Panel I The Future of Algorithmic Stablecoins | Pragma Istanbul 2023

[Music] so for our very first panel for today I want to bring on stanie and run to talk about the future of stable coins so please join me in welcoming both Ron and stannie on stage GM GM hell all right so I mostly want to spend the next 30 so minutes understanding how everybody else should think about stable coins and more specifically how you think about this entire space evolving um I'll kind of start my first question with you run um tell us about where you see maker fitting in now it's it's been the first stable coin out there you've been growing and evolving and changing for so many years um what's the new Direction in the future of maker Dow yeah I mean the first thing I want to say is any stable coin uh needs to focus on growing user demand and this is actually sort of I think I mean there's a lot of stable hun projects out there even a project like maker has had a very hard time sort of struggling to understand this is actually what matters not all sorts of other things I mean there are many other things that that are great features or whatever great stuff that a stablein can do but you got to figure out how to get users to your stable coin and as we sort of uh you know realized this is the only thing that really matters this is what you got to figure out um they become clear that that um what I mean what you can actually measure and tell that users want sort of on the ground usually something like I want a a c a currency that other people are using already right and where I'm going with this is that um and actually this is something I kept getting told coming to Turkey right that if you're so it's basically if you're stable coin and you are thinking about what's your place in the market what are you what are you offering your users you have basically have to think in terms of tether basically because tether is like the actual dominant stable coin that already today is sort of has a real product Market fit at a extremely large scale right that people use as money in this like ideal Financial inclusion kind of way so um I think in the past makers always just viewed ourselves as like well we just you know we're just the better version of tether or something like that we and we're sort of competing directly and we're just trying to get people to use it as money but again you can't really do that um if if you're fighting against a much larger Network effect right so our conclusion is basically you've got to find something in addition to this like like core uh you're just trying to be money and and that's it the best money or something like that right and so in our case what we think is really the second sort of big opportunity and the second big business model you can go for on crypto is yield right so we've already started that that in maker with the die savings rate and S die right where people can get a 5% yield if they're not Americans uh and and that's been really successful right in growing I mean that's actually managed to like be the first majors sort of growth spurt in a sense after this massive downturn you know where we had a moment where maker accumulated demand or something like 1.5 billion due to this new uh yield that was available and you have a lot of projects building on top of this as like a new primitive because now there's like a I mean it's not like the old days in defi summer but the big difference is it's more reliable and sustainable right you can actually count on this this yield and that is also by itself interesting because it allows you to build more lasting and uh use cases but we want to go further than just providing an efficient yield on chain that's powered by real well assets and and sustainable um um collateral that can deliver this Shield we want to see if we can tap into the unique power of crypto and deliver something that's a little bit more exciting and fun and gamified specifically of tying back to defi summer right the the spirits of of uh getting together communities out of out of thin air and through yield farming so that's uh really the core uh of our strategy with what we call endgame which is this attempt to like do a sort of final overhaul of maker that sets it up for long-term lasting growth through tapping into all the absolute best things the most powerful things that have been discovered to be possible with crypto awesome we're going to dig into endgame in a second um I'll kind of ask a similar version of this to to stani uh obviously we've seen tether immensely grow in in parts of the the world and uh over the last few years usdc as well maker obviously has been around for uh a little bit over six if I'm not mistaken um why start grow why did the a ecosystem need grow what made you kind of think about this being the next step for the space yeah it's it's quite interesting because um in the AA ecosystem essentially what what AA protocol is you can supply cryptographic assets um and then you can earn yield um and draw other cryptographic assets stable coins for example um and borrow against your collateral um so this whole collateralization is a really powerful um feature in in this and finance you know not just the a protocol but um the uh die maker di system is based on over calization um to to quite good extent um and the perspective we um came with go is that when we build products at our company we try to understand what the users want right um so what kind of products we can actually build or features or um anything that makes their life lives easier um and something that we notice is that especially like during the defi summer and um a little bit later as well that the um protocol itself had Li liquidity crunches so obviously the interest rates in the protocol are are um algorithmic meaning that they're based on supply and demand um so at some point there is a shortage