DeFi by Design EP#70: veTokenomics, DeFi Revival, & Sustainability with Balancer DAO

Transcript

welcome to d5 by design where we talk all things blockchain and cryptocurrency while striving to educate empower and enrich it's your boy andy and welcome back to the defy slate youtube channel smash the like button on this video that really helps us out and sit back and enjoy the content thank you very much what's going on guys welcome back to the d5 by design podcast we're here today episode 70. uh wow it's been a it's been ascend right here 70 episodes of this podcast it's enjoyable i'm really really excited to talk today with andrea and alan of balancer dow and balancer labs in og d5 protocol um i still i still remember the days when they first launched and everyone was trying to figure out what

the smart pools were all about and what their new amen design was all about and now we're here on all sorts of different chains a bunch of upgrades we're just excited to kind of see and talk about the evolution of balancer and d5 today and kind of where we think things are heading so here today of course with rob as well rob how how we doing today buddy yo yo doing well man doing well it's another beautiful day in florida it's great to be out here talking to andrea and alan uh yeah i'm i'm curious about kind of the uh the confluence between balance or labs and balance or dao and how they complement each other um and then also yeah the evolution of how balancer has you know continued to stay ahead of the game uh in you know all of these different amms and clones and and

kind of all these different forks of different projects um and how balancer you know keeps their moat um and keeps their user base and and uh liquidity efficient so i'll uh pass it over to alan and let him introduce himself and what he does over at balancer hey guys nice to meet you play pleasure to be here my name is alan i'm the d5 partnership lead of balancer labs i joined balancers six not seven months ago um yeah and i'm pretty excited to be part of this team we have a groundbreaking technology i i've been in device since since i was born not kidding i

i joined i was working uh as an owner on different dows and teams during the device summer and and i was a liquidity provider of balancer b2 and when i when i saw the opportunity of joining the team with the launch of balancer b2 i didn't doubt that and i yeah i jump directly to to balance the technology because it's for for my personal point of view it's one of the most groundbreaking technologies on defy sweet and andrea how did you get into the dao well you know i

you know my my you know story is a little bit less exciting you know i started you know in crypto maybe in 2017 but i was mostly you know looking at uh you know privacy coins and of course i was a bitcoiner et cetera until uh you know defy summer defy summer is where everything changed um i was you know very much interested on what was going on around the you know the ecosystem and i started as a you know as an lp right and then little by little um you know i started to you know interact more with the community back in the days uh up to the point where they asked me to

be more involved so since like july last year in 2021 i became a baller which ballers are basically uh like those you know community members that are let's say they are more engaged you know with the protocol and with the community so that's how i started and then after that um we created the dao the structure that we are we're using today and uh and now yeah now i'm taking care of everything that has to do with partnerships and you know the liquidity mining program and you know i take care of marketing a little bit and uh you know

again leading one of the the people games also oh the v-mods yeah now we have all the you know the v-ball uh you know you know hype you know for the new economics around balancer so yeah i'm pretty much taking care a little bit of of a few things you know the the the problem with i mean i wouldn't say a problem but you know the characteristic of the dao is that you don't really have like a very specific uh position you know you can transition in between different places and stuff and so so yeah that's that's me pretty much so cool cool awesome yeah i'm curious what you guys think specifically probably alan kind of from the back from the early

days of farming during kind of d5 summer how the progression of yield farming has kind of gone in your eyes from let's say as simple as lping with a reward on sushi or balancer or or unit swap all the way to the complexities of like convex and veto comics now and lockups kind of what's your thoughts overall i suppose just on the broad market of yield farming and kind of how it shifted um and then potentially even where you might see it going yeah that's a tough question um we've been debating with andrea because we both are professional liquidity providers and we've been witnessing the whole evolution from let's say b5 1.0 that balancer was part of that journey with

