DeFi By Design EP#33: Explaining Yield Farming Aggregators

Transcript

welcome to d5 by design where we talk all things blockchain and cryptocurrency while striving to educate empower and enrich andy is a crypto investor and believer since early 2017 after he discovered bitcoin through the university of florida's blockchain club since his time at uf he's founded a few successful internet businesses and went full time into entrepreneurship in 2019 a strong believer in decentralization and fair opportunity andy is aiming to educate empower and enrich as many people as possible through the permissionless system we know as d5 rob started playing poker with bitcoin in 2015 and hasn't looked back since discovering

bitcoin he dove head first into the world of crypto first by trading then immersing himself in blockchain application decentralization and financial game theory while pursuing a math and philosophy dual major at university he launched a successful algo trading fund and helped push the university blockchain club to new levels our vision is to onboard billions into defy and totally disrupt the corrupted system of central banks and power as we know it with education we will close the information gap and bring d5 to the masses what's going on guys real quick break for the d5 by design podcast sponsors and a defy slate sponsors who make this

all possible first we have ave a money market protocol that allows you to borrow and lend and leverage your assets to earn interest right so if you want to deposit some stable coins in there currently you can get three four five six eight percent apys on stable coins which else any bank in the world uh as far as we're concerned you can deposit uh any uh ethereum based asset that is listed there borrow against it you can borrow stable coins you can borrow other assets like ether wi-fi link even the ave token itself ave is the go-to protocol for any sort of borrowing lending check it out at app.com the next one we have is access auxis is a new crypto wallet auxis.com you can store all of your crypto there

they have quite a few options uh they're integrating new dex features soon um and allow you to have a non-custodial way to store your crypto safely off of centralized exchanges and also just not in a meta mask or in your own ledger a bit of extra security there next we have mcdex mcdex is a decentralized perpetual swap protocol basically allowing you to trade on leverage uh on the ethereum chain right they're coming out with v3 very soon about a time you're listening to this it might already be out they are super solid team um and they're pumping updates and allowing you to trade decentralized perpetual swaps on eth link and a few others all on ethereum all decentralized so that is mcdex next video ramify ramify is a decentralized stablecoin it's an algorithmic stablecoin that is pegged to

the purchasing power of commodities and then basically it measures what value one dollar buys in terms of a commodity index each week and then it provides you with essentially a store value that allows you to continuously evade inflation while maintaining you know a stable aspect as if it was a dollar and that is the ramify protocol check them out on twitter finally we have diversify it is an l2 decentralized exchange they allow you to basically trade in a gasless and feedless manner big volumes whatever quantities you need it's almost like a centralized exchange on ethereum but you are the custodian they do not hold your coins as a centralized exchange would you have full control full power so really it's almost like centralized exchange capabilities on a

decentralized exchange and that is diversified all those sponsors make this possible i know it's a lot to take in but thank you very much for listening and let's get back to it welcome to the d5 by design podcast it is a day to talk about d5 every day and here we are again talking about d5 welcome to episode 32. uh our special guest today is red from harvest finance his name is red like the color red so don't do not call him anything else because his name is red and so we're excited to sit down here for a bit and chat uh defy what's going on on binance smart chain kind of how to capitalize on that

and how to make sure that you don't get wrecked on that and then other things that we're seeing as yield opportunities and things to go over with harvest finance which we think could help you guys uh basically find a place to uh use and utilize your capital into productive capital so we're gonna go over all those things today uh looking forward to it i'm gonna pass it over to my boy robbie we're actually stationed together today the location is not to be talked about because of opsec just kidding we're in gainesville bro we're absolutely fiving and uh yeah robbie yeah so uh yeah so it's not not often that uh andy and i link up on the same side of town but uh it's one of those rare days so super stoked to be here uh it's another beautiful day in florida

we're kicking it just having a good time and gonna be talking to red from harvest like andy said just going over all things defy what harvest does and how they contribute uh to the ecosystem and yeah let's uh pass it over to red how you doing today man what's going on guys thanks for having me cool so yeah maybe we can start with just kind of a light intro how you got involved in crypto um kind of what you saw as like some you know telltale signs that this is an innovation this was something that you wanted to contribute to um and then kind of what your role is at harvest um and you know how you make your bread here in crypto sure um so basically i started around like 2017 um in crypto heard about bitcoin years

before that but it was kind of like magic internet money i thought it kind of ridiculous um but then my brother-in-law started talking about ethereum and smart contracts um and that got me really interested just seeing like oh you can build like applications that live on the internet with like no owner right so that's kind of what i decentralization kind of really clicked for me and i'm like a degenerate gambler um at heart i love betting on the nfl go vikings i don't know if you guys can see that um so you know yeah terrible get out of here um so the idea that you could build like a casino a global casino online um using like a single currency a global currency like

