2025: The Dawn of DTFs by Nevin Freeman, Co-founder, Reserve

all right uh for this next 15 minutes I'm going to need five Intrepid volunteers to come and join me on stage who would like to be part of a new defi experiment raise your hand yep okay that's one come on up I need five so that means four more it's it's going to be fine you don't have to do much it'll be chill he'll be sitting on these chairs I believe in you guys we can do this come on four volunteers we can get reserved people if no one else oh yep thank you very much number two yeah cheer two volunteers oh yep number oh three and four all right and uh let's uh girtler why don't you be number five just for fun all right yes all right so today I want to show you guys uh something we think is really cool it's a New Concept called a DTF so an ETF you're all familiar with an ETF like the S&P 500 ETF a DTF is basically the decentralized version so it's a token that represents a basket of other tokens okay and something that's so cool is how easy it is to create a DTF and transact with it compared to an ETF an ETF everything's super regulated very hard to deal with um so we're just going to Dive Right In and show you uh what it's like to create a DTF uh in defi it's almost as easy as creating a a new liquidity pool in Unis swap so from our volunteers I'm going to need each person uh to choose a a token that exists on base you can also choose like a major L1 token because those are all generally bridged um so let's start uh let's start on the other end with Matt girtler uh Matt can you choose a token for us I'll be boring and choose eth eth uh that's the one I'm not going to allow you to choose for this particular Dem Mo so pick another boring token salana Soul all right and our next volunteer well we'll go with CB BTC BTC brilliant love it uh we want CB BTC there we go all right next volunteer Arkham what was that Arkham Arkham hopefully that's on Bas a r km it's not on base oh how about the DTF token itself that sounds good brilliant Choice uh all right dgen dgen brilliant love it oops okay okay we have oh so we have this whole long list you can barely see it question um I I forgot I wearing my pudy juicy could you get pudy Beast pudy pudy I think they did a a rap version of pudy on Beast we can have six tokens uh it doesn't seem to be on base so we're going to skip that one another way to choose is pick a letter trb I love the dedication here we're really making this happen uh trbl no see this is the thing with defi it's very confusing to find all the tokens on all the different chains all right but we're going to for the sake of moving it along we're going to choose the Venice token I hope you are okay with that selection it's very controversial token but uh it's pretty cool all right so we've chosen our tokens for a DTF you guys will participate again in a moment um now we get to set our governing body so I have created a governance token for these fine five people uh the Intrepid Governor token I think I called it so yep Intrepid uh so that's going to be the Dow that will govern this DTF going forward you guys actually are going to be the only holders of this token uh so hopefully you'll carry this forward well from here we're relying on you uh the all of the fees other than what goes to the platform will go to you the governance token holders I'm just putting in all of those fees to you so hopefully this DTF gets popular and uh we get to specify a guardian you guys might be familiar with that concept from decentralized governance a brand manager that can control the images on the website and an auction loer that helps with auctions and we're going to accept the defaults for governance and then We're Off to the Races and now I have to say we created this and and made put this live yesterday so it's a little bit of a a gamble to to to do this demo in front of all of you guys there's a good chance that this might not work uh but I think it's worth showing you oh we have to choose a name what would you guys like to call this this new DTF token unstable unstable love it UNS uh and this DTF will take over the world usually you would specify a mandate that would explain how we're going to govern it all right so now we are creating the Dow that will govern this token it's it's sad that you guys can't see the screen as well as everybody else um that'll just take a second all right you guys are now the proud controllers of this token forever um and actually well yeah do that in a second now the moment of truth to see whether the final step is going to work production are you buying the tokens now what is so now what we do is we we deploy the DTF and in so doing we create a tiny amount of it at the very beginning but just a little bit uh to establish it and then anybody else can come and buy and sell anytime they want um and unfortunately this last step I knew this was going to happen it's not working uh I actually I think I chose the the wrong browser tab here um but with a little bit of help from our engineering team uh we're going to make this happen and what's going to happen oh no here we go yes the server did its thing brilliant all right so for those in the audience who can see this wallet uh what's so cool here is this technology is going to go out and buy all of the relevant tokens and zip them together and create this initial unit of DTF so we're doing that right now do we get to allocate or like it specify the allocation or does it just do it equally so I did it equally to save time for this demo but you actually yes yes it worked the gtf has created and now you might wonder how are these people how is it that they hold the governance token it's because each of these is a paper wallet that holds 20% of the governance token so don't lose this this paper wallet actually that's the only copy of that key and now you guys are the proud controllers of this DTF going forward a round of applause for our volunteers well done the unstable but okay now you your last job is you have to