Building the PerpDEX UX Layer | Andotlas & Burt, Kwenta

Transcript

ux in crypto is so bad it's just really hard to use like we did the thing we proved that you could have money on the internet and like move it around and even ship that off to a bank and like convert it into Fiat but the process of doing that like anyone who's had a metam mass transaction fail for like a meaningful amount of money is like it's a bad experience and like all the transactions and clicks you have to do to get it done so the cross chain interoperability potential is actually huge chaos Labs the leading onchain risk management firm recently launched its new flagship Oracle product Edge Edge delivers integrated High Precision risk and price data for any application with the market follow and reach out to chaos Labs on X to learn more what's up guys just want to tell you a little bit more

about fuel labs and their new ethereum L2 fuel ignition so fuel Labs is launching fuel ignition a high performance e L2 powered by their fuel VM with the launch of ignition the team is also launching phase two for their fuel points program to reward users and promote make sure to check out fuel. Network to learn more nothing said on zerox Research is a recommendation to buy or sell Securities or tokens this podcast is for informational purposes only and any views expressed by anyone on the show are solely our opinions not Financial advice pachio Ryan and our guests May hold positions in the company's funds or projects discussed what's up guys welcome back to another episode of zerox research today I'm joined by Andrew and Bert who are core contributors at quenta

thanks for joining us guys thank you thanks for having us um before we get started do you guys want to run over what you guys are building over at quenta uh sure uh Anda would you like to uh would you like to start yeah sure I think I can kick us off so quent is a lightweight exchange that uh enables users to easily access onchain Perpetual futures um we started with synthetics and have seen most of our success and growth using the synthetics protocol uh as our liquidity source for our perss and now we're starting to explore adding new liquidity resources such as perennial which is about 2 to three months out and we've just launched a case study about how that's been going if you want to check that out but we've quadrupled their

volume uh since integration and uh seen a lot of success so now we're eyeing uh gains in GMX proposals which have now passed and we're continuing to grow across the onchain ecosystem of Perpetual Futures and make onchain trading as easy as possible that's perfect and can you expand on what lightweight exchange means sure it just means that we don't have all the bulkiness of protocol for liquidity beneath us we're basically just the ux layer on top of these liquidity protocols um so our job is just to specialize in making the best user experience for trading purpose possible um with onchain tooling and we get to skip all the process of trying to figure out the liquidity mechanics as we

let the people that we're integrating with uh compete over offering the best solution perfect and I guess maybe for our listeners do you want to run over how exactly that works like you're the ux but but how do you actually integrate synthetics and perennial sure so what we do is basically um use either direct contract integration or an SDK to um populate our interface with their markets uh data Etc um and make it as easy as possible just to plug into our exchange connect your wallet and start trading and hopefully eventually um just use your email or pass key um to uh access these trading

tools deposit and start trading burps maybe I can jump in here too um and kind of give a different uh a different perspective on what the product really means right because um I'm I'm really coming from a retail trading background that's like what I do uh I sit there and I lose all my money right on on these platforms like quenta so one of the problems that uh I took to the rest of the team like Andrew over here and and really wanted solving was uh I'm using all these perps exchanges I'm using GMX I'm using gains I'm using uh synthetics through quenta um how do I easily just go pop my money in one market take it out and pop it in another without having

to have you know 16 tabs of different websites um and you know go through this hassle of bridging so what uh what the guys did for me was really bring all of these tools kind of under one package and this is uh right now we're working with the first iteration um and there are some really uh kind of cool plans in the future for how to make all of these things that if you were to go and trade uh you know five different purpose venues in order to access all these markets and all these liquidity all these different things that you would need we're just bringing them kind of all into one package and making it really easy for people to use that makes sense I um how do you so you have synthetics right now and perennial and

you're thinking of um GMX and gains how do you decide on which venues to integrate um what does the process of that look like sure so we're decentralized protocol meaning that we have a governance system so any major changes new Integrations anything that's not cosmetic um needs to go through our governance process so you have to write a kip a quenta impro proposal and essentially um have that presented to the community and we have a council which is elected by our uh stakers or our token holders um to uh make these decisions so they'll vote on The Proposal once it's been presented um and then that change is officially passed on to the core contributors to execute on

so in the case of gains and GMX both of them uh wrote up proposals uh they went through the council they were voted and accepted and passed um and now the core contributors are working through the integration process so yeah a bit bit of bureaucracy but pays off so bureaucracy is a feature not a bug I want to ask a bit about that bureaucracy because I feel like I get to talk talk to a lot of people and you either hate governance processes or you're like really into governance like futarchy everything how has taking off your quanta hat just like as a developer what has that experience been like for you like dealing with governance um I I'm sure it has its ups and its downs but