ethereum or even bitcoin um and like no government could stop it because you know again it's decentralized so you know billions made in vegas i mean you could talk about trillions if you could do this globally right so that really kind of sparked my um my interest in cryptocurrency and then when i kind of stumbled into it like uh icos were really he's like starting to take fire um and i came across a project called token card which is now monolith um it's like a visa card where you could spend your crypto and so to me that was like another like aha moment like okay well it was magic internet money but if i could swipe a visa debit card really easily and spend it then it's actual money right so i was like this product is going to be huge

i really want to follow this so um i love chatting crypto it's why i'm kind of chatting here with you guys so you know being in their discord chat channel just naturally talking other people about this and kind of hyping it up they're like hey do you want to help moderate and so like it was right around the ico kicking off that i was just help moderating the chat and i kind of hung around for like three or four years just being a volunteer and just learning about crypto and just making a lot of friendships and networking and then along the way i've just come across like projects like harvest finance again i just kind of walked in the door and saw hey this is a product that's needed in the space defy summer yield farming is a huge innovation but harvest is an

aggregator of different farms instead of you having to jump from farm to farm to farm harvest is kind of all in one shop doing it for you so i was like hey this is a project i need to use i don't want to get rug pulled in some um in some yield farm so let me use harvest and kind of the same thing i was hanging out in their community answering questions oh hey do you want to be a moderator sure so like since like week two or three of the project i've been you know helping moderate um in the project and then just grown through that so you know now i do podcasts um i try to help kind of like project manage all the the moderators and organize the different work because i think what people don't understand about dows is there's a lot more than just like

casting a vote and hoping some developers like you know write some really cool code you know there's people that have to do customer service there's people that have to do podcasts there's people that have to help run our competitions help with uh the twitter handle you know there's just like a million little things that when you actually consider like a small business all those things actually have to happen within a dow too when you're talking especially with like a harvest where you have like a 500 million dollar tbl or whatever so that's like my specific role at harvest is i do a lot of like some of the just project management organization of all the different mods who are help contributing so it's not just me there's like 10 other mods there all pitching in based on their talents like i don't have any developer skills

um so there's other devs that may have some developer skills right there's other guys that are really good with marketing or artwork like the artwork coming our on our front page comes outsourced and other people working on that so you know a collective of us mods that help out this anonymous core developer team that actually does all the programming for harvest finance so just kind of like another unique nuances you have like these it's like a mafia in real life as you said honestly online global casino right that's very honest way of your entrance um and then you bring together these people that have never met and you've got an online mafio just trying to play the game and i mean it's just like

wow what is going on here so i think we should definitely dive into the the dow topic we're super interested in trying to somehow create a dow for what we're building with defy slate and a lot of that is just kind of being lazy and wanting you know to have other tasks be done there and done there and just kind of you know more run the show right but ultimately when you get this collective you know there's this new form of collaboration as you're explaining which is just you know unparalleled elsewhere um but before we get there we're gonna have to go over some of the dark side of the news in your explanation of harvest you you're you were saying that you could come there and not get rug pulled i got rug pulled on harvest finance so let's go over that like what was

the the kind of jump start to harvest kind of okay you guys got off the ground you know tvl boomed right i remember the token launched in like the 2k range i think 3k range for a bit um right then obviously yield yield farm and dump dump dump um you know then like go right so what happened from there up to the hack and then i guess you know what's the what's been the plan of attack after how is the story of harvest changed um from you know how it started to now sure so i mean like i kind of mentioned like week one harvest is a youth farming aggregator right um and to clarify a rogue pool means kind of like an exit scam um so for sure so harvest got hacked you kind of mentioned later so you didn't get it

by harvey said there was a hack that occurred at harvest so and we can talk about that a little bit um so yeah so basically a harvest is a yield farming aggregator um so they have their own code that basically stores all the user funds right and then it basically has to then create a strategy to connect to places like curve or um idle finance or all these other places where the yield farms are so not only does your coding in a sense have to be perfect you have to also make sure the coding of the platform that you're connecting to is perfect so maybe that's a scam and you want to make sure you your entire platform harvest doesn't get rudd pulled by connecting to a scam right so there's all these like little nuances that you have to make sure

