Rocket Pool Community Call | 12 July 2023

Transcript

thanks ma for that introduction and thank you vmix protocol uh could I hear you guys names one more time sorry I missed them yes my name's uh Jay I'm jonto all right awesome thank you guys for joining us today we will be discussing uh vmix finance and your protocol and how rocketpool might be able to leverage it on the optimism protocol uh Vmax is a lending protocol with some unique characteristics namely it's a isolated tranche mechanism where uh similar assets can be grouped together by the Dow for their ltp ratios so this is something that we will dive further into detail

later on but for now how about you guys introduce yourselves and tell us a little bit about what BMX is uh and what is unique about it yeah you can kick it off with the introduction of myself and then what jonto and then we can go into a little bit about the Vmax stuff um so Jay my background you know prior to cryptos in math and economics spent all the time doing computational biology research and then spent a couple years doing data science for investment firms had got the crypto bug back in 2016-17 eventually got up the courage to leave my my old job and started working in crypto full-time helping out across from

D5 protocols and then about eight months or so ago maybe a little bit more um started kind of formulating the idea of vimeex and what we were thinking was kind of missing in learning protocol space and how we could fill those gaps and so we started pulled together the team um and yeah no now here we are I'll let jonto give a quick intro on his end yeah real quick um pre-crypto was working in fintech mostly software for hedge funds I had a whole career there and then left in 2018 to go full-time D5 was kind of an individual contributor across the D5 space um for a little while and then I was at

badgered hour for a few years and then have also been contributing at zero Network which is a Bitcoin Bridge being built out right now and yeah heard what Jay was working on um kind of were across each other's networks uh last year and kind of came on to help build it out and now now we're here getting close to Launch very cool stories yeah I think it would kind of quick walk through on Vmax um then we can dive into any more specifics that you find interesting but yeah at a high level vmix is a it's an overcauterized learning protocol that's using this risk isolated lending pool structure so you

can kind of think of it as an Ave Factory where each individual lending pool or what we're calling tranches is kind of its own instance of a lending protocol um the goal being really that we thought you know there's this massive base of underused Assets in defy um you know specifically high quality asset stake now they're protocols like LP tokens and Vault tokens that you know are pretty Prime assets to be barred against because they're earning interest you know they're underlying safe assets but because the structure of traditional lending protocols like Alvin compound for example with a kind of single monolithic lending pool that pool inherents all the risk of the assets added and so we were like okay if we want to support

all these assets we have to basically separate them you know by their risk which is you know where the name tranche came from um and isolate things that are higher risk into their own pool so if something happens it's isolated to that pool and it's not impacting other pools um so a big Focus for us is on kind of unlocking these LP tokens and Vault tokens interest bearing assets as collateral on our protocol so people can you know borrow against them lever up to earn higher yield um it's kind of a where it kind of rolls into our Ethan all that sort of stuff that we can get to and kind of unlock these assets that you can't borrow against in most most other places

um where we take a very different approach from people who've done kind of permissionless hunting protocols in the past is where your semi-permissionless permissionless with an asterisk where we've built out a pretty sophisticated risk management framework and simulation tools um with a goal being basically that the the Dow or the risk committee when it's formed will be the ones setting all the asset specific first parameters for the assets configuring oracles assets will have to go through an approval process where you know they have to have enough liquidity um you know it's not as simple as a lending or a deck where you can just permissionlessly list assets and people trade against them because when you're listing these they have to be liquided

and so there's all these aspects of an asset that you know makes it safe to be borrowed or used as collateral and so we'll kind of handle all that process for users sure for people who want to create tranches um just so there's you know more confidence in the assets being being added and you know making the the protocol safer place so hopefully we you know it's walking that very fine line between permissionless and you know strictly controlled um there will be this aspect of you know verified Tron chadmans that will be kind of trusted third parties or other protocols that have some sort of control to you know fine-tune risk parameters or make it more efficient for their pool but

um yeah that's kind of the super high level just Toronto I'm not sure if you want to fill anything else that pretty much covers it um it's really just high level it's kind of creating more of a structure so we could have more people a lot of people to do what they do better um you know it shouldn't be that every um lending protocol has to have like this robust you know risk management team so what we're really bad at built out is the ability for there to be pool admins and that can be people who are very focused on risk management um to kind of come and kind of take their own approach on how they want to structure the pool

and this can be built out and you know kind of like let the market decide as Jay said what we're focusing on as the Vmax you know organization endow initially is kind of working towards the automated side of that so how can we have take away the guesswork around parameter setting and things like that um take take the data um take it you know on-chain data process it and figure out how can we make these things more like Robo pools almost where you can get close to permission permissionless uh pool management but it's within set parameters the permissionless parts just you're able to permissions permissionlessly add things to the pool as long as they meet certain parameters um so that's kind of what we're working

towards can take a while to get there um but we hope that's you know really the differentiator and you know where it fits in with you know rocket pool obviously is our eth itself the asset and then you know like Jay mentioned our initial focus is high quality assets in LP that you can't currently borrow against so things like reef and eth on velodrome or uniswapper um you know I guess aura's coming balancer beats you know if you're talking specifically right right optimism you know things like that that's what we're really focused on awesome that's a very interesting approach uh it almost reminds me of like a uh like a yearn meets an Oiler where you're trying to get the permissionless

side of lending protocols uh with the security of like an admin team and that is still sort of permissionless could you compare it to the urine strategy system where anyone could create a strategy that then people could deposit into the Vault uh you mentioned that there would be third-party uh from semi-permissioned people involved how exactly do they fit in yeah so the the semi-permissioned piece is um so basically how these structures anyone can come along and create a lending pool or a tronchon V Max And so there's really kind of three groups of people there's just your external users

