DeFi by Design EP#114: DeFi Dark Horse Curvance Unpacked

Transcript

welcome back to the rollup High Roller Community as always nothing on the rollup is to be construed as Financial advice we are just an Educators in the defi space toss us a quick like give us a share a repost send it to a friend who may want to watch this and finally give us a sub or a follow it means the world to help support credibly neutral educational content in def5 we're here to educate Empower and enrich you and let's jump in welcome to D5 by Design we talk all things blockchain and cryptocurrency while striving to educate Empower and enrich what's going on guys welcome back to episode 114 of the D5 by Design podcast uh welcome to the bull market

Chris might not believe it or my as she likes to go by but I'm telling you it's here so fade him at all costs or else he'll talk your ear off about math for an hour but today we're going to dive deeper and we're going to go into Sou uh I think really the the Weeds about uh on the Chain lending I mean I think there's different types of lending that's happening and um yeah I'd like to really dive into the reads there talk that what kurur is doing um and yeah we're here with Rob of course but we're running low on time so we're gonna skip right over to ma ma you had a background being a qual um doing some onchain offchain math uh work uh how did that kind of lead you

to to to coming to build Defi and curant yeah so my background historically is in first thanks for the the intro I love the4 holy you guys have uh really been doing cranking these out that's awesome so love seeing the the triple digits there but yeah my uh my background before crypto is in traditional Finance so I worked at hedge funds building uh systematic trading algorithms or asset managers building a lot of like machine learning models General statistical models stuff like that working with a lot of like big trades you know hundreds of millions of dollars or billions of dollars and like how do you effectively buy or sell those

positions when you know that thing might not have change you know traded in the last two weeks or something a lot of like very um exotic like fixed income debt and stuff like that so yeah uh during covid actually I started looking I always had an interest in crypto stuff I uh when I was in undergrad in engineering before I went into Finance uh I spent a lot of time in undergrad like messing around like Bitcoin mining and stuff like that with some of my uh housemates and you know we didn't really we didn't do anything massive there we didn't make a ton of money or anything but it was pretty interesting and then I kind of uh signed off from the industry for number of years as I went through

you know into finance and then graduated did my masters went into um you know trafi and all that and then during covid Dove back in and found it pretty interesting because I saw a lot of um you know articles and literature about all the cool stuff people were building with like defi summer and stuff like that and it felt like it matured a lot and and it was actually becoming something interesting and to me it's really like one of the two industries it's like crypto and AI that are actually building like new interesting stuff instead of um you know kind of business as usual like minor improvements so to me like I want to build um compelling interesting like stuff that actually changes you know an

industry people's lives like the future to me that's a lot more compelling than like just trying to make like you know a lot of money or like climb the corporate ladder or whatever so um you know it's just been an industry that's really captivated me the last few years very cool yeah thanks for for taking us through the background and kind of leading up to like what you guys are doing now with with curv ANS um you spoke about how you kind of like refound crypto um and and specifically like onchain finance and defi during during uh pandemic and Co like what what was like the the portal like what was the

entrance point where you're like all right this is going to be the rabbit hole that I I dive deeper into like what what was that ENT point and then how did you ultimately find curve yeah that's that's a great question so for me um just the way I like learning about stuff is just to jump in with both feet so I have a background obviously very heavy in like um statistics you know programming building stuff right like a a software engineer um you know mathematician background and uh for me it was like okay well how do I if I'm interested in this stuff and and I saw a lot of different stuff like you know dexes are interested like amm and money markets and you know people building like permissionless like options

platforms a lot of this stuff that like requires a ton of people to underwrite or to manage in like traditional Finance people are now programming with code and to me that was interesting so it's like a whole basket of stuff like that like chain link and you know like a lot of things Like Ur and these kind of now are considered like the ogs but at the time we're really like at the top of their you know game in terms of like plur pration of their technology um so for me it was like okay I want to learn solidity I'm going to just like go through like you know looking at people's code you know messing around on like YouTube just writing stuff myself and I just kind of spent like day and night when I wasn't working uh learning and teaching myself a lot of solidity

and then as I felt more comfortable I offered to volunteer at a lot of different Dows a lot of those Dows are now like defunct but um as as with most like uh you know defi summer um you know volunteer DS and stuff but you know I it was an opportunity for me to really jump in with both feed and learn and just get exposure um you know a that stuff I did for free so it was really just like For the Love of the Game there and through that you know experience writing uh stuff volunteering writing stuff I ended up doing a lot of solo auditing as well and that's you know also helped me refine my craft and then you know just helping people build like their own project is like a de for higher and

things like that um it's just like I don't want to say like a notch in the belt but more and more experience that kind of compounds um into something where just you know I'm able to refine my skill set start building my own contract formats making really efficient stuff building Cool Tech and that really snowballed um into around May of last year and I was introduced through a mutual friend um to my co-founder and he had this idea for curvs um it was in origin origal the original form was like this third layer on top of curve convex and a few other platforms like Badger and Year and that took um you know like it took a lot of people's interest but

