Building with Builders in Mind: Creating a New Token Standard

Transcript

so this next talk is called building with builders in mind creating a new token standard and your speaker is already on stage so give him a round of applause for Dominic Ryder thank you very much thank you yeah today we're going to be talking about a brand new token standard which uh really annoyed me after the 6551 came out because it was supposed to be brand new in the ex exact pretty much same thing but OD has a couple of uh key differences in the fact that uh it can be rebalanced and also that there are uh LPS so uh just to give you some been in the industry since well bought my first uh token xrp in 2018 if people will uh

forgive me for that I think it was eoro back when that was uh the done thing but previous to that I worked in financial services so I started out as a uh stock broker derivatives Trader 200 50 cold calls a day typical Boiler Room stuff that you see uh and then did really well love the fast-paced environment um one thing I found when I was in financial services is mainly the fact that there always seem to be two elements to every single uh office anyone who's worked in uh Financial Services will uh be fully aware that you tend to have the CFA privately educated uh full education always uh you know coming from old money background on the investment side and

then you tend to have the sales team the sort of admin the marketing uh who try their hardest to try and get to the same level but there's a lot of disadvantages especially in uh fund management uh and so alvara was brought from that to try and democratize uh and create a true uh meritocracy uh in fund management so uh not my first token uh I founded VM Studios back in August 31st 2021 so uh we got to just over 600 million fully diluted value at our Peak on qoin robic gate still going strong but been hammered like everybody else in the uh in the bare Market but there we are we're still here um a stock broker

derivatives Trader uh work worked for a company called St James's place which is a footsy 100 wealth manager where as associate partner there uh after working at all of these investment firms including uh traditional VC afterwards which invested into uh you know some tech stuff but also B things like Care Homes gyms children's nurseries anything that had a tangible uh Freehold property that we could take charge of should anything bad happened to the underlying business so after all of that experience I realized that even though I might sound Posh uh I don't don't come from uh an upper class background I'm just English so uh I found that you had this big separation and a lot of tension in between the investment team and the

sales team which I was on uh and it all stemmed from the the fact that it's always an old boys club even to this day uh both in the stock market VCS I mean even in in crypto you get held back by who you know and what you know and that's why anyone starting their own protocol you know you have the typical uh who's on your Advisory Board most advisors they're just pretty useless I mean they're just a a face of the website uh and then outlive their value very very quickly but all the same uh you do have this step that you can't get past so with alvara we uh trying to solve a few problems so we have got there we go tread free problems lack of

transparency which isn't necessarily just traditional Finance even with uh you know alamida and centralized exchanges in general you know even with proof of reserves you still have this you know Merkel tree thing it can be faked crypto.com sent like 32,000 e to gate uh and there's always a problem with the opaque nature uh even in sort of centralized crypto uh High fees as well especially on the active management some people would know uh if you're familiar you've got passives which is like Vanguard and ETFs and indexes and then you got active managers where somebody is actually making decisions uh and those tend to come with uh High fees of up to 20% performance and 1.6% is the

uh the average uh and there's a high barrier to entry both somebody looking to become a fund manager because we seem to have this uh idea and concept uh in humanity that people who are born into uh sort of uh Superior or privileged um you know uh place in their life uh automatically uh become you know better than than than others who equally have the intelligence but in reality uh we just don't have those advantages to get to the level of these fund managers you need a CFA you need an IMC all of these are just standard procedures to

get into a fund management business even if you're the best investor in the world if you do not have those you won't get a fund management job in London anyway um so this frustrated me uh a lot uh especially because I thought I was smarter than some of these people frankly U maybe that's just arrogance but all of these mistakes I saw them making just seem so Junior uh and their selections like uh Cathy wood is a perfect example example from Arc has terrible performance like sold in N video before it pumped uh has literally been long Tesla at all the wrong times and then short on other times so I wanted to give people the ability to be their own boss be their own fund