who have very limited controls they can create a pool they can select from a drop down of supported assets that's already been pre-approved and then they just kind of take the risk parameters we give them they take the oracles that we've created um and then they can create their pool and so they can you know play around with the mixture of Assets in a pool and that type of stuff but there's very limited control there the other big category is Vmax the Dow which is kind of the the global admin setting risk parameters approving assets creating custom oracles for assets that need them doing all this type of stuff and then the the third bucket is the kind of like verified tranche admin and

so these are the the more permissioned actors and so the idea is that these are probably going to be trusted protocols and so you know for example rocket pool could be a verified admin they could have some controls over there risk parameters for their pool and so they could you know for example example create like a rocket pool tranche they could say okay we want re um in the pool and we only want to allow people to you know borrow ustc and eth against it and then we can you know fine-tune the LTV and the interest rate curves for those assets so it's like super efficient to lever up on re you know do something like that and so that's kind of where the third bucket of people comes in it's like these really

trusted third-party protocols or you know eventually could be individuals who are you know are really trusted in kind of the risk management front to basically create a pool a lending pool that's like fine-tuned to what they want to do with it um in in doing that yeah Drive their Community to it and then they can also capture a share of the revenue earned by that pool and so we'll split 50 50 um any Revenue that's earned between Vmax Dow and the the verify tranche admin operator and so you know you can kind of like use our framework to create your own mini lending protocol if you will so I'm thinking it like if I was a chaos Labs or a gauntlet or one of these other

risk management organizations that don't actually have their own protocol they just specifically focus on risk management uh Vmax seems like a pretty good fit because now they can come in and since they just focus on fine-tuning parameters vmix can just handle the implementation so they seem like a good category a good fit for that category as you mentioned Rock yep do you want to see us yeah I was just gonna agree I I think that's a really cool idea and something we've been talking a little bit about and would love to see people like Gauntlet and Chaos hops to do something like this where like they can basically showcase how good they are and they can compete you know like on fine-tuning tuning parameters and you

know whether it's more of a thought experiment or if they actually get traction um they can basically be verified tronch admin select the assets they want to support really fine-tune them they could you know create their own stable swap pools and adjust parameters so they think they're you know optimal for what's going on and do a lot of that stuff I think would be super cool to see and also a great way for for them to kind of show off their expertise and um you know kind of use as a testing ground for other protocols too yeah totally Echo that I want to talk a little bit about the isolated nature of uh the The Lending pools are these so say we had a uh Ave for example Ave has the e-mode classification for lsts so

lst's writ large uh seemed or essentially share the same eat pool uh and they have that isolated to them is vmix in that category where the isolation is more categorical where we have this LST grouping so all R reads Steve rhaps teeth would have their own Landing pool or is it even more granular in that there would be just the re ELP or the r-e-e the beasts uh five pool token yes her word were isolated in the sense that the entire pool will be isolated we don't have kind of like a nitty-gritty e-mode type of thing that's

you know kind of granular on the asset level eventually we probably will add something like that in for now you know we wanted to reduce the complexity and just kind of get the basic protocol out there but I think the more controls you can have whether it's asset to asset specific risk parameters would be really cool to do in the future but for now we're we're just isolated on the the whole lending pool um you know the whole lending pool basically and so the assets inside of it won't be grouped by you know lsts or any of that sort of stuff but you could create you know an LST lending pool and then in that pool you could you know customize your risk parameters for all the assets in it but it'll be still kind

of isolated to that overall pool um which you could think of as like a mini instance of Ave does that answer your question make sense yeah yeah no that definitely tracks a fall a follow-up question is say a user was to or this uh some semi-permission third party was to create a pool of various lsts against eth and they wanted to fine tune the parameters could they do that such that uh uh what degree of control would these individuals have is it just the typical lending curve or is there anything new that you add to the mix that allows greater fine-tuning for blending pools yeah so we kind of used all the standard um risk parameters so there'll be bar

and Supply caps lending uh interest rate curves loan to value liquidation penalty we also use a borrow factor which Euler brought to Market which is you know kind of an LTV for the assets you borrow against it um and so we the fine tuning will kind of be in those um kind of generalized risk parameters um and then also allow for some customization with the Oracle as well and so you could take for example like a new Oracle provider comes up we you know review their stuff we feel comfortable with their approach to oracles or you know a new chain link competitor for example they could use their own custom

Oracle as a way to kind of showcase that you know they have robust oracles and we would probably work with them to you know set caps to be conservative and then over time adjust them upwards and and stuff like that eventually kind of going back to what I was saying before with this emote thing we would we would like to add more granular abilities to just risk controls where you could do you know kind of specific based off using one assets collateral and borrowing another asset or a group of other assets um how you could kind of fine-tune ltvs based off the correlations of the assets and stuff like that but you know

we're not not quite there yet totally understandable uh and good to see that uh Eve just in the discussion for the future another question I had is or would you be able to talk a bit to the security benefits of having the isolated system one of the downsides of ave's e-mode is though it creates this uh like sort of overall structure it also has the downside of exposing the entire pool to Steve last year Steve famously had a major defect sorry now two years ago right when was that no no still last year in May of 2022 Steve famously depacked by uh 10 at one point causing

