Mikko Ohtamaa is the founder of Trading Strategy and one of the first people who audited Ethereum smart contracts. He started working with Bitcoin all the way back in 2013, and after seeing FTX collapse and trading bots ripping people off, he decided to build something better.
What started as a search for reliable tools has turned into a mission to make advanced DeFi strategies work for everyday users, not just big players.
We asked Mikko how Trading Strategy got started, what kind of problems they’ve had to solve, and how they’re using infrastructure like dRPC to make it all work.
AMA with Mikko Ohtamaa
Can you tell us who you are, what your background is, and what led you to build in Web3?
I got involved with Bitcoin development in 2013, and very early in Ethereum smart contract development, being one of the first smart contract auditors. Back in the day, I studied industrial engineering and management. Before starting to build in Web3, I worked with traditional finance. I saw how inefficient and a bad deal for the users traditional banking is. The early Bitcoin movement overlapped with Occupy Wall Street: I see Web3 as our best opportunity to empower and democratise investments.
What motivated you to build your dApp, and which user group benefits the most from it?
Trading Strategy co-founders are hobbyist algorithmic traders. We used most trading bots and copy trading services in cryptocurrency. Most of these are rip-offs, with borderline scammy offerings. Furthermore, centralised exchanges have been untrustworthy repeatedly, FTX being the final nail in the coffin. When the summer of DeFi 2020 happened, we were inspired by the concept of investment vaults, and how we can leverage public blockchains for transparency, scale and investor protection.
How has your product evolved since you started building it, and which milestones you are most proud of?
DeFi has gotten much better during the last two years. Standardisation of DeFi vault, with ERC-4626 standard, has made it much more interesting to do trading strategies that trade across different protocols and trade types. Today, in DeFi, you can compose directional spot markets on Uniswap, perps on GMX, lending on Aave and market making on Curve, all in the same strategy. Allocating capital between these protocols can happen in the same transaction, and there is no room for idle cash and missed yield.
What infrastructure or technical bottlenecks have you had to overcome while building?
We are running on ten different EVM chains today. The Ethereum JSON-RPC interface, which everyone uses to interact with the blockchain, is a poorly designed standard. No one is improving this, and the developer experience has been stuck the same since 2014. A lot of our technical challenges have been just building workarounds of workarounds for issues caused by the poor quality of JSON-RPC.
How are you currently using dRPC, and what impact has it had on your operations or business outcomes?
We are making billions of RPC requests monthly to collect the vast historical datasets needed for trading strategy development and backtesting. We process this data, then make it publicly available for download for quants and strategy developers in friendly OHLCV and related formats they are familiar with. With the flexible dRPC subscription plan, we do not need to pay ridiculous charges that some other providers would charge us to do the same number of JSON-RPC requests. We can be very relaxed about what kind of data we scan, and how fast, and we do not need to worry about running out of quotas or hitting API rate limit issues.
