Projects
![]()
No projects found
Investors
New
DAO Treasuries
DATs
Lend / Borrow APRs
Chains
Categories
Spaces
DevNTell - The Future of On-Chain Lending with @mystic_finance feat. CEO @itsKelmat | Host: @narb_s
Recorded: March 24, 2026 Duration: 0:31:15Space Recording
Full Transcription
GM, GM, welcome to us going to be another fantastic episode of Devintel.
So if you don't know, Devintel is a 30-minute podcast held every week,
allowing founders, hackers, and anyone in between the opportunity to come on the podcast
and showcase what they built.
And today, I'm excited to welcome Joao Moreira, who is the founder and CEO of Mystic Finance.
So if you don't know, Mystic is a lending market for tokenized real-world assets,
which focuses on the best
of RWAs to maximize their use in DeFi. So if you stick around for today's episode, you'll get to
meet Joelle, learn all about Mystic and what they're up to now, and how you can get started
using them today. All right, let's get into it. Sorry, that was on mute.
GM, GM, welcome to the show, Joel.
I'm excited to have you on, man.
GM, nice to meet you, man.
And yeah, it's great to be here.
Thanks for the invite.
It's a pleasure to be at Devontel.
uh pleasure to to be at devintel yeah yeah it's a pleasure to have you uh yeah so uh before we get
Yeah, yeah, it's a pleasure to have you.
into all the great things uh mystic finance uh would you just like to give a introduction about
yourself if folks aren't familiar yeah i appreciate it i guess i will start with the fact that i am a
huge lord of the rings fan so i appreciate your background and you shouting out the culture for the web3 user voice and the developer voice that is so uh let's hope we do uh yeah non-grim non-grim uh stuff in
this uh in this in this episode uh yeah so guys my my name is joe right i'm from lisbon portugal
i have a background mostly in uh sales and tech mostly software as a service actually. So I created a startup back in 2020.
Then I went into private equity for SaaS businesses where I ultimately became CEO for a SaaS business
we had bought from another founder.
So we were like by side after they exited.
And then around 2022, I started playing around with, 2021, that is, with crypto as a user and really got into the NFT crisis at the time.
It was my entry-level drug, I guess.
And from there, I really started getting into it as, I always looked at it as an interesting builder opportunity.
Like, I've always wanted to build products and have my own thing going on.
So even though i was
using it as user at the time it was always in the back of my mind um how i can how can i leverage
this technology to build something cool and what problems am i finding at the time what happened
was we couldn't um completely different than what we're doing now but we couldn't like i couldn't
like do like a swap of an nft for another like an otc swap and i had to
go through a moderator like this kind of very otc thing and i wound up developing like um an nft otc
desk ultimately and that was kind of my first product in crypto and from that i was hooked and
i've been building stuff in crypto ever since and nowadays what we do is couldn't be more different than that.
But I guess it was what I needed to get started.
Amazing, man.
And are you a self-taught developer or did you kind of pick it up here and there as you were kind of jumping into crypto?
Yeah, good question.
Like in my first startup, we were were in 2020 we were two of us it was pre-llm eras so
no fast tracking our way around it we had to i mean that was low code and stuff like that right
but uh we ultimately had to teach ourselves how to code to build the mvp it was garbage to say the
least uh hope my then co-founder doesn't listen to this episode um and we yeah ultimately taught myself hard code then
to get slightly better i then did like a mobile app for like charitable donations like a
lifestyle project really more than a business and now a mistake i've actually gone ahead and
removed myself from developing almost entirely and i let the team handle that because i think i'm
even though i know it i'm not great at it.
I think you kind of got to double down where you can create leverage.
And I mean, the rest of the team is so much better than me.
There's just no point in me doing it.
So I'll just do the BD, everything else.
And someone's got it.
But if it stays in your mind, it's not enough, right?
So, yeah, I think that's part of the journey
right amazing yeah yeah man uh you got to do what you got to do uh to to get your product out there
and yeah i mean you you did you did the heavy lifting you did it um so-called old school style
getting your hands dirty and learning to code. So that's good.
