DeFi by Design EP#9: Community, Governance, & Sustainability

Transcript

welcome to d5 by design where we talk all things blockchain and cryptocurrency while striving to educate empower and enrich what's up guys just want to take a quick break and tell you about our sponsors for defy slate so first we have acropolis acropolis is an all-in-one d5 yield farming platform they actually offer dollar cost averaging into bitcoin and ethereum uncollateralized loans and their mainnet just launched it's called delphi and they actually just filled it up to a cap and they have governance launching soon check out acropolis.io for more and then we have mcdex mcdex is the first decentralized perpetual swap exchange they offer up to 10x on

ethereum perpetual swaps and 5x on link as well as lend and snx completely decentralized trading check them out on mcduck dot io both these platforms are extremely active in the d5 space and their protocols are growing and the users are as well so check those out and we'll get right back to the podcast now what's going on guys welcome to episode 9 of the d5 by design podcast we are here today with yana from acropolis acropolis is a d5 aggregator that is just launched their mainnet it's called the delphi mainnet and it's getting a whole lot of traction we are here today to dig all into that and what's been going on over at the acapulse team i'm here

with the co-host robbie rob how you doing today i'm doing good andrew doing good just hanging out but i'm excited to talk to acropolis because obviously they're uh right within the core of this d5 craze um and you know even even if uh prices are coming down a little bit whatever the momentum might be slowing i don't think acropolis is slowing down at all so i'm excited to hear about you know how they're doing that how they're keeping up the pace and you know uh just staying with this defy ecosystem so definitely excited to have jana on today yana how are you doing this morning hey guys nice to meet you i'm doing fine basically just busy with work yeah yes so yana could you give our audience a brief

introduction to you how you met the team at acropolis kind of what you do for the team yeah sure uh i'm actually leading uh community initiatives at acropolis i'm in in the space for around uh three years i guess and i was always i started as a community manager myself and became community leads in acropolis and since previous projects so because i just feel the community and their excitement and pains and stuff like this and as to acropolis itself i joined them because i knew kate from previous project we worked together on

and the idea was just really exciting for me and i decided that i want to try awesome yeah yeah i really like the idea of acropolis so for those who don't understand or who aren't aware of kind of what acropolis does and correct me from young iana but effectively what it is is it's a yield aggregator which means that it brings opportunities to do yield farming staking and savings and even soon some other cool features that we'll probably hop into but effectively what it allows you to do is farm on different platforms and different pools all on one uh site all on the delphi platform and so basically what you can do is you're able to get exposure to all different types

of assets risk and opportunities that allow you to earn yield all in one place yeah yeah it's basically we we just want to provide people tools to save and scale basically to grow so all our products are designed as a high yield savings synthetic accounts basically so both delphi and sparta are a way to save and grow this uh just stable coins so volatile and yana i know acropolis is definitely more robust than a lot of other uh d5 protocols like you know just some of the ones that are clones of like a uniswap acropolis is much more robust right so

could you talk a little bit about the the features that kind of differentiate acro from some of these other just you know uh andy likes to call them meme coins i i just think of them as like simple clones what does uh acropolis do to differentiate themselves and then also what are you guys building to you know just to close out this year uh yeah sure uh well basically yeah for status we are not a clone of iron finance or any uh other platforms that came to life this year we started working in the space in uh 2017 and uh in 2019 we started building our own

framework for setting up for profit dowse which is highly customizable by the different developers and uh basically anyone can use it for their own needs uh to set up their own dows uh with uh business logic they like and stuff like this uh and after initial design was done we started building sparta which is uh basically underculturalized landing pool uh base uh defy yields from different defy protocols which is based by design on informal savings groups which can be found

all over the world like roscos brute phones and stuff like this so basically a small group of people can join one pool save together issue loans to each other and stuff like this and this summer we had an idea for automating dollar cost averaging into different liquidity pools and assets like there's no decentralized or convenient way actually right now to dollar cost average into btc for example if you are not on sexes and we started to play with the idea and presented it uh at ideo product validation day uh in june uh and everyone liked it

so we started uh to work on a product so which will include both dollar cost averaging savings and yields farming some simple place where uh average joe can go and just earn yields uh diversify his long-term portfolio of this btc and ethereum for example and farm tokens on top uh this is how delphi came to life two busy months yeah and one thing you mentioned in there was the under collateralized loans which i haven't seen any other crypto protocol put into use um could you explain that a little bit more and it sounds like you know you are verifying right so uh

