A researcher who decided the market needed a floor
Will Villanueva did not arrive in crypto through finance. He arrived through physics. His degree from the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology is a Bachelor of Science in physics, with a math minor and coursework stacked toward biology, chemistry and pre-med. It is an unusual starting line for someone who would go on to build interest-rate markets on a public blockchain, and it helps explain how he approaches the work: as a system to be modeled rather than a trend to be chased.
Before founding a company, he moved through roles that most people in DeFi never mention on stage. He worked at 6sense and at ProcureNow, a government procurement software company later absorbed into OpenGov Procurement. That is not the resume of a crypto native who found Bitcoin in a dorm room. It is the resume of an engineer who learned to ship real products for real users before he found the thing he wanted to build for good.
The turn came at ConsenSys, the studio that has seeded much of the Ethereum ecosystem. There Villanueva worked as a researcher and engineer, including time connected to Bounties Network, and dug into both Eth1 and Eth2 - the existing chain and the proof-of-stake future being designed alongside it. Few people were fluent in both. That fluency is what let him see a gap that others could feel but not name.
The gap: everything in DeFi floated
By 2020, decentralized finance had lending, borrowing and trading, but almost every rate in the system floated. Deposit into a lending protocol and your yield could be 8 percent one week and 2 percent the next. For a speculator, volatility is opportunity. For anyone trying to plan - a treasury, a saver, an institution - it is a wall. Traditional finance solved this a long time ago with fixed-income instruments. DeFi had barely started.
Villanueva teamed up with Jonny Rhea, a fellow Ethereum researcher, and the two founded Element Finance. The pairing was deliberate: two people who understood the protocol layer deeply, combined with product and software-engineering experience. Their protocol let users split a yield-bearing position into two parts - a principal token that trades like fixed income, and a yield token that captures the variable interest. Suddenly you could lock in a fixed rate, or take a leveraged view on future yield, using the same underlying deposit.
A cap table that read like a DeFi guest list
The idea landed. In March 2021, Element raised $4.4 million to bring liquidity to fixed-rate income and interest markets. By June the Element Protocol was live on Ethereum mainnet after nearly a year of research and development. Then, in October 2021, came the round that put the company on the map: a $32 million Series A led by Polychain Capital at a $320 million valuation.
The investor list was striking not just for the funds - a16z, Placeholder, A_Capital, Scalar, Ethereal Ventures and others - but for the founders who backed it personally. Rune Christensen of MakerDAO, Stani Kulechov of Aave, Fernando Martinelli of Balancer, Kain Warwick of Synthetix and Hart Lambur of UMA all wrote checks. When your competitors and peers are investing in your protocol, it is a signal that you are building infrastructure the whole ecosystem wants to exist.
From Element to DELV
Companies rename themselves for all sorts of reasons, and most of the reasons are forgettable. In Element's case the rebrand to DELV reflected a widening ambition. The goal was no longer a single fixed-rate protocol but a full suite of decentralized finance primitives designed to work together. The company describes itself as building the tools to help create and usher in a new financial system - a large claim that only earns credibility through shipping.
And ship it did. Along the way the team launched a governance DAO with a token airdrop, a moment Villanueva discussed publicly on the Bankless podcast alongside Rhea. He also took the stage at TOKEN2049 in London in 2021 to lead a panel on the future of finance with peers from Aave, Synthetix, Gauntlet and Robot Ventures. For a founder whose instinct is research over showmanship, these were deliberate steps into the public role that running a protocol company demands.
Hyperdrive: killing the expiration date
DELV's flagship product, Hyperdrive, is where Villanueva's engineering taste shows most clearly. Earlier fixed-rate designs, including Element's own, worked in fixed terms with expiration dates. That fragmented liquidity across maturities and forced liquidity providers to roll positions over. Hyperdrive reimagines the automated market maker so that fixed and variable rates can be accessed with no preset expiration, no fragmented liquidity between terms and no LP rollovers - what the team calls everlasting liquidity.
It is the kind of problem that rewards someone who thinks in systems: not a feature bolted onto an existing design, but a rethink of the market structure itself. In May 2025 the effort drew a further reported $6 million to expand fixed-rate yield and borrow products. Earlier that year, in March 2025, the team also faced the harder side of building financial infrastructure - a vulnerability was identified in the Hyperdrive smart contracts under specific conditions, the sort of test that reveals how seriously a team takes security.
Boring, on purpose
The thread running through all of it is a contrarian belief in an industry addicted to volatility. Villanueva's wager is that predictability - not the next 1000 percent yield - is what onboards the next wave of people into open finance. Fixed rates are, in his words, a stepping stone. Most of the world does not want its savings to swing wildly. It wants a number it can plan around. Building that number, in a transparent and permissionless way, is the quiet infrastructure work that most users will never notice and eventually rely on.
That is a long game, and Villanueva has been playing it since 2020 with the patience of someone trained to test a hypothesis rather than pitch a moonshot. From a mining-and-technology school in the New Mexico desert to a San Francisco company backed by the biggest names in DeFi, his path is not a straight line. Careers rarely are. What connects the dots is a consistent instinct: find the missing primitive, model it properly, and build it so well it disappears into the plumbing.