Mick Hagen is no stranger to building ambitious products. As a lifelong entrepreneur and technologist, he’s now leading the charge on a suite of tools designed to bring decentralized finance to the mainstream. In this conversation, Mick breaks down the architecture behind his three interconnected projects — Ripe, Underscore, and Hightop — and shares why he believes DeFi, paired with user-friendly design and real-world asset tokenization, has the potential to unlock financial opportunity for people around the world.
Q: Tell me about Hightop and what you’re working on there.
Yeah. So we actually have three different projects that we’re working on right now that are all related. Hightop is the main kind of consumer app, but Ripe and Underscore are kind of the infrastructure, the power. So let me work from the bottom and then we’ll talk about Hightop in a second.
Ripe is a DeFi protocol that lets you borrow against anything. And so a lot of other DeFi lending protocols, like for loans, typically work in a way that the user — the borrower — has to get one loan per collateral asset. And so for users, it’s quite inconvenient, where you have to have different loans for each of your assets.
Ripe protocol allows you to just get one loan with all your assets. And to start, we’re only focused on crypto assets, because that’s the easiest to kind of do right now, but we’ve built it in a way that it can support tokenized real world assets. I’m personally really excited about real world assets and the tokenization of these assets, and so we’ve built a lot of the capabilities inside of Ripe protocol that when assets like stocks — your Nvidia stock, your Amazon stock, your Apple stock — those are getting tokenized, and a lot of great companies out there are tokenizing stocks. Those assets will also be able to be used as collateral on Ripe so that you can borrow against [them]. There’s stocks, there’s private credit, there’s real estate, there’s collectibles — all sorts of cool things that are getting tokenized — and Ripe protocol is built to be able to allow you to get a loan against any of those assets.
We have our own stablecoin called Green, and so basically somebody deposits their assets into Ripe protocol, and then they can mint Green — our stablecoin — against it. And then from there, the user can swap out for USDC. Over time, we’ll build in more kind of fiat integrations so that it can go to your Wells Fargo account, etcetera.
We just launched Ripe a couple weeks ago. It’s growing nicely — we have more than $6 million [in] deposits, we have more than $1.3 million in Green. And then the protocol has about $1.8 million in kind of protocol-owned liquidity. What that means is it’s liquidity so that when people are swapping in and out of Green, the protocol owns it, which means it’s permanent. It’s kind of persistent. It’s not going to run away if it gets scared in the market. That’s really valuable because that gives confidence to people who are using the protocol that they’ll always be able to swap in and out of our stablecoin. So those are a few metrics — and you can find this on our homepage, you know, R.finance. You could click on “Launch App” and you could go into the details of like, what are people borrowing against? What are the assets that are supported? All of that.
Q: And what about Underscore?
Underscore I think is really cool, because I’m really excited about AI and AI agents. And so what Underscore does is it allows AI agents to do things on your behalf in DeFi. So DeFi has a lot of cool capabilities — you can buy and sell assets, you can borrow like we were just talking about with Ripe, you can make payments, you can earn yield.
And so Underscore is basically infrastructure so that AI agents can do things on your behalf in DeFi, but with controls, with limits, with guardrails. Because I’m sure you know, and I know, we all know — AI agents can’t be trusted. They hallucinate all the time, they mess up. And when we’re talking about money, you don’t want the AI to mess up with your money.
So we built Underscore in a way that you could put limits. You can say, okay, I’m going to let this AI agent only spend $100. It’s going to invest $100, it’s going to do what it says it’s going to do, but it’s controlled. It doesn’t have access to all your funds. You can put limits, and you can specify, okay, this AI agent can only touch Bitcoin. It can’t go buy meme coins, it can’t go do other things. So you can put these types of restrictions on AI agents, and it’s all enforced by smart contracts.
And so Underscore is a really cool protocol to enable these AI agents to do things for you in DeFi. And that has a couple hundred thousand dollars in deposits — it’s still small. We’re just getting started with that. But the metrics around that — there’s like 200 users, a couple hundred thousand dollars in deposits in that protocol. And we’re going to ramp that up.
Q: And Hightop ties it all together?
Yeah. So now the third thing is Hightop. And Hightop basically is built on these two protocols. So all the loans that happen in Hightop are from Ripe. All the AI agent capabilities that are in Hightop come from Underscore. So Hightop — you can think of it as just the consumer app, the mobile app. You download it from the App Store. It’s meant to be easy. It’s meant to be simple. It’s meant to be for your Uber driver, your hairdresser. It’s not meant to be for like the hardcore trader, the hardcore crypto degen. It’s not meant for that.