credit is definitely something that's difficult to manage but um there's maybe a small group or a larger group of people that can offer loans to one another yeah go ahead it sounds like that might be maybe a lot like does it remain decentralized at that point could you explain maybe a little bit more how that works uh yes uh so basically yes party is decentralized it's basically a pool uh uh when you join it uh you essentially buy uh a share uh in this pool so you're you're getting a representation of your capital and uh in future iteration it will also earn yield when we deploy a new version uh but right now basically

uh you can uh join it and ask for a loan you need to provide only fifty percent of the collateral like uh so for example you want to have 1k die you deposit uh 500 die uh leave it as a collateral and ask for a loan for one k k die and other members of sparta can vouch for you and basically cosign this loan they provide collateral for it so right now it's mostly like small groups of people issuing loans to each other to people they know but we will also be working on different

risk scoring solutions by integrating maybe three books or stuff like this where you can check the transaction history of a person who is asking for a loan uh transaction history is always accessible nasr scan either way by it but you will see like some kind of breakdown of his or her interactions with different lensing protocols whether he or she rebate previous loans somewhere and whether he or she had any loans in sparta already and stuff like this so yeah basically you provide 50 collateral other members collateralize your own

so it's fully culturalized actually for the system itself and uh you rebate yeah that idea of like a social system of a social credit score a reputation kind of idea super interesting because ideally that's kind of how the the real world works outside of defy when you're taking out a loan to you know let's say get a house right it's not like you have a one-to-one ratio of of collateral or 1.5 to one um in you know because otherwise you wouldn't need the loan right if you yeah if yeah right like if you want to get a loan to get a house you you know you have 20 or 30 and you need the rest and that bringing that concept to d5 is

going to be absolutely huge i mean i've seen people rant and rave about it on twitter but yeah keeping that credit system of like who who can we trust with the loans and and whatnot is going to be super important for the for like the sparta idea just in general if we can figure out the best way and i think what you guys are working on is really solid up until now and bringing that decentralized under clatterized loans i think is gonna be one big thing that's talked about not necessarily this year or you know even next year but over the next few years as defy grows that ability to get those loans is going to be huge yes thank you very much yeah for sure for sure so uh a little bit more on

on the community and the marketing and and the governance side so obviously rob and i are in the discord in acupulse discord pretty active right you know seeing everything that's going on i'm curious as to what you think makes a strong community and a strong core team is it the memes is it the way the team is run is the social media channels or is it all you know what in your opinion makes a strong community and how do you work towards creating that for the acropolis uh ecosystem well uh personally for me strong community can only like literally only be built around either products or emea and i personally don't really believe in

long-term system sustainability of mimi economy and mimi community because like okay we have this meme we have that meme and we will just migrate from one to another and good core community a strong community is only built around some products that can already be used of course and which has a strong some kind of strong use case or which is simplify a life of a person by a lot and this current defy frenzy around farming and stuff like this there is a lot of people that want to participate of course because the yield and the apis and stuff

like this is enormous and everyone wants to earn something for them but a lot of new opportunities and a lot of stuff is more for techies not for average people even not for average crypto people who are already in the crypto space like for a couple of years but haven't looked into the fight itself and i see a lot of people uh like uh stumbling like why my transaction expands and why this stuff is not working why and how much i will earn uh i i don't understand anything at all please help me so the best thing to build strong community around the product apart from different faq

guides and being responsive is actually feeling the community like people and project teams should not be entitled if i can say so like they are not above their community in any sense they can have similar struggles with other products and they should understand how it feels when no one helps or when uh it's not understandable at all and you're feeling like you're dumb but you're not dumb it's actually really hard to understand so uh yeah i always try to feel everyone's

pain and struggles and [Music] that and have a lot of patience basically just to answer all the questions and people love it uh people essentially love when uh when teams understands uh what needs to be improved uh what needs to be done for them to understand and stuff like this um and well for me it is this is basically even uh with no marketing if you have a strong community like uh discussions in discord on telegram even if you don't have twitter at all uh basically

one way or another everyone will know about you you know yeah that's a great point because i mean word of mouth is like the best marketing you know you're hearing it from someone you trust and if they're already a part of the community then that that's great and go ahead yeah i was gonna say the idea of being in the trenches uh with the community is super important right so there's this whole concept right now vcs i'm trying to invest into d5 and big funds and really having no clue what's going on and getting outperformed by a bunch of people who look at twitter memes all day and it's true right if you're not in the trenches and understanding what the community is going through and trying to help and listen then it'll be tough to help grow your protocol in the right way that

