DeFi By Design EP#24: Bringing DeFi To The Real World (Video Walkthrough)

Transcript

[Music] d5 slate team [Music] what's up y'all real quick if you like the d5 state content on twitter and youtube and sub stack please please give us a like and a subscribe on this video on youtube and join our channel join the community we'd really appreciate it we're pumping this stuff out for you all as much as we can and we really enjoy the support and the community that we've built thank you very much and enjoy yo yo yo it's your boy andy my second recording of the day baby we're going strong we've got eath all-time highs today we are here with mel mel is working with the team at monolith.xyz dot xyz is a really

interesting little uh a domain thing i've seen that a lot more in crypto than anywhere else dot com seems to uh seems too corporate like anyways um mono is super cool they have a bunch of cool crypto cards a bunch of cool kind of on-ramps and and really trying to bring crypto into the real world if you will because you know sometimes we kind of operate in our own little world here um so you know it's definitely good to try to keep pushing that into the real world and get legacy finance and the legacy world which kind of makes it seem like the world's old but hey everything's moving fast uh you know kind of on board with what's going on here so i'm gonna let mel kind of give himself a little introduction hype himself up a bit and let's dive into monolith after that

what's up mel how are you doing hi andy and hello everyone um i'm doing good i am i think we are we're in very exciting times right like everyone's listening to this um i think we're literally witnessing potentially one of the biggest shifts in our society in a century so and like it's exciting to to ultimately um yeah like get to experience this transcendental moment for humanity and um well that's on a macroscopic level of course but yeah cool yeah i know for sure i i mean i agree so how did you get um with monolith and kind of like what's your background

um so monolith is basically um this dream that i had um about i mean it's not now like five or so years ago i was one of the first people who i guess was like had abandoned like the traditional finance well and was trying to live exclusively on bitcoin right and i'd i'd canceled my bank accounts and i only had a bitcoin wallet and i tried to make that work i was traveling across the world um and it basically was very very difficult right there are very few places that at the time accepted bitcoin and it still hasn't changed much today and so

but nevertheless i really wanted to live this you know like be one of the first people to live in this new economy and so that's literally what monolith is about it's this product that we've designed where you can use your crypto essentially um in the real world right so you can use it effectively as something to replace your regular bank right your bank of america or whatever else right and so that means we have a visa debit card that means we have a non-custodial wallet right um and um and our ultimate goal is that you know we know that what's happening on ethereum and and on other blockchains but mostly on ethereum right now

is this massive explosion explosion in d5 right and we've kind of we saw this coming back in the early days that there would be this ethereum economy we didn't quite know what it would look like but today it's clear that the first real core parts of it is is going to be decentralized finance these decentralized financial services and um yeah the the core idea is that our products um will you know because of defy we will be able to give people a far more compelling and far more profitable ultimately financial experience or experience of money and that they can't get in the traditional world right and we need to to make this work for people's lives

we need to be able to embed this into their daily lives and so we have to have the ability for people to add money to the platform and the ability for people to to use you know these finances in their daily life spend it on stuff yeah um yeah where did the name come from how did you come up with that so um i guess i mean a lot of your your listeners or viewers um i mean a lot of us are quite young and so my guess is this isn't going to be completely familiar to everyone but there's the stanley kubrick movie a 2001 a space odyssey it's from like 1969 or something it was three hours long but um in that movie um um which i watched around the time

that that my co-founder and i david um that we you know were like all about ethereum right uh this was during the time we first like were like really getting into ethereum in 2015 and um um we just watched this movie and in this movie um this monolith appears every this big black stone appears every time humanity is transcending from one level of technology to the next so going from the you know the stone age where like it's a bunch of apes right into like the you know the moment that they discover you know like technology essentially it's every time that that transition happens from the stone age

civilization to the space station eventually the singularity and the monolith is there and it represents that moment in time of acceleration and this this leap and it dawned on us that what we were seeing happen with ethereum and this ethereum platform was virtually um was actually the real life equivalent to stanley kubrick's wellness right that ethereum represents this technological leap for our society um on a you know like on a potentially much more profound level than even people today realize we really are we are able to re-architect

the fundamental fabric of our society and you know it's like going from like the the french revolution age which is what we live in now right that's when democracy was created and we've kind of been you know like reeling high on on that phase but it's kind of coming to this end right like it's not able to deal with the challenges we're going to be facing this coming century and what ethereum allows us to do is basically enter what i like to call the space age especially because i like space but mainly because um it literally is we're we're going to build a future society with ethereum that is able to deal with the challenges we face in the world today whether it's