any yeah so I designed a a lot of these governance mechanics so it's definitely something that I um felt was like a good decision and I think a lot of the the small tweaks you've made have been positive but it's mostly uh come to fruition as I sort of hoped it would be which is you know after kind of studying the ecosystem and seeing what has been working um and I I originally was a core contributor at synthetics where they had their own Council and they had multiple different councils so they had like four different groups voting for different things um we just have one single Council and those Kips go through that one Council it's kind of as lightweight of a governance processes you can get

before just straight up being you know like a top down organization so it's it's I would say as close to a hybrid model of being decentralized as possible so I would say that the uh speed or friction has minimal impact aside from needing to go through the formalities so as painful as it is uh it's not that painful it's it's I think something that works hard for the community everyone feels across what's going going on and it's just good for engagement communication like a lot of the proposals I think sure they could be you know kind of just run through the core contributors we we trust that they're making good decisions and if we have to we can shut them down kind of

thing but I think it's good to just engage with the community have those discussions and it sort of just keeps everyone updated on what's Happening so curious what uh Bert's take is because he's less uh uh yeah part of the original design so I'm pretty opinionated on governance and I've uh to give a little context I par anticipated pretty hard in uh synthetics governance as well since they're our main partner and uh I've just kind of been a fan of the project for a really long time um I wanted to get involved and I think I think Andrew's view of the differences between our process and their process is is pretty good ours is a little more lightweight um I think a lot of times uh to kind of take it back and explain a little bit of what it means to have this

uh kind of council model and this hybrid model rather than a direct token holder vote um the council doesn't really have uh let's say positive power over over the core contributors right uh you can tell the core contributors what to do but it's still up to the core contributors whether or not to take that action and so you still have this fundamental control that the people who are building the protocol have because they can choose whether to build it or not right um but for the purpose of finding direction um the big question I think everybody has in their head is what do users really want so uh in my opinion the best way to find out what users really want is to bring them into the process and actually have them uh engage

in building and we've kind of pushed this further I think than anybody else in the space um at one point we had a lot of really active developers uh developing through um our our core contributor Ralph's project the uh devow so there were people actually uh putting lines of code uh in in quenta that were then reviewed by core contributors um and and so it was really this whole decentralized building process um and I think like that combined with the idea that every core contributor feels like they have kind of an equal say in governance they can they can stand up there and talk about strategy as well um it makes it feel like everybody in the community everybody working on this has ownership over the project and I think that actually brings uh quite a positive

element like why am I going to stay up until 3 in the morning uh just working my ass off on something um if it was just a top- down hierarchy and I'm just uh I have a job I'm not going to do that okay I'm going to do the minimum but if I feel like I have ownership over this thing then I'm going to go out of my way to make sure that it's a success yeah I think that makes a lot of sense and it's probably the best um defense of uh onch I find like a lot of people as they are in protocols and they work with governance sometimes they can become a bit um pessimistic about it but I agree with you I think like just giving people the chance to collaborate is prettyy it's pretty special um special is not a yeah I mean has anybody

done a project for uh years and not become pessimistic about it I can tell you every everything I've ever done in my history I could tell you why it sucked you know what I mean it's uh it's just something that happens naturally that makes sense uh is there anything that you guys would have done differently you mentioned that it's gone through a few iterations um what's something that you definitely would have done at the very beginning that was like a life Cher afterwards but you guys kind of realize it a bit late it's okay if there's nothing I would never do governance I wouldn't recommend it to anyone if you're trying to be a fast competitive product like I wouldn't do governance at all I'd find some way around it it's not like super

good for just like raw competition and just like having ownership and accountability so I think what we're seeing now with a lot of protocols is trading off elements of decentralization for just really good ux really good product and I think that our governance has been in a bit of a bubble in terms of like how it's been impacted by our decisions at like a product level but I don't think that's something that's going to happen forever I'm curious to see like how the next like year impacts uh the governance process because surely there's going to be elements of competition coming out in the next six months that we're going to need to stay on top of or not be able to keep up and

I think that I hope that governance is set up so that it can act quickly enough as it is right now to compete because I think that someone coming out with a heavily capitalized project that adds ux layer with zero governance and just makes an exceptional product is something that very well could compete head-to-head with us and do a great job so what we're doing very hard I think at this point is making sure that um we're ahead of that as much as possible and trying to uh Ensure that we have a good competitive mode for Speed um so I would just say that you know the the things that I've learned here are that we're vulnerable to a centralized competitor just running us over with raw cash speed

decision-making Etc and all we can do right now is basically build up that moat and buffer so that it's really really hard to actually attack us so I I I don't know if that's a governance problem or not but there's something there that's definitely at the back of my mind while we're like making competitive decisions Etc so yeah yeah I think uh I I think Andrew's right here um there are some downsides to this decentralized governance process it is a little bit slower and it's a little bit more difficult to find a single Vision which a lot of really successful projects whether you go to trafi defi anything have like a a Founder with a very strong Vision who's very present right so trying to take the decentralized process and recreate that sense of purpose is very very difficult

