Okto by CoinDCX 🛠 Simplifying DeFi with Okto - Gaurav Arora and Vivek Gupta

crypto products and nfts are unregulated and can be highly risky there may be no regulatory recalls but any loss from such transactions um hi everybody my name is gaurav um and I'm part of the Octo team in coin dcx and today I'll just uh my my job is to give you a quick introduction about uh how we are approaching solving the decentralized uh Finance problem uh with our octo app um I you know it's just me talking to the screen so I'll keep it short and try not to make it too boring uh so yeah let me just jump into it uh so you know before I actually start talking about opto it's it's really good to uh get a view of uh how we think decentralized finances you know nobody's written the textbook yet there's no standard definition of decentralized Finance but you know just to understand uh what we think about decent centralized Finance you know there's a very interesting uh uh quote somebody gave to me recently they said that if you remember the second law of Thermodynamics it basically says that the entropy in the system always keeps on increasing right and I think if you keep that in mind and you look at Finance over the last 100 years or so that's really what's been happening this decentralization has been happening throughout the last few hundred years you know uh if you look about uh look at it uh compared to a hundred years ago to now more people have access to banking systems more people have access to uh stocks trading uh so it's not only the large Banks but more and more smaller Traders uh you know small businesses they have access to these Financial systems and this latest wave of decentralization you know which blockchain is bringing is just an extension of that that that's at least the way we look at it um and if you think about decentralization right it's I think you can kind of break it up in really three parts there's decentralization or you know democratization of the supply side um you know which is the people who are participating in it they are a decentralization of kind of the demand side in terms of how I'm holding my assets uh you know where I'm keeping the and then the decentralization of of the actual transactions so let me talk about the three parts right so if you look at the supply side earlier only your bank could offer you interest or only your bank or you know Investment Bank could offer you um uh some of these uh you know products or you know Structured Products or some of the complex products that you could trade but now with D5 honestly anybody who can write code can just build a quick product they can build upon a previous product you know they can combine multiple products together which we call composability so it's really really enabled many many more people to create Innovative products and that I think you know by itself is going to just uh uh bring about great Innovation and in creating these Financial products if you look at the participants right um uh the the people who can access these products um you know and this has been a un directive they want to bring in inclusion into the financial system they want to bring in more people into the financial system that has been a goal for the United Nations since 2015. and I think this truly helps towards that goal where anybody with just a mobile phone can now start you know interacting with these uh new products that have been created uh can you trade can uh you know land earn some interest and maybe even buy some more complex products so it's bringing in uh democratization on both sides and the last part is and I think this is also very important where because there is now no Central clearing Authority or matching engine uh you know the transactions are really cheap they're fast they're almost instant uh which you know simple things and there's a much uh uh talked about example of you know sending money from one country to another which would all your take days and you know maybe months uh a few decades back now can it does happens in seconds so you know that's the kind of speed that decentralizes Finance also bringing on the transaction so supply side demand side and the transaction site but having said that right it's not perfect yet there's just uh still a lot of challenges in there I think a lot of power exists in this ecosystem uh but uh this uh not everybody's been able to access the power so what are the key problems that um that currently this ecosystem faces uh and if you ask me to summarize it in one line I would just say this this D5 currently faces a problem of usability like it is incredibly difficult to access and use this ecosystem and let me try and you know add some more color to this to this statement uh uh the number of chains right if you look at it there are many many chains and they have rightly popped up because they're solving different problems so from a technology side they're they're amazing and they're powerful and they're solving different things from a user side they just add so much complication I know even like seasoned DC D5 veterans keep getting stumped by these chains you know uh you know how do I access this chain with his dad that trade my asset is stuck in this Chain versus that chain so it's it's creating a usability problem while it is technically very good so multi-chain cross chain is is a big problem uh the other I think really big one is uh honestly feed phrases so whenever you want to create your own decentralized Finance wallet you need to have a seed phrase so um everybody needs to understand what the seed phrase is you know to store it