DeFi Personal Agency and Institutional Adoption - Evgeny Gaevoy (Wintermute) - TOKEN2049

yeah hello everyone we're really excited to be here and today's topic personal agency institutional adoption is something it's very personal for me but i think i'll start with a bit of introduction because those who don't know me um i'm evgeny guyboy i am the ceo of wintermute we are one of them we are one of the leading market makers in cryptocurrency space we trade across all the major centralized and decentralized exchanges and we we have a sizeable presence on otc side but like we we've been really early on the d5 in the fire trade in the back back in 2019 and basically this this topic this but part of it is personal agency part of the institutional adoption is something i feel quite strongly strongly on the philosophical level i guess because it's uh it's something i keep thinking about a lot but at the same time it's it's very important for us on the business side because we are deeply ingrained in defy not just as a institution but also as a as somebody who is active user for a lot of those protocols like div idx and uh union swap and somebody who is also building actively into space and participates in the space and well honestly burning a lot of ethereum every day um and i i hope you guys are either old enough or geeky enough to appreciate the graphical references throughout this presentation so i will start with i was just just like how a lot of those talks are going i will start with a bit of a history i guess and um starting with very much on the personal agency side is basically how it all started and it all started with a guy who minds the first bitcoin and then uh and release the paper not necessarily in the sorter and what i find what i find really interesting about is not necessarily the underpinning technology which is on one on one hand simple on the other hand like really actually allowing to achieve a lot of things but actually it's a set of values set of ideals is that uh that draws this technology forward and it basically starts with personal agency which basically means well being the master of your own fates and that also that's better yay hello okay and also interesting it's about this concept of sovereignty and what's important for me in this is like there is this concept of freedom of course and sovereignty is something different because freedom is ultimately in freedom ultimately impacting others like your personal freedom is impossible without impacting and and sometimes others and like achieving things uh while sovereignty is something else sovereignty is basically being independent from the outside world and being basically being being able to not really coerce anyone to achieve anything uh but same at the same time achieving your own goals and that's that's i think a very important distinction from well on the philosophical level but also something that drove well bitcoin uh as a technology as a movement from early on and while you might might think okay it's just libertarianism uh it's like idealistic views and everything what's the reality is like those values those uh like this set of ideas it actually drove there drove housing technology was determined how it was built and this trillion dollar well market cap for bitcoins it's again in that range it's it would not be impossible without the set of ideals um but things don't stay at vacuum and as we like as we progress and basically fast forward into uh 2017 [Applause] that that's where that's where i've intermediate started that's where i actually started my crypto journey as well and that's that's where we've seen a lot of tokens appearing a lot of new projects appearing some of them being incrementally better than bitcoin some of them doing something very different like ethereum some of them being honestly outright scams uh but it it did create it and it did create a new narrative and the narrative was about yeah what happens when those individuals that value their like sovereignty so much what happens when they team up and what happens when they team up is effectively defy summer that we like a lot of us experienced last last year and it basically brought with itself like a new set of values new set of ideals uh which on one hand was much broad and somewhat contradictory to what bitcoin was about but on the other hand it was it kind of built on top of it and was a lot about decentralizing governance so it was about like-minded individuals getting together building stuff together and basically yeah being independent in that in that regard yeah is this better feels even better yeah wow um and on the other hand it was like it was about co-creation so it was about well those lego building blocks that max has mentioned the previous in the previous conversation it was about those building blocks that became much more powerful than than they would be otherwise on its own like maker make a dao would not be really important if we would not be able to trade die on uh on union swap or borrow it on diy dx back in the days and but at the same time this concept of sovereignty it's kind of states but it became much much bigger because we've seen individuals grouping up and downs and been sovereign in their own dial ecosystem and we've seen the whole crypt ecosystem being very sovereign and really willing to operate on its own without well without like any outside control or without any outside regulation which we will come back next uh soon and effectively what that's what it means and i'll actually skip back it's it's again this this door is this this grouse and this technology would not be possible without without those without failures pretty much because we would not be able to be here if if it was driven by just just by desire of i don't know greed or making money on the tokens going up also that was definitely part of the part of the growth of course um and we now now we enter like well this is the next set of uh adoption the curve and that's that's where institutions come in and there is not so much to fast forward to because we are we are here now like and at the initial glance we see some of those headlines and we see i don't know george soros buying bitcoin and some other institution by bitcoin we see all kinds of uh elon musk news back and forth we see microstrategy buying bitcoin like crazy and it feels like adoption but and it's exciting and bitcoin atf will be exciting when it gets released but to me it's kind of sad in a way because once you like once once you realize that all it does is just treats crypto is just another asset class while it's so so much bigger it basically ignores all these like values and ideals that created bitcoin and defy and it just sums it up into well asset class that you can invest into and look it's the future is like the future that we cannot come up to is yeah institutions will buy also all kinds of tokens they will all go up they will be on a balance sheet and then but then i think the overall value creation