so I think um even though I'm kind of a de centralized governance Maxi um I'm going to have to come in and try to support that from the other side and figure out how do I justify um having the community so involved in the process and really like I think where we've struggled is making sure that every Community member who gets in and participates in governance um really has that incentive to carry it through and and really keep representing quenta and like keep that uh keep that as part of their core mission right so I think uh I think that's going to be a challenge is making sure that and it has been a challenge right making sure that when people get in governance um and they're participating that they really follow through um I think that's a you know been a challenge for everybody so that's

probably where I'm going to have to justify it moving forward that's fair um that centralized versus decentralized tradeoff I feel like has been very very apparent this cycle um like l2s um I think it's like like Mega E one sequencer versus well I guess all Els have it but I mean not even doing like the facade that we usually do is has been the case but yeah I think um Andrew your points as well about the kind of streamlining the console system I mean you mentioned synthetics and I think even recently they are are looking to kind of streamline down to to a single console so I find you know you deciding to go with that design prior to that decision

I mean it's very pressant um trying to attack that you know speed and and and make you know getting things done um just interesting to see that play out like that and see you know others in the market kind of go that way but to shift maybe the conversation a little bit um let's talk about maybe in terms of even from the lens of competition um what are your guys like forward-looking cross chain plans um I know we just talked about some of the venues that you're looking to add um and some a lot of that liquidity is like arbitrum for example but um are you guys looking forward to integrating you know venues across other l2s or other chains going forward and and what does that look like for you uh so we already are cross chain right so we have uh optimism right now was kind

of where we started um we've launched on base with synthetics we have synthetics V3 on base you can go use it right now uh we have arbitrum with perennial which you mentioned earlier and we have um arbitrum with synthetics coming up very very soon so we have all of those on our plate plus I believe there are plans for uh an L1 per which is uh which is some pretty exciting stuff um it'll be expensive to use but you know a lot of people maybe playing with big Capital only want to have it on L1 so that could be an interesting product um so all of these things are happening and I think uh at this point moving forward to other chains uh might not be the priority as much as just figuring out how the ux

works on the chains that we are uh on right now and so that's one of the things that the contributors been working on uh very hard is trying to figure out okay from a user perspective what kind of tools do you need to come in and you know seamlessly use uh synthetics on bass uh GMX on arbitrum perennial on arbitrum and and have this be uh something practical so I know one of the uh one of the big things that we've been doing kind of internally is trying to figure out what a markets page that's totally unified uh looks like and I think these simple things um being able to compare markets across chains being able to compare funding across chains like those types of things are the tools that you need uh to interact

with something like this and that's really where the focus is right now great answer I want to Andrew I'm curious your thoughts there as well but I I originally asked around cross chain and I wanted to tee up the concept of like what are you guys looking at from like a chain abstraction sort of Point obviously you know you're handling these venues across different chains you mentioned a few things is there anything like super critical right now that maybe you don't have that you're working towards um that you think is like the next big unlock here as you are offering you know liquidity across multiple chains and trying to make that easier for users to interact yeah so I would just say that we are actively assessing tooling to abstract as much of this away as possible in terms of like using

different chains ux and crypto is so bad it's just really hard to use like we did the thing we proved that you could have money on the internet and like move it around and even ship that off to a bank and like convert it into Fiat but the process of doing that like anyone who's had a metam mass transaction fail for like a meaningful amount of money is like it's a bad experience and like all the transactions and clicks you have to do to get it done so the cross chain interoperability potential is actually huge because I think we're abstracting a ton of those little clicks and potential fail points away um and just moving all of the like nonsense of how we did this thing and how we made it happen like away from the user like they don't

really need to know what optimism is or they don't need to know what like I don't know some of the some of the components of uh even like bridging Etc so I if we can just come up with a solution for them where it's all just magically happening like that's the dream solution so I would say it's it's arguably our highest priority is figuring out how we can like hide the little intricacies of crypto because it's it's terrible like so hopefully this gets a lot better and I think it's going to be an improvement with so many projects like actively um coming up with Solutions right now and I'm watching all of them like mostly the a lot of the bridging Solutions right now are coming up with I think very interesting things um and we actively have conversations with them um but still to be determined who's going to

win this out but constantly trying and testing these new Solutions as they come up so yeah that makes a lot of sense I think um maybe one more on the same topic is you know there's a continuously debate around designs for and particularly in per perex designs we see this where there's this conversation around whether it makes sense to launch on an existing L1 or L2 or you you know have your own app chain do you see like we we've see you know venues exploring multiple models here there has been a little bit of a trend in um some of these exchanges going to their own chains do you see that like adding a little bit of a roadblock for you guys in terms of just making this you know