Mass liquidations across defy uh and causing a lot of harm had emote been popularized at the time uh this speak the d-pag may have had may have had adverse effects to the broader ecosystem even if you weren't holding Steve uh so you were just in the reef LP you might have been hit by these crazy changes uh in uh in borrowing levels and things like that so could you talk a bit about uh just why it might be beneficial to have these really isolated lending pools yeah um yeah the at a high level the the goal really is um that these pools basically allow for

experimentation and supporting of high-risk assets and kind of more controlled environments such that if something does happen you know like taking your example it doesn't impact the whole protocol it's totally isolated to this individual pool and so you can you know think of the example of supporting new LP tokens that haven't been used in lending protocols before we can create an individual pool for these tokens that are you know higher risk they don't have a track record of being used in lending protocols and we can set really conservative borrow and Supply caps and so we could say like okay we'll only allow you know a million dollars worth of collateral of this help you token based off its liquidity and how confident we are in this asset and the

underlying assets and then basically allow it to kind of prove out its track record and over time we can slowly increase the the borrow and Supply caps and we can say okay now it'll make it two million five million 10 million over time and eventually you know fully open it up or leave some high cap on it and so the idea is that if something did happen it would be a isolated to the pool that's in and then because it's a new higher risk asset we'd be super conservative on the overall protocols exposure to the asset and so it's kind of this like two-pronged approach to how we can you know isolate and mitigate risk and make sure that the whole protocol isn't affected by you know some random new asset that we want to try and experiment with and support

it's definitely important to keep the protocol's health in mind uh recently famous uh Ave or sorry a curve founder Mitchell I don't remember his last name has been borrowing quite intensely against his curve position and has led to some criticisms from other players about how this could lead to a situation of bad debt for Ave if the entire position had to be liquidated do you have any comments on how Vmax addresses bad debt and how it mitigates risks to the protocol writ large yeah so I think and also any comments about

the curve CRV token situation and lessons you can learn from that yeah it's it's definitely it's a it's really interesting situation and you know part of it exists um you know because I'm sure Ave has learned a lot over time and when they initially said a lot of these things and didn't have our own Supply caps um you know it allowed for some of the stuff that you know they probably wouldn't let fall do the cracks now and so I think there's a lot of really great lessons to learn with it that kind of goes back to when you add an asset for use has collateral in a protocol you have to be very careful and take into account what the liquidity profile of the asset is if you support an asset with no caps on it and someone

deposits 50 million dollars worth of the s's collateral but there's only five million dollars in liquidity on chain to actually liquidate the asset you're obviously going to run into quite a bit of trouble if you have to liquidate the whole position and so our approach for you know we're kind of in a in a good spot in a way where we can study basically all the issues with past honing protocols we can approach all these typical assets that people use in lending protocols with a fresh set of eyes and we don't you know carry that baggage of already having a bunch of people using these assets on the the protocol um and so when we go to add an asset like curve we would basically look at what is the liquidity profile of this asset and based off liquidity profile

you know how much of an asset can we safely liquidate before it would cause bad bad debt on the protocol this kind of goes back to our risk management framework and simulation tools we have for looking at this stuff you know how much slippage is there to liquidate a million dollars of curve tokens for example um and then we can basically set our bar and Supply caps for a given asset based off you know actual on-chain data so we're confident um you know that we can safely support the assets and then basically you just have to watch them super closely and if the liquidity profile for an asset starts to erode over time you have to you know take actions to to mitigate risk for the protocol whether that's you know

continuing to increase the LTV to slowly liquidate the position or increasing interest rates to get people to you know unwind their positions and you know pausing further borrowing lending of the asset so um yeah in short I think we've we can and have learned a lot from watching other lending protocols and you know approaching these things with more caution and doing things slowly and not kind of rushing into things and leaving more time for you know us to gain confidence and study how things you know market dynamics play out before supporting them I love that answer you know if we don't learn from the failures of the previous protocols we're just going to be stuck in this repetitive Loop of just launching a lending protocols that

eventually uh get exploited or lead to bad debt so uh I hope we do definitely learn from uh the past in these situations I want to shift the gears a little bit and talk about the future as I understand it Vmax will be launching on optimism but I believe has not launched yet uh can you talk a little bit about uh what plans you have for optimism and how are youth uh can fit into that uh as I understand it arith currently despite its uh very high liquidity on optimism has very little leverage against it uh potentially a big opportunity there yeah so where we're at right now is we're planning on launching on optimism

sometime probably in the early August um the protocol is all kind of finalized we've gone through our official audit with uh why audit yearns you know auditing Division and then have done an audit competition on hats finance that we just wrapped up and then I think on the 20th or so our plan is to launch a second smaller competition to review all the final changes and kind of give us her our final stamp of approval and once that's finalized we'll aim to launch an optimism um so it should be coming up very soon stay tuned um definitely learning that things take longer than you expect as usual um but definitely yeah

um but yeah our plans for for our eth and you know we've noticed the same thing we're really excited to support aritha's collateral and then also I think out of the gate we'll be supporting two LP tokens that are already the eth pairs um velodrum Ari thief and Beethoven arith with that one staked in Aura to earn additional yeah so that's kind of exciting yeah I'm not sure if we've really mentioned it before but a big focus with these LP tokens is supporting them to take another protocols um or just you know staked in their own protocol for Belgium's case

um the villager MLP will be stake to earn Velo and the optimism rewards and all that sort of stuff so users don't have to skip out on earning all the the additional rewards they're used to by you know using the assets as collateral if you know convex was launched on optimism 2 we would do the same thing for a curve LP where it would be staked in in convex but you know that opportunity's not there yet um and same thing with vaults you know where there's you're involtered BP vaults that are really enticing and have enough liquidity to be safe for us to support we can you know deposit the lp tokens into a vault to you know Auto compound yield and all that sort of stuff um I personally have a good chunk of my reef currently in the Beats five beefy