manager uh and be able to compete onetoone on a meritocracy so I don't have the actual demo which I was going to present but essentially what we have built is a factory contract which mints our new token standard which as I say is currently called the EC BTS because it hasn't been given a number yet and it allows anybody to come onto the platform input however many tokens that they would like let's say that it's a a metaverse uh fund that somebody wants to bring so they imp put 33% sand 33% uh Mana uh 5% is automatically in Alva for those using the factory contract uh and the rest they have as uh token VM once

they mint that they get full management rights and earn 1% of anybody that contributes to that so it loads up onto a coin market cap style leaderboard where everybody who has ever minted one of those can compete oneon-one against each other when people contribute on the monthly rebalancing they get LP tokens so what this means is that if you have 1,000 people who are all on a CMC style leaderboard all of their performance is ranked if people are able to contribute to that and get LP tokens then you as the best fund manager you can build a dow and build your own fund within the

platform so if uh if I performed at 100% somebody else performed at 50% uh I can uh literally get 10 people uh contribute one e each I'll earn 1% of all of that so you have the ability to build your own Dow around the protocol so what we've got with alvara is core uh defi infrastructure just like how curve is the building blocks for so many other protocols convex uh year stake Dow uh pickle Finance all use curves infrastructure and liquidity pools in order to uh produce their own um this is the building blocks for a whole new um

there we go a whole new level of uh infrastructure and should spawn uh and has the ability to spawn so many other protocols uh beneath it there we go our token standard um so we are still to decide which layer two obviously we're launching on E because if we want to be core defi infrastructure you know that's where we got to go uh but because it's going to be a large transaction in order to Mint this to your wallet uh we will need a layer two so you know there's a few toss offs between optimism arbitrum nosis is gasless so that that could be a good one for us as well but we're yet to decide um on that so with this you

actually have the ability to uh be ranked amongst and against uh any crypto fund around let's say you've got uh multicoin let's say that you've got uh panta we want to get our token standard to the level where if they aren't using it then there'll be questions asked as to why they don't want to rank their performance against everybody else's if we can spur the sort of uh competition uh and look after the retail element where we are incentivizing all of these influencers or KS who you know talk the big talk and say how early they were to everything if we can uh actually make them put their money where their mouth

is show their um performance against everybody else we open up a huge playing field where if institutions don't use our token standard people will ask why they don't want to compete against retail what what have you got to uh fear so this should allow for a true meritocracy where anybody can rise to the top based on their own performance build their assets under management earn 1% of the fees for doing so and if they do want to expand that business then they can do so um at their own Leisure uh so we're hoping to build this out into like this Dow and sub um culture just like how you do have um all of these aggregators that are built

around curve we want to have the same level where you know you got convex which is top 100 token Y which is close to all wouldn't exist without curve as its infrastructure so we want to get to that level where we have so many protocols that and so many fund managers that have been able to uh take advantage and actually get to that status where they are the look the looked to manager compared to everybody else no matter their background uh with the actual protocol itself we're not taking ownership of the token standard it's it wouldn't be a token standard if you're gatekeeping it uh what we are uh doing is allowing for anybody anywhere to Mint from our

Factory contract but any BTS coded anywhere will automatically pull through just like how openc would pull through any erc721 uh ours will pull through any BTS so the 5% uh which is in ALA which is standard um that doesn't have to uh be done uh you know we're not going to gep that but anybody minting it through our platform will be able to do that but you can contribute to any BTS via the protocol uh whether it has any ala or not so the hope is uh obviously to get to a level where we have the same sort of selection and the same sort of uh categories that we can have the exact

sort of coin market cap you know metaverse gaming and put these into all of these subsets uh so that people can come and have choice and they can genuinely uh genuinely go with whoever they think will drive the best performance see all of the stats um and so the Alvar foundation will be building this out to try and facilitate the next generation of uh fund managers onchain obviously uh would prevent from sort of the alamaa stuff and everything that's happened on there I mean as much as we do have transparency in blockchain there's certain elements where you don't know and you have to trust what goes on with