of stable coins um and that causes issues for the user itself because you come to AA because it's simply a really good um product and you know I constantly see a lot of interesting um lending protocols being launched um or higher yield and people always kind of like Wonder like why why um why aren't the a users moving their funds elsewhere but I I think like the product is kind of the stickiness um that we have so we were thinking that you know how we can actually improve their um behavior on the uh protocol through the app and we realized that you know if you can guarantee uh liquidity for these users um at predictable uh prices um effectively the the borrow rate um we can actually create happy users and that's how we think about we we do have a large community so obviously the a protocol itself is CED by the obow um there was there is like a brilliant uh contributors that are contributing directly to the protocol um whether it's development or something else um and I I do think that um it's a really powerful uh mechanism uh for our users and that's where the that's where the the plan of um go C so one thing kind of noticed from both of your answers is that um in a way we're we're focusing on a a subset of what the audience is for these stable coins so so my kind of first question to you is um to both or either of you um yield is is definitely very powerful but is that the profile of the person who should be using the stable coin or minting it to increase the supply how do you actually measure the success of a stable coin is it the flow is it just the issuance what's the key metric here and and like kind of are we betting on payments being the the end game for is working stable coin or something else yeah this is my favorite thing to discuss about stable coins because there's such a I don't know what it is but in in the told crypto industry there's like a really strong misconception and confusion about this fundamental thing like what matters for stable coin and I mean I was actually pretty much saying it before right but in terms of what you know it doesn't matter where the supply comes from room it doesn't matter like any of these other things if people aren't holding the damn thing you know if people don't want to hold a stable coin then all the other stuff is is is pointless and it's always going to be the key kpi like the fundamental key metric is how large is the supply of the stable coin and the only thing that can possibly drive that buing some edge cases is how much demand is for the stable coin right how many people want to you know hold the stable coin in the pocket and use it as savings and consider it you know and this is kind of the tricky part consider it a stable store value because that's kind of the real problem is it's just like I mean we're not talking about the core like crypto community of like people coming to an event like this for instance like I mean obviously there's a lot of users and there's a lot of of money uh probably many of you are like eth Ico investors or something right but the reality is like the the real scale of a stable coin like d and especially something like tether it comes from like much more more ordinary Normy types of people right uh and it's very very hard to like convince them to trust something that's built you know that's backed by like some techno stuff that is complicated and you know and they're not NE necessarily into decentralization or any other the stuff you know there do they even need to know this right that's the other piece yeah and I mean their favorite thing is tether right and it's totally not centralized but they love it for because they can trust it not just T but tar on Throne Network so it's it's like double bad you know we actually looked into this because we were like let's figure out what's going on with tether and Tron and actually supposedly it really is that normies uh they do only hold tether on like binance and and fintex the Tron stuff that's all these finex and and and binance transferring between each other so I wish I wish there would be a lot of nomies out there using Tron wallets but so far based on what we know that is not the case would be fun though so so maybe you want to add something to it like I how do we kind of Ensure there's there's more payments via stable coins for our regular day-to-day things and is that what we're betting on with go yeah the larger vision is is that um you know a lot of stable coin projects they they focus on the supply side in the beginning so what's the technology behind of the colorization what are the features of um uh the whole system and and how you can actually grow within the decentralized finance um ecosystem um and obviously go has um been launched few months ago it's now roughly 35 um million so it's very small but uh quite significant growth um so far um but from Vision perspective I I think um what we aim to do as a company um is to to basically uh grow the onchain gross domestic product um basically which means that the more um we trade goods and services you know um the more the economy grow um and then being able to do that trading on chain is is very valuable um especially if you can use set settlement in instruments like uh die and go um for example for for payments um so I I do think payments is an interesting use case um the the hard part is kind of like how we bre the Gap actually where you know you can start using uh stable coins um in you know Shops and and physical um locations and I the reason I'm I'm thinking this way is that you know um I was you know kind of born on internet so it was big thing for me to you know access to all information globally so you are not limited to your library your home you know what your friends are saying and you know teachers teaching you but you get you have access to this enormous amount of information right um but the second thing