Superfluid Reactor Summit: The Future of On-chain Payments

[Applause] [Music] as we bring on everybody here on the panel i'd like to welcome three amazing people so luca from maker and kill from circle and fred from superfluid we're gonna talk about just how we think on-chain payments is going to evolve make our circle at superfluid are kind of the common pieces here that everybody's using for just interacting on the chain especially as we think about stable coins being the fundamental base layer of sending money here and what defines done so i could be more excited to bring everybody on so at this point to ask everybody to turn on their cameras and kind of introduce themselves and say hi and we can get this started so uh welcome everybody um we uh we already know who fran is um but i'd love to invite uh luca and the kill to uh introduce themselves and talk about what you do and just give an overview of the product for those of us on the chat that may not be aware thanks having me guys uh luca here um so i i work with maker i am one of the core team members of maker pretty much looking at anything that has to do with the financial risk oversight of the protocol i am an independent researcher i write my own research and publish it under a sub stack called dirt roads that i hope that some of you have heard of and invest in the space and have great great chats with super smart people like fra so thanks for having me excited to have you thank you yeah thanks for having me kartik um my name is nikhil chanduk i am chief product officer at circle um what circle does is uh it makes a makes a stable coin it sort of ships a stable coin which i think everybody knows about it's usdc um we have products in the payment space uh that we have in market and that we are building further out uh we're excited about payments we're excited about lending so we can talk about uh anything today so uh thanks for having me we're excited to have you as well um so maybe i'll kind of just jump right in the most kind of obvious question is um you've kind of seen this ecosystem evolve from multiple angles here what's kind of been the most like interesting trend about specifically payments that each of you have seen uh we can start with friend here and uh every kind of just showcased what has surprised you in the last year well i mean working at superfluit obviously i think the most interesting part of payments is streaming right more in general recurring payments the reason specifically i'm excited about recurring payments is that it can actually bring income on chain right and that's very interesting if you look at for example urbel's uh presentation from uh earlier right because bringing income on chain is what will on board so many users right uh one of the examples he brought was gamify right so like play to earn games and these are onboarding literally millions of users and they're not coming to speculate they're coming to earn money right so the earning potential that uh recurring payments or streaming brings and the the fact that those earnings are on chain and can be used for our stuff i think is very interesting i think we're still just scratching the surface here uh i think puma finance is going to be a very important protocol in the future regarding lending against these earnings in terms of other payments infrastructure i've seen a lot built on superfluid i'm very excited about we've seen diagonal finance but also another startup called drip which are building checkouts with uh let's say specific mechanics built into the payment layer itself right and that's something that you can uniquely do uh on chain well you can't really do off-chain right so if the payment happens then you know trigger something uh you can deliver a loyalty nfg and deliver a social token you can you know redirect a recurring um for example referring referral revenue right all of these things you can encode directly into the payment stream because it's happening on chain so this is kind of the the most important and uh interesting thing for me amazing uh luca any anything to add here i mean i i i started uh chatting about what the guys at super fluid were were doing uh almost a year ago because i think again streaming payments can be abstracted into into streaming value uh that can have so many so many um applications and i i always thought that the way defy or crypto in general steps up to the next level is by onboarding as many use cases as possible from the real world so i think stream allowing value to flow seamlessly through people-to-people in payments but also in supply chains i think is what fascinates me the most i i had a couple of chats with companies that are trying to innovate in a suplate supply chain system by creating a a seamless flow of value that goes along the chain and i think it's it which is an incredible source of inefficiency these days financially with a lot of value trapped so i'm very excited to see the evolutions in that front as well that's awesome um i think you've already gonna all touched upon topics that i want to dig into in general and uh and by the way for we're already kind of getting some comments from the audience if you have any questions for our speakers please just put them in the chat and i'll be able to ask them here but uh to me this is an interesting point because i think both maker and circle are kind of at the intersection of onboarding existing businesses that are in web 2 to more web 3 but also then enabling a whole new set of web 3 native companies and types of businesses to exist kind of from how you've seen usdc or dive being used has there been something that's kind of surprised you in terms of like oh i didn't think this could be possible or of course streaming is a perfect example but i'm curious like what has been an unintended consequence of a good example of how your stable points have been