cross-chain interactivity a little bit more complex if more and more of these venues kind of just go to their own chains maybe with their own their own unique infrastructure setups yeah I I think um you know I think there there are a couple different perspectives there number one uh like you said there are some advantages uh for these projects going to their own l1s I think I'm going to throw a little bit of shade here just a little bit of shade um if you're going to your own L1 and you're not using like an L2 that inherits the security of ethereum uh what are you even doing because you know you can if you wanted to launch a centralized exchange you can actually do that without launching a whole chain and and you know laring like you're

centralized you can just launch a centralized exchange and it's going to work great a lot of people have done this um and if you have a market maker great you're in good shape um if you want to actually launch a decentralized protocol um which is uh kind of robust and um and inherits the security of ethereum it's going to be a little bit different but luckily uh both optimism and arbitrum uh are working on like with the optimism super chain or uh arbitrum orbit uh you can actually launch your own a purpose-built chain um that inherits the security of ethereum and this is this is now possible so I know uh there synthetics is not using their chain uh yet for per trting they've

launched a governance chain already and um this is kind of like an interesting concept if if synthetics has their own chain uh what are they planning over there uh with this right now it's just governance in the future it could be trading or anything um but uh I think from our perspective it does make it a little more complicated because uh let's say arbitrum we have uh you know GMX gains synthetics perennial if you wanted to move margin between these different uh protocols and it's all on arbitrum it's just a single block right uh once your trade is settled uh you can just use a multi call and move your margin out of one and into the other and it's like it's like there's no difference

between them uh once people start isolating on other chains even though there might be some uh ux advantages for them it does make it a little more complicated for us uh but I think there are some really interesting Solutions uh coming up like uh socket is is actually one of the projects that's already integrated into quenta and I know socket and and a lot of these other bridging protocols and and cross-chain interoperability Protocols are trying to figure out how you reduce the time or completely eliminate the time it takes to bridge across chains um and and of course it's become very very cheap like if you're moving usdc already uh it's what $2 to move you know you can move a million dollars and and only pay two so that is is already almost where

we need it in order for this to essentially not be an issue right it's very very close and there's some some great people working on this stuff yeah I imagine with intents uh becoming more and more popular and I I assume their like costs will go down as there's more intent networks you'll just like it'll become Dirt Cheap to go from chain X to chain y or even within I know is your intense um integration live yet or is this something that you guys are working on or is this something that is coming up um it is not live yet I think um I'm I'm assuming what you might be referring to is the perennial intent system uh this is yeah this is something that they recently um that they recently

announced and I don't have too many details for you we'll have to kind of wait for perennial to release details about this but essentially the way they're going to be using intents right is to create a an extremely fast hybrid system uh where um as far as I understand their uh their amm is going to be able to work seamlessly with an order book and I think that's really uh we've seen a couple of teams kind of take this approach to solve a lot of the issues with both order books and amm um to try to combine the two and have uh an order book that provides very Dynamic liquidity you know if you're a market maker you can provide a lot of liquidity at Mark or in an instant if market conditions change take it away um and

then have all that liquidity backstopped by an amm so uh that's kind of what uh what perennial is using intense for um and I'm sure there's going to be more information pretty soon on that that makes sense I um one thing you brought up was that if you are going to be um not desies you might as well just launch a sex and this has been not that but the idea that like the sex deck um competition has been very very um favored by Sexes still what do you think is like the main struggle that perss have on chain compared to Sexes and how how close do you think we are to taking more and more volume off centralized venues yeah it's it's maybe worth

prefacing this with the fact that there is still an advantage to being on chain like it's not like centralized exchange is just outright better the whole scenario with FTX collapsing and losing users funds is impossible on chain we can't meddle with the rules of how those like trading Dynamics happen and that's why like it's still worth figuring out how to figure like how to you know execute the financial ecosystem on chain so it's still worth doing even if it's faster with centralized exchange the risk in security of doing it on chain is definitely worth it um I think the struggles are very much that the latency and just general like efficiency of being on chain is just not as strong as what um centralized exchanges have done however I think that the Innovation is

happening on chain amms are a model that didn't exist until onchain Finance happened so now we have the efficiency of an order book being married with the Innovation happening with an amm and I think now we might actually be able to eat out the the volume being produced offchain because we're doing something that's new it's taking something that I think is like going to be the new meta for pers which is this hybrid order book and pool system and do something completely competitive with it that um I think can e at the um the centralized exchange order book model order books are tried and true they work well um but there's no like weird magic of defi happening in order books so it's uh it's good that we still have the amm and it's

it's you know I'm interested to see how the uh the hybrid orderbook model really like uh offers new efficiencies in the system um so yeah that'll be interesting and two to build a little bit on what Ando said over here um he brought up FTX which of course is kind of the classic example especially in in recent memory of a time where you know when centralized exchanges go wrong um and the thing I I kind of want to point out is that this a isn't the first time this has happened with centralized exchanges and B isn't the first time that uh us as kind of the pioneers of crypto have had to explain to people why you want to go on chain I mean this goes all the way back to when I first heard

