Can Decentralized Social Scale? | Stani Kulecov (Lens, Aave)

Transcript

every time you peel back another layer you just end up figuring out that this thing is again a master class in mechanism design all right everyone welcome back to another episode of zero X research the show was made possible thanks to our fantastic sponsor the atom accelerator it has literally never been easier or more attractive to building the cosmos ecosystem so if you're a contributor looking for Grants between ten thousand dollars and one million dollars check out Adam accelerator.com online or look at the show notes today is May 22nd and we have an awesome interview lined up with stani the founder of Ave and lens he is a true crypto OG so getting his perspective on the current state of defy and where Ave and lines are at was super

exciting but as always before that we are going to hop into a little hot seat cool throne with Ren and effort capital from the blockworks research team Ren who you got in the house here cool Throne I got coinbase in The Crucible on this week I know I've sort of talked about that in the last few years episodes ago but society different today last Thursday coinbase one sort of announced the new I'm sorry coinbase announcer new coinbase one program it's basically a subscription pen 5 29.99 a month and with that subscription you get zero trading fees you get a lower staking take rate for cardano Adams Solana and xcz you get 24 7 dedicated Account Support you also get a discount

for permissionless so if you're going maybe subscribe for coinbase one for what I think is a 20 discount um importantly you also get a 10 off lemonade which is kind of like an AI insurance underwriter so to say um I think it's an interesting Trend right so because if you're sort of seeing a progression of web tube everything has eventually transitioned to a subscription model you know YouTube premium Netflix Spotify Apple music like everything transfer subscription sooner or later and it'll be interesting to see whether that trend pays out starting with coinbase um and I think there's a few other

interesting things that I'd like to talk about the first is that there's probably a large amount of retail users which don't generate a huge amount of revenue for the exchange um so at a 40 bips maker weight it will take roughly eight thousand dollars in monthly volume to generate thirty dollars in fees for coinbase and I would guess the bottom of the power like retail Traders don't generate 8 000 a monthly trading value and that 29.99 coinbase one subscription May generate a lot more Revenue for coinbase and I think another interesting thing is that they included lemonade which is like nothing to do with crypto it's just like a lifestyle like Insurance product right so is it

possible that coinbase is able to onboard more users in the crypto by offering more sort of these lifestyle perks I don't know you get a monthly free door Dash code you get 20 off Uber and maybe I'll sort of like giving the boot case here but for example coinbase May work together with these companies that are onboarding into coinbase one subscriptions and get them to use coinbase Commerce which is their version of like PayPal or Visa or sort of like their payment system that Merchants can use and I just thought it's a interesting move probably yeah and origin one given the current market conditions and how transaction fees and the creating value haven't been the greatest and they don't look so great

for Q2 so far but would love to hear like what you guys think of it I can already hear effort capital in the back of my head telling me how uh not Amazon but coinbase rather is taking over the world and it's funny that I accidentally said Amazon there but uh yeah it seems like an interesting model I like your comparisons to the kind of how the uh the web 2 world has become very subscription based and it's interesting to see the lifestyle Edition there I don't know effort do you have a more interesting take on why they're kind of potentially moving into that uh lifestyle move I mean if you think about it the you know coinbase fundamentally thinks that cryptocurrencies can transform the entire financial sector create new Financial products

um and innovate on financial products that haven't seen innovation in decades right like lemonade it sounds silly I actually really like the coinbase Commerce angle that you're going with right I honestly didn't even really think about that but I mean Insurance we've seen D5 protocols uh like Nexus neutral which I think gets [ __ ] on in in on crypto Twitter for like really not being that good of a product really not mailing out crypto protocols when they needed when they're needed as like their their insurance offering fighting insurance is a is an area of Finance um in general that like needs an overhaul my mother actually is like in insurance underwriter it's like terrible it's it doesn't actually pay out users when there's like floods like flood insurance doesn't even work properly

there's not proper risk uh risk Frameworks I think that probably uh calculate risk or quantify risk and maybe like eventually coinbase decides to create like a lifestyle Financial product like could you imagine coinbase Insurance leveraging D5 protocols uh and leveraging some type of decentralized identity Solution on top of that like there's I think there's other product offerings that just by grabbing in the user leveraging coinbase one where it gets entire lifestyle package on top of the other you know use cases like their uh zero fee trading and whatnot on their exchange platform they're trying to create like a stickier ecosystem um kind of like what Apple did with you know the their phone and their App Store

like once you yeah once you kind of grab onto the customer you offer them other products and services to kind of keep them within this ecosystem and arguably Apple has like the best ecosystem in All Tech you can obviously say the same thing about like Amazon and uh apple as well I'm sorry Amazon and Facebook as well or meta uh but I think this is coinbase trying to figure out other ways to Branch out their revenue stream and keep their customer base sticky especially in a bear Market when trading volumes are like the lowest we've seen in literally like 2019 since 2019 in Summit since I believe um I like this move I mean it's more recurring Revenue it's uh decentralizing or or Distributing their their different revenue streams out there they're the Amazon web three good point that yeah I

like the point you made effort in regards to just smoothing out the revenue I think that's ultimately the story here I think they just want more predictable mrr in the in the long run obviously crypto is pretty volatile as is so they probably want to smooth that out as best they can and to be honest it makes a ton of sense for a ton of people like if you if you do fifteen thousand dollars of volume on coinbase like for thirty dollars a month in zero fees like you're probably out positive on that deal and like you would be sure to redirect your you know trading volume on coinbase because you have that subscription so ultimately it makes a stickier customer base so I like to apply it for sure I think one thing that I find interesting is that it doesn't lower the take rate for each staking

I mean coinbase has the highest takeaway for you seeking out of all staking service provider whether that's like a centralized exchange or a liquid sticky protocol understands that 25 today I'm not sure how sticky coinbase things they're like use taker customers are but I would bet not that sticky especially in the long term and as these liquid sticking protocols become like more battle tested you wouldn't really settle for a 25 take rate when a 10 take rate exits out there and if I'm not around Finance also has a VIP program where if you're part of that VIP program you have like an even lower take rate than what they're offering normally um and that's kind of shown in the data

right ever since the federal upgrade the amount of if that's stake with coinbase has decreased versus all the other liquid sticking providers which have gone up by like 10 20 30 I don't know man I might I might take the other side of this one because I I agree with you the data definitely shows exactly what you mentioned um but I think there's a very specific reason for that and the people in crypto right now are all tech savvy rational investors that want to maximize their profit but the next wave of users I don't think will will classify as that and I very much so expect people to pile into uh the coinbase app mint CBE through the app and hold CBE and like

fully thinking that they're earning the native staking yield and even if they're aware there's a 25 fee they'll be totally okay with that because of the ease of access of CBE and so I think that we're going to see this separation of investor preferences between ease of access which coinbase absolutely dominates in a total fee revenue or fee maximization which will be something like maybe a two token model like fraxieth or other smaller providers that you kind of have to go a little further out on the risk curve for or decentralization like something like a rocket pool or quite frankly even stake teeth so um you know we see these there's just going to be a distribution of preferences but I really do think that the next wave of users are just going to favor the ease of access piece so kind

