Off-Piste wants DeFi to be more accessible: While making investing available to everyone.

• Author: Howell, Izzy

SINCE THE EARLY DAYS OF THE INTERNET, there have been few innovations that have caused the kind of noise that decentralized finance (known more commonly as DeFi) has. Now, words like "Dogecoin," "smart contracts," and "NFTs" pepper our Twitter feeds and followers of different coins espouse the same kind of obsessive zeal once reserved for religious cults or political parties.

One of them is Barrett Williams, co-founder of the Utah-based Off-Piste, a decentralized asset protocol that allows retail and institutional investors to create and trade pre-IPO futures on top global startups.

Named after its founders' affinity for skiing in Utah along unmarked paths, the platform has the potential to radically alter the way we approach investing today. "Off-Piste [is] a nontraditional route from point A to point B," Williams says. "And what we are providing is a nontraditional mechanism for gaining exposure to private capital markets."

Williams is impassioned about the purpose behind his platform and what it's designed to do. While many people today are barred from investing in private companies due to issues relating to accreditation and regulation, the company is hellbent on changing that.

"Just allow people to invest as they so choose," he implores. "There shouldn't be rules and restrictions, because I know plenty of people who don't qualify as an accredited investor, yet are much smarter than some of these people who are accredited investors at the end of the day, and I think it's a joke that they can't invest in a private company--especially a top-tier one."

Enter Off-Piste. "You'll basically be trading, buying, selling, and minting. And there are some serious complexities that we've discovered on the minting and shorting side," says Alex Whitley, co-founder and chief experience officer at Off-Piste. "What we're trying to do is take this really complex idea--and the mechanisms behind it which will be facilitated through a smart contract on the backend--and distill that down to: 'What does the user need to know to participate in these markets?'

Right now, there is a huge learning curve with participating in crypto in general. It requires multiple [hot] wallets, multiple applications, and a whole ton of education that you have to do yourself. I believe that that can be solved through a user interface. And that's what I've done my whole career: take these really complex ideas and distill them down into the core functionality to achieve the outcome that a user would want.

UI is an issue. To date, many consumer-facing DeFi applications--even some of...