The Future of Onchain Finance with Getty Hill

[Music] cool man we're recording live from uh the podcast Studio 1871 um representing E Chicago Vlad here with Getty Hill from gfx labs and oku trade awesome man it's good to have you here um you've been uh in the Chicago circles for for a while and um we're all very excited to get you in the studio and talk about what you're working on talk a little bit about yourselves um I when we talked previously I think you mentioned were you were you uh raised here yeah I actually grew up here um off of like a block ala Stadium division um so went to school and everything it wasn't until like college where like I really lived anywhere else me and flit yeah uh lived in then for Florida for a couple years um eventually for work as well Denver for a couple years and then when we wanted to actually start gfx Labs uh and go out on our own we decided it was actually Chicago is the best place to do it so we moved back to Chicago myself and my co-founder Eddie y um and built the company here that's awesome um so what were you doing uh prior to gfx so um after school Eddie and I were working at a Chicago prop trading firm although it was you know traditional trading firm that was started in Chicago called 4170 trading on the traditional side then we worked for grapefruit trading that was the actual crypto side of the company um we worked down of Miami though so that the whole crypto side of the company was down Miami the tral guys were up here for the most part um and so we lived down there that time even though it was Chicago base that's super cool what was your background in school in like Finance or are you meler I was originally going to school for aerospace engineering so yeah like big bra end up in C I don't know about that but I enjoyed things that flew and can go fast and like always L drones and model airplanes and building that sort of stuff when I was a kid so like you talk about like in an alternative timeline then crypto like where was I going to end up like yeah I probably would have been like desiging like small uavs for the military or something like that but here I am now like seven eight years into crypto yeah I mean when's the crypto space sucku and I think you're pretty much a lifer it's just like so much happening it's so much happening and you know I was dabbling in the space I would say in like 2016 2017 era it wasn't until really um um it got fulltime at the training firm in 2018 but it was when I touched like compound for the first time uh when it when it came out before there were stable coins before like the only stable coin that there was was single collateral die when it eventually came out of compound so first time I like did a load on there I think was like basic attention token back in the day where like it all kind of clicked for me I was like holy folks see me like I can borrow money from someone or something I suppose um for any amount of time at whatever the rate it tells me and I know exactly what I'm getting and I know that if I want to pay it back a moment later I can do that and like somehow that whole experience was so eye opening about like how Finance could be done that I managed to stick around for another like several years yeah did you have this feeling of like oh my God like the the tools of like Wall Street are now available just like on the internet to like anybody it showed me what Wall Street could become I think a lot of people in the space Miss understand trading firms and private equity and funds and think like these guys are our edit and it's like no like these are actually amazing tools of capitalism that have allowed the United States to thrive um these guys just want to make money as much as we do ultimately they're going to use whatever tool they can do so to like make the most money they can and provide you know uh the best service they can to who they're providing that service too I think defi these protocols Etc we can get them to adopt this these these tools over time and as be like mature like that's what's eye opening is possible it's like okay we can change like the standard of that the standard qu that we all better on like WR on you the same way that people in like the 19 like 50s and such like 60s looked at how like equities are traded on paper and over the phone we look back at that be like that's crazy like I think you know 30 years from now we're going to look back how Securities are traded today and think the same thing essentially so what do you think is like the biggest hold up to like increased adoption do you think it's more literally just like it's just it takes a long time for these things to get built out and scale and that's as much of a challenge as the regulatory side or do you think the regulatory side is creating problems in terms of like moving faster is much as I would love to say like The Regulators of the full problem the world's lot bigger than the United States as much as even like my American Centric self like to believe um if it was purely regulatory then we would see this like you know we would see us getting lapped in other places and at this point like sure like maybe it's a lot easier to build a crypto company um in you know Singapore or in Hong Kong or you just entirely offshore in the bahas or something like these guys aren't figuring it out yet though maybe some of them are a bit further ahead of the curve than some of the americ companies there's obviously I can tell firsthand there's a lot of friction to try to build a crypto company in Chicago in the United States um but I think at the same time it is just like a reps in a time thing we need more people in the space who are long-term thinkers and unfortunately the industry doesn't exactly incentivize for longterm thinking as much as we would like to say it does yeah um but we've come a long way over the last three four years and I imagine they just going to like it has in the past continue to accelerate the amount of progress we're able to kind of squeeze into a year do you think do you feel like Chicago is well equipped to provide that support system like what what are we missing here and what what are the things that we do well at provided for you know companies that here yeah so I mean as far as things that to do well like we thought about like where to start the company we approach it pretty like logically like okay we're going to do it in a major American city it needs be a place where you can like hire people out of like gfx has an office in Chicago like a work from home compy yeah we have some remote people and T but we have an office that like by state in Grand that a bunch of us go into every single day uh how big is the team we're 20 people um about uh 10 of that's in Chicago and then the rest kind of spread out um but bring them into Chicago often but as far as Chicago goes it's you know has everything in my mind that New York can offer maybe at a slightly smaller scale but we're still the third largest city in the nation uh we have the greatest Finch companies and trading firms in the nation based in Chicago so there's a there's a good talent pool here a lot bigger talent pool than when I was in Denver like Denver is fantastic it has a lot of these qualities the scale is just not there right um and you also want somewhere like people are nice like I really didn't appreciate um How Great Chicago is as far as the midwestern culture was until I like lived at other places like wow people are just friendly and nice here food's good restaurants are good um cost living is not so bad and I can like walk down the lake path whenever I want on a nice Sumer day and like those things are just like amazing people don't understand just how great like Chicago WIS really have it okay the flip size maybe like politically speaking the city is Have Nots of Great Space H but these things are like solvable uh we have an election of our own coming up soon so hopefully some of these things get sorted out but um in the grand scheme of thing it's like yeah I don't have any regrets about starting the company in Chicago yeah um so from like a local government perspective like do you guys engage at all with you know like Regulators here or yeah like what's your experience with like there yeah well like I'm sure like maybe some of the folks are listening to this will remember like last summer um kind of Rob essentially this time of