DeFi Degens, Decentralized Derivatives, & Other Stories - Panel

welcome guys to the infinity stage for the panel on onboarding people to d5 arguably the most important part of defy right now is making it accessible for everybody because well without users what is d5 right so we are here to educate you on bringing users to d5 we have some special guests today we have ryan from tracer dao we have yubo from the vega protocol from parallel finance we have we have bonnie from the vega protocol and alexis from open and we're going to talk about onboarding users to d5 so let's jump right into it with the first question which is guys how do you feel that the d5 user experience can be made a lot easier and smoother for anybody to make a wallet and start to interact with you know your protocol or others what is the uh thing that you would like to see be built and improved on uh it's a it's a kind of a complicated question you know a lot of this is has to do with really how the ui is and having something simple and straightforward um works pretty well and i think that like in general in the d5 space there's been like uh everyone kind of just wants a ui that seems familiar to people so there seems to be like a general standard like you know how like the the uniswap swap interface looks like a lot of uh other amms have cop are have copied that and it's just it's when it's straightforward intuitive you got the wallet all the way up in the top right everyone just kind of like i feel like there's like these shelling points in the way that the ui is formed and i feel like this seems to be naturally sorting itself out everyone wants to have this easy to use user interface and uh i get what would be helpful is more collaboration between teams and their ideas of like how they do the user interface because um like it's just kind of like random who's getting to set these trends i guess but um so that's a big part of it is just to have something that's intuitive and a large part of that is because it's such a new thing that like there's not really much like you know what what people knew 10 years ago isn't intuitive uh like like you teleport them to the future now they wouldn't know how to use these interfaces but like because there's so much similarity and commonality between them um that that helps a lot um outside of that it's i don't know i it goes a lot into opinion stuff i like to be able to mouse over things and learn about stuff as i go but you know it's opinion stuff yeah and and yubo this is a really good question because we think about that almost every day because our mission is to bring uh d5 to a billion people to mass adoption so one of the i think big blocker will be mobile first most of the people have a mobile phone not everyone have a pc so i think having a really smooth integration directly on your mobile phone and then um you know sort of optimize the ui that is uh so simple uh that fit into the wallet um one of the you know sort of big issue is that the wallets on your phone is the wallets and then the um you know the derivative protocols or d5 protocol has a desktop version and then when you use the d5 protocol inside of the wallets then it just looks pretty pretty bad so if someone can actually merge them together i think that'll be the best experience so that you know you have the wallets and then you have the d5 you can buy and then at the same time having some social recovery i think going to be super helpful because like most of the people you know they don't understand like besides us like a lot of people don't understand how to securely uh store their private keys so uh having some social recovery mechanism will be extremely helpful to onboard more people yeah i think um when i think about this i think um it's a bit like asking how do you onboard people to finance and the answer is what what are they going to do in finance what are they going to do in defects so if you are a individual retail trader and you want just to swap something or just to get a position that's different if you're an lp or if you're a fund and so really you're sort of set you need to segment define to what are the use cases what are people using and then the user experience that's right will be different like just a an lp fund is not going to want to trade on their mobile phone but then many d5 potential users will the other thing is you have to give people a reason to be in defense if you've only got dj's you've only got people who are you know long crypto forever and they're experimenting they're going to do different things they're going to want different things than if you're trying to you know as these guys said the look for the mass adoption the next billion people those people might want different stuff and you see this in finance in traditional finance you have spread betting you have retail trading you have robin hood you have professional platforms and this stuff will get differentiated to get to a billion people you're going to have multiple types of users multiple types of user journeys multiple types of experience and then you've got to sort out the wallets as well and you've got to work out how to make wallets easier and whether that's you know mobile wallets like argent or whether it's improvements to metamask whether it's hardware wallets all of these things kind of we're kind of working through the ui stuff now and i hope i hope we get there with the social wallet recovery and and usability i think it's a lot better than it was five years ago but it's also a lot worse than it needs to be to get to a billion users um i love that focus on use cases because people are coming to these applications to do something and in d5 that's often leverage yield or hedging and so i think