of my two cents on the matter yeah Sam who you got in the hot Cedar culture on this week so mine might be a little bit controversial I'm not sure depending upon what people's opinion is on the matter but I think everyone by now probably knows there is a Lido uh draft proposal on the Forum basically um saying that we should return protocol revenue or at least a portion of I think it was 30 to 50 percent of the actual um take rate to the Dow treasury on the Forum last week and there is some suspicious timing with a couple tweets from notable figures in the industry one being Andrew Kang and the other being Hal press uh Andrew actually tweeted about an ldo proposal an hour before there was any proposal live and then four or five minutes later Hal press

started tweeting about the proposal so maybe he has a forum post notifications on and just saw it really fast or someone texted him and said hey there's a new proposal up and uh the account that made the post was created that day and it was only live for like eight hours before making the proposal so she just some sketchy uh sketchy things going on in governance land feels like kind of a an attempt to get a last little bit of exit liquidity to sell into for people with big bags of LDL looking to exit their position so not saying that's exactly what happened but it definitely doesn't look good and it was enough to Warrant a hot seat uh in my view so not sure if you guys have any opinions on that or if you guys have any thoughts in general about the proposal

that we saw yeah it definitely seems like some uh some Peak bear market [ __ ] and you know no liquidity quick Forum post get a pump get out of the asset I mean I don't know it's tough to say if that was actually what happened you know to be fully transparent here you know we all have uh governance tractors on I get an email a second there's a a a forum Post in a series of different Assets in their governance form so it's possible it's possible of course tweeting before the thing happens that that of course isn't possible so I don't know if maybe it was referencing a different proposal hard to say but uh definitely a little sketchy you know and the better mentality to take in this space I've kind of found is

if it can be manipulated it will be manipulated that's like kind of how I view a lot of the active address activity we tend to see you know these crazy pumps and active addresses on super cheap chains like okay so it's very easy to increase the number of daily active addresses I don't know just kind of like a general framework I have when when assessing certain things in the space and I think this kind of falls into that category I mean maybe alpress is using gov Hub our our new governance act Creator blockers research a little silent chill right there uh no I I think it's deservedly so to be on the hot seat like I I don't think it's just a coincidence um it might not be the specifically the two people that you mentioned Sam uh we don't know exactly you know the the

exact actions that were taking place but all we know is a random account went on Toledo Forum that was created seven hours before the proposal it was even made so it wasn't even by someone that's known to the Lido community that actually has some Cloud can actually get a proposal like that past just some random account posted this how press just so happened so see it within four minutes maybe using gov Hub that's great if he is uh you know but our product is great and we actually were talking about uh that light up proposal like three minutes before like the moment that it came in I think red you saw it like within a minute of the posting so I'm not exactly sure how you saw it probably go up but uh really cool that really cool that we were able to catch on

discuss it ourselves but um it's just it's nefarious activities however you see it you could tell that the person that made the proposal doesn't actually really know much about Lido because they were saying that the Dow itself had 17 and a half years of Runway with which took into account the native token in a treasury it was just it was a really bad proposal overall um it didn't make it doesn't make sense today for lydo to pass Revenue back to their token holders um it was the poor proposal overall and overall like the moment it got posted and got announced on Twitter it was the talk of the psych of the market in the local local high and um whoever posted it found their engineered ex liquidity I think one thing I think about is that when I first found out about the shenanigans I was

like okay yeah that seems like kind of scammy why didn't I thought about it a bit more like houses different from like one of those big chat 5 hedge funds that specialize in shorting stocks and then releasing like a hit piece about how like some companies bucks are completely messed up like it feels kind of similar you know like you accumulated position whether that's long or short and then you've released like some information obviously in the case of like a short fund with the intention of manipulating the stock price or having some effect on the stock price and then using that as exit Equity chances are and I clarify they probably have like a slightly longer term outlook on a kind of short the stock rather than

the style case where I just pumped and dumped in like two hours but that was just an interesting comparison that I thought of that is interesting and I think that's a fair comparison to make I guess just with the one caveat being like you know the Lido one is actually trying to change fundamentally how the the token accrues value whereas like the the example of like a inequity research shop that's shorting I guess they're kind of evaluating facts and not changing the actual structure of the company but I think it's a fair comparison to make and and something I haven't uh hadn't thought about but we did actually Dan and I hopped on bell curve for a Roundup this week so if you're more interested to hear about the whole idea situation in depth you guys can check that one out on uh apple apple

or Spotify but effort I'll kick it over to you for your hot seat or cool Throne yeah all right Hot Seat today I'm stepping um the sneaker mft application that was like pretty big heading into like the end of this past full cycle uh so they announced this morning that they integrated Apple pay into their uh their App Store uh application and it said the users will not need a crypto wall to purchase step into the grand FTS uh instead of needing a crypto wallet to um I guess deposit usdc into to buy a sneaker nft you're actually able to have a pay to buy something called spark credits and then 10 spark credits equals one usdc uh and then I guess you use these spark credits uh and I'm assuming

I haven't used the app yet to be fully honest but I'm guessing you sign in using like Google or have a web 2 identification system and you are able to buy um your sneaker nfts and it's like attached to that webto account um which I think in general is a cool Innovation I'm not saying that it's not but the reason why it's on they're on the hot seat today is because they use things like this in their Twitter thread we think Apple for their continued support for step in since they're launch in 2021 they called it a Monumental milestone Stefan has like 40 daily active users Apple doesn't probably even know what Steppin is all stuff it did was like use their Apple pay SDK to like and got a payment provider to actually accept that

uh so like apple didn't support Stephen Apple pay nobody cares about step and sneaker nfts and their 40 active users like this is literally the this is like a protocol in 2017 2018 and as recently as like Avalanche earlier this year who I also put on the hot feed for a very similar reason saying that they have an AWS is their partner it's like no just because AWS is running nodes or made it easy to do like one click node setup of your layer one blockchain that doesn't mean AWS partnered with you they're just providing a service because they're in the business of making money like there's no way step-in was supported by Apple Apple doesn't know who stepping is like I'm just sick of protocols especially in a bear Market I'm just

saying the protocols are trying to use like again engineered exit liquidity because I guarantee you the moment this came out some people that were in the know probably dump their tokens um yeah so that's why it happens on the hot seat regardless of it I think this is where crypto has to go to though it has to be like we got to attract the way the crypto wallet I think applications will need to have built-in wallets so you don't require someone to download an additional application like coinbase or metamask uh I like where this is going but I'm just like over this space hyping things that aren't Partnerships I Echo that sentiment there on that last bit but I'm curious like what does this look like on the on-chain side does anybody know so if you like log into the app and have some control

based on your username and password over some assets that are on chain I'm imagining that there's just like uh one a wallet on chain that like holds all these assets and then some database off chain that kind of maps username and password to nft um that's my guess does anybody know if that's how it works I'm actually not too sure how it works under the hood but I'd imagine it's exactly that with like the on chain you know information actually serving as kind of like the escrow account for all of the users and I'd imagine you'd be able to send these nfts to like a you know a separate UA like that you actually control off or on chain so that's how I guess but I don't know I I strongly agree though effort

like these Partnerships are pretty exhausting and they're really not Partnerships at all so I was actually trying to think of like you know some pros on this and I guess just at the end of the day like you need to make sure that there's people willing to spend more money you know in the app than people who expect to just extract money out and that's not what we've seen from step into date and I find it hard to believe that people are gonna you know want to spend thousands of dollars on a pair of sneakers just to extract a few dollars a day and then also reinvest all those profits into a new pair of digital sneakers like that seems a little far-fetched like it feels more like a the means of the end is to to make money so not too bullish stepping but also