year April May there was some legislature like going through the Illinois um state government about regulating crypto and pretty say ftic ways that didn't really make a lot of sense would have quite literally forced our company which does in the grand scheme of things rather safe things out of the state um and we end up taking very active role in that process particularly because we're a local company we're a local team um and the product that we've been building over the last year and a half particularly is one that's really easy to grasp by even most Regulators we felt we had a very compelling ER of the folks saying like hey like you guys aren't quite understanding The Narrative here so we ended up writing letters to like I don't know 20 or so like Illinois like Congress State people and saying to them I'd say only like a quarter of them replied but a quarter of them did reply which is nice um yeah and we published that letter online and like I do think it actually like made it to quite a number of people and influence ultimately in some small way like how that ended up um turning out in the Senate what have you know failed over there to that's awesome so we we do try to get involved or we need to get involved because we it's important that's where we are I would rather not relocate the company of course of course wasn't uproot like that I mean I think maybe that's why some companies adopt more like remote first culture in in crypto just to heal themselves some of that I think so and you know the industry is still so small hiring great crypto Talent regardless of locations are as hard as it is so a lot of the talent that we have hired in Chicago have been folks that we transitioned over from web two jobs or whatever it may be on the front end or back end um we just had someone join our team from over at Apex Holdings which is like you know one of Greater Chicago greatest fin tech companies right now join the team doesn't know a ton about Krypto but is a whip smart engineer uh it wants to get you know more interested in the space more engra in the space we're used to that like Eddie and I'm a co-founder we were willing to spend a lot of time with our new hires to make sure that we'll get them up to speed about what they need to know um and then the grand scham of things like if you're a smart person you're going to figure it out like nothing that isn't the crypto space is rocket science it's just needs a little time and El grp and you'll get it done yeah so what's um yeah I want to dive deeper into just like the company culture just aspects of like how do you guys build products and um you obviously like your your team Dynamic so it sounds like you don't really have a a bias towards a certain type of person when it comes to like hiring and joining your team like are you maybe biased against NBAs okay how about that I my own opinions of that but I'm I'm mostly alive with you yeah Eddie and I are both dropouts like so we I actually only did two years of school Eddie did one year school he was at Northwestern awesome I was at a a school called emiral Aeronautical University that was a great place for aerospace engineering uh before we DED down the crypto rout ho we debt grapefruit trading for what ended up being three and a half years yeah we're super thankful at that opportunity like kind of more or less we got lucky and met the right people at the right time and then you know enough to get the opportunity and then worked hard enough to keep that opportunity work at the firm and we really try to like give more folks opportunity our team is a younger set te and we have the whole age range are we actually one of the engineers who just hired recently fantastic sen engineer as well I think he's like 60 years old or something like that like he's he's up there yeah whip smart true crypto Deen amazing we're thrilled to have him on the team and then like we have an engineer on the team or when we hired we didn't even know how old these was and I interview my interview people I don't ask them how old they are and we're going to we work in Chicago get an email from the wework staff being like hey someone on your team's below the age of 21 you need to make sure that they don't consume alcohol because you know sometimes the offices do happy hours and such like who the heck is below the 21 or Team Ed up being that this whip smart engineer that we hired off of GitHub essentially who's yeah uh was in Utah working uh for a trucking company over there on like data side of things uh was 19 and like he was at the company for like a whole month all of us were like super impressed with him didn't even realize that he was just 19 we really want want to make sure that when we hire people we bring people on the team it's purely about like what they have what talent they have what they are possible and capable of and we want to make sure that whenever folks do join the team that we're constantly pushing the envelope like it's people say the team like uh we we we are pushing envelope regularly in weird ways and it can be uncomfortable times as working but when it all clicks and comes together then it's like super satisfying because you're doing constantly new interesting things so one of the interesting things I've seen maybe more recently and in you know with like crypto project and defi space some of the salana based teams uh they kind of just like blow up on Twitter like just some of the personalities are kind of intense and I wonder like if you if you guys have like a culture of just like like hey we are Finance industry professionals like yes this is a DJ and like the crypto space can be a little more of wild wild west but do you ever think about just like okay like everybody needs to just kind of have their stuff together in public or I don't know I think this is one of those things that's kind of warless accidentally happened for us um and that like the people who join the team have been ones who spent a lot of time on like socials or in the crypto sphere um yeah and part of that I'll admit is probably because like we're not necessarily always Hing like crypto people from nean it's a lot of web to like implants coming over um but even so like you know like I don't tell anyone like what they can and cannot tweet it just seems to be like the culture that we've established has been level ahead I would say it's like the best we to describe and that like okay we all know we're trying to build here we know that the notion of today's crypto is especially literally today's crypto is around meme coins or such or other new L2 coins coming out and you know L1 coins coming out and that's all fun and good but everyone at the company knows that like the fiveyear vision for us is like Securities and equities and commodities on blockchain right now it's it's five year for reason that's ways away for us yeah but like I think we're all in agreement that the way that access and efficiency for trading Securities from both people is still really not great Robin Hood Pro even proved in the United States where I think most people previous to them were like oh yeah you know any American they if they want to trade it Apple stock and go do so I mean Rob just made it brain dead easy and found like another 40 million people that previously folks didn't really understand that they were interested in trading like okay there's probably still more in the United States but let alone the rest of the world don't have access to American markets so I think because we've always taken a very larer approach to things because we're never like really extremely racing to like Sprint out that next feature or something over on our side even though we're constantly delivering things that it just makes it a more manageable culture for everyone so maybe just in that sense we've attracted a different crowd yeah uh like for you personally does the the crypto news site and also like the up and down bull bear cycles does that ever you know fact like does that affect you in any way yeah for sure I mean it's impossible OB you figured out strategies to like kind of harness that energy or like I mean one thing is just been last time on Twitter I me you go back to like when I was at the training room and I would have like I used um two like 40in TVs as like my monitors nice um and I would have one with like all of our trading everything that Systems off live that you been