the core thing is to explain to users how they can achieve their desired outcome with the product and i think a lot of that goes back to education because a lot of these things are brand new to users and it's important for them to understand the risks whether that's financial risks or contract risks or you know exactly kind of what payoff they're getting um and so i think a lot of it goes back down to making sure these users know like this is the exact kind of position i'm taking this is my risk reward and here's how it's letting me accomplish my broader goal um i just want to say real quick i i i i like i like your answer to this i think you uh to me you have the best answer because like i think that's something big that's missing is like whenever you sit down in a new protocol you're like what am i actually getting like like without going through all the docs like what are my risks like is there any chance i'll just like lose all my money like what is that zero or is it like one in a thousand like like that's a big difference between zero and one and a thousand like what's my payoff like i really like on the squeeze interface there's like a little thing you can drag when you drag it it like shows you your payoff structure like as you're setting up your position and like as you before you click the button you know exactly how everything is going to go i feel like that's a that would be a huge thing for a lot of people because like even experts in the field feel really confused when they're like oh i kind of have a general idea what's gonna happen let's click go i totally feel that's been something we've been trying to figure out and it's not easy because you're trying to take like these you know as you guys know like g5 derivatives complicated financial products and distill them down to something that's very understandable in its purest form and make sure that those graphs are being read correctly that people aren't mis you know misunderstanding them so for example that squeak graph doesn't include funding and so we have to be very very clear like this is the payoff without funding and make sure people 100 understand that um to just give the full picture i think this is really really important stuff and and something that i think about a lot is traditional finance is adversarial right and particularly in retail you hide the risk from people and give them flashy lights and you want them to trade because you know you're going to make money when you're building a protocol you've got you've got to go with all the use cases but you've also got to give people fair tools and fair information you know when i look when i worked with traders in the city of london they have unbelievably sophisticated tools that explain their risk what happens if the interest rate moves by a percent and all of this stuff that's not available to retail traders and they lose out as a result in this adversarial interface but equally giving them exactly the same tools as someone an investment bank has won't help either because they can't interpret it so the job of like distilling the knowledge and the information producing visualizations and reports and data that says here's how you can understand the risk you're taking where you can understand the product you're buying if you like or the thing you're getting involved with in a way that relates to you as a as an individual and to your use case is like it's a super hard challenge but it's really essential for these kind of open non-adversarial networks yeah it comes down to the medium and the messaging right so making the ui easier doing all these things that all of us essentially just hit on and making the messaging with our education and our marketing just that much simpler for everybody um so i have a little exercise if you guys are up for an exercise yeah all right so i want you to explain the most exciting t5 contract or derivative that you guys are aware of in the easiest terms possible for everybody here so they have a really good understanding of what that complex product is but do it in the easiest terms possible and alexis is fired up we're going to let her go first and we're going to give these guys some time here yeah so so we know it's super squeaky that's all that's been on my mind i've only been squeaking um so squeak you can think about as 2x leverage which is something that people might be familiar with but without liquidations so if eath is going up you're making more with squeeze than you are with 2x leverage and if eath is going down you get liquidated on 2x leverage but you don't get liquidated with squeeze now what's the catch with squeak you're paying funding and so you're paying a premium to access this really really nice payoff of unlimited upside and limited downside sick who's next um i'm probably going to say something a little bit simple i guess so i think the rvv3 is super exciting because they provide this efficiency mode so if you borrow an asset that are similar to the other assets the uh collateral factor which means that how much you know sort of loan to value you have will be higher than um when you borrow across different category i think that is pretty uh pretty critical features um when you think about all of the asset and you categorize them and then make the market way more efficient versus a single asset with the same collateral factor across every single pool and i think that would be super interesting plus like maybe on top of that people can build on sort of bi-directional uh collateral factor system so if you cross different category maybe you have different collateral factor versus just one so another graph on top of this category i think going to be super interesting to improve the borrower and lending