it was something that was difficult to build at the time just because there wasn't the technology like in terms of quality oracles and all this stuff um so I came in and obviously I have a more web to experience background so I was able to kind of clean house and actually start scoping out building uh curv ANS and it was one of those things where we went through this whole Market you know we had we're like trying to raise money at the time and then you have like Luda collapse then FTX like everyone's like everything's going to zero so we kind of um you know made it through with like a Sho string budget at a dream really and over time we've been able to see what's been successful in

the industry and what's not so um I use the example of like the the ship of Theus where you're basically replacing one plank over time and by the end of the voyage the whole ship's replaced and it's like is this even the same thing and to me that's kind of what curv an is um it's really become like my baby over the last 18 months here so it started as this like highlevel you know kind of Optimizer for a few different ecosystems and now has really become its own like Juggernaut of a D5 primitive um now it could basically handle like any D5 stuff any money market um functionality like you know everything from amm LP tokens Perpetual exchange amm token or

Perpetual exchange LP tokens uh interest bearing stable coins LSD 5 products liquid reaking like everything um any your C20 token basically permission permission list so on so that took forever to build uh we built pretty much all of our code from scratch and we were able to like I said see what's been successful and what's not so um a lot of like the crises that people have gone through like you know keeping the D5 protocols um you know alive and growing and and trying to make them Thrive we've been able to look at that and like improve um upon those models as well as like um you know throw out what we you know had in

our original design that maybe wouldn't have worked as you know well in the more mature market and and we're pretty happy where We've Ended up it's it's really become this like huge Juggernaut and something that I really didn't expect to get uh you know so involved with um if you told me I'd be doing this like three years ago or something I would not have believed you sure yeah I I I I'm curious like like starting from the concept of of building a third layer on top of curving conve convex um like like could you describe the that you inter like that you interplay with them like how how

would curv an as this third layer and I realized that it's changed quite a bit since since that initial concept but could you could you describe like that first uh use case as that layer on top of convex and then and then we'll maybe we can talk more about like how you generalized from there to incorporate like several other applications and and different token standards yeah yeah yeah definitely so um in that original form when I came in the vision was to basically be able to take like curve LPS or Like Ur assets or Badger assets and then basically deposit them into curv ANS and it would behave Ain to like a typical money market um all like a A or

a compound or at that time when U my coat originally came up with the idea was cream right so now you're going really far back um so it it would have essentially been like a basic money market for those assets and then your rewards just pull like you were in that um you know platform it just essentially is the same experience but with this like added utility of like the the money market you know collateralizing baring against it leveraging it um kind of a Kindle like gearbox at that time I is the example I would use but uh yeah it was one of those things where it's really funny I don't mean to interject but like we now have this entire like liquid staking narrative for eth uh for like uh e staked inv validators and

there's still like all of this like locked up liquidity in LP tokens like you're describing like you have that curve LP token you don't really have the mechanism to make that liquid so so by providing a money market where you can deposit this LP token now you have the ability to kind of make it liquid where someone can borrow against it you can get liquidity whereas otherwise it would have been lot so I don't mean to interrupt but I I think that on about unlocking liquidity yeah there's a few different angles that we've looked at it like one is definitely that like kind of unlocking as we describe it it's like hey you can just collateralize anything now right like we could very easily adapt our code to support like nfts and probably like a week of development does that mean we're

going to prioritize that on day one probably not but we could do anything um theoretically so it's one of those things where we could really offer like this whole new universe of opportunities for people and see what people really like and then we could double down on that and build greater support and um you know like keep maturing that that vertical um but yeah it was one of those things where like as I was building this I was like well this is like a really expensive process so we should make these things Auto compound right so that you don't you just have your assets natively Auto compound that's going to get you better yield you're not going to have to pay especially because when we were first was looking at this like gas

was still really high right so it's like okay most people don't want to pay $100 to claim $70 in rewards that would kind of suck um so I was like okay well why don't we make this Auto compounding well now that it's Auto compounding everyone's assets are together well now we can abstract that away and then why don't we support balancer stuff well why don't we also support like Pendle stuff well now we should start looking at other chains because now we could support all these like really performant like dexes and you know different um implementations well a Perpetual exchange LP token is basically the same thing so why don't we support those two and then you you keep you know going down that Avenue it's like well we could just support anything right like we

could support the most basic assets of like rap Bitcoin or link or uni or maker whatever you want but also like these very structured you know products like where you're talking about like Ando finances like treasury bills or um you know like all these different like uh almost like Index Fund tokens like uh like GP and stuff like that we can we could support pretty much anything because of the Vault design and we try to take that Vision with everything um you know that was like the first major break through for us was like let's just support everything and then the second was kind of pulling apart the current view of omni chain where it's like I have Tech that it you know can function

