A Builder's Guide to Onchain Funding | Silas Boyd-Wickizer - Divvi

[Music] hey everyone uh I'm Silas I'm the CTO at Vora uh we recently released a new project called divy divvy makes it uh very efficient for ecosystems and protocol uh to collaborate with Builders to fuel growth uh and makes it super simple for uh Builders uh to get rewarded from those protocols based on their their onchain impact um at divy we think that um funding is one of the main impediments to uh scaling blockchain adoption uh very broadly basically executing on the promise uh or the hope uh that we've been working on for the last 10 years so I'm really excited to be here uh and share um what we think is part of the solution to that so to to start off with I wanted to highlight um the uh kind of disappointing nature of funding today in web 3 at divy uh we believe that individuals contributors and projects should be rewarded uh in proportion to their impact ideally the impact they bring on chain in the current um options available today grants retr funding uh and what we call pay to playay uh miss the mark in a number of different ways grants uh are often subjective you're codifying milestones and English or some other non solidity language and there's like lots of room uh for discussion about whether you've met the Milestone uh whether you get paid uh and often times uh it or so we've heard it can be a relatively political process uh retro grants or retro funding uh are a little bit of an improvement although they're delayed uh and your impact uh isn't really well known uh while you're working on your project you might be grinding away thinking you're doing a great job bringing impact to a particular ecosystem and then find out later uh that you're really targeting the wrong things and then pay to play uh what we mean by this is uh when you essentially uh offer some Capital uh to be part of an ecosystem could be like providing liquidity could be buying a governance token and then trying to encourage use uh of that platform the problem with this is that your rewards uh are essentially capped by uh your ability uh to buy in um so none of these are great uh I think they're unfair to builders because Builders aren't being rewarded for the impact they bring uh and I think they're really inefficient for protocols and ecosystems who give given you know one token uh they want to get the most bang for their Buck out of that token and I don't think any of these programs uh really deliver on that uh and I think that uh these models are uh impeding the growth of of blockchain ecosystems uh I don't know web 3 Crystal um but I I like her style I like the Tweet uh I think she's being uh a little glib but it captures sort of uh my viewpoint uh in a little bit of a succinct way so uh I'd like to uh share and and brainstorm a little bit on uh how we could come up with a better model one that grows the pie for ecosystems uh and grows the pie for Builders also so you can probably guess where this is going um I think uh a better model starts with an onchain funding model with well defined impact metrics uh that rewards Builders automatically and so the idea here is if you're an ecosystem uh you only pay for incremental value uh that's delivered to your ecosystem uh and if you're Builder uh you get paid for bringing impact and all you need to do uh is is focus on creating value um for ecosystems uh I think this solves uh the problem where they're worried about deploying their Capital efficiently um because for uh one unit of of their token uh they're only giving that out uh when people actually deliver impact to the ecosystem this idea of onchain impact based funding uh is not new um I have a couple examples here I'm sure there's plenty more um where protocols have essentially built this in as a core part uh of their offering um but I think it's interesting to go over them to to give credit uh to the ideas um but also I think it's pretty compelling evidence that this model uh can work really well uh the first one liquidy is a collateralized lending program on ethereum uh it has like a relatively modest uh tvl of only 350 million um modest when compared to some of the big players um but they're on at least tens or probably more uh front ends that integrate with liquidy and try to onboard users to the protocol and the reason they have this broad coverage of front ends is that they have built into the protocol a mechanism for sharing Revenue with front-end Builders and what they do is when a user first comes to one of these front ends and is interacting with liquidy for the first time uh you tackle on uh a little bit of metadata with the transaction uh that says hey this user's new uh I'm referring them here's an ID for my front end uh and then Forever After the front end that refers uh that user gets a slice of the protocol Revenue that that user helps generate um beef is a second example beefy is a a yield Optimizer I'll shill beefy all day long uh they have a relatively small core team um but they have this like massive set of of yield optimization strategies over a thousand of them across uh more than 20 chains and I think the reason for this broad offering from beefy uh is that they buy in to onchain impact based funding uh specifically for um strategy developers you get a small slice of the Harvest Revenue that your strategy brings to the beefy protocol and so folks are highly incentivized to build out these strategies uh across all these different chains and so so what we're aiming to do with divy uh is build a generalized platform that makes it really easy for any protocol uh to adopt this approach uh and also for uh Builders to integrate it into their products so uh divy is a on-train uh orchestration layer that helps ecosystems grow by paying builders for impact so I'll quickly go over at least at a high level how protocols plug in to divy uh and how uh a builder can can plug into divy so there's basically two steps for a protocol um the first is to Define what we call an impact reward function with divy this is basically how you measure impact or value added to your ecosystem and how much you're willing to pay for it uh it can be a mutable uh or time lock so have some expir on it uh we expect since this is a relatively new model uh and projects might be at different phases of their life cycle that there might be some experimentation here so if you're pre-revenue you know maybe you want to incentivize uh something like monthly active users but if you've already like hit the inflection point where you're generating Revenue uh you probably want to Define impact as as incremental Revenue but anyway as you