come join me over here to take a selfie because we have to make a picture for this this proof of everybody crowd around make sure we're all in here all right G give me like a thumbs up or like a happy face yeah three two one yeah boom okay now one second like get it I just brilliant all right you guys can see on the screen we're we're adding you this is immortalized forever um all right one more round of applause for our volunteers you guys can take your seats thank you thank you for participating we can just leave this here all right so that is how easy it is I'm just going to use this for the coins image as well now I'm confirming that I am the uh onchain brand manager to be able to make these changes and now we should be able to see our brand new ttf there it is unstable we can see uh dgen Soul BTC Venice and the DTF token itself so I want to do that live to show you uh that when our zapper works it really is as easy as creating a new liquidity pool to create a ETF a token that's backed by a basket of other tokens and then anybody can come and buy into that token immediately let's let's see if this works why not why not try it um and now I I have to stress how cool this part is okay this token was just created there is no liquidity for this DTF token um because it literally just spun up and so for someone to be able to come in and buy into the DTF it's actually necessary for them to mint it this interface automatically uh will go out and Source the liquidity for the underlying and mint that token so that somebody can buy in right from the beginning uh even even without there being liquidity now that is so different from trafi right imagine youve created an ETF well it's by definition it's exchange traded right so there has to be liquidity on that exchange for people to get it and the only people who can issue or redeem an ETF are sort of designated parties that can work with these particular ETF issuance companies right the magic of defi is all of this is permissionless uh and so we truly think that this is a a new primitive that is likely to to pick up in defi the same way that amm have um and it has a very similar permissionless nature where just as you know Unis swap started and within a short period of time there's like tens of thousands of trading pairs the same thing can happen uh with dtfs in in def5 because of how simple and permissionless it is because these are a low liquidity tokens there's a high price impact but we'll go ahead and do it anyway just to show uh uh the fact that you can buy in right away now um the the last thing to mention here just to put this in perspective in trafi I think it's about 12% of all equities are held in ETFs in in you know sort of in in index funds as opposed to being held directly in defi in crypto it's like virtually zero um but we see no reason why the same Dynamics don't apply we think that people will want to hold baskets of tokens over the course of time it's a much more convenient way to get exposure to a whole narrative or sector uh so yeah so I'm now the the proud first holder of some of this unstable DTF and uh just to wrap it up here so Reserve our background is uh creating dtfs of a different type that optimize for yield all this tvl growth that you see here are yield dtfs uh the new product is index dtfs uh that give you exposures to a broad set of things uh the clanker index so far of everything that was uh deployed is is doing the best carrying carrying our wallets from all the test transactions we did with it um but one of the cool launch partners that sort of shows the the future here is uh the Bloomberg Galaxy crypto index so Bloomberg was actually happy to license uh their index that they create that's a broad Market license uh or broad market index so that you can come and buy a single token and get access to you know all of these different major assets uh again with that simple defi interface um and uh as you can see from this list uh there's all different kinds of dtfs already being created on the reserve platform and within a week or two once we've uh finalized working out any last bugs that interface to create will be public and any of you guys and anyone else can come and do so uh got about one and a half minutes here the last thing I want to say is for anyone who's hi I'm nin I'm one of the co-founders of Reserve uh Reserve as a project is trying to figure out you know what do we do about inflation inflation sucks what could be the right answer for the entire world to deal with inflation in the long term in the next 20 years our belief or at least my belief is that um the right way to deal with that is is with asset back currency a token that is backed by a basket of all the world's assets and you just saw the technology that we built that we think over the course of time will allow for that we think all traditional assets are going to end up being tokenized and so you'll have these dtfs that are a mixture of native crypto assets and traditional fin assets equities and bonds and and so on real estate funds all that and so we think that 20 years from now whatever is the most popular index across all different asset classes if it exists as a token that's permissionless that you can just send around to anyone we think that that could become actually the consensus store of value for the world because if you think about it we always you know that's what everybody does we always diversify our assets if there's one Diversified portfolio that's the most popular kind of like the S&P 500 in the US you could hold that store your value and easily transact with anyone anywhere in the world in a few seconds thanks to crypto rails uh if they hold that too so that's our long-term vision for uh you know a bottomup answer to how the world could deal with inflation uh without relying on governments to solve it so thanks I hope you enjoy the demo uh please uh go check out these dtfs uh Mint one and see how easy it is and consider making them yourselves in the future thank you very much