One of the great opportunities in blockchain is the concept of “programmable money.” The ability for entrepreneurs to create, trade, and use digital assets globally will likely be as impactful as when people were first able to create and consume information globally via the web. That said, today, most transactions on blockchain are simple, one-time events. If you want to do anything more sophisticated — for example, commit to a future transaction at a future price — it is complicated, expensive, and often not secure. Use cases like recurring payments, buy/sell orders based on on-chain events or price movements, or swapping between chains have previously been mostly inaccessible due to cost or technical complexity.
OAK Network is solving this problem by building the web3 hub for DeFi and payment automation through an easy to use event driven transaction model built on Polkadot. We are happy to share that we co-led the seed with our friends at Foundation Capital, Hypersphere, and Electric among others.
The best way to think about OAK is an if this, then that system for blockchain transactions — specifically for long running smart transactions that require some maintenance of state. The team at OAK is addressing this missing feature to significantly expand the use cases of programmable money. OAK enables users and developers to schedule future and recurring payments, engage in trustless auto-trading, and place decentralized limit and stop-loss orders on AMM DEXs — all without smart contract middlemen or compromising the security of a user’s wallet.
OAK is co-founded by Irsal McGinnis and Chris Li. We got to know Irsal during her time as a former Blend engineering leader. Chris was an early investor and developer in the blockchain ecosystem with projects like Polkadot and NuCypher. We were impressed by how technically strong both Irsal and Chris are, and their clear vision for what OAK can become.
While we are in the early days, we’re excited to back this team to unlock the next wave of creativity around DeFi. Learn more about the OAK Network in their Discord Server, and check out the company’s engineering and growth job openings.