keeps the community happy as well as progresses for everybody and all the shareholders and i mean that that takes us right to the governance so recently the governance token adal just launched uh for the acropolis uh team and the and the shareholders so now you can go ahead and stake acro earn acro and adele tokens but there was a bit of a little a little bump in the road yana and so i would love to hear your point of view on the on the token burn concept and kind of how you were able to handle that and you know how how you further see decentralization coming into acropolis uh yeah we have only one regretted set so we didn't put it

to the vote itself we just thought that it will basically be faster this way because everyone was proposing actually proposing talking burn all over the discord to twitter telegram and everywhere and we decided that it will be faster this way but yeah should have done the vote yeah i mean that's that's the thing though that's like the decentralization versus the getting things done quickly i did and i just recently saw this happen with that new game arc x have you guys seen that new protocol type thing pop-up it's called arc i heard about them but haven't looked into

them like properly yeah so basically the contract the admin contract has control of all the funds and and can drain all the reserves right and the explanation is okay well if we want to decentralize it and turn it into a multi-sig wallet which for all the listeners just means that there is more than one person uh it's more of a community idea of how the funds and how the contracts are used then it's going to take way longer for this to grow and i you know we won't be able to fix problems et cetera et cetera and so that's kind of like like the never ending you know problem that you run into with the decentralization and and the rapid progress of just making quick choices uh yeah it's uh it's a naked chicken

problem basically uh i personally do not believe uh in decentralization from day one it's uh not it's it's literally not sustainable for long-term growth uh not talking about iron finance right now as a zoo guys uh and allah from andre myself uh but still they also have their struggles with governance actually right now because it's decentralized and they can't implement some stuff without approval of community and then it's like takes a lot of time for actual proposals to to be watertown unfortunately and in being fully

decentralized from the day one is hard to terms of building fast and shipping fast uh so for for adele governance and philadelphia governance itself we are working on governance pools and we want to push different governance proposals soon but it will still be gradual decentralization so first people will be able what to vote on one things and on more things and so on and so on until uh the product itself is stable enough for us to decentralize it fully because basically like right now it's in beta it's

uh it it has passed one audit it's under second audit and there will be another audit and there's a real risk that there is some bug or security issue and if people are decentralized already uh we won't be able to fix it fast enough to save users funds basically for example so yeah it's it's a hard problem actually to really discuss because uh a lot of different people have a lot of different opinions and by majority it's like i'm not sure how it will look like but

uh people who do not have their own products uh from community for this for example yield farmers different different yield farmers uh different traders whatever it is they think that running a product and building the product is easier than it actually is and that crease that creates a negative loophole basically because they want everything to be decentralized but as soon as it is uh decentralized uh things like getting chaotic uh by its own unfortunately so uh i think any team including us should uh move forward with governance

decentralization and stuff like this uh one step at a time not rushing it's just because it's a can have a bad uh influence on future of the product itself yeah and once you once you do something with with governance like there's no going back you know it's not like the governments of our countries can just go back and you know edit the constitution or the whatever the creating documents were and it's pretty similar with the protocol in that sense you know but as long as we're consistently working towards decentralization i think that's that is the main goal and it's kind of funny not seeing i mean there's definitely hype around acropolis but it's not like to that extent of those projects that are completely unaudited

and just totally throwing out these super high apys out of the window it's almost a meme that people are less interested in audited projects than they are in the unauthorized way i i never understood this like it's i i think that they really do not understand that they might might lose all their money basically it's uh it's it's kind of strange when uh i see like uh uh some new mimi foot coin pops up with the website uh and i see transaction of uh 100 000 k dollars uh 500 000 k dollars and i'm thinking like

what it's like guys do you not understand that uh it can be hacked or whatever like well it does say something that they're the community's just not concerned with risk and i'm not sure if that just aligns with like investment i'm not i'm not sure if if they're not concerned or they do not understand this at all like uh for example uh a lot of uh people that just started uh started joining crypto and the fire especially uh they uh think of different yield yields products as a banks and with banks you have custody you have insurance you have everything so

if something happens you get your money back but some people do not understand that uh it's not like this encrypt uh that's the one uh not you you can buy insurance for everything even if this nexus and opens at 2 and even after 100 audits it's still hackable it's free so they just simply do not pay attention to such things when they see 1000 api this apis i actually might potentially kill uh the bus around the fire as a whole in but in the end because one big hack and people will be too scared to