your money one example that I've used before is anyone in the UK here might know the pr fund which is basically this uh this fund which has gone up in an actual straight line uh for about 25 years and that's cuz they smooth their returns they don't disclose all of their Holdings uh and they just pay 3% performance every single year uh no questions asked and they keep anything over and above and you just have to trust uh that they you know don't have too much leverage in that fund they haven't blown it up uh so we want to have and if anyone believes in blockchain like we know the merits of having tokenized uh assets so we got gold already we've got crypto but

there's no reason that we shouldn't have individual stocks have having an erc20 equivalent because it's proof of ownership you know that is the future for traditional finance and therefore there is no reason why a successful uh uh protocol such as ours uh that can build out this infrastructure can't bring on uh traditional Finance eventually but how we do that is by becoming such a well-used standard that when they are looking to enter this industry they use just like how uh you know let's say Porsche nfts that that didn't do very well you know they Ed the ERC 721 because it's gone too standard we want to be the same so that when you fund start traditional or crypto they

actually uh come to us as standard so as I say yet the uh actual demo that I was going to show you we'll show you this in a bit more detail but um the platform itself is a bit like uh openc and a bit like coin market cap in the fact that it's a full Suite once you've started your Dow if you're successful you can sell your management rights so you can actually uh essentially sell uh your performance a lot of people wonder you know who wants to buy it if it's based on the fund manager's performance but there's plenty of uh evidence in the traditional World there was a guy called Neil Woodford who uh again uh actually blew up his Fund in the end but he moved from Invesco Perpetual to start his own firm and

still tons of people stayed with the old manager uh so people can uh you know start a business uh create their business manage their business and then sell their business all the way to the end the token as I say uh for anything minted for the 5% uh anything minted through the factory contract uh has the 5% the key part of our Dow and of how we are running it is that we're doing the exact same gauge weight system as curve the reason for this is that we are hoping to have obviously the uh competitive nature of retail underlying and lots of individual Factory minted contracts but we want to have institutions incentivized to purchase as much Alva as possible anyone uh familiar

with Curve will know that if you lock it for four years you get the most most votes escro and therefore you have more power and this is what started uh the curve Wars where you had convex Year all competing for everybody's ve curve uh to try and incentivize their LP the most so we be doing the same concept in the if for example you're multicoin and you want as much assets under management into your BTS as possible then we as alvara will be sending uh Alva to the lp token holders and the Dow decides uh which uh BTS that goes to so that's the same sort of uh institutional

competitiveness that that curve managed to produce so well uh with the the curve was and why uh comvex eventually sort of won that out so the platform itself is fully ready to go uh we're at the funding stage we are looking to integrate uh allowing for nfts within the overal protocol as well that's quite difficult to do because if we have the monthly rebalancing and we have uh you know people coming in and out of the fund how do you represent that illiquid asset alongside so many different liquid tokens so that's the next stage for us is making sure that we can give exposure to uh nfts alongside but uh yeah we're fully built out um fully ready to uh

raise funding I think I probably went over my time but it's quite hard to uh judge there but scan the QR code anybody who does uh want to learn more um any questions I think that they should like turn up here but I don't have the thing that was going to do them before so let me know if there are any at the back or uh put your hand up and uh happy to answer it's good to have one at least I think I've I I don't think I've seen a a talk that's actually had a couple so

it's good to see okay I'm not sure oh okay it's yeah yeah so my question is you mentioned like the 5% of this token is like in your factory contract but it's not part of the standard itself right um correct the 1% that goes to the to the manager of the fund is that also like baked into the standard itself or is that also like a parameter you decided for your factory so the rebalancing is done on a monthly basis and So within that transaction uh it will sell down uh 112th of a of the month obviously um 112th of 1% and

distribute that to the BTS owner so it's all automatically done uh within the contract itself um and yeah the 5% uh Alva is just for those who uh mint it via the factory contract and we want to open it up and you know make it a token standard by making sure that people can code it without that element okay thank you you might have a question on the screen oh there we go I think that was the one that we just had ah okay nice yeah that's it all right then um thank you very much yeah thank you so much Dominic that was

great