um that just because your platform is good and even if another platform is good like curve what about the interactions between the two right like if your code's not communicating perfectly you may have like an issue and that's kind of what happened was there was a like a bad string of code at harvest that wasn't properly i think it's called like set virtual price or something like that again i'm not a dev but basically what happened was it allowed somebody to take what's called a flash loan which is where you can borrow funds and pay it back all within one transaction and you can do that within d5 so basically they're able to borrow like 50 million dollars overflow the vaults tricking the vaults price and then they are able to do the

cycle of withdrawals using a trick price and then that's kind of how you got hacked they did a drain basically tricking the oracles again that was one piece of code that kind of makes things go crazy and so that's why defy in a whole um is kind of like wild west i think you guys talk about wild west and you're like a theme of what you guys do at d5 slate and that's a great analogy for d5 there's a lot of opportunity gold rush go stake your claim i've used this analogy a lot myself but there's a lot of like dangers and traps so it's like perfect as you can be you can fall into those pits um the golden goose of the whole defy industry or not industry but like yield farming

is wired and they suffered the same exact tack as harvest did right so like again that's not to make excuses that's just to say like as good as you are yeah like as good as you are you're on the cutting edge and it's kind of very hard to know all risk vectors because they're on the cutting edge too the hackers are just right there behind you looking for you to make any mistake right so that's kind of what happened at harvest and better than you probably yeah exactly you know they are also in online almost that are that's the real mafia the white hat mafia we're trying to do the good for the people and they're like people trying to back dora so um after that so what we tried to do was we issued an iou token in a sense right um iou is just kind of like a rough way to

say it but um it's called the grain token it was issued kind of one to one for every dollar lost which was about 17 percent to a given user right so um i know you got hacked i think um you should have been kind of capped out about 17 um yeah yeah so yeah while hack sucks if you think about it like today what did the market dump right like 25 30 depending on what you're in so like yes it's a hack again no excuses this is just like yeah we just got scammed the last time oh bad see you know but like so yeah like a market dump it was like double you know the negative impact that the hack had on harvest right so again not making an excuse or whatever just kind of like putting into the context

and that's kind of i think why harvest rebounded very well we still have 500 million dollars in a system we have you know pushing towards 100 total strategies now linking up finance smart chain um i think with over 35 strategies just in finance smart chain so um so i think i was touching we issued kind of an iou token grain token there's money allocated to it out of emissions um the community is very much involved in that because we did voting on hey how much should we allocate on the platform because one thing is is you know there wasn't 23 million dollars laying around in our ops treasury fund at that point right and then awesome we just you know wipe out our ops treasury fund wipe out all profits the platform you break the platform and then nobody really does good out of that

right so again engaging with the community it's kind of like what's the best balance of making sure people can get reimbursed between also ensuring the pro the platform itself can live so it can continue to devote profits towards reimbursement right so that's kind of what the grain token is and people can use that as even as a speculatory tool today um because i've seen like grain token down at like a penny and it shoot up all the way to 20 cents so there's even like a traders market within the grain tokens itself so um and then just now is today i kind of touched on it you know harvest is doing business as is i think that was like three or four months ago that hacked occurred no real issues we've now deployed cross chain farming to finance

smart chain and just really continuing uh the steps to still be on the cutting edge yeah and i think that's a great transition to more of the dow conversation um you know kind of determining how how some of those decisions are made you know are we going to reimburse um the funds that were lost how you're going to do it um what is that doubt process like and for you know kind of these cutting-edge technologies you know it's really like how you organize your your leadership and your mafia right to continue this analogy um so yeah i guess more of like the dow conversation um and if you're a moderator you know maybe you can speak on like the decision making process

how was it to set up the dao um you know how do you deal with conflict within the dow when there's not clear um a clear hierarchy and everyone's kind of collaborating on making these decisions you know how how do you guys come to the to agreement between the entire community when you know really there's just a few of you guys being moderators and and trying to gather the opinions of everyone in the community i mean it's a great question um there's different ways to do it so i can't it's very hard to speak universally um like kind of one of the universal truths is when there's a token that exists for a project your token is like almost like a one-to-one vote right so again that's not that doesn't

apply to every project there's weighted voting systems but it's almost basically assigned to token ownership so again if you hold like the harvest token farm and a proposal is made by any community member it kind of starts out initially in our discord and somebody says hey here's a proposal i think harvest could benefit from this if that gains traction we kind of discuss it within the community and then the core devs at that point may chime in and say okay this has kind of reached to the point where yeah we think this could be good for the ecosystem is this something that the community ultimately wants to vote in as a whole because not everybody's necessarily in