that was really really cool is that um you could start doing business um online right and that's something that really really um put the economy over the Internet so you know that's where the paypals of the world Stripes of the world were born because you know people started to trade online um and they needed settlement system as well so I think something similar might happen on chain as well and that's the growth where the growth actually uh comes and naturally it's easier to sell dig digital Goods um that's pretty much what people are uh doing when they're buying digital assets or they're buying nfts for example um so yeah I I do think it plays a vital role uh payments um maybe coming back to your ruin let's let's talk about the endgame what's your new design focus and and the strategy shift let's have everybody understand what the plan is and and why oh yeah I'll just do a quick 20 second recap no so so um so I mean I was talking about right so and actually let me correct your you said we were 6 years old and that that is a I mean that's brand new six years we are like like going past eight at this point I mean we've been grinding in the trenches and uh smashing our heads against the walls I Mayan have counted the the multic collateral oh yeah okay then you're right but well there was even more craz in this before we even launched anything you know that was like the the most chaotic part of all anyway but you know maker is really really really old uh in crypto terms and we've gone through a lot of craziness over our life and sort of seen and experienced many different cycles of crypto but mostly throughout this whole time uh the sort of the original core vision of what maker was doing was you know we're going to make a stable coin the goal is to make blockchain available to normal people and the way we're going to achieve this is we're going to build some really good Tech and then we're going to deploy it and then you know the free market will take care of it I guess was sort of the idea right so we did all that and it turns out the free Market it's not that simple basically it doesn't just take care of it um and what we basically ran into was that there's this whole dimension of well like I didn't even mention the users as I was saying this right I mean who's going to use this stuff right how are we going to get them to use it that's sort of one part of it and that's the most important part by far the most important part but there's also the whole thing of like how the hell are you going to govern this thing given that it's a bunch of humans that are going to govern the humans they you know like politics and they like like getting rich quick and they're like infighting and so on uh as we all know if we've uh been in crypto long enough and especially in Dows so endgame is effectively sort of the moment where we fully realize look we have to actually like rethink from scratch what exactly how exactly are we going to achieve this fundamental vision and goal of building a stable coin and building something that's going to benefit regular people through all the power available with blockchain technology and then we sort of you know killed The Darlings of the project in a sense right so rethought it from scratch and and we're like okay now we can go from being the oldest and most sort of entrenched and conservative to actually get all the way to like the absolute Cutting Edge of what's already shown to be possible and not what we can sort of do of putting together these new ideas right and so the absolute number one key killer feature of endgame um is uh you know taking what I call like the magic of defi summer which was yield farming and then removing the Krabby par which was the fact that was all bunch of pony and scams and all fell apart right but keeping like this idea of you can have fun it's exciting to get tokens that are sort of have different unique aspects to them right uh it's really interesting um to have a new community merge out of nothing and but not only that that it creates real value at least if you manage to sort of anchor that value right you manage to to uh to provide s of an actual functional vessel to the passion and the alignment of such a community what what basically backs those coins in your opinion yeah so so um so and that's so so basically that is the I mean so what I was just talking about here is like this is how we are going to get growth right this is how we're going to provide something that's going to get users in but the other problem we have is how we're going to organ the Dow itself and that's basically the other part that's the answer to what backs all these tokens right is that um we're going to take maker and break it up into these subd Dows as they're called right so you take all the different specializations that exist today in sort of one big monolithic uh kind of um you know soup of maker today I mean it's gotten a lot better it's I mean you know it's the best most well-run out there but it's still not uh anywhere as good as it as it should be and as it can be and how we want to make that happen is with these specialized subd Downs right so you go from a monolithic approach where everyone has to understand everything and be a part of everything and you can have more specialized smaller communities some communities can focus on real assets some can focus on you know deep Cutting Edge Innovation uh there is a Sakura da which is this Japan the deed culturally focused gaming subd which is very experimental but the idea is that there also needs to be room for that kind of stuff basically uh in a in a dow and in a stable coin project so how do you align all the incentives between the um you know the the maker uh holders and all these other because like the the one of the um issues I see with the sub subdab model is that um you know you have you know you have the