on one chain and then I'm going to make my token Omni chain and I can call it Omni chain like the whole protocol now that's not really in my eyes like what I would call Omni chain like so one that's kind of like a captured term so I I've been using this term that I call like cross chain equivalents now so it's like you know well yes like if you want to move like the CV token back and forth from chain to chain you could do that if you want to you know have assets on arbitr and then get them on optimism you could borrow them on ARB and then it's going to send them right over in that same transaction so you get your assets on another chain well if we have like gauge voting via like voting escro uh

models well why don't you let people vote from one chain to another or for any chain you know same thing with like fees rather than having people lock tokens on one chain and they get the fees on that one chain why don't we aggregate them all together and then now you could get fees on every chain which is pretty cool for you know a lot of these emerging chains and it's been something that a lot of these different chains that we've um talked to have been super excited about so you just keep like abstracting away a lot of the um you know rough edges in in what we see in defi today and I think it helps um you know break down the barriers of like integrating and using defi products right like you think about the average

person that just bought like eth on coinbase and then they move it over to their metamask and they're like okay what do I do now you was people that in the last cycle would look at YouTube videos for like lping on Sushi swap or maybe they're reading a medium article for how to use like how to provide liquidity on GMX or maybe even there's like long Twitter threads like you guys even you know do some content on this it's like here's how you can you know do these different strategies or here's this schol Tech you could use what if we could like abstract away a lot of that and make it so like maybe your grandma can't do it just yet but you know any kind of normal um defi curious person can so suddenly you don't need to go on

Twitter and figure out where the best dees are on that chain or how to bridge over to base or you know do all these different things if we just handle all that complexity for you I think it ends up just being a lot more enjoyable because who wants to open 10 tabs to do some complex operation when you could just open one and use curv yeah a couple things uh on the last point the all-in-one model is definitely becoming more popular all they just put on put swaps on their platform I know other lending markets have integrated dexes and bridges all into their the their platform which is like a huge thing because again like going to four different apps to bridge swap deposit lend borrow swap

rbridge reutilize some other app is just a lot a tongue twister yeah let alone doing it right and then and then on the um uh on the Omni chain concept I think you're totally right the the uh what like the the the projects that we have right now that are like cross chain Omni chain are like close but they're not like that true definition um and so uh catalyst is an amm that's coming out that's that's going to be like fully fully cross chained just by Design with their code you guys will come out um as well and then you know we'll see uh your implementation either with Wormhole or some other kind of Technology Axel or or one of these to enable that and yeah

that kind of deposit on one chain borrow on the next all inone transaction get get used liquidity across different chains to get the best rates on dexes things like that feels like we're like getting really close to that I think that's going to be a 2024 thing and that's something that that in 2020 we we were kind of like dreaming of and then we had like a go to polygon and we thought that was the coolest thing ever that you could Bridge the polygon and still use a and now it's like we're going to use all these different chains uh in this way that you describe and then the the final thing is you brought up um gearbox which gearbox has recently put out a really cool uh uh V3 credit account abstraction model and I'm curious from your perspective on the protocol side uh what you think about

the Dilemma where we have basically there's like two or three dilemmas one is how do you ensure users don't get liquidated basically how do you ensure that users come back and pay off debt um and how do you ensure that users don't take their funds that they borrowed from your app and go use them in some absolute dgen pool thus you know without your lenders knowing and then obviously you know they get wrecked right that's what happens you know I go on a I go on XYZ I borrow I go apit into some mean coin H you know it goes to zero all of a sudden I've got this borrow on a I just walk away obviously I borrowed more less than what I have in collateral but if my collateral also goes down obviously there's liquidations of things but what

I was getting to was gearbox is doing basically uh they're implementing uh basically a smart contract wallet with a uh allow list of of daps that uh their borrowers can uh go and use so there's like an allow list of smart contracts like so if you borrow some Stables against your e you're only allowed to go to these XY highly trusted secure daps and then there there's also a mechanism where you can code the wallet um but the it's the the repayment is guaranteed over some time or or some sort of mechanism so yeah I'm curious like how you plan to tackle the those two main problems and then if a kind abstraction in that sense that gearbox St could be a

solution or or is something that you're thinking about um yeah yeah so first off I do love that the gearbox guys are still grinding they're like one of the ogs so I love to see people keep that and you know keep innovating um I think there's a lot of ways to skin a cat as they would say for that for us um I'm not saying we aren't you know looking at those types of models like account abstraction and stuff like that but the way you know as you you talk through that I kept thinking like well a lot of that is like handled around like how do you offload risk right because you have these lenders that basically are the counterparty against them so if like you said if someone's just buying a meme

coin that goes goes down to you know zero in like 4 seconds it's kind of hard for them to pay back that loan right or um if they like Get Wrecked somehow they click on the wrong link or you know what whatever you know some scenario where they get wrecked um for me trying to protect that bad Deb effectively yeah so there's two ways that we've um approached that I'll I'll start first with liquidations and then the bad debt side but on the liquidation side we came up with this new what we call like this Dynamic liquidation engine and what that does is typically muddy markets have this um dilemma as you highlighted either one you want users to well you want people to use your you know app and