discord chat there um to talk about things so that's where it takes the next level where you go to like a program like snapchat um snapshot where then you can like formally propose something in written text and then it's connected to i really like the mafia analogy here and i don't mean to introduce like it sounds like the the dev programmers are like the family right like they're they're the the godfather and michael and like these are the key decision makers that kind of decide like all right you know did this this kind of scenario happen maybe away from uh the rest of the community and there's a decision that needs to be made let's organize a sit down right so like the family then has a sit down and and the snapshot occurs and

then everyone kind of casts their vote on all right so how are we going to deal with this this uh proposal are we going to accept it or are we going to kind of reject it and keep moving on business as usual um so there it seems like maybe you know like you said there's a bunch of different ways to do this and this is how harvest does it there's like an inner circle um that kind of decides when a proposal is um valid enough to even be voted on um and then when that when that proposal is passed let's say um it's instantiated by these devs that then turn it into code yeah um is this mental model correct yeah i mean again i don't like the negative connotations necessary with

like the mafia but i mean it's it's a semi-good analogy right because there's not like this dark purpose right like ultimately like um anonymity in the expansion to be a c i'm sorry to interrupt as as well but like is that how the choice was made was it like devs go and then you know this is a good idea this is going to help the community right so in the positive light is that kind of how the choice was made yeah like think of um like a farming commune right like everybody's working together um and that's kind of why we use the the farming and harvest analogy everybody's working together but like ultimately there's still a guy that owns the farm they're still going to be kind of like a head figure right but if you're truly a commune if you want to make changes to the farm or

somebody wants to propose it like it ultimately has to like appease the owner of the farm or show that it's going to be something for the common good and then you talk to everybody about it and say hey does everybody agree with this and so that same principle applies here right so like instead of thinking mafia i think we're like again like a farming commune where everybody's kind of working together to pitch in their skills as i mentioned you know i'm not a dev i'm a talker um we have dev moderators we have dev people that help build our dashboards um again we have people that are good pitch man and do the marketing stuff so again that's more of a commune of the different collective talents that people are coming together to help support um this farming um land that the dads have provided and they're

the guys that say yeah okay i'm down to put a barn over there right you can't just we can't just show up and start building on their property right but if we get their approval and they agree with it cool right so i think that's the better analogy than like a whole kind of like mafia thing in a sense yeah the analogy aside let's go over the the binding smart chain uh application and expansion um in this in this kind of commune sense right so uh i think when you guys put your heads together as a team and shows that expanding to buying and smart chain would be meaningful to the community you know what what was the process like there and you know what's going on over on binance smart chain uh yield

opportunities for our followers um and people who are interested sure so again going back to like the commune analogy um there wasn't like a vote to say should we expand to finance although there was discussion to say what chains are out there um that help support like the idea of yield farming right so the devs may not hear of every yield farm that's available out there so we actually do we have a strategies channel and partnerships channel where people show up and say hey we think you should work with them or here's a brand new farm here's the apys and then the devs may intake that um so binance chain um i don't exactly remember exactly perfectly but i think it was just like there's so many farms popping up there and binance has so much pull within the

the crypto community let's build there right um so again just kind of going back to the the commune analogy hey we bought some land over there do you guys want to start working on it sure and now people are working on like finance marching that's that's kind of the same idea here right like the dad that's the bot more farmland and now everybody's working there and so now new strategies are popping up and again some of these strategies are very much referred by our community because they say hey ellipsis hey space force token or whatever it is these things have crazy apis and then we'll go and look at them and we actually have a guy jasper community guy he's not a core dev he helps write the strategies and say here devs i've done kind of like the framework stuff do you guys want to implement this

and then they may go and further build it out from there right so you can see kind of like the organic growth all through this process right we rely on community and developers both to make this successful so you mentioned some of the apys and and what allows them to be higher or some being lower maybe maybe we could dig into that a little bit more like you know some some of these binance coins that we see um on the harvest farms are like in the thousands of percent for apy and we understand you know that that doesn't last for an entire year maybe not even you know a full month or two um but maybe you could speak on like harvest as an aggregator what allows some of those apys to be so high um whereas some of the other ones are much more you know moderate in

you know 10 to 20 percent sure i mean a lot of it um depends on the the platform of the farm itself that you're connecting to so when it's a brand new project they may just be issuing so many tokens it's really artificially inflating their apy or maybe a market pump is occurring and it's pumping that specific token so then the apy is going to be higher because the token itself becomes more valuable compared to maybe something that's like a little bit like older or more established like uniswap more people also may be farming uniswap because of its popularity and its name or or one inch is actually the one that you can farm right now so the more money that floods into a