maker uh community and you know it's relatively stable um um the um the the token itself and you govern you know the makeer protocol but once you start having all these uh subd Dows um uh it's it's going to be interesting to see how they all will align interests for example with maker like um or is that the even idea there because I could imagine that you know if there's a project that that has their own token maybe and it's you know permissionless participation maybe they will contribute also to the um AOW AA ecosystem um what is your thinking there um yeah and this is a really interesting point because this is so what's funny is this idea of subow and this idea of like breaking off and having more isolated decision-making power uh with a key aspect being that there is capital at stake right so subd Dows they can they can for instance deploy capital on behalf of maker if they take the first loss right so I mean and this is actually an example of how you align incentives right this is the basic concept of over calization Junior Capital right I mean just like we aligned incentives of borrowers in our lending protocols by telling yeah you get need to put up some extra Capital so I'm not going to lose we're not going to lose our money because they put even more money up that they would lose in that case right but um but when but I mean and as I said a lot of people had this idea even the very beginning it was one of the first ideas that people kept repeating in the mega community and I actually thought it was imposs POS for the kind of the the concerns you're outlining right that look if you got two different tokens or two different whatever how are they not going to fight and and you know how is it not going to be a bunch of of issues with that but essentially um our solution is I mean first of all I think we saw this we saw that you can just do a lot more with tokens than you just think uh we saw that in Def some right you can do this very Advanced uh you know very sophisticated Financial engineering toonomic Financial engine right so um actually I would describe the very simple relationship in terms of how do you align the subd out tokens with the MGR token uh it's kind of equivalent to you know a government and companies where you have basically subsidies and then Texas so maker is continuously providing a subsidy to the subd so they benefit from Maker's growth and then at the same time maker is continuously taxing the subow so maker benefits from their growth and then what you're doing is you're sort of tying the tokens together so they're in some sense a little bit like a wrapped version of the other not completely right but there's some element of these tokens are actually fundamentally tied together and then finally uh you do have to have a sense of essentially sovereignty in the sense that ultimately all of the subd Dow's governance is sort of tied into the governance security of maker itself so maker is able to enforce that a subow can't like go Rogue and sort of break the rulle rules and of course what does that mean what does it mean break the rules and then we get into the really deep end of endgame right which involves you got to actually truly like gather all the relevant data that is necessary to practically run a giant you know multi-billion dollar Financial Network and you have to make that data public you have to make it accessible to the people who are supposed to participate and we plan to do this with AI because we think that's a really strong tool to make comp Lex data symbol um but if you have that then you can actually you know regulate consistently how uh individual autonomous subd Dows and actors how they can actually um have the freedom to to innovate and to experiment and also collaborate as much as possible you know the more the better uh for us right with other projects right because because of that fundamental tie in of the incentives between the subt out token and the mkr token uh you know maker doesn't even like it's not even necessary that D becomes super successful if the subd Sy is successful then naturally make still be better off so that's kind of I think that's a really interesting also twist to what how maker going to sort of act in the space and in the in the economy because the goal would just be make sure the subd Dos grow no matter the cost doesn't matter who they work with what stable coins they promote anything like that that's completely fine if they're making money the ecosystem as a whole is benefiting what stops them the believing the maker system because I I kind of feel that if if if you're in an innovator and you want to build something um you could just launch a token um by yourself and I mean I get the idea of of kind of like um the Junior and senior de but for example like um what keeps them loyal in in in maker um well so that's actually a really cool question right but so I really want to stress that like from my in my opinion the most important thing to understand about Dao is that it is not the da itself is not people right the da itself is code and tokens as long as those who hold the tokens are like sort of um opaque enough that you can't pinpoint the very specific people as soon as you got identifiable people and like these other whatever it is you it's no longer a doubt it's some kind of legal Association right that there's there's an organized group of known people that are engaging in some sort of economic activity sooner or later at some scale and at some time frame like their interests are going to diverge from those of the of the Dow and the tokens which doesn't have any kind of real legal significance right so anyway so my point is that there are companies that work for subow then there are subow themselves and then there's maker and all of these are separate from each other and when it comes to the companies themselves and ecosystem