Interview with Chris from Ozean

Can you tell us a bit about yourself and your role in the ecosystem?

Hello, I’m Chris, a Product Manager at Ozean. Over the past three years, I have been focused on developing advanced DeFi products, including the Ozean Optimism RWA L2 Rollup, the NFT AMM platform Caviar, and Cross-Chain Liquidity AMMs such as Thorchain and Maya Protocol.

Within the Ozean ecosystem, my responsibilities include product specification, ideation, design, and the execution of key initiatives. These include our LGE/Pre-Deposit campaign, our Grants program, the DeFi Opportunities page, tokenomics, and frontend enhancements—each aimed at optimizing the user experience.

What is your team currently focused on? Are there any recent initiatives you’re particularly excited about?

At present, the Ozean team is focused on the upcoming Mainnet launch, with the flagship product, Port, leading the way. Port is an on-chain vault infrastructure that aims to enhance liquidity, accessibility, and diversification for yield-bearing Real-World Assets (RWAs). In our Vision document, we explain how Ozean is bridging the gap between decentralized finance (DeFi) and traditional finance by integrating RWAs into the blockchain ecosystem. By introducing an ETF-like structure, Port facilitates liquidity and diversification, offering investors a secure portfolio of income-generating assets.

In what ways does Ozean support developers — from funding and infrastructure to education and community?

Grants & Incentives for RWA Projects: Ozean offers grants for projects focused on integrating RWAs into the blockchain ecosystem and dApps who are increasing the utility around RWAs such as Money Markets, Perpetuals, AMMs, and Tokenization. This could include tokenization of physical assets like real estate or commodities, and Ozean helps fund initiatives that bridge the gap between traditional finance and blockchain technology.

Seamless RWA Integration: Developers building applications that deal with Real World Assets can seamlessly integrate their on-chain and off-chain operations via Ozean’s infrastructure. The rollup architecture ensures that RWAs can be tokenized, tracked, and managed in a cost-effective and efficient way.

Collaboration with Optimism Community: Being built on Optimism, Ozean connects developers to a broader community of Layer 2 builders, fostering cross-collaboration and opportunities to integrate into the Optimism ecosystem.

Collaborations for RWA Solutions: Through its strategic partnerships, Ozean allows developers to integrate their RWA-based applications with institutional investors, creating a robust marketplace for digital assets backed by physical-world value.

What’s one thing you’re especially proud of when it comes to how your ecosystem has supported developers recently?

One thing Ozean should be especially proud of is its developer-focused approach to making Real World Asset (RWA) tokenization more accessible and scalable on a Layer 2 network. Recently, Ozean’s efforts to provide developers with not just scalable infrastructure but also hands-on educational resources for tokenizing real-world assets have made a real impact.

This is particularly impressive because the RWA space—where physical-world assets like real estate, commodities, or even debt instruments are brought onto the blockchain—presents unique technical challenges. Ozean has managed to simplify this process for developers by leveraging Optimism’s Layer 2 rollups. The platform’s ability to offer low-fee, high-throughput solutions for building decentralized applications (dApps) in the RWA tokenization space, while simultaneously making it easy for developers to integrate those assets into DeFi protocols, is a huge win.

How do you see the Ozean ecosystem evolving over the next 1–2 years? What about the longer-term vision, over 5–10 years?

In the 1–2 year horizon, Ozean is focusing on perfecting its Layer 2 infrastructure, expanding RWA tokenization, growing its developer base, and pushing for adoption among DeFi projects. Over 5–10 years, the project will evolve into a leading platform for the decentralization of traditional finance, offering a fully integrated ecosystem for trading tokenized assets, creating decentralized financial products, and expanding into a global network of RWA-backed DeFi solutions. This longer-term vision positions Ozean to be a pivotal player in the convergence of traditional and decentralized finance, with global asset tokenization and financial inclusion at its core.

Ozean is currently working with dRPC as an infrastructure partner — how has that collaboration helped your ecosystem so far, and where do you see it going next?

The collaboration between Ozean and dRPC has already delivered significant value in terms of scalability, performance, and developer experience. By providing low-latency, high-throughput RPC infrastructure, dRPC ensures that Ozean can continue to scale its Layer 2 ecosystem and meet the growing demands of the community, particularly in the areas of RWA tokenization and DeFi.

In the future, as Ozean grows, the partnership with dRPC will likely deepen, especially as Ozean seeks to optimize its ecosystem for real-time interactions, cross-chain interoperability, and advanced financial products. The integration of more customized solutions, real-time data analytics, and secure RPC for high-value transactions will ensure that Ozean remains a leading player in the blockchain space, delivering fast, secure, and scalable solutions to its growing developer base.

How is your ecosystem approaching decentralization — in governance, infrastructure, or community involvement?

Ozean’s approach to decentralization will likely follow a progressive, phased strategy, focusing on decentralized governance, infrastructure, and community involvement. The key drivers for decentralization will be Layer 2 scalability (through Optimism), open-source development, community-led growth, and the seamless integration of tokenized Real World Assets (RWAs) into the broader decentralized ecosystem. As the ecosystem matures, Ozean will increasingly embrace a fully decentralized governance structure and offer decentralized solutions for asset-backed financial products, contributing to the vision of a trustless, secure, and inclusive decentralized finance platform.

The post Builder Spotlight: Ozean appeared first on dRPC Blog.

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.

Interview with Mikko from Trading Strategy

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.

The post Builder Spotlight: Trading Strategy appeared first on dRPC Blog.

Can you tell us who you are, what your background is, and what led you to build in Web3?

I’m Esko, Co-Founder and CEO of Hedgehog Protocol. I’ve been in Web3 for about five years now, working across different parts of the ecosystem. Before starting Hedgehog, I was part of the team at Prosper, a prediction market platform that was acquired by Animoca Brands in 2021. That experience gave me a front-row seat to how fast things move in this space and the kind of infrastructure gaps that still need solving.

What problem does your dApp solve, and who is it built for?

Hedgehog is building infrastructure that lets us create markets for any kind of on-chain expense. This means users can now trade and hedge their transaction costs instead of just accepting them passively. We’re giving people a way to take a position on things like gas fees and other blockchain expenses. The protocol is built for businesses that want to manage cost volatility, traders looking for new markets, and degens who want to speculate on on-chain activity.

How has your product evolved since you started to built it, and which milestones you are most proud of?

We’ve always been laser-focuses on the modularity of our infrastructure, allowing any market to be built on top of a synthetic blockspace. We’ve started focusing on the base fee market, and since then we’ve been collecting feedback and demand from users and we’ve already have several different markets lined up, like a FeeM auction market, MEV priority fees market, funding rates, bitcoin transaction fees, etc. We’re most proud of this vision that we had at the beginning of making our stack super modular and composable, and it turns out that the market demand is exactly like we predicted.

What infrastructure or technical bottlenecks have you had to overcome while building?

Several. One of the biggest ones was trying to get a custom oracle built for our first market. We reached out to providers like Chainlink and Redstone, but it wasn’t possible within our timeline or use case, so we ended up building our own oracle from scratch. Another big one came from changes in Telegram’s blockchain policy, which forced us to rethink the logic behind our miniapp. There have been plenty of smaller roadblocks aswell..

Have you come across tools like dRPC that aggregate RPC access across multiple chains? What would make a solution like that valuable or relevant for your team

Yes, since we need to fetch on-chain cost data across multiple chains, a solution like dRPC is perfect for us.

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