How Should DeFi Really Work? | Dean Tribble - Ymax

All right, we've heard many talks about institutional adoption and agents taking over everything, but humans are still here and we're still using DeFi. And we have Dean Trible to talk about the importance of UX in DeFi. Here you go.

Thank you. Thank you for having me. Uh, can people hear me? Yes. Okay, I can hear me now.

Um, so I'm gonna here to talk about getting yield from everywhere, not just for agents, but also for humans. Let's start with what people have been having to do, right? Meet the DeFi tiger, right? They've got maybe even a million dollars. They're doing this on an ongoing basis.

They've been doing it for years. They are not a beginner, but it is so difficult to execute many of the kinds of things people want to be able to do that they will see yield opportunities and not be able to get to them. The friction inherent in these systems are very difficult because they have to stitch together their own manual tools with all their bridging efforts and etc. And as they're doing that, they get interrupted leading to delays, security losses, etc. But with the downturn right in this in this bare market, you know, that chaos of of high-flying DeFi yields has been uh more scary than usual, but stable coin yields and the stable coin deployment has barely uh has barely seen the bare market.

And the question is, are you holding stable coins? Are you getting yield on stable coins? And to do that, are you having to babysit your stable coins? Right? The process of taking advantage of these thousand plus vaults out there that have different strategies for getting you yield on your stable coin is you have to withdraw from one, sign a transaction, wait 15 minutes, bridge it to another chain, wait 15 minutes, deploy it into a transaction, deploy it into, you know, beefy compound a um uh Morpho, etc.

And you know, you're waiting, you're waiting, go get coffee, come back. Okay, now it's done. But it is fraught with with potential for interruption, potential for loss, and a lot of uh challenge of time that you have to spend in order to make that happen. So really what you want is what people have talked about of much like intents. You want to be able to express, I've got money.

I want it out there in those vaults. make it happen. Of course, that requires currently a miracle, but the end game that you want is I've got the money. Deploy it where it ends up on and you can barely read there in Morpho on a on arbitum or compound on base or a on mainnet or beefy somewhere else, right? You want a deployment that takes advantage of vaults independent of where they're at.

And as the market changes, you want to quickly be able to adapt to that new situation without having to tediously, manually, and riskfully reallocate your capital. So that intermediate miracle is what YAX is here to provide, right? It does single signature deployment, management, execution of your capital and execution of your strategy on chain. It uses AI co-pilots to assist you in picking uh picking opportunities and of course deploying them efficiently. And it's non-custodial by design.

So it remains your coin. It's not accidentally custodied someplace that you didn't expect. And so I'll show a demo of this. Now this was done recorded uh recently on a portfolio. We just launched early access which we'll talk about.

But here I'm connecting to EVM wallet on whatever chain my money happens to be. I'm going to pick some vaults that I would like independent of what chain they happen to be on. Right? So I'll pick a and morpho and compound and we'll be steadily adding these things. Now I have my selections and I can just manually move those sliders or balance them evenly or enter a number to say here's the allocation I want.

And then I go through, you know, oh well, I have to add some money. So great, I'll put in a hundred bucks and then say go. And that's my this is my intent. Allocate a hundred bucks that I'm giving you to these funds, right? Sign it.

Brings up MetaMask or uh Rabby or whatever it is and and triggers it. Now, we could we could wait for the you know the the time on the block to make that happen, but where you end up with is this. And this account is out there. You could look at it. Um, and up at the top you can see it started the process of executing this.

Ethereum is slow. Base is slow. It will take 20 minutes for them to finish. But it doesn't have to take your 20 minutes. What happens is behind the scenes the smart contract of YAX created a strategy a plan for how it was going was going to accomplish that intent that you provided it and onchain it executed those steps whereas each of them completed it animated and you'd see that happen here and as it completes you can even follow the link to arbitum scan or ether scan or what have you in order to see the transaction as it happened in order to see your money being deployed into accounts that this contract created on your behalf on all of those other chains.

And so what that means is from the one place that your wallet happened, you could create the portfolio and control it from there. And the assets, they can be anywhere you want getting yield from everywhere. And you know, so now it's deployed, you can dig further. There's the AI co-pilot that lets you dig into the risks, dig into options, ask about what's coming, analyze your performance over time, and as the market changes, look at new opportunities. So, let's let's look at some of that, right?

That new opportunities, right? The market does change. The awesome vault this week, the someone comes up with a new strategy next week or adds uh automated compounding on that extra strategy or whatever it is, you want to be able to move easily. And that's the place where having a tool that does all of this execution for you on chain is absolutely critical where you can discover new opportunities assisted by the AI that knows your positions that knows your strategies. You can easily add or rebalance things and each one of those actions you take is a single signature no matter how many funds we're going to oper uh manipulate on your behalf.

Okay. And so if I Yeah. So the optimization piece, the way that shows up is over time you offchain agents detect AI agents detect opportunities that for that match what you've got in your portfolio because they have access to that information and they propose them. Oh, so it so it does one click to say, you know, hey, you could move some of your money from a to arbitrum. One click and it happens.

I just have to confirm it and I'm off to the races. And again, behind the scenes, it will go through that activity. You're off to have coffee. it's off to make you more money. And so an example of what would happen is, you know, here is a sort of a summary when this first started working some time ago, right, of a portfolio.