uni swap and then this meme around defy 2.0 that token mug and olympus dao we're leading so i don't have like a hard answer for that because it is evolving i don't i'm still trying to see what the outcome will be in terms of how can we like we want to rent liquidity we want to own liquidity because everyone now wants to own the liquidity but at the same time it's really tough because you need to give in incentives or some kind of incentive in order to attract that liquidity but i think the model for example of tried thou with the

protocol controller um i don't remember the pcb i don't i don't remember the acronym of that word is one of the coolest thing that i've been seeing in d5 um [Music] with balancer we've been debating what we should be doing in terms of our tokenomics and that's why fernando suggests emulating what kirk did with their b motherboard both escrow model and it's pretty new for us because we are just we just launched a couple of days ago beat the people is only on mainnet uh gotches on l2 will be live probably

in two weeks on arbitrary and polygon but but but by the type of conversation that we are having with andrea and other thousand protocols we are seeing a lot of interest on participating on this from those that were not interested on on balancer due to the difficulties to attract the incentives to their pools now they are seeing an opportunity or to bribe that is a new mechanism in this defy 2.0 world and we are having many partners that are building bright tooling on top of balancer to unleash the be bald wars or the people battles that's why

how we are call it um and yeah i'm just experimenting at the same time we are releasing this type of new functionalities on balancer um but yeah with with andrea we we've been debating a lot about d5 1.0 d fight 2.0 and what will be the next step in terms of d5 because d5 is still in uh how can is in a bearish mode most of the tokens of d5 are like suffering a lot and if you have like a a token that it's really underrated you are giving a lot

of incentives to have like a an attractive apy but at the end of the day you are like wasting millions of dollars per week just to attract liquidity and it's not sustainable it's it's okay for a bootstrapping space but i don't think anyone has the answer of what will happen in the next three years two years um i think olympus thou was pictured as the the philosophical stone with their bonds but eventually the price start to to kill that model and hopefully they they should not enter on

a death spiral mode but there is no clearance so we just look what happened to usd and yesterday after before and yeah it's sad it's said to be what i mean anytime there's a founder who's on twitter challenging sbf to make his token pump is it's probably not the not the best sign and i mean i think we saw a lot of the bootstrapping of liquidity and defense happen early in 20 2020 where we really just tried to basically blow the blow the lid off almost and and kind of we entered the hangover phase which is okay because we got the interest that was kind of

it was needed right we needed to basically just provide a just a big bang to really get it off the ground because effectively there was nothing there before but now we're kind of in the hangover but what what if that allows us to do is find these better strategies to actually create real value and create you know real systems um you know that can uh continue to grow and flourish as you're saying so it's kind of like a never-ending um kind of uh journey to find the best tokenomics and the best yield farming opportunities and kind of how to properly incentivize and it's a big challenge yeah and it's a bit it's it's really good because it challenged ourselves our doubts and our protocol to push more and more to improve the tokenomics to improve the way we give

incentives and i think the dao and andreas should know it better are like the dao of balancer is pretty new but if you see the conversation that are happening internally they want to create a better system a better model to give more sustainability to the dao and at the end of the day from my personal point of view i see the dao as the main umbrella of all the different entities that will will will fly around balancer protocol i don't know andrea what do you think yeah well the the conversation uh has been uh

you know uh you've been you guys been talking quite for about a few few points you know the original question was how basically how defy evolved from a very simple you know uh provide liquidity and get uh stupid apys right um well you know the problem with that is that of course that was the the spike that uh ignited the defy summer and then and that allowed you know the entire industry to evolve to to where we are today um now yeah as as alan is saying you know the problem is now how do you retain liquidity and attract more liquidity and continue to innovate without having

to spend you know crazy amount of you know uh you know you know funds or you know money whatever you want to call it to to maintain this liquidity so that's very difficult um of course you know one thing that we know the thing is that we we keep we keep experimenting uh on uh you know defy 1.0 now we have defy 2.0 and everything but the only thing we really know for sure is that liquidity mining is a very powerful tool and is the only one so far that has proven to be successful to attract you know uh 200 billion dollars in tvl uh across you know across the defy ecosystem uh without those those incentives we wouldn't be at this point