Yeah, it was very painful at the time, honestly.
But I think it's very healthy also for you to learn how to code. And it definitely helps you understand the startup world a lot better.
I think ultimately everyone should know how to code.
It's ultimately very beneficial.
Yeah, 100%.
There's nothing like learning the fundamentals to kind of trap you. And you mentioned that you kind of come from a background in finance. So I guess for people who aren't familiar and to kind of set the scene for the rest of this episode, I guess, what are some of the major challenges and hurdles that you experience?
I mean, other than your user, actual user experience with doing on-chain lending and whatnot.
What are some of the bigger challenges in your mind around on-chain lending that really motivated you to start Mystic Finance?
Yeah, great question.
So, again, maybe setting the scene again for my setting the scene.
At the time, we were really doing NFT stuff.
We then pivoted into like gaming NFT marketplace infrastructure.
But as long as I did NFT-based technology, we were really ultimately leveraged on NFT
valuations, NFT market.
And that really just didn't have the outcome we thought of.
And then I kind of took a step back early 2024 and thought like, I'm really not building
on fundamentals.
Like I should be more first principles about how I go about building and I guess I was chasing fans without even realizing it really.
And so I thought okay let's take a step back what's really gonna like exist in 10 years and what is going to be the backbone of blockchain activity of the next 5-10 years and we concluded it is going to be lending is not the killer use case,
but it's definitely one of, right?
And credit as a whole, obviously,
is a huge component of the finance fabric of the world.
And we thought tokenization, RWAs,
were going to be the next big PMF in crypto beyond stablecoins,
which obviously have been on a tear for the past couple of years.
And I think that looking at RWAs in early 2024
and where they are now has really happened in a way,
or those assumptions have kind of played out correctly,
like RWATVL has completely exploded from like 5 billion
to 35 billion uh it's clearly a lending game so to speak so it is a game of uh leveraging these
these financial products and and getting them to be modular modularly used in defy um
and and so it was with that outlook on things that we started building Mystic,
like there will be an opportunity at this intersection.
What then happened for us was we met this chain called Plum, who was doing a layer one
for RWAs.
We kind of wound up committing to building the native lending market on Plum and at the
time there was really no instance of RWA back lending on China.
I mean, you had the initial guys, right?
The squad that kind of pioneered things like Centrifuge and Goldfinch and Maple, arguably,
right?
And the guys that really had done the first few steps of taking private credit on China,
but you didn't have like the more native modular ecosystem that you're seeing now with stuff like barretto and stuff
like securitize out and you're i think the industry is really taking a huge next step in that regard
all you had at the time was flux finance from um from mondo which was a more definitive
interpretation of rwa lending because rwa link is that, just loans against anything that is not natively digital,
right, and so that is fairly broad.
We were looking at it more
from this definitive interpretation.
And so because of that, we were concluding,
okay, there's a big opportunity here,
but we need to learn more about what the problems
of onboarding these assets,
which are intrinsically different, are gonna look like.
And so we committed to build with Bloom and work
in that ecosystem.
And Mystic is still live on Bloom to this day,
the year and a half on or maybe two years.
And we wound up meeting Morpho along the way
and building on the Morpho stack.
We ultimately became the front end for Morpho on Bloom
and now more chains after that.
And it was in that process that we wound up concluding that the problem with RWA and lending,
RWA and lending, pardon, was actually more of a secondary market liquidity problem than a lending infrastructure problem.
This might not be the right wording because there's definitely a problem in lending infrastructure.
right wording because there's definitely a problem in lending infrastructure i guess it's maybe better
phrase that we thought our team was best poised to solve the secondary market liquidity problem
because there's big network effects in lending that apps like morphe already solved in oiler
and ave and we just really looked at it as can we do something 10x over these guys for our wis
and we ultimately were like we maybe can'tfully. But we really know that there's going to be the secondary liquidity problem now, that
they're not, it's not their business, right, at all.
And there's nothing here.
And because we were, again, Plum's focus on RWIs, because we were the lending market,
we were ultimately the more, for instance, most focused on RWIs at the time.
