Why DeFi matters on Ethereum | Devcon SEA

[Music] looks like we have a very good turnout today very exciting um very important conversation def does it mat on the F room or not was a large conversation on Twitter a few months ago vitalic got in some trouble with the D ogs and yeah now we have this at Devcon so consequences of actions uh we have a lot of really cool people here today so let's just start off let's do intros my name is namic part of the founding team here at Mega Eve hence the Hat um I love crypto I love defi I don't think defi is the only thing that matters matters but I love D hi everyone uh my name is ly I started kyber at one of the earliest decentral change in the space I guess you know back then in 2017 def5 wasn't a thing um stepped out a couple of years ago but still uh help out the team here and there and recently started calber uh focus on building um new defi project new Improvement on ethereum with new fers hi my name is Tasha uh also a local here uh from Thailand uh founded a project called Alpha Finance which built a lot of thei products uh and a lot of experiments uh with the flagship product is called Alpha homora where we came up with the concept of Leverage U farming uh so can share a bit more of like you know def5 back in 2020 and also like nowadays as well uh transition to advisory role uh last year and then also started another project called infinite which is more on the defi infrastructure layer so it abstracts a lot of complexities to get new def protocols built and scale uh within the same chain and to all different chains as well um yeah that's about me I I'm Kane um I guess I'm partially responsible for us being uh on the stage here today um the the funny thing is I I was on the stage and I was like the last time I was on a Devcon main stage was accepting a ux award at uh at Devcon 4 in 2018 for Haven which is dark right like if it it speaks to how bad ux was back then um but we won a a ux award so it's been six years back on on the main stage very excited to be here so thanks let's get straight into it if heims the first during complete blockchain um very quickly found pmf as this Global Financial layer right black rock is on ethereum super bullish what's the role of defi on ethereum what's its Edge and how can Defi and ethereum maintain this mode what do you think kyber I think the best thing that eum can offer to many defy application is that um you know it has the highest like security guarantee it's a Non-Stop you know uh teing complete machine that you can expect that at really really I think like I think since 2016 we had no consensus incident ever right so I think you can be sure that your defy application will run in extremely you know even like in extremely harh condition um it wouldn't be like stop like you know because of whatever condition right so I think that's the highest guarantee that itum can offer to D5 protocols but do people really care you're seeing a lot of ity on other l1s you're seeing like arbitrum as an L2 have you know it was the defi chain for a long time I mean hyper liquid is also doing pretty well there now but do people even care about these guarantees does anyone here care about the guarantees I think they would care if they suffer from say lifet issues right I mean like I think there are several incidents in the past that some of the popular layer one some of the popular ethereum ker was stops right like basically for hours and people cannot close their landing position people cannot like you know do their transaction right and that really like made like made them suffer right financially loss right um you know I would so firstly I love ethereum right so I'm just playing a bit of Devil's Advocate I think arguments can be made that like eal1 when gas fees are unbelievably High they're it's basically off right for every single person in an Emerging Market they can't afford to use etherium L1 when like something important is happening it's too expensive what do you think Tasha yeah no I think um two things actually like I think the the question to to really an the question of like you know why Define an ethereum right you have to think of like what the users want users want to use dii for yields for you know liquidity um the yields a lot of the time on chain comes from interoperability or you know the the money Legos uh which I think that's pretty much you know competitive edge of ethereum uh also the network effects as well for you know being around for so long a lot of Builders there um a lot of liquidity there therefore you know you as a new Builder as a new D app actually benefits a lot more building on ethereum because you get that edge and as a result to that you know users therefore get the benefits of network effect uh of that money Lego the second for sure you know when we talk about defi is liquidity you know ethereum has 60 billion of liquidity out of about like 110 billion of liquidity on chain that's like more than 50% so I feel like you know if you're looking to swap you're looking to lend or you know do different things you don't want to pay like you know 5% of fees or like you know whatever High SL slippage right so I feel like at the end of the day you know there can be many l1s and l2s it will take time um and I I believe that there will not be just all activities on ethereum um and I think you know there will be like multiple players that that would capture a lot of demand um but I think it would also take time for for the other l1s and l2s to also get the benefit of that Network effect and the liquidity yeah what are your faults Kane I think it's trade-offs right like the the trade-off that we have with L1 is it doesn't go down it gets expensive right but um you know there is super deep liquidity and you can find a clearing price for almost everything right um you've got composability you've got you know all of these different markets there's a ton of Lindy um and yeah in you know congestion moments most people are out but it will still keep functioning you'll still be able to uh you know find uh find liquidity if you're willing to pay for it right um the flip side is then we have l2s which