join again yeah and i know a lot of times these protocols show like a thousand apy like you're saying but and oftentimes that only lasts for a few days um sometimes a few hours so that apy is only accurate right for the time period that you know maybe in the first few days or or hours it's not going to last the entire year which would actually be the accurate um representation of apy right and then i i actually did want to ask you kind of uh something that came to mind as you were describing the the just lack of understanding of risk right around the ecosystem and i'm curious how much do you think of

that was uh kind of born because of bitcoin and i mean because we're seeing all of these anonymous founders and like you said it's almost like people are more willing to put their funds into something with an anonymous team for some reason and i'm kind of speculating here but you know people obviously got rich with bitcoin right and then now there's kind of a second wave of people that maybe feel like they missed the boat do you think that is partly the appeal of anonymous founders like um it kind of gives people flashbacks of bitcoin and it's like oh you know this could be the next big thing because the person who created it doesn't even have an identity

is that reasonable to think or kind of how do you see that i'm not sure about this because i simply like all that i see in different chat rooms and telegram and on discord is that people don't even pay attention to the team even if it's not anonymous it's like if they see 1000 api they join if they don't see they don't that's honestly true like it's so true it's just like oh big apy i'm in but rob i think i think you do have a point there like i mean there's definitely an element of credibility to having founders that are real people like you know for example uh ethereum and and metallic and

acropolis team and k and jana and anna right so it it's it's super important to have that reputational uh pull for long-term more sustainable projects but yeah i think you're right and then i would argue that the higher risk gamblers if you will uh when it comes to the farming i feel like they are almost more inclined to as youna saying high apys and anonymous sketchy food weird name projects that just attract this a certain crowd yeah and if you know the the gamblers like you referred to them if they can point to someone that you know has the possibility of rug pulling or you know taking everyone's money then i i do see some people kind of

uh hesitate when they see that but i think that is almost a fundamental misunderstanding is like just because someone's anonymous doesn't mean they have any less ability to rug pull than you know an entire team it's actually not the case right a team that has some share of power has way less ability to screw over the entire community and that's kind of why i think people are so interested in decentralization is because you know in a fully decentralized community if everyone has you know some share of power then it's almost impossible to go and and screw

over the entire community at that point and i think that is something that grows with decentralization is just the ability you know even if everyone is well intentioned it's it still comes down to the possibility of uh some you know catastrophic thing happening to people's money yeah yeah i mean there's no doubt about that um the the idea of that is kind of just what happened with sushi that was pretty funny yeah and that's kind of what i'm what i'm referring to is like you know people were obviously like yana said so distracted by the apy that they didn't even take into account that this guy could just pull out all of his money but like what what kind of risk is

that though like obviously when you put your funds into even delphi for example right you have to provide your funds as liquidity so there is a chance of a smart contract bug or in any of these platforms but when the sushi guy sold all of his shares to ethereum yeah though i mean the price tanked from like ten dollars to one dollar which is bad so anybody who bought sushi tokens on that run up got absolutely wrecked but aside from that everybody else who farmed sushi i think made money and so it's kind of an interesting concept there of like what like and and then the founder tried to make it seem like he it was kind of ethical like he he wasn't trying to scam anybody i don't know it was weird

yeah it's it was really weird actually it's funny it's i i'm just blessing my job that i don't have time to farm medicine right now yeah that's how i feel i need a break like it's kind of ridiculous and with all this stuff here it's it's too too many protocols right now too many uh food i don't know what's what's what will be next will be cats and dogs so with that in mind how does acropolis stand out how do we navigate a world where the high apy flashy you know apys weird protocols are getting all the attention how do we stand out with

acropolis and you know is it the community is it is it the founders is it the product you know what what could we you know use to stand out how do we stand out uh well we do not actually especially personally i i do not believe in long-term 1000 api like having them for one month two months three months it's not sustainable at all uh and i think that's uh delphi itself and uh the community at acropolis uh outstanding a lot in the sphere uh as with actually any legit uh protocol that is not trying to copy past uh some contracts but actually

building something uh usable for everyone not for one two days but for years and delph itself this yields farming game it's uh can be seen as i would guess some kind of uh especially after audits but still defy risks apply for uh even after 100 audits and stuff like this disclosure it's just as a safe space because basically community will be able to vote on what protocols should be added underlying the file yields and farming protocols what strategies should be implemented in philadelphia for

