Compound Dashboard

[Music] [Applause] [Music] so next up we have cole and spencer who are going to talk about the compound that they built as part of being a grant recipient so i will welcome both of them here on stage and cole and spencer whenever you're ready feel free to get started welcome thank you awesome thank you so thank you everyone uh for coming today and really appreciate the invite to the talk today we are going to be presenting some work that we did for the compound grants program called the compound dashboard which is an analytics dashboard for the compound protocol you can actually go visit it now at compoundfinance.info if you want to check it out yourself and what it is is a dashboard for a holistic view of the compound protocol itself and a deeper dive into analytics so talk a little bit about ourselves we are paperclip labs we are an agency focused on building web3 products so we design develop uh and uh focus on user research and strategy uh our backgrounds are in the traditional tech world and we um kind of realized that there was an opportunity here for us to bring our skill set to the grants program so my name is cole and joining me today is spencer you may have noticed our last names are the same we are actually brothers and we started paperclip labs about six months ago i want to give a massive shout out to larry actually for really kind of getting us started and kind of asking us every day when we were going to quit our jobs and come and do this full-time so today we're going to talk a little bit about what we built and the learnings that we learned from what we actually built what else we've done and what we're hoping to do next as an agency focused in this space yeah so first what we built is an analytics website for the compound protocol before we kind of get into what it is or kind of how we built it we kind of want to say why we built it um so initially we were looking to invest in a stablecoin marketing compound and we're interested in seeing the historical interest rates to see which market had performed the best over time there was there wasn't really any data on this i looked on the content website and a few other websites couldn't really find anything i messaged in the compound discord and said you know is there currently a way to see historical market interest rates the response was kind of not really i looked at the discord and also saw other people had mentioned this earlier in the weeks past so we saw this as an opportunity to kind of create a product here to help people get more information about the compound protocol so for our mvp we just built a really simple website which showed the apy over time taking data from the compound api now this is kind of where the project is going to stop we kind of answered our question about what stablecoin we wanted to invest in and you know we shared this with the community hoping it would help some other people as well at the time the compound grants was just forming so actually one of the community members who was helping out with the compound grants committee introduced us to larry we spoke with larry about this and he kind of convinced us to kind of pursue this further so we applied for a grant to provide a website that would provide a holistic view of the compound protocol data and provide users data that they wanted to see to make informed investment decisions so this kind of brought us to the first stage of building this app out which is the initial research so in the initial research phase we we had a list of ideas of what we could do for this dashboard we knew that we needed to compare interest rates over time but didn't really know what else the community might want so we reached out to the community via the discord and sent out a survey just asking people you know what do you actually want to see from an analytics dashboard what's missing right now and what can we build to hopefully fill that that void we've got some really great results from this and one of the one of the bits of feedback that we received initially we actually brought forward with us and this is kind of our north star that we used when designing and building out the first iteration of the product and any future sets uh moving forward and that quote was you know i think making sure that the community members sent to us was you know i think making sure that every number on the page is meaningful even to the most novice of users and this was really valuable and really kind of set the stage for the way that we built the product itself we also wanted to ask what already exists out there were there other tools that could do this what other tools are kind of the best-in-class solution one of the platforms that we kind of referenced often is the unison swap info dashboard this is a really easy dashboard to use and gives you a great overall view of the protocol as well as individual markets within unispot so we kind of felt like this was a great opportunity for compound to have something similar when it came to how could we compare interest rates over time we looked at a lot of different financial applications and the one that we found that did a really great job from a user experience was google finance there's a really neat feature in google finance that allows you to compare stocks prices over time and we felt that we could bring that feature into the dashboard itself so in this image here you can see that we are comparing at the bottom there's a line item of little pill pills that you can click on and you can compare different interest rates over time by selecting different time frames so this is compound info this is the protocol overview page on this page it has information and data about the compound protocol as a whole so you see things like supply and borrow as well as reserves over time a few key pieces of information like how many unique users and utilization and you'll notice throughout the application there's these headings like the utilization one has these small underlines underneath probably might be hard to see in this image but as the user hovers over this they get a tooltip that pops up and it explains what utilization is how it's calculated and why it's useful this is important that you know no matter what caliber of users using this interface they'll be able to learn about different things of the compound protocol if they aren't already aware down below there's a table of all the compound markets so here there's a few key statistics and if we go and click into the die market we can get into the individual markets page so the main piece of information here is that apy over time chart that colon showed so you can compare the supply and borrow api with and without the comp distribution of different assets over time we also have some key statistics about the market again all these headings are tooltips that the user can hover over to get more information if they're not sure what this piece of data is and below there's another chart which should supply borrowing reserves over time for the individual asset so kind of how it was built in the development stack behind this um the company api provides really good data about like current um about the current market but we weren't able to pull the data in from there about historical interest rates and all the like time series data to populate our charts actually a community member from the compound discord reached show and introduced us to flip side crypto flip side is a data