging
• The platform remains fully non-custodial despite automation features
• Account abstraction for Solana was built using technology from SWIG
• Glider is now live at glider.fi for Solana-based assets
• The platform has become one of the few apps combining both EVM and SVM in a truly chain-agnostic manner

Top Quotes

• "How many of you enjoy the process of opening up your wallet, connecting to an app, and manually transacting every single day throughout every day? Literally nobody here."

• "We live in a society today where we have cars that can take us from point A to point B without any human in the loop. Why don't we have this in crypto?"

• "While we're in MapQuest era in crypto, the rest of the world is in the Waymo era."

• "What if your wallet could actually rebalance for you, move between yield sources, interact and save you from liquidation in the middle of the night? How many people could this have saved during the Terra Luna crash?"

• "Every Web3 application you see these days is a really poor copy of something that you can do in Web2. We're not taking full advantage of the potential that you have with on-chain assets."

• "No gas, no signing, no bridging, and fully non-custodial. You no longer have to stare at a screen 24/7."

• "With Glider, we take you from point A to point B without you having to worry about how to get there."

• "Our number one goal with Glider is to grow the wealth of our users."

Questions Answered

What is Glider and what problem does it solve?

Glider is an automated portfolio management platform for decentralized finance that eliminates the manual complexity of on-chain investing. The platform allows users to create and manage portfolios across multiple blockchain networks without dealing with gas fees, transaction signing, bridging, or the technical intricacies of individual protocols. Instead of executing each step manually—which can require 20 or more clicks and native tokens on multiple chains—users simply specify their desired portfolio allocation or strategy, and Glider handles all execution automatically while maintaining non-custodial security.

How does Glider work without requiring gas or transaction signing?

Glider utilizes account abstraction technology, specifically leveraging SWIG's implementation for Solana, to abstract away the technical requirements of blockchain interaction. Account abstraction allows the platform to execute transactions on behalf of users without requiring them to hold native gas tokens or manually sign each operation. This creates a seamless experience where users interact with a simple interface while sophisticated infrastructure handles blockchain complexity behind the scenes. Importantly, this automation doesn't compromise security—users maintain cryptographic control of their assets throughout.

What chains does Glider support?

Glider currently supports both EVM-compatible chains (specifically Base and Plume) and Solana's SVM architecture. This makes it one of the few platforms to offer truly chain-agnostic portfolio management across these fundamentally different blockchain ecosystems. Users can create portfolios containing assets from any supported chain, and Glider will handle the cross-chain orchestration required to execute trades, rebalancing, or other strategies. The team built this capability specifically to address the fragmentation problem in DeFi, where opportunities and liquidity are spread across isolated networks.

What automated features does Glider offer?

Glider supports a comprehensive range of automated investing features including portfolio rebalancing, yield source migration, liquidation protection, and price-triggered actions. Users can set up strategies that automatically move assets between protocols to optimize yield, protect leveraged positions from liquidation during market volatility, or execute trades when assets hit certain price levels. The platform even supports more creative triggers like executing trades based on social media activity. All of these features operate continuously without requiring users to monitor markets around the clock.

Who has invested in Glider?

Glider has secured backing from major institutional investors including A16Z (Andreessen Horowitz), Coinbase, and Uniswap. The involvement of these prominent crypto-native firms signals strong confidence in both the team and the market opportunity. A16Z's investment is particularly notable given their track record of backing successful infrastructure projects, while Coinbase and Uniswap bring deep expertise in exchange and DeFi operations respectively.

How many users does Glider have?

In just two months since launching on EVM chains (Base and Plume), Glider has attracted over 50,000 active users who have created approximately 30,000 portfolios containing real value. The company reports that users have developed habitual engagement patterns, returning daily to check their portfolios similar to how traditional investors monitor their stock holdings. This rapid adoption and strong retention suggests meaningful product-market fit and validates the demand for simplified DeFi portfolio management.

Is Glider custodial or non-custodial?

Glider is fully non-custodial, meaning users maintain complete control over their assets at all times. Despite offering automated features that execute transactions on behalf of users, the platform is designed so that cryptographic ownership never transfers to Glider or any third party. This approach preserves the fundamental value proposition of DeFi—self-sovereignty over financial assets—while still delivering the convenience and automation that mainstream users expect from financial technology.