strategy and the rewards stay static that means your apy gets lower right because it means it has to pass up the same exact number awards to more money that's coming in right so that can lower your apy so there's a bunch of different factors finance smart chain just has brand new farms and projects popping up all the time so you see their apy percentages a little bit higher than some of the ethereum projects gotcha yeah and it comes down to the tokenomics of the platform um not not harvest platform because you guys kind of aggregate the same across all these different protocols but more so the tokenomics of any any new connection that harvest makes um

and you know like you said if they're being inflated very high there's going to be a lot more tokens being pumped into that farm and inflating that apy way up yeah and i think that's one of our key strengths not only trying to make it easy for the user but we push a lot of strategies to kind of try to stay on that cutting edge i think we actually have the most strategies i don't want to be quoted on that but at like 85 plus 80 of them i think right i think i counted 85 at last or around there so i mean we're getting there right um so again i think that's just really us trying to stay on the cutting edge of what's the best apis which farms are safe um and you know without trying to just yolo into stuff

right because again we're dealing with people's money we've already kind of experienced a hack we don't want users to go through that so there's just this balance of d-gen but have to make sure that we're careful right right and so for the users of harvest and those that are listening to this podcast right interested in actually getting in the action here on harvest what does that kind of look like to users right so um let's let's walk through the mental model of what using a platform like harvest actually means in like a financial sense right like yield farming okay we understand that that is that you know you are participating in the distribution of a protocols governance token right that's effectively what yield farming is and your opportunity cost is your

liquidity right so you're depositing your funds into this protocol to earn uh rewards in the form of the protocols governance token uh and in some cases uh the actual underlying asset in which you are depositing as well right so let's just go over kind of what is the step-by-step uh kind of the the practical model for like okay so you got to go on metamask and connect it but also like kind of like the mental model like all right why am i coming to use harvest right like what is a user coming to achieve so i think um today's market is a great example of why like mainstream would want to use harvest than even just holding like ether bitcoin by

itself right because let's say you bought bitcoin yesterday you're like sweet i'm in a bitcoin holder and then wake up and the market's dumped 30 on you and you're just like this is a terrible experience and this happens like all the time right when like fumo kicks in then everybody ends up buying the top of the market and then that's how crypto gets a bad name because then you have these wild swings right so everybody wants a wild swing up nobody can ever handle the wild swings downwards right so in terms of like mainstream um and we tweeted about this today was harvest has 15 different stable coin strategies between ethereum and binance right and so a stable coin is basically like a digital representation of a dollar or a euro so a dollar's a dollar you have one dollar usdc

you don't have to worry about waking up tomorrow and it being only worth 70 cents because the market dropped 30 percent right like that's what happens with ethereum or bitcoin and i think that's what shies away at matilda from ever putting her money in cryptocurrency and that's what everybody's waiting for the mainstream the mainstream right um so if at harvest you can bring a digital dollar that isn't subject to market volatility and still make like 20 to 50 percent 50 times what a fiat bank is going to give you on your your dollar why wouldn't you use harvest finance right so that's the key selling port and then we try to make it very easy it's pretty much hey if you can get a digital dollar off coinbase the largest

exchange one of the largest exchange in the world or you know go to binance and get some usdt or whatever it is and get that to your metamask wallet you simply go to harvest.finance find where usdc is on the list click it click deposit and you're pretty much done as long as you have some eath in your wallet right so as you as long as you kind of have like this basic understanding i need a little bit eat for gas and then i can go to a website it's it's that easy right and then also working with some other projects like zapify is a great project that we're trying to talk about where even if you have ethereum or if you have link or whatever it is right with 85 different strategies that means you may have 85 different varieties of coins that you may need to deposit it

again at matilda doesn't want to have to go out and buy some spacecoin hybrid bsu token lp right but if you're using something like zapper and she does have usdc in her wallet she can still deposit to that strategy because zapper is going to do all the work behind the scenes for you right so that's one of the really important things that we haven't touched on yet is like dows or projects like harvest working with other projects and being collaborative in the space instead of kind of being like hey we're just harvest silence finance we're siloed um we y'all made some investments recently right yeah um that's one of the really cool things um council 69 um basically anybody can come to us

whether it's like is that that number of coincidences no not at all it's not a mafia bro 68 other councils and this one just happens token supplies also 690 420 so you make me you make out of that thousand words one too many lsd tabs okay one too many so basically council 69 means anybody whether it's you guys or the developers themselves saying hey look at this awesome project um they're in like there's their seed round or like pre-sale round or whatever harvests go put in we're generally putting in about fifty thousand dollars a new project you know very small amount but we do it when we recognize it's a