efficiency nice i was asked a question that like i i feel like i you're just gonna assume that i'm biased on i mean it is this it is the perpetual pool product um with with tracer it seems to be the most exciting to me i guess squeeze could be a close call i'm also i think storage is pretty exciting but although that's not as much of game theory it's just a technical file storage uh solution um just professional pools can kind of do what something similar to squeeze like it squeeze um the this kind of gives you like a constant leverage exposure and and the way it works um it uses a perpetual swap um now uh the i i like the what we've built at tracer and with the perpetual pools um because it's like basically two etfs um that like an etfs is exchange traded funds so like it manages your money for you and you can buy shares of it and then if what they're investing in goes up you you go up two um so these these two pools they send money to each other uh based on the price of an underlying so like if you have like a three leverage eth uh pool um then the price of eath goes up one percent the losing pool gives three percent of its holdings to the other pool and then the pools are slightly imbalanced and someone's people are incentivized to go back in so it kind of resets and it can keep this constant leverage but the main value of it is that it's tokenizable and you can take these leverage tokens anywhere you can take them away from the platform normally you can't take your leverage tokens elsewhere because you have a funding rate you have to have like two separate accounts this all just puts it into one thing and the value of your token roughly performs like a leveraged exposure without liquidation and it's a very simple straightforward thing that has just big benefits with uh the tendency that leverage tokens do to decay it has less of that and we're working on improvements for that and i just i'm really excited for that i think the potential is very high and we've had some professors excited about it so i i i'm i'm cautiously like hopeful that like it could make people who want to keep a leverage all the time um not not do it through however they were doing it like this it might make that obsolete and people might prefer to use this and that's really exciting to me and i hope it plays out as well it is in the simulations because it would be pretty game changing sweet [Music] awesome um and so i'm going to talk about something that's not exactly a d5 product but it's kind of a building block for many types of d5 product and something i'm super excited about is the concept of hybrid liquidity so you know we have order books and clob liquidity mostly on centralized exchanges right now but uh decentralized clob is coming on some of the sort of scaling platforms and scaling layers we also have amms and both of them have downsides if you are providing liquidity to a small market or a new market it can be very expensive to provide price liquidity with amms you have in permanent loss and you have other features around price discovery which aren't so great in fact amms generally require you know sort of another source to be arbitraged against to have good price discovery um the thing that i'm super excited about is the ability to combine both into the same market so effectively you can have a market where there is liquidity that's provided on amn pool there's liquidity that's provided on order book and when you take out a trade the the market itself optimizes the amount of liquidity it takes from the order book and the amount from the amm so a market can be launched simple as hell just throw money into the amm launch the market launch the product easy for anyone to do in the community but then as that product grows as it becomes more liquid people can start provide priced orders and price liquidity you get better price discovery and you can have you know true kind of primary price sources primary markets uh on defy thanks guys that was uh that was fun and you guys got to talk about what you're building or what you like which is i mean that's kind of what we're all here for in the ethereum community we can all kind of strive to either build to help on the marketing front to grow by the word of mouth kind of in spread um you know what is what you want to be a part of and what you believe in um whether that's dows and nfts or d5 and more so that's always fun and glad to be here now i kind of want to you know look back in the past to try to identify something in the future here so guys the question is what do you think has been the biggest let's call it app or project or company that's you know i know that's broad but that has brought adoption to crypto right so that way that we can figure out potentially what the next killer app could be which is you know a variation of that so what do you guys think has brought the most attention or the most adoption to crypto up until this point in time today um and why does it have to be in d5 or something else i mean like if you look at just super simple just look at ethereum ether scan gas fee like ranks which apps like consume most amount of gas meaning that the most amount of people are willing to pay for this app to use um i think based on the current ranking the open c where like nft trading related are number one and then we see um all the am ms like you know uni swap sushi all of the swaps and the metamask has a swap and then one inch if you add all of them together that's one of the biggest category where people spend a gas for and then i think the other really big one based on like the average of 30 days whatever is going to be the erc20 transfer especially stablecoin transfer usdc usdt and then uh die and then um i think that this