about Bitcoin trying to explain to people who didn't really get it like why don't we just use dollars still um you know and trying to figure out how to tell people why you would actually hold this in in your own wallet and what the advantages are I think uh what we're learning is that this is not something where you explain it to the public and then uh it it clicks and then you're done like this is this is something we're going to have to keep explaining for probably the the rest of the industry and be times when people decide that actually non-custodial isn't a big deal um maybe maybe you want a custodian in some cases but I think uh fundamentally what we're doing is creating a non-custodial system here so uh that is the whole point of cryp that

is what we do here um and we're going to have to keep explaining to Market participants why that's valuable and if you don't believe it's valuable then I don't know why you're here because that's like the whole point that's what it is yeah that's a great I think a great breakdown in kind of like separation there um diving into the kind of the value statements um I I guess when we when we think about the the per space in general um how like if we look across the board and and we view it um as a category how does quenta fit in um in your guys's opinions and what are some like key factors like in terms of differentiating quenta from you know the

rest of the field in the competition today yeah so quenta is a layer on top of all of the perss So eventually our idea here is that if you're trading onchain perss you're going to be doing it through quenta and we're going to be guiding you to access the best of what's available maybe not by automatically routing but presenting you with all the information you need to make sure that for the trade you're making it's going to be the best place to go execute that trade and have like multiple positions open across different exchanges and places um we want to be the ux layer on top of perss on chain like that's the whole question Vision um I think in terms of like what makes us different is that we're not trying to add our own liquidity in we're really just trying to make it so that

accessing this is as easy as possible and when users are trying to access anything on chain purps it's through Quant so yeah yeah and I think too um we're in this place with with onchain perss where uh people forget how recently it actually became possible I mean I remember synthetics V1 trying to use this uh it was I think 15 seconds for an order to settle which doesn't sound too long you know 15 seconds is is a is a time you can wait but if you're talking about price movements in 15 seconds during volatility it's absolutely possible like this isn't a product you can use and you go back further and and trying to build something like this on L1 would have

sounded absolutely ridiculous uh when when we first started using these these defi tools so right now is kind of the first time this is even possible um and I think quent's model of kind of being a a front end a pure front end is something you're going to start seeing a lot more um a lot of these different projects like uh GMX and gains of course came to us and uh and gave us a proposal um and I think that's like the start down this road that a lot of these backend Builders uh are going down where uh these projects want to be kind of a liquidity layer um that's that's what synthetics has started calling themselves that's what started calling themselves and so if you're a liquidity

layer and that's where you're focusing you're going to need people to build applications on top and uh actually even going back to like um Lyra which I'm a big fan of Lyra we actually had an integration uh with them at one point um and then they went off and and built their own uh built their own L2 um they're called deriv now but uh Lyra at one point had a proposal from coin store which was uh a centralized exchange and coin store wanted to access onchain liquidity and essentially build their own white label front end so you would have logged on to the centralized exchange coin store and if you wanted to trade options it would have used the onchain liquidity so I think that uh that didn't really pan out at the time

maybe it was a little early a little before its time but I think these are hints as to where the industry is going where you're going to have these super specialized teams um building uh application front ends you see this a little bit with wallet providers um and we're really just kind of kind of at the at the Forefront of that chaos Labs the leading onchain risk management firm recently launched its new flagship Oracle product Edge Edge delivers integrated High Precision risk and price data for any application with the market after 2 months of securing Jupiter Edge has already secured 30 billion in volume and more than 60% of all Salon of per volume EDG is comprised of three components High Precision price data with an integrated risk engine automated delivery of realtime parameter adjustments on chain and secure delivery of custom data points via zero knowledge

proofs follow and reach out to chaos Labs on X to learn more thanks again to chaos labs for sponsoring today's episode what's up guys fuel ignition is finally here fuel ignition is a high performance L2 solution that aims to solve both state sustainability and performance execution as an eoll up ignition is built upon the fuel VM and a utxo based asset Centric architecture with e grade security make sure to check out the growing fuel ecosystem by participating in phase two of the fuel points program today visit fuel. Network to learn more historically perss have been very competitive as a space um we haven't really seen like a single dominant winner kind of take over the the landscape as we've seen maybe other categories um although most thought it

would so I think one of the big things that we've seen is you know as incentive programs and new exchange venues have popped up people have kind of you know Traders and and users like looking to chase aird drops and and new tokens they've kind of jumped around um and that that liquidity has kind of shifted across the space over time do you see this like continuing to play out or will you know at some point that sort of dies off the existing winners kind of continue to grow from there um does it does it matter for you as as you know trying to be that front end layer anyway what are your thoughts um definitely it's going to continue to grow and change uh and I think I think as I kind of pointed out