utilized by people maybe uh i can i can take the crack i feel like the uh so i'll say two things one is uh we have the circle has this partnership with strike where they're doing payouts on twitter um and uh so the use case is uh twitter have creators that they want to pay these creators are all over the world they they want to make sure that you know they can essentially share earnings with them what's in what's an easy infrastructure to build to be able to do that well clearly using on-chain payouts is the best way to do it doing it in a stablecoin is like uh is definitely preferable so twitter like stripe stripe and twitter are experimenting with usdc for these payouts why this is interesting um i worked at youtube for seven eight years i was there really early and youtube is one of the earliest companies that did creator payouts and so for those who don't know if you upload a video on youtube you get to keep and you monetize it you get to keep 55 building that infrastructure that connects like connects the ad impression the ad payout to the creator payout is extremely complex and then scaling it to the whole world is where youtube is at i think today at like two and a half billion users is incredibly complex uh so um i think to do that so simply is like fascinating to me uh because that was one of the ways we built a moat around youtube because nobody else could do it facebook didn't do it and i think they're just doing it now and so i think the power of that is pretty phenomenal i kind of love the idea of streaming payments there uh i haven't wrapped my head around like you know add verification to streaming pay like a payout to a creator uh i think there's some nice use cases to explore that as well so that's sort of one bucket i'd say the other bucket that is really interesting to me again is i think there are two large ecosystems about to collide which is really interesting one is payments which is uh you know how can we make it more efficient we can have we can make things more efficient and we can unlock more use cases because we do things on chain so that's super interesting um whether it's streaming whether it's payouts like you know there's all manners of things we can do the other is like is the ads ecosystem and we don't talk about ads much in crypto because i think nobody likes ads but ads basically built the internet and yes along the way there were some trade-offs that were made that are not that are not pleasant and not good um and but i think the fundamental business need is to acquire users and and and have a way to acquire users and businesses will pay money to acquire users what i see happening now with like novel payment formats uh with nfts with these new novel platforms coming together it's sort of a collapse of like the payment sql system with the ads ecosystem and i think like that is super interesting which is like if there is a wallet that pays me and if i can have a close relationship with the user because they paid me on chain and then i issue something to them on chain and then i have a loyalty program and if that becomes super portable and allows for new networks to emerge ads market is a truly normal market payment payments itself is 200 market so the need for like cheaper payments and the need for acquiring customers is not going to go away and if you collapse those two things together we are in this new world of like payments and ads working together um which which i just find intellectually very fascinating um and i think we're just seeing sprouts of that now so oh that is a really good framing um i do want to kind of comment and dig into that but i don't want to deprive look of any comments that he wanted to share so i'll go for it yeah i sometimes i get a bit abstract so i apologize in advance it's the mathematician in me i i think uh i think all of us that i have are seeing a different angle of uh the stable coin and the payment system in defy which is fascinating i think the usd usdc guys at circle they have uh an incredible um perspective on the on ramping of ramping of liquidity and the true use of usdc as i mean means of payment which is fascinating at die way is slightly different i think at maker we are we are starting to see the use of dye as as a as a great stabilizer of defy you will never imagine because die ultimate is like his very sen is a central liquidity source of defy very trustable and now after the last two weeks we are starting to see the value of this trust uh i always thought the other collateral is the the the the problem that over collateralization is not a scalable system increa in stable coins is a meme is not true but and i'm i will not i will got into that rabbit hole but i think we are starting to see dye being used as a stabilizer of many use cases in define from interest rates to credit credit uh interest rates and uh liquidity risk here here and there and i think this is something that i wouldn't i wouldn't have it was not imaginable a couple of years ago right i think crypto instability were two things that were not going together but i think it's um it's something that we will see more and more and more over the years absolutely and i remember uh just two years ago we're celebrating uh d5 tbl hitting a billion dollars and then now we're over 100 and nobody even thinks about like that exponential leap and uh the the pace that everything is evolving is just truly mind-blowing um fran i want also going to give you a chance uh of course streaming is a super interesting massive category of its own what's kind of been something that you've kind of seen uniquely enabled on the streaming money side well actually without mentioning stream money i think what uh stripe did was super interesting as niki mentioned i mean that was just uh incredible right it really shows you how crypto can break barriers significantly right where a traditional