We kind of concluded, like, we were just very early to understanding
the secondary market liquidity problem.
And so we, I wouldn't say it's a pivot,
but we kind of started focusing more division on that.
Ultimately it was, it's still a mystic product,
which is a solution for RWAs secondary markets,
which ultimately act as an enabler to on-chain lending.
And so I'm answering your question in a very roundabout way, which is to say we did find problems in on-chain lending. And so I'm answering your question in a very roundabout way,
which is to say we did find problems in on-chain lending,
which are secondary markets. And maybe just explaining what that is a bit better,
double-clicking on that concept.
It's the fact that usually when you have a liquidation
in a lending market, you will liquidate it by flash loan
plus swapping the collateral.
So you borrow from the lending market,
you pay off the debt in in the lending market uh and then you you use the decks for swapping uh
classical for borrow assets right and um ultimately that's depending on amm liquidity to do these
liquidations right um the the fact of the matter is that's really not possible in rws because
they're more fragmented they're regulated first foremost, so you're not really going to have the same AMM liquidity.
Or I would even rephrase to any AMM liquidity.
I think you look at most securities nowadays and they don't have any AMM liquidity to speak of.
It's not an AMM game.
Also, because most of them have redemption features because they're tokenized funds.
have redemption features because they're tokenized funds you can get your stables back one way or
You can get your stables back one way or the other.
the other and the existence of these redemption features also kind of makes it so that you can
always redeem right and again as i said earlier it's a lending game so to speak you're if you're
an issuer you're better off focusing on getting a lot of lending tvl and ballooning your um versus
spending the equivalent incentives on secondary liquidity when you already have redemptions,
right?
Which, I mean, obviously LSTs do as well, but it's a slightly different dynamic, I think.
Also because, again, of the regulatory aspect and the fact that a lot of these assets are
permissioned, right?
Kind of changes the dynamic.
And so, again, the problem we wound up realizing is we need to be able to liquidate these assets
predictably.
Otherwise, you can't onboard them as collateral in lending.
That was ultimately the problem we found that we were experiencing on Plume.
We were having difficulties scaling our multiple worlds unless we could find predictable liquidation pots.
And so we kind of embarked on this journey to build these predictable liquidation pots, these secondary markets.
And that's what we've been working on ever since.
Amazing. Amazing.
And I think it's interesting for me to see so many teams working on RWAs now.
Like this season, this year on DevIntel,
I think I've had at least four or five different teams come on,
and they're all working
on rwas in one way shape or form um i i guess in your mind like is has there been any like
particular change from like the regulatory side or anything that kind of has attributed to to kind of
this like big gold rush uh so to speak of everyone building on rwas that's interesting to hear
um yeah i mean from from my perspective i think you have a combination of of aspects like the
the more crypto friendly regulatory uh environment in the us which i think facilitates um
which I think facilitates institutional appetite for crypto.
That's definitely one.
I think that regulatory clarity helps this intersection or this, pardon me, this overlap happen.
I think you also saw something that was different, which is for the longest time we thought institutions coming on chain meant they buying our bags so to
speak i think you kind of realize that what you're seeing now is that what works actually the opposite
is us buying their bags like is they're using crypto as a distribution channel and they can
distribute off-chain products to an on-chain user base and for them that's good right it's just
increasing AUM they have less regulatory oversight because they can work with these partners like Securitize for example or other issuers they help them come
on chain and and I think that change in perspective helps a lot right obviously you have
you have the the the first example I gave also right you have dots and you're seeing
these worlds merge even from the buying our bags perspective.
But I think that native issuance on-chain of off-chain products
and the diversification of the underlying of the yield that that brings really helps.
If I'm answering your question also very directly when US Treasury bill yields went up to 5% for something percent
that really accelerated the RWA space by I think four years three years five years because
suddenly it was a great idea to hold T-BIOS on China and it became really competitive with on-chain yields.
Whereas before, RWA's were just getting crushed by on-chain yields.
So when that was a reality, it was going to be very hard to justify to a natively on-chain user base to hold RWA's.