make sure that they don't like feel like they're getting scammed right like getting liquidated really easily but at the same time you need to make sure that if volatility hits like you know Gary gendler you know arrests vitalic or something and eth goes down 30% in a millisecond like how do you not have the whole thing blow up right because a lot of times there's no real offset for bad debt and these different um you know issues that could arise from like insane volatility so for us what we did is we built this like um kind of dynamic system so rather than typical money markets have like a liquidation level where if you hit that level then it closes out some percent usually it's

around 50% some really protective platform to 100% um or you know maybe there's there's some other numbers in there too I'm sure everyone has their own blend um for us we built this kind of liquidation region that I call it I I I'll call it a band but it's um different than the curve USD band system um which is a another good model out there but for us essentially um as you hit the top band it does like a soft liquidation so that's going to be a lower penalty lower close Factor like smaller amount of assets closed out but as you see into the region if you're not getting liquidated maybe price is moving really quickly or you know Mev Bots or users don't think that it's worthwhile

to take on that debt um the penalty gets larger and the clo the amount of the position that can be closed out increases until it hits the bottom and then it could fully close you out so what that does is like if someone is just you know um in like kind of basic assets with like normal risk parameters and um you know like there's not a ton of Market volatility maybe they tapped that soft liquidation but they're not going to feel like they got ripped off because it's like a small amount of collateral and the penalty wasn't too bad right but if there's really violent um volatility like when the ETF the fake ETF news hit and then it went up a ton and then down at time like that person probably will get slammed much harder

but we don't take you know like the lenders don't take on any bad debt from that so it accomplishes like that kind of like kindness to the you know uh borrowers but also doesn't like slap the lenders with any major risk the other side is if somehow bad debt does accumulate maybe the move is like so violent and there's not enough um unchain liquidity or like gas spikes to 10,000 or something and it's just not worth it for people um there's a way to socialize bad debt in curv ANS so one of the one of the typical problems is like there's really no way to handle bad deck because no one's going to liquidate it and give you money for free um so a lot of times it just sits there so then

essentially it's a a race for the exit right so if there's a million dollars in bad debt which would be a huge amount but just for argument sake and there's $10 million in that pool that means the last 10% of people that are getting out they have nothing right so there's this like Game Theory aspect well now because there's bad debt you don't want to be left holding the bag so you're going to leave um but with this essentially it can be handled like a natural liquidation and then it just offsets essentially the exchange rate on that token for lender so it socializes it rather than the last 10% of people getting slammed with like 100% loss in that like really bad case it would offset the value of everyone's um lent assets by 10% um from that 10 million

down to the 9 million so now that should be much less frequent if ever on curv ANS but it's important to have those kind of Escape valves um for those like really dangerous like Black Swan events yeah we we've seen those happen like anytime there's a lending Market um like an issue that it tends to be with some sort of like pricing normally what we've seen is that it's due to some a liquid collateral um and what tends to happen is that if uh you're able to uh deposit some collateral uh that's IL liquid it's so easy to pump the price and like artificially like increase the value of the collateral that you have on

the market means that you can borrow all of this liquid value and then go sell it off and then you know whatever happens to the liquid price happens so I'm curious what the what the Oracle like solution for that is when it comes to LP tokens is it a matter of like looking at the contents of the lp tokens like like most easily understood is probably like an eth Bitcoin pair on Unis um that eth Bitcoin is if it's a V3 pool it's a it's an nft that nft doesn't have like a very liquid pool of liquidity that you can just sell off somewhere so do you look at like the contents which would be the eth and the Bitcoin inside

that LP quote those determine a value for the lp and that's what you treat as as collateral and and if so like how like what what is the Oracle solution to to kind of like do that calculation with low enough Laten see that you can still make liquidations yeah that's that's a good question so um a lot to unpack there so I'll kind of um break that question down a little bit on the Oracle side we built um this pretty comprehensive uh Oracle system I call it like a pessimistic Oracle so what it does is we're able to take in prices from any different Oracle provider so that's like you know onchain ones like curve and balancer and uni

Swap and whatever but we could also Tak in price feeds from like chain link and Redstone and and all these other different providers and we could basically aggregate um any two that we want and then it takes the better of the prices for the lenders in that case so if it's valuing collateral in which someone in your example maybe it's like this usdc or you said eth um Bitcoin um LP it would look at the value of those underlying assets from both of those feeds and then pick the lower one and then aggregate like okay well the lp exchange rate is blah blah blah and then it's going to take the lower price of that and then maybe they're borrowing usdc and I mean generally usdc usdc should be worth a dollar but it isn't

always as we've seen um it would take the higher price on the coll on the lent asset side so you're taking the lower price um in terms of the valuation of that collateral and then the higher price in terms of what that person owes and that while it's not a huge differential it does help in like very volatile periods where there is like gaps in pricing between different um you know whether it be exchanges and onchain or or just you know decks to decks and um it also has logic in there um with a what I call like the traditional Finance equivalent would be like circuit breakers so if someone is trying to like pump the price and manipulate the oracles if the prices diverge too heavily um currently it's 10% but this