bolt Vault Auto compounding the op tokens uh and it's been a very high sustainable source of yield I think averaging around eight to nine percent uh which is well above uh the standard eth borrow cost right so if we if you on Vmax can onboard that LP token the Arbitrage will not Arbitrage but the the gap between the borrow cost and earning rate will be substantial uh so I'll be interested to see how the LTV evolves around that because even with potentially relatively conservative ltvs early users could be doubling or tripling their aprs

if you want to Triple yeah that's what's kind of interesting about the model is you know we're not dictating who can and can't run a pool um so there's you know so many different ways you can slice it it can be uh you know a beats pool that has all the you know the different beats uh bolts in it it can be a beefy pool it can be some something focused with aura or it can be our eth that goes across all the different you know platforms and you can have yeah the volts that are Auto compounding and like you said if I think if it's more of a re focused pool uh you can then have more aggressive parameters if you're

dictating that all is going that's going to be in that pool is eth denominated assets so if you're just boring against r e l p Pairs and you're just grabbing all the reflp pairs across optimism then you can have much more aggressive parameters than if you're going to add in you know usdc in there as well so um you can do that and then um yes let the market the market will decide where these kind of borrow rate lands but um that can you know you just have to source that kind of the eat depositors on the other end so what is the attractive return for eat depositors as borrowers um that was still provides enough meat on the bone for people who want to leverage into that so definitely something uh I think is you know pretty

cool um like I said you kind of you know slice and dice these things however you want and then you know if it's a low barrier of Entry to launch a pool then you know people can try different things and you just see where you know see where the market deploys the capital yeah absolutely going to be interesting to see how that unfolds on that topic of figuring out how to Source eth liquidity in something like this situation how does the um do you have a standard curve for uh the interest that a user would earn from depositing or is it custom per pool that users can create

as in the like interest rate curve for yeah yeah so we just we use the same model that Ave uses for interest rate curve and so it's you know based off the utilization of the assets and the slopes we set for the for the interest rate curves and so it's you know standard kind of like kinked um slope or once you pass the optimal utilization for the asset being used then you know your interest rate starts to go up very quickly to make sure there you know remains liquidy in the in the pool for people to unwind their positions um and so yeah not not too much new there I do think there's a lot of room for improvements and interesting ways we

could you know improve on that model in the future if we get to it um of course there's always a balance between taking the traditional battle tested approach and versus you know trying something new and and having it not work so yeah for now we're using it approach it's it's a pretty reliable model to build off of for now that's for sure so you are currently planning on launching two optimism do you have plans to expand Beyond optimism in the future or do you think it will remain optimism-centric and also why optimism yeah so we we definitely have plans um to expand Beyond optimism where we go next

is not determined yet um there's a lot of interesting stuff on arbitrum where we could see ourselves going to arbitrum next um also mainnet of Youth mainnet Of course has kind of the larger space of users in in tvl and new protocols so um maybe we'll go there too um in what order I'm not really sure yet what kind of a value when we get to that that place um in the the decision making for optimism is you know we wanted basically to go somewhere first that is a a little bit friendlier environment there's less competition with other lending protocols um you know kind of more um blue ocean for us to expand into and

then also optimism has a lot of protocols on it that we thought would be um you know the right fit for us to support um you know a handful of dexes that have a bunch of liquidity urine and um beefier on there and so there's kind of just like a great base of protocols that we thought would be a good fit um that had assets that we wanted to support on DMX and so between those two things we thought it would be a you know a great kind of starting point to showcase our unique use case and you know try out a lot of stuff and do some experimentation and then you know kind of hone in and get a nice foundation and then look to expand to other places a lot of tvl it is actually pretty

concentrated into like GMX um so yeah optimism had you know a nice like Jay said a nice you know uh ecosystem of different things and I think that's you know helps will help um your kind of show what vmix has to offer if we can you know support more smaller pools than do all our experimentation there and then as we expand we'll have to be more confident in kind of what we want to Target makes a lot of sense makes a lot of sense especially as a the op tokens uh Runway I believe is going to be extended as more protocols uh apply for the next rounds uh and the next ARB token

allocation is still not yet set so it's definitely a lot of L2 activity to come in the future can you guys talk a little bit now about how the protocol takes its fees and about the vmex token if you have one or plan to have one yeah um yeah we take fees in kind of the standard way that lending protocols take fees which is we take a share of the interest earned by lenders on the protocol that's specific to the asset in question high-risk assets usually we take a higher fee on and lower risk assets or ones that you know are competitive across a bunch of

lending protocols we take you know pre negligible fees on like you know usdc for example um and then those those fees will basically go to the to the Dow can be used to you know backstop reserves if they're you know is bad debt at a cruise we can use fees earned to you know backstop them or be used to you know pay contributors and expand work on the protocol and all that sort of stuff um so you know pretty standard model for learning protocols and then for VMax token we we do have a plan to launch a Vmax token um when we'll launch it not exactly sure um it'll depend on how the protocol is

doing and when we think is a good time to launch it and so the exact function of the the token is a little up in the air right now but we have some some cool ideas around it where you know we want to take more of a revenue based token emissions approach where you know we're not just minting tokens into markets um you know kind of arbitrarily and wasting a bunch of BMX tokens when we launch it but instead kind of focus on the pools that are you know really earning revenue for the protocol or strategic that we think in the future will earn revenue for the protocol and then basically adjust the the token emissions based off that and kind of take more of a data-driven revenue based approach instead of you know this more arbitrary minting into