corruption or climate change or whatever um and um and will allow us to you know build you know we can literally imagine this being the foundation for scythe that reaches the stars right you cannot imagine that today with the corrupt political systems that you know power our world today right it's archaic and this is the world that dave and i realized back then we were living in taiwan that we were going to be part of and we you know we saw this monolith movie and it was like that's it that's the theory and and that's what we want to call our company right we want to material crazy power of ethereum that's wild maybe a little bit of psychedelics in there

too you know hey we'll we'll get into that but wow what a uh what an interesting story i mean that's awesome i like that idea of monolith and obviously the the the deep-seated um kind of realm of ethereum because yeah it's just it's deep as i said like just you know it goes and it goes and it goes um you know and it's awesome that you were able to see that and identify that and now i've been working on monolith for three years four years now yeah three and a half uh nice yeah nice so real quick for those who don't understand or are aren't quite aware yet monolith is um it is um it is effectively um a

banking replacements right i'm not allowed to legally say it's a bank because that involves all kinds of regulations sort of stuff but it is trying to replace your bank it's the same functions as your bank um but all the financial services are powered by d5 right so your lending your interest rate and whatever is all powered by d5 um but um um but you don't have to become some sort of freak living in the decentralized world no no you can still do all your daily financial stuff right you can still receive your salary you can still pay you know like your for your for your gatorade or whatever right or a new pair of skis yeah right so basically it's trying to

basically give people a second option from a bank you know you've got a a debit card effectively with what you can spend um you know you can store stable coins in there you that earn interest on ave you know you could spend your crypto at you know anywhere that accepts like a visa card right yeah that's that's completely right so what we're trying to do this year is um what what we've made so far is we've built this power this powerful ethereum wallets right for essentially people who understand d5 right people like yourself right well i what i i'm now kind of describing as the defy

elites more and more it's become like the d5 elites um you know there's this massive knowledge gap between people like like us who are super into the space and everyone else out there in the world right we're able to benefit from all these you know things that are coming out and defying and they're not but and that's what we want to solve this year so we have been thinking a lot about how we can try and build a defy experience of money that normal people can use right that i could literally finally give to my mom right yeah she can ditch the dutch bank that she uses right which she can't do today and that's the that's kind of the road map that we have for the year

and that involves solving you know some of the major issues like gas and how people interact with d5 right to mean you um choosing between c dye and a die or cusd and whatever um this is a you know a choice that makes sense to us right we've kind of like um followed how the industry's developed we have a sense of what each is and how it works and what it means but anyone else right especially someone who doesn't really care about money just wants to make money work this is an outrageous idea that's definitely going to scare them off from d5 right the idea that you have to choose between 20 different dollar tokens what does that even mean why are they even too many different versions of it right

right make any sense and by the time that you know like it's that's where the complexity is today but in five years there's going to be a thousand dollar tokens right yeah and and at that point people like us won't even be able to keep up with d5 right it's already starting to happen right like we're you know i'm focused on our company and solving these challenges i can't even keep up anymore with all the stuff that's crazy there's so many things happening there's so much happening yeah and therefore it seems to us that the real challenge we have to solve monarch wants to solve is the challenge of

um how will one billion people truly interact with defy and that the answer to that may not always be how the industry thinks of it today right how a lot of people in the industry would say it's going to happen and it may not be something anyone's even consciously come up with yet right it's it's a journey um but monolith is we are setting ourselves up for that journey right we think that with the rate of acceleration right um that within five years definitely within 10 by the end of this decade but probably within five years the amount of magic and insane financial uh quote in parentheses a lot more than

financial possibilities um on ethereum and in d5 and on maybe other blockchains will be so incredibly big and compelling um that if anyone manages to make a consumer experience of money that uses that um it'll attract a billion people right it's possible there will be um a d5 experience of money um that a billion people use within the next five years and that's what we need to build so let's go more into that i'm gonna pull up the monolith website here we are it looks great just hide this real quick and um boom so here's the monitor so from what we've just said we're

trying to onboard basically as many people as possible in the d5 make it easy um so decentralized platform on ethereum this is what it looks like alrighty so here we go all right wallet security and card all right so let's go over all these real quick um apocalypse resistant um your funds won't disappear if everything else does fair enough the blockchain isn't going anywhere um deploy your own contract wallet um so basically you can have your own wallet within the the app that can uh engage with any contract effectively um dex aggregator so you all have a inside of the app there is a dex where you can trade

that aggregates from i assume unit swap and sushi swap and balancer etc um add money so you can so you can onboard your your uh you know your dollars or your euros or whatever it is through uh ramp i assume uh or some sort of fiat on-ramp while we build the fiat on rap uh on-ramp ourselves nice indeed even though ramp is amazing they get the bouncing around yeah yeah cool and then wallet connect is basically so you can use other wallets within monolith that you have and then ens is you know kind of like your own your own domain um cool so did i miss anything there yeah there's there's a bunch um i'm sure i did um