They're not familiar with it. They're not not underwriting there's kind of no reason when suddenly it becomes competitive the revenue through clarity is better and you're starting to see
genuine genuine demand for it then it starts becoming like okay now let's like
fill this and let's let's start to to do this and i think all things combined mean you're starting to
see a web 2 user base that's interested a web 3 user base that's interested in having these on
and and yeah it's really great to see because when i first joined crypto we would never shut up about like the time the industry would get to this point if you were
around you'll remember shortly and it's great to see it happening now basically 100 i i agree and
on my timeline i i like every day i'm seeing something about, oh, hey, like Nasdaq wants to start messing around with like tokenized securities and operating 24-7, Coinbase offering securities, on-chain securities of stocks and whatnot.
Certainly the floodgates have opened.
And yeah, I shared your same sentiment.
Like I remember early in 2021,
that's when I got into Crypto and Web3s.
Like everyone was saying, oh yeah, this is the dream.
Like we're going to get there eventually.
And now we're here.
Yeah, so we'll see.
We'll see how it continues to play out.
But I guess reeling it back into Mystic itself,
I want to kind of paint the picture for kind of two sides of the coin in terms of the users of Mystic.
So for the everyday user of Mystic Finance, what features can they expect to see on the
platform?
Yeah, I appreciate it.
So there's kind of two worlds to our product.
One is mysticfinance.xyz,
which is ultimately the secondary UI for Morpho,
which has the same features you Morpho has.
You can supply on the app, borrow on the app,
leverage on the app,
see the same kind of lending and borrow analytics
that you could, fairly simple app,
but actually works really well on emerging chains
where Morpho doesn't want to come.
There needs to be a player like this. And we kind of found this pocket where we work really
well and and that has active users pretty much every single minute and um we we have good feedback
so that that's worked well this rwy uh focused product that we've been mentioning that one's
uh gonna live in a separate domain called octarin finance Finance, O-C-T-A-R-I-N-E, Octarine.
And ultimately, that UX is going to be a DEX UX of this swap, which ultimately enables users to swap RWIs for stable coins immediately.
And this is the product that ultimately solves that um that that secondary market
liquidity problem i mentioned earlier so what we do there is um we ultimately auction with lps
requests of users that don't want to wait the redemption time of an asset and lps that are
comfortable underwriting that duration risk effectively or in other words they're comfortable waiting that period in turn of the user they will buy the user's asset at a
premium redeem it themselves and pocket the premium in the process so ultimately um it enables rwa
holders to get out immediately okay creating a secondary market for them um and it gives lps that are comfortable
on the right in these assets access to this pretty unique deal flow of users that ultimately mean
ultimately are okay selling them at a slight discount right and so that's going to market
very soon uh hopefully in the next three to four weeks and that's rv1 for octamine rv2 which we're
really excited about is infrastructure for anyone to create instant liquidity facilities, which means issuers, curators, protocols can themselves
stand up vaults that act as secondary market liquidity themselves.
And yeah, we think that really plays to our strengths of building curator infrastructure
of all the understanding and experience we have now in the RWA space.
And I think that's the final form of of our builder journey hopefully
but i guess more experienced people than me will tell you that there's probably no way you just
keep on finding more stuff to do um but if so that would be our next our next thing to do
awesome and yeah that sounds all super exciting and uh yeah i mean it'd be awesome for some of
our users to or some of our viewers today to become Mystic users.
I have to go play around, see what's up.
And I guess for the other side of the coin,
for our developers in the audience, we are a developer show,
you kind of touched on it on the infra side,
but is there any other SDKs, APIs, or anything top of mind
that you think might be exciting for developers to kind of poke into to plug in Mystic to their apps?
Yeah, absolutely. I guess I would kind of subdivide it into two things.
For Mystic, the Morpho-based app, if you're building lending experiences on emerging chains,
building lending experiences on emerging chains.
I mean, we've frequently had requests for APIs,
for our API to be able to access lending information
for so people can build their own lending experiences
on these chains, whether it's a liquidation bot
or it's an LP that wants to track positions
more accurately, right?
So that's been a recurring topic.