can be configured and maybe it's you know um closer in the final release but if the prices were to move more than 10% away from one another it pauses borrowing so in cases like uh like mago's protocol where you had highly profitable trading strategies it basically locks down um any borrowing from that because um not only do they need to you know manipulate the price they need to manipulate on you know different dexes or centralized exchanges and then not only they need to manipulate it um in a more comprehensive manner they also need to make sure that they're manipulating those sources in such a way that they don't diverge so um in a lot of our kind of internal

analysis it could take anywhere from 40 to 40 to 50 times as much like initial Capital to manipulate prices at that point it's just not worthwhile right it's it's easier to go to like some other party and try to like attack them um the second piece there is on the collateral itself so we look at onchain liquidity um more specifically we look at the offside of the liquidity so for example um I'll you use the example of eth um but say the majority obviously eth is very liquid so maybe we pick like a less liquid token like recently curve um the CRV token had like that whole pool kind of disappear um so a lot of

the liquidity was in like the CVX CRV pool and some other pools on Unis swap such um so we could look at the offside where maybe you're looking at an asset like um you know CRV but the pool is kind of um slanted especially for paired assets like with CVX CRV so maybe the pool is like 80% on one side and 20% on another or balancer even has pools like that just naturally you don't care that there's you know say $10 million in liquidity if there's only 20% in something that you really want to get into like a less um a liquid token a more liquid token so then we would say okay well there's 2 million in that like offside liquidity and then we would take

some percentage of that say 30% so it's like okay collateral would be capped out for that particular asset at $600,000 now of course those numbers are very depressed but um in general it shouldn't massively impact needs of people because what we also do is we've moved to this um like posting collateral model akin to what you'd see on like a perpetual or a centralized exchange and what that looks like is you could deposit an infinite amount of assets to like yield Farm maybe you're farming like curve LPS or like CVX RV or something on balancer or GMX or Pendle or whatever um you could Farm in a limited amount we don't

care but if you want to collateralize that asset and borrow against it there are uh collateral constraints so when you're posting that collateral we check at what the outstanding collateral for that particular asset in that particular Market is um and that allows us to cap what the market exposure is to lenders so you don't have that situation of someone just taking you know $10 million of an asset or or even a million dollar and they manipulate it up to 10 million and then they deposit it borrow a bunch of stable coins and you know go on their merry way it doesn't work um another piece that we added to that is we added a 20 minute minimum to both

collateralization and on um loans so a lot of like the kind of manipulations you know I don't want to go on to Twitter and see like a PEC Shield tweet about us you know like Kerman you got to check out this contract and I'm like oh but when uh when people create these positions there's a 20 minute minimum time frame so any of those flash loans where people fund a wallet with like you know $100 from tornado cash and then they go to a and they borrow $50 million and then manipulate the price of this like super complicated you know attack and then steal millions of dollars that doesn't work at all on curve ANS because the flash loan breaks because we won't let you take the assets

back out um in under 20 minutes essentially so it's actually pretty similar to what GMX is glp does um the V1 where it has the 15 minute minimum so um we're we've kind of looked at all these different stages of like how can we get bopped and then avoiding each of those uh scenarios yeah it must be nice to uh to fil three years after everybody gets bopped you know yeah yeah well that's that's what's been a huge help to us with the bar Market because we keep seeing like the same you know okay these guys got hit with some re-entrancy attack or this was a price manipulation or this was an empty Market attack and I'm not going to go into like all these

individual scenarios but you see the same ones popping up over and over and over again and we've taken a lot of time to look at all of those issues and basically go down the list will we get screwed from this do we have like is this possible in curv an how do we fix this how do we avoid that uh and so on yeah and before we before we kind of wrap up the next five 10 minutes here would like to talk about the strategy you guys had uh to kind of really onboard a lot of different Dows and community members within defi um whether it be with your raise which we can touch on on and just with your general partnership angles and how you feel that's going to help you um you know what as you launch and uh also kind of

what that could look like uh in the next year or so uh you know how you see cbands integrating with all these teams that either invested in you or that you guys are currently in talks with to partner with uh you know one way or another sure yeah so for us it's been kind of like an everything approach with them we don't want to just like be like hey we're going to support people's stuff and can you retweet us right like that's a very shallow and and sometimes those relationships are fine right but like a lot of our core um you know like strategic joint ventures or collaborations wherever you want to call it to us those are ones that should be like an all of the above approach of like you know we're doing co-marketing

obviously but like you're also invested in our seed round and you're putting tvl like assets in maybe you're moving some of your protocol and liquidity maybe we're co- incentivizing stuff maybe you're reviewing our code right so who better to audit our code and obviously we're going through a ton of audits but who better to look at and review our Technical Solutions than the people that wrote that code themselves right the at the code that we're interacting with um or like you know different um you know things like maybe integrating them with our test net or or or different um you know events right maybe it be like maybe someone puts on like a trading competition right and and people can LP through curv ANS is just like now they're building out liquidity too