project that contributes like to the ecosystem of d5 itself right we're not just doing it to say oh 50 grand we want to turn it into 50 million right like that's not the intention hey sign us up we'll uh we'll take you up on that we'll give you five percent of the call today now but um what are some of the projects that you've uh that you've they've recently uh invested in like doubts you know projects and dabs so basically we've uh ap wine finance um that's like a futures project so basically like you have farm and farm has an apy because of the profit share that it gets out of the platform let's say it's like 60 a month or whatever or just say 100 a month as a the flat easy rate

you can deposit that at ap wine it says okay lock up your farm for one month and they collect in a sense the yield on your behalf for one month so if it's a hundred percent of for a year what does that chop down to one month of yield for farm and they issue you a future token that says here's your paycheck advance on your farm yield one month ahead of time which now i can go and degen into something else right because i have that paycheck advance ahead of time for the yield that i'm waiting a month for right so that's one really cool ap wine finance another one is like babylon finance um basically it's like kind of like the commune oh yeah they're pretty

new yeah a group mind kind of thing where like people can formulate strategies and then those can get voted in harvest is like a partner platform there because again we have 85 different strategies so why wouldn't you want to build strategies with like your group mind you know babylon finance again connecting with harvest finance um we also have like um uh perp fi um was another investment so perpetual um derivatives um or leverage they're blowing up yeah like perfect there's another they got like a billion in volume i think yeah so i mean yeah and that was one of our very first ones so they're doing um really great great on their in their own respect as well i think i think we did like a 10x or whatever even on that investment so

you know so it's not even about that but it's just you know what was it like a dollar it's at six now i'm a bag holder i've been saying yeah there we go i mean there you go see so um you know but again it's not about the money it's just like hey this is a really good idea these are really good projects how can we kind of connect and then going beyond just that dollar investment is now what can harvest do with you so like with ap wine finance they listed ifarm token so now users can leverage ifarm right babylon finances their users are going to hopefully start leveraging the harvest finance platform for their strategy so you know that's a big part of why we hook up with these different projects right because there's the synergy between us both creates more than if we were just sitting there

silent by ourselves yeah yeah definitely i mean i mean that that's a core philosophy of d5 is the composability between protocols but but now we're starting to see it between chains as well and it's really starting to grow and it gets down to that right the um the sum of everyone is greater than the whole of the parts or maybe i said that backwards right the whole is greater than the sum of its parts yeah um but at the end of the day right that that's that's what it means to be a commune where um you know you can make a little bit of an investment into some other protocol and it ultimately ends up helping your own your own project more so than maybe that 50 grand would have helped if you just reinvested it

back into it back in the harvest exactly that's super cool um in terms of what harvest is working on and kind of how you guys are branching out into the rest of the ecosystem what do you what do you see is um kind of the just like the next steps maybe for harvest or maybe it's for d5 as a whole um and we've talked a lot about on some previous podcasts about gas fees and what that means for kind of the future of the ecosystem um yeah maybe you could just kind of give us what your next like six months to a year looks like in d5 what you're really um you know excited for it in the near future um like for harvest like specifically um it's just continuing to

look at like those other opportunities right like now ave is automatic and they're doing some like yield farm stuff over there so is that like the next layer two opportunity right so now harvard you know farming across three different chains um and just continuing to expand that um looking at new farm type opportunities like we offer nft farming right so um you know what can we go beyond that you guys have uh what is the punk punk farm yeah you can uh farm with punks you can farm with moon cats um you know there's like four or five different ones on there so yeah so like before you know that's another you know one of the themes of harvest is like why just hold ethereum or bitcoin or

you know these nfts in your wallet and they just sit there and kind of do nothing other than like kind of ride the wave of market speculation why not put them to work right why not go out and farm if you have the opportunity to do something with that right so you know again just trying to offer these additional opportunities to users that didn't exist you know just talking about like you know things like pert fi or you know another project i'm looking at is complify you know we're farming derivatives right so like complify is pretty cool where it's their fully collateralized um derivatives like 5x derivatives it's like one of the scariest things that like you do margin trading so like especially this market right like yes eath looks so strong 5x long eath i'm going to bed

boom you wake up not only is your position rocked you got a margin call coming in that's eating up you know little johnny's college fund right like that's what's always care yesterday it sounds like you uh you were listening to andy and i's conversation over the last 24 hours well i'm going to show you the project that you should be in then because so basically complify is is an amm right so you take just real quick if you had let's say ten thousand dollars you deposit it into the pool at complify ten thousand usdc it creates five thousand short five thousand long tokens and so now you're in balance right and so if the the long start going up it starts eating away at the value of the short