aggregator for the blockchain they aggregate on-chain data into these tables that allow users to query them off chain um so what we did is write sql queries and then a really um powerful tool that they have is exporting these queries as an api so we talked to the flip side crypto team asked them if it was okay to use their application for data for hours so they're kind of our backend for all the times you use data we use gas now for the gas information on the website and then the compound api for any of the current information like market statistics this all comes into our react application on the front end and gets displayed and re we use recharge for our plotting libraries so once we release this the community we kind of put it out in the community discord dm'd a few members that were really active and just kind of wanted to get some feedback initially everybody said you know this is really cool they find this really useful but they wanted to see more so this is one quote from a community member that says this is awesome do the interest rates include com any way to get more information as part of historical rates at the time our apy chart didn't include the comp distribution so we actually had this kind of in the pipeline it was a feature that was coming but so we implemented this um we were able to implement this pretty easily to toggle on and off the comp distribution for your assets um so essentially uh there's a lot of requests similar to this one from community members and we kind of got thinking you know what other value can we bring to the table what other things can we do and what are our next steps here yes so with regards to next steps as spencer mentioned we reached out to the community again this time with another survey asking community members what they wanted to see what additional things they wanted to see beyond the current version of the the analytics dashboard that we had built we received some really great feedback from the community members and we ended up taking that feedback and compiling some feature sets that we were actually able to come back to the grants committee and apply for a second grant to continue building the dashboard itself so we're currently actually working on the next version of the dashboard and that will be slowly releasing some new features for that in the coming weeks today we want to also talk about like what we learned actually working for the grant committee or the compound grants program so the first thing is that we learned working here is that the timelines are self-driven as a uh as a grant recipient you set the timeline as as well as the milestones for your project so it's really important that if you are thinking about doing a grant you really set realist our recommendation would be setting you know realistic timelines and milestones for you to hit and achieve so you can build that product and get that out another thing we learned is there's many ways to gather feedback you don't have to just use the discord channel you can use things like twitter reddit dm community members and even like searching uh old the historic or the historical information in discord you can find some really great questions from community members about possible features that might be missing another thing we learned is that you prioritize the features at the beginning we mentioned this quote that we received from the user saying that the prep that dashboard should be easy for as easy for a novice user to use when we got feedback from the community we did have to think about making sure that the information that we're going to be displaying and new features that we might input into the dashboard meet that criteria of being easy to use so we did have to kind of cut some some community feedback we felt in some cases there was some feedback that was maybe more of an advanced feature that you could probably find or build and do an analytics dashboard or some other dashboard we felt that our analytics dashboard was really just focused on that core community as our core novice user of the protocol and giving a a pretty good understanding of what's going on within the protocol itself and the last thing is that the community is amazing and awesome we found that people are so willing to give you feedback and help you uh as spencer mentioned you know a community member reaching out and introducing us to the flip side team um so our biggest recommendation is if you are working on a grant or thinking about working for a grant reach up to the community you can get some really great feedback from them and learn a ton as well so that was one of the grants that we did we've actually worked on two other compound grants along the way and we'll quickly just share you share with you some of the other grants we've worked on so we had the opportunity to do the help with the compound grants branding we partnered with the compound design team and massive shout out to jason on the design team for really supporting us throughout this experience you can check out the compound grants branding on the twitter pages or on their the compound grants website we also worked on a platform called stake signal which is almost like a margin call tool for the compound protocol we worked on the branding product design and user research phases for this product and actually patrick is going to be sharing in the next talk so we won't talk too much more about this but wanted to kind of share some of the other things we've been able to do so what's next for us um so from the compound grants program and the work that we've done here we've actually got some other projects which has been really amazing for us as an agency uh to keep building so most recently we did the branding logo and website for the d5 education fund we've had some opportunities to work on some really cool projects in the nft and gaming spaces which we hopefully will be able to share in the future as we worked in this industry as well we've kind of realized there is a bit of a gap for uh contractors and freelancers uh to get as with regards to kind of getting paid and getting set up so we're currently thinking about working on our own project at the moment about how that how we could kind of make that transition easier for a freelancer etc coming into the space and how getting paid can work and manage we're also always looking to to other to work with a grants as well so if you do have any grants or are interested in working with us in the future please feel free to reach out you can send us a dm on twitter which is at paperclip labs or you can check out our website which will be posting some information about our some of our projects that we've worked on in the near future so you can check that out as well again thanks so much for having us today and really hope that everyone has the opportunity and goes to think about things about applying for the grant we would highly recommend the compound grants program as a place to get started and build some cool products amazing goal spencer that was an incredible presentation and uh such amazing work we're getting a lot of great comments on the chat too about how impressive everybody is with the ui and all of your future feature plans um i was going to ask you how people can get involved but you already ended with that so everybody check out paperclip.xyz and uh this is amazing let us know how anybody else can contribute to this this is great thank you so much thank you thank you [Music] [Applause]