right so maker today doesn't have a foundation anymore famously it dissolved right today what maker has is something like 20 companies that all collaborate but they don't just work for for maker and work on the subd many of them work for I mean many of the other large uh protocols in the space so maybe just in terms of understanding this as analogy you are not saying this is like a subsidiary model where major companies effectively spending up these subsidiaries they're just in a way to work together but they can have their independent interests the goal is to have an incentive where they do not kind of diverge too much so that's for the companies are fully separate right I mean a company is a company you can't control a company through the blockchain subd Dows are inherently in a sense a part of maker you could say like so they they don't have the you could say the technical or the governance capability to separate themselves out of maker at all but they simply have a lot of like within those constraints they have as much autonomy and as much sort of um flexibility as it is safe to give them without having sort of you know various cases occur yeah this is maybe I guess the obvious question for ustani is seems like you differ on some places um so how do you think about the governance for go and and sort of where where do you kind of see that evolve or change from uh what run just said yeah it's um um very interesting run um and I I think um uh I'm personally more like governance uh minimalist um so I I kind of understand the pain points that that come with the governance and um what the subd are aiming to solve um I I I think a lot of the politics actually slows down the Innovation um and you know things that could be built better so I I do think that going for forward something that we are researching quite a lot within our team is that you know where we can actually apply on governance um it's a little bit trickier for protocols like a because um you you have these different kinds of risk parameters that needs to be managed down the line um it's more easier to something like unisoft where you know you deploy the code and you know it has very simple um function to do but nevertheless I I I do think that governance is a amazing uh tool to to basically coordinate globally um in a very transparent um way with Integrity um but at the same time like it can really become a bottleneck and you know you see a lot of folks coming into these governance forums and and then they um you know they they they just cause a lot of uh pain as well so it's it's it's it's it's not a um unknown uh thing in in the ecosystem but I do think that um having like a DA or or governance structure which is like very narrow is very important um because a dow isn't the company right so effectively what a DA is it it allocates uh treasury uh pays bills um and and also you know does code upgrades so so I do think we come from a perspective where in avow you have these service providers um ranging from uh development work um you know risk management and and other kinds of uh service providers and they're hired directly by the Dow um and I think that's been super efficient model you know that's why we we've been able to launch go and and you know do a lot of things on that side and you know launch all these uh different markets because you know there's just people who are incentivized and companies that are incentivized to actually provide the best services to the Dao um and if they don't we basically fired them so it's it's a it's a really um interesting model I don't know if if if it will be something that we will continue using in the future um but so far it's been working um to some success yeah so I feel like there there's some uh some definitional overlap or or I guess nonoverlap here um R you mentioned that um governance to you is just kind of code and in a set of rules uh whereas a lot of the times in this space um we get governance mixed up with kind of individuals sort of being the the bottle next to to make decisions um I can understand both your points uh my kind of question is for the success of an algorithmic stable coin who is responsible for ensuring that it's actually stable and and kind of the stability around in a way just whatever the pegging is is it $1 to USD or any other currency we choose is that the code is that all of the other parties is that now in your case subd Dows working towards managing risk independently how does that world work in both of your E Systems and kind of for you uh as you kind of get to scale you're going to have a lot more volatility until you get there um where does governance fit in for managing stability so the answer is that it's it's a combination of everything and to end right it is the code plus the people plus the rules plus the companies plus the community plus the market and so on and so on and so on right and the challenge is how do you make sure that all of these different pieces they all align towards that intended goal given that their individual goals are usually something like I want to make as much money as possible especially I mean you know and this is the definition of cryptoeconomics right especially when many of these actors are Anonymous uh and so so I mean this is the unfortunate of billion dollar question with governance which is that you simply can't this I mean or rather you have to assume if you're trying to build something that's actually resilient that will run by itself that you can uh leave behind right and will just keep running you have to assume that anything controlled by humans could be controlled by corrupt humans right just like you expect any exploit you put in a smart contract to potentially be attacked by North Korea right the problem is just that it's a lot harder to model out how can corrupt or you know incompetent all the kind of things that can humans