sort of go along that growth Journey you can imagine changing how you uh incentivize and measure value the second step is to pled Capital with divy Um this can be continuous so essentially in in perpetuity kind of following the liquidy model uh or cap by some a time and amount and again we're like building in flexibility for protocols to experiment a little bit uh with this model um I think we expect that there'll be some market dynamics here where Builders will um be willing to accept a smaller slice uh of value or rewards and return for more certainty around the rewards in the capital uh and similarly um they'll want a larger reward uh given given more uncertainty uh so that's how uh protocols or ecosystems can plug in uh and now for Builders um we think this is is is really easy um as long as um you know what kind of product you're building and know what protocols you can leverage to solve those problems that's what step two um is really focused on so identifying the protocols that divy supports that help solve user problems for you and again you you'll probably want to consider uh the reward amount and and the certainty uh around those rewards um the next step is to register as a builder with divy uh this currently requires submitting a Google form uh we need to run some AML and ofac checks on the wallet address that that that receives the rewards but we're working on sort of eliminating uh that constraint hopefully in the near future uh and then step three is to register referrals on chain uh with divy and again sort of copying from from the liquidity folk or from the liquidy folks um the referral impact rewards are in in perpetuity so if you help onboard a user do a specific protocol uh and the user eventually leaves your application and goes on to do great things uh with that protocol uh as a builder you're going to be entitled uh to some percent of the growth that that user continues to contribute uh to the protocol um so that's kind of it for like high level uh how an ecosystem uh and how Builders can integrate with divy um we think that uh this can make funding much more scalable uh than it is today and I think there's like three sort of example use cases that I personally am passionate about and find really interesting uh the first is something that I Call longtail funding uh this is something that that we've um bumped into in some shape or form uh at felora um but I think that divy can uh enable the sort of hundreds or thousands of these like very uh hyper local specialized applications that might be targeted uh at a specific country or maybe even a specific Community uh within a city there's two examples here that that I'm excited about that that are building on divy today one is called tuop uh it's specific to the Colombian market and the other is called uh CC which targets uh the Kenyon Market uh tuop offers like three four different features you can onboard um uh from Fiat into crypto uh into a uh Colombian Peso stable coin you can do peer-to-peer payments you can swap your Colombian uh peso stable coin for uh usdb stable coin and then uh earn yield on that USD back stable coin using the protocols that that divy supports um and then the fourth one is a uncollateralized lending program that's like very specific to uh the Colombian market and it's unlikely that that tuop is is going to be a a global phenomenon they have like the Colombian Peso currency symbol in their name um but they're getting funding from building this like relatively Niche application they're helping incrementally grow the value of the underlying protocols uh they're using for yield uh and I think it's it's a great example of one of these hyper localized applications the Second Use case um I'm excited about is is decentralized marketing I've um probably spent more time uh trying to implement decentralized marketing campaigns than I feel good about admitting um but basically uh you there's a feature in divy um that allows you to split rewards over several different entities and so what you can do is have referral links for local ambassadors for your application uh that you're building and incentivize them to help onboard uh new users to your app uh and the underlying protocols that you've integrated with that divy supports and the idea here is that instead of just simply like onboarding users and forgetting about it or like incentivizing transactions that don't add value to the ecosystem these ambassadors are going to be highly incentivized to find users that are high value for your ecosystem and your protocol uh and sort of handhold them and get them onboarded and make sure they're getting value uh out of of using your application uh and then the last thing is is not really one specific application um but this idea that you kind of own your impact um and you have full control over the stream of rewards that uh coming your way uh and so you can do sort of maybe creative wacky things um if you wanted to you could sort of tokenize your income stream U package it up and and sell it and I could imagine this like really funky state where there's uh DG sort of betting uh or buying up these income streams I've been hearing a lot about AI agents could imagine there's AI agents running around uh trying to speculate on the most uh the most lucrative income streams okay uh so uh that's about it I have some uh details on how you can get started with divy today we are um Ju Just launched last week um we have what we're calling a builder Camp to help builders get started uh integrating divy uh into applications we're using divy to uh incentivize growth of divvy so there's some like bonuses baked into this program if you help the divvy protocol reach certain milestones we have a a nice set of initial protocols uh that we support and you can bring a new app idea you can get started from scratch uh or if you have an existing one uh it's really easy to plug in to divy uh it's like 10 lines of typescript um this is all it takes uh we're also uh have some bounties on the hackathon going on right now at eth Denver seems like the the easiest Couple Grand uh anyone could make who's participating in a hackathon um there's there's more info on our docs page but it really just boils down to these these five typescript statements okay so that's it um if you're a protocol or an ecosystem and and looking for additional lovers to help grow would would love to chat with you uh and if you're a builder um trying to get funding uh or um thinking uh about what your next project is uh would also love to chat with you about that uh we'll have a booth at uh at the East Denver proper uh and thanks so much [Applause]