because we offer a lot of tools to these different projects I mean especially um cdps like you know what are some of the on in particular yeah so yeah so we've already um got a lot of formal investments from you know a lot of cdps like fra and you know uh well now reducted is launching their daero and that's like a CDP so you know those are like two of our lead investors um we had a very non or unconventional route for our rise we didn't like go heavy with VCS and stuff um we did get offers a little over a year ago to like just fill out like a big you know juicy seed raise round um expand the roundout sell

more tokens you know we could have gone that route but we chose not to we wanted to be much more strategic so all of our um major investors are like either the Dows themselves or Angels at that Dows um at those different Dows or protocols or whatever or maybe like small LPS that would you know participate in a larger round so we've gotten like a lot of participation from like Angels like I have my scroll shirt on you know scroll participated polygon Wormhole um a lot of different platforms um that were really excited about whether it be chains you know infrastructure or the daps that we would um work with and kind of champion ourselves so that's been

like one really easy way to align with them is like you know Confluence it's like we're not just building in their Shadow we're building alongside them right so we're helping them you knowand mature um and really get their feet under themselves so they can they can keep um you know pushing the envelope on whatever their goals are so for us that's been very strategic and a lot of these teams we've been working with um for like over a year now so I would say a lot of the massive like CDP providers um are pretty interesting um to us so they're they've been ones that we've been talking to a ton as well as like Perpetual exchanges like GMX and MX so um those are the ones that we're

predominantly focused on on our launch as well as some um you know I I'll call them uh like Trailblazers like Pendle um that are building some pretty cool Tech but it's not really like they don't have a ton of competitors so they're kind of off on their own Island in a lot of ways so um supporting their stuff has been really cool the Pendle guys have been great to us and we also have an Angel um contributing to Pendle as well so um you know hoping to help these guys you know build out liquidity improve the utility of their tokens like being able to just engage in those ecosystems in a really easy way and and I hope that eventually people become confident enough in curand

that they're like if this is you know call it blessed by curv an and that we have confidence like we've done our due diligence we've vetted the team the contracts we've audited our code we've looked at their code made sure they have good audits made sure the liquidity is good like you can have confidence in this thing like that's where we want it to be eventually not like you know any advice it's not Financial advice as they say but um you know we're only trying to work with like the cream of the uh cream of the crop we can support any set but we're choosing to support the ones that we think are the best and yes sir Rob we're friends with the we're friends with Pendle the whole time

friends with everybody rob you very popular yeah th this was lots of fun Chris I mean um it's been an absolute pleasure like uh having you HED learning more about the like the generality of the tech because ultimately like it I I I love the the Strategic approach that you said like the fu to VCS like we're gonna go to the route where all right it wasn't that bad no I mean I and and I'm sure it was it was like a friendly Fu but it's like there's there's like more value that that can be provided than a check and by working together with the partners that live on chain then you become closer and deeper partners with

those with those and and it does go beyond the check it goes to the the co- marketing and the co- incentivizing and the the reviews of the code base yeah or even just building Tech together right like we'll build on top of their Tech but you know there's also a lot of projects that we're talking to that want to like build stuff on top of curand does that pan out I have no idea but you know it's like much more it's a lot easier when you're like joined at the hip in in more ways than just like you know um well we got to do something so we should support your stuff H that sounds okay you know it's like much more like we're we're excited about the future and you guys are too yeah and then you're building it together which is which is like there's

there's something at stake um for for both teams and it's like all right you kind of like both when both teams put you know money where their mouth is um there's a common interest and a common goal and I think we're all able to like go further together um so it's really cool to see you guys take that route I know we're we're running we're running up on time here so the the final question that we got unless you got another minute to to stick around and I can stick around yeah that's fine yeah cool well I I did I do have another question like a little bit more in the weeds um so before we we kind of wrap up my my curiosity is in is in the yield because like with with regards to any any money market letters are going to go

where the best yields are so for LP tokens um and and like this question I think we can get real creative because we we're all kind of Deens here here so like there are strategies that come out like when you can when you can borrow LP tokens I think this is part of the new primitive element that you guys are helping to unlock so my my first and foremost question is like where does the yield come from um does it come from token emissions or does it primarily come from interest that borrowers pay um yeah we can we can start there and then i' to get the strategies of like LP tokens Cash and Carry POS like we can we can yeah yeah yeah so um on my end you know it was much more like we don't want

to just build like we just give you a ton of tokens and you do whatever like that kind of like I I don't want to use the term Ponzi but you know like the kind of like a mission driven yield we do have our own gauge system and um we've done a lot of innovation on that front but I'll start on like the asset support side and yield before getting into that um so we can support like yield bearing assets in full I.E LP token tokens like you highlighted or these like interest bearing stable coins but it doesn't have to be things that just give you emissions so it could also just be like rap Ste or um like Ando you know usdy or even just rap Bitcoin and stuff right like you're not going to get any native yield on rap Bitcoin for it