you know so um you know of course now uh the the market is becoming more more competitive it's not what it used to be so i can hear my so basically we used to only have like uni swap and uh sushi uh you guys remember that and then of course now you have you know multiple uh taxes across multiple chains and you have forks and you have this and that and they're all competing for the same liquidity so it becomes you know the market is becoming much more efficient uh and of course is maturing as well so i don't think we will gonna we're gonna go back to those uh good old days

when used to have like i don't know 500 apy for like three months consecutive months or whatever and so things are gonna evolve and they're gonna they're gonna probably slow down they're gonna be they're gonna look much less attractive so we need to find a new way man those were the good old days man yeah those are the good old days they were and everything was so crazy and uh you know i remember the first time i you know i uh put some some money to work into compound and i was like calling my wife hey look at this you know look you could see you know the the interest you know um just keep adding up every second yeah of course you know all that all that

magic is gone now you know we much more mature now we're different and you know so yeah things have changed man for sure so yeah so do you guys think that the yields are going to get smaller as like more people come in is that like a general is that the general take that the kind of the adoption curve is is beneficial for everybody involved but the overall yield curve is going to come down or like what's your what's your take on on that like my wish is that the swap fees should be enough attractive enough to tackle the incentives that we give to to a liquidity but that's not what's happening like if you see the the

analytics you will see that eighty percent ninety percent of the trading volume comes from money makers and bots so we are still in an early stage of retail user doing swap on on taxes but eventually when this blows off and everyone is happy doing trading on texas versus exchange uh we will see like a more suitable ap wise in terms of swap fees but at the same time we are also on balancer experimenting increasing the the swap fees for

some specific pools during this volatility days and we are seeing the increase of the swap the the apr of the swap fees by a lot like our own pool the 80 20 pool of ball if is getting like five percent of apr today due to the swap fees because we increased the the fee for that particular pool so i think this is one of the things that balancer has and liquidity creators and liquidity creators should be taking the lead of experimenting with the type of customization that balancer provides to play with changing the swap

fees during volatility markets earn more fees so i think that's one of them the biggest advantage of balancer versus other decentralized exchanges yeah and and do you anticipate kind of the fees going up like you mentioned um you know d5 1.0 like that really had a big big bang and then those tokens have kind of tapered off as far as their prices like you know even even if the the rates go down because of like the the new money coming in and the swap fees aren't uh sufficient to hold those rates where where they are

kind of double digits and and beyond is there a is there another path for kind of d5 tokens governance tokens to increase in price or do you think it's almost entirely based on tvl i don't think it's based on tbla i see tbl just a vanity metric i care more about trading volume because it's where the the fish should come from for the dowels or for the treasuries um [Music] i'm i'm envisioning like a [Music] d5 protocols that start building on top of balancer and start doing some money legos strategies but right now there are

really few of them because one of the things this is my personal opinion but one of the things that i'm seeing is that builders sometimes are way ahead or really outside of what the market is demanding on or saying so builders has this 10 of build whatever they want to do because they think that what they are doing the markets it's needing but sometimes it's not sometimes the market is needed some type of tooling or a feature that is not aligned what with the with the intention of the builders so we

we are still in this stage that builders know that they can raise millions in dollar by doing some some dubs but eventually this defy defy will evolve and the market will merge with the builders and we will start doing some financial uh implementations for the fight but we are not on that stage yet got it got it yet it's kind of like that product market fit bringing in what the what the market wants versus what the builders are actually building and kind of collabing yeah in the middle um you know and i think i think a lot of

the market wanted uh projects like balancer to basically to basically implement some sort of change of tokenomics which you guys have obviously reacted to with the ve model i'm kind of curious so is is the ve model a bet on the balancer team and protocol long term like what it would uh obviously there's no advice in this podcast um in anything that we do but in the sense of locking up the tokens for four years is that would you say that that's the best way to take a bet on the balance or team and protocol or if not kind of like what what would be a general strategy um you know for somebody to who's very bullish