and if it goes vice versa so it's basically just like teetering back and forth fully collateralized so if you put in your thousand dollars bet on each lung and it did dump overnight and kind of screw you the good thing is is one you don't lose anything more than that thousand dollars because you're fully collateralized and two i think one of the most important things is no forced liquidation right so think of the patriots when they're down 28 3. i hate the patriots but i know you love tom brady but they're down 28 to the falcons they're down 28 to the falcons going into the end of the third quarter imagine if they ended the game there because they're like oh you're down too far you're losing too much right that's like what a forced liquidation is

basically what a liquid that's basically what a liquidation is right when you fall fall into that margin but right complied because every position is fully um collateralized you don't need there's no risk for like the centralized exchange to say oh this guy's losing too much money we need to liquidate him otherwise he may not pay us or he may not have enough to pay us so there's no forced liquidation to complify so you're in the race till the end of the month so e-shorts are getting smoked all this month and then now back to back like weekends we'll just say back to back weeks you've had huge dives in the market where these zero dollar tokens from each because they were getting so rock they were down to zero but never got liquidated have now charged back up to

be worth like 40 60 cents of their value almost back level to what eth longs were doing through this whole month right so it's almost like this analogy towards the hair ether is ripping it up that's what you should put your money on but that short is just slowly doing its work and as we get to the finish line because they settle at the end of the month right so it's not like it's a forced liquidation but the market has to settle so eventually these you can cash out at your true value of the token the tortoise is almost caught up to the hair after this blazing speed that ethan's been doing all month so it's like super interesting that you can do this d gen 5x yolo still in derivatives but not wake up in the morning

completely wiped out and have a margin call hanging over your head liquidity mining is starting yeah sounds like yeah so liquidity morning starts should we get rich now or should we go hey get your funds ready liquidity mining started what's the website for the lmp it's a compli c-o-m-p-l-i dot f-i so it's compli um it's and just add app app at the front of that app.complete. and just check it out right now it's kind of like the beta testing period um you can earn some of the comfy token right now but true liquidity mining starts like on the the first or second when the market opens up

and what's cool is you can put money in as an lp you'll earn trading fees or you can earn the governance token 2 by buying the derivatives but if you don't want to be risky and say oh i don't want to lose money you know betting 5x long um just to try to earn this governance token just buy equal parts of the short and now you're balanced out have no risk and you're farming the comfy token so at you're just you're just basically yeah pretty much but because you there's different uh reward pools for the lps versus the derivative stakers so you can farm both pools with very low wrist side wow sounds like a ponzi scam no no no

because again like again everything no no i'm kidding i'm kidding you kill me with these mafia terms man no those i should not have said that those those terms should be completely banned and eradicated from crypto unless it's actually something that's at ponzi scam because the ponzi nomics meme like i love it but like it just gives crypto such a defy like a view and connotation but um yeah it really does because i mean some are pure ponzis but like some have their you know economics is complicated right like you know the fiat is more of a scam than anything because they just kind of printing press and um you know and supposedly there's all these economics behind it but i think somebody's just going burr right but like to truly build this

complicated defy system there's a lot of like underlying parts so in some respects oh this thing ethereum there's there's no um cap on its issuance it must be a ponzi that's like kind of what the btc argument is but that's not how it works right like there's economic principles built into all of this stuff um so again like yeah i don't like the word ponzi um unless you're kind of looking at these like fly-by-night projects that just some did some kind of fork and slapped a token on there just so they can you know pump and exit scan there's definitely there's projects out there but we kind of like that that first um entrance into um crypto like a lot of whatever you want to call them no

coiners normies what you know whatever you want to call them like that is one of the first hesitations is like how can there possibly be a coin or an asset that pays me four thousand percent apy there just has to be something wrong with that and then you start trying to poke holes and like you said economics is complicated but if you eventually say to yourself like i don't want to learn anymore or i don't want to understand the complexities you just kind of throw your hands up and it's like yeah it has to be a ponzi because it just sounds too good to be true i think what people need to be more careful of is like the pied piper like elon musk or mark cuban and they just throw out a coin name like doji coin and then dojo coin rushes up

to 40 cents when it doesn't have like a financial economic reason that it should be 40 cents right like oh no dogecoin is simply a meme like there there's things yeah but again but people are just rolling on elon musk is talking about it and that's where the danger is right so like but then people equate that to crypto oh i bought deutsche coin and i lost money and it's not kryptos faults because you listen to elon musk right but if you actually looked into crypto and this is what i explained people when i try to talk to them crypto face-to-face i'm like get past all that look at the underlying technology blockchain what look what it could do for casinos and like fair play or voting or you know just even in a currency the fact that you can track all the money back and forth even though