um markets approach um and then there'll be some you know scraping features around the the token where we'll probably do something around you stake the tokens and you earn some form of multiplier point over time and that multiplier point will give you boost on the the missions that you earn in the um by participating in vmex so we'll take you know some approach there probably it's you know not locking tokens we I think it's pretty inefficient and not kind of the best way not the best user experience for a new protocol to have people lock up tokens for a bunch of years especially without the especially without the liquid liquidity directing aspect of it I think taking

that out of curve context is usually pretty silly but yeah as you were saying yeah yeah totally agree and so you know we want kind of the same benefit of you know incentivizing people to not sell tokens and so one way to do that is just you know kind of do the inverse of what curve lock is doing which is you know decaying your Boost over time instead it's just the longer you hold the tokens the more boost you get and so it's kind of a nice incentive for people to hold on to their tokens um and yeah that's well as we get closer to the token and as we launch we'll definitely be posting a lot more information on the the approach to the token and we'll be looking for feedback from the community and other people who

you know have opinions about this stuff to you know make sure we're taking everything into account before we launch it but that's kind of the high level structure um John two I'm not sure if you want to fill in any details there either you know what TBD have you laid it out is as we start obviously the core principles are not just admitting it to admitting it we don't want just you know empty tvl we're hoping that the product stands on its own and can attract you know tvl even without token incentives um but then obviously you want to you know attract you know the future kind of governors of the protocol so bring

people in rewarding them for um being deposited or is using the protocol and then having appropriate you know incentives for them to continue to hold we think is an important um as well as sending people to hold LP and keep deep liquidity um we have it wherever we have the protocol deployed any one of our big questions is also just how to kind of manage the token across networks so I think we'll probably start with things fairly simple and then you know buildings out from there as we decide how the protocol is going to look when it's you know on optimism and arbitrome and mainnet and and you know wherever else and wherever else let me go so I think

on the one thing to mention on the governance side is we want to get past the whole okay you hold this token you now decide the specific borrow parameters of this asset that just seems incredibly inefficient so that's where building out this tooling and working with uh you know a developer on building out specific tooling for pulling on chain liquidity data to kind of put into these decisions is getting to the point where people could maybe just token holders can just vote on a framework uh for how parameters are set and managed in the protocol whether it's you know having to have some manual intervention based on alerts and things or eventually

maybe having to be fully automated all of that can just be stripped away to where there's less decisions being made and then there's you know the governing body is more just deciding that hey this framework kind of makes sense um based on available data and then we use the data to kind of tweak those parameters um so yeah don't want to have holders have to kind of you know do due diligence in every little asset um hopefully we can kind of get get past that but um like I said it's simple to start and we're excited to see how we'll see where it goes it's very strange that we've seen a lot of protocols move towards increasing how much governance there is with tokens in recent years which is like the exact

opposite of what we want in crypto in a lot of ways like the token is there to kick-start flywheel incentives it's not there for governance that the crypto wasn't created for governance it was created for self-sustaining flywheels and self-sustaining uh systems uh and we I mentioned Steve earlier the ldo token and its government's role is a big risk to ethereum and protocol security and if we can get to the ideal State we would have protocols like vmex that have little governance aspects and most of the actual uh facilitation is automated so great to see that is the general principle you guys appear to be

operating on and in terms of liquidity and the tokens I'm a big believer in starting small and uh being data driven uh we in rocketpool uh started with a small-ish amount of incentives and then ramped up uh as we and are continuing to ramp up as we learn more and more about what has been working and what hasn't been working so uh yeah I hope you guys I wish you guys the best in the token launch uh do you guys have anything to add now uh in closing thoughts it's been a wonderful call and uh I think uh the rocketpool community will have a lot of new opportunities with vmex in the future on

optimism yeah it's been a it's been an awesome call thanks so much for for having us on and for all the great questions really really appreciate it and yeah I guess in in closing just stay tuned um for updates around launch and lots of exciting stuff coming in a lot of different you know assets that I think will be pretty exciting for people to start playing around with are Ethan you know our eth LP pools and you know definitely follow us on Twitter opener Discord and if you have any ideas around assets to add or you know risk framework or you know in general without any things we were just talking about interesting then you know definitely help in ask questions you know share your thoughts all that sort of stuff so

um you know we definitely want Community contribution and building this because you know you guys in the community are the ones using the protocol so absolutely won't you know to hear your thoughts on what you think is the best structure um but yeah that's that's all thanks so much um really appreciate you having us on thank you guys for joining us jonatho did you want to add anything no well good yeah really appreciate you having us on um like I said Jay said yeah follow us on Twitter hop on the Discord and uh we'll be neutrals in Discord but um things that

left me picking up in the next month or so so um come check it out great amazing thank you guys so much and if you're listening make sure to check out Vmax protocol uh maybe the future of lending on optimism let's kick it back now over to Nick Ashley our community manager as we switch over to the second half of today's call well hello I'm back quite a bit to discuss I think this time around um yeah and we have some breaking news from just today I believe we'll be covering yeah absolutely and it's been one of those days for me um lots of bits and

pieces kind of ticking away behind the scenes trying to keep on top of it so it's good that we've got a new ecosystem lead Grant who is um so you're getting up to speed with rocket pool and the ecosystem which is uh no easy task because as soon as you learn about one piece um something else grows out it's all good still could you tell us a little bit about what grants responsibilities as ecosystem lead will be yeah yeah absolutely um I guess I'll preface this by saying that we do intend to get Grant on as a