for example some kind of simple view like i just want to deposit stable coin and earn this kind of yields here's uh my usdt please forward them to any pool of your choosing and uh basically we right now we future community curates uh all additions to the to the platform itself so it's unfortunately for some it won't be uh some sushi or farm or whatever integrations because it's risky and it's not audited and it's like one two days a week of farming but we are integrating for

example other or curve or compounds and uh ren for the sake of its balancer uniswap and stuff like this and in future more based on community proposals basically so um people would be able to feel safer just because they understand that it's not something that we are pulling out of of our hands and just given insane apis for this uh but it's something that communities chosen as a safe option to have a saving account there yeah that simplicity

and credibility audited slow launch taking everything slowly and making sure everything is done correctly that's what makes a project survive when we look back in 2022 versus the quick pump and dumps of 2020. and i think that's super super important that um you know that you have that outlook and that you know that the team does as well and i'm certainly excited to continue on that trek yeah rob do you have a question yeah yeah so um just kind of as jana was explaining the functionality i i think acropol acropolis is completely positioned to do just that which is have a more sustainable approach to

a decentralized bank right we were talking about earlier a lot of these other protocols are just clones and they're really just arbitragers they don't provide that scalable consistent trustworthy place for holding coins for a long time and i think that's the difference between some of the flashy protocols with high apys at least initially and then a protocol more like acropolis where it is more scalable you can kind of put your money in and trust it for a year you know rather than a more flashy like sushi protocol where well sushi might be a bad example but any protocol that is showing a thousand apy and

um it is getting um just demolished after a few days that's obviously not sustainable because they're chasing apys right that's really the difference acropolis is positioning themselves to be more scalable more trustworthy and uh these other protocols are not they're really just arbitrage clones yeah and we actually didn't provide any ability to actually choose they like follow these apis even when we had any protocol at any stage if it uh has uh liquidity mining token

it will show uh high apis but uh we didn't uh like promote it in any way uh uh or endorse people uh just simply because we had caps we didn't allow whales to participate in any way and farm all the supply we didn't allow a lot of people joining just it was a fair lunch it's uh for closed beta and for open beta uh everyone knew how much they can deposit individually they know what's other caps on tvl of each pool and stuff like this so um

it's actually uh also making things much more fairer and sustainable long term jana and kind of just uh follow up on that question i i was kind of going is uh is there any plans for fiat on ramps for acropolis uh yeah we want to add fiat on ramps we actually uh the ultimate dream is to add some kind of automatic deposits like just schedule a deposit from your bank accounts or from your credit cards or whatever uh which can be deposited since so into the platform uh it's as far as i

know it's not possible yet with any fiat on ramp right now uh but yes we will be starting integrating uh different fiat on rap solutions and possibly fiat off-ramps too in the near future yeah and that directly just shows how uh scalable and more trustworthy acropolis than a lot of these other protocols because i mean does anyone think uh nomi chef from sushi would go and build bank relationships and and kind of build that infrastructure i really doubt it you know because it seems like those anonymous accounts are just operating with that cloak of like secrecy and they don't really want more people involved than just their friends and

make themselves rich so i i really like the positioning that acropolis has built it seems scalable trustworthy and really in demand from from the community yeah and that goes along with that concept again of just like what we're looking to actually build in d5 and help everybody rather than just help a small amount with that kind of community mindset and speaking of helping others and and bringing others in this are our our last question for you yana we're kind of wrapping up here we're a bit out of time but our last question is if you were asked to give a one minute elevator pitch of defy and where acropolis fits what would it be okay so one minute

elevator pitch is said defy is your alternative uh way to save money and to become overtime economically independent financial independence of whatever it is uh to uh just uh save and earn without dependency on political situation in the without dependency on uh any outbreaks cavity and stuff like this so it's just uh some kind of alternative safe space uh to save and for acropolis itself is like it's a nice

platform that will help you visit it's just uh i'm not really a much of a person for peaches or for chilean or stuff like this because it's just if uh i want to recommend something i will do it and i will describe how to do it or how it works or whatever but i won't be this kind of a silly person that will say you should use it because those shows here nah i think that's a fair explanation i mean that's that's actually a cool way to look at it it comes down to that idea of borderless permissionless access to financial

systems that allow you to like you said save earn and be independent from everything and yeah acropolis is is a way to get plugged into that and yeah check it out acropolis dot io if you like uh this has been jana it's been absolutely great to have you on and really appreciate it thanks thank you very much for having me appreciate it alrighty guys thanks for listening to the d5 by design podcast until next time defy slate team