constantly watching and one would just be like you know email Twitter Discord telegram Etc you know um but I would always have like tweet deck up on my screen constantly um and once we left there I was like well this isn't this isn't a good thing and I'm on Twitter all the time about the trading for um that do even say back that I was tweeting that much just like reading things keeping a good beat on things um and since then like Fast Forward today like I've turned off Twitter notifications on my phone like I'll really only look at it like in the morning when I wake up when I go to sleep and like throughout the day if someone sends me a thing or like I need to look at like our socials but otherwise trying to like really keep my time on the Twitter feared like more manageable I do think it's important for Founders to do it so not to say you shouldn't do it at all I don't think it's reasonable say you can cut it out but uh you just have to take a longterm approach these things otherwise you're just going to get be up yeah yeah do you like Twitter for you is out a source of just like Alpha and like in terms of just what's going on the crypto space like what's hot what's not or do you view it as more like as a Founder like there's just interesting stuff in Crypton but it's also Tech at large like this is my source so like all of the B would say I mean like at this point um I get a lot of my news for just like General like worldwide news from Twitter I'm like I like reading the morning brew as well for folks who maybe like know that that's like a popular morning like five minute read newsletter but yeah for just general dudes to get up speed on things um but like you just Twitter everything from like trying to find new Talent like as a Founder I'm constantly looking to see like who's someone that like we at this point we're kind of always thinking about growing and it just a matter of finding the right person we not more dictates like when we're gr at this point um and so like constantly looking to see like who's saying what or who's going where or where the things are flowing not just the opinions and the news of people but it is good to know to like yeah what our competitors are up to what they're saying what's the latest marketing strategy on Twitter all of that um so I do think there is like some necessity of like how going to be on the app we just um on Tuesday we hosted an event here at 1871 uh focusing on farcaster oh yeah love farcaster yeah I was going to so I was going to ask you like have you transitioned any of your attention or yeah to like following warcast like yeah yeah oku and like a repost over there daily we've been trying to like Foster over there I will say this been maybe a little slow for us particularly uh but yeah it's a it's I I'm more passive over it I don't think I've like quite figured out like the niche of like what to say necessarily to folks that like they want to read um but yeah I I'll go over there every other day probably and scroll around just for 15 minutes and see like what are people talking about which way are the winds blowing um just to get a good beat on things because it is beginning to kind of become its own separate faction from Twitter as far as like what meta is that people are discussing over there sure um it's just different yeah so I guess it's another data point but it is one like I am like I've definitely spent a lot more time on Modern War Caster over the last month that I did like three months ago yeah I mean that's um that's a trend like the growth trenders are picking up it's insane what they managed to create over there is like really really impressive and from a team that has been at it since like 21 I mean like a lot of people feel like it's an overnight success for them and maybe it's been like the parabola growth for sure is absurd but they've been grinding since like 21 um and a lot of the success that they've seen now has been in the last like literally like four months yeah so yeah um just goes to show that like some of these platforms to go with that platform thesis that they're trying to build out on uh takes a lot of time and it is like truly an exponential problem or like the beginning is just going to be a slow crawl but once you hit that point of inflection like oh my God does that does that give you some like additional confidence that like hey look you know it takes a long time to build these things and adoption we're not sure when exactly it's going to come but we just as long as we focus on building the thing that we know is going to be valuable in in the future like we just stay on that path yeah well I think there's an important balance that you need to make sure that um as you build that platform you want to make sure you have users along the way solidifying that at least what you have today is valuable and then say you know my products only going to get exponentially more valuable as they add more features and functionality or you know usefulness to those that user set as well but you got make sure along the way that like you're not just saying oh well I'm at zero right now but having five power users done you know in the first month is great so that's you can gr it into 20 and then 100 and so on and so forth um but yeah everyone has to start with that Foundation somehow yeah so let's talk a little more about you know product at gfx because you know you guys are building Boku now but this isn't the only thing you guys ever worked on was like you know we've talked previously and you guys have built a bunch of stuff so tell like walk me back through the to the beginning the origins of gfx like what was the original product they oh boy yeah yeah I mean the original product for us worth I still have conviction and unfortunately it's pretty much impossible to build the United States so we can certainly certainly talk about it a lot um what Eddie and I were at the trading firm when we were deciding whether or not it was the right time for us to leave um we're having a long CH and he's like you know what that if we do leave like what are we going to go do and I'm like well like here's some ideas and Edie for anyone's B than before will tell you point point blankly when he thinks you're wrong your idea is not a good one and I pitched in the idea of like it'd be so awesome that if I had my money on compound I could go down to the score with a card and I could swipe it and I would use my collateral my eth collateral and compound and bar UCC get and sit automatically and pay for like my good or whatever service I bike paid for at the store you just make that really seamless ux a great way to introduce to folks um a new way to think about savings eventually a new way to think about savings cuz the notion of credit card right now having to pay it every single month is really not particularly feasible for Americans and for many low and middle class Americans with you know not a ton of income yeah they run into this like visceral Loop of not being able to like start saving money because they're spending money and they're um having to pay off their debts with cash that they've ear and they never get to a point of having cash to actually save right so the idea in my mind was like can we get to a point where someone can take their paycheck immediately put it into like something really safe you know an S&P 500 ETF maybe even like us bonds yeah but use that as collateral that's your investment and then borrow cash against it to pay for you know your whatever you're buying at Target or something you know your mundane things just everyday life things because that way eventually you have actually like your liabilities and a depreciating asset that is the dollar and you're you know have eventually assets over here on the other end and start off small but at least that gives uh a way to break this like cycle for folks now obviously like that's again like a bit of my five years somay will be equities and you know Commodities on oku thing it's going to be a while before you can realize that Vision but you have to start off with what I saw on compound initially was like oh like this ux is actually quite buildable right and it becomes just a regulatory problem more or less so that's what we started the company on originally we went and pitched it to the Misa guys and got a mis's fintech FastTrack program over there and like okay if we use these as