somewhere you cannot lose it it's a single point of failure if you lose it you have to lose access to all your money so just just creating understanding managing that seed phrase is a large problem um another problem is I think just Discovery and risk right figuring out what to transact with what it is key what is not risky what is the uh you know a hack or a scam or a rug pull scheme it's very difficult to understand some of that for the for the novel person uh and and you know uh all of this is becomes even more complex when I we see that the ecosystem is coming up in buses first so this wallet works with one chain or one protocol this wallet works with another one so you need to have sometimes even multiple wallets to do multiple things so all of these are like large problems that the ecosystem is facing so imagine like uh you know this is how we like to visualize our solution imagine a wallet which which uh actually is just a simple mobile application which you can download you can set it up almost in like one or two clicks without having to go through complexity of understanding the key phrases once you install it you immediately have access to all the use cases and I'm I'm not talking about something use cases which is earning interest making a loan taking a uh you know buying a token across thousands of tokens you can do all of that without having to honestly worry about which chain which protocol and all of that stuff and uh all of this in the most secure uh way so that while you're getting all of this ease you don't have to worry about security so that is the solution that we want to build for you and you know that's really what we're calling octo so what we say about octo is it's the power of self-custody in your uh pocket uh complete access to D5 uh with in a very simple uh user interface is really what you want to do and while defying the starting point we want to get to the pla a place where we want to give you access to the best of web 3 just from this single app and that's the journey we want to take so let me just double click into octo uh now you know that's our product which we will be launching very soon um and just talking about a few of the things that we are solving with auto so let's start with self-custody because I think anyway that's the theme of the moment everybody is really uh talking about self-custody self-custody as a lot of you would know is basically the assets are in your control they're not sitting in a pooled custody where a lot of other people their assets then they're very segregated uh in your own address or wallet and you have full control of it so that's self-custody is literally the Cornerstone on which we built the whole octo app um and then the second part of it is the self-custody is secured by NPC technology uh which hides the key the keys apart from you makes it almost a keyless experience while at the same time giving you complete Security so uh if if you try to strike summarize them you see in a couple of words right what we do is there's not one single key that is accessing uh that's used to access the wallet that actually you know different uh uh kind of parts of the key that are stored in different areas they don't never come into one place they don't talk to each other and all of them have to actually be there to sign the the transaction for it to go through so there's no one single point of failure uh so that's self-custody powered by MPC and then once you have this base what we want to add to it is you know bring the best of uh D5 to you we want to bring you all the swaps or all the tokens that you want to trade all the earning opportunities uh you know across Farms liquidity pools everything uh in a very seamless manner where you don't have to worry about uh integration routines asset movement across chains all of that stuff we will abstract and take care of all of that for you and and the the last really part is you know assisting you through all of this assisting you in uh you know understanding the risk assisting you in Discovery saying hey this is what you should be doing this is what where you could actually maximize the the assets that you have earned most from it and and really even assisting you if you you know lose your access to your app how can we help recover you unlike uh in the previous form of self-custody if you lose a key you'll lose everything with October we can actually uh help recover back for you also so that's a kind of the Cornerstone of all of the things that we're building in October but having said that you know none of this is easy all of these sound very easy on uh when I say it in English but you know in reality there's a lot of complex things that have to be solved and and really we are looking at help from all of you to solve you know small small parts of these problems uh simplify things so that you can make it much more easy much more usable uh for the users and and that's really what this hackathon will be about hi everyone my name is Vivek I work engineering at octo as gaurav mentioned in his chat we are trying to make uh D5 more accessible bring it to retail users as we attempt to bring it to retail users it presents a number of challenges primarily centered around making the whole experience simpler and easier for the users some of the problem statements that we are currently addressing include making the transactions Atomic now what do I mean it means that a user might want to execute more than one transactions or we might need to require to execute more than one transaction on the blockchain but for an end user it simply means a single transaction