Founder Fireside with Mounir from Paraswap - Vanessa Grellet and Mounir Benchemled (Paraswap)

what is your actual name munir uh i like bench it's nice it's ben shemlet but you can say bench as well hi everyone welcome um i'm super excited to have a fireside chat today with munir the founder of paraswap i'm particularly excited because i think paris swap started during one hackathon so i wanted to have your perspective munir on how you started paraswap and what was the sort of journey that you went on until now yeah we started in 2019 the idea actually came in late 2018 back in uh late 2018 it was in the middle of the bear markets uh where everyone is thinking that crypto is maybe dying and uh and the the defy uh movement was barely starting and so this is the same time when uni swap has came in and when kirby kyber networks has launched and um it was going in a direction where it became clear that the future is decentralized exchanges um so the first idea was to build a ui aggregator that's like a decentralized version of a coinbase that anyone can use us and that will aggregate multiple taxes like unusual kyber bank or at the time which didn't really work it was too early for that time for the retail to use taxes today it seems very normal but in the summer 2019 you have to explain watch at decks before explaining your products which is not the case today which led me to pivot into a product for the defy niche which was a telegram group of 3 000 people at the time but super engaged and super passionate and the rest is history with the involvement that we've seen for the last two years and a half i'm sure a lot of people in the audience use parasop but for those who are less acquainted with it could you tell us where you are now going from a telegram group to the new products that you're rolling out yeah well in simple terms it's a dax aggregator or i would like to how would like to describe it is a middleware that connects uh liquidity from major trading venues so today we are talking about taxes and defy tokens and beam tokens but tomorrow it can be anything that can be tokenized so from stocks and bonds and real estate and anything like that that can be traded unchained so parasite is the best execution platform and that's something that exists already in traditional markets and we're bringing that to defy or to unchain settlements and so what is unique about paraswap yeah so we see it now as an ecosystem so our to try to build is a platform that other developers can build on top of and what we do is we try to always to bootstrap new use cases the first obvious one was just building a ui that allows trading from a to b but other use cases emerge like in ave we can trade apys it can swap an api or an asset that generates a x percent api to another that generates a white percent that is higher than the first one um it can be nft trading where for instance in a super air or or in a uh open c i want to buy a an nft that is denominated in eth but i have die and i can use parasol in order to go from die to eat and buy the nft on the on the fly it can be for institutions that want to trade uh either defy tokens or like uh arc 20 tokens or any other ici sto tokens or real estate uh tokenized tokens using a immediate settlements platform like powerswap that's also a use case so that's what we're trying to build it's not just a ui with a tax aggregator but it's a platform that can have multiple use cases and the value proposition is this best execution platform and uh in terms of you said institutions want to use taxes it seems to me it's really hard for them i know that ave came with you know ave arc and metamask is rolling out metamask institutional what has been the reaction and how do you work with institutions uh around new york products yeah we're running already some pilots uh with some banks and uh hedge funds uh who are either on trade five or on cfi and want to get exposure to defy and the main motivations well actually there are two motivations one is earning yield on defined they see that there are some very interesting yield especially on stable coins or in bitcoin or eth and they don't have access to that yield or they have to go through intermediaries which comes with the high fees so it's not really economically interesting for them and also for trading um they have to go through rtc desks in general or to be exchanges which has issues with the settlements i would say delays and the prices of course so paraswap also its value proposition for trading is delivering price that is better than the markets by using this aggregation algorithms um so our prices are very attractive to these guys um and just our prices uh using what you call parasaur pool which is a set of market makers or you can see it as a network of otc traders so they get the same service except that it's using multiple ltc desks in aggregating multi multiple tc desk and delivering a price that is better than the sum of those all rtc traders so that's a big value proposition and they don't have to trade on uniswap they don't have to use the public version they will have to use a version that filters on those on those rtc traders so they are getting a good price they are also getting a i would say a platform that is compliance between code so those are traders so those are also companies that can be kyc the ml so they are using us as if they were using an otc desk except that they're getting a good price and the hope is that in the future they will have a way to use decentralized exchanges i don't see this happening like tomorrow but we see some very good signs uh of them being open to trade on decentralized exchanges like in pure defy i can get into the details on how this can can work but yeah that's the hope it's like a drug pill to get them on board and use use a decentralized exchange aggregator and the hope is to use defy in the future so what is the major hurdle is it kycml and how do you address that yeah i would say that's the main issue is always the legal parts that block in because uh sometimes i think it's psychological because when you use bitcoin and if you're transferring a bitcoin or a bt or eth uh you don't know ac uh at all i mean you don't go ac the miners so i think um and we can map that to decentralized exchanges because we are not trading with a counterparty we're training against a smart contract or i guess an algorithm so in my opinion there is little differences in a legal point of view i'm not really legal experts but intuitively that's what i think but to answer your question yes this is what's holding them back from going to taxes and why we need them but well we need also the capital that they have in place and we're talking about trillions of dollars do you think then that will trump the current trading with crypto-native um individuals at some points like what will it take for it to be to become like larger than what is currently being traded yeah well i think we should have them on board first and uh once they get in once they understand the system because i think there is still also some education work to be done and that i think will be just the first step and the rest will take care of itself because they will understand the system and they will see the benefits and this that's what we can see at least on ave arc where they started looking into uh into permission pools but now our discussions with them uh we started discussions about how about getting on a pool from ave but maybe 90 of this pool was supplied by some known institutions