Buy in then like we surely can like convince enough other like a bank and a card processor to like partners with us we know on this and we have the crypto knowledge to make it happen uh we just need to get the card knowledge the car knowledge is more abundant so we're like okay we can figure it out yeah obviously with this card it is not launched so it did end up P but essentially there were a lot of bridges you needed to build between you know Trad fire rails and D fire rails and make it work well the technology side just was is the easy part there on that one it really came down of the regulatory side of like oh okay even with Vis is like stamp of approval on us and being in the fast track program that one from like okay people wouldn't return our phone calls we couldn't even like talk to a bank or a card processor to be like oh okay they'll pick up your phone call and then tell your idea is crazy it's like well that's the least nice of them um and we finally found someone to like launch it with we built out the whole interface the whole the card product got the card design picked and everything uh I actually still have the cards like my background here in my phone if you want to look yeah um shoot I have too many notifications on my phone screen yeah I'll show it to you after but um I still have the car in the back on my phone screen because I want to build this thing someday but yeah we got within two week to La launch this thing and our banking partner uh got caught up in the OC which is the United States like um office ccom controller who's like regulates more like the cop on banks essentially yep and this was back in 22 Yeah summer of 22 they did a whole like fintech Crackdown essentially and fintechs were not you know using Banks properly up to like full regulations and somehow our banking power kind of got caught up in this and then got tossed then we had to find a new banking partner with our card partner um still and that was going to take like five months to okay put that on the Shelf come back to it five months later yeah and then you know once we started getting that going just as we were getting going uh online again caroluna happens carolo spirals into FTX exploding and then once FTX exploded that it was like done we were even trying to get our own MTL licenses like we had a few of like mtls our land or we transmitter licenses for folks aren't familiar um which are amazing things if you can get them but because they're regulated on a state-by-state basis make it really hard so it's just one of those things where the idea is there someone someday maybe us will build that and it'll be great um in the meantime though like no one in the United States has been able to build this product meanwhile like they're building the exact same things at this point in the EU no problem because the you know regulatory driver there's a little more i% favorable just defined um whereas here it's just not the case that that's a good example of like where Founders are succeeding at doing this elsewhere yeah um it's not many of those examples I would say that's one of the rare ones but somebody will build that that but that was the first year the company essentially was trying to build that product and at what point were you like this is not feasible we need to Pivot um we started the company with the idea that we would do multiple things to hedge ourselves from the Geto Labs company a lab like a real Labs company like we wanted to bottle off of like 18 T Bell labs and like okay we're going to build our cash count we'll have one cash C that will funn all over our fun research and development ideas on the side was it easy to get buying from investors for that model our initial set of investors when we started the company was like we raised two and a half million in like a seed round yeah from Mostly um crypto friends that we knew in the industry it was essentially one big Angel roundout so it's like half of it came from Folks at the trading firm that we left behind um because they believed in us but ultim was yeah like every check on that round with someone that knew us pretty damn well or was very good friends with someone who knew us really well yeah and they'll just trusted in like Eddie and I's ability to like figure it all out very true SE route they're like we're just investing in these people we'll believe that you figure it out here's the vision for poppy okay we'll believe you can figure out even if yell you'll pivot into something else um that that's got to be very liberating to have sort of that blank check to you know play around and figure things out because I think in crypto you have to be extremely flexible extremely where you where you focus your attention because the narrative The Meta changes all the time and what needs to be built out can change all time we see like the biggest projects like layer ones like near has changed the like I don't what they are anymore enough so that that's awesome that you had that initial support have you guys had to go out and raise more money since we have not that's not to say we once upon a time we did try so I mean the first year and a half of the company was in hindsight us making a lot of mistakes figuring a lot of things out as fast as you could and then fixing those mistakes as fast as you could and that's the key part like we Stars I would say generally fail it's like they just don't do they don't do a good job getting back on the horse when they realize they screwed something up and that was like what really set Eddie and I apart is like we're totally fine admitting we were wrong and then just fixing it and just getting on with it um and so yeah like at one point the company was like you to have cash we were doing so great and we were like okay we have option eight B and C these are like our three like plans that we need to execute on we need one of them for the company to survive we need you know two of them for the company to be in like a good position and we need three of them for the company to like Thrive over the next few years yeah um and it ended up being that we got two out of the three so that's like how the company managed to get today but we like grinded on these things for like a solid six months a very scary six months uh and it ultimate all like panned out like not ideally I would say we got through especially given the fact that the barrel was a lot longer than I I think any of us anticipated and uh timeline wise where are we at here like this is like yeah this is August of 2020 SL like August September October so this is like right before the previous bull market yeah so teruna exploded in May that was June 21 right that was 22 22 sorry yeah 22 sorry okay so this is okay this is the beginning of the of last SP yeah so like the company had been around for like uh was coming up on like seven months or so okay okay and we're like okay I've made the class mistakes of hiring too many people too soon and scaling too fast and not being focused enough all your class mistakes of course um and one of those things though you just got to make them make the mistakes for yourself I think uh do right unfortunately yeah um realize in like April of 21 that yeah Market's not on a great trajectory things aren't looking good we need to Pivot our strategy so we started to do that yeah April March um and then come yeah May June I think I think it was early June ter lunu exploded maybe like June 5th or so ter lunu explodes Market melts down we launch interest protocol which is this barland protocol we we was you know designed kind of marrying the idea of a makeer Down comp compound and was was this a second this is what you guys yeah after yeah like the idea was we were to work it into poppy uh which was the card product and so like we were marrying these two ideas together instead of like sending all overflow to compound we were going to kind of build our own barlin protocol and send flow to ourselves was what you know made a lot of sense yep um um launch this teral Luda explodes Market melts down um you know and just you know continues to die through the summer um it was around this time that the Unis spot Foundation folks they had given us a phone call and they're like hey the foundation wasn't even started yet we're thinking about starting this thing we're big delegates over at Unis swab among some other Dows uh what do you guys think Etc like this