think it's cool that they're trying to go mainstream with the Apple integration I think one photo for me at least over the past few months is that there's been a lot of developments in the mobile world for crypto right first unisop got their wallet approved and then I think actually Infinity also got approved on the App Store and now step in and I think there's like a decent amount of protocols for the next big upgrade dydx for example for V4 they're going to build out a full-fledged IOS and Android app and it seems like kryptos really trying to make that push into Mobile which at the end of the day is what I feel the majority of people will access or at least interactive crypto on not like a laptop or a desktop and I think another interesting thing about Stefan

also a food streamer I didn't partake and stuff and in the blue Market but step in especially like buying that spark credits seems very pay to it and pay to win is like a huge category in traditional gaming that makes a lot of money and is actually sustainable for the game developers rather than a play to earn which is kind of like what we saw during the Brew Market between actually infinity and all of these other games that just continuously issued all of the like native tokens and they got dumped into the ground once the market kind of died out but pay to win is a lot more sustainable of a business model and I would love to see more games or sort of more like protocols like step in integrate that into the app using like

new developments such as like integrating with Apple pay or Logic on mobile if you take the step in piece out of it how do you guys feel about this like semi-on-chain reality that they're like augmenting for their users you know like you still have this web 2 feel but in reality like you are transacting on chain just like through a proxy is that a good thing like is it I guess is that a good thing is that bringing people on chain that that's to me right now like this industry just needs to get people on chain when they don't even need to be on chain or they don't know that they're on train I should say so like this web 2.5 feel I think we're just gonna it's a we're gradually gonna get there when there's better infrastructure when there's better uh when signing in with ethereum where

everyone in the world has like an ANS or something we'll get there it's gonna probably take five to ten years plus um but I think this is a good thing so like I don't mean to put them on the hot seat for like I do think there's some Innovation here and I do think this is like the right way uh the space needs ahead in the future as in the short to mid term um so I I like that and I think that's really all that matters um it's just getting more people on chain interacting feeling more comfortable with using a decentralized application whether or not they know it's decentralized or not like ultimately like us nerds care that it's decentralized we care about this cool animation in Tech but the average user even in 10 years even if crypto is mainstream and managing billions and

trillions of dollars like most average people still won't even know and that's beautiful though like it they shouldn't have to know it should just work and feel the exact same way as web2 effort do you happen to know if these spark credits are like more like fortnite's V bucks and that they're not like redeemable once you buy them or an erc20 type token like like once you buy them with dollars like is that pretty much just that's what they are you have to buy sneakers with them in order to redeem them or is there like a way out of those because that would be interesting because like I know gift card Industries like make a [ __ ] ton of money just because people leave a couple dollars on every card and then you've got a million people with a card and it adds up pretty quick so that'd be kind

of interesting yeah in their medium I I honestly don't know the answers that like in their medium posts they don't say whether or not it's an erc20 they just keep calling them spark credits and that there's the smallest unit of smart smart credits is one so that just like thinking about it like every other erc20 out there pretty much even go with like small denomination as possible and send that wallet wallet the fact that they're saying like the smallest denomination one the client credits are not saying it's related to erc20 I'm assuming that it's not redeemable like or you can't transfer that to other users yeah that that makes sense that's what I I would probably expect too uh anyways Dan who you got in the hot Cedar cool Throne drum roll please to no one's surprise curve the Llama

lending protocol and CRV USD stablecoin is a master class in mechanism Design This thing is absolutely beautiful um I'm not prepared to say it's Flawless because there are a ton of parameters that definitely need to be optimized as times go time goes on but the early testing looks pretty damn good I mean right now there's only one listed collateral it's state facts Heath um and that's the yield accruing version of frax's liquid staking token and it launched with a 10 million dollar uh debt ceiling it's currently at just over 7 million in less than a week of since launching so we've already seen it in an initial pretty good onslaught of demand but the key Innovation really with the

with the lending protocol is around the liquidation mechanism so we think about maker Dow compound Ave our largest D5 lending protocols today they all use what are called hard liquidations to protect the protocol's solvency and what a hard liquidation is is at a specific Health factor which is like a modified version of the loan to value ratio the loan becomes under collateralized at that point the collateral is auctioned off or sold off for the debt asset and the asset or the debt is repaid on behalf of the borrower so the borrower actually loses their collateral they only are only left with the open loan that they have but that is actually closed out by an Arbitrage or

an Mev bot on their behalf and what this results in is the protocol has you know the protocol stays solvent and we've seen Hardware liquidations are very effective at doing this but it leaves the the borrower without their collateral and so curve kind of set out to improve this this exact piece and so they created what is called a soft liquidation soft liquidation method and basically what that does is instead of having that one critical number where your loan becomes under collateralized and you get hard liquidated there's actually a range of liquidation so it's like over this one period so instead of let's say you know your loan was liquidated at an eighth price of sixteen hundred dollars now instead of hitting 1600 and being screwed at like 60

between 1650 and 1700 your collateral gets slowly uh shifted out of the collateral asset and into a stable coin so therefore when the price moves below the liquidation range you're fully in stable coins and out of the volatile collateral asset and that debt your debt is always less than the amount of stable coins that is now your collateral so you're always like this design basically keeps you in that over collateralized State um and so there's a couple key unlocks here so first of all as the price of collateral is 5 falling you're actually buying stable coins and selling eth which is pretty Contra uh you know the

opposite of a traditional amm which would be the exact opposite of that scenario and so it gives you this ability to protect boiler collateral and that's really the big unlock here is you can not have to worry about a sharp downswing at Price completely wrecking you um but there are trade-offs like there's no Free Run free lunch and defy and the trade-off here is that yes you save collateral but on the way back up you actually regain your collateral and as you're regaining collateral instead of regaining a hundred percent you actually lose a little bit that little bit of collateral is essentially paid to the arbitrageurs for arbing or off your transactions and so as the price recovers you actually gain your collateral back so not only

does it protect you from being full liquidated but if the price fully recovers above your original uh investment price or above the upper bound of your liquidation range I should say you get the ability to withdraw the entirety of your collateral minus a small portion so that small portion today uh you know we're still actively testing this in production and uh protocol founder Michael eggerov actually has a million dollar a little over a million dollar loan out and he's been in like took out an insanely dgn loan for the sake of testing the thing um so that's a very Chad move I gotta say but it's an 89 LTV loan with with a range of 10 bands so a super long range it's a maximum range length and a very

very high LTV load so it's going to get liquidated very soon right um and over about four to five days of being in soft liquidation so like it's loan actively being arbed between collateral and stablecoin it only lost a little over one percent of his collateral so that when he when it recovers he would get 99 of his collateral back and never had to worry about hard liquidation that is a huge unlock for defy in that like it's a little early to tell and get all excited about this but it's hard not to think that this will be the new standard for how D5 loans get taken out it just is a better user experience and there's a couple there's like a lot of different ways to take this um and I know the uh the guys here are probably super tired