that we can recognize them from their addresses and that's opened the door to two more things to happen in the future so i'm exciting that you're saying we're swapping nfts what does that mean uh could you expand a little bit more on this feature because i think everyone is pretty excited about the capabilities in the future to have more financialization of nfts and and create liquid markets and i think that that could be a big contribution to that yeah so nfc swaps can be there are multiple types of swap so there are swaps we can see we can see in the native marketplaces like an open ce or rare ball in others so we're not in that business within the business of execution and best execution so uh we can bring upgrades to the experience that these users have for instance um their example i was saying in the beginning in an open sea or or any other marketplace where i want to buy it an nft that it's denominated in ith and i don't have it so i have to buy eth and then put my my buy order well i can use pyroswap i can either do a market buy if it's possible or i can do a limit order where this is going to be possible in the future and i can pay with any token that i have that i have in position we have some thoughts some very early stage thoughts on how we can automatically price in nft that it's not maybe a art very sophisticated artwork where the pricing is i would say subjective but for like a board ape where maybe it's more about the features of that of that character we have some ideas of bringing some algorithms that can maybe add some pricing suggestions at least to to the to the to the artist um and in terms of paraswap the protocol are we anticipating a new version like how are you managing currently the governance and and the new features and and upgrades yeah so the dao is super active by the way we lost the dow three months ago and the forum is super busy i have a hard time following up so i have to look look there every day and make sure i follow everything that's happening so the community took over a lot of things and their most recent one is gas refunds they're super special because it's about having an auto compounding asset that's also providing this free usage of the platform so that's super cool and then there are a lot of things are upcoming some with nfts for swap summon entities for gas refunds uh for institutions and also the idea is to maximize on building this platform is to stop building i would say end user features and focus more on building platforms so that other developers can can build on top of so that's the direction we try to take is to be more of a developer platform instead of an end user platform and i remember that you made a very deliberate choice in terms of your launch and the launch of the dao which created a lot of emotion in the community could you sort of take us through the journey on why you made those choices and why the community made those choices and how is that a little bit different than the the previous models that we see and and why did you think that was like a great uh great model for prior swap yes unfortunately there is no standard on how to launch a dao nowadays there are a lot of experiments and some work very well some work less well and the hours i would say uh was we learned a lot of a lot of lessons uh unfortunately we cannot do a second lunch it's already done we can launch the door only once um but yeah i would say the defy community or the crypto is uh maturing is is growing a lot and there is no nothing i would say uh concrete where we can like a playbook that you can follow and and have a successful formula i mean it doesn't work in in startups in general so the choice we've made is to uh make an airdrop for for users that wasn't i mean super optimized uh the list i can say but it allowed us to launch the dao and have a super engaged community and that's we can see on a daily basis so i would say the lessons learned is maybe to do models where we will consult the community before launching and i think that works a lot because even though we can have the impression that we are giving away maybe too much to and that can be dangerous and and that's we've seen that before but at least it can feel add another social filter to uh whatever airdrop or whatever incentive models we're doing and that we can learn a lot from what we're doing right now from liquidity mining programs and other kinds of incentives where the community always has a double eye and a double up a second opinion and we always adjust what we're doing so i think if we were to come back we would do that and we will not just launch we will consult the community and see the opinions and from that we will do a a proper launch hopefully but yeah that's that's the past so now that you're contributing to the dao and the community and keeping a watch on uh daily governance proposals what would you say is the biggest challenge that you went through as a founder you know when you started working with a small team a very focused small team of devs and now you know expanding to the community what has been the lessons learned or you know recommendations for people in the room that you you could give i would say the biggest challenge is uh forming a solid team so around hiring and that's i would say the biggest challenge i was confronted too is how to make sure we hire the best talents and how to make sure also to make sure this challenge will stay and will be happy and will be always incentivized and also intellectually stimulated um that was the biggest challenge that we've spent and the choice we have made is to keep a small team not a big team but very solid ones and also very i would say i don't know for lack of a better word like very selective interviews uh but that have worked so far very well i mean the team is very very good and the quality of the deliverables are super high and now we have another challenge with the dao is true it's they haven't started we haven't started yet is to have a other teams working directly for the dao and not for us that can um have a their account accountability to the dow knowing that our accountability is our accountability is to the dao but we would love to have other teams who work directly for the dao and this can be developers marketers product designers and so on so that's the early stage of a new adventure uh that's is in discussion with the tao and are you thinking um are there discussions around ecosystem funds or grants etc like what's what's your strategy there yeah so the some contributors propose to have a yearly budget and that includes multiple segments one of them is for grants for other projects to build on powerswap and other four contributors and that would include these future teams that will work for the dao and we don't have yet a formula we're looking into other projects like maker dao for instance uh which in some like lido which have a process that looks like a company so they have hiring processes they have teams team meetings and and so on so that's something in in the work and also for the grants that's super something we're super excited about uh on how to incentivize other teams to build on power swap and the thing where what we're thinking about as well is we've seen many projects that will fund with the native token which can be cool but i think what people look for is maybe stable coins and eth so we're looking for solutions on how we can diversify the treasury in order to make those kind of grants and even pay for contributors much more efficient