is a great idea love to have an organization who's wholly focused on the nature of the protocol and the Dow because at this point Unis swap labs um was beginning to have their own set of priorities um from from the Dow it was going to be really nice to have someone who could really focused on the day-to-day efforts of the Dow specifically total c um and I was like what are you guys going to do with the money like you want they're asking for $60 million for folks aren't familiar from on the forums they were like what's the that's a lot of cash what's the plan you know paint this Grand picture and they're like what do you think we should do with the money so I came back to them with kind of like a handful of ideas and one of them was what ended up becoming oku was hey we been in this industry for you know at that point um coming up on five years we've seen what protocol succeed in fail we have an idea very well of what traditional exchange looks like for some reason defi is it really doing a great job closing this Gap with CI yeah and we think a big reason that is on the ux side we spent a lot a lot of time as industry focusing on the protocol and a lot of time focusing on infrastructure but not a lot of time about just really making it super easy for folks to Trans Ocean over from binance at the time FTX onto something that is trustless and more transparent and often even just more efficient uh to use as far as from a cost standpoint right uh and so we pitch this to them and they were like oh this is a pretty good idea I mean took us I'm simplifying this is like three months of like pitching essentially and turns on ideas and iterations but to to the uh moft D yeah the Dow SL like the foundation so before they funded and then they got funded um and then in October it was announced we awarded our Grant so at that point we were kind of working on interest protocol and then building out on the side um oku at that point was called um un swap Diamond was like the public name of it okay um so the company had morphed a lot over that like six months we seriously like became a lot much much more of a butt and up legitimate organization I would say not to say that it was craziness beforehand but like we learned a lot through that period of time oh sure um and in terms of like who you're targeting with oku like who do you think are going to be the initial adopters of of the client of the interface yeah so the way we kind of break this down a really high level is there's kind of like three phases phase one is like you need to get like buying from like your defi users today yeah and you're power defi users so this is particularly when we categorize like a power defi user someone who's active on multiple chains other than ethereum and with like some reasonable amount of money um and like we need to get buying from these folks to build the product that we want five years from now essentially it's like kind of a requirement along the way so get buying from these folks is which we've been focused on for the last year since we launched oku last July and then from there once you've got that buying now we're kind of going to zoom out and say okay how do we get buying from people who are like pretty active on evm or on chain but not necessarily like touching trading platforms on train so like me know just setting coins around essentially is like the best example of that sure not on coinbase for binance quite yet you know like s past that point uh but not super into defi how do we get those people to feel like this infrastructure is more friendly to them than what the status quo has been interesting well from what you've shown me in the past of like the O interface it looked like a very professional Trader interface like it's kind of like when you flip flip on coinbase Pro yeah you know that's what it felt like to me yeah so um and that was exactly what we were going for that that was the plan we wanted people who were trading on the coinbase pro the binance interface to feel like oh this is friendly this is something I'm very used to seeing except it's just onchain instead right um and so that's absolutely we're going for so we want to get those users now in hindsight we probably should have got about it a little differently as one white we probably went for those Advanced users a little too suit we should have focused on def5 users a little more aply we had to maybe back track a big for it but in the grand scheme of things it's worked out amazing because like folks understand where we're going and like yourself they come on the platform and they're like okay I understand like what I'm supposed to be doing here um it it's very clear and that ultimately in the long run is going to make us a much stronger platform because we have already been essentially working on getting those users off of binance and other traditional trading platforms a year earlier than we maybe should have so what um what first of all the product is launch right it's yeah launch any we can go to u. trade what um what do I need to can I simply connect my wallet going or and better yet you don't even need to connect your wallet you can just go on the platform and start scrolling around I hate it when applications make you click like open the app try app there's none of that there's nothing like until you want to actually do something in our platform you don't have to connect your wall and once you connect your wall I'm not going to make you give me your email or any of your information as well and um because you're based in the US do you have any kyc requirements do you have um any limitations on the coins that are accessible you know from unisoft you have to sort of like limit your list of like Whit listed tokens yeah yeah great great question so as far as yeah American company American team Etc like we do comply with like the ofac um sanctions list so uh if you're someone that is down in Iran or in North Korea not could be able to use the oku site y um same thing with like wall and addresses there is like lot addresses that aren't um that are on that oax AG Li as well and like they can't use the site either so those are like two general like precautions that we take to make sure we've maintain compliance sure uh and then in addition to that uh as far as like assets go there are a handful of Assets in the platform that like the SEC made strong arguments against of being insecurities or just you know I've already settled with them and said there Securities that you know begrudgingly we've said okay probably not best to like also allow people to trade those assets on our platform if um that's be kind of become the status quo I'm really hesitant to do those things I'm a Founder very much where like I think most Founders kind of just listen to their outside Council and there often outside council is going to be more cautious than internal councel so like we made the decision like the ten high of the company was bringing an internal councel so that way we we made sure we had someone who was always incentivized to appropriately push the envelope with us I'm say hey I really want to try to find a way to do this thing how do we make sure that we're doing it in a compli fashion um and that's really helped us get a leg up on what the status quo has kind of been unfortunately for like american-based def5 companies over the last couple years that makes sense um so I have I have a technical question for you I've always been curious about when you're building clients on top of these protocols obviously the client needs to extract a feed you know you guys need to make money yeah and he'll do that on the client's side but I've always been curious how does that fee split actually work between you know the 3% LP versus like you guys take an additional cut sure so there's a few different ways like how like protocols do today now our our frontend today we don't take a fee on swaps or anything so anyway go to front and trade across any of our liquidity sources there's no fee but we can kind of break it down into a few different categories so obviously you come and trade on our front and you are paying the Unis swap protocol fee or wherever that liquidity is coming from so in that case that fee accounting is occurring at the protocol layer we don't even have to think about it or worry about it it just baked into whenever you touch the protocol and those pools um at