uh are able to you know keep prices down even during congestion um different trade-offs different uh you know different value props right like the not as liquid um they are cheaper most of the time um and so you know uh you're not going to get priced out from using arbitrum or optimism right um you know so I think that the the point of ethereum is to have uh this very secure L1 and then have many different approaches to scaling for l2s um that's the road map it's working um and I think that you know that's one of the reasons why people keep building on it so we've kind of mentioned f2s a couple times now and the prompt is like why def5 matters on ethereum do we think that l2s are etherium um I mean I think for small transation for like simple transation you can always go to L2 right I think a lot and also like for okay so before that I let let me give some sort of like history kind of like lesson from that that we learn from kyber right I mean back in 2018 2017 when we launched kyber basically our modotto was that we allow market makers to do Market making on chain right by making like on CH to update the price um and to allow other people to trade with the market makers and I think when defi summer happens uh um when defi summer happened it really kill kyber right why because the gas price increased like crazily and it made it like you know really impossible for the market makers to update the price and to really like you know make profit right because like they had like to spend too much on the price update um so I think you use cases like that can certainly run on L2 because one is cheap one second is fast right like you can do like you know high frequency uh price update you can do like a lot of like micro transaction but you cannot do on L1 right so it really like you know um you know have uh users have more option right uh if they want to do like high value transaction if they want to make sure that you know they can always withdraw their fund from like you know a landing Vote or like you know do that like basically they can pray pay right like in order to do things U then they can go to L1 uh L2 they can do things fast they can do like thing cheap right and they can do a lot of other new things yeah I love your answer I think I I feel the same way um if the L1 and the L2 have different kinds of defi experiences and applications they're complimentary if they a replication of what exists on the L1 I think then you're just competitive and parasitic what do you guys think of uni train I mean unit swap right like it exists on every train I mean every L2 every L1 it's an amm and now they have their own app train thoughts um maybe I won't answer that question I'll answer a different uh question that that you asked earlier so my my view of whether l2s are ethereum is that we have found ourselves in this place right um for reasons um a lot of them are regulatory reasons I think where um we could have been more pragmatic about how we were building things um but we had to kind of try and scops everyone into believing that things were further along than they actually were right um you know all l2s are somewhat centralized right um you know to varying degrees uh in a normal world that didn't have adversarial Regulators trying to shut down crypto we would be able to be honest about that set of trade-offs right and just say look this is technology that we're in the process of building you have L1 L1 has trade-offs you know L2 all of the the scaling Solutions um have trade-offs and we're going to build demand first and once we've got that demand then we're going to figure out ways to decentralize it there's two problems one um in the early days we had a lot of people who are here for ideological reasons including myself um who were like Hardline about uh decentralization and censorship resistance right um and you know I've come to the conclusion after like seven years of building in this space that that's just not viable right um there's no point in building a perfectly decentralized perfectly censorship resistant system if there's no demand for it right um and so we need to be willing to make pragmatic uh tradeoffs as we're building towards you know demand because the these are technical problems we can definitely solve them right um so my view today is that it's better to build demand and then figure out ways to make the technology better over time more decentralized more censorship resistant um than to start with some pure ideal um and I think that we've all been moving in this direction right like all of the l2s did this but we kind of had to like squint and pretend that it wasn't the case um it's also the case of defi like all the daps are not decentralized right they're hosted on aw they're hosted in Cloud flare um but you know we're like oh yeah like you know no multisig don't look over here um it's it's right um and if we weren't in the regulatory environment that we've been in for the last four years I think we would have been able to be more honest about it um and I think that now we need to just lean into it be pragmatic build things get to mass adoption and once we've got Mass adoption we can figure out how to make it purely decentralized and purely censorship resist and really improve the tech so it's a very different approach to how we started back in the old days building OG defi um but I think it's a it's the only way forward hyper liquid is a great example right build for users what they want and that's like you know distributed system in end of the day where anyone can come and like participate right and is it as decentralized as like your conventional L1 like no but does it have an unbelievable PMS and that's awesome yes so yeah I think like the tradeoffs are definitely part of the mega EP thesis for sure so music to my ears um anybody else have any thoughts on the the L2 L1 stuff or we can move on actually I think the other thought that I have is that um you know a lot of people might might jeopardized that the fact that hey like more l2s create more liquidity fragmentation but I think on a hindsight those new liquidity on these new l2s could not even have been onchain