USDN: Real Yield & Programmability in One Stablecoin with Jelena Djuric of Noble

Transcript

we're calling Noble dollar uh composable yield stable coin it's a yield bearing stable coin which we're seeing has a lot of demand in general but there's this other element which is it's fundamentally um programmable you can fundamentally decide where to redirect the yield kind of onchain in this like programmatic like transparent way you know we've seen the ab and flows right we've seen like IBC you know take off you know kind of dominate um bridging volume and then we've seen that retract right but at the end of the day there is this like whole world that like hasn't experienced the call it Beauty and simplicity of IBC which is the evm space can Noble sort of serve as this stable coin and rwa issuance chain for these uh kind of emerging kind of evm app chains

and and roll up environments [Music] all right let's go I'm here with yena Durk the CEO and co-founder of noble noble is infrastructure for stable coins uh particularly in the cosmos ecosystem and um we've known each other for a while in fact interop Ventures is an investor at Noble and today we're going to get a bit of an update because it's been a while since you've been on the podcast been a

while since we talk um what's been happening in the noble world over the last uh I guess six months or a year um the noble dollar uh this new project that you guys are uh spearheading and also we're going to talk about Cosmos a little bit because it's been a while since we went like deep into the cosmos trenches so yeah thanks for coming on yeah thanks for having me sub uh I think the last time I was on was like duffing more than a year ago so a lot has changed lot has happened uh yeah pleasure to be here yeah so I guess like how are things going you guys now growing and scaling and how's that how's that as like as a as a CEO you know as an entrepreneur how's it feel to be kind of scaling at the at the speed you guys

have been scaling yeah you know it's been uh really just a pleasure honestly to be able to have their resources to on board you know just fantastic people um cross engineering marketing product so the life of the founder like I'm not going to talk you know gravel around this too much but it's actually pretty hard right I feel like there used to be like a little bit of a fetishization of like being a founder and like how cool it was and I'm like no it's actually really difficult um and I'm sure you also feel that with like the fund and a lot of the stuff that you do but the biggest benefit and advantage of being a Founder is getting to just work with amazing people I know that's maybe sometimes a cliche but yeah and and we've been fortunate enough to grow the team so

kind of on that friend yeah probably since we last spoke we had a number of really important milestones in our of life cycle so of course we uh raised series a um which uh you guys participated in um and then that was led by Paradigm uh with participation from a number of other funds uh and that was a $15 million raise uh and that's given us the kind of resources and and really mandate to uh really expand on what I call like the 1.0 version of of the noble um Mission and and kind of uh Vision which I'm happy to obviously go into more details around and and how that's evolved but yeah it's been it's been great has been great um and really it's the people uh make the the journey

really uh gratifying how big is the team now yeah so it's 13 of us um most of that is of course engineering um and we're hiring so do check out our careers page at the noble. XYZ careers uh we're looking for a head of design um role and then we'll be building up the engineering function as well so always really uh on the lookout for like really talented going Engineers Cosmos SDK Engineers uh and also actually on the evm side uh which I'm happy to discuss why uh we're looking for that kind of talent in in a moment but yeah check it our Cru and you brought on a CTO so you um which which is uh I think something you guys wanted for a long time John formerly from from K yeah what's that

been like yeah so John's actually officially a co-founder as well so when I started the project uh it was really uh kind of a labor of love among a number of kind of teens so for for those that remember originally um Noble was being sort of Co co-developed by a number of teams uh including Strang law Adventures um and then of course myself as the founder I brought on a co-founder his name is Stefan and and that was great that was sort of the initial MVP product but really after our seed round we decided okay let's build a team let's bring on that CTO uh kind of leader and that was of course eventually editing John and so yeah he's uh he's doing a great job again like I just get such

great feedback from both like our engineering team but within the ecosystem he is definitely you know one of the one of the brightest Minds kind of uh in in this uh Cosmos engineering space so anyways yeah he's great and officially a co-founder so it's three of us now myself Stefan and and John awesome so I I don't know I don't know where to start off with first I guess uh maybe just how phenomenal the usdc growth has been on Noble you know there's a meme in in the cosmos place I can't remember like who's tweeting this but like I think it's pachu maybe it's not pachu but like he tweets like every time you know there's like a new Milestone he'll just like tweet the usdc docool screenshot and like and over the last year I've just watched that rank

you know go up from like yeah avalan and he just like and then that now polygon yeah you surpassed polygon and actually I I use that a lot like when when talking to investors and talking about teams we invested in you know talk about movement and and Noble and you know sort of pigeot as the the fourth or I guess fifth today largest usdc issuer in in crypto what do you think that growth is attributed to and like who's using Noble in and who's bringing liquidity onto Noble and where do you see the biggest applications and use cases for usdc in the cosmos IVC EOS system yeah absolutely so one thing I'll just know