on balance or long term to kind of uh take action on well uh a few things here okay number one the v v e ball is a copy of the curve uh tokenomics however our max max lock-in time is only one year not four so this is because we wanted to you know give a little bit more freedom to to the user to the average user i i personally believe that four years is way too long okay so that's the first point so there's there's much less risk when you're locking your token for like 25 of whatever you know curve is doing that's number one then when it comes to you know uh how to play this you know

the uh the balancer uh okay i think uh alan is gone okay so how to play this this game um well it is going to be something very similar to what uh you know the infrastructure that we're building on top of the v-ball is very similar to um to whatever you know curve has so you're going to have uh like a bribing platform uh that we're building uh yeah well we are not building another team is building which is going to be um you know there are a number of platforms but you know if i can give you a name you know redacted cartel is doing a great job at attracting all those bribers and um so this is something that is

going to be very powerful for sure so if i was if i was an average user at this time what i would probably do is wait for uh those platforms that those those bribing platforms to come out and uh and and and see what the market offers you know so there is no rush at the moment to to lock and commit to one year you know uh you know when you're locking uh when when you know the entire you know the entire structure is going to come out in the next 48 hours or you know next this week you're gonna have a lot of news regarding all these so that's probably the my best uh advice i can give even though i cannot give

financial advice of course so yeah and the the tokenomics here at play like when the ve model uh someone locks up their tokens for you know some extended period of time to to get voting power the idea here is that someone would want exposure to the balancer token but not necessarily uh want the voting power and then they can delegate that voting power to someone else and then you know it's the financial tooling that is built on bribes is starting to is starting to reflect more of like uh this this economy of governance

uh more so than the kind of like economy of liquidity um so how do you see kind of the the evolution of uh the curve model playing out like do you anticipate you know the the incentives uh still kind of just directing liquidity or is this model something that can be applied further you know like what what is uh kind of the next step here um once bribe tooling is built out and and balancer kind of has this more comprehensive ecosystem what what does that enable um is it like you know someone can borrow against their ve tokens um lend them out for for

interest you know what what are some of the uh new strategies that are unveiled after uh this tooling is built out on balancing yeah well it's a it's a very good question i cannot give you an answer or a straight answer of what is going to be the evolution because we are literally navigating in uncharted waters so uh for sure what what is going to happen now is this bribing you know v you know we call it bald wars or bar battles some some call it uh and this is gonna probably enable you know you know a flywheel effect and you're gonna see a lot of liquidity coming in now the next stage is gonna be how are you going to uh you know act on governance you know because in

the end ball token is a is a governance token you know so uh the next step is gonna be uh building an infrastructure for for actual governance you know at the moment you know the dao itself it works you know operates under you know government governance voting power um so now everyone is pretty much focused on the economic incentives incentive i was locking those tokens but no one is really looking at what the evolution is going to be when it comes to how the you know the the platform or the protocol or the dao is going to operate in the future and how we can you know use those votes to you know to you know to evolve you know the way we actually operate you know internally as

a dao you know as a as an organization you know decentralized organization so this is probably what uh i can tell you today you know honestly it's very difficult to to predict the future you know um but uh yeah there is this area of governance that i think is going to be the next big thing that now for now is a little bit uh uh you know um not on the spotlight we determined yeah exactly yeah yeah yeah yeah and and that kind of brings us to the convo of having the balancer labs team and kind of the balancer down and potentially even like a grand style or a you know a legal kind of sub dow or a marketing sub doubt i'm curious what why did balancer

decide to structure how it's structured was it in the name of decentralization was it in the name of regulation kind of walk us through the the structure of the dao and the labs and kind of how those two entities kind of co-mingle and a bit of the reasoning as to why it's it's set up uh as such okay so the dows in general you know when you when you walk around in the you know defy or or the crypto industry you always hear dow you know this word dao but nobody really knows you know why we're doing it and you know if you if you read the the i mean there's not much just to to read but honestly uh the first experiments of dao's were like back in