is something really big because people um saddle uh settle like i don't know like hundreds of billions or maybe trillions of stable coins every year this is significant amount of money that people are using um and then recently i think obviously like nft brought a lot of uh you know people outside v5 and outside crypto for the first time they got access to this you know wallets they start to use mana masks to buy and then sell their nfts and punks and whatever what have you so i think you know obviously what we can learn from this this trend is that um something simple but something at the same time has a easier understandable concept right so if you explain this nft to your grandma right you can say hey this is just a digital version of art it's easy to understand if you explain like you know uni swap to your grandma then you have to think about like how to explain that right so um i think the more that if you can describe something within like one sentence then i think that would be the thing can bring more people to onboard especially like older generations i'm gonna i'm actually gonna say two things very quickly i think the first one is kind of the technical thing that has brought adoption and the second one is more of a kind of uh awareness thing something that built awareness of crypto and the technical thing was the the invention of tokens um and i think the first time i heard of it was like counterparty.co on bitcoin and then the erc20 standard really kicked that into like second gear third gear fourth gear and really created the huge ico boom and everything else i think that was the token invention was absolutely fundamental to enabling this ecosystem and then the thing which i thought in my mind brought it to public attention where it hadn't been before was cryptokitties i remember cryptokitties was the first time that people i hung out with who weren't techy and didn't care about crypto were like what's this thing it's on the news maybe i should buy one like my sister bought one she can't do anything with it because she's not willing to pay the gas now but at the time she bought one and so i think you know that created this knowledge in sort of popular culture that didn't exist prior and i think that was a huge moment dude everybody should be inherently happy about the nft space as a concept not necessarily all the projects but as a concept for the amount of awareness and mind power that has just been hard shifted right into this this entire ecosystem so yeah so from my understanding like i mean i don't i haven't onboarded a lot of people but i get the pretty good feeling that like a lot of it goes for the first catching people's attention and making them aware and that's for investing kind of things that's word of mouth people people you know they're wanting to make money on crypto they know it's going up they don't want to miss out on that so and then or they hear about nfts and i feel like more people have heard about that than than maybe even crypto um but once they hear about it they want to dip their toe in the water as safely and easy as they can i know here in the u.s coinbase is a big part of that a lot of people feel like there's like this little curated white list of tokens that they can they feel safe buying they like no out of the thousands out there coinbase approved these so like maybe it's okay to buy and i'm not getting screwed over and they don't have to research anything maybe so coinbase is is that is the next part of that so there's there's the awareness on both of those fronts then coinbase and maybe the equivalent in other countries i don't know which is more popular there and then making the jump to move into metamask which i guess you kind of have to if your goal is to get to nfts right off the bat and metamask has done a lot to help people enter the space because there's a lot of people coming in they're very very nervous like they don't ever every action you could lose your money you don't there's no one to like call up because there's no customer service to get your money back so it's it's pretty rough if you make a mistake so people are nervous and metamask makes that simple a lot of people are willing to pay metamask's fee to like swap right there in metamask like it's it's not worth the anxiety to like sit there and go to these decentralized websites so i think the the the integration in metamask and and just making things straightforward for people once they dip their toe into the water they can get at least what they're after some some safe things or maybe i i i would consider nfts unsafe but some some good some investments so some things they're interested in so like those are the things that seem important to me to that are bringing people in and making it easy yeah just to add on one thing which is uh regulation is very important to consider when you think about like mass adoption um the kind of you know the heavy you are toward regulations then relatively speaking i think you have more barrier for mass adoption in some of the device the regulators might require you know kycs and other sort of reporting mechanisms and that would be pretty pretty big issues versus some other protocols that you know this is completely off the let's say security laws then you might have a you know faster growth trajectory in my opinion so one more kind of dimension to think about which is regulation yeah and there's so many protocols so many nfts just growing that it's becoming something that's on the radar for the regulators and i mean we've seen as we as we just mentioned some of these innovations um in in crypto that have kind of grown uh and accelerated the mass adoption have got us here um and i think a reason why a lot of us you know