We want Hightop to be the easiest and simplest way to earn yield, to buy, and to borrow against your crypto assets. And so we’re working on like the fiat on-ramps and off-ramps, so a bit like — your Uber driver doesn’t have to think about crypto addresses and private keys and seed phrases. Like, nope. They just connect their debit card or they connect their bank and they can put money in, and then from there, they can get all these DeFi powers.
And so it’s using all of the crypto on-chain DeFi stuff, but we’ve tried to hide all the complexity and make it really easy as a mobile app. And so Hightop is basically just the mobile app that lets you earn yield, lets you borrow against your assets, it lets you buy different assets — and it’s using Underscore and Ripe under the hood.
Q: That’s amazing. I used to work at an off-ramp, and the biggest issue we ran into was people struggling with DeFi interfaces. Sounds like you’re really addressing that from the ground up.
Yeah, hopefully we can make it really easy so people don’t have to think too hard. We just want to try to make it as easy as possible.
Q: I’d love to talk about how you first got into blockchain. What kind of captured your attention before you were working in it?
Yeah, so, I started out my career as an entrepreneur, dropped out of Princeton, started an ed-tech company, and that grew to be successful. We were acquired by Chegg. After that is when I started doing angel investing and I bought my first Bitcoin. It was in 2013 when I bought my first Bitcoin. And I was living in San Francisco at the time. I had heard about it from friends — it was kind of a geeky, new thing. And so I bought some Bitcoin then. But I really didn’t get into it until a few years later. Like, I didn’t go full-time into the crypto industry until a few years later — 2016.
I was working on a new project. I was working on a decentralized messaging protocol, and specifically, we were trying to replace email protocols — so like SMTP, POP, IMAP, like these things that power email. And we were trying to build a better email. And so we were working on a decentralized protocol, but we weren’t using blockchain at all. We weren’t thinking about blockchain. But because we were working on decentralized protocols, I kept hearing people say, “Oh, have you heard about Ethereum? Have you heard about blockchain networks?” And maybe you can leverage these blockchains as a way to incentivize usage and to get people to use your system.
That’s when I started to look at Ethereum. I was living in London at the time and started learning about Ethereum, and I started to get really excited about this idea of smart contracts — that you could build applications, that you could use tokens and kind of these cryptocurrencies as a way to incentivize kind of bootstrapping and growing a network. And I started — so I went down the rabbit hole. Started doing a lot of investing, because then 2017 hit and there was the ICO craze. And so I was just investing left and right in all the ICOs. Some worked, some didn’t. It was fun. It was just like a crazy time. But then when the dust settled, I was still really excited and passionate about the space. And I became really passionate about DeFi — decentralized finance — and just this idea that people all over the world could get access to financial tools and financial services.
My mom’s from Guatemala. I spent some time in Central America. I lived in Brazil for a couple of years as a Mormon missionary. And so I had been around a lot of people that didn’t have economic opportunities, didn’t have access to the same kind of financial tools that we do in America. And so I became really excited and passionate about DeFi. And that’s really what I’ve focused on since then. Since 2018, I’ve been all in on DeFi, all in on stablecoins and yield protocols — giving people access to savings tools and the ability to earn yield. I’m thinking about borrowing protocols and giving access to credit. I’m excited about tokenization, right?
Like, I imagine a world in which a farmer who has land in Central America, and that’s all they have — how could we tokenize that land so they could borrow against it? Or their livestock — they have a family of goats. How do we allow them to get a loan against their goats? And these are all still kind of early ideas and not fully materialized, but the vision of that is exciting to me. Like, that idea is incredibly exciting to me.
Q: Forgive this question — you may have covered it — but there are so many platforms out there. What is ultimately going to make Hightop different? How are you positioning it?
No, no, that’s a great question.
I think most of the things that exist out there allow you to buy and sell crypto assets. Things like Coinbase and many exchanges allow you to buy and sell crypto assets. But what they don’t allow you to do is borrow against all of those assets in a single loan position. Right now, the borrowing landscape within DeFi is protocols like Morpho and Euler. You have to get a loan against each of your assets. And so if you have 10 assets, now you gotta get 10 loans. That’s not a great user experience — especially when you think about mass market and retail.
You have other DeFi protocols like Aave where it’s a money market, but they have different constraints. So you can get one loan against your assets, but they just can’t support a lot of assets. Because it’s a money market — you have people that are borrowing other people’s deposits — and so they can only really support kind of the bluest of blue-chip assets. And so they really can’t go far beyond like five assets, right? And so Ripe is… so the ability to borrow against your entire portfolio, which we think is super unique.
Another thing that we think is super unique is the AI agent capabilities. So right now we have an AI agent in Hightop that’s monitoring DeFi yields and automatically optimizing, rebalancing. And so you — even while you sleep, while you work, while you do whatever — the AI agent is making you money and making sure you’re in the best protocols to generate the best yield.