the 17 if i'm not mistaken uh and since then we're still experimenting when it comes to governance you know it's very difficult so um why how first of all how did we get here so basically um balancer the protocol has been built by balancer labs and balancer labs is like a corporation they have their own ceo they have the cto etc etc okay but you know certain decisions and you know um certain decisions can't really be made by a corporation that has maybe um you know they are probably based in the us or you know there are a number of regulatory constraints and concerns uh that do not allow

corporations or you know uh labs in in this case balancing labs to uh to take care of everything that runs around the protocol okay so they really needed like a decentralized structure something that could take advantage of the current state of affairs which is basically a very you know um uncertain you know regulatory framework or environment so uh we wanted to take advantage of that and they believe that building a dow to operate on top of a balancer will resolve many issues now the second point is the second the second question was how do we how do we structure this it's not easy especially when you know the dao

dao generally it's uh you know uh uses a flattening of hierarchical uh structures so you don't really have like a like a boss and other people so it's very difficult to really self-organize okay so balancer labs in general it helped a little bit direct this this organization and we decided to create a number of soup dowels okay and this comes from you know basically studying you know other other dows like for example we had a look at index cop we had a look at uh uma uh we we basically studied a little bit of market uh y earned which is a big you know big example for for everyone in the industry so that's how we started we

started by looking at others and trying to take to take the best parts of you know of all all these all these organizations and um so that's how we started we created like little soup daos and each su dao it basically follows you know um has you know has a number of members inside this this subdial and uh you know we carry on a number of you know tasks that usually they are they are very much you know coordinated or at least they are um in the same lines you know the same principle as balancer labs so it's very very at the moment we're working really really closely but at some point you know balancer labs is supposed to

disappear forever and the dao will be actually be the structure that the organization that controls it all but we are still in this transitioning phase the dow j started only four months ago we're very new and uh we're still trying to figure out what's the best way of governance was the best way of self organization etc you know does it answer your question yeah man it does and it's it's it alludes to how um subdials are able to kind of make the flattened hierarchy a little bit more productive in terms of creating these like smaller guilds where there's probably some sort of leadership within these sub-dials but at the end of the day it's all kind of still in that flattened structure so it gives you a

bit more well structure and it gives you um you know a probably a more efficient way to kind of work and i also understand why it's important to kind of take that shift from a us base especially or just any entity in any nation state and basically move to a non-governable entity um you know i think that's i think that's extremely powerful uh it it kind of goes along with the ethos of like the blockchain being immutable it's kind of like well if the blockchain's immutable then the people that are working also have to be a part of these basically organizations that are kind of like you can't you can't really you know you can't take them down you know type of thing so it's important to push that towards you know that realm but as you said it takes time because once you get

there you can't really go back um so you know it takes that it takes steps to make sure that you get there properly and make the right you know kind of choices on governance and on these things that that you mentioned yeah you want to basically you want to try to uh reduce the risk of any attack attacking vector so um so yeah what you say is very true i actually agree 100 uh we need to be you know uh robust and anti-fragile and probably the best way to achieve this anti-fragility is by spreading you know the governance across the world you know like anyone can participate and anyone is can be can be uh removed and uh so and and the system keeps moving

forward you know so that's that's where we that's what we're trying to achieve at balance right now yeah and the model is consistent with you know other applications and then other other organizations that have started out as a centralized company to bootstrap uh a dow and progress towards decentralization over time you know it's not it's not like someone can just flip a switch and then all of a sudden all of this you know becomes decentralized it's as you describe the distribution of voting power and governance power across the entire population of those who who are interested in imbalancer and as balancer grows and matures the population grows as well and then

obviously governance power is distributed even more evenly across this entire population sure i agree yeah and you know at like this this progression right you know like as we get into more and more decentralization i think this holds true for like most other applications as well as some of the incentive models like you know initially it was uh these kind of uh liquidity mining proposals that were distributing the tokens but it was i don't know it was like maybe you know yourself or alan that were that were deciding okay you know we're gonna distribute a million tokens over the course of a month um but now you know we're incorporating more and