before this her space is all very very new and a lot of the stuff we're talking about you know we we mentioned earlier the hybrid model uh where you would have an amm back stopping an order book um this kind of stuff is is still being built out and I think that's what's exciting about the per space is that so much of it is still just hypothetical at this point we haven't really seen it in action so I think uh that is what's leading to a lot of these shifts in popularity um incentives of course have have something to do with it you can get people over to try your exchange using incentives you can't get them to stay with incentives because eventually these things run out you have to build a good product and so we've seen you know at one point it was uh dydx really at the

at the Forefront um and dydx had great ux at the time uh GMX had the deepest liquidity you could trade more eth than ever before and so that's why you saw guys like sefue taking these massive positions on chain he did the same thing with um uh with synthetics and was actually splitting orders so you could see even the liquidity there wasn't really sufficient for what a a lot of these big players uh needed and then you know you have now hyper liquid kind of coming in and uh and using a more kind of a centralized approach with their own L1 but really delivering liquidity uh they have great Market maker backing and Speed and Performance and a lot of different assets that you can trade so I

think that's why you've seen this back and forth is because as the herp space is being built um we're just reaching New Heights and really that next rung is there for anybody to take uh whoever can come in and take the advantages of you know the GMX and synthetics model and the hyper liquid model and kind of combine them um you're going to be able to be king for a while because that just hasn't really been reached yet yeah can I add the I think the money games probably won't go away like some sort of incentive farming like I think in general that's just a component of crypto that's going to stay permanently is I think that's how we're going to get like the masses in here is just there going to be so much value add from like weird incentive schemes that it probably

won't make sense to just be in a bank because it's like opportunity cost at that point but I do think that there's going to be an element of like ah the it's harder and harder to just like come out and start with like a purpose exchange now like you it's a Red Sea at this point like even pitching investors and saying hey I have this new idea for a purpose exchange like they're going to groan you know what I mean so you better have something pretty special to tell them um um so it needs to be something that's like completely Innovative you have to have some kind of Advantage you have to probably be pretty big and well funded to like come in and be the next you know I I think dydx has kind of been usurped a little bit right now by hyper liquid like to be the next

hyper liquid now like I mean it's gonna take some magic so definitely is becoming a harder harder game to play so yeah I think there is a bit of um maybe a curve happening where it's not like a trillion projects are going to be launching you might just see like a couple cherry picking here and there um I I like the idea of how quenta can like capture that and like help people access that easily but I also feel that we can only like take on so much addressable market so I hope that it does kind of consolidate but I think it's not going to stop for sure yeah we have to we have to really see all these Trends coming because even though we're not providing the liquidity and and any of our partners can be the most successful we have to be able to identify the the

trends in the space because we can't go uh putting a bunch of work into something that's kind of already a failed project right like we can't go working with a partner that can't deliver uh kind of the precipice of the space so that's kind of where uh where our our bread is buttered so to speak this is going to be a slight tangent but I want to ask about it because B you mentioned Trends um and you mentioned that you guys integrated Lyra at some point is do you have any plans to integrate um options again um if not is it because we've just failed to find pmf um and if that's the case why do you think that is it's like free questions back to back but curious what your

thoughts all right um I'm going to say yes we're going to integrate options again uh not because it's really on the table but because I just really want to trade options um I I think the one thing to put in perspective here is that options in trafi for crypto uh that's probably where the deepest liquidity is going to pop up and it's very difficult to hedge these things without uh like a lot of different a lot of different very liquid markets so I think uh eth options in crypto are going to eventually unlock uh more liquidity for eth options in in defi as it becomes much much easier to hedge so I don't think it's necessarily

that like product Market fit has failed I think it's just very very difficult to attract a lot of liquidity and when I go and trade options if I see liquidity is really really low it's just not a useful product right even if the product should be useful uh it's not going to be and I can't really trade it so um that that's kind of my perspective on the matter but I think uh I think derivatives are going to continue to be interesting I think if you think it's going to stop here um you might be mistaken I'm I'm just interested in per I don't don't have any plans to introduce options and I don't want to break berd's heart but there's already a lot going on just in pers like as you said perss is new there's a lot of innovation just there I think options

are something that North Americans have used to get leverage uh and that's why it's so popular and it's we haven't really had something like perose to just like clean way to like get leverage um so I'm curious to see if people care that much about like Risk Management or if they just want like super easy leverage which is my hunch so we'll see but it's definitely not at the top of the docket like it's it's uh something I think we're going to be monitoring closely for fit Etc but I think pers has a lot to give us still yeah Fair points from both of you guys I think um to Shi maybe shift back from the tangent um we were talking incentive programs um for for purose protocols um not that it's necessarily

directly an you know an incentive program but I do have maybe to preface this question I do have a little bit of a thesis that um I think we'll continue to see you know strong resilient kind of apps and and protocols within this space transition into using points programs that mirror what we see in traditional businesses you know Airlines points programs credit card you know cash back things like that um so to kind of line that up for you guys you do have a new quenta does have a new points system um it seem just from my read it seems like it's a little bit of like um battle pass season pass kind of design similar to maybe like a gaming um gamified sort of design where you know you compete on like a season basis dur points and then get some rewards for it um was there any