Unis spop in particular there are a number of different like Fe tiers there are some pools that are as high as 1% you have your 30 basis point or Point 3% um your five basis point and then your one basis point one basis points where you trade like your stable coin stable coin pairs that's actually something like gfx Labs brought about in Unis we were the ones who pushed for the one basis point F2 to be added I I actually am shocked because I I my I knew about the five bases point. one because that's like kind of the curveent standard and that was just a stable you know light pair standard but who's making money at at one basis point it's you make one money at one basis point when you're trading like die for usdc or like USD t for like usdc so volume is ging massive though yeah but that's the case like it is it is just massive volume like the biggest markets on un swap um are generally like as far as volume goes are those stable coin markets but that's the same thing for any traditional exchange too like you go on binance and you're looking at who's trading the most F where it's often like those sorts of pairs they're still important pairs because outside the United States tethers are dominant uh it's a very American Centric thing for like USC to be like the norm but it's actually te in most places right um so so yeah you have those featers and Unis spop obviously others when you look at the like metamask rainbow wallet um un swap front ends what how they Implement their fee typically is at the router layer so they'll build a smart contract on top of the core protocol and they'll pass in some parameters there and say hey we want to make sure like we're getting our fee on this now sometimes like if you're trading for like eus DC it's as simple as saying oh I want to take out um my ad 5 or 887 and a half basis points out of you know E3 USC generally folks are going to take the USC half there um sometimes if you're train trading something for you know two coins that aren't so popular then there might include an additional leg in that trade to get you know that unpopular coin into like a usdc um or sometimes the depending on the platform they'll just accept the unpopular um token as like their quote unquote feet and then have a secondary automated system like trade that for or uscc for them down the line so there's a few different ways to slice it but it's always been like infrastructure on top of it um there's a lot of different ways though you can you can slice this though for sure interesting so I imagine these implementations all have a little bit of additional gas overhead yes so which is obviously going to be passed to the a so how much time do you guys spend about you know think about just like smart contract optimization and do honestly not much at all because for us a lot of the activities on not on ethereum um and just increasingly so you know on base or optimism or arbitr oku is already supporting all these chains yeah we're across 15 chains actually amazing yeah we add about like two chains a month right now we'll be at 20 by like early July oh like walk me through the process of you know moving to a new chain I imagine everything that's evm equivalent is super easy to just like redeploy though yeah it's I don't want to say super easy um it's something we particularly spent a lot of time on making sure that it is easy for us to add new chains I would say like that's part of our Edge versus some of the Legacy systems that are out there um but ultimately like it is like a whole another thing you have to worry about as far as uptime and you know possible downtime goes to routing is different on chains some chains do even if it's very like even if it's like 99.9% e you know evm compatible there might be like one weird change this chain might treat gas slightly differently than another chain like there's enough where it becomes a little the headache to add each additional chain uh we've spent a lot of time making that easy for us um the biggest thing is like infrastructure so for us most applications when they add new chain support are typically relying on some third party infrastructure to index like events for them or something in between or some type of information we have been in this industry for a while and have dealt with indexing information since the trading firm time where we were indexing a lot of information on train and so we've gotten pretty good at getting information all chain into a database and then cleaning it uh and doing it at speed and at scale um so we use a lot of that experience to like amplify oku's ability to support new chains because yeah there's just so many transactions on you to swap when you begin to add up all the different chain play if you actually we added this to the front end recently if you go to the Unis SWOT Plum page on the left hand side this is fun thing it's a transaction feed it'll show you trades as they come in across every single unop deployment people I don't think realize PRI of this how many trades are actually occurring on Unis swap when you add up all the deployment it's pretty like it's a proper trading system yeah no absolutely um that's I it's just fascinating to me from a perspective of um like you guys are using these rails um in a way that looks familiar to you know to the traditional uh um Traders and you know trafi people and I think but what's happening behind the scenes is a lot of like software engineering Alchemy to to make all that happen yeah what and one of the things like as as a also as a Founder that I could thinking about is how infrastructure wise we have to actually add an additional layer of complexity when we build out these products because it's not just a front end and a back end now but it's a front end and two back ends you've got a blockchain and you're still using a traditional web 2 database you still have your SQL and like multiple in many cases too like we have a whole separate system for order routing on our platform a separate system for oracles a separate system for the front I mean yeah well so my question to you is do you ever dream of a day where literally it's a front end and a blockchain and nothing else is needed like do you do you see a future where that is feasible I I don't think so I think there's a lot of really important work that's been happened particularly on the networking side of things yeah that isn't often appreciated uh CU it's just not sexy to like think about how networking happens and how like a team in Chicago can make their site performed for folks in Indonesia or something um I think some of that stuff like doesn't need to be on a blockchain ultimately what really need to be on a blockchain is like the asset settlement layer and I think we're fting that down as much as possible such that maybe today transactions are cheap on based on optimism but we're also dealing with a pretty small percentage of the world like we still have a scaling problem in the industry of like how do you actually make these platforms at the protocol and infrastructure level so that's another thing I don't mean to say like people shouldn't focus on infrastructure like the protocol side of things we can only build oku to the level we can do it today I lean with such a lean team that we have because so much time and effort has been put into like infrastructure um yeah right um so compared to building in trafi like when you were how much of your time you spend when you were in that World um actually like building software versus just were you more of like a Trader that I personally was more on the trading side of things I spent maybe like 20% of my time doing like I don't know if I can like literally say it was software I spent a lot of time building um basic trading scripts for all sorts of different things particularly D5 based things or defi liquidations and then once I could prove my concept out that it was Eddie's job to make my script actually and usable so a very classic thing in like prop trading is that like you need to seize the moment when you find a trade your trade's probably not going to last longer than maybe a day maybe a few weeks like and so often it's just like do whatever you can to get like the most basic thing to get whatever Edge you have on as fast as possible and then make it efficient later and so that's like that's what I was you know going to do was find the edges of the opportunity