will be very very limited and what we will end up with is something much smaller compared to well in other parts and this another pass is well i guess i guess that's that's the main thing i want to talk about actually because there is much more like on the institutional side there is much more they can do potentially but it's not really in idealistic ways that yeah go institutions do stuff for us so that we are all happy it's actually it's actually beneficial for both institutions and the space to for them to do so and uh that's that's i guess where i would like to kind of step back and discuss yeah who's uh well who's the dragon is who the main boss is because you you would probably see a lot of animosity towards like certain i don't know toughest regulators towards institutions towards governance and like to me it sometimes feels really personal what's going on uh but what's important is underneath is something very different that is it is a simple goal to make stuff more efficient and it for me personally it resonates very deeply because that's like that's what drives me like i have my values and ideals but at the same time i have like basic stuff that drives me which is i i really want to make things more efficient and kind of going back to my years and traditional finance like before starting wintermute four years ago i was working at october which is one of the leading market makers in traditional finance trading billions every day and i was a market maker so i was making markets more efficient but with every year like over 10 years it was every year i would see that well institutions would well legacy institutions would make our lives tough because their technology would just stay the same regulators would make our lifetime because their regulation will be very reactive and not really proactive and it would actually make things more complex and way less efficient without necessarily achieving goals and yeah don't get me started on taxes because yeah i think it's it's a really messed up system uh pretty much everywhere in the world um and so i i got into blockchain very late like in 2016 or so and what what was interesting for me from the very beginning was just just the potential for it to make things more efficient and that's what really drove me in the space and that's what led me to quit my job and focus on the space uh full-time not necessarily just buying bitcoin which i did much later um and back to the back to the adoption piece like if i'm looking at uh institutions like the real adoption to me is actually those kind of headlines it's basically visa buying a crypto punk nft for the art collection or surgeon looking at make a dao and actually yeah minting some dye out of it uh up to 20 millimeters which is which would be really amazing when it happens and this is much more impactful to me personally and i think it's much more impactful for the whole space and even the for investors and soros buying bitcoin because this is what this is what like actual first steps toward adoptions towards adoption are looking like and it's it's obviously yeah like if you look at the structure behind like sergeant deal it's it's doesn't look efficient at all it looks rather messy and uh monstrous to a degree but i think it's the first basic steps which would allow all of us to actually see well new world and this this is this is about basically transition about transition from this legacy tax tag to blockchain and don't get me wrong like i love blockchain but i don't think every everything will move to blockchain but we have an opportunity here to get rid of get rid of a lot of traditional institutions like uh clearing houses like this stuff should just go because it's just it's bloody efficient sorry for my friends um inclusivity like really really important as well because what you have now is the system where well the best opportunities are resolved for well people who are already quite wealthy and it's it's nowhere near inclusive uh as opposed to what we have in defy and transparency which is like it sounds like a really good saying but it's actually driving more transparency in the traditional finance would bring more clients because it will just increa it would simply increase trust um and the final bit is self-regulation and yeah we can talk about regulation and how it works and why it doesn't work but i think like one kind of experiment that wasn't tried yet and defy is like what happens if you allow the system to self-regulate uh it doesn't happen that much like you see self-regulation or you see self-regulation on level of uh taos so you see like a lot of governance proposals being uh proposed you see a lot of bad actors being called out with different proposals and that's that's all very cool but you don't see you don't necessarily see a lot of self-regulation you see a lot of self-correction you see centralized exchanges cooperating with hacking hacker like not notice hackers but like with the guys who try to try to catch those hackers and i think we what we are kind of lacking on defy side is like more of the self-regulation basically an opportunity to prove to regulators that can be done differently it can be done more efficiently it can be done in a very different different way and basically where we find ourselves now is like we can choose this first pass of just treating the bitcoin encrypted as another asset class and see it growing from 2.3 trillion i don't know 10.3 trillion or maybe less or maybe more or we can we can actually see it's completely replacing the like integral parts of the current system and that that would actually mean that the institutions need to take this personal agency or personally and actually puts put themselves much more inside the current system and try to well experiment quite honestly and try to take risks uh because that's that's what al alta is about and if you basically take the adoption and multiplied by investment you will get like much bigger pie and so you will get a much bigger slice of the pie and that's that's why i'm gonna conclude pretty much in general yeah come talk to me after this talk we are doing a lot of stuff in the space we are building we are trading so come build with us and trade with us come come vote with us um yeah we are here for you and we would love to work with you thank you that was awesome we do have a little bit of time uh for q a if anybody has any questions for you and we're more than happy to ask anything that you want put your hand up let us see you are all very quiet today um where can people find out more about winter moon and how is it uh what's the best place to find out more stuff on you as well well the basics stuff is a website i'm pretty receptive on twitter as well so feel free to just dm me and what's your twitter handle uh my first name last name very easy great stuff well thank you very much for coming down we're really really proud to have you here today and wish you all the best at wintermute thank you big round of applause