about hearing me talk about this considering uh we have a report launching on May 26th that goes over this so I've been doing a D5 deep dive on it for a little over a week and uh our morning calls have been polluted with with curve USD talk but the stable coins a whole nother piece a lot of very interesting mechanisms there there's a couple different ways the protocol generates revenue from this I mean all in it's just a true master class and mechanism design I think the interest rate curve is is probably the most exciting thing it takes like one equilibrium rate and modifies that rate by the current the crb USD price and the balance of debt in this in the system and that just like we've never seen anything like that it's similar to an Ave lending rate mechanism where at a certain point the rate

increases to protect the protocol but instead of being based around a utilization rate that's really based around the price of the stable coin which is pretty interesting too so some cool stability mechanisms there we probably don't have time to get into but net net I mean it's really hard not to be bullish on curve as a protocol right now without diving in too deep into the mechanisms I just wanted to ask one question then thus the mechanism of llama kind of open the door for under collateralized Landing in some form or not yet that's a great question and I actually asked Stony about this in our interview if like we could get to a a place with of under collateralized lending with like using lens as a decentralized identity solution I'll let

you guys hear the answer yourselves in the interview but I don't know I don't think so to be honest because you still need like the issue is under class under collateralized lending is there's no recoi recourse against the borrower if they never pay back the loan and so this doesn't really solve that it just gives you a better ux and you can really like max out risk parameters right like Ave doesn't let you borrow against stake tracks eth at an 89 LTV because it's a risky asset and they need to worry about Dex liquidity to liquidate that into which is a whole other ballpark issue but um yeah it just really lets you beef out the risk parameters and not have to worry about that hard liquidation now

kavi there is still scenario there are still scenarios where you do hit hard liquidation uh but they're they're pretty hard to to meet that that criteria as of right now uh Dan I'm not sure if this is if this question makes sense but does the time does the time in soft liquidation compound your collateral erosion for when you're collateral when you get back into like a non-soft liquid in state great question and like um yes but there are multiple factors there so like the band range so the number of bands are the length of from upper bound and lower bound of the liquidation range impacts it as well but yes like every ARB transaction if you

are if you are in liquidation range during an ARB transaction you are losing or you're getting your collateral converted between uh stablecoin and collateral in either direction as well and so again that that's when the erosion happens but what's interesting is this is an amm instead of just a pool holding assets and so it costs transaction fees to participate in swapping the the assets in the pool for the arbitragers right and so the 100 of these swap fees flow to borrowers and only the borrowers in the active range so if you're getting your collateral eroded you're also the only people accruing swap fees and so that's kind of how this Nets out because the swappies

are quite high it's 0.6 percent which like that is a very very very above average for defy but it's because of the mech the pricing invariant used by the amm that it's still profitable to be running these transactions as an arbitrageur so the swap feed kind of acts as like this balancing mechanism of being you know kind of slowing down the number of arbs so that Capital erosion while also still keeping the pool healthy and ensuring that like like paying the borrowers for the erosion that's happening as well so it's like this crazy balance mechanism and like every time you peel back another layer you just end up figuring out that this thing is again a master class and mechanism design so one last serious question uh about curve USD what who do you think is going

to raid the debt ceiling first curve USD or the US government laughs oh my God that's an incredible question uh let's go curve down let's go curve now talking like a true uh token holder I feel like curve really missed out on some good marketing material with all this talk of hard versus soft liquidations to be completely honest I feel like there's a good joke to be made in there but uh Dad what's new with the uh Adam accelerator absolutely got to give a shout out to our incredible sponsor um you know if you're a developer looking to kind of break into the industry or look for a new home in the industry industry the atom economic zone is for you it's the premier place to build in crypto right now it's offering interchange security that you know you

can launch a chain without having to bootstrap your validator set um you're inheriting the economic security of the atom token itself you got IBC which gives you the flexibility of interoperability and neutron is a great example of why these things are important you know they just launched um and now you have this permissionless smart contract platform to go build anything on you know this is likely to be like the D5 Hub of the atom economic zone and it's going to be exciting to see all the development there and that's on top of the fact that liquid staking is starting to take off which it inherently makes defy more exciting again you know we've seen this across all of ethereum D5 as well um and lastly one of the things that the cosmos industry or the cosmos ecosystem as needed for for quite some time was a

native stable coin that can be relied on and the usdc is actively in testing uh minting through Noble and that is going to be like this last piece so you know we have liquid staking and a native stable coin plus this permissionless place to build smart contracts I mean I really do expect uh to see a D5 summer level of activity out of the cosmos ecosystem and if you have an idea that you think deserves a grant from the atom accelerator please do reach out we'll we'll be sure to put their Link in the description and they're currently giving grants from 10 000 to 1 million dollars and that's on a rolling basis as well so a really monthly basis so you know if you're a builder again this is the place for you to be checking out right now so be sure to check out

the link in the description and uh now we'll jump over to the interview with stani the CEO and founder of Ave companies all right everyone we are joined today by stani the founder and CEO of Ave companies stani it's really exciting to have you on you know you've been around the space for what feels like forever you've been building uh Ave since 2017 so you know that's over six years ago which is about three three and a half lifetimes in crypto years so we really appreciate you coming on uh to talk to us we got a pretty exciting conversation today around the lens and Ave both have some pretty exciting developments going on in their respective ecosystems but before we jump into that I'd love to kind of just uh dive into your your thoughts on the state of crypto today can you just talk

to a little bit a little bit about the evolution of the industry how has it changed for the better over the last few years and is there anything that you feel is like change for the worse yeah tank stand for the introduction as well uh um definitely feeling old now but uh I I usually like try to measure the uh progress of um blockchain or crypto or web3 or whatever um anyone wants to call it and by way of trying to like measure and understand the adoption um compared to other Technologies um and I think something very comparable recently is that there's been a lot of um um excitement uh Ai and I had to bring AI very early into this discussion but

um uh I think it's relevant because for example AI has been um a field where we've seen uh Decades of work and maybe more recently uh taken and a half more intensively um and when we look at the overall crypto space um um and the underlying blockchain technology and different use cases so we've existed roughly uh a bit more than uh 10 years you know depending like um how how you calculate I mean ethereum pretty much if you look at if it was 100 in 2013 um that's pretty much 10 years gonna be

during this year um and then you know Bitcoin even a few years earlier so it just showcases like how early we're in the space but the um the newer the technology is usually it has faster adoption curve and the reason for that is that a technology might rely upon something that um it's anchoring into a pre-existing technology so so um example is that you know some of these social media applications they have a significant increasing growth in adoption um because there's already underlying Technologies you know there is there's the internet there's uh 5G there's

mobile phones uh a bunch a bunch of other stuff and the way blockchain is is approaching is that it kind of provides a completely different kind of a mindset and a platform of how you know the future intranet is going to be built and the future applications are going to build in a way where you know we kind of like read these re um I use the concept of read the essentialization because you know internet was built in a very decentralized way went into more centralized pad to make it more user-friendlier uh more adoption and now we have this kind of like um idea of uh read the essentializing everything we have

um online so I I think personally because we're building everything pretty much from the scratch and we're still dealing with uh scalability challenges um and I think there are challenges they're more of uh scalability progress because we started with uh how much security we need to actually secure a blockchain based uh infrastructure and now we're looking into you know now that we have the biggest layer how much security we need and how we apply scalability um and inherit something like ethereum layer twos and build that path towards more uh wider user adoption so like we're we're in the right path but because everything starts from very much uh from the um bottom on the whole stack