can can do right emotional you know whatever pissed off humans like all the ways yeah I mean all the ways that they can cause problems in like a complex sort of multi-dimensional Social and Technical and economic structure this is I mean this is crazy crazy difficult this is you know you can't do like formal verification and then just like there's no role book here you you can't model human behavior that that precisely so absolutely yeah but I mean I think that unfortunately maybe you could also say fortunately like I mean I think basically you got to tackle this problem head on and like anything else is just going to fail when uh whenever the I mean unless you live forever and you stay in control forever and make sure the good people always running the show then sooner or later that's going to fail so that's where we come back to this approach of basically uh Gathering as much data as possible about all the different possibilities within governance all the different dynamics that can occur especially between the various humans the various um sort of U could say bureaucrats as I like to call them sometimes right and and how you can ensure that there's enough checks and balances that even if you get a sort of an aberration right you get some kind of social attack or any kind of like sort of complex issue uh in governance that's causing drama or politics or whatever um that there's there's basically enough self-healing ability a kind of immune system build into all of these different aspects of the technical and social and economic and all all of those layers that it can sort of push it back put itself push it push itself back into equilibrium and this fundamental idea that this is how you have to build a Dow end to end to to serve this goal of resilience uh is what we call alignment engineering so you sort of engineer alignment between all the actors towards this goal of sort of protecting themselves against the ways things can go out of equilibrium and out of alignment and help everyone get it back into alignment and one of the one of the key aspects again is it got to be easy it's got to be something everyone can do because everyone has to be a part of it and you can't rely on Experts because or or somebody who studied it for years circular problem you're trying to solve yeah because I mean again they could be the ones who are bad the bad guys right so yeah I I also think that the um trusting too much smart contracts is also quite dangerous because um you know the a protocol there's probably you know three people that really really know the protocol well from a technical standpoint um you know and it's it's really hard to build um defi protocols with with some sort of a overcollateralization u mechanism um and it it becomes quite quickly um very very complex so I you think that the uh the governance has really uh big attack surface um and and I also think that you know things we have codified you know whether it's smart contracts or it's in law you know times change and we should be able to um you know change change the code as well so it's I I do age like people can be um you know they can be the enabler or the Destroyer um and and how to kind of like a keep the right balance and and keep right values is is a is an interesting question because I think run you came back for um you came back to the maker ecosystem I think a couple of times already um it just showcases kind of um you know that um people who build these protocols and ecosystems you know um how actually there's a good continuity and the decentralization uh moves forward so and at the same time you can't really you don't want to codify some of the things in a way that you can't actually do any changes because at that point you know you're blocking yourself from ground exactly imagine using U like who is using here over like 10 year old laptop for example not no one right so so you know okay one but it's it's an example that you know like software Hardware you know it gets out of it gets out of um it gets dated effectively so whenever you ship software you know the expired date you know is is when you ship it so you know if you want to keep and innovate you have to have a mechanism to to actually um upgrade things um but but I think there's there needs to be a combination in somewhere you want to have upgradeability and somewhere you want to have immutability so nothing can change in that's also very beautiful thing so one kind of thing I'm curious about kind of having heard all of this is do USG go and and US die see the protocol or see it as a protocol or a product what what effectively are you designing and and is this a developer tool or a consumer tool it's got to be a mix of both but PRI prioritization wise how do you define these these things yeah that's a great question you sort of answered in that you got to have both to some extent and actually think for maker I think um we used to probably think of it as purely as a protocol uh and we made a bunch of like weird decisions in hindsight such as having a very low supply of mkr entirely for this goal like look this is a back end thing this is supposed to you know this is not for you unless you're a genius and you can sit and manage a central bank or something right and that's the kind of vibe that we build up in the community and the problem is that's just not how crypto Works how what makes crypto grow right crypto is very much like you got to be able to you got to have that access you got to have that Community Spirit right you got to have that excitement so that's a huge part of like what we are changing with endgame and maker you know the final attempt to actually make it run itself and make it make it sustainable and make it able to grow sustainably right that is to really be like let's make it a lot more like a product that that you know that still stays true to that fundamental