kind of like the growth that we've seen around usdc adoption within Cosmos as a whole V of course kind the Noble's uh you know the noble chain was not inevitable right like we we do actually have native tether in the ecosystem that's on Cava and that really hasn't seen much traction and so I'll kind of answer the first part of your question which is the reason really for a lot of this adoption is uh is a couple things one uh it's really how we designed the noble protocol like from day one right we wanted to make sure it was this highly minimalistic kind of flexible uh you know trade uh we're not you know introducing defi natively on on the noble layer one right we have a proof of authority validator set super fast upgrades um you know the kind of module framework that we've um

adopted for Native issuance is very specific to to our goal which is how to you proliferate um Native stable coins everywhere and so when we obviously kind of came up with that initial like design it was you know still a thesis still a um still still something that we you know didn't see kind of being validated in in the real world and in the real market and then you know what you fast forward to today and and it's clearly that that model has worked and so what are kind of elements of that model well of course there's a few things one we have things like Circle native Bridge The Crossing transfer protocol integrated directly onto Noble uh so this means that you know today you can go natively between uh between any plasmo chain and any cctp chain which

includes atum salana arbitrum Etc and natively in one click under the hood that also includes IBC and specifically IBC forwarding so I think you were mentioning you were looking to well I think it was EUR e actually that you were looking to get access to in Cosmos but if it's usdc for example you know that that's like a one-click transfer right like take your usdc from Eve to to to Noble or or osmosis and one click and that's something we developed under the H just to really make it easy again for people to Port their Stables kind of from point A to point B with one click no slippage all of these kind of uh basic I would say ux requirements and really because of that and of course because of a lot of the kind of community work that we did you really saw USD takeoff so yeah I mean that

number right like that call it half a billion or so of native uscc on Noble of course is demand driven from from protocols within Cosmos that of course rely on stable coins for for variety of use cases so about 70% um I would say is around USC of that half a billion is on dydx the rest of that is that Osos say say injective and and a number of other protocols so that kind of ratio is actually also like similar in other ecosystems so like feel get arbitrum most of that St that stable equ liquidity is is like hyper liquid of course that means salana is a different Beast right with like all of their kind of mcoin use cases but if you look at Defi and like trading it's typically you know a handful of of kind of dexes or

def platforms that you know drive a lot of that um liquidity and volume but of course Noble's role is to that longtail of app chains and and rollups as well right like if you're a developer you know maybe with less resources or you know less connections you should still be able to tap into that like native stable coin liquidity and so I'm very like proud and excited when we have these you know startup kind of earlier teams saying hey like we really need like a you know seamless access to Stables like how does Noble work and then we can kind of you know educate them on like noble but also IBC and then of course our implementation of cctp and things like this so yeah we're again about half a billion yes fifth largest protocol with Native usdc and uh

yeah about 70% of that is DX approximately um but yeah I mean it's growing right like that demand and that kind of distribution ultimately will will evolve and grow and we're just here to service that demand yeah so a pretty large portion then I I kind of knew this was the case was it is is attributable to dydx um where do you see the biggest growth opportunity and do you think that like dydx owning such a large chunk of like being such a large part of U your your user base maybe presents a threat like you say like dydx launches its own stable coin

to serve its users that would potentially like take away a lot of usage from Noble how do you think about diversifying you know the the use cases and like applications that are you know heavily leveraging no in order to be more resilient in in in that sort of event yeah so there's a few things there on like kind of to your first question which is kind of what is like future demand look like so obviously like being Cosmo people and like being around for like a decent amount of time at this point you know we've seen the ab and flows right we've seen like IBC you know take off you know kind of dominate um bridging volume and then we've seen that retracted right but at the end of the day there is this like whole other world that like hasn't experienced the kind

call it Beauty and simplicity of IBC which is the evm space and so one really exciting development we're looking towards is uh IBC urea so this is the kind of new this will be a main release of of of IBC which uh extends IBC to the EPM space so you're actually going have an opportunity for you know various em app chains and kind of rollup environments to leverage IBC as the bridging mechanism for various you know kind of assets and for interoperability ility and uh we're we're looking at this point and we're having a lot of conversations around this can Noble sort of serve as this stable coin and our wa issuance chain for these uh kind of emerging kind of evm app chains and

rollup environments um and you might question like why right why why don't these kind projects Source from e mainnet or why don't these projects Source from like other layer twos and uh it'll it all comes back to ux so I mean again we do a lot of things to make it really easy to use Noble right like these like kind of under the hood workflows around you know forwarding um you know again we have uh the native kind of cctp integration already we we have you know fast finality one second block times um you know uscc is used as a native gas token all of these sort of like ux arguments um I think really resonate with developers and so yeah we're continuing to have a lot of conversations with various you know various Builders and by the way this