there's a lot to say there's um indeed i mean so there are some other tabs right above yeah yeah we can go over those as well well um but i guess the point is um i think our wallet today truly is optimized for um for the the d5 elites right the ethereum elites um and and so yeah i think a lot of the features that aren't listed here that we're working on are ones that are going to make this very easy for the general public right like it shouldn't be that adding money um to your monarch wallets that you then have to can offend for yourself

and yeah figure out which dollar tokens to hold right um it's almost like i don't mean to interrupt but it's almost like you want to use all the d5 back end that you are so aware of and so knowledgeable of with like the simplest front end like okay i want us dollar i want to earn interest two clicks of a button everything else happens on the back end but like i mean like okay i want to hold 100 euros or a thousand euros or i want to have 10k my savings account and i want that to earn interest and that's all i want to do i don't even want to know how it happens you know yeah yeah you're literally describing a ui that's completely cracked yeah yeah so how do you how do you kind of

like short and sweet how do you kind of come up with that so um do you optimize for the best strategies for earning that yield you know how do you kind of create that ui what goes into that thought process um i i think so one of the one of the issues in working with ethereum today that kind of um is guiding our design process is the issue of gas right so we've been one of the companies hardest hit by gas for sure um because like you pointing you're pointing out here we deploy a contract wallet for every use right so right now every user gets their own contract wallet it's called sas money and it costs to

use the money to interact with it um this is idealistic but for the mass market we probably have to come up with something slightly different so that's what we're doing now um because every time you have a user you basically have to pay to create that wallet yeah and yeah you guys are paying for that and okay so let's say we have 10 000 users yeah and all of them want you know they have dye in their wallet right but they want sea dye or they want a dying um they are individually going to have to do a swap or you know create the sea dye which costs all of them gas but the magic of ethereum to me it seems part of it is that um like it doesn't

matter if you're doing it for ten dollars or for a billion dollars it costs the same amount of money to to do that process and so why do we have like 10 000 people individually doing that instead of just one transaction which is yeah and so um given that what we're talking about building is this consumer version of d5 you know um like most like you could probably say assume that um the vast majority of consumers in the future using d5 will be using a very small number of financial services right only the best ones

right it's just like with apps on your phone you know like sure it was fun back in the day you downloaded like 50 new apps for a week yeah yeah but now you only use five of them right yeah and and probably especially when it comes to finances um it's going to be very similar for um the vast majority of people they use and so why don't we just focus on making those few things that are most important to people really really accessible and really really cheap to use this is the bloody problem with defy today is that you could get ten percent interest you could get a hundred percent interest for you care but the moment you um you know like

leave the position or whatever all that interest is wiped away yeah because of the gas cost unless you're like a massive whale or you've been in the position for you know months to years exactly right exactly so um um d5 is becoming an elitist game right only if you have a lot of money um is it um can you kind of do what you want and still make a process yeah especially with the theorem going up which is kind of contradictory yeah people are getting priced out yeah exactly um and and so therefore it seems to us that um in the medium term and this is before you know layer twos

have obviously like properly start to roll out but even then before it all kind of works well together right um but in the medium term um the only way that i see a consumer using d5 meaningfully is if it's kind of bundled up into hey um we all act as one collective together on the blockchain rather than like you know um each person for themselves yeah and um yeah that's what we're working on and we think that if we nail it you know like like in a lot of countries interest rates are not even remotely close to what you can get on ethereum today and yeah

like that's really killer products it is and i mean yeah the grouping and the batching would be huge um figuring that out is going to be crucial um yeah i mean obviously and yeah and layered too i mean gas has just been a huge problem i mean i think i think now as price of ethereum goes up i mean we're seeing unit swap transactions dollars to to withdraw and deposit in ave and compound you know 150 dollars um yeah it's just it's crazy um but let's uh let's shift our focus to the card so let's let's this is where i believe the monolith card is um all right so let's go over this so what do we got here we've got a card for uh the english folks they're the british

folks we've got a card for all of europe is that correct that's correct yeah yeah we offer a year and a pound card okay so let's go over the euro card i assume it probably fits more unfortunately uh unfortunately there's no states one but that's totally okay uh there's a lot of regulations in states it's um not exactly the ideal place to build for d5 it's kind of funny to start to realize that yeah i mean europe is very regulated as well um yeah switzerland's place to be yeah all right so what do we guys so there's there's no fee for you know any any month or to get the card um so you know every time you make a purchase

there is a small fee um yeah there's uh so we give people okay what my goal was when we made this was to make this um um literally be a viable replacement to your bank right and that means that it can't cost you um you know like there shouldn't be any significant fees in there and so um what some of our competitors will do is they'll give you a poor exchange rate right so they'll say oh the price of beef isn't this much you know it's not fifteen hundred dollars one thousand five hundred but it's like it's actually like 1400 or something right and and but they won't tell you