as an example approve the funds swap it for a token and use that token for adding liquidity to a liquidity pool now to a blockchain this looks like three different transactions but from an end user point of view this is like a singular transaction is there a way for us to be able to bundle these transactions and execute it as a single Atomic Unit on blockchain so that's our first problem statement where we're asking you to design a contract that takes a bundle of transactions and executes the transaction as a single unit either everything succeeds or everything fails as an atomic unit on chain uh now my example could also be extended to include say yield farming right so I approve funds I swap funds I add it to liquidity pool once and after I have received the liquidity token I use that liquidity token to add it to a pool or a farm this is what we are expecting you to do as part of our first problem statement the second problem statement revolves around being able to execute transactions without having gas token or native token in both instances uh typically retail users do not understand that they require to pay the gas fee in in Native tokens or in gas tokens even if they did it creates challenges of a different nature what if I did not have a gas token the most obvious route for me is to swap one of my existing tokens to receive cash tokens but this swap transaction also requires the user to have cash fee tokens so the second problem statement that we are trying to solve is around being able to execute a transaction when the user does not have the gas token or does not have the native token to be able to pay the cash fee how do you solve this you basically use the tokens other tokens other stable tokens like usdt usdc die and other such tokens that might exist in user's wallet and use those tokens to be able to pay the gas fee and then execute the transactions the third problem statement is around web 3 recovery um we are looking for you to build a mechanism using which users are able to store any of their secret information it could be any data in a decentralized fashion on blockchain and then be able to retrieve it in a permissioned zero knowledge fashion now once this technology has been built it can have multitudes of use cases for instance it could also be used for backing up a user's private key or creating mechanisms around nominations for people to be able to nominate nominees uh to be able to uh you know to recover that private key for executing transactions but for us for for this hackathon we are looking for you to Simply focus on building this technology where user is able to store any information any data in a decentralized fashion on your blockchain and then be able to retrieve it in a permission serial knowledge fashion continuing from what I was just saying um the fourth problem statement that we are trying to address is around wallet nominations uh now for a retail users many times in fact for any user in the world many times your assets might actually outlive the user there is no simple way in blockchain for people to be able to nominate their assets to somebody else because it is all about holding the private key whoever holds a private key is the one who holds the assets so in this world while it creates uh Power for the user it is it is Central to how decentralization works it is also important for us to build mechanisms wherein people are able to create nominees where nominees are able to unlock their funds in case where users are incapacitated so that's the fourth problem statement we are looking for you to address build a mechanism where people are able to nominate and then be able to unlock funds in case of incapacitation lastly token naming service um now all of us know there is no Central database for maintaining a registry of token names or token icons this results in multitude of problems including for aggregators like octo to be able to determine which is the genuine token to use but more importantly for a retail users who tend to get spammed it is very very easy for anybody to create a token by any name I mean I could launch a token today by the name BNB I could launch a token by the name Eid how would a user be able to say a Spam token from a genuine token we are asking you as part of our last problem statement to build out a token naming service using which you will be able to uh using which people will be able to register their token name or their token logo and this needs to be a fully decentralized mechanism where there are validators validators who are able to approve these transactions and no central body no centralized body uh be involved in maintaining this registry that's our final problem statement if there are any other problem statements you would like to work on uh please feel free to reach out to our on-ground team to discuss a problem statement before you start executing it and for any assistance with the problem statements that we have listed of course please do reach out to us we have an on-ground team there uh happy to work with you in order to help you solve the problems like I said uh we are working on bringing D5 ecosystem to retail users making it more accessible we are actively working on solving a lot of these problems I am very confident that a lot of you will come up with very innovative solutions or sort of problems we are dealing with I've uh we're really looking forward to some of these Solutions coming out and all the best let's start cracking crypto products and nfts are articulated and can be highly risky there may be no regulatory recalls but any loss from such transactions