and exploiting them to whatever ability we could as fast as we could um and then Eddie was really good at actually making those robust processes and that that's the Beautiful part about like uh Eddie and I we have worked together for so long at this point um and we went to actually high school together too that's awesome um that we know each other very well on how like our brains operate and how we work and like what we're going to do Under Pressure and we just like we're aptly like we really trust one another like when I know he needs to get something done he'll get it done and vice versa and our skill sets are actually just entirely different so it it works pretty well yeah that's awesome okay so let's let's think let's zo out big picture A lot's happened in the past just week on the regulatory side just seems like the Democrats are shifting there a little bit after seeing the backlash from um you know bogers and stuff um so one I want to get your take on that but two I want to get your sense of like where you think we're at in this crypto cycle what the next year looks like and how that plays into what you guys are working on yeah I think hey everyone's a excited for Gary to move on and find a new career uh or Gary I would never thought po yeah exactly that's the thing um as as much as I'm like okay with Regulators doing Regulators jobs like they've they've gone far beyond what they should be doing at this point uh and are just causing straight harm to American businesses and then you zoom on like the micro of like even Chicago and it's just like legislators still still have such a misunderstanding about what the industry is and what we're trying to do uh and I think it's going to take us a long time to actually get the message out to everyone so like we've worked really close we actually have a proposal up right now on the unpop forums to support the um defi education fund uh which is a group that works on a lot of you know political efforts and helping um teams that don't necessarily have money to kind of defend themselves when some of the larger branches go after them yeah um do so as well I think it's great that it's becoming a more topical issue within like Congress um I think that's like a really good positive thing I think we do have a lot of cleanup left over from the FTX era um to deal with and it's going to just take a long time um and we'll just see what happens in the next Administration I'm kind of of the opinion that like people generally put more weight into the administration change than is like actually like worthwhile um I think of the grand SCH of things it'll just be nice to know that like Gary's not at the seat I think that's actually the more important thing and I think we can probably accomplish that even if Biden gets elected yeah and then the grand scheme of thing is like I think there's having a president in office right now for another four years regardless who that person is even though I'm really not excited about either of them um is just going to be that good stabilizer at this when you zoom out on the M cow down it's like there's so much happening in the world and so much happening in the United States that just like having some stabilization let alone for crypto would just be good for everyone for everything yes um and ultimately crypto was still pretty small piece of the Cog and machine so we kind of do need the winds net on the macro to be blowing in the right direction for this thing to you know be a little extra productive say yeah for sure so okay so then in terms of lits um are you are you feel pretty bullish about where we're at and you know yeah also do you believe in the Cycle Theory like do you really think like crypto goes to the bull bear cyes like yeah I I think the cycle I think the Cycle Theory is true like whether like the the nature of like timing on exactly I don't know um but yeah I mean I it's like pretty clear across like any industry that like things are going to have like their booms and their boss and like crypto with the way the industry is set up through instead is very much susceptible to like those booms AB bus probably more than like any other industry in the history uh outside of just traditional financial markets is so well one thing I think with crypto and I think it it looks Amplified because it's all liquid and it's all there for people to see these price flu whereas like private Equity VC they could hide a lot of that you know I think it's true but like penny stocks have been around for a long time that is a pretty crazy place and Wall Street bets is a pretty crazy place so um I think when people talk about like know take for the you know the recent GameStop stuff that just happened in the last couple weeks with ran Kitty coming back online like why does that why is there's so much excitement behind those things than there is from crypto still and I think that really does come down to like oku and applications like oku need to do a better job making these things more accessible for like those types of movements to even be possible in our industry and that just like goes to show that there's still a pretty big gap from like infra in ux that exists in regular equities markets and like what you can do in crypto but there's people who want to do these things and be those activists um yeah it's definitely going to like happen in our industry sooner posst it later so are you guys geared up for maybe an influx of new retail showing up for your platform maybe in the next year to 18 months yeah and like how can you optimize like your onboarding to make that happen yeah so like kind like I mentioned before like today has been in the last six months have been aot about supporting like today's users and making sure they have optimal experiences and then leveraging like our time infastructure in making their experience good into a better experience for future retail users MH and so the last six months have been dedicated to a lot of platform and efficiency improvements you go on oku today the site is so much more performable than it was 6 months ago and like Years love it it's actually a huge difference and that's not even to say we were slow six months ago we actually still really performing with that as well just in hind was like wow it could be that much better it's pretty great um moving forward it's like okay we're going to be bringing on off ramping and bridging into the platform as well and that's just going to continue to really Hammer home our platform diesis for ourselves and then refine it such that it'll be usable and a good product for more advanced defi users how do we use the remaining of the year to not only grow the scope further voku and the features that we offer but then actually make the retail experience for new folks that much simpler yeah because I I think you're Bas a level assumption right now is that somebody will have a wallet and they will have yeah F and I I think that's like the funny and the wallet part I we're not going to assume because that's why we're brilant on off ramp get into the interface is because I want like people to be to choose if they want want to bring their own wallet yeah I think at the long run like the wallet stuff is like film cameras essentially like it just temporary thing that made a lot of sense for some time and now we all have iPhones in our pocket and like no one like buys an icon DSLR anymore or anything else like um yeah I think are you saying the wallet will be baked in at like the OS level the eventually yeah I think we're like a ways away from that being all like possible through account abstraction and stuff and that's going like account abstraction is still brand freaking new in the grand scheme of things M um but that's like the end State no one is going to want to actually make a wallet who is a coin boost user today who's a Fidelity account ER trade user Etc like how do you get these folks who are trading you know average resell user on an average platform they want that same ux it's our job to recreate that as closely as possible while maintaining like full def ethos yeah and I think it's entirely possible you can go on ochre today with an email address and it will create you a new wallet thanks to wallet connect and you on there problem is you do have to come with your own gas money today MH but I mean we implemented that like two months ago uh and like wallet connect