At Paris Blockchain Week, BeInCrypto sat down with Andrey Fedorov, the Chief Marketing Officer and acting Chief Business Development Officer at STON.fi, to dive deep into the platform’s mission, roadmap, and broader views on the DeFi sector.

Andrey Fedorov shared insights into how Omniston, a liquidity aggregation protocol developed by STON.fi, aims to simplify and streamline decentralized liquidity access across the TON blockchain and beyond. It presents a unified integration point for DeFi apps, liquidity providers, and users alike.

Andrey Fedorov on Omniston

Omniston is a decentralized liquidity aggregation protocol that connects DeFi apps to TON liquidity. This protocol is built for the TON blockchain, which means that when users want to swap TON-based tokens, Omniston finds the best deals. I’d say this is a protocol and not an exchange in itself, but it does connect apps, for example, for some exchanges, wallets, games, some other apps that need to access liquidity. So, there are users in these apps who want to swap and trade tokens. 

Usually, DeFi apps need to find and integrate with various liquidity sources — a process that’s time-consuming, complex, and often expensive due to the integration work involved. That’s where Omniston comes in. Basically, instead of connecting to five or ten different liquidity sources one by one, you just integrate with Omniston once. It’s like this one plug-in point.

So when a DeFi app connects to Omniston, it automatically gets access to all these different liquidity sources that are already connected. And it works both ways — liquidity providers, market makers, and anyone who has liquidity, they also get access to the user base of those apps.

And the cool thing is, anyone can plug into Omniston. If you have access to liquidity, whether it’s on-chain (like liquidity pools or vaults) or off-chain (like private funds), you can integrate through Omniston. This makes your liquidity available to all the apps connected to Omniston. 

As a result, users benefit from deeper liquidity, and liquidity providers can earn yield by serving those users. We use the term “liquidity providers” broadly — it includes market makers and any other entities that can supply liquidity.

About Omniston’s roadmap

Right now, Omniston is mainly focused on providing access — so we’re not charging anything at this stage. The idea is really to drive usage. We want people to connect and start building with it. Liquidity providers can already earn money, and the same goes for DeFi apps — they can build on top of Omniston and create their own revenue models.

As for monetization on our side, we think it’ll come, but probably not in the traditional ‘pay-to-use’ way. We just launched about a month ago, so it’s still very early. The priority right now is adoption. We want to get more apps plugged in, more liquidity providers onboarded. Once we scale that up, we’ll explore monetization options — but that doesn’t necessarily mean we’ll start charging across the board.

The STON.fi team is still finalizing KPIs. We’re testing everything live — this is a working product — so we’re figuring out the numbers as we go. But if I had to name one core metric right now, it’s connectivity. We want to connect as many applications as possible, and aggregate as much liquidity as we can. That’s the north star for us.

Looking at the roadmap, the next big step is cross-chain swaps. Omniston currently runs on the TON blockchain, but we’ve already built the architecture for cross-chain functionality, and we’re actively testing it. Over the next few months, we’ll be working on integration testing.

Of course, we’re taking it step by step. The next chain will likely be Tron, and then we’ll move into EVM ecosystems. But it’s not going to be all at once — we’re rolling this out gradually.

TON — The Ideal Blockchain for Omniston?

There are two reasons why we chose TON. First, it is a technically strong blockchain. Second, it’s rapidly becoming the native chain of Telegram, which has a massive user base of over one billion people.

TON helps us access these huge markets. A technically strong blockchain plus a huge market is a good fit. Additionally, the TON ecosystem offers solid developer support and growing resources, making it a compelling platform on which to build.

I would also add that the TON ecosystem is growing very fast, with strong support from the TON Foundation. Plus, with so many projects on the chain, they craft good documentation that shows the use cases and so on. For developers building on TON, this means they benefit not just from the strong support but also from the collective experience and momentum of the broader community — which is incredibly valuable.

The Impact of Crypto and Blockchain Regulation

First of all, I don’t think regulation is a limitation per se. It’s something we monitor closely, and we take all regulatory developments into account as we grow. 

I would say that Europe has made some progress over here because of MiCA. Regulation in the United States is fragmented, but we still need to watch them closely. Our goal is to remain fully compliant — and we view that as necessary and inevitable.

Promising Crypto Trends

Everybody is speaking about AI agents. The concept is definitely compelling and has strong future potential, but the challenge is that there aren’t many clear, practical use cases yet. What we need to do now is find these good use cases, and currently, I would say that there are not so many. That’s the problem. But again, we need to watch this space closely.

From what I understand, AI agents are already being used to evaluate whether there is a balance in the market. It is interesting to use them for this specific test case, but this is only one. It is the most obvious one.

There’s definitely room to explore more impactful ways to combine AI with crypto. It’s an area worth studying closely, and while we’re still in the early stages, I don’t see any fundamental limitations holding us back.