fintech would have to go and have specific partners in each country they want to make a payout and that's you know effectively you know means only google can do it with crypto you can send money anywhere right and that's something we're seeing a lot uh also in superfluid you know if you look at some of the teams that are using superfluid to pay compensation right they pay people all over the world in a lot of cases they don't even know where their team is right and they can just pay that because an address is just a unique identifier that that is all you need to make a payment right contrast that with a bank where you know you get asked the reason for the payment you get asked you know the address of the payment i recently got asked the birthday of the payee right so it's just a completely different world and if you think of the fact that you can establish long-term financial relationships just by clicking a button and making one transaction on the blockchain i think it's clear that there's a lot of opportunities there and as nikki said it's it's a massive market so you know bringing payments on chain and bringing uh onboarding that next billion users will be through payments i have no doubts because not everybody needs to trade uh dog money right but everybody needs to make payments and that's absolutely and this is exactly what i was going to comment on now from nikhil's question which is yeah fundamentally the the reason why some of these massive um kind of companies sort of got the network set up is because you have to take on anyone from the legal cost to understanding the the generalization of this payout network and it's different for every jurisdiction different for every country different for even different amounts triggering various edge cases and you now just get to eliminate that by having an address that just exists and you can figure out multiple ways to now use that or disperse that in different places and i think like that's to me an interesting good example of a middleman where you've just made that the abstraction and it can flow anywhere from there and now you have explorations possible on both sides so i can need to figure out which fiat railway to connect to to disperse it in different places that's what stripes kind of going on on the other side now i have the money i can stream it in different places but it's on the top layer that's where superfluid is going and you fundamentally have uh yeah programmatically sort of enable a whole new world that just wasn't possible before when we kind of think about that essentially of course i agree money is a massive market everybody needs that for for everything in any capitalistic world but uh is is kind of the thinking here that we fundamentally just get the same experiences that we already know and use in our daily lives they're just now more transparent or or faster or do you kind of believe that it changes how we also interact i mean niki touched on like the ad part of things and customer acquisitions becomes a lot more easier but uh like how do we think about room for improvement on now bunny being on chain it's an open question we can uh i can have anybody of you first luca yeah i i can say that if it's fine for the other panelists i i i always joke that i think money is the most sophisticated must must be mass market product in the world it's like the most complex philosophical product we all use it we completely ignore how it works and we're all happy which is incredible because i mean but i think the point is money does many things right we always we always have the the canonical definition that money is uh currency in general is a unity of account is a storage of value is uh is a means of exchange but i think there is another there is another point that i think is the most important is an allocator of resources we work more where we get more money and it's four very complex uh functionalities that are wrapped into one it is the banknote we have in our pockets or the money we think we have in our accounts that is actually very different from the banknotes but people ignore it uh but i think so we we are we we go used to the idea that the net the money of the future should be the same should be like uh uh this omni comprehensive product i don't think it's gonna be the case i think we will see different types of currency or subsets of currency doing different things and then you might have a a great stable coin i hate the term but it's let's keep stablecoin i get a great civil coin for transact a great stablecoin to access leverage a great stablecoin to store value great stablecoin to allocate incentives and and this is what the token economy is enabling and i think we will start seeing this type of specialization in uh what are some of the properties of like these three examples like what will be different for for a coin there and and why does that classification exist i mean i i'll give an example that an infamous example of what happened in the last few months so tara was minting usd people were not using usd as a mean of exchange they were not using usd as a storage value they were using usd as an access for leverage that was the only thing it was not a stablecoin it was a it was a money market product within uh within a coin and you know i don't want to go into the details but it was it was a source of leverage uh people are using die to store value on chain because they think they believe in this principle of decentralization and over collateralization and the crypto natives they love using die as as that that storage of value but die itself uses usdc because usdc is a great stabilizer because represents mimics the power and the trust of the us economy into crypto and we are the largest holder of usdc in the world at least until a couple of days a couple of a couple of weeks ago uh so there it is and the relationship is synergic