So those are a few of the things — right? Like AI agent capabilities, but in a smart way with limits and controls, as I was saying. The ability to borrow against all your assets. Then the last thing I’ll say is just — we’ve built a lot around being ready for kind of these tokenized assets. And so as tokenized stocks come online — get ready for takeoff — like, we’re ready to support a lot of those assets.
Ultimately, we think we can build a better Coinbase or a better Robinhood. And we really want to build Hightop in a way that’s very easy, very simple. We’re not focused on the crypto trader. We’re not the crypto degens. I think Robinhood and Coinbase continue to lean more into the day trader — the person who wants to see all the charts and be a very active trader.
We want to lean the other way, which is: your neighbor, your Uber driver, your hairdresser, your high school buddy — they’re not going to be staring at charts all day and doing the day trade. Like, we just want super simple. So I think the opportunity there is a little bit more wide open… like drop-dead simple applications.
Q: That’s amazing. And obviously my mind’s curious — how are you planning to create that entry point for your everyday web2 user? That seems like the biggest hurdle in the industry.
Thing about the Clarity Act and all the recent legislation and regulation is that banks and kind of financial institutions are much more willing to allow kind of the fiat on-ramps and off-ramp integration. So — easier to get banking partnerships. You know, you have Stripe doing big acquisitions like Bridge, which is kind of a stablecoin infrastructure provider. You know, Stripe is making a bunch of different acquisitions that are interesting.
So it’s becoming easier for us to kind of bridge the gap of like, okay, the Uber driver has cash, they have Apple Pay, they have a debit card — how can that money easily come into Hightop without them having to think about setting up wallets and private keys and seed phrases? So yeah, that’s the challenge. And that’s the nice thing though — there’s more and more tools and more and more infrastructure to smooth that out and make it easier.
Q: One thing you mentioned that I thought was compelling was access — giving people access to these tools who don’t already have them, especially outside the U.S.
Yeah, 100%. That’s what motivates me. Like, that’s the mission that I’d say I’m on — is giving people all over the world access to these financial tools that they didn’t have before. DeFi offers that. It offers the potential of that. Obviously, like, apps like Hightop need to smooth out the rough edges so that people don’t have to set up private keys and all of that. But DeFi has the potential to do exactly that. I’m really excited because as assets get tokenized — like, even just thinking about OpenAI getting tokenized, and R has doing this — like, it would be amazing if somebody in Brazil could buy $5 worth of OpenAI. Like, that’s incredible. Something that was only reserved for VCs and the insiders and all this stuff — like, that’s cool.
Q: How is your team thinking about financial literacy challenges — especially for users who may not even know what they’re looking for?
Yeah, I’d say we have a lot of work to do on that still. Like, more resources within Hightop to educate people and help them understand kind of how this stuff works. So I’d say we have a lot of work to do on that. We started off just kind of with the core use cases of like, okay — earning yield, being able to borrow, being able to invest. But there’s a lot more work we need to do around that.
Q: It sounds like UI/UX is a huge focus too — making it usable and easy to understand.
Yeah, exactly.
Q: I’m actually curious — you’ve mentioned real-world asset tokenization a few times. What are your thoughts on the recent legislation and where that’s headed?
Yeah, I mean, I’m really excited. I think it seems like every week we hear or see of a new financial institution that’s announcing some tokenization project — whether it be JP Morgan with tokenizing deposits, big asset managers like BlackRock has already been doing it, but they continue to lean in. And Apollo — tokenizing private credit funds. Franklin Templeton. I mean, the list goes on, and it’s great. It’s exciting. We’re just getting started.
I think the more the Trump administration embraces it and adds clarity around it with the SEC, etc., we’re only going to just see more and more of the big financial institutions jump in and lean in. So I think it’ll be dominoes, and it’s kind of a wave that’s building and building and building — and it’s going to be like a tsunami. Everyone has different stablecoin projects, different tokenization projects, different blockchain-DeFi integrations. It’s exciting, for sure.
Q: What made you want to build in Utah?
Well, I grew up here. This is my home. So I’m not somebody who, like, was living somewhere else and said, “I want to go to Utah.” This is just my home. I’d say as long as Utah stays out of the way — like, that’s the main thing we want — is to not have bureaucracy, not have red tape and barriers. Stay out of the way of innovators. And I think innovators will be happy to be here.
Q: Is most of your team based in Utah?
Three of the five are. So yeah, most of the team.
Q: How do you feel about the local talent pool for blockchain jobs?
Well, we haven’t really tried to hire a lot — we’re still pretty small — but hopefully soon we will. But I think Utah’s great. Generally, my perspective on Utah talent pool is really good, it’s really strong. I think there’s a lot of great tech, sales, and marketing. I think Utah will be a great place for us to continue to grow.