to begin with if there's not you know for that L2 to begin with right so I feel like each out2 can of have its own Community you know the the founder the team building that out2 have their own you know VCS or have their own Community or like onchain users um deploying liquidity there so I feel like yes there's liquidity fragmentation for the short term among all these you know tens hundreds of l1s and l2s but over time like I feel like there's going to be a point where that liquidity gets smarter they know about ethereum no about other al2s no about other EUR opties elsewhere and then eventually that would you know kind of aggregate to you know a few places so I think we're we're seeing that shift a bit more as well as those l2s launch a token and the liquidity kind of like you know aggregate to somewhere else um so I think net positive overall in my opinion for for the whole industry yeah I think like I was always a big fan of arbitrum is a case study because it showed uh that the most efficient like I mean they had the the shortest block times right so for defi it enables more efficient defi than anywhere else and it found really strong pmf U Op with the super train is trying to create like this next level of interoperability between like their cluster uh really really exciting I I tend to believe that like too much fragmentation is an issue uh especially when you don't have differentiated block space right uh if it's just like all Horrors onal scaling but you don't actually you can increase like the capacity the the total net amount of block space that is associated with the fium ecosystem but if you want to actually work on like vertical scaling as well like you're just capped right and like okay if we just want the the grand successive like ethereum to be like you know transfer of like money right okay it works but if we want like these really sophisticated applications which exist in like other hyper execution environments like salana we need to work on like multiple uh degrees um but you know we you you've mentioned like l1's a couple times right I love to get into this conversation of like to understand why does defi match on ethereum we need to understand how defi is different on ethereum compared to other allel ones right as we know like defi pardon me ethereum is the most uh decentralized smart contractor and complete blockchain right and that attracts large large players right right you I remember I was once speaking to a famous salana VC and we were talking about like the role of defi on E versus the role of Def on Saul and he was like okay you know 10 years down the road when there's like a bank-to-bank transfer of like a currency right that happens on Eve that's not going to happen on Saul if someone's moving half a billion dollars that happens on etherium uh but we love to get everyone else's opinions here on like what is the granularity of defy on ethereum compared to other you know like it's not like E Salon is like super centralized it's still relatively decentralized right how does defi differ between like let's say ethereum uh salana and yeah I think those are the main two l1s out there today in my opinion I think just you know it it shows a lot from the stats as well right like ethereum as mentioned like 60 billion I think about like 400,000 wallets so that shows a lot of like how aggregated or like how how large a wallet has to be on ethereum uh just to make sense on ethereum versus Solana where about 7 billion of assets and 6 million of wallets so I think I think it it chose the the type of applications on those two different l1s already and also the the types of activities and the types of uses um and those results are pretty much you know as a result of of the tech uh or like you know how it's built as well um you mentioned that you know ethereum is a lot more decentralized a lot more secure and hence you know High liquidity or like large amount of liquidity um is more trustworthy on ethereum as opposed to salana where I think it's more very much like retail driven um they may not care so much about decentralization or you know security for maybe like $100 of wallet right but they're willing to like do a lot of like bets and a lot of like derivative trading on Solana and make you know a lot of money from from doing that activity so I think um there's no right or wrong in my opinion of like whether it's decentralized or not but just more of like what's the unique differentiation of that chain or that L2 it is and how that differentiation would attract that differentiated types of applications and therefore that segment of uses cuz if there's no differentiation from the tech or the fundamental chain itself then it's going to be very very hard to to attract um the right apps and the right users I think that there was a there was a moment in time where um a lot of the ideological Builders were on ethereum um and uh the more pragmatic Builders uh were pushed to um salana partially because you know cheaper transaction fees right they were like we don't really care about anything other than uh users being able to transact cheaply right um and you know they they went there and and ultimately defi is about Network effects right um you know the network effects on ethereum Main net are really powerful and there was a period in time where we were needing to bootstrap new network effects on all the l2s which was really hard right like I tried to do this on optimism it did not go well it was it was a very difficult thing right um and and in parallel to that uh you had Network effects that were growing on salana and so you now have these two independent uh you know um networks that have uh different network effects with different Builders and I think they both have enough critical mass to be sustainable um what's interesting about ethereum to me though is we now have this new uh kind of process where we get to experiment with things like Mega eth um you know with some of these new networks that are trying different sets of trade-offs and we get to try and bootstrap new network effects and see whether or not we can compete with you know ultra low fees for example right or