usdc is also used for transacting off ramping and ramping and and maybe other tokens that can be can flow through the superfluid protocol for example that are not coins will be incredible tools to incentivize people better than currency so i think we started to see things being they differentiate themselves and it's difficult for us because we have always considered money as one single monolithic construct but it is not even in the real world and i i stopped rambling mumbling but even in the in the real world people are using the dollar in a different way compared to how they use their local currency in emerging markets that is a payment tool the dollars is an international payment tool or storage of value and i think it's it's become it will become more and more and more specialized now what would be the ultimate experience of the end user i don't know probably would be seamless but in the background many many interesting things will happen i think that's a really interesting attraction to dig into i i think fran you wanted to say something so i'll let you and kind of comment on the original question we can dig into this this afternoon i wanted to comment on lucas uh on what luke is saying that's something i've i've been thinking about a lot and i think with things like superfluid where you can actually really accelerate the movement of money and automate it we will start seeing people having basically no dollars in their bank account right but that's not because they're not transacting in dollars they are transacting in dollars they're simply transacting really quickly but they're not holding any dollars they're holding maybe bitcoin or ethereum right so they're using dollars as a medium of exchange but not necessarily as a store value or stability or anything else right so these kinds of things become possible as you build financial automations and financial tools that enable money to move faster and exchange forms faster right if it becomes easier to for example imagine if as a user you can put your bitcoin or ethereum as collateral and then borrow in a stream to pay your rent right at that point uh maybe you're the person you're paying a rent to is then reinvesting it into bitcoin right so i'm paying the rent in uh in dollars i'm taking the leverage in dollars but i actually never hold dollars and the counterparty never holds dollars either so we're using dollars purely as a unit of account for the rental contract and as a medium of exchange but neither of us actually have dollars right so it's a pretty fascinating idea if you start thinking about it really is i was going to say we're kind of coming up with the the photons of the money world's analogy in this case yeah i love that idea by the way i think like the i mean money is many things to lucas point like you know cash is highly inefficient sits in my pocket and doesn't do anything and so cash money dollars in my bank account sits and sits in the account and doesn't do anything well it does do something it allows the bank to lend forward but i think like one of the things that fran is pointing out that like it can do more things for me um like if i have 200 hours in the bank i can have it be in bitcoin i can you know real time essentially stream my rent i find that idea really fascinating like because i came to work on this primarily because i think the risk capital in the world is like uh misallocated and like how can we get it to be allocated better because it's sort of that's what people who are poor need is they need risk capital they don't need a gift of money right like if they need like a stable form of capital and they need they need to be able to take risk which is in america it's it's phenomenal like the way you can do that and crypto does that on chain now you can take on risk um you you can chain not take on risk you know there's not as much risk capital it's all over collateralized but i think like the dream is that it's under collateralized and like you can have like the money if i have like a thousand dollars sitting in my usdc account it's actually true for me today i have money any cash i have i put into maple finance now it's it's not quite streaming there is a lock-in uh but it's just money that i parked there because it's being used to like fund these businesses on the other side and there's a very specific type of business there today but the reason i fund it is because i believe more real-world businesses are going to come in through these pools that people are exposing and it's highly efficient for me to be able to deploy that money it takes me like two minutes like going to my metamask to do a couple of clicks and the money is deployed i think that kind of efficiency is really really powerful uh in terms of like creating opportunity for people right like that's what that's what gets me jazzed which is uh i mean all the other d5 constructs are fascinating but like if we can connect the real world to this then we should be able to like none of us should have like that cash uh we should and we should that doesn't mean that we don't get access to liquidity today we hold cash because we need access to liquidity i think we could deploy our cash and still have access to liquidity would be like the magical place to be and then we can have like fund more things in the world because we would just be fundamentally more efficient so um but yeah friend i'd love i actually was just reading a paper uh before starting i find it fascinating yeah and i think i can jump in here because i think it's it's it's relevant to what nikita just said to describe how we can compose this monetary stack so die we have an infinite balance sheet we can print as many times we want as long as there is trust in the die so we need good collateral to print die against and we started with this idea of onboarding real world use cases a year ago in a bootstrap