idea that of course it is infrastructure and it is a protocol um and and you know the immediately in the short run so in a couple of months the way that everyone will uh be impacted by this is that maker is actually doing a reprint which some of you probably don't know yet but you'll you'll find out soon are you going to change to taker no no it will into this thing it will it will I mean it will so many Brands and specially maker as probably one of the first and oldest surviving Brands right we just like made up like sounds cool right there wasn't really much thought put into what's the like what is a brand what's the purpose of a brand what's the purpose of the project what's like usually very often that is not really aligned with with sort of the broader vision and broader goal right so now by by again sort of killing our doll ings right by looking going back to First principles and everything and how to really achieve lasting success and growth and a and a niche that actually makes sense uh for what a decentralized stable Co can do you know we've been in this very long uh you know um deep process hiring some top uh brand development firms to basically try to develop like an endtoend brand that fits with the strategy that fits with like this this fundamental concept actually of alignment engineering right that itself ties into how do you tie it all together but I think again I mean back to what I was saying in the beginning most importantly how do you get the goddamn user right how do you speak to like normal users who aren't like crypto Bros because we already got those in like the techie the super nerdy techie types I mean they're by far they're already in crypto right they're curious enough to already be at the edge but that's not the audience who want to get to for Mass adoption yeah I mean I hate I mean it's a cler right but we got to go beyond crypto right we got got to get to normal people and and I mean and they don't they're not into stuff like decentralization of libertarianism anymore we already got those guys right we need something simpler that you don't have to like you know become a a fanboy and and sort of go all in to use right um so that's that's the idea with the Rebrand I also think that um you know there's there's a great distinction between um a community and and actual users um you know you might make some you know product decisions that actually you know has some sort of um response from users and and the community and um I think we get these two groups very easily mixed up in our space um and regarding like I also think we put a lot of emphasis on you know the kind of like a word of a protocol because end of the day they are if they have end users you know they're decentralized products more or less um whether it's like a consumer user or or maybe like a um business user um that's how we think um in in our company so we've uh we just basically focus on building for the user you know trying to understand what they're doing day-to-day um and and building features around their um behavior and and trying to understand as well that you know what could save their time you know what could be um better experience um and I think that's kind of like what what's really missing um in crypto so you know we we focus on building this these massive communities who are very loud um and at the same time you know there's no users necessarily um so we're focusing on quite a lot of actually building endtoend uh good products um we're known for building um good uh back end infrastructure smart contract infrastructure um and we're more and more focusing on building better experiences as well well um and getting the best ux talent as well and designers and and I think down the line um we do also lot of branding work um internally um we've uh kind of uh we're very proud of of of the brands we we create um and you know the way we use our Brands is we always want to tell some sort of a uh story as well um so I I think I like to always say that we're we're kind of um in a moment um where you know we're trying to figure out the personal computer um interface for the blockchain um and we're now kind of like getting getting to that so how you abstract away a lot of the complexity and um the abstract away the blockchain and create interfaces where they're seamless in something that normies can actually use um so it's a really really fascinating time now to to build actually D5 awesome um we may have time for two question questions if there's anybody in the audience who has questions just walk up over to the stand right now otherwise I'm going to finish with my list uh but we're we're nearing the end so as we get a couple more people in uh my question a quick one for youan would be early days for go um are you satisfied with where things are now kind of how do you assess how the last couple months have been yeah I mean our team builts software so we're happy that we we launch go um it's it's been something we're we've been working for uh over a year um and obviously you know the the AOW is is more responsible of you know what will be you know the growth paths um for go as well um I'm pretty happy that's um where it's been growing especially because you know um there's no native um incentive so the growth has been quite organic um and I've seen some fascinating initiatives um we we did this um go passport for example where you know we sold pass go passports for 100 go um where you get basically a robit ticket uh some swag and and the NFD itself you know and we sold 300 of those So like um I just want to see more and more kind of like um creativity so if if if some of you are hacking this this weekend um that's an interesting area to try to um focus and and bringing creativity out how you could use example go awesome well my last question to you before we go into the the audience question is um uh starting