you know really low latency um and so even though each time we create a new set of tradeoffs with a new L2 we need to bootstrap Network effects there is already that kind of core liquidity that's sitting on L1 that's that's sort of anchoring it all um so you don't start from scratch right like you wouldn't want L you know you wouldn't want megie to be in L1 that would be a really hard process to to bootstrap um but you know it's uh it's able to kind of pull some of the eat liquidity there um so I think the that we have a very interesting Prospect in front of us where something like salana which is monolithic and has Network effects is now going to have a bunch of things that are competing with it on some of its core value props right low transaction fees High throughput Etc um and it's going to be very very interesting to see whether it kind of gets squeezed in the middle right from like deep liquidity from L1 and then super fast low you know uh transaction fees from some of the l2s so I think this cycle we will find out I think um one of the thing that I always um look at into new um ethereum kolers or like new layer ones is uh whether with the new technology Improvement they can create any new use cases right and if you look into defy I think all the defy Innovation still happen on ethereum or evm kind of ecosystem right like we have concentrated liquidity per de amm de whatever right like you know defy Landings every Innovation that we have seen in defi started in the ethereum ecosystem um Solana or other high performance layer one they might have Amplified them right the use cases but still I mean they all started like from the same Innovation that that started in the ethereum ecosystem right I would say like the central limit order book uh came from uh no one ever tried to do that in etherium because like come on like that's a bit silly there was e Delta back in 2017 but like I think the G the gas was just like too bad we we did try it it just failed horribly yeah yeah so I think like when we started this conversation by talking about like eal one right and we spoke a bit about eal 2 and we had a conversation around how if you have an L1 and an L2 like if they're complimentary meaning they go after different kinds of use cases uh like that's pretty chill if not that's not so chill but one of the edges of eal1 is the fact that it's this extremely decentralized extremely uh like like you know you can do all these awesome things on E1 but there's not that many things you can do right so yesterday or the day before this uh Justin Drake had like an announcement around like a bunch of optimizations for eal1 um uh what did you guys think of that conversation it was actually in this stage at 5:00 pm same time so you know I came here to watch that um which is the first time that I've like run across like a you know um Devcon uh to try and get to a presentation um and I think that there were a lot of things that were very exciting about that um the my my issue with it fundamentally um and you know there's there's definitely uh different takes on this is that if you're going to like YOLO propose a uh different path for ethereum L1 um then it needs to probably have a different time frame right so we already have a long-term road map for L1 uh if you if you want to propose something that is you know supposed to be a radical deviation from that um having the same time frame I think is not the right approach um and so I think that there was a little of disappointment including for me I was like 2030 is like so far away right like we're talking um and then you know also it's software right like I was sitting there when vitalic was like the merge is coming in 2017 like no like so you know 2030 also feels like much further away because it's really 2035 so I I think that if we're going to propose radical approaches to L1 scaling uh then it needs to be you know um something that is much more uh pragmatic and and sooner yeah I was excited I also uh sprinted to get here I was literally sitting on the floor in that corner and yeah it was just a bit it was a bit um you know disheartening for me because in a lot of ways like I was I knew basically what the Spiel was going to be and it's actually very bullish even for meie because we're not interested in replicating any use case that can exist on any L1 so I want aerium L1 to be better right I don't think if it is as competitive what's whatever but it really does show just like the level of alific of ethereum as a main net right it's very very large it's very difficult to get things across the uh finish line to the point where we have like over a year for just like pilling people right when you know it's like clearly we are in two different rooms because I feel like people already are like we need to do something we've legit become Bitcoin like there was a period of time where we were like Bitcoin they're crazy like they won't do anything and we're like all right let's think about it for two years and then we'll start like it's like I don't know I mean yes of course ethereum is important we shouldn't it up but like you know it it doesn't feel like that's a reasonable time frame what do you guys think I feel like U Dustin Drake he high up the talk a little bit too much and I think that people have like different expectation from what was deliver uh but I think like from the protocol developer point of view right I think I mean I think the most exciting things that or potential that I got out from that is one you know user experience on L1 might be a lot better given you know the potential shorter block term faster finality term right um but the reality is that I think protocol developers will just like you know I think will probably like accommodate or like change accordingly to the to the updates from the layer one right so like for example currently um 12C block term maybe it's not too bad for users is just a little bit like you know too much of me and stuff right but you know us want to have better experience they go to layer two right uh 4 second block term less M price is closer to the centralized changes price um but you know I think it doesn't