more of the community into those decisions and it's no longer uh you and and you know other decision makers on behalf of the dow um as a dow becomes more decentralized we're kind of incorporating the user feedback uh and and giving that and to the builders so that the builders can incorporate it much more closely and the users and the builders become more composable um yeah and i kind of see this as a as a route like when the tooling becomes available for users to actually implement their own strategies i want to give a shout out to d5 saver because they've started to implement something like this where you have uh they call it a recipe creator and you

can kind of stack your strategies and implement you know kind of cross application strategies with no code so delivering those tools to end users would allow users to direct and kind of build the applications themselves and and users become builders you know rather than having these two separate groups i think it probably starts with uh incentives where users can start to direct their own incentives via the the ve model and then after that they can with the right tooling start to build their own strategies and build their own applications that put the money legos together uh rather than building them from scratch sure

100 i agree um yeah i didn't know about this uh this specific application rob i i had no idea they they came out you know we can talk about it later maybe i can study it a little bit more i was not prepared no no it's good i mean the idea is like someone can provide liquidity to balancer and then in the same transaction they can lock it into a ve balancer and then you know if there's some way to lend against or borrow against the ve then you know all of this you can stack into one transaction um and and typically like you would need a shadowy supercoder you know to code some flash loan in order to execute that

strategy but i think it's the it's the no code tools that are starting to bring those use cases to the end user and and narrow the gap between users and builders which ultimately puts us into a more decentralized uh population as the users you know take on more self-custody and and more building for themselves because ultimately that's kind of and i'm curious if you see a similar vision um as decentralization plays out and the market becomes more mature uh eventually we get to a point where uh users self-custody their own funds you know you andy myself we're all self-custodying our funds now and interacting with these applications do

you see um a reality where the majority of the population is is in self custody okay we're kind of destined to you know use these custody providers like banks and whatnot yeah yeah i mean this self custody is this is an essential part of crypto in general that's what we always advocate for and i think we should all go there now the barriers of entry for defy in general uh they're still very high i mean um and they're getting higher you know because because the the space is becoming more and more you know sophisticated and complex and uh it's not as easy as it used to be it used to be easier during summer summer

2020 but not anymore so um possibly at some point uh the you know the you know the the level of expertise will probably be reduced when the the industry mature and you will find application that will help you know the average investor the average the average user to to you know to interact with these apps but for now um for sure i will see in the future something like this but now what i see right now is more complexity and uh and more sophistication in general so you really need to be on top of it you know 24 7. sometimes uh i i can't get um you know up to speed with

everything that is happening around us you know you you miss a week and it's like if you missed two months uh because the the industry and yeah the you know the um you know the ecosystem is you know it's evolving so quickly that it's so difficult even for us that we work full-time okay so um eventually at some point things will be will be smoother uh but not now no definitely not not something is gonna happen anytime soon you know doesn't make sense it's a process no but it's a process exactly i mean it's simply just easier to have somebody else cut city funds but yeah it doesn't align with the uh with the kind of dows and

decentralization thesis and i mean talking about custody and funds when it comes to to balance or doubt are you guys using a multi-sig of some sort to hold the treasury like how does the bowel token treasury align with the dow versus the the labs and how does that how's that govern currently yeah we have a five percent of total uh total token allocation which has been dedic which is for the dao okay which is basically our treasury uh and this of course you know this treasury is controlled by a multisig and uh you know and this multisig designers are you know the you know one of the you know some of the most recognized names in the industry so um this is how we operate at the moment

um so yeah this is what we do at the moment we're using like standard stuff yeah yeah so if people want to build on balance or or contribute um that you know and they need some sort of grant or uh uh you know some sort of token allocation to to do this whether it be to provide liquidity or to pay for the operation um you know their best bet is to come to the doubt effectively yeah okay we have a special uh let's say a special group which is a balancer grants it's called balancing ground which is actually a soup dao now which is run by the community again and that has you know it runs on a quarterly basis so they have like a