way saying okay let's go to the borrowers directly but it would be like the fed trying to underwrite a mortgage of an individual of a corporate so it's very inefficient it's a test so we are starting to do protocol to protocol liquidity and the example of maple is is a relevant example because maple has been currently approved by the maker community to develop a direct deposit module where there will be a dipole potentially where uh maker will be the stabilizer of the pool maker will print money and deposit it as a senior tranche of the pool that then loans the money out together with other other money uh through pool delegates that take first first loss risk into the real economy and in this way we are we are letting die flow in the hands of as many people as possible but in a very sustainable way and composable way where we have a competitive advantage infinite balance sheet at quasi-zero cost of capital other pools have other competitive advantages they are great in creating products they have great access to the ultimate borrowers they have a great user experience or structure whatever so we give them our advantage advantage access to a super cheap and infinite source of capital as long as they do their job well and they do the rest of the heavy lifting and take most of the profits in this way we can help other borrowers to other lenders to take the right type of risk they want and not being exposed to a bank run and borrowers to access risk capital because i agree this is this is the real what what we want we want to give risk up good risk capital to the right borrowers and maple is doing it to our frequency traders tomorrow we'll do it to somebody else gold finch is doing in in the emerging markets credits wants to do it in emerging markets true fi is doing it to corporates so there is a great there is a there is a lot of innovation there absolutely i think uh no that's a really good way to think about kind of just framing that and i was going to say like for for both of you uh luca and nikhil like how uh i feel like i think ustc especially is in more of a position where you get to see more traditional businesses coming in and and on ramping um kind of from your perspective like what's holding up uh more volumes to kind of go up or or anywhere from mercenary adoption to just a high kind of volume case like what are some common themes or roblox that you see or questions that get asked yeah i mean i think from uh we can look at it both from a lending perspective and a borrowing perspective i think from a lending perspective um people are still skeptical of crypto yields they don't fully understand it like i think was it last week that u.s terror died like uh yeah so uh that is not good for us right like as an industry people just equate usdc die usdt uh with terra and they have the same questions and even our largest largest lenders called us that day and they said well how does this affect you uh even though we are very clear that we are bitcoin uh like you know when you put money into circle yield it's over collateralized with bitcoin and it's there's there's no connection to us there um but still makes people nervous and i think it's just early days in terms of people getting comfortable with uh yield that crypto markets can create um also our yields are not the best right now because like you know there's just the fed is giving out amazing yield and and so and i think that is not lost on people so they're like well i can take on the risk of crypto but for what so i think that'll that'll eventually settle uh one argument can be well those scenes are going to converge uh eventually because like who cares whether it's crypto or uh or not well i i still think there's some time before that happens the on on the undercollateralized landing side i'd say on the on the borrowing side so to speak um i'd say we're just like maples just a year old even goldfinch i think is less than a year old like being in market i'm sure those projects are longer but like them being live it's so early look at the experience of like lending into a pool on maple today like you can go and evaluate like you know the pool you can see their history you can see who they're lending out to but you really don't know because you really haven't digested the data there's no rating service on the debt that they have there's nobody who is tracking like the performance of the underwriter over a long enough period of time and arguably there hasn't been a long enough period of time and so the at least my my vision is that like eventually we move into a world in which there are hundreds and thousands of like underwriters on the internet and they are in these like very specific pools that are specific to industry um and like you know if you're in climate you want to represent carbon credits on chain and you want to make sure there's a unique representation of a carbon credit so it's not sold twice it's like a common problem that i have found in my discussions um if you are i talked to somebody who was doing a protocol and they were just buying invoices and they had a specific protocol where they would buy the invoices um and make 10 on like a net 90 invoice and they have specific needs and that's going to get encoded in a protocol and then eventually they will have specific underwriters within that protocol you know who are who are essentially managing that debt so i think this whole ecosystem will evolve really fast we need is i think systems that can help it across these different pools systems that can evaluate the different pools uh more more primitives to represent these assets on chain because those primitives are very basic right now um and then what could be like what's the list of new primitives or variations that we we need to see i know you already could i think they're industry specific like that's what i said like you know how do