like clear like inspiration for it um and I guess so I I don't think it's been very long maybe a month or so have we seen positive results so far just from the implementation there um yeah I think uh so the inspiration here was honestly our original uh incentive program uh we had a quenta incentive program um and and this serves a couple of purposes not only is it a great incentive but if you're a decentralized uh protocol and you need decentralized governance you have to distribute that token somehow like we have to figure out who has skin in the game how to measure that and and then how to provide them with the ability to govern um so it's not just about like free tokens right it's it's

actually solving a a fundamental problem for the organization um but what we were doing is doing this kind of calculated uh or this complicated calculation on the back end this is similar to what D dydx was doing uh for their token distribution program um and it was a little bit unclear to users exactly how this calculation was happening uh exactly how much rewards power they had so I said you know what let's just take this whole thing and actually display it to the user we were using something called reward score on the back end and now essentially points are there's your reward score um on a separate page where you can view it and with a couple

gamified aspects like you can actually rise the ranks and and uh increase your reward score relative to other users um so you know a lot of people have told me like why are you you guys doing points the meta's dead which let me tell you it's not dead uh points meta in in games is never over it's like Timeless right so um I think people just need to get used to the idea that having a measurement of your participation uh in in the application or the Dow isn't going to go away um so exactly what benefits this confers to users is something we're keeping uh a little bit close to our chest at this point um and and I think that you know one of the features is to see

who's motivated by it we've definitely seen a few people very excited about this um I think a lot of people are really waiting to find out what the benefits are um and I have some pretty interesting ideas there so I'm I'm kind of excited to you know show this to everybody um we have like in a in our perennial proposal um that we made to the arbitrum Dow the The Proposal along with perennial that we made uh for these arbitrum tokens we actually did already commit um some Quant tokens to this program uh through that proposal so whether or not this is going to be more expansive um I don't really want to let on but uh it it's kind of obvious what's happening here right is that like what we're trying to do is measure

participation um and then there will be a few more fun ways like gamified ways that you can that you can participate or or spend your points or or kind of uh you know use them for uh for some kind of game Within the game right and and the end result is uh your participation in the protocol is going to be rewarded yeah I think that's great I you know we've seen not to name any names but we've seen you know some protocols start to kind of experiment with this type of design um so I think it's interesting to see you guys take this same path and um like I said you know traditional you know game companies doing battle passes season passes things like that it's it's a way for players to come back and kind of keep contributing and get some

benefit out of it so um ultimately I mean I'm personally a fan of kind of this approach in point systems um the direction that they're headed so it's good to see that yeah if I had my way there would be a whole game around it already um I have to kind of compete for uh for Dev resources here I have to claw my my devs uh in my direction to help this out but yeah I've taken uh I I have some ideas coming up um I've taken a lot of inspiration from like trading card games and and these more just things you play for fun right that have absolutely nothing to do with Defi and so I really want to bring this into the points program uh and just make it something that is is ongoing keeps running and it's just something to keep people

engaged and measure your participation so uh we'll find more ways to do that soon and as well as like you know we have actually a uh a a bonus points mission right now so essentially if you've traded a million or more in volume on uh GMX gains hyper liquid or a previous uh quenta deploy you can come in and you actually get double points for your first uh I believe it's about 10,000 in volume um and this is just like this is just something to reward people who are already active uh make sure it's not cable right you have to have some kind of onchain history for coming in and and trying the new version of quenta maybe you've never been there

maybe you haven't been there in a little while you can come in and try the new version of quenta and you're going to get extra rewarded for it so that's a little hint as to like how we might use this in the future to really Target specific users with this positive history on chain perfect I um maybe take it I guess more of an overview what are um on the strategy side what are some things that you guys did that you thought was very very good for um like go to market to get liquidity and volume on quenta um and what are some things that you definitely would have done differently that you did kind of uh in not the most efficient way it's okay if there's nothing bad I'll start with

um I think adding perennial recently was a really tough decision because we've been with synthetics for so long we've had tremendous success with synthetics like we've done 60 billion in volume just with synthetics so I think it was a sort of strange decision at the time to decide to like expand beyond that um but what we're seeing now is it open doors to new communities new Traders new liquidity sources um and it's really just just like expanded the horizons of what Quin can achieve so it was at the time a tough decision and it felt to me as someone who was originally coming from synthetics very much in OG like a counterintuitive decision um I felt that there was a level of commitment needed

but now I think what we've done is actually we've really bought our independence at this point and have a lot of Pathways that we can go down new uh possibilities for us so I think that's probably one of the most positive things that we've done um and one of the most negative things or something that we could have done better probably that I think I just would have done it sooner like I think just expanding and being more committed to just being a ux layer I think we weren't sure if we wanted to like add our own liquidity system do our own unique derivatives to like complement synthetics for a long time I think we've always just been good at executing on ux like just like coming up with features doing what Traders want I

