Voltaire

Voltaire’s vision is to become a high-yield savings account powered by DeFi.

Ironically, DeFi today is creating barriers for many.

One of our Brazilian friends said "DeFi is for people who earn in USD. I can't even afford o pay for gas." See this defiant article for more about DeFi's first world problem: https://thedefiant.io/defi-has-a-first-world-problem-too-few-developing-nations-users/

We were very distraught by the unreasonable transaction fees on Ethereum and made it our mission to build financial services that cater to those without the time and financial luxury to pay today's DeFi entry fees.

Another barrier in DeFi is the educational one.

We have done almost 50 user interviews and found that complexity and riskiness are among the top detractors for investors considering DeFi. To address this, Voltaire aims to be dead simple, with the UI that is not just aesthetically pleasing but also abstracts away some of the excessive decision-making for the user.

Another relevant Defiant article about usability: https://thedefiant.io/what-defi-can-learn-from-fintech-adoption/](https://thedefiant.io/what-defi-can-learn-from-fintech-adoption/

Voltaire aims to be the simplest, easiest way for the everyday investor to earn passive income through DeFi. It is built using scalable solutions such as Polygon, which bring dramatic reductions in transaction costs and speed.

Voltaire uses Torus on Polygon for a seamless onboarding experience for a user who may not already have a crypto wallet.

Torus has an intuitive SDK that allowed us to embed the wallet into our React web app. The user can log in or sign up for a crypto wallet with their social media account. It then becomes the web3 provider, which allows the user to sign transactions such as supplying to Aave.

For our very first prototype, we allow the user to deposit onto Aave Polygon to start earning interest right away. To lend on Aave Polygon, we use the Aave SDK. We only needed to update some configs to point from mainnet to Polygon, which was neat!

The user’s wallet data is obtained through the Zapper API. We built a client for making those API calls from the frontend, which we then augmented to also merge with data from the Aave SDK. This will be further expanded to be a generic data-aggregating library.

We also thoroughly reviewed each other's pull requests, even though it was a hackathon! You will see a lot of nitpicky review comments and refactors in our codebase 😛

Thank you to Sponsors Aave, Polygon, Torus, Zapper, who responded to our many questions and comments on discord!