have came into space is uh because we've seen uh what the outcomes can be in a a realistic manner in terms of your of your finances of the world of of society of the digital just that there's a lot of things that kind of bring us in um and the title of this panel has to do with d5 degens so we've been you know we've been pretty straightforward here um but i would like to invite anybody to tell perhaps a story about a epic yield farm or a miserable rug or an nft or something that you like to do in the free time that's not working you know a little story of uh of an experience on chain anybody can can take the floor or if you don't want to we can we can totally move on but it is called t5d gens and i tell a story but you guys are the speakers here i think one of the biggest dj things is just like a lot of the high apy pools um i i don't blame them for not wanting to or not being able to recall one um there are so many um so just a reminder guys stay safe um indie five but keep getting out there let's get back to onboarding um as we kind of wrap up here um i think it's imperative that we understand what is required for us to grow the ecosystem so let's talk about what you guys think are some of the best ideas for us as a community for all of us to take action on perhaps as a as you know with an outcome to grow the community how can we grow the community as a whole all of us in this room what can we take with us to grow the community and onboard more users to get to a billion um i don't i don't know a lot of a lot of you may not have been around went right when ethereum was starting but like it seemed there was a lot more excitement back then and like with like like we're going to change the world this is changing everything i mean obviously that's still with us all um but i don't know it kind of like reminds me of like the you know early days of apple and people building in garages and like people like experimenting and tinkering and that excitement i think that drew in a lot of the most valuable people into the space like the people who were gonna really contribute and make a difference that those people were attracted by um by by this spirit of changing the world the spirit of something different like maybe this is going to take off like like the internet took off and it just opens up so many possibilities so that that that's that starry-eyed like wonder of what what's possible out there i feel like that spirit and that ethos like brings a lot of uh can can it doesn't just bring the valuable people i think it just it's just a magnet that attracts a lot of people and i feel like it's underrated and i feel like it should be um done more so guys keep the vibes up yes um i think one thing that's been really helpful is just talking to people in your life and sending them even just a small amount of crypto there's nothing like trying it for yourself and then just like feeling that experience and feeling that magic and so i always have a little bit on hand that i like to just like send to friends and family and it's cool because like now years later people are like i got the uniswap airdrop because you sent me some eats and i'm like okay good now go use that uni to like do something interesting and learn more about stuff so i feel like that's always the best way just getting people diving into it head first and learning by doing something i like to think about is is communities versus community and what i mean is the bigger you get the less likely it is that everyone wants to be part of the same community like we have a community here which is builders developers dj's whatever and this is an amazing feeling and that feeling won't last when you're a billion people if you're trying to shove them all into the same community but if you look for the different communities i mean nft has been a great example you bring in artists you bring creators completely different although adjacent and very aligned to this community and so i think actually creating these kind of sub communities where people find their home and find something they're passionate about find something they can get involved in and contribute to because in the early days of crypto i got people super interested and they're like what can i do i'm like can you code they're like no so you can't be involved so you don't want that to happen you want actually to get the communities of different types of users different diversity of people because i think that's how you get to we change the whole world rather than we are a bunch of developers bullish on dowse and to wrap us up yeah to wrap us up i think like i think to be honest i totally agree i think the token is the best way to connect people this is the whole premise of uh sort of decentralized uh you know protocols and finance which is we have um this token that has a bunch of utility and then um you know appreciate over time and that connect the whole community together right if you look at like you know link they have linked marines and then each tokens have his own sort of army behind it so i think to be honest really just to send out some tokens to your friends and then give them some education and then once they got into it i think it's going to be a rabbit hole they will just keep on going the retention rate is uh well china is pretty low right maybe five percent of people uh leave during the bear market and then out of that five percent when the bull market come back the majority of them are going to come back again so i think just giving them some tokens and some education will be the best way to grow the community thanks guys and thank you everybody for coming out and hearing about the onboarding d5 talk appreciate every one of you guys for coming out and cheers