guest so he can hear all this firsthand uh I'm guessing maybe towards the end of the month but essentially it is to carve out a good bit of um the BD work that I've been doing as part of my everything that's not technical role um and allowing me to focus a little bit more on the marketing and Community size of things um one is going through is if you look back over the past man is it six months give or take a bit more maybe nine months the speed that um the protocol has been growing and

some of the Milestones along the way like um the chain link press feed bit of foreshadowing there um kind of kicked off uh a number of Integrations that were kind of I suppose you could say passive from the rocket pool side um but going forwards I think there's going to be an increasing need for more um active BD work um kind of ongoing relationship management kind of stuff and potentially branching out into areas where we um traditionally haven't been that involved whether that is uh like institutions and the like um so short answer uh it will be

essentially a BD role but um the the job title is called ecosystem lead got it got it uh will you be seeing Grant on uh Twitter space anytime soon yeah the idea is um maybe sometimes towards the in sometime towards the end of the month I think we have a guest for the next week um if I recall correctly uh but not a whole lot locked in at least for for future weeks so uh yeah it could be that around the 26th or so uh so watch this space and keep an eye out and of course the event section underscore

great looking forward to working with Grant honestly my group chats have been stand recently too so having him around is probably going to help everyone yeah yeah absolutely um and while we're on the topic of uh events and Discord we have an AMA with spool in a couple days um that's just a bonus AMA for this week and we may be having two panel appearances from langers and that hopefully we can confirm um tomorrow morning or I guess later this morning Australian time so I'm sorry excuse me keep an eye out on

um on that event section the the calls and see how it's going to be a relatively late notice but yeah please come along and help to support languages if those panels come together good to hear it could hear it so moving now on to some of the breaking news we I mentioned earlier and that Matt had foreshadowed RPL has now officially gone live with a chain link price feed on RPL USD from mainnet and this is a pretty big deal so RPL is current Oracle is only uniswap V3 meaning most lending protocols most

dapps have not been able to integrate our PL safely and for the most part rocketful as the protocol was fine with this since rpl's main purpose was to be staked rather than to be used in defy but what recent months have showed is that the lack of defy utility have led to occasions where the RPL liquidity has fallen off a cliff into just like uh no one can sell anything without causing massive slippage and this is obviously horrible for a protocol ux because if you want to stake a token you have to first buy the token you want to stake and if there's no liquidity to do that in we got a problem

fortunately liquidity has increased for uh for RPL thanks to uh random Market participants and additionally we now have as of today the RPL USC chain link price feed uh so this should first of all allow protocols easier integration secondarily increase RPL volumes of trading and as a tertiary effect of the prior to increase overall RPL liquidity uh so this is a just a huge milestone for the protocol and as we had a Renaissance some nine months ago on the back of the re chain link

feed perhaps now we see a similar but not quite as potent Renaissance uh in the coming months yeah it would certainly be interesting to watch that develop and I think yeah it's important to reflect on the approach it's going to be taken when it comes to the rpr Token over the past few years even down to things like uh centralized exchange listings Market making and the like um IPL is a little bit different to many other tokens out there and that it does have a use case within the ecosystem it's not just another governance token

so as you've just said Jasper um people need to acquire the token um to run many pools with rocket pool so make it easier to acquire that token is always a good thing in the past I think um debt that kind of fact that there is a use case for rpr um within the rocket Port ecosystem um has kind of led to the the decision-making process of well um we want to encourage people to purchase and use the token not to necessarily speculate it on it or um purchase it for you know the purpose of

using it in D5 but in this case when we're talking about unlocking the ability to lend up here um there is certainly some interesting use cases and it can link in with ipl's role in the ecosystem potentially people may want to um borrow RPL for a short or a longer period of time and similarly on the other side it allows people who are holding up here but not putting it to use for whatever reason to um to do that and to earn a return so we have had certainly um you know reports from time to time and Discord on Twitter people reaching out saying oh I've got a lot of RPL that I

want to put to use but for whatever reason they're not or can't run a node and similarly people who have a demand for appear so yeah um great to see the uh kind of ecosystem there expanding and it'll be interesting to watch the kind of uptake um for the rpr token few important things about this it's important to note that RPL though is now has a CL feed uh I don't believe it will be listed as collateral in Ave which is actually quite useful for us in the ecosystem because as you mentioned we don't want to encourage speculative use so since RPL can only be borrowed we have a strategy that Mark Zeller

himself has uh popularized and has been his impetus for getting RPL onboarded and that is the ability to remain mainly RPL neutral and still participate in the ecosystem you can do this by depositing our eth or eth or even usdc if you for some reason wanted to do that and in borrowing the RPL required to run the mini pools in doing so you allow the previous speculators who deposited their RPL into Ave to participate in the our rocketpool ecosystem further you if you are participating in this C system as the node operator have

now a lot enabled yourself to earn a spread so instead of just earning the RPL APR and having to take the RPL price risk now you can just look at the RPL borrow feed and the RPL APR from staking and focus on just that you don't have to worry so much about the RPL volatility because you're not going to be losing any of the RPL you'll just be paying it back in the end and your debt is denominated in RPL so really this is opening up a huge number of ecosystem participants into protecting the beacon chain uh and enabling a group of users who previously