change much like to like protocol developers that much uh it might impact a lot more on the user experience it might you know have like more transation on E term layer one I but I think from the protocols developers point of view not much changes yeah I think um a lot of a lot of thoughts uh very much inter resonate with uh both two other panelists 12 I think the first thought is like you know from from 12C block time to 4 second sounds good but you know by 2030 will that be even too slow you know uh you know you also mentioned perhaps in 2035 right um 10 years from now maybe like all all the things we're talking about is all like already abstract away from the users and everything's expecting like in less than a second right um that's the first thought the second as well is more like I think it really raises a question of whether ethereum has to be fast or whether ethereum will like should play the role of you know the main settlement layer don't have to be as fast let the other outs do the fast job um and just be secure be decentralized and and maintain that role so I think you know really still debating among myself whether you know ethereum should or should not um take this route and I think it's you know there's no right or wrong answer as well um but very I think whether we take on this route or not it really it will really change and shift the way eth token as well will play and also the ethereum network um will play in in the whole uh Dynamic yeah I feel like the the need for ethereum L1 to do these optimizations comes from the fact that like l2s are kind of parasitic right or at least in my opinion they have been historically uh yeah like look at like I don't know uh yeah like look at hyper liquid right uh vampire attacks arbitrum and is now its own L1 and is amazing but what happened right like it was able to get a lot of liquidity in user base from eperium what was good for the epher asset nothing much what was good for the epher user on L1 nothing much uh and then you know a lot of question marks can be even pointed to existing l2s like if your architecture uh effectively can easily become its own L1 right like are you building this L2 because you want to just like vampire attack eum's existing ecob system and then you know strong arguments can be made for like we have to focus on the eal one because these l2s are not actually good for us um yeah what do you guys think we need to do to 100 xd5 on eperium and that can be in l2s as well eperium is what you want it to be I think there you one of the mistakes that I certainly made um back in the day was uh rejecting polygon right um you know I was like it's a side chain it's you know ideology again right um it's a side chain it's not real you know it's parasitic to L1 all kinds of stuff right um I think that there is uh a need to ensure that ethereum including the l2s side chains whatever um you know uh maintains relevance if if ethereum loses relevance um it's very hard to get it back right ethereum is the the dominant platform for defi today it has a deepest liquidity um but if something flips it it could get dark right and so I think that improving the L1 is important if we just kind of hand over all responsibility for relevance to l2s then you're right like if if you know a one L2 becomes huge and then it decides to split off to an L1 like good night right um so I think that there is uh a really important um aspect to maintaining relevance for the L1 continuing to improve it um and I think the existing road map is good right I think the the existing road map is a solid road map it's good to see Alternatives proposed um I think that some of those Alternatives uh you know I was hoping it was going to be like magical Wizardry and like next Tuesday we get you know 1 second block times or something but here we are um but uh you know I I genuinely believe that we need both of these things because to your point if we if we just you know kind of uh let the L1 aify and turn into Bitcoin where it's like a 5year debate about opcat like that's a really really bad place to be and I think that it's almost definite that ethereum will lose relevance at that point I also feel like Bitcoin can afford to take 5 years those affordances do not exist for fium right like if you were number one you can do this but not if you're number two also like no one is pretending to build a new network I mean you know Litecoin gave up on that right like you know there's not even Digital Silver I think it's like now a sloth chain or something as of today right so um you know there's there's no credible threat to bitcoin from that perspective of you know store value digital gold whatever whatever it is um but there are many many many credible threats to ethereum including the l2s arguably right um so you know there is a responsibility to continue to improve the L1 um in order to make sure that you know it has a defensible mode what do you guys think how do we make d500 Xpat on the fum um in 2018 2019 um when we just I think when before defy summer right so I think one of the things that we did really um and and I think we're still proud of that uh now is um we started wbtc right with uh bito and couple of other project um so back then when we realized that okay the TV or the the asset on ethereum that that there was that too many asset for people to trade right for like def like if you do def5 and and the whole like TV of everything is like 100 million ions right US dollars what else can you do um so we did um wbtc and I think recently we started like seeing more and more people like bringing other asset to ethereum right via real asset on different ways as well I think that and and also like if you look into like stable coin right like usdc and usdt I think most of it is on ethereum now um I think that's one way for us to secure like you know the the number one position for ethereum right like we need to bring more asset in we need like to bring like you know a decentralized version of rap BTC into ethereum for example or like we need to unlock defy sorry Bitcoin liquidity in ethereum and ethereum layer tools um yeah um I mean you know the Counterpoint to that