team implemented it at the same time where the first users of that fature so yeah there's a lot of time at the clock for sure for sure and it you're right it just it takes time to build this stuff out and and I hope that it's not just about recreating today's experiences for you know for the average retail but it's making them even better you know like we want them we want people to feel like oh my God this is so much better than what I've been using right yeah I mean the nature of it is like in order to get users actually to come over right you have to be like five to 10 times better than whatever prior product they were using yeah legation is not enough decentralization is not enough most users will not care about it right um but I think where decentralization plays a really apt role in allowing us to compete with coinbase and eventually like a Fidelity and an E Trade and such is efficiency on our end you can take a team like ours which we're 20 people today and a very lean 20 that is as well um and we're only recently actually 20 people and see how far we've made it with our INF like our infrastructure our resources available to us and you compare us to coinbase who has 4,000 people yeah and it's like okay well like how can a team like ours already build pretty good product all around obviously not to the scale or size of which the coinbase has achieve with a substantially smaller team and it's because like we don't have to worry about um maintaining exchange uptime like coinbase does like that's going to be like a whole department of people that we just don't have to worry about because we have the blockchain to it you know how do we worry about custody user funds we don't need to do that either because like folks are going to master self cost you either using a wallet or they're going to use some of the new wallet tools that like allow you use an email with with the website instead like okay that's some else we don't need to worry about that's like a huge gigantic bucket for them now the regulatory overhead of like cost scene assets and compliance across the world I mean don't wrong like we care about compliance we're pretty small team to have in-house counsil but like you can do these things solar more efficiently when you abstract over a bunch of your infrastructure onto the blockchain instead so it's not that users five years from now need to care about decentralization it's a need to care about the ux we can create with aot a lot more purposely for them I would say yeah yeah it's a weir that's I mean the Holy Grail is just a weird one for everybody the team's bu like every everybody should realize and see these efficiencies very clear yeah and of course too like the only way you can build a product that's 10 times better than what users are used to is at some point try to build a product that's equivalent to what they are using like I think a lot of folks and maybe this is where I'm wrong I don't I don't think I am um believe that you can kind of just like Le frog steps along the way and just like oh I can just like overnight build a product that's 10x better than like whatever else has ever used I think in some cases you can do that I think those are like amazing software companies that can do that I think when you're talk about financial tooling that becomes really hard to do because there's just so much um historically speaking and uh trust in these systems that are required for users to get comfortable with I mean is even crypto users now who want to go use an onoff ramp feature that we're adding and we have to ask some for the social security number yeah and that just sucks like I and crypto user who's already used to putting their social security number into everything doesn't want to do that no chance retail is going to want to do that so there's some of those like fter points where it's just like that stuff's going to take us time to figure out uh and there less of like Tech problems and more sort of just regulatory on ones well you um you sparked my my thought on a specific uh area where I think like we could do a lot better in terms of user onboarding are you bullish on any identity solution something where it's almost like your your crypto uh like social security card that is just like in your wallet and all you would have to do instead of asking for social security number is just be like can we have access to the information on this card can we see your card right and that just lets you I think it's inevitable like someone's going to do this and they're going to do it very well I think the problem is is like no startups going to succeed at doing it uh the only people who can really do it are like the major kyc providers today or like a world government um and like the governments are going to do it obviously so it's going to like come down to like one of the top five kyc providers okay um quite about or you need to be a startup kyc provider scale yourself between the top five and then do it after that maybe maybe it's him maybe he'll get your iris oh yeah I I'm I'm I've got my IR scan I went and did it um I was a fan I think like there's a lot of Merit to like making sure you can prove that like you as a human as unique from another human I mean just look at like polling in the United States or like in Chicago I was going to my mode a few months ago and you know I'm not particularly experienced voter offchain and I went to go vote and they have you like slice like a party obviously and I put down independent they're like dice woman at the playoffs sweetie you don't want to do that you won't be able to vote for anything and I'm like why they're like there's no independent candidates I'm like you mean I can put down my party but I can't vote for just whatever candidate I want and you can only vote for your party's cand I feel like I'm a relatively educated person I don't understand this I was like what do you mean you can't just like select whatever party you want and then vote for whatever candidate you want and it's like these polling systems now obviously that example is just bureaucracy but like there's just so much of it's like oh like have friends who um have like lived in Chicago for years who aren't actually like Americans um you know or dreamers Etc they can't vote all intents and purposes if they wanted to go physically vote they could V vote right there's nothing actually stopping them from doing it other than like the like handwavy fear that like somehow you might be caught but obviously these systems aren't at all so this is kid like we have technology like now like worldcoin and such and what they're doing over their orb like these platforms exist it's just technology problems now getting like the government to adopt them to solve these things so anyway sorry that was a Tang but no I mean we could we go for hours then we've covered a ton stuff it's just like you're an endlessly fascinating man I love to pick it right in you know obviously thank you so much for coming in and doing this I want to give you a chance to just like plug anything you want in with you know in terms of you personally or or gfx lab stuff and then also like your socials for anybody out there who wants to you know follow you yeah thank you very much for having me um for anyone who's trading on chain at all obviously go check out ok. trade um we have a great platform on there with like nine integrated liquidity sources for on every single em you can Poss imagine it feels like sometimes with war coming um so if you're ever going to a new chain and you're like where can I trade that I know I'm going to have a good user experience oku is there for you uh and then from there like liquidity providers LPS and such just W that's other part of oku today is actually with Unis spot B3 providing liquidity in these new chains as well um analytics and information as such for folks who are actually token holders of like uni or mkr or um optimism or arbitrum tokens like a rather prevalent delegate at each of those places uh you can delegate to us in gfx labs.

eth um or make orow you can call me up and I'll give you some information because we're all Happ to be an on over there it's a fun world over at maker out um and yeah just yeah you can follow us on Twitter at oku oku trade or myself like gy H so awesome awesome thanks again G this is amazing yeah thanks you very much for having me all right [Music]