million dollars to allocate well as a budget let's say and they receive applications and these applications and they're then analyzed by by the team and we tend to to be fairly successful we had a quite a few interesting you know grantees so far and so everyone that is interested on building something using the balancer technology which is extremely flexible i will strongly encourage to to go to balancer grants uh i think you're pretty easily you can easily find it on twitter for sure on balance balancer grants and send out an application there's all the instructions are there is pretty straightforward stuff so

um we just closed wave three uh it just closed like a week ago and now we're just beginning with the wave four so whoever is interested can definitely you know send us an application form and we'll take care of it i'm actually part of the grants you know the grants committee as well so um yeah there's a lot a lot of stuff going on there too uh man it's non-stop you know no stuff yeah so that kind of contributes to the growth of the balancer ecosystem right like grants and providing funding for people that want to build tooling or do community growth stuff like that what other sub-dials are you excited about um that contribute to the growth of balancer uh like you know aside from the grants you know yeah yeah

well we have at the moment we have five soup dowels you know of course all of them they're very important within the ecosystem because they take care of very specific areas you know so you have the dev one and then you have uh you know of course partnership you have marketing you have treasury you have ops let's say ops is more like uh like has been delegated powers from the different sub-dials so they take care of for example the the salaries and they take care of you know uh holding the funds you know like uh you know we don't we don't self-custody funds like let's say partnership or marketing or whatever we don't have our own funds we delegate you know ops to take care of it

so basically they all play a very important role so i wouldn't be able to tell you which one is the best one definitely you know all of them they have their strengths and they are they are in you know integral and uh fundamental parts for the the the success of the dao so all of them really um for what i for what it's worth uh you know the partnerships without we we've been working very hard during the past quarter and we achieved so many things and we have so many other projects that we want to we want to start and we work very closely with balancer labs you know the partnership uh of balancing labs which of course is alan and other members

and um so yeah i mean it's like a non-stop it's a 24 7 job pretty much you know and uh yeah i'm very very excited about how these things are going you know compared to where we started man if i think about six months ago man we're we were nothing we're like five people you know like talking on discord with nothing nothing really specific to do or nothing really you know very you know nothing consistent but now now it's everything changed everything has changed and it's becoming more and more complex and sophisticated you know same as the ecosystem so yeah yeah and that's that's where the the growth is happening is kind of

at the top of the stack where like we're building more and more complexities um which is great for those who are in d5 um and and it's probably pushing farther and farther out like you're saying you know we're all involved in d5 but it's still difficult to keep up uh with all of the all of the innovation that's happening so someone who's just now entering the ecosystem you know that that's probably too far gone like the curve convex bribery model you know someone who's entering in 2022 they're they're probably never going to get to that level of uh involvement in dowse or liquidity providing um you know

at a point like i'm just i'm curious is there like any any cap to this complexity probably not right no it's gonna get more and more complex but one thing i i i i want to say is that you know everyone everyone can participate i mean you you will be surprised on how many new members are coming to us and they want to participate in a way or another and we're very open to them you know so even though you know it's getting more and more complex there's still you know there's still some you know some myth in there there we there's still a possibility to participate so and for everyone that is interested in joining dao's the best strategy the best thing i will say is probably finding

like those you know those projects that maybe are very solid uh but that are less popular you know of course if you go to y urn uh you're never gonna get there you know let's be honest but maybe you can find some other projects that are still very interesting to you it can be anything really we you know there are a number of them you know like thousands of them that maybe they're just starting or they they need you know contributors and they need like uh you know community managers or whatever and you know these people they need they need actually uh you know human capital you know so there's still a possibility there of course the more we we progress the more

we go ahead you know you know communities like balancer or you know as i said why iron et cetera will become it will become more and more complicated to probably make make an impact within the community because the community the more bigger the bigger you become the difficult it is to you know to make an impact but still you know you can still join like a early stage project and and be be part of those projects same way as i did you know i didn't know that balance was going to become what it became you know i just been around from the very beginning and you know here i am so i'm sure other people can do the same you know yeah definitely and there's there's new projects spinning off of older ones all