isn't necessarily just for usdc right like there are many kind of like like stable points um out there and many of which we support and so we sort of say hey like these are kind of the Native Integrations that we have this is kind of the mechanism for how you would sort of like in one click have this kind of ability to Source stable coin and rwa liquidity from Noble and so we're kind of doing the current the a lot of the research and the kind of market research around the demand for this and so the kind of high level answer to your question is we definitely see the evm space as a source of demand for a lot of like the liquidity and the stable coin liquidity that we um that we generate and proliferate and it's funny like on kind of like a side note a lot of the

issues that we're seeing in ethereum space Cosmos fa like years ago right fragmentation right is like a huge problem you know this kind of like debate right like are l2s like parasitic to like the eth main net you know we we've had these debates uh from for from forever ago in Cosmos ecosystem and so yeah I mean as you know like we solved for this stable coin kind of liquidity fragmentation in in Cosmos uh with with usdc of course and and the other assets that we Port um and now we're thinking hey like is this something that we could potentially do for uh evm projects as well once of course interesting is stable and performance yeah okay so let let's talk a little bit about this IBC Eureka and I think just there's a bigger topic here which is the fragmentation of

IBC and the different IBC versions that are emerging now I'm not like super deep in the Weeds on this but there's IBC R there is like unions IBC there's hyperledger IBC and as far as I understand it these are not compatible now like this is what IBC was meant to solve yeah and now we find ourselves potentially with three competing versions of the same protocol can you give us like sort of the highe level of why this is happening and yeah what are the different forces at play here definitely um it's funny it's like that Meme right around like standards um I think it's a no it's it's I think it's like a comic but but it goes something

like uh you know there's like 20 standards you should use my standard right it's like well introducing like a 21st standard isn't like solving for like the lack of coordination among like the standards that already exist right so yes there are kind of multiple call it uh kind of companies and and groups that are uh kind of building you know on top of IBC that are obviously trying to make things like IBC to evm like go to market like quicker um yeah so I mean you kind of named a few of those projects um I think like hyperlane of course uh yeah there's Union there's of course IBC kind of call it core which is being developed by the interchain labs team ultimately these are just different teams looking to take IBC go to market

quicker and looking to kind of build these relationships with these various protocols I'm not going to like go into like the nuances or or details necessarily of like what makes like unions implementation different than than kind of uh uh like hyper Lanes but I think for Noble what we care about um that's the thing obviously that I want to focus on is obviously what is like the easiest to implement right like what is actually stable what has been audited what has the least amount of Pops involved when it comes to transferring tokens from like point A to point B what has like the greatest like developer tooling um around things like IBC to evm that's what we care about and yeah ultimately the way that we design Noble of course like out of the box is to work with like IBC core as we know it which

is developed and maintained among a number of um a number of teams but at the same time we're also highly highly flexible to support other interoperable interop Solutions so like we like we obviously do talk to even like the kind of standard kind of bridging protocols right I mean one team that we're working with is Wormhole actually for Noble's implementation of of which is a which is a new stable coin that we're supporting which is going to be wrapped on Noble and called Noble dollar which which I'm super excited to chat about in a bit but yeah wormall is is actually like the bridging solution in that scenario right cuz like IBC Ora is just not stable and it just doesn't make sense for for this particular use case and so yeah Noble is highly leveraged and exposed to like all

interrupt Solutions versus like kind of pigeon pigeon holing ourselves into one of course IBC is like the preferred and we like have spent a number of resources uh and dedicated time and energy to making IBC work on some of the workflows that I described earlier but again we're also like exposed to other kind of interop solutions as well and I think at the end of the day we just care about the end user we care about the use case that's why you know we're we okay to work with you know various inw providers and so you mentioned that Noble would issue usdc on EDM chains this sort of comes as a surprise I wonder maybe if you could dive into this a little bit more and because there there is like native usdc over in the evm space and it seemed it feels like

bridging is just like much easier there you know it feels intuitively like a a much further hop right to have us usdc be issued on Noble are these chains that are looking for real native issuance of usdc and they're looking for like the closest thing that they can get to that in the form of a like bridged Noble asset or or is the idea for Noble to issue those directly and like what's the deal there like kind of with circle in your ability to say like okay hey you know L2 whatever we're going to be the native usdc issuer there so that people can Bridge straight out you know into C CTP and across that that Circle ecosystem yeah so there's like a few um kind of Dynamics here play so first of

all for like any um kind again app chain rollup um you know uh there is already something called a bridge contract standard that Circle offers which is almost like a permissionless kind of standard where um you know project can simply say hey we're not we're going to first support like a bridged standard of uscc that like Circle has sort of um call it a blessed and said yeah this is is the bridge standard that we support and then with enough volume of course that could be kind of migrated to Native but even like within that right like think about the like the developer ecos system there is like hundreds if not thousands of projects looking to deploy whether that's an L2 or an L3 or or you know kind of Leverage a like a new sort of role of as a service framework like