there's pseudo and anonymity right like if you could do that with the american dollar in a sense you couldn't printing press it or politicians couldn't be hoarding money as easily right because you have this huge public ledger so there are viable benefits to it there just may be shady people using it right so i think those things to get too intermixed especially when you have a celebrity like elon musk you know hyping stuff that they shouldn't be hyping i guess you know i was having this conversation with someone the other day where i i got a bunch of texts like oh should i buy dogecoin and you know it's always a complicated answer like well i don't really know like maybe maybe you want it just for the entertainment value

or maybe you're you're really just trying to a lotto ticket it's a lot right right so but but it's interesting to see like there is essentially no utility with dogecoin that that is you know basically there's no disagreement there but then i i mentioned to the same to the same person it's like yeah there's there's no utility in dogecoin it's just a meme but essentially that's what bitcoin is like what's the utility of bitcoin other than it's it's mean value it's literally just it goes up because people agree that it's worth something and for the same reasoning that's that's pretty much the the value proposition of gold as well so you know it's tough to think that like

dogecoin is worth something only because there's there's um like people that agree that maybe it should be worth something uh but i think we can apply that same narrative to a lot of different coins in the ecosystem um where we can separate ethereum and d5 into almost a completely different sector because there is utility value and there's things that you can do with your tokens you can put them to work collateralize them and then ultimately you have this d5 flywheel that starts to spin people might still call that like you know a scam or a meme or a ponzi whatever you want to call it like kind of these negative connotation words or narratives but um at the end of the day it does provide some utility value uh compared to some of these other

assets that are simply just um a store of value and and really no utility um so i think that's kind of actually why i struggled with bitcoin a little bit because i'm like when i very first heard about it years before i actually got into crypto because again like the lack utility like well you can't spend this at a store so a house is valuable so it's just like some like a digital baseball card almost where like almo only this small segment of people are really to care about the value of this but again like when then bitcoin the first the first nft yeah exactly but i think that's kind of where i see ethereum as you said like there's so much more you can do with ethereum and you don't even need like the whole token

ecosystem necessarily but like just going back to the like the the casino analogy if a bunch of people could come together and pool their money together in like this smart contract you know trustless and we could all pull our money together and we act as the bank casino and then the token that everybody holds is just collecting the cut let's say the one percent on every bet instead of like the 10 vegas charges you've now reduced you know tenfold the cost of the customer and now you've created an automated digitally distributed dividend to everybody's holding money there again and it's global so now you've made a commune casino

right like that to me forget bitcoin right like maybe bitcoin is a currency that you use there just for the trading uh value purposes because it's blockchain but the value is the casino and what people are doing there and placing their bets and the fees that you're aggregating out of it right like that's what's exciting to me not the store value but yeah that's where the innovation is really happening and uh kind of the growth of the ecosystem and the growth of the financial ecosystem as a whole um red we talked about a ton of stuff here um you know you're on your own personal involvement um getting into harvest and and some of the uh recovery that we've seen and kind of how you guys have grown over time

um as well as governance and just kind of the ecosystem as a whole uh this is this has been great man do you have any parting thoughts or anything you want to you know tell our audience before we hop off no i would just say please um if you're interested in kind of like dipping your toe into crypto currencies or if you've kind of heard of yield farming or yeah i want to make 20 on my dollar um i would definitely check out like harvest finance just because we try to make it very user friendly like i said bring some digital dollars you get from coinbase check out our website um you can deposit i would just say you know kind of do your own research understand what you're getting into don't listen to just red or elon musk kind of like okay what is dogecoin let me go look for

it myself and then you find out it's probably not as nice as elon musk said if you come to harvest finance and kind of look and do your own research you're gonna see like whoa i can really do make my 20 cents or 20 um on my dollar right so that's what i would encourage or just give parting thoughts um to users and then just be very careful in general and decentralized finance there are a lot of scams out there that's why harvest exists to kind of try to filter out some of those scams and yield farming but there are some kind of snake oil salesmen again going back to that uh wild west analogy so while there is a lot of money to be made there's also a lot of potential pitfalls that all users should be careful of yeah i mean this has been great um super

you know we appreciate you coming on and um you know look forward to a lot more updates and uh progress from harvest appreciate it guys really yeah we will check out some of those some of those newer projects that are coming out we're gonna look into those for sure complify and ap wine finance those are two really cool ones really excited yeah and babylon hopefully we can help him out yeah man appreciate it buddy we will talk soon appreciate it thank you guys thanks man thanks for listening to the d5i design podcast until next time d5 slate team you