it's it's definitely slower progress than if you compare some other Technologies but still you know we've been here for uh 15 uh so years comparing to some of the technologies that are getting a lot of traction they've been they've been around um as a concept and continuous progress for a few decades so that's kind of where we are from technological perspective um with with crypto awesome so you really highlight that scalability is like the challenge that the the industry has to work around today and you often hear people mention like hey crypto really hasn't found its killer application that onboarded you know that next wave of of users um but it almost sounds too like uh I

don't put words in your mouth here but it sounds like you're referencing you know like the reason that is is because we haven't seen uh you know that that scalability that you need in order to onboard those users in the first place so even if the app existed it's almost like this chicken or the egg problem to some degree um you know if you look at D5 today do you think that you we still need to see this you know like where it's come over the last couple years is huge right like the on-chain lending on chain liquidity uh it was kind of born which fueled the growth of of D5 lending and then you saw these New Primitives get formed around that is D5 still missing uh some of these newer uh like applications or scalability really the issue within D5 as well well

interestingly um in the first place Bitcoin kind of tried to solve uh one part of financial transactioning uh with the use of blockchain basically settling value between peers um and with the ethereum we also got a kind of like a more programmable layer um on a on a financial Ledger um just stay centralized which which basically means that you know whatever um program financial transaction you can imagine um that that could actually be could be built on um on a blockchain can actually now happen because of the if the the concept of ethereum virtual machine and I think um

regarding kind of like the um idea of of where uh D5 is at this point I think we've been filling a lot of gaps over the past years um you know we figured out how to exchange value in a very um efficient way how to supply liquidity and and create the market for many of these assets that are uh created and secured by the blockchain um and with the lending borrowing stable coins we even expanded um usability for for for uh Financial ecosystem um and I I I do think um defy

um works if you can build something um I usually say in a way that's if you build something that is you know better faster stronger Finance um then it makes sense to use D5 so if if because of this interest finance and many of these protocols that you're using um you're able to get liquidity or attract liquidity where you you couldn't do it before um or if you can do transactioning with counterparties that you couldn't do before um and brings you new reach um that brings also access and that's you know better finance and because it's transparent um you'll need to necessarily trust a single point um or a centralized provider you know

that creates confidence on transacting Beyond like your normal reach and I think that's the whole point of uh blockchain because you know it creates this kind of like a democratic platform for transactioning but I think um about the the killer app um and what that could be um I I think it's more of like that um for example ethereum or um crypto as a general I think is a platform so it's kind of like a um uh gaming console think about it as like a Nintendo or Playstation so you have this like uh machine that you know works well

um and you play as long as there's some interesting things happening uh or you have some sort of interesting um you know um upside to it so when you look at the history of of um you know ethereum and and everything that is happening in in crypto you have this kind of like the social elements um involved into it um a lot of the use cases they are quite Limited in the sense that um you might need that lower cost component and scalability but there's a lot of social things happening um in crypto so um people were chasing um yield uh back in B5 summer people minting nfts and buying monkey

pictures uh during the nft summer um and you know now people are chasing also um you know Meme coins so these all are like social events and games that are happening uh on chain um and as you have more scalability you have a more scalable infrastructure you can create different kinds of games and but games I mean like it's not just on like I use games and use cases as as a synonym and the reason I'm calling them games um because they they do have this there's a component of like uh exploration Discovery um satisfaction um and the social uh component as well um so that's like there's a lot of

things that has happened in the past um years that brought people here um but we could do much more if the infrastructure allows us to do and for D5 specifically I think we're in a good state where a lot of these protocols that have been built over the years um they're actually starting to show resiliency the beauty of D5 and web3 is that it's purely an open space um open design space so you can come in and build something very fascinating with a relatively small team um anywhere from the world um and Empower a lot of people who are interacting with with decent as Finance but at the same time to get more adoption we need to build uh resilient

protocols um you know that actually can hold um large amount of funds without actually getting compromised or having uh issues and that's the kind of like the hardest part for D5 is that whatever you're creating for um to secure 100 million over the long term you should be able to secure with the same um with the same design uh 100 maybe hundreds of billions um as well so that's the kind of like a challenge that D5 has and I think for the future uh what we have to think about is that you know not now that we have this interesting trustless um

execution environment on these things as fine as what we can actually build on top that isn't necessarily existing traditional finance and could actually be very empowering because we have this system that would build with decentralized Finance yeah that all makes a lot of sense to me and I love that analogy is between uh blockchains and gaming consoles that's not something I thought of before and I feel like it's pretty perfect honestly but I did want to ask you a question uh something that kind of got resurfaced last week when someone posted something the Lido forums to share Revenue with with token stakers but you know there's one Camp that's like yes that's great gives yield utility to the Token but then other Camp is like well we actually need to reinvest the protocol profits into maybe redeploying on other chains and

Insurance Fund offering you products whatever it is uh I wanted to get your take on whether or not you know various protocols should be sharing Revenue with token stakers or if you think that that money needs to be reinvested into growth yeah this voice down to the question is that like what kind of functions a dollar should have um and it's a it's a wide range topic actually so we've seen um Dallas that have different kinds of units you know those units get allocations of capital and they're part of this this um the whole kind of like a bigger Dao like you have sub-dials um then you have actually like a you know you have a team and and which is is

basically part of that Dao and and you know building for the uh protocol uh building for having a growth um measures for the protocol and a bunch of other um things so so kind of like we see also doubts that act like a company um almost um I personally think that the layer of the dowels uh should be very thin um because end of the day that's what we're building are public goods meaning that you really want to mitigate all the potential risks that involves um uh that protocol to operate uh without issues um and I think once we basically have protocols that are sufficiently working

well um they're resilient um maybe their risk parameters are managed pretty well and can be automated down the line um one of the risks that still exists is the kind of like governance uh risk from the people itself so recently saw the incident with tornado cash with the tile governance attack um but that's the kind of a surface that we have to limit our results from as well so how to reduce that human risk out of the system and have a functional uh public good and I think that's where uh having kind of like a thin layer dial layer where you have a functional protocol and the Dow effectively allocates Capital to make

maintain the protocol have some fixes um pay for security contributors um some small measures but effective it should be kind of like a thin layer and everything else from that so if that public good actually is really beneficial creates Revenue I mean obedau rates Revenue annually from 25 to 50 million depending on the uh fluctuate fluctuations annually uh meaning that it's one of the rarest dials that are actually um producing that positive um profits after uh all the costs associated for for paying for contributors um in that case you could actually

allow some sort of a mechanisms where the token holders can maybe take additional risk stake the assets and get part of that profit share by actively contributing with their assets into the protocol not not necessarily passively because that's that's another story so I believe that maybe in that case you could have an interesting opportunity there so yeah I I kind of like I come from a perspective where I think a Dao uh shouldn't do everything that it could maybe that's the case in the beginning but down the line you really follow a path where a protocol becomes a public good and the doubt um kind of like becomes like a trust