like conduits framework other other examples yeah there there's a lot of kind of demand for this for both the native use uh sorry the native asset and also this kind of bridge contract standard and so Noble simply kind of plays this role um and again this is something that we're working on working towards which is you know in the meantime uh before let's say this native asset is like you know kind of deployed you know by a circle and kind of their internal engineering U kind of processes is there a role for Noble to play and increasingly the answer is like yes right so one team that we have uh chatted about this uh with in depth is is the conduit you know kind of project and so they have this really you know kind of ful you kind of rollup as a

service kind of environment to just like again help developers you know spin up rollups go to market quicker and of course stable points are always part of that like equation and so again we're evaluating like can Noble service this uh kind of function where again it's like this one click feels like native kind of experience where you do get the native stable you know onto that roll up you know kind of in a seamless way and again the only reason we're really even like talking about this is because we've done this in Cosmos right where arguably Cosmos is e you know just as fractured or fragmented than what you have in ethereum space where again you have all these like lay in our case it's like layer ones they s layer ones with their own validator set of course the interupt mechanism is a standardized it's IBC but

again you have the same sort of Dynamics at play where these projects do want of course these native stable coins that they can uh you know securely advertise as such right there is there are Redemption mechanisms you know with centralized exchanges it works pretty well and so yes of course there is is na there are native Stables on ethereum both main net and on various layer 2os whether that's you know arbitr or optimism or you know other other environments but same time we're still seeing that that doesn't solve these kind of needs of these like longtail um you know pool of developers that that want you know some developer kind of environment and experience that again it feels like native for all tense of purposes it is native it's one hop from the origin but of course it's um you

know a different kind of issuance model than what you see maybe Vis things like the super chain or via things like the Arbitron Bridge or or things like this yeah right and so ARB does have usdc does have native and the super chain also optimism yeah yeah of course okay cool and um something I wanted to also talk about we'll talk about like the usdn and m0 and and all that in a second but uh one of the I think interesting things about Noble is that it's a proof of authority chain and I know there's been discussion or at least rumors or just lots of conversation about like Nobles or like where where Noble would align right early on there was like this idea of that Noble would be a interchange

security replicated security channel in the CMOS Hub there was also I think some discussion at some point about being an enan Lair AVS maybe although I don't remember if I I don't know if I remember that super accurately but what's the like what's the current thinking about um like noble as an app chain moving forward yeah it's a great question and yeah this uh question around like shared security and like uh kind of Noble's underlying consensus yes of course has been a topic since day one so I guess like for those that maybe just don't have as much context um I'll I'll briefly share that so when we initially came up with a design for for Noble around that time this was uh back in mid 2022 which wow feel feels like forever

ago and and in some ways it was but at that time of course shared security was a huge topic within the cosmos ecosystem right and this actually is before like Igan lay and you know kind of other ABS projects at kind of the eorum space so in many ways yeah Cosmos was like a little bit early to this discussion right you had interchange security which was basically like taking the entire atom a validator set in the entire kind of market cap of atom and using that to secure consumer chains right that's what we call them uh you also had mesh security also being proposed by like sunny and the osmosis team which was how do you take you know partial set security How do you take partial validator sets across many protocols combine them into one and have that secure consumer chains versus just like

the kind of entire let's say Adam validator set um there were a lot of different designs and of course Noble was with playing with in that discussion because of course we didn't have a chain we didn't have a validator set we didn't have a to token like for for for stake none of that and then ultimately honestly we just felt that it was much safer to go the POA route as like the model and the design on share security was evolving so quickly like there wasn't really consensus around like the optimal shared security model and yeah I mean even now like interchange security as a concept has sort of faded away um and I mean even in the ethereum space around various share security models like that's still kind of evolving and and very much like in discussion one

kind of project I'll call out that I really en enjoyed kind of following in the shared security space is symbiotic it kind of reminds me of like the original kind of mesh security Vision which you know even though at that time I was working on interchange security really resonated with me as like a just a great like kind of a like design and and you know kind of alternative to like a more monolithic stra security system if you could call it that and so regardless we're still seeing that evolve right like in real time kind of in the ethereum space and so like one of my principles is like don't break it if if it's not broken or don't fix it if it's not broken right like it's not broken right like actually if anything the proof of authority validator set works very well like really really well

um you know in in the worst case scenarios there is this ability to roll back state if something like really disastrous were to happen we have super fast upgrades like I'm constantly amazed at like how quickly we can upgrade like two two you know two seconds 3 seconds that we've reached kind of like as like as the best metric of like upgrade times among like 20 validator set distributed around the world that's impressive right from a coordination perspective and so again it's fast one second block times we can also upgrade very quickly in the worst case scenario there are things that we could do to uh you know kind of protect our users and and make sure that bad actors don't get away with crime if that like that horrible you know kind of