just sitting there right so we can also um like deposit those assets but there's always a tradeoff right like we could go to the highest and best like yield but maybe it's a very like new and un um you know like kind of unstress tested platform right so it's like to us it's much more important that like you have confidence that like nothing's going to blow up and that everything's going to you know when you go to bed and you wake up like your stuff is still going to be there that's the most important thing even Beyond like just try to squeak out that last bit of yield so we are going to be working with like the best you know platforms to generate yield for these like underlying you know LP tokens and you know the different um you know

like assets you know like Futures related stuff like Pendle and all that stuff but um there are also those more as I call them like primitive assets that they just sit there so in some cases it is an autoc compounding like Vault it's like a step in for um you having to claim it every few hours or you know weeks and compounding it but in other cases it's more AK to like a basic money market like a A or a compound or something like that where you know yes we could also deposit it under you know into a under the hood or something else and squeak out a bit more yield but now what happens if um utilization goes 100% on there right now you can't get your

stuff out well that's not good that's not a model that we want to build on top of so in some cases you could really pick what your risk profile is right is is you know like what what is your risk tolerance and then you can kind of like do you want to go like kind of that more D gen route as you said like LP tokens or like like um you know like some of these more newer assets that are a bit more exotic or do you want to just like you know I'm just bullish on bitcoin so I'm gonna just put rap Bitcoin in here and I'm gonna borrow usdc and I'm gonna go buy a car right you could just do that too um or you could like do a lot of these leverage strategies as well like we've built native leverage in so

you can like Leverage up and leverage down in a single transaction like you would a Perpetual so because there's no open and close fees on this stuff and you're paying interest on your loans um it actually in some cases if you if you know liquid is really deep and you're not worried about um you know slippage and such you could use it to almost like per leverage um you know some of these positions the other thing that's really helped with that is we've removed what people call rehypothecation so one of the biggest worries that a lot of people have with these like really risky assets or exotic assets like LP tokens and stuff is like well what happens if someone borrows it and then maybe they just try to like

send that token to zero right you just borrow all the lp you unwrap it so now the lp is Tiny and you just nuke that token down to zero well now you know you just like you've exploded your collateral there you know um so now you or well your debt in that case so now you've made a bunch of money right so you've kind of like drained that project we've we've pulled all that out so like if you're depositing an asset or you're collateralizing it you cannot like have people borrow that asset and if you're lending like a usdc or like eth in an LSD market then you're not going to be able to borrow against it unless you're depositing it on the collateral side so it fixes a lot of those um like tail risk pieces um and that allows us to

like be much more aggressive on things like collateralization ratios liquidation rates what stuff we're supporting how the markets are structured because we could do isolated or cross um I mean we basically could do anything and and we've pulled apart a lot of like the the risk you know the tail risk there that makes us um uniquely positioned to support a lot of really cool stuff with like a lot of really cool features very cool yeah yeah iolated Mor awesome go ahead Annie I look forward to seeing it yeah I think it's I think it's going to be pretty cool for a lot of people to start messing around with this we spent

a lot of time even outside of all the contracts we talked a lot about contracts but the other piece that we've spent a ton of time on is like the user experience so you know I've obviously um in the last since like Co I've been my own like d d gen and and really at the end of the day I've built like the app that I would want to use myself um and we've taken a much more like Web Two approach to the dab where it's like communicating a lot of information a lot of quality of life in the app so you could do stuff really easily like even just the leveraging piece um you know I'm sure you guys have used a money market maybe you want to like Leverage up on something you got to like deposit you got to borrow it you got to

go to a DEX and swap it then you got to deposit it back in then you got to borrow more you yeah like you just you're doing like 15 16 17 transactions no never never did anything like that in my life why would we have say that all that stuff super easily yeah yeah so it's like are you planning to have it on the site like on the dep like all within it like swap Bridge Buy sell yeah yeah you can do everything basically so if you wanna if you're like I want to go bridge to arbitrum from you know optimism like you could just use curv ANS instead of like going to you know like whatever Bridge

your choice or maybe you don't even know the right bridge to how do you get to base right or or how do you get to scroll or you know a lot of these platforms that are like you know a bit newer people the knowledge is not quite as like out there right so like we can kind of help with that so you know we've spent a lot of time looking at like the the typical web 3 dap and you know they serve their purpose but I think a lot of U uiux is kind of broken in web 3 where it's like there's this huge burden of knowledge even when you're talking about like yield opportunities and stuff one of things and this probably won't be in it when it's live but it's something that we'll be working on like on the road map is I want to get the um

basically information to people on like what opportunities are out there so maybe you're in like a Ste eth LP pair on like eth and you're getting 4% but like you could actually get 133% on arbitrum in Camelot or something right wouldn't it be awesome if instead of you having to like go to Camelot and check out the rates and then go to you know base and check out Aerodrome and then go to Drome on optimism and then you're going to like you know um all these different chains and dexes like oh what's curve on this chain what's balancer on this chain like it's it's a huge amount of work right so why don't we have behind the scenes something that just like does some analysis on it it says okay so based on the rates on defi