the time so if someone isn't you know at the level where they understand convex curve leveraged lp ve model like that's okay because someone can contribute to a more basic model that maybe has been around much longer something like uma or balanster you know even though these projects have been building since 2017 there's still new money legos to build on top you know someone who's just now entering can can still apply for a grant and then build on the more fundamental technology some something like that and then another thing i'm noticing within the this ecosystem is that because we have so many competing chains

on all on all of those competing chains you have like uh let's say or a friendly fork or a fork of a certain project or whatever so um and this is actually programs that we actually follow too which is this friendly fork uh program which basically we we partner with you know great teams that they produce like a fork of balancer like for example beethoven on phantom you might i don't know if you know them or not but basically you know these are great teams they have great teams they have great fundamentals they are amazing uh they you know they are friend with us and you know you can join i mean they started

just a few months ago like maybe less than a year ago no i don't remember exactly but not too long ago and you can join those communities and be like someone that really makes a difference there so and more chains are coming you know the competition is gonna it's gonna be more and more and uh so a more and more project will come and build on those new chains so that definitely there is something there you know what are the trade-offs with that friendly fork program you know does it does it take does it take away any like value you know if balancer was to go deploy on phantom you know why why did you choose to let someone else fork your code rather than deploy there yourself it's a good question man this is just a strategic

decision from balancer labs they don't have the uh they don't have the capacity the technical you know the bandwidth to to deploy on other chains you know all those chains you know like for example we are on polygon and arbitrary they went through uh you know a certain uh you know risk analysis and they decided that you know risk benefit analyzing they say okay this is worth going there and you know there is no worth you know so to compensate for this given the fact that the balancer technology is in our opinion in my opinion is superior in terms of a m and you know underlying technologies is so good we want to have this technology everywhere so how do we reach for example avalanche okay or how do we

reach phantom how do we reach uh i don't know now there are more comings okay um so how do we do that well the only thing we can do is finding good teams that teams that we can trust and uh and you know let them you know deploy contracts launch the platform and do what they have to do and and we just you know in exchange basically we have a token you know they allocate a number of tokens to us to the treasury from the balance of treasury so we have exposure to their to their you know to their project okay but we're not involved so basically it's a way for us to have a stake stakeholding position in you know

on for example now we're launching a new fork on avalanche which is called hexagon okay we have a stake on that particular project okay so um instead of being there and doing you know doing all the work we let a new project go there so they can actually get their own identity because each chain is different okay so in in terms of avalanche they have their own users they have their own community and you want to have like a native you know decks you know using maybe the balancer technology on the on that on the particular chain so this is the vision that we have at the dao we want to empower other teams to do the same and be successful if they're good teams right so

this is this is pretty much the trade-off of course you know there's always known unknowns so you don't really know uh you know uh how far the project is gonna go and you don't really control the team so you really you know it's difficult to to see too far into the future okay but you know in the end it's kind of a bet you know we're betting on on this particular on a certain project on a certain team and we hope things go well we do our due diligence etc but we cannot completely eliminate all the risks but risks are always they're always going to be there if balancer is gonna is gonna deploy on avalanche we will have certain risk and um and if another team does you know of course there are other other risks uh does it make sense

sorry man i talk a lot you know yeah yeah yeah definitely no it's good yeah you're you're taking a bet on balancers underlying technology and you're kind of funding you know the builders that are going and deploying that that technology on other chains you know so that you have a you have a stake like you're saying um and you're betting on yeah balancer uh through kind of a proxy and it doesn't require the the resources that that it would if if you were to deploy there yourself correct correct correct yeah yeah well we're we're getting close on time here uh andy what what you got yeah that's about it it's been a pleasure andre thanks for coming on and talking all things balancer it's been enjoyable

love to see the the ogd fight cruise kind of grow and thrive so uh excited to see the future and yeah thanks for coming on man thank you pleasure of mine guys thank you very much for your time and uh i wish you the best i hope to talk to you soon in another podcast