situation were to happen and honestly it it makes asset issuers in kind of RW is issuers I think also more comfortable with the concept of kind multi-chain issuance because they know that Noble is a stable reliable kind of like Hub like in the middle of all these other protocols that facilitates this the stable coin issuance and they understand that we do have this proof of authority validator set that again is is trustworthy so yeah I mean listen the POA set works well again this is something that we decided to do a couple of years ago because Shar security just was not you know as stable as we would have liked it to be in Cosmos and then honestly a couple of years later I would argue that we we made the right choice right and so I'm also kind of proud of

that but of course there is this question of like okay well what's next for for Noble from like um you know chain architecture perspective and and so I'm actually very happy to kind of share some of these early um ideations with you um and kind of the community and there's something that we'll have more information on in in the coming weeks but one thing to note about Noble is obviously as I said there's no kind of defi right now on Noble right like there's no real there's no VM right we we don't support cosm as an example of a VM that we have in Cosmos again our layer one chain is is very stable you know we don't support applications where you would need to do trading as I said

on the noble chain a lot of that takes place on a kind of destination chains like dyx or osmosis or or say or or other chains but that all obviously is on liming right like we we do support the stable coins that have a lot of Demand right we were chatting about like the Euro e um kind of before the show started and uh a lot of the times we thought well how do we actually build you know let's say a stable swap app or a lending app or or something that really takes advantage of kind of the Native issuance that the noble L1 already supports and so one thing that we're in the process of Designing is actually an EVN side chain uh actually built on Celestia that talks to the layer one so that talks the noble layer

layer one kind of proof of authority chain uh in terms of like sourcing kind of like the the actual kind of stable quids and rwas but this Iain can support things like a euro to dollar um you know swapping app or even a payments app so yeah this is the the kind of net new thing that we're looking at because again if it's not broken don't fix it like the POA chain works very well you know we we've invested a lot of resources into it already but of course we understand there's like an entire kind of ecosystem and kind of the need to build applications that are useful and practical and people want right whether like swapping between the Euro and the dollar or payments or again that use stable coins under the hood so

versus you know kind of Outsourcing a lot of that labor and a lot of that kind of demand to other places we realize well why don't we just build it ourselves and what better place to do that than kind of on Celestia as an emence chain kind of on Celestia of course there's a lot of historical kind of intellectual and and philosophical synergies between like Cosmos and Celestia that which I know you know about and yeah it's exciting to uh kind of finally be in this space where you know we've done such a good job of like the pure kind of like issuance model across this like highly highly fragmented ecosystem of many many chains many protocols that all want native disables kind of from going from that to this what we're calling the Noble app ler where you can you know start

building these applications you know that are useful to people so yeah I want you to be able to swap your dollars to Euros or or vice versa and kind of you know in one click be able to withdraw that to your you know bank account in the in the case of uree like on on on an Noble app player and and hopefully that yeah that's something that we will'll be working towards very cool I'm looking forward to that like yeah find like the you know I'm I'm a obviously like user of usdc on Cosmos I'm also a user of uree big fan of manium I use that app like we use it for business also for personal and you guys also issue the uree Y on in Cosmos which means that given the problem is the liquidity right

that's that's the problem that I often run into you know if you try to swap anything more than 10K whether it's on I know you guys don't issue the ethereum version of your e but whether it's on ethereum or on on osmosis there's just like no liquidity uh yes yes and that that's an issue right if this is going to if this scales um how do you how do you think about like scaling that right because I mean it's basically it's a stable swap uh to some extent I mean two Stables with two uh different um uh prices right so I don't know if you can actually can you call a stable swap even if it's like swapping two different currencies yeah um a good question I mean we are uh there's like the category sa swaps and

there's like different um kind of algorithms or kind of mechanisms that supports different types of stable swaps so yeah when it comes to like dollars and dollar like assets um that's typically the kind of am I mean like dollars and Euros yeah and that um yeah so that we're looking at designing something something more similar to concentrated liquidity pool where you're always going to have like the perfect price for that conversion so let's say yeah euro to dollar and you can sort of incentivize market makers on either side and liquidity providers you know kind of with like ticks within a certain range of that perfect price and and yeah I mean this is something that you know you're seeing the Euro as a stable coin take off kind of Elsewhere like on base for example but really it's it's not