you represent a carbon credit like uh there are these voluntary carbon markets like um and now verification is easier for some class of use cases because you have satellite imagery okay great so i know that the trees that you said are going to be there are there but now if i there's no way of knowing did you start at carbon credit three times uh well if everything goes on chain you can be sure that it wasn't sold three times right like so um i think it is going to be by industry so i don't think maybe there's one protocol that rules them all and it's possible um but i think there will be some sort of like you know if you look at the web and then they will search and um i don't know what the equivalent of search is but i think we will go looking for yield across these vast pools as as an economy and we're going to have to figure out like you know what are the systems we need to sort of allocate capital across these different yield pools people will have a zillion preferences and and then all of this how does this intersect the real world in terms of security laws uh do you only want this to be a defy system not really if you want to attract all the money then you have to intersect the world of securities laws at some point how will that work i think so those questions come from businesses as well going back to the original question like you know well if i buy this am i buying a security and what happens if i connect my wallet to it what is the wallet is hosted there's all kinds of uh regulatory things that we're still reasoning through but i'm very optimistic that if you can show the benefit then the demand will come the supply will come you can call it you can call either side the demand rule supply because the need is there like the if you are starting a business today if you want to do something new in the world you need capital and that need is gonna not is not going away anytime soon and nobody will say that it is a very efficient market and so i think for access right yeah the internet will do for like uh for allocating the stress capital what like you know the internet did for like information it made it super cheap so how will that happen i don't know it's one it's only been like nine months or a year of this ecosystem i i'm very excited about it though so like i think it goes past payments i think payments is really one i'll give it to uh i'll give it back uh payments is really interesting because it creates that on-chain data that can be used for verification like um you know is the supplier somebody who pays on time how much have they paid who have they paid can you analyze the network of payees what can you learn about it can you then grade the supplier higher or lower based on that it's just it's like navigating a network and like learning and making building an index and like learning about it and then but yeah done very differently because you're allocating money my monies has value getting information wrong has also has cost but the cost is not immediate it is diffused so you've essentially made the case for lucas argument for specialization needed yeah 100 but i just don't know if like i believe that there is a stable coin per ecosystem or if there's just different ecosystems that all have like different rules and they're all normalized using a dollar denominated silver coin or if you look at fran's argument which is like so in each of these ecosystems you hold maybe the native coin and then you use the dollar just to settle and you're in and out of the door really fast that may be just fine like i don't know which way you'll go luca friend anything you want to add to this i mean i i agree i think i it's great to be to remain open-minded and i think i have no clue as well how this will develop and i think a good researcher reacts to new information with new hypothesis so it is something that we keep we keep evolving but what is exciting of this industry for people like ourselves is we are not like journalists that are trying to predict the future we are working to make that future real so we also have an influence on how these things would develop and i think i i myself i came into this industry after 15 years in traditional finance and i see incredible amount of talent coming into this industry and they don't really care about prices so i think even the bear market is going to be extremely productive and i i think more talent will come in the more ideas and would be developed so it's something that we can we can shape together and we don't need necessarily to to mimic exactly what was before defy i also think for example that i i this is a dream because i think it will mean that we will have had a successful transition on on chain economy i think at some point we will abandon the pack like like uh like a an emerging market that doesn't need to be packed to the dollar for credibility but now is is big enough to to walk on his uh on its own uh legs i think i mean at some point maybe is the value of if they will represent the value of their economy and they will be the base of the monitor for the monetary stack of a certain ecosystem and they will and it's it seems impossible now but maybe maybe maybe not not in the future also considering the inflation data and the uncertainty on the value of the monetary staff we're seeing but institutions like institutions like circle for example are so important because they are bridging the old world into the new rails and although i have no doubts that we will migrate completely in a blockchain enabled financial system i don't know when this is going to happen and i think if we screw things up we might delay this adoption by 20 years which in our in our perspective it seems like it's like the same as it would never happen so i think having uh incredibly professional and dedicated innovative bridges between the the off-chain and the on-chain economy