How Maestro's Is Building Enterprise-Grade DeFi Infrastructure for Bitcoin

Today, we're honored to sit down with an ardent builder in the Web3 space, Varderes Barsegyan, co-founder and CTO of Maestro. Varderes's career journey, from physics and aerospace to biotech and now blockchain, is a testament to his passion for building high-performance systems. His company, Maestro, is a web3 infrastructure provider that is laying the groundwork for a scalable, enterprise-grade future for blockchains like Bitcoin. It’s a pleasure to have you with us.

\ Ishan Pandey: Varderes, welcome. You’ve had a fascinating career path, moving from physics and aerospace engineering into biotech, and now to blockchain. How did those diverse experiences, such as your work on AI for early cancer detection at Freenome, influence your decision to co-found Maestro?

\ Varderes Barsegyan: Blockchain technologies, particularly Bitcoin, will encompass the entire global economy, whether that be aerospace engineering, biotech, or finance more directly. Humanity will eventually exchange value entirely on blockchain railways. I couldn’t see myself making more impact than this, and when the opportunity presented itself I left my awesome career for something greater than myself. It’s true that I’ve worked on a variety of projects across different industries, but I often found common approaches and the same fundamental problem solving principles. I must give a lot of credit to my physics degree. Studying the fundamental workings of the universe helps establish a strong problem solving framework that can be applied anywhere. You learn to ask the most important questions and focus on the most impactful things.

\ Ishan Pandey: What is the current state of infrastructure being built to enable Bitcoin DeFi, and what are the primary challenges this new infrastructure aims to solve? Further, how does the UTXO design present unique challenges for building complex DeFi applications, such as lending protocols, compared to the account-based model?

\ Varderes Barsegyan: Bitcoin DeFi infrastructure requires mastery over UTXOs. An infrastructure provider must have bulletproof indexing and data streaming APIs to support transaction construction and real-time data updates. Without these sophisticated tools, there is no way to have Bitcoin DeFi that can compete with other blockchains, UTXO or otherwise. In particular, UTXOs present a unique challenge because the entire history of the blockchain must be indexed and be up to date at all times so as to accurately reflect the state of Bitcoin addresses. On the other hand, account-based systems can simply be queried for address states–there is no need for an index. Furthermore, it’s not enough to simply index the chain; infrastructure providers must also provide an interface to the Bitcoin mempool. Due to Bitcoin 10 minute block times, no scalable DeFi application can be built without it operating in the context of the mempool.

\ Ishan Pandey: How does the decentralised Bitcoin lending ecosystem work in practice, and what specific infrastructure, like that developed by Maestro, is being built to facilitate it? And how does this new infrastructure address the limitations and enable a new kind of native decentralized finance on Bitcoin?

\ Varderes Barsegyan: It depends on the type of lending system, but as with any DeFi lending solution on Bitcoin, it requires mastery over UTXO management. The great thing about what we’re building at Maestro is that our APIs can service any kind of Bitcoin DeFi, not just lending. In the case of lending, however, we have a close partnership with the biggest lending platform on Bitcoin: Liquidium. We are helping them index the states of inscriptions and the UTXOs that are pertaining to inscription transfers. They use this information to determine who can borrow against their ordinals, when and how much they can borrow.

\ They then use this information to construct partially signed Bitcoin transactions (PSBTs) that lock ordinals at scripts and withdraw BTC from liquidity providers. If they didn’t use Maestro for this information, they would have to build hefty internal solutions that will cost them a lot of money in compute resources and hire an engineering team to manage that infrastructure. By using us instead, they can focus entirely on building a superior user experience for their customers.

\ Ishan Pandey: Open source is a trust signal but also a business choice. What do you open by default for the community and why (SDKs, clients, reference indexers), what remains closed (proprietary schedulers, data pipelines), and how do you avoid a support burden while still growing the developer ecosystem on Bitcoin?

\ Varderes Barsegyan: An extensive open source strategy is absolutely critical for our line of business, especially since we're actively trying to work with large institutions with a lot of constraints. Open source establishes trust and allows a lot of eyes to look at our code and vet it, otherwise impossible with a small internal team. Further, it gives the opportunity for people in these organizations to run the software themselves and see how it works.

\ As a result, selling Maestro as a platform to them becomes a far easier sell. All of the biggest software companies have massive open source tools and contribute actively to them. A great example is Terraform, the most popular IaaC tool ever created, used by basically every software company. Hashicorp, the creators of TF, just sold for billions to IBM. Similar to Hashicorp, Maestro has powerful proprietary infrastructure that doesn’t need to be open source, particularly how we manage our workloads and build reliability and redundancy around them.

\ Ishan Pandey: For developers and entrepreneurs looking to build on Bitcoin, what advice would you give them about navigating this evolving ecosystem, and how does a platform like Maestro enable them to innovate more effectively?

\ Varderes Barsegyan: For people building DeFi, I would expect them to always have a crystal clear answer to the question “where does the yield come from?”.

\ For people building infrastructure to support DeFi, I would expect them to always have a crystal clear answer to the question “why should I use your stuff and not build it in house?”.

\ Either way, Maestro helps unlock the entire Bitcoin ecosystem on multiple fronts: comprehensive data APIs, node management, AI integrations, meaningful partnerships, to name a few. We have supported many startups already and will continue to do so.

\ Ishan Pandey: What's your vision for Bitcoin DeFi? When you imagine its future, what do you foresee?

\ Varderes Barsegyan: The entire financial backbone of the world will eventually either directly or indirectly settle on Bitcoin rails. Bitcoin DeFi in particular will be a multi-faceted ecosystem with a lot of liquidity and activity on both Bitcoin base chain and a few prominent L2s. Different scaling layers will address different unique problems pertaining to specific use cases. Everyone that is involved in the financial world, will be interacting with Bitcoin, whether they know it or not, such like how we’re all seamlessly interacting with the internet.

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:::tip This author is an independent contributor publishing via our business blogging program. HackerNoon has reviewed the report for quality, but the claims herein belong to the author. #DYO

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