it's not really prominent yet even despite the fact that the Euro as like a currency in the regular FX Market is the second most uh traded currency in the world right USD be number one Euro being number two and I think that the yen is number three um if I'm not mistaken and so you got do all three yeah well the Yen actually technically isn't live but yeah we're hoping to support it yeah exactly so we're just really trying to create like very familiar user experiences that you would have with the wise or revolute or you know in Canada with like an interact e transfer although that is like so bad like I don't that's all inter e transfer is pretty good actually like okay I mean I don't think people should fun inter e

transfer it's like you could just s an email people get money in their vay account it's actually pretty pretty that's true that's true I guess it's kind of Frey things that only Canadians know about that's true that's true it's just a bit of a monopoly and it's like very permissioned and anyways you're right it's not the worst ux but I me it would be cool if you guys built like basically Noble to interact e transfer that would be pretty dope well it's funny you say that CU I mean like there is a workflow that we've been like discussing on building which is like similar with with manium right because manium does already have like the licenses and like the ability for you to withdraw to your bank account right like which in Europe yeah in Europe right for like like that market but yeah like that

kind of premise of like an inter um you transfer tip products but of course with Stables um yeah I mean that'd be really cool in any case uh like as you said like liquidity is low right for the Euro right like it's bad pricing right like as you said more than 10,000 I I actually thought that's that seems high like I don't think it's even less that like the pricing gets kind of bad but um that's just because there's no like protocols that really are just going all in on like stable INF like stable coin infrastructure and even them you know to a greater degree uh around like RW when it comes to things like bonds um as well which of course you support so yeah I mean again we're just trying to figure out like let's take like a destiny into

our own hands and let's you know with all the experience that we have around multi-chain issuance of stables and kind of routing and these like complex kind of workflows under the hood like how do we expand that to uh an F player right where now it's not just like you know you let's say using you know the Euro on the osmosis pool but you actually being able to like swap for that like you know on Noble with better pricing and and things like this so yeah that that's really the the vision you know at a basic level there and again it's just always a pleasure to work with teams that we really respect and have been around for a very long time and are smart people so yeah and that's very much the celesia team so yeah yeah yeah

cool well let's talk about this this usdn thing I was actually kind of surprised when I when I saw that so why are you guys launching your own stable coin it's a great question um all right so a few things it's it's a fundamentally different um call it like model right for for like a stable coin and I'll also just quickly take it back to like our one of like our driving motivations which is working with really great team um mzo like like through and through like fit fits that um description right so just for those that are kind of like not in the know uh m0 is a uh it's a it's a project uh built on ethereum which effectively takes a lot of the kind of amazing like elements of circle model

and and maker Dow's model and kind of like puts it together and is like hey this is like a new way to uh issue a stable coin and the building blocks for kind of that that issuance framework are all on eth and let me just now kind of go into details of what it is so so n zero they have the stable coin hold um so n just like usdc or tether is always Peg to kind of $1 and similar to those stable coins m is collateralized by uh by treasury bills um it's actually over collateralized by I think 106% and you can actually see all of that collateralization on chain there's attestations uh via a validator network um that kind of attest to those reserves that are of course held offchain um every I think 24 hours and so so there's

M it's cloudz by it bills and it's over collateralized and all of that is sort of transparently um kind of available but the cool thing about is they are creating almost like in some ways like a hub and spoke model where they partner with distribution Partners like noble and they say take this it's like this kind of like basic building block always equal to a dollar but because we're collateralizing it with uh yield bearing instruments like t- bills you can actually decide how to pass on that yield as a distribution partner to your kind of network of you know applications users Etc Noble will be the first um uh distributor of of this m token taking it we're calling it The Noble dollar and we're saying hey it earns yield this

yield depending on who supports an old dollar can be redirected and kind of controlled programm programmatically to a variety of destinations so let's say you are a DEX kind of you know that supports Noble you say hey we want to support the noble dollar and for our purposes we're actually going to redirect the yield you know 4.3% to liquidity pools for incentives or to subsidize fees or maybe say actually we want we're a um maybe a more general purpose chain a general purpose L1 with a variety of defi applications we have a token and we're going to take this Noble dollar and we're going to take the yield that is generated from the kind of distribution of this noal dollar and we're going to do a buy and a buy and

burn over a native token which of course you know is is is like positive for the supply and the distribution of of of a native token in terms of like price action and so this is really interesting right like one it's a yield bearing stable point which we're seeing has a lot of demand in general because of course people like yield and and and that's and that's normal but there's this like other element which is it's fundamentally um programmable right like this or in our case the noble dollar you can fundament fundamentally decide where to redirect direct the yield kind of onchain in this like programmatic like transparent way and so we're calling Noble dollar uh composable yield stable coin because the yield is composable in a way that is not doable kind of with