though is like Tron and usdt right like this crazy scam chain and it's doing you know huge volumes of stable coins right um you know there's reasonable concerns about both of those things USD and Tron right but from a practical standpoint there's a lot of happening on Tron and a lot of people are using it um and even the argument of like oh yeah high value transfers people will only do it on ethereum like people do big usdt transfers on Tron all the time yeah actually in Turkey you go to the uh you go to the Grand Bazaar and you go to the OTC desks they don't do ethereum they only do Tron because they know what it is yeah it's actually kind of sad but it's true they only use Tron I mean I think most people I mean I think Asis talked earlier right I mean L1 ethereum will fit for some certain use cases right like for the asset that are less volatile that like you know that you don't need like require like subsecond kind of like finality um then you can still rely on layer one right hopefully you know in a couple of years or in a few years from now on the next stepcon people will start like using usdt or usdc payment on Mega E on Bas on you know all the layer tools right awesome so let's move to questions we have 9 minutes and 30 seconds allocated for Q&A if you guys don't have questions I'm just going to keep laring so question for me oh geez for my point of view I see meie is a direct comparator to salana let's go uh assuming Tech performs as promised inshah how do you feel about this comparison and also when testnet yeah I mean I think that like there's a meme that uh is said sometimes where we're going to out salana salana I think like fundamentally the thesis for Mega E is uh performance and decentralization don't really go hand in hand and that's because consensus is complicated there more decentralized you are right like it takes longer to reach consensus and on Mega if what we say is okay you know what like it is tough let's just kick that down to ethereum the power of proofs be that fraud proofs Sur ability proofs coupled with the force exit slforce inclusion meaning even if the sequencer is wilding out I can go back to the L1 is unbelievably powerful people haven't explored it enough and when you take these guarantees and you say you know what now let's go performance first you're able to achieve a level of performance that's never really been seen before in crypto and that's what like our thesis is and that's what we're doing and yeah test net very soon keep keep tune uh all I'll say is like yeah really really excited to be compl completely honest uh with Unis V4 coming up probably early next year youing D5 will get even crazier with hooks will we possibly see the stocks going to D5 of amm uh you seem like you you have some facial reactions um I mean obviously I think uh with V4 coming I think we will see like a lot more like different strategy that people will bring in like you know with amm and different like strategy that every hope we have you know their own way of Market making right uh but I think the re the the reality that we are seeing now because like I think kyber now runs one of the biggest legator on evm and we see that um I think a lot more liquidities are going offchain right via like you know private market makers via RFQ Network um and they have like every one of them have like different strategy of like where to get liquidity how to do pricing and things like that of course they still use like onchain for settlement right but I think we're seeing more and more of that like going up chain um and I think doing stock I think like you don't need like uni V4 to do that right like you know like all the RFQ all the like you know existing infrastructure can already do that uh I'm also like super excited to see like what can what uni4 can bring uh to the table there's been like a lot of talk lately but like I haven't seen like concrete example I mean every single new version of uni swap manages to break defi in some spectacular way right so I'm looking forward to the unintended consequences of uh V4 uh I can only imagine what chaos is going to uh come from this but I feel like a lot of the hooks or pretty much you know strategies that you can do are only a number of them like you can do a lot with you know hooks for sure with Unis but I feel like the only ones that going to get adopted would be like a handful um and I think a lot of those use strategies or you know trading strategies or you know so-called hooks um are already like being used and built by these with our you know market makers doing onchain things instead of building it offchain and themselves then just making it more onchain accessible for for normal users to access those hooks so I think um yeah the impact would be more on like a lot of people would be able to access what those useth strategies that market makers are already doing um and not just limited by the ones that they build themselves Kane how will infinex change the defi landscape good question I thought that my uh mcoin was going to maybe win that uh question battle there for second but uh it looks like no so sorry what about mem coin oh I so I launched a meme coin um as a way of like testing out salana I wanted to like get my head around what salana was doing um so I launched this meme coin and uh air dropped it to all the uh snx holders and they're just like the biggest jeets in history and they all just like dumped it to Oblivion and they were like they were like I can't believe that you've done this to us like you know they're fighting with each other and they're like what are you going to do like to you know I was like guys like just don't dump on each other right like your friends aren't your excellent liquidity but here we are um anyway infinex really quick question yeah so it was a soul meme coin to snx haers right but snx was on ethereum so it was a different wallet address what was that like yeah so so basically what I did is I um aird dropped a token on bass called 2192 um and then uh they were all just like dumping it into Oblivion so I was like all right like we have to burn it so I made everyone burn the token so they have