is the most important thing we we we need we have and i i truly hope that the dialogue with the regulators will be constructive because um because it's so important for the regulators to participate in this migration order immigration otherwise it will happen anyway but it will happen it will happen in a messy way and the weak ones will be the ones who suffer and we don't want this to happen so this it is very exciting but i'm also like for me my call to action is we are not here looking at the future and trying to predict how is it going to be and that in the capital markets based on our prediction we are here because we want to shape it so everyone has a responsibility in the quality of the tweets and the quality of the research and the quality of work to not just to speculate but to create uh the future we want and i'm not i'm not an idealist here i think it is real and we all have this kind of personal responsibility how we interact with the ecosystem or outside of the ecosystem now i think that's a really well put argument and i wish that was my last question because it would have been a perfect note to end on um oh i do have one more question but i want to give fran a chance to comment as well and uh we can get to wrapping up the panel yeah honestly there's not much i can add those were two great interventions um the only thing i might comment to is something uh nikhil said about how yields are leaving because they're the fed is hiking up their own interest rates so and that's something that's uh we've seen a few times right when uh when we started superfluid the yields and d5 were at zero i don't know how many people remember that um even maker dow i think had negative uh negative interest rate at some point so what um what that tells us the fact that they're inversely correlated tells us that the interest that we see in defy is purely driven by speculation because there's no actual economic activity if there were uh uncollateralized borrowing and lending then we would have yields even if yields in uh in the traditional markets are high but we don't because there is nothing except for speculation at the moment and i think it's very important to bring those payments from chain to create those markets from uncollateralized lending because that will stabilize yields if people are borrowing on chain then there's yields right regardless of what the off chain yields are right and that will break that inverse specu inverse relationship between the the yields and defined uh treasuries which will also mean that you know crypto in general becomes a real mature market right so ultimately breaking the direct connection between speculation and crypto is the only way we have to make this mature and i think uh payments are ultimately the harbor of that right because everybody needs to make payments it's the simplest way to bring people on board and it will bring with it things like credit it will bring with it things like more efficient supply chains potentially cheaper everything right because we have more efficient rails for moving value so overall yeah uh as as lucas said feel a responsibility to make that future happen and work in that direction i absolutely agree so so maybe one optimistic to end that will be uh just maybe getting a preview of how each of you are kind of enabling that would love to learn about what you think is important for maker to do and for circle to do and for super fluidity to actually get millions more people coming in and be onboarded i start with maker very quickly i i i spent an immense amount of energy over the last few months trying to protect the con this concept of prudence because we have a responsibility managing a stable coin and unfortunately these days it is quite evident that i was right it doesn't feel good to be right and i want to keep evolving balancing this the need for prudence because i think it is very very important so what we are trying to do at maker is through protocol to protocol interactions we want to onboard as much high quality collateral as possible on chain showing to the world that there is a super efficient source of capital out there that can be used to distribute tunica's point uh risk capital around the world so showing that this value also for protocols that can build on this portable liquidity from maker and if we are successful pro the ecosystem will thrive capital will go into the right ends not the ones that want to speculate or originate or run away maker will expand and uh the die will be in more hands and obviously we will be even more important in a difficult system while staying you know being composable with others and i want to stress for example there is space because everybody is a different specialization so we have a very strong and deep strategic relationship with usdc and it's a pillar of our of our construct and we think this will be will remain and will expand as we grow and mature so i think this is what we're trying to do over the next the next few months i i i can go um i i think click for for us um uh we have like three broad focus areas one is uh we want to increase like the programmability of ustc so fundamentally we think about usdc as a platform uh we think about um the platform attributes being uh liquidity trust and speed and that's what we push on all day um like that's what frames our entire product effort uh how can we be more liquid how can we if you want to do something with usdc how can you do it fast uh and and then how we how do we maintain trust at all times so so we're going to keep pushing on that and like that just means supporting more chains we have more functionality coming uh and as we do that like we are sort of guiding light is where the developers are so we go where the developers tell us to go and there are good ways of analyzing that data and like we just we consume the data and we follow the