So for any developer building landing apps on emerging
evm chains we're happy to to work with you guys in that regard completely open public infrastructure
and then on octarin the rwi liquidity facility i guess that one's more interesting for users
interested in adding support for rwi secondary markets in their protocols, in their apps.
Perfect example is you already have a lending market.
You want to enable RWA secondary market liquidity.
We come in as a plugin almost to make that happen.
And we're very interested in working with everyone,
with anyone working on lending right now and anyone working on even Dex's,
but to ultimately collaborate because our product
is intrinsically collaborative.
We want to work with people that have done DeFi primitives so they can stand up their
own RWY secondary markets, right?
So that they can onboard RWY as a collateral.
That is ultimately the objective is let a lending market self-service solve or DIY solve the secondary markets problem.
Awesome.
Yeah, and I mean, all the docs are in the description
of this podcast.
So if you're a developer and are interested in getting
your hands dirty in lending markets,
definitely check that out.
And I guess, I mean, you kind of said it,
the last couple of questions worth,
but I guess in a succinct way,
how would you say Mystic Finance compares to the competition out there?
Like, what's your secret sauce that kind of gives you the edge on the competition?
Yeah, sure.
I'll focus more on Octarine on this one,
which I think is more innovative, really,
and ultimately a better fit for this question.
I guess, again, we're solving the problem
of RWA secondary market liquidity,
which begets the question of the way you source
that secondary market liquidity ultimately
is the product almost, right?
And we're seeing the competition you source that secondary market liquidity ultimately is the product almost right and we're seeing the competition really source it um well in the uh in different ways i guess
what i want to say is that we are the only one sourcing it fully on chain so we're going for a
fully d5 based approach um very modular with other protocols uh we're really trying to build a Lego piece
that fits into the rest of the ecosystem.
Whereas I would say that competitors are taking a more,
maybe, monolithic approach, right,
that is more focused on them standing up their own facility.
And again, I guess the comparison I would make
is between someone standing up their own facility and us who are making infrastructure for others to create their own facilities.
So that's kind of how we see ourselves and how we perceive ourselves versus the competition.
Will it work? I don't know. Hopefully. But that's the game, right?
But yeah, that's it. I hope that answers your question.
It does. It does. And yeah, indeed, it's all part of the game.
You don't know until you try.
And yeah, I guess on this topic in itself, kind of to take it a little high level, as a founder yourself, I'm sure you've gone through a bunch of different learning lessons and whatnot throughout the years.
For the people watching today who might be on the cusp of starting their own company today
or maybe on the fence of doing so, what's some key pieces of advice that you want to give to them?
Maybe it's advice you'd want to give to your younger self
before you started Mystic Finance. I like that question. Yeah, I mean, if I could follow the
advice I'm about to give, I'd be a happier man for it, I think. I mean, ultimately, your success
is completely correlated to your resilience. You need to stay in the market long enough to,
quote-unquote, be lucky and find the right opportunity and that in my eyes means you can't be looking
at the opportunity cost like if you're building in crypto if you're capable of launching and having
success in your own products there's probably going to be a company elsewhere that's going to
pay you a better salary than you're earning doing that um for your talents and and that means if
you're always thinking ah this is not working when i could be working at x y and z earning uh a b and c dollars i mean i don't think that's the right
frame of mind right if you're you should think of yourself as a missionary not a mercenary right
you're doing this because you really want to do it and there is no money to substitute that once
uh and and once you do that you're quote-unquote free to just build away
so to speak right obviously I mean there's real world constraints you need
to have money etc that's not what I mean but but just not not constantly be
focused on the opportunity cost and more focus on the upside is healthier and
leads to you being resilient and you being resilient leads to you staying in
the market and ultimately you stay in the market you increase your friend of
mine a father for of mine has this expression
I really like, which is your
surface area
of luck, something like that, which is just
the amount of shots on goal you can make
you'll eventually get lucky on one of them
and you really only need to get lucky once
and so
that's really it, right, you've got to be resilient
and maybe a secondary one is like just build
alongside people you like to work with and don't do the journey
by yourself. Plus now with AI, it's so easy to do that. Right.