other kind of stable coin models and uh we're really excited to to kind of of do that right so again like as a primitive it is this very stable very um you know kind of legitimate uh kind of asset because see where the collateral lives um you know there's this entire network of kind of mentors and banks that um kind of have signed up onto the system but of course it's highly highly defi native right because you can have this composable yield element in in the equation where both Noble as a distrib distribution partner of m0 but other protocols other app app developers can say hey we're going to redirect the yield in in in like this very specific

way because that's just how you know that that's just where the demand is like in this moment in time and so yeah we're really excited to be the first distribution partner of mzero again it is a novel kind of stable coin issuance model right that's very very different than what you typically um see in the market with the likes of of course like tether uh and others but yeah we think there's a lot of opportunity and yeah we're super excited to to be working on this cool so so MZ I'd love to get them on actually uh need to kind of dive in deeper into what they're building but so they they issue this this kind of like dollar equivalent asset that is is

generating yield um through the T bills that it's backed from or whatever RW it's backed from and then um you get to issue your own I guess call it white label stable coin using this infrastructure and they say hey like we're going to take part of this yield but then you go do whatever you want with the rest of the yield yeah is that basically yeah basically and actually the kind of even even more interesting thing is like noble as a distribution partner can actually become a distributor to other protocols kind of like Downstream right yeah because like really like if Noble dollar works it means like M works and

if M works it means Noble dollar works because also one thing I didn't mention is that is fungible with Noble dollar Noble dollar is fungible with another white labeled version of right in the same way that uscc is f like on eth is fible with uscc on Noble so you have this like network of distribut distribution partners that just have a lot more you know alignment when it comes to the upside of of of the um kind of tvl of of that token going up because of course there is the yield component that like typically is not shared with with partners and so for us we think it's you know just takes like a lot of like amazing kind of first fundamental first principles of like a lot of the Stables that like work which is like

people want dollars there's like a you know a revenue or like a business profitability case when you can of course collateralize those dollars with yield bearing assets like real world assets of course as you said and then thirdly you know there is the onchain distribution piece that's really important right to get like liquidity and and kind of users and and you know mind share of these stable coins and so if you can like make these Stables like work very well on chain be super defin native but also have a yield bearing component and then of course like like from off fundability kind of like ux perspective also work then I think uh there's something that's like really powerful there but um but yeah again we're just grateful to be kind the first um distribution partner for this asset

and uh and and yeah hopefully intend to prove that the model is is a good model so when when does this go live so we're rolling it out into phases so the number one phase is like usdn on Noble so you'll be able to actually um kind of swap into Noble dollar with usdc that goes live bearing any like delays of engineering timelines March 5th and then so yeah that's really exciting and then the second phase which is super super important is again having usdn available over IBC to the rest of the ecosystem as well um but that takes a little bit more engineering effort because of course you need to develop uh you know things like R basing and uh make make sure that that entire kind of system uh works well and

is safe and and secure so those are the two phases and we're looking at the kind of rebasing version of usdn to go live uh a couple of months after the initial launch which is um which is uh March 5th okay and are there any plans for like a noble token that is not a stable coin like is that still being discussed yeah so still being discussed nothing like I can obviously share right now but um definitely something that we're like interested in and you know like Seb like just kind of take a step backwards right like we all want like to see protocols that like have real users and like generate meaningful revenue and like have like good products like succeed right like I think hyper liquid's like a great example like they have like a

product that like people use and you know they make revenue and like it's like a good user experience and it works and people use it and that's what we want Noble to be right like we want like things that we build for people to use to be like valuable and I think like if that happens then like yes like they're you know likely will be a token but we don't want to ever launch a token before we've like achieved some like level of usability and like traction and um Real World Adoption which is like what before token it's a it's a great philosophy I know it's like a little uh a paradigm shift but I wish to be honest more teams had that in mind so yeah exactly I mean honestly I I think it's such a good Flex if you can if you can do that uh another

team that you probably were familiar with that that are also doing a very interesting kind of validator set and POA network is is dango Larry's project and um I don't know you're familiar with that but look basically he's building a proof of authority Network and the way that validators would get remunerated is they're just going to invoice them like yeah they're just going to invoice the company and the company will pay the validators to run the network and then network will be generating Reven from fees so it's just like cutting out all of this complexity just kind of token complexity and issuance and like right just invoice just just have the valers invoice you and pay you for the infra and yeah and as we all know like

typically how valuators got compensated of course was like through commissions on like inflationary like tokens that were like Stakes with those validators and we've also seen the challenges around those like models as well and like hey I like yield too but what about real yield what about real world asset yield like like t- yield so that's kind of like what we're also trying to do like let's make sure there is like some like positive fly flywheel effect like kind of push with um the things that we build when it comes to like get like developers on board it and like getting you know kind of a community of of kind of loyal users but that yield should probably come from Real World yield uh and guess what that already exists in the real world so why not just bring that on chain so yeah that's like

another Nuance thing right like I I like that that the validators can just invoice a company get paid for their services makes a lot of sense it's a lot more durable it's a lot more sustainable and predictable right like you shouldn't have to check the price action of the Native token to like be like am I going to cover my costs this month right like that's not sustainable yeah well I'm happy to connect you guys yeah in order to have native usdc on also on on Dango because I know that they're counting on having fees paid in USD so so before we wrap up I do want to take a step back and just like talk about Cosmos a little bit here so a couple months ago in December I had