had no entrance name being uh people who want to stake with rockpool but don't want to have RPL price risk so yeah this is going to be huge on just so many levels definitely will be the basis of a thread soon yeah pretty great one question uh I don't know if you'll be able to answer this or not did we have to for the CL feed I know it is generally standard practice to do so and it's also generally standard practice not to discuss payments or non-payments of it uh but I'm just wondering if you had any information that you could share so that question too

um this is something that's I've been out of the loop of his unfortunate question for layers we can ask him during the next Community call what I did here is that um in terms of interacting with chain link he said it was a little bit challenging in terms of getting information from them or getting them to send through documentation and everything that's involved um I believe that they chain link um have been if not already moving towards a paid model for this specific um yeah price feed I'm not sure sorry on whether there is a fee I wouldn't be surprised if there was but um it is it is something we have to get some

clarification from language about I was expecting there to be a fee and in my recent proposal on the Forum I actually suggested that the RP Dao put the bill for the listing on chain link so uh either way great news was just curious but moving on now from chain link uh I hear that you have joined the Nexus Mutual Community call recently uh and that they've been pretty receptive can you talk a little bit about that yeah that was um actually just a few hours ago um in the Nexus Mutual Discord there is a and in in PIP I guess is how you pronounce

it uh up what's been out for a little while um proposing to allocate a decent chunk of eth to linguistic with rocketball uh 14 400 to be precise and just a little dust yeah exactly um I think that is about to commence shortly in terms of the on game uh the on-chained governance vote um on the 12th I'm assuming that's probably U.S 12th so maybe a little way to go um but yeah just mostly sharing an interaction to Rocket pool what exactly the protocol is um The Proposal itself is quite

straightforward it doesn't necessarily need a lot of explanation um but yeah cool went well there are a few of their community members along and it was a good opportunity to kind of share about what rock was doing to make sure that when um adao or any industry liquid Stakes with rocket pool not only are they earning a return um but more importantly they're helping to secure the network contributing to decentralization helping to ensure that the blockchain remains incredibly neutral and free from censorship which is also pretty important so yeah Thinking Beyond just the numbers there um does seem to be pretty well received

um but you never know when it comes to on-chen voting um Sometimes some of these uh dials that the power can be divided up in interesting ways so have to wait and see fingers crossed yeah every Milestone get with one of these major Dao's diversifying their treasuries towards rocketpool is a huge milestone in enabling future Dows and treasuries to doing the same uh Nexus Mutual is one of the largest treasuries so getting them to diversify towards us would be a huge huge scalp and definitely help similar causes going on in the ecosystem cough cough uh mantle flash bit down uh but yeah we can't expect everyone to

uh uh hear or be rational apparently uh diversifying your treasury between lsts is the most economically rational thing to do since the disparity between the yields is relatively small and the discrepancies of risk are relatively large with Steve you don't want to get too far into this but you do have relative amounts of censorship risk due to the Dow structure and uh also the very limited node operator set that isn't less present if at all within already and so having a diverse portfolio is just protecting the treasury from these

tail risks so great work math on getting the word spread to next mutual and hopefully this is a catalyst for the rest of the treasury Community to do the same yeah you're right in there every little bit um there is there is uh certainly a lot going on out there but I think rocket was presence in the market is um built up solely over time uh in an organic way uh and yeah through multiple small actions that we all take whether that is engaging with dolls or um content out on social platforms uh or

even having you know the gifts and like we do on these Twitter spaces each week each individual item um you know it may not be some um big flashy advertising expenditure but it does accrue over time and it is something that you can't just buy if you keep an eye out on New protocols that launch um you may you may realize that uh despite you know the funding and the VC backing you can't kind of buy um genuine engagement and kind of integration within the D5 World overnight is something that only happens with time and with you know in Rocco's case uh a genuine solid product so yeah that's also important to keep in mind

yeah having 3 000 note operators as a community is definitely useful I must say similar to news has previously voted to diversify through to our re through a uh time-weighted automated Market maker that was being developed by a third-party group uh well that third party group sends launched the new protocol for uh twap exchanges for treasuries and has also ceded the 100K Reef necessary uh to enable the trade at low uh slippage this tuac protocol that launched is fairly interesting there was

a lot of discussion about it in creating whether it was in that useful Edition or not but what it will allow treasuries to do if it gains popularity is to make a relatively large transactions with relatively low liquidity and if we are to pursue these sort of upper highest Echelon of treasuries something like this might be a pretty useful feather tab in our tap and so glad to see that the first transaction is going live and I wish them the best perhaps they might be pivotal to our treasury expansion in the future definitely a good relationship to build you know we've um we've talked about

nouns off and on over the past few weeks I think there's at least one maybe two amas with them I can't remember if they were these Community calls that we hosted but I do distinctly recall um jumping on one of the amas I think just for you and norweck and some others may have joined too um but yeah but yeah the the nouns guys uh theme seemed like a great group so it was um good to see this initiative which has kind of been ticking along for for a little while come to fruition so here's a topic that was actually new to me and that is the rap protocol has

uh reduced their fees for the Reed token uh so this is pretty cool raft is a stable coin product protocol built around various uh Olympus taking tokens and had recently onboarded res and now seem to be doing a promotion to increase our eth usage so if you are already in the raft protocol if you have I believe their stable quality is called r uh consider switching your CDP over and potentially saving some fees yeah it'll be interesting to see how the Dynamics play out in the liquids taking token collateralized stable coin in

space we've had a few of these protocols on including raft as guests it seems to be a pretty rapidly growing field and of course with that you get a lot of competition different ways of approaching the same product at the end of the day it's probably likely that there'll be a smaller number of um protocols and you know the step by raft it seems to um be a pretty good one in terms of making them look like a more attractive option for anyone wanting to put their uh to work in this way of course we also have our own home spun well semi-host fund uh liquid's taking