But it's ultimately just 50 times harder. So, you know,
just find people you like to work with and build a team and be resilient.
And hopefully it will work itself out.
Beautifully said. And yeah, I 100% agree.
And I love that quote.
I mean, it's like you have to fail a bunch of times before you succeed.
And eventually hard work finds luck.
So definitely you need to keep taking those shots.
Eventually one of them will hit the net and you'll succeed.
Usually one of them will hit the net and you'll succeed.
And I guess kind of to touch on the sentiment of the market a bit, we're kind of in like this weird bearish state, at least from like the consumer side.
I don't really see it from like the builder side.
And you touched on it early on.
There's lots of institutions that want to basically tokenize all the things, right?
And then get into staples and whatnot.
So I guess for the doubters out there who are like, ah, no, this DeFi thing isn't going to be a thing.
I guess what would be your response to that, I guess?
Words of encouragement.
Yeah, absolutely.
Good question as well i think you really my my input would really be to do what i did not do before which is
think of first principles right do you think uh the direction where we're headed or what do you
think will be real five ten years from now and what underpins that reality are those things going to
remain real and if so and if you believe in them,
that's where you should be placing your bets, right?
Not on what's making noise right now
or everything's going to make noise three to six months from now.
That's such an easy mistake to make in crypto
because things are changing all the time.
So it's very easy for you to follow some noise you found
or some shiny object you thought was cool.
And then you're off on this tangent
and it's something that's going to die.
Like, and that has nothing to do with your conviction.
Right.
So I think if you're retail, I mean, and if you're looking at where the industry is going
and if you take this lens, this is also a lens that doesn't really look at price that
much because you're thinking long-term horizon.
Now, obviously this assumes price follows
value which in crypto is very questionable but uh in in the assumption that it doesn't that we're
speaking of value um i think you should follow like really think hard on on that and place your
bets accordingly so on the tokenization example you're seeing institutions understand the blockchain is better but that's not all technological rails for their assets it's better financial
plumbing ultimately and if that's a fact then you will see this explosion of our
WHVL and you will see your institutions come on chain and adapting the
technology now if it's private if it's public but but see now you start to build
on top of that and but you start with the really base assumption of is this work is this better
how where something can be said for any industry you're into right prediction markets meme coins
arguably right so there's something for everyone in there but there will be another line with
something for everyone so i wouldn't be so focused on the now focusing more on the law on the letter
and think of the assumptions that are real now that will
ultimately predict the latter
and act accordingly.
So, yeah, again, that's what
for my history I didn't do and I'm trying
to do now. And also it makes it
healthy for you because you're following your conviction.
You're not acting on impulse
and again, that makes you more resilient.
Love it.
Love it. Yeah, well said.
I completely agree.
And as we're coming to time here,
one last question for you.
For the folks that are watching us today or listening,
what's the best way for them to follow all the progress of Mystic Finance, Octane,
and yeah, generally how to keep up to date
with all the things?
Yeah, I appreciate the question.
Follow me on X at itskalmat, I-T-S-K-E-L-M-A-T.
Follow us on Mystic at mystic underscore finance.
This is all X and follow us on Octarine at Octarine Phi.
On X, that one's soon to launch over the coming months,
so keep an eye out.
Otherwise, if you're interested in building in RWAs, if you're interested in building in on-chain lending, or if you just want to talk
startups and crypto in general, I'm always here. So yeah, that's it.
Beautiful. Love it. Yeah. Likewise, Raul. Thank you so much for taking the time out of your
busy day to come chat with us today uh and yeah uh
definitely looking forward to seeing all the uh amazing things that you mentioned kind of come to
fruition um we'll be keeping an eye out and uh yeah i guess with that i just want to wish everybody
a very happy tuesday uh or wednesday wherever you may be and we'll catch you back here uh thursday
uh for another episode of Devon Tell.
All right, all.
Until then, have a good one.
Cheers.
Have a good one.
Thanks for the invite, Tom.
Of course.
No problem.
See you.
Take care.