and they'll save zero percent we don't do that we literally get the rates from uni swap and we get rate from kraken um and uh and then we we charge you a very transparent fee yeah um yeah and and then there's we have an additional one percent fee which goes to the tkn asset contracts so this is our token um so our token holders effectively get one percent of of the card volume every time they top up or every time there is a transaction being spent basically yeah every time money gets added on the card nice so so so the that's kind of where the cash flow mechanism for the tkn token comes from is the usage of the product yeah that's

right nice there's a purchase i'm gonna spend limit cool looks good nice so so basically you know if someone's interested in getting this card in europe and is watching this video they basically their main use would be if they're in d5 if there are you know if they own crypto basically they can send the crypto to this card or to the monolith wallet and then the wallet is able to then top it up to usd or no sorry to euros or to pounds um and basically you can spend that anywhere a visa is accepted so it's effectively like yeah just basically avoiding all banks in general just kind of going through monolith yeah i mean we're at that stage right and we're getting to the point where you

will probably never need a traditional financial service ever again you can literally live your life from d fight and that's what mall is trying to provide for people yeah because this is the big key i mean gas is obviously huge for like in the ecosystem but you got to be able to get out into the real world until if ethereum or you know die is ever accepted at a bar right until that even is a case and that may never be the case or it might take years right until that until that happens you know this is key right getting it getting a way to get out of the system into like the real world um you know and so that's kind of what we're solving so um yeah i love to see it that's uh that's awesome now let's see what does help what do we do

with help here is is this going to be like docs nice yeah it's our support page cool obviously every account requires kyc just for the regulations in europe obviously yeah yeah we are very very regulated in europe so we have to follow all the rules and we do nice is it oh my gosh i thought that was you man there's mel look at this full team wow yeah we've added a lot of new people

these are the the people with the the um the placeholder image for the guy with the yeah these are all people who joined during the pandemic so we don't we haven't been able to take pictures of them yet but it seems quite big now wow you guys have quite a team now eh yeah we're like 28 people or something i think yeah it's awesome community nice this is a dope website cool that's awesome so okay so let's go over this again for our for our um for audience so we've got the monolith

card and the mall and the monolith app so walk us through kind of what so we're in europe we're looking to get going and to start to use monolith how are we doing this um if you are a person who either wants to get into defy and you want to be able to like buy ad money um to the wallet to use in d5 or if more likely you're someone who's made a decent amount of money in the last few years right oh never how could you okay come on mel that that's not a possibility then you know this is a product for you right like you remain in control of it yourself um um and you can

you can feel good every time you use your card because you're literally you know going from a decentralized you know from the decentralized world into the normal world only at the point of sale and not a moment before right um and yeah like this is this is for you right have fun yeah i mean it makes you makes you wonder and this is kind of how i've seen it is like okay why do i even need a bank anymore i mean obviously like pay rent a bit you know some things but okay so i can just hold my money and defy if the market's going up and i'm bullish i hold assets that i think are going to go up eth rap bitcoin bitcoin even right and if the market's going down or i'm i i

want to take some profits i just put it into stable coins put it earn some yield or if i want to buy more i can just take it out and if i and then whenever i i'd like to actually use my funds i just send it to the card top it up and it's game on so it's like i got a bank account in d5 i've got an investment portfolio in d5 i can do yield farming i can do lp right i can do all my work and my job elsewhere but as long as my money is here i can always be making money and then always use that that those that money through monolith to live life and so it's like you really start to see over the next few weeks months years even especially like you know you're not even going to need

to like do everything else that you know has been happening like you just don't like there's just like you know you could use that card for every purchase that you spend like everything it's you know once you get on that it's just like crazy like it's like what is going on so i applaud you for this uh for this creation and this work as a founder you're working hard on one project for a long time it's absolutely awesome um and yeah any closing thoughts mel um i guess yeah like what you just said right the the goal is to to allow um people who aren't they're so emotionally dedicated to our

space like us right to extract value from the space in the same way like like our goal is to bring this to everyone else right and the sooner we can do that the sooner we can actually change and start to really change the world in a meaningful way right like um yeah and i think defy and the larger industry is you know it's it's the right industry to be in um if if you want to actually meaningfully change the world in the next decade um yeah it's gonna be crazy and we're gonna we're gonna be part of it so it's awesome absolutely awesome mel well i appreciate you coming on i'm glad

that we could both make time for this uh those who are still listening thank you for watching um definitely got a good overview of kind of what monolith is aiming to do how to get involved get yourself a monolith card if you're from europe check it out uh follow them twitter instagram or not instagram twitter on telegram and discord check them out and yeah mel it was a it was a pleasure thank you for having me andy i i very much enjoyed this as well peace buddy take care