developers it's very simple um so that's on the stable coin side on the and then like broadly speaking we have two applications that we care about deeply uh one is payments um uh payments is uh we're going to do more in terms of increasing uh increasing value in like crypto payments uh i think um and supporting like various methods of payments for the merchants that we are working with like merchants come to us today for vr payment rails uh we're gonna give them uh a way to manage uh crypto rails as well uh in the future so that's one aspect and then there's like all these accessory businesses around that and the third thing for us is uh is trying to figure out how to bring real world assets on chain and how to enable those markets what is our role there uh we're still reasoning through it because a lot of this is very exciting but still very early so i do agree with fran's point that payments is ready today like you know everybody needs to do it it's a great way to onboard people um and the last thing i'd say is like um there's a lot of one thing i am careful about as i reason about this is i approach everything with a lot of curiosity and not a lot of judgment because i don't know like you know there's a funky new liquidity scheme that like is is really really important to the ecosystem i'm going to read the white paper i'm going to try to make sense of it and sometimes it doesn't make sense like you know and it's just mind-boggling to us like as to why something should exist but it does but our job at circle is to keep making widgets like that's what we do um and and we make widgets for developers and we make widgets for businesses and like i am pretty confident that we have plenty of widgets to make over the next two years i'm not bothered by the bear market i'm not bothered by like you know like all the noise with regulation like because fundamentally i believe like what we're doing is useful we are reducing cost we are increasing opportunity and as long as we can make that argument in good faith and with at two very high scrutiny i feel good about like uh what we're doing so yeah the best thing about that is uh it's measurable and uh defensible on chain we can see it measurable and defensible or unchanged so yeah you don't have to believe me you can just you just need to write you need to write something that can aggregate the data that's it and it's clearly working so uh i totally agree friend last words to you well i mean similarly to uh what nikila and luca said ultimately we have to keep building doesn't matter right whatever happens in the market doesn't matter we started the market when yields were negative that didn't matter uh the yields might become negative again it still doesn't matter right what we're doing is useful uh it's bringing efficiency increasing opportunity in our case i also feel we're you know fundamentally bringing something new right so it's even hard to tell exactly what the use cases will be so the most important things for superfluid are actually very similar to uh to circle right it's keep building for developers and enable those developers to explore those use cases to build those applications that will on board the users right ultimately pro like crypto loves protocols but protocols don't on board users right protocols or pure uh you know rules for information exchange we need people to build applications that solve problems right what we do is just provide the primitives that allow those applications to create new things right but we still need the builders and they need to build useful things so ultimately providing developer tools is the single most important thing that all of us can do and onboarding developers will onboard users because if what we're doing you know unless we're all being uh extremely wrong uh we're bringing efficiency right and there's no uh there's no way that you know regulatory scrutiny or you know the occasional implosion of uh ill-devised financial scheme will stop this right it's still uh useful and that's not gonna change uh regardless of what happens outside of the industry but uh i just wanna echo again what luca said i do feel that we have a responsibility to make that future happen and uh it's one of the reasons i think a lot of people don't take crypto halfway right you see people fall down the rabbit hole and the reason they fall down the rabbit hole is that they are seeing future in the making and that is extremely exciting right uh it's not like uh you know changing button colors at google you're literally changing the way the money ex the world experiences money right that experience is the transfer of value so there's something about krypton web feed which is extremely exciting for builders and uh building more exciting tools for those builders is extremely rewarding for us so that's what we'll keep doing there was a time at google where it wasn't just about changing colors but there was like you know i was early like mid-2000s like 2005 google but like there was a time where like and the same things happened like you know first they were semi-conductor companies then they were the you know the cisco's of the world and like eventually reached google then it became about youtube and it became about the apps so i think we're following the same path and i think we're somewhere in the early part of that cycle um but yeah it's like uh i may be older than all of you so i have seen this movie at least once before but it's exciting it's exciting to be part of this uh to be building at this speed which is which is i enjoy tremendously yeah i think that's a perfect note to end this on i want to thank all three of you for uh taking the time today so look any kill friend really appreciate the amazing thoughtful discussion and uh we hope to bring you on again and have a round two of this thank you bye thank you very much thanks for joining folks