Magmar and uh and Josh from the ICF and and ICL on the podcast and we went into this you know Skip acquisition and the whole ecosystem has been like I think kind of Fairly bullish on this news and on this on his development like unclear if tangibly like things have if that hasn't moved the needle yet it's still quite early yeah but I'm curious like what you think uh about this shift and um if uh if you know if you guys have uh in in your dealings with you know the hob folks and just other teams in the ecosystem like what is your sense um from other Founders in the space on like

does this really sort of help Cosmos come out of and particularly the up out of this of this I want like it's not an intellectual rut right it's more of like a product and uh like usage rut right like people I think intellectually think the cosmos is great and even people outside of Cosmos but there's just been a real long bare Market in Cosmos and uh we're not out of that yet so yeah what what are your thoughts yeah so listen it's always been about coordination and about getting teams to kind of work together on U building out like these core kind of Cosmos Primitives like IBC mainten as things like CM wasm you know

I mentioned earlier like I we're not going to be supporting km wasm on the noble ler one because there just hasn't been maintenance of it um that we would have liked to see for us to feel like comfortable that this is like a stable piece of software that we can like entrust our users with like their you know real funds and so of course like having a you know kind of centralized team like skip taking on some of those responsibilities around core development and maintenance is great I think what remains to be seen as like how much of that is like directed by like the sole objective of like Adam succeeding versus just like doing it as like a public good and maintaining these core Primitives again because they're just really useful and Powerful for like many teams to kind

of use and you know boost trp a cosmos cell one and you know decide to of course you know build an app chain kind of all the cosmo stack and I I think like there are some is a tension perhaps around of course focusing on like adding the token versus like focusing on like just like the public goods kind of uh with need attention and love and care and resources like as a whole and I'm just like curious to see like how that evolves right like as I said earlier as we were chatting about like IBC right like there are multiple teams at this point like getting Venture funding and like trying to take these like Primitives to Market U maybe even quicker right than like what let's say the foundation can do um and I think that's normal right like I think that's like a normal kind of healthy thing

because it just one like shows you how powerful IBC is but two like shows you that like you know on the one hand we do have this like very competent very professional team kind of taking control finally and and like trying to coordinate the ecosystem but on the other hand there will always exist like a much larger ecosystem of like development teams that are you know for one reason now they kind of building their app or or their you know layer one or whatever on on the cosmic stack and so I guess like my like comment is like ultimately very very bullish and like positive that there's again like a team doing this playing this role like a coordinator but of course like let's make sure that's like public goods driven right because at the end of the day yes like Adam is like an important

token it's like funded a lot of the development that we that we like have right now but it's also not the only like token it's not the only layer one that exists in Cosmos and so there is a much larger um you know kind of ecosystem of projects that would love to build on Cosmos if they there was a staple of em that was like audited regularly and that um you know was Secure like like cosm wasm or there are a lot of teams that want to build on Cosmos um you know assuming that IBC you know to evm Works um you know all of these like decision- making processes that like Founders or engineering teams like make um you know I hope that like those can be well like honored let's say by this new um by this team which is the

skip team so yeah again we work very very closely with them we're going to continue to work Clos to with them on like a lot of the core development because of course Noble you know depends on a lot of this core development to kind of you know continue existing and building um ultimately very positive excellent yeah I'm also very very uh think very positively very highly of that team and I think if there's one team that uh has the experience the alignment and also is very product driven execution driven I think it's the skip team so I've been um very happy to be fortunate to be able to chat with them like a few times in the last few months and just seeing the direction that things are going and I

think it's positive I think I think if if if one thing it seems to have reeled backs reeled in some of the chains that had kind of distanced themselves from Cosmos there appears to be a yeah um a desire to maybe realign with Adam or get closer to to the hub and I think that's that's good for the Hub and it's good for Adam and and the other thing that bear is being said is is that or is worth being said is that adom is very distributed it has a broad distribution of token holders which includes many funds family offices High net worths right so there's there are

people there are back holders that are holding like very large amounts of atom and it's also pretty well integrated across centralized exchanges and on-ramps yeah so it it has that Foundation I think that it can continue to do well if it is well stewarded yep by this good team and the ICF so cool well yena thank you so much for coming on let's not wait a year to this again yeah please and and uh we'll see you soon thank you so much for having me as always thanks for the chats [Music] [Music]