um from from and I'll from analogy there where it just allocates capital and halves less and less governance votes um down the line a really interesting perspective there Stoney I I think uh this is going to be a conversation that stays in the Limelight uh for the the foreseeable future honestly but I want to kind of drive the conversation a little more towards lens but before diving specifically into this one application I want to get your views from a high level perspective around decentralized social media as a whole how does it benefit the end users to use uh decentralized social media compared to maybe the web 2 Alternatives yeah I think it goes back to the previous um conversation that you you know we we

started with building an Internet that is really decentralized so anyone can connect then you have this idea of you know you can sell force a server Connect into this um big um infrastructure of our internet um slowly what we realize is that you know it's it's not really efficient to or it's not actually an easy um to get everyone online um and share information um you could read it easily so if you have a web browser uh you could easily browse the internet so as a read mode it works pretty well but once you want to express something and you want to create content share ideas you know that is

where you kind of like have to figure the way that how you actually contribute um to to um and whatever that discussion might be online and and that's where actually uh bigger social media platforms and the web 2 was uh somehow built where you know you had actually um ways to create content share information um and share links um big Reddit uh Slash though is is a good example um of that and then you know other platforms and more like a bigger social media platforms today have the very same pattern because they

provide the usability in exchange for uh I would say kind of like a more control over um your Social Capital so so your profile um your uh floor base and what you actually see uh in in the feed and that's very little where you have actually control and benefits so what we the way we approach actually um social media and what we did with lens is that we were looking into those different kinds of um artifacts or or features what happens is like what is happening in online networking so typically you create a profile um then you might follow other profiles

that that are interesting for you um and then you you basically share or whatever you find and amplify content to your own uh follower base and then you create content um and then we took some of these um social media Primitives and turned them into uh protocol guarantees um by using smart contracts and using the blockchain so for example when you create a profile um on lens that profile is um secured by by the blockchain and if you follow other users that follower graph is also secured by the blockchain um and these are protocol guarantees so

you can you can actually choose make a normal database uh follow as well um but basically what we are going to provide to um users is that they actually have an access control um into their online presence um however they want to do that and then it's up to the applications that are building on top of the lens protocol to actually decide which bunch of these features because the lens stack it's it can consists of that on-chain component uh but there's also a significant off-chain component for example the recent um uh kind of like an optimistic scaling solution that we launched a mocha which

actually creates blockchain transactions but stores them on a data ability layer uh which is verified by whoever wants to verify run a verifier um and then also other option components if you don't want to actually stare store any data on that data available layer or on chain so it's it's basically a full hybrid uh stack and what's interesting here is that it's up to the applications and then users to to choose what they actually want and need and reflect the the user experience but the biggest benefit for users is that now the kind of like um our Dynamics change between the the

platforms to a bit more um user-centric and that means that if you as a user have uh oversight of your profile and your follower graph um and it's not actually any more stored in a platform in a um let's say owned by a social media company what it actually means is that you have now the choice and portability to take your followers and go to another experience or even use an alternative algorithm so because it's open it also means that anyone can compute and create algorithms for Discovery finding content finding peers to total in a more open uh

way so it democratizes the the access to create these algorithms and also provide to the user as well so it changes a lot of those dynamics that that whole hopefully are helpful and because you're tapping into the same user base hopefully what what we're thinking is that it's more easier to bootstrap a social media application because you could use the previous uh user base and and kind of like attract without them needing to create a new account because you have that portability by by default yeah that's super interesting you gotta think that'll really push kind of the Innovation at the front end side of social media to kind of the next level considering how easy it is to move your

data from one to the next so love to hear that um before we get into momoka the da solution that you guys uh unveiled recently I did want to get just your quick thoughts on uh the the hardships of building on polygon if any that you've experienced by trying to scale social media on web3 Rails yeah I think pollen is a great option for um some of the artifacts that we have in the lens ecosystem in the protocol so for example um storing a profile makes a lot of sense in terms of um the the security you want to apply so whenever it comes to your blockchain there's always a component of scale and the cost of scale and and that security

so um in in terms of polygon there is a certain amount of transactions that you can you can actually submit into the POS chain without goal is to actually provide the user's choice so they should be able to choose in which networks they're using to secure the profile and and also their their their name namespace as well um so when it comes to actually um transactions that are more frequent um and that's usually sharing content which is basically amplification of content with the mirroring um the creation of the content comments um you know some of these applications

social media applications in web 2 they experience um at Peak twenty twenty five thousand transactions per second um and we're talking about something where um you know you might find um a block time where you could actually fit all those transactions but because the amount is upgrade and look blockchain the way it works is that uh you have let's say block time is two seconds for the synchronization you still have a lot of data that gets queued and with something like momoka you can take that big amount of data and just dump it directly to a data availability layers and it's agnostic so

you can choose where obviously RV this is the main one now um and verified that the data is submitted correctly so it's it's actually like the way we describe um uh building on on polygon or um and also in the mocha and everything that we have in the stack is that it's about applying the right uh ingredients and tools uh to what problem you're trying to solve and you have to be very research uh conscious when you're actually working with a blockchain especially when it comes when you're dealing with non-financial transactions because that's where you have to think about okay so do you actually do I need a blockchain to secure

um let's say a profile in most cases you do for example do I need a blockchain to to create a post or a comment in those cases maybe data availability is is uh enough uh as a solution so those kind of challenges come um when when you're building uh also when you have a strong uh on chain component as well okay so one of the first thing that comes to my mind here is like the design decision uh between building in the ethereum ecosystem so you know through polygon or the leveraging a high throughput chain uh something like Solana you know we've seen a recent rise in the number of high throughput chains around uh sui and Aptos as well so I'm curious just to get your take on like do

you think it would make sense to build out a decentralized social media platform on one of these high throughput blockchains I think where where they might be very useful is um securing some of the elements so for example the tokenization part so um I think it's very valuable for a lens user to be able to choose where they actually want to Mint their nfts so the beauty of momokai is that it really kind of uh creates the actual content that you know the Creator the user wants to create um but you can actually decide after that moment has happened and you have created the content uh where it could be minted so you could

actually you similar like a lazy mean fun feature where um you know whoever likes the content can actually Bring It On chain and mint copy of it um and then decide also on which chain that should happen and I think that's where kind of like a it plays a big part of of the tokenization aspect and I think all the nfts they don't need to really be minted um on ethereum and there's going to be a moment at some point where we have a lot of layer twos settling on ethereum they're gonna take a lot of clock space um so at some point even when the upgrades that are coming even if the gas price is going down at some point that

that demand is getting refilled so we have to think about where where this actually more consumer uh facing um activity will go and those chains will perfectly the same as polygon will provide that um pads ifinner will just become a bit unusable for the consumer perspective but then you have those layer twos and alternatively other layer ones um where where you can actually have that tokenization so it's it's more about providing as much as possible and and as much as possible flexibility for the user sorry for the uh that's just for the user but also for the developers

and letting them to choose and whenever we build ads are but we try to always think about uh how can we be less opinionated and how we can just leave the choice more for for people who are you know useful events in the future gotcha yeah that that makes a lot of sense um I think it'd be super helpful if you could kind of describe to us you know what is a typical transaction look like for a user when they're using lens today and posting all that data to polygon versus what it'll actually look like once momoka is fully uh integrated um throughout the stack like what what is the trade-off and security assumptions but like what is the you know benefit in terms of performance and user experience going to be yeah so the