really do think we have one of the most competitive uxs and just all of defi we probably should have just tripled down on that like and just done that from the get-go once we saw that we were getting traction able to like provide to uh per Traders like we should have just been making sure that we always had the best offering no matter who it was with and continued to find incentives programs things that were interesting for people and experiment with that because that's really our bread and butter that's what we're like really good at doing I think so yeah I would have just probably had conviction quicker that we would have um been a ux layer and just you know instead of trying to find uh ways to provide value etc for our existing Partnerships just experiment early and quick so yeah yeah and uh bring bringing

this back to our original discussion about decentralized governance too I think um I I think we have this kind of push and pull right where we've certainly seen success from experimenting with perennial um that's also probably one of our biggest drawbacks is that we are so willing to experiment so it's uh it's led to a lot of Direction changes and it can be kind of hard to see uh exactly where the path leads um so I think our you know it it's been kind of the same answer here right our our biggest uh success and our biggest failures have both been just being so willing to try uh something new and kind of and kind of find that

product Market fit and I think moving forward the challenge is going to be like okay taking those learnings uh figuring out that yeah we can we can go and um build this kind of new product and and really have this uh focus of being a purpose Marketplace and how do we take this kind of wide focus and then narrow it down and figure out how we can really make the most impact with what we're doing day one day two right yeah that makes sense um to wrap it up what is I usually struggle asking this but I want to be very clear what are you guys specifically excited about not like what's coming up with quen but what are you guys specifically excited about that is coming up with quenta and um no

that's really it what what is like your dream and ambition for the next 6 to 12 months is the time uh period so what I'm excited about uh I mentioned a little bit earlier uh perennials intent system and kind of moving toward a hybrid uh a hybrid order book amm system synthetics also has already proposal live for an order book and so they're doing something very similar I know a lot more about how the uh the synthetic system works where actually what what will be able to do is kind of hot swap in this order book to the existing amm system that's already running we won't have to deprecate B3 or anything like this um it's actually just adding the order book

as another settlement uh a settlement strategy so you could even enter through the order book and exit through the amm um and and this type of innovation is something that's going to be brought to quenta first so working with these partners and really trying to figure out how you take this really interesting uh backend design um that's unlocking you know new more Dynamic liquidity and figuring out how to give users the best experience and make this kind of uh intuitive for users that's really what I'm most excited about because I really want to use these products and where am I going to do that um I'm going to have to do that on quenta like we're going to be the first to have this uh with perennial and synthetics so pretty excited to see those things come to

fruition um there is a referendum going on right now with synthetics it just passed it was successful and what that's going to do is basically create a whole new uh unified system where it's just one Council uh bringing back some of the core OG people that really made synthetic special like Kane he'll be an adviser to it um and some of the earliest investors I think I'm really excited to see the potential of what that can do for the synthetics and overall pers ecosystem as they have been historically exceptional at innovating and doing things that no one's done before they're good at pioneering so I think that as excited as I am about bringing in new Integrations and

doing what we can to maximize the experience for our users I also feel excited about that defi OG like Renaissance happening right now and I think I'm I'm here for it I think want to be able to support that and however that happens and I think that we already have a lot of smart people we don't really need more people to come in and launch shitcoins and have low liquidity and for people to struggle like synthetics has the liquidity it has the Innovation it has the team and the momentum I think I'm mostly excited about taking what's already working and bringing it back up to the top um so yeah probably a bullish bullish synthetics take but definitely something I want to uh to see come to fruition and really like do it justice

because yeah it's it could go anyway but yeah I'm I'm optimistic perfect both very very good answers and that I appreciate that you guys are actually giving me what you guys are excited about and not something like oh um where can our listeners find out more about quenta where do you want them to go first um to engage with quenta um apart from the front end yeah apart apart from quenta itself uh we're on I I mean our Discord is where we're most active so you can find me in there probably 29 hours a day um if you use Discord please come in come say hi we'll

answer all your questions we'll uh listen to your trading ideas whatever you want um if you want to just keep up with news uh we have um of course our Twitter where we post anything important and just occasional posting uh we have our blog which you can find from the quenta front end but you can also get there from blog. quenta doio right now um and uh and yeah we're also you know we're on debank we're on warcast we're on pretty much any social media platform uh you can think of maybe not quite as active there as as our Discord we have a telegram uh but you know whatever you prefer uh we'll try to post everything that's very very important there and if you want to talk to me just slide into my

DMs fantastic Danny do you have anything you want to say or shall I wrap it up um Bert is in the trenches in Discord and the listen ERS should be too so yeah go check them out fantastic guys thank you so much for coming on thank you it was a great time [Music]