It's got eight positions spread across three chains, one signature, and it was all done in three minutes where it could reach out from the contract across highly reliable bridges to pull out funds, deploy them into new positions, move them among chains and all those things that you currently have to do by hand and instead it just does it. Okay, so what's our road map look like? Right, we've got stable coin yield op yield orchestration now informed by and improved by AI underneath. We will be extending that with continuous asset expansion. You know, beefy for example is in alpha.

We will be we will be adding the agent automation so you can add more of your own agents. You can add more strategies. you can subscribe to more automation strategies and things that end up letting you do adaptive rebalancing based on market sentiment uh changes in APIs, your history, new opportunities available, etc. And that moves into additional information integrated in and integrated in both available on the AI advisory side and the uh or the AI tooling side and the uh application itself to be able to do um riskbased management, AI integration, MCP integration, etc. So that's where we're going.

Um but the tool right now is pretty awesome during ETH Denver where the booth is right over there um in this nice relaxing teal, right? you know, stress less, uh, yield more, where you can, if you create a portfolio of $50 and keep it there for 30 days, uh, we'll add $25 to the end of it. So, it's pretty much the only guaranteed yield you're going to get this this week. Uh, but it's good yield. So, go create a portfolio um, and give us feedback and we'll add the things that you need for this.

So, thank you very much for your time and for year and um, look forward to seeing you online. Good.

I absolutely do.

I talk fast. I was hoping for that.

Yeah, you got you got through through your presentation pretty fast. We have some time for questions. Does anybody have DeFi questions or UX questions or comments or suggestions? Anything?

Well, if you pop up the uh thing, I can show the the uh activity, but no, it's fine. Oh, they popped up the activity.

So, I mentioned you could see all the activity, right? This is the thing that that proceeds through and gives you access to everything that's going on. If I uh were to go to one of these things and check it out, you know, you can see, you know, if you really want to get down to the nitty-gritty and see exactly what happened, you can. And behind the scenes, um, what this thing does is when you sign your, uh, intent, it creates accounts on your behalf controlled by the portfolio on all those other chains. So if you, you know, funded it from Ethereum and said, I want into an arbitum pool, it makes an Ethereum account, it makes an arbitrum account, pulls your money in, distributes it, deploys it into a or compound or what have you, and and holds it on your behalf.

when you say reallocate, it will do the withdrawals, the transfers, the deposits, the autoco compounding, etc. So, we're very happy with this. People have been playing with it to be able to go into a portfolio. Whoops. And uh just edit the portfolio by saying, "Yeah, I want less of that.

I want a little bit more of that. Um let's bring that up." You know, review those changes. make that happen, right? And at that point, suddenly I've got a new vault added to my portfolio on another chain and I'm good to go.

So anyway, thank you all for your time and if there any you have no more questions, you can join us over there if you have question. Oh, you have a question? Yes, sir. Okay. So the qu the question is when he deposits where does the money go to?

So when you do a when you do an account creation let me cancel out of here. You sign a permit that YAX can take in your money and deploy it. So if you do that on let's say your money's on arbitum you sign your transaction on arbitum saying hey add this yax will take that that authorization create an account on ar ar ar ar ar ar ar ar ar ar ar ar ar ar ar ar ar ar ar ar arbitum that it controls and let's say you were depositing on base it'll create account on base those will happen to have the same address. It will pull money from that you said it could take into the arbitum account and then deposit it across. So if you're and then issue once that's happened it'll issue the instruction where from the arbitum account put it into into a and from the base account put it into compound or whatever you're doing and so the money goes from your account to an account on those chains that the portfolio that the YAX portfolio contract is controlling on your behalf.

Your key your original key controls your portfolio through the through YAX. So if you say do a withdraw, it will pull from those subsidiary accounts, move it back to the account that you originally deposited into. So it is um it it is always controlled by you, so your custody, but it will be in a subsidiary account in your portfolio via the YAX contract and and it is possible to withdraw those funds with no operation of off-chain services at all. You can you can withdraw it. You know, in the event that you know any YAX, Oracle integration, any of that, if that's all gone, you can still pull your money out.

It's your money.

So the question was from the accounts that we created, does he still have the authority to withdraw from those accounts? The answer is yes. However, they are not EOA accounts. They are not accounts with a private key behind them. They are smart contract or a smart wallet accounts that are controlled by the YAX portfolio contract that it's controlled by you.

And so it is indirect, but there's no there's nothing that I, my company, a third party, an oracle or anyone can do to prevent you from withdrawing. So you have you have access through the YAX contract to those smart wallets that are created on your behalf. There's no co-mingling of funds. So it is a smart wallet for your portfolio that you can pull from.

Yeah. Exactly. So that you can onchain. If I go up here, this uh this has the accounts for this contract. This is showing what accounts did it create as subsidiaries for your portfolio.

And so you can go onchain and see, you know, by gosh, what does OP scanner tell me is my current balance of USDC in this account and I can't focus at this level. Uh, it got pulled. I don't know what I'll have to dig in, but you can you can dig in and find where the USDC is. Um, and what transactions happened in order to satisfy your deployment. Any other questions?

Thank you very much. We take, you know, of course, users custody of their assets very seriously. That's one of the critical elements of this. And indeed, if you look at some of these other systems out there for doing yield optimization, what have you, what they actually have is an off-chain Amazon cloud service that has the keys. And so if that's gone, if that uh trusted execution environment is gone, now there's no blockchain on the planet that can return you your funds.

And so from a from a system point of view, the ability to have everything really be relying on onchain custody is an amazing and important security step. So all right, thank you all.