token based CDP to and that is gravitab gravita just announced in a very humorous Fashion on the Discord that they are increasing the reef uh cap to 5.5 million uh shout out to ox4nx for announcing that gravitab would be increasing the debt cap in the rocketful Discord before anywhere else most specifically in the uh Rocket Fuel submissions channel so if you want to keep updated on everything in the ecosystem make sure you are following uh Rocky fuel submissions yeah this is very much breaking news

isn't it I don't think it's even managed to make its way out to the Bird app yet um yeah 5.5 is a great step hopefully they can add 1.4 million as the next um bump up once that is inevitably hit can't wait for the 6.9 million so we have uh uh Parallax protocol and this is what I'm not very familiar with uh could you talk a little bit about parallax yeah this is another one of these um kind of out of left field uh announcements uh I have been chatting

very briefly to Parallax um just going through the usual steps of um how we would kind of potentially work with them whether they would want to go to the IMC or the PMC with it and we can do co-marketing or Twitter space and the like so yeah this is uh a liquid seeking strategy that they have announced and it supports Ari so it's possible to potentially have a D5 position managed by Parallax Finance um still very much early days um but yeah they did announce this before before getting in touch uh so

it's a little bit of a alluding Pro uh process but um you can find out more and and do your own due diligence alongside Me In Parallel um oh nice uh non-intended pun there um from the Twitter account but yeah I guess just yet another one of um many such examples of uh the the defy World um going to arith is um it's kind of one of those a grade assets right right it's definitely in the starting lineup for most new protocols launching especially multi-asset protocols

so in the IMC World We are continuing to flesh out and uh establish our L2 strategy uh once we settle on a ZK strategy we will be enabling liquidity incentives on both ZTE sync and ZK evm polygon notably I believe just yesterday and I don't think this is on the Bird app either uh the polygon team added bonus rewards on the arith poll pool on ZK ebm so if you are a zero null knowledge Explorer you can find some good yields for Aries on polygon however the IMC again is still uh

debating on the exact amount of liquidity he wants to give to uh zkevms versus optimistic l2s if this is a topic that you have an opinion on uh definitely let us let us know in the IMC public channel uh your thoughts about which l2s you use where you would want to see re liquidity would be pretty helpful for us as we make our decisions I think they're coming towards the end of the discussion points for this call um there have certainly been some other other

developments in Discord on Twitter um in terms of ah how do we say this don't like to necessary name names but other ecosystem participants so this caused a little bit of um activity recently with people engaged in Spirited discussions and Discord and on Twitter there's been a busy week for that kind of stuff um certainly kept me and I'm sure KRON busy um watching carefully but um I guess yeah at the end of the day not necessarily a topic we want to go into too much uh or devote too much time to on this call but um important to I suppose really rate some of the themes

that we've discussed to date in terms of um the the Safety and Security of ethereum its ability to continue operating is incredibly neutral blockchain without threat of censorship is where um most of the consumers coming from I obviously can't speak for the rockable community but based on what's being shared it um does seem to be the the overwhelming um reason for for these discussions and it is it is pretty important at the end of the day as I said earlier kind of it's um it's why we're all here it's a key part well that might have been on the Nexus movie call actually but um um it's the reason that blockchain

technology is is what it is right rather than just another centralized Financial products so um yeah I guess that's all I'm going to say about that but um certainly has been uh suppose a note a note with a topic over the past a few days the Rockefeller Community is definitely care about protecting ethereum and ethereum's users uh and I believe much of the recent discussion uh was coming from that as a place of origin if you do want to learn more whack put out some amazing coverage on the issues in his uh Rocket Fuel episode so definitely give that a check if you want

to learn more and with that I believe we have covered all the topics for today at the start of this call we were joined by vmix protocol vmx Finance rather they are a novel lending platform that will be launching on optimism and will be able to take advantage of some of the re uh strategies that are on optimism that are high yielding in a isolated lending Market this will enable folding for the velodrome or beats five pools and also just bring a lot of utility to re and the optimism ecosystem where our Earth has had good liquidity but relatively little usage

after that call we switched topics and we went into some of the updates for the past week uh their main story from today was the RPL RPL USD chain link feed is now live on mainnet this will enable just a huge variety of different Integrations uh and also just bolster the sustainability of the rocky pool protocol into the future as now we have a default utility that will support RPL liquidity defect by proxy we also talked about the ongoing efforts to convince treasuries for Dows and more to allocate towards arith MAV has been

working hard with next Mutual nouns Dao have recently moved forward with the 100K re transaction with their time weighted amm we also talked about cdps and how raft protocol has reduced fees on re and Parallax fault has been has recently opened up uh with support for arith a the world of L2 ZK EVMS polygon has added bonus incentives I highly recommend everyone check out if they are exploring uh and we will continue on the IMC to discuss and plan for other expansions uh there has been some intense conversation in trading as I

mentioned earlier uh but definitely worthwhile to read and be aware of anything else you want to add map um I guess just begin to reiterate the calls that we have coming up not everything is in the event that you're underscore yet there are a couple of panels that lingers May attend that we have yet to add so keep an eye out on that and please get along assuming they go ahead and help support languages and rocketpool but otherwise um we will catch you probably for the bonus AMA later this week with spool awesome thank you all for listening in and this is Jasper checking out from his

first week of med school uh thank you for joining and have a good night okay thanks talk to Jessica thanks everyone foreign