with run what advice would you give to Stan as he scales up grow and then then I want Stan to uh to do the same for run yeah I will repeat what I've already said which is we can it's all about focusing on the user growing demand and I think uh go had this had this issue with the PEC that I think is now going to get solved because of the you know the supply ceiling getting hit and I really think that it's going to be some like that's an opportunity to then from then on keeping the pack exactly one which will have this kind of additional effect of actually getting even more demand because obviously that's just a major signal for for end users so I'm very excited to uh to see that and then see how it can grow from there um well my first advice will be to drop the end game but R will not listen to me so obviously I'm I'm I'm joking because it's it's really interesting experimentation um in in in defi um but regarding the subd Dows um I I see a lot of the maker Community um forking different protocols um and my kind of worry there is that you know some of these teams they might not know the the code base um significantly um and it's it's very hard for example to ensure the security of the of the protocol uh itself and I think a lot of emphasis should go there um and i' I've seen some immun f Buck bounties which has been uh quite great but I think that's the kind of like um um the the flip side of of those subd Dows um because you know they're using infrastructure that they NE necessarily haven't built um and complex infrastructure so I I think there's something very simple like the Unis swop um protocol and you know it's like it's relatively simple to understand how it works but you know when you go to the liquidity protocols it becomes more um complex and with different setups so my my kind of advice will be there to put more um focus on that side yeah we definitely want to do that and we want to collaborate with you guys work together in security absolutely that's that's an awesome ending um all right two people is there third just two people so we'll just do two questions uh please make them concise and no multi-part questions that's the time we have so please good morning a quick question do you see Senor share stable coins ever flourishing in the future it's a little bit louder do you see any Sate share stable coins algo stable coins that are non-collateralized to exist and flourish in the future un I think we may have some a issues here we're not uh you may have to shout because the echo I think is is yeah I'm going to try again uh is there any future that you can see singet St share stable coins exist flourish and now I get yeah absolutely not no it's a totally that concept was immediately proven unworkable theoretically the moment it was proposed and no one else ever did it because it was so obvious it didn't work and then every time someone tried it it failed every single time so you can't create something out of nothing that is really is almost physics we've seen uh six years of senior shes not work out well um second question sorry so at the beginning of the panel you mentioned about tether success and I think you know a part of the success was due to bit finex uh you know introducing it then tether being largely used for Market making and you know uh for crypto liquidity and I also see similar moves me being made by binance Etc because like you mentioned user demand being extremely critical to make her success for instance uh and when you were talking about sub Dows uh you like there was this nostalgia about defi summer uh and and looking at spark protocol right now I'm a user of spark farming uh using S and I see that you know like we we are perhaps like and I'm just going to preface this then ask my question you know um maker might still be too def Centric like looking at users we have right now 5 million uh onchain active users versus roughly 60 million centralized exchange users and you know um so and this is going to be my question like are you guys looking at for instance um uh STI being utilized in let's say onchain order book liquidity or centralized exchange liquidity are you guys looking at fintech Integrations like payments uh microcredit stuff that could you know uh put gr get a lot of trans ction basically in terms of huse at the M yeah absolutely okay um so the challenge with maker has always been there's a trillion opportunities how do you how do you prioritize how do you execute uh and this subow approach is supposed to be the solution to that right because we have yeah like we have sparked out spark protocol that's for Cutting Edge defi that's for collaborating with uh with AA and other of the of the sort of the deep uh crypto projects um for things like doing stuff on centralized exchanges doing stuff in trafy interesting Partnerships inter interesting experiments we've done that with the co-op maker but it's been very slow and it's just again it's difficult to do that with a giant monolithic governance process so we have multiple different real asset Focus Subs that focus on different aspects of this right there's Public Credit scale institutions then there's like private credit getting sort of in the weeds funding small businesses it's so much easier to do that through a decentralized process if the community making the sort of the the fundamental decisions is specialized in that field right and that's what the subd Dos do everyone can Farm the tokens if you're into private credit and you want to fund small businesses in Indonesia there's a sub out for that right if you're into Cutting Edge Tech doing the latest dii collaborating with all the other big protocols then you farm spark protocol and that way the community itself the votings itself will be a lot more competent hopefully awesome well please join me in thanking ruin and stanie for this amazing conversation thank you