the uh the on-chain transaction when when you were creating content um on polygon you simply trade it you're creating a post uh for example you can say like um you know GM Xerox research uh you know we're gonna interview um I don't know we're gonna interview someone tomorrow um and it's gonna be huge to create that pause and you you submit it so in the background actually none of the none of the um transactions have gas neither you need to sign so that's done by um a service called a dispatcher so basically you could submit your own transaction pay your gas sign you know

very decent dress fashion uh but in most cases it's not really needed because you know you're creating content it's not a financial transaction so you're using dispatcher to have a better ux um so once you pause what happens in the user interfaces in in many of these clients like Lancer um butterfly um what actually happens is that the the content itself gets reflected to you right away so as a user you see that you see the post there so anyone can go in comment so it's opted optimistically randomly render it to you reflected on the on the clients and then at the in

the background what's happening is that the transaction is putting the EQ and if there isn't any queue it's submitted on chain on polygon if there's a cue so if there is like a huge amount of transactions I don't know maybe um something happens um in the news and everyone is going commenting uh so some sort of um event you have a transaction Spike and the block space isn't enough so the other transactions will um be submitted on the next um uh block so basically you have that transaction once said done you actually have your own chain pause which means that anyone can go and collect

um in as a user you can there's building monetization in the lens protocol so monetization isn't like the main thing about uh lens but it's something that happened organically uh and maybe because blockchain has this a component of settling transactions so if you consider um if you can create content you can also settle like the actual payment transactions um uh in together and yeah when you compared actually to a momoka transaction so what happens there is that the process is very similar um to create a transaction um and it's actually blockchain transaction so

uh that's created um by the user but then and signed by the user in so-called submitters uh submit the transaction and sell so what they what the submitter does and currently there's only one submitter uh what can be added more down the line as as we have planned the submitter uh simulates the transaction um with a feature that that is um on the Node Network so basically it's it's called Eat call uh it's simulated against the uh smart contract rules that are in the protocol so for example if there's a rule that's um and you're making a comment that only your follower can comment and someone

creates a transaction and and you're and they're not following you that transaction will fail basically and the simulation will fail in the mobile transaction will fail but if it's true what happens then is that the transaction um is simulated by the submitter and the submitter is submitting it to bundler it's basically a service provider that helps you aggregate data into Data availability layers like RPF and that transaction is stored in RV uh and reflected on the user interfaces and verifiers verify that the data format that was created and simulated it was correct

um and it's stored in data availability layer and also there is a verification proof that is stored there as well so what actually happens here um is is a transaction that is reflected in um less than a second and you can use the same idea so it's it's kind of like an optimistic data scaling solution so you don't have execution and that's why the transaction cost is um extremely low so recently um I was looking at the momoka transactions so we have 112 000 transactions in the total spend for all these transactions is 45 dollars so it just tells you that the costs are

similar to what you will be running um AWS infrastructure and that's the kind of like a idea there because you don't need to use the execution that blockchain provides you're basically using um data availability for data scaling and you can actually use that because uh these are social media transactions and uh non-financial transaction and the same kind of model could apply to gaming as well you just need to change what kind of data you're submitting and what are those things that has to be verified on that data format and that could be applicable there as well I hope I didn't confuse too much because I tried to like explain us

um like kind of like every single process that happens there's it might be a lot of digest data availability as a whole is already a confusing topic so adding in the twist of decentrals a decentralized social media definitely makes it more exciting um but I pulled up the mimoka Explorer here at momoka.lens.xyz uh congratulations first of all on on crossing the 100 000 transactions Mark currently 112 transactions have been processed through my mocha um and there's this box here it says total spent uh 45.52 cents which equates to 0.0004 cents per transaction excuse me dollars per transaction and so that like so am I thinking it right that the users are therefore paying the

transactions obviously a very very minimal fee um and that that Revenue if you will will flow to the submitter in this case yeah so so this spent amount is actually the what what will be the cost for spending for the RV so one of the data will be the layers that it's used so momoka can use technically whatever uh da layer is created so it could be um I don't know even ipf has a data availability layer um to some extent so um but RB has a pricing where if you want the data to be stored

um forever or like long period of time I think they calculated for 100 years you pay a small cost uh for doing that um so basically that that is the course that it that is associated on storing on our RV and having that guarantee there uh but in the future uh because as you see there's one submitter um but anyone can run a verifier even you know you can have a verifier that is running on runtime um within the application of flight cleanser or any of these clients but in the future you can create a network agreement between the verifiers so once you have certain amount of verifiers verify the same data

um you can create some sort of incentive system there um and you can create some sort of incentive system on the submitter side so when you actually have more submitters um they would have to have some sort of uh incentive of of submitting and also some ways of actually slashing if those conditions if there's something that isn't really um uh aligned with the the what they should have submitted so it's an interesting kind of like a concept of network agreement that you can do outside of the uh blockchain or whatever data you wanna you want these nodes to agree upon it's very lightweight as well so you can run

this on a mobile phone you're very fine okay awesome yeah that that adds up I see the Celestia guys always tweeting out like look where I'm look at the crazy place I'm running a light a light note from now uh so maybe we need to get some picks out of the Ave companies team from uh look where I'm writing running a verifier from now but uh so I'm curious so you know you mentioned that there could in the end State be multiple submitters what would be the incentive to come online and be a submitter participate in this ecosystem you know if I was spitting up my own decentralized media uh decentralized social media platform like what I want to run a submitter as well yeah if you want to help to decentralize the world but I think up I think they could be

actually like Financial incentives as well um because the submitters are actually running a very important task of of looking whatever data is created um and submitting that into our RV if um so I think both both for the very part of the submitter that there needs to be um then there needs to be some sort of uh incentive mechanism down down the line I think now we can get um a few few people to run the submitters but they also need some sort of uh um penalties as well if they don't produce you know if they if if they don't submit the correct

um data but that's pretty much a network agreement with some sort of a slashing um model that we're uh thinking about uh down the line once once we know that this the system works momoka has been working quite well so far so um it supports uh posts and comments um and mirroring and now what we want to support in the future also is that if you create our own chain post you can also create a memo card comment to have this kind of like a cross um cross-compassibility um down the line uh we're also we've brought also a rust client um from omoka so that's something that

is coming and it's going to work faster um so yeah it's there's definitely a lot of exciting things coming up yeah it definitely sounds like it and I know a ton of people in the space are waiting for that kind of killer social media back-end application and I feel like lens definitely has the first mover advantage on that so excited to keep following it but I did want to steer the correction a little bit towards Ave as we only have like about 10 minutes left can't forget about the vog baby of your astami so I'm curious how how it goes coming along we just saw a curb USD launch obviously die and frax have been around for a while um so I guess what's the differentiator for go what's the timeline and uh yeah how you feel about the implementation

yeah um happy that we we um the the decentralized disabled coin um especially on the like over collateral side is is getting more uh more traction um but in our case with with the go I think I mean it's there's there's quite a lot of things that has been already done uh on our site that really gets us into very like near um moment of of progressing um or um the code has been public for quite a while um to the infrastructure itself is ready um the governance process has been progressing um there's been a couple of votes uh regarding the interest rates that the