llama or whatever you can get 133% by just moving over here you don't have to change what asset you're in or anything if you want you could zap out of the position Bridge over and zap in we'll queue up all three transactions or all two transactions and you're good to go it's very much a web two oriented uh philosophy to give recommendations to people like you scroll on and pick your social media application like 95 99% of that is all recommended content and recommended transactions and strategies I think follows right along with that strategy that mindset yeah it it's very cool to see that like

brought to life yeah I I think we got to be careful of like you know the like recommendation you know aspect to it for sure but you know I think if we if we could like just have it like easily discoverable for people where they can just like poke around and it's just like hey you have these opportunities out there um I think that's going to move the needle a lot for people because like instead of having like 10 tabs open you could just have one you know and then it's like it's your swapper your bridge and you know like all your market and Yi farming um so really becomes like this everything app for def cool any other key road map items that that audience and people listening should be aware of to like just kind of like keep track of

you know whether it's q1 Q2 tge any other road map items that you think people should be aware of yeah so um you know we've we've really been turning on like the the engine if you will in in December for you know things like the seedr announcement and white paper and all that stuff um you know we're going to be running a test net starting hopefully towards the end of December but if partner Integrations take a little bit longer it might bleed into January um and people will be able to try out like the full app and then we're going to be moving towards like a Beta release um either in February or March and that's going to be uh basically live on atheria Main net um there is like an A Minor incentivized airdrop for the

test net as as well as participation in the beta you get streamed uh call options in both and we are exploring like a referral program in the uh Beta release as well um after four weeks we'll be moving into what we're calling like the official release and that's going to be where it goes multi-chain onto you know still on ethereum but also arbitrum optimism Bas and polygon ZK VM we are also looking at additional chains such as like scroll um you know mantle and a lot of other uh parties like ZK sync and stuff it's unclear you know when those roll outs for those different Chains would be but it's very much again we're very strategic so we're in contact

with these different teams and seeing um you know what that roll out would look like and will make sense for everyone in terms of priorities and everything um but we do plan on having like a wave two wave three approach for different chains different assets and everything but um the goal is really to if you want to like borrow or lend or you want to just yield Farm we probably support it that's the end goal um and we do plan on having like an incentive market for like vote escrow on cve um we have built some really cool Tech around streaming incentives with different projects so things like arbitrum stips um have been really successful so um it's even easier to set up all that stuff on curv ANS so

instead of you having to build out these models yourselves like air drops VI Merkel trees or you know building your own contracts to stream rewards you can just set up all that stuff on curv ANS without any code written which is pretty I think compelling um because people can create incentives on both the collateral side but also the debt side so maybe you you're generating a ton of money on your yield fing strategy great like you might want to just get people to lend against you so that you could like lever up and and do more of that strategy well you could incentivize the other side or maybe you're in like a more um long-term you know stable position where you just want to get some additional yield on top

will you could vote for your own stuff or stream your own um incentives on top for that pool so a lot of really cool strategies um in terms of how uh different incentives are provided to people and we're also going to be uh you know as a as a last piece here we're also going to be open sourcing a lot of our TCH around like the cross chain sharing fees cross chain cross-chain gauge voting um and like the Oracle system we're aiming to open source a lot of that stuff so I think it moves the need a lot we are spending a crap ton of money on audits so for a lot of teams out there that maybe are looking for the next step or innovation or Improvement for their own Tech um it might be worth you know worthwhile to check out the

curv an Innovations on that front sweet very cool and for anyone who is still listening and and towards the end of this video You're a legend uh for making this far uh pretty deep uh in that in that last answer that ma gave there was the word airdrop so just want to make sure that that was heard loud and clear um but yeah my you're you're a legend in your own right so thank you so much for coming on the the last question as as um I think we're we're about ready to wrap up here is that uh we asked this to all of our podcast guests all 113 that came before you so uh if you were stuck in an elevator um for you know however long a minute two minutes if you had to if you

had to talk to one person and give them if you had to curve ants pill one person who would you who would you choose and why that's an interesting question um alive dead both dead or alive anyone in your imagination you choose a that's a good question um yeah I mean if you're thinking about like people that I just want to talk to and be like hey this is really cool and I'm excited about it and you should be too it' probably be like some of the people that uh that I respected and looked up to when I was younger like the scientist Richard finman um but if you're talking about a live or just like someone that'd be cool to you know hang out with and just talk to probably like I don't know like K Reeves or something he seems like a cool

dude someone outside the industry right we've heard vitalic we've heard Satoshi we've heard you know the whole SL oh well that's boring because they they're gonna they're gonna like you know know their stuff it's so got it's like everyone everyone tends to come up with like a new a new angle it's it's great I think peman and Kean Reeves are both first well there you go I could be the uh the strange man that didn't offer a uh crypto person there yeah but I feel like you gota you got to pick someone that's like you know totally out of left field where they're like hearing this stuff for the first time so one of them's dead and the other one is very much to my understanding not in the industry so I think those are probably

the most interesting uh ones that come to mind for me yeah yeah well great answers all around and a phenomenal podcast thank you so much thanks for having me