to like all burn it to get something and what I gave them was a salana token then they were obviously all pissed about that um and so you know it was this long like uh weird you know airdrop game basically um but yeah it it turned out poorly and everyone's mad so classic uh meme coin games um so so infinex though um infinex is trying to uh bring uh binance on chain right um we've had for the last you know decade basically a little bit longer uh centralized exchanges dominating transactions right um most crypto transactions happen inside of someone's uh database and we've made inroads against this at various times you know Unis swaps competed with coinbase on on a couple of days um in history so you know good job um but we haven't really been able to make much uh Headway against centralized exchanges um so we finally now I think have uh the um infrastructure that we need to be able to bring everyone on chain um but the way to do that you know as I kind of alluded to earlier is to be pragmatic right building defi we tried to build defi in a way that was um both non-custodial and censorship resistant and we didn't even land the censorship resistance but we just created the worst ux and so infinex is basically saying look we're going to Park Central we're going to we're going to be non-custodial right but we're going to park censorship resistance and we're going to build the best ux possible and we're going to get people using uh all of these onchain protocols that we've made um and we're going to create you know Mass adoption and once we've got Mass adoption then we'll go back and fix the the you know the other issues so next up is um what do you think of the value or cruel mechanisms uh for l2s versus the monetary premium of e uh I'll start is someone who's building an L2 I think like most L2 tokens kind of suck um I think in general like governance is a bit of a meme we we've seen this of like major defi protocols that are like governance prod tokens and then the governance happens and then they don't follow governance um so yeah I think like part of this is because a regulatory landscape has been very scary so when you look at like toonomic design uh the just design space is very limited I do think that is changing and I think there are there'll be like a Renaissance for uh token design over the next few years and we'll be able to catch up on lost time and I'm excited to see what that looks like uh in the future but at the moment I definitely think like I think like l2s are like you know Cur L2 tokens are kind of cursed and they s part is they don't even provide value back to the E asset class so it's like a lose lose and uh no one's really that interested at least in my opinion what do you guys think I think the best L2 token design that I've seen recently was uni chain um because they actually have you know the ability to capture the value from me from like all the different fees that uni has been um or any like you know Dex has been uh capturing and I think people were joking around that you know uni chain was a fee swis for uni token that people have been waiting for um yeah good to see you're still holding your un yeah I agree I think uh a good analogy though is like if if L2 tokens only relying on you know transaction fees capturing all those then as a result you know you need to maximize number of users which again comes back to how many users are there on chain right so I think um ultimately we we have to kind of like really embed the toomics of L2 especially for our L2 as well to really be a part of the product and the chain and be more creative like what else can you engineer and what else can you capture value along all the different parts of the chain itself and I think you know barish chain is one uh idea or like one experimental way of like how you can expand the number of ways to capture that values um but definitely like you know not limiting to to just that um I haven't given this much thought so this could be utterly insane but um I I feel like L2 tokens were a mistake um they've created this uh Environ I mean that that part I have thought about and that that is true I do believe that um they have created this fragmentation of attention um within the ethereum ecosystem um which is really problematic now okay you want to launch an L2 it needs a token like what do you do um I feel like we should have tried something something like if you make the best L2 you get some eth or something like that right instead of like you know just uh mint your own token out of thin air um I think that would have uh been a much more effective uh mechanism for Distributing value like if you can scale ethereum you know the if the EF had been like all right we're going to put up you know 100 million uh extra eth right we're going to like increase the inflation rate or something and whoever captures the most transactions or whatever in l2s you get this pile of eth uh I think we've been in a much better place today yeah I think we just need a closer relationship between the asset and epher right like the architecture of these L2 should be beneficial both to epher as an L1 is an L1 and eer as an asset class and no one's really done it vitalic should uh buyback all the l2s and uh and ban L2 tokens no comment uh so when are you going to fight David Hoffman again I tried to I I wanted a rematch and he won't fight me again um which I get I'm still so injured I've still got like three broken ribs and my fingers are all messed up so I can understand why he doesn't want to do it again um but also like come on David like give me my rematch please and you had the broken ribs before you even had your fight of David so you were kind yeah they were broken before unfortunately I didn't realize I thought they were bruised but yeah so what is defi learn atas and like what's your vision for it no that's the meme coin that's 2192 they haven't giv up on it like guys let it go it's over yeah I was I was thinking I'm really like not cool I have no idea what this thing is um so yeah I guess do you want to talk about synthetics yeah I can I could talk about synthetics um so uh synthetics got to a point um last year