governance wants to set um in accepting a second um facilitator so facility that is essentially a a bucket and a mandate command to go the first um which is also like quite an interesting concept so the first facilitator allows to mean go against um your colonization at Abe protocol um and the second one is is just a flash Mentor facilitator so there's a certain bucket size of flash minting um go and doing all this visibility stuff in um D5 so basically that's that that's the whole process is quite quite far

um and I think down the line um what's important for us is kind of like um the idea of Go is is is obviously uh it brings diversity into the um stable coins ecosystem especially on the over collateral stablecoin uh part but the more kind of like a bigger vision is that we really want to push um stable coins um into E5 as a more of a financial layer for the internet um meaning that with the layer twos we might actually have a a better chance of seeing more payment applications are being built and it's quite ironic because Bitcoin in the first place was was there to solve you

know payments between people um and you know with um with D5 would pretty much you know we built a uh quite robust Financial ecosystem uh with swapping lending and borrowing and stable coins but you know no one in crypto actually uses stable coins um to set all their payments every day so there are some of course but I think the scale is is so small at this point and you know it could bring a lot of transparency and accountability um to Internet payment transactions so that's kind of our vision is that um we're super excited that it goes um live

um quite soon but then what's more exciting is that how it could actually create impact um and benefit people across globally build better um Financial ecosystem which is more transparent um were resilient um and and has guaranteed execution with the smart contract so that's something we're super excited about um and and also excited about that there's um other faults in the market that are uh also working hard towards the same goal so we're we're all in the same boat yeah yeah I'm glad you mentioned that I mean you know there's also like seemingly an increased overlap between uh maker Dow and Ave and some degree

right the makered out team uh of course forked the Ave 3 front ending contracts to build spark and of course is paying a feedback to Ave for doing so um and they are able to like use the die savings rate um to kind of create this new lending market for die using spark and so I'm curious like how do you think that will influence the aves market for a dial ending uh Retreat because I personally believe um what bid build is is with our team um and the support with the community white um um I think like a state of the art uh protocol that is very flexible so you

can you can create markets where you know collaterals might not be borrowable and you know you can um uh borrow against them but the collateral itself is not Blended and create similar markets that already exist in the um the Arab ecosystem um I I personally think they lowballed the uh the profit sharing but but it's that's you know that's up to the governance and it's uh it's it's something I'm not really involved in in um and I'm I think probably down the line we'll see more this kind of focus synergies um as well and and now having go you know that that also helps to kind of like a having some

sort of like a cross liquidity between all of these markets so I'm I'm happy that they went to this pad as well because it was also a missing component for their ecosystem um and yeah I think yeah I think down the line at what we're following more is is kind of like a bigger vision of how we get how we get these stable coins or how we get D5 more in the wider you know adoption and keep experimenting and a lot of the the exciting things that has happened in the Alba ecosystem and things that we build you know comes from some degree of experimentations um as well and I do think I've um I've participated in the um eat globals uh at least one

hackathon and what we're we're talking to hackers there about D5 and I think we're in a kind of like a state of D5 where um you know we can't really anymore look into finance and you know what exists there and fill gaps in D5 we actually have to um we have to really think about like what kind of things we need to really build that could be better uh create more impact um help the users and and help adoption so I actually will they appreciate a lot the fight builders that um have existed and have builted and contributed for the past years but I'm somewhat somewhat even more excited about the D5 builders that are here for to build the future and and kind of like

tackling a bit more of those challenging parts of like how we get more um more more kind of like a scale uh an adoption so it's definitely going to be um interesting next next few years on on the D5 um side yeah absolutely actually I meant to ask this question when we were talking about lens but since you said you know we're hoping go can actually used in the real world in some capacity sometime in the future are you guys looking at any way to build out kind of like a mobile uh strategy like I know you know uniswap with their mobile wallet I'm just curious if lens or Ave teams are thinking in the same vein yeah it's quite interesting I I really appreciate what units of team did and I

kind of thought I like that they have the you know it's a wallet only to swap when you need to stop and kind of like having that um mobile experience um in in their ecosystem um I personally want like the way I think about web3 and and building is that um I want to build very core infrastructure that that really gives a lot of design space and experimentation space for a lot of the builders in this in the um space um and leaves them relieves ability for them to build those applications that might bring them into mainstream right we do um

we do kind of like understand that what kind of things could be built um and and guide to to the right direction but that's the beauty of um a decentralized ecosystem is that you really don't need to build everything um you can just focus on making and and bring you one thing and ensuring it it works well um and then all the things actually will build around and good example for that is that we launched um lens a year ago by the way it's one year anniversary anniversary for lens on on the uh main net so um there's actually a main Net post on Leinster I mean on on lens protocol that you can collect from one Matic uh

that that is kind of like a a uh anniversary post uh but anyway so we launched the protocol without any front ends and someone built a front-end hackathon that is open source and again Fork it um and suddenly in two months of our range we saw first front-ends and clients being built on lands and actually they're very good now you know they they have very good music experience um video experience and it just gets better down the line so um if there is really good margin and space left for Builders um they usually come and build as well and I'm kind of expecting a bit the same uh for for the urban ecosystem one thing

they need is is basically a vision and a and a pad and some some also ideas um and and usually it is that's how we see a lot of uh Innovation yeah definitely go check out that than nft here um thanks for calling that one out there Stoney and uh you know that I want to ask one more closing question just because the lines between Ave and the lens are you know I I can see a world where they overlap in that if lens can at some point be used as some sort of like decentralized identity solution um and then like theoretically you know you could have like a go facilitator that was uh you know authorized to amend a certain amount of go in these like some sort of like under collateralized loan fashion I mean I think this is

pretty far out on the timeline if ever possible but I'm curious really quickly if you could just provide your insights around like do you think lens could ever be some sort of decentralized identity protocol I think I mean I I definitely see them working kind of like a separate ecosystem and ecosystem involved but I do see it down the line um value in in actually let's say that you're using minus protocol um you have an audience and you're earning some sort of income and you can your income could be predicted out of it so it's kind of interesting because we really don't earn anything on on social uh in in most cases um online

um you know and more like the way internet is built anyways today is that it's the companies that are making all the money and and the users are just like consuming contributing um you know and and we we kind of are trying to make the ancient more people powered uh right so and if if in the future you have uh creators or users that are earning income and you can predict that income I could see that could be like one step of of um some sort of trust network of for for providing um liquidity and capital um down the line but I think we're we're still far away from that I I do think

that the current um credit markets aren't really fair you know especially if you are moving from one country to another um it you know it's very hard to passport for your credit ratings you might start from pretty much zero um so there's advantages of like blockchain based data and utilizing that if you have audience and revenue um that could be a first step um but we've really built lens from the perspective of um you know how to make internet more people powered um you know taking away from businesses and giving to people

the the description there but it's an interesting interesting idea down the line for sure awesome awesome well Stanley this has been a fantastic conversation I I really appreciate you taking the time to come out and speak with us um you know thanks again for coming on and if you want to leave the audience with uh somewhere to find you learn more about what you uh what you're building and what your current thoughts are maybe even show your lens handle I saw your closing in on the 90k mark we'd love to help you get there yeah so I'm stanito plans um and you can follow me across all the advanced applications um if you don't have a lens profile yet so latest protocol is still in beta um so we um we can give um give a profile if you're building something on lens or you're curious

about web3 social um excited what we're building just send me a DM on on Twitter and I can help help you uh go from there great thanks a lot studying