where I think we tried several different times uh to uh find ways to coordinate it right um you know a lot of the OG Dows um struggle with this uh kind of power vacuum issue right um I've talked to run about this a little bit I joke I joked with him he didn't think it was funny I said we should stop creating power vacuums and maybe that would uh would uh make the governance problems go away but um we we've been trying to work out how to inject some agency back into the Dow um and uh luckily one of the OG holders stepped up about 6 months ago and said okay you know I'm happy to to kind of take on this role try and coordinate people try and drive it Forward um and rethink how uh the token mechanism um is is made and you know I think the interesting thing about um building in defi is we're still very early like we still haven't figured it out right like just because the thing's been around for six years doesn't mean that it's working right or doesn't you know there's aspects that are working um but there's always optimization that could be made and if you don't have someone with agency to kind of do some YOLO things and try things uh then you will just kind of stagnate right um and so I think within the snx community there's a lot of demand for like finding um and trying some new things it's been a while since there you know we've tried anything new tried something different tried something a bit aggressive um and so I'm really excited because I think there's this uh kind of new uh push you know we've launched our own chain um you know so more l2s um but there's also a push to redesign the token bring it to this new L2 and find new ways to kind of capture value into the token and drive adoption again um and the final thing that I'll say is like one of the mistakes that defi made a few years ago um and I contributed to this was trying to meme into existence this real yield narrative right it's just the I mean you know it's the dumbest most boring narrative you could possibly have and uh I think everyone like fell asleep and stopped caring about defi um we need to bring back the fun a little bit um you know stany was saying he's going to launch something with 10,000% apy so I'm looking forward to that um maybe he announced it before on on uh his talk but um we need to inject some excitement back in right we need to make D5 fun again um it's it's not trafi it's still it's still early if it's not oh I don't want it uh so how can defi amplify adoption overall vers deploying on new l2s new chains so much Tech that building up with that um does anyone understand what this means yeah I think it's more of like how can we have more types of defi as opposed of the same type of di applications on just like more more l2s um I think comes down to the types of assets right so like def applications it's like a product so a product for what assets right if it's if it's for you know eth or let's say governance token there can only be a certain thing you can do with it but now that we have more let's say types of assets like LST LRT different kinds of Rd then each type of asset will require or like will expand the you know Innovative area of like what you can do with it so I think uh with the rise of new assets already being on chain it already gives rise to more types of defi products already um so I think to amplify that even more then we need um you know more types of assets on chain and that would you know consistently lead to more types of products building around those assets I think people need to understand like what where to do what right like uh I think the issue of having like 50,000 new l2s and new chains which are all the same is uh there's actually like nothing new right it might be an asset which kind of looks like this other asset which exists on that other chain and like there's some variation of the same deck but like it's a tiny bit different doesn't really matter it's not a new experience um so I think like part of it is study what sana's like execution environment enabled and that enabled a new kind of Defi and uh ultimately you know shill link Mega I guess but like I think until you have like an execution environment which facilitates new kinds of activity uh maybe we should stop just like replicating the same thing and not fragment users and just like focus on defi on the L1 like there's defi E1 is kind of cheap now because like no one's using it it's not as cheap when you're subsidizing people's gas trust me it feels more expensive what do you guys you have any thoughts ly um I think eventually like I think I think there are few things that will have like user life better right one is on the wet stack I think wet should abstract away like all the different chain for users and secondly on the aggregation aggregator stack that will basically like user don't need to know that they're trading on like uni swap or curve or like whatever next right they just need like to call the API and that's it and everything will be done for them they get they will get the best rate they get like you know the best execution ever right I think these two thing will will matter a lot for defi in general that you know user don't need to care which CH they are on which Dex which protocol that they interacting with and you know those are couple of clicks they are done what do you think about like restating defi um it creates a lot of new asset and that's good for defi so there are more like activities more asset for people to consider um yeah I think General is good whether they are useful um no comment I still don't know what reaking is and I'm too afraid to ask final words everyone go on reaking no just like any funny little comment to say goodbye to our beautiful audience I think we have all been building so much infrastructure so much applications we need to do more you know on boarding users um he's doing it we should all you know do more of it and yeah I think that would be nit positive for even infra Builders as well we have four years to get to mass adoption and we can basically do whatever the we want so start doing some crazy it's time to build yeah make your fom great again let's go [Applause]