DeFi By Design EP#37: Community Investing for Passive Crypto Enthusiasts

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 what's going on y'all welcome to episode 37 of the d5 by design podcast here today with robbie the co-host of d5 slate we just had a sick team call about the upcoming dow which by the time you're listening to this one it's probably already out in full force

also here today with the co-founder of an up-and-coming protocol uh this protocol i'll give you some hints it's an on-chain asset management protocol it is a it is going to come out and have some new strategies and kind of a new twist to the way that decentralized asset management works on chain we're here today with ramon the founder of babylon finance and we're going to hear all about what's going on with decentralized asset management on ethereum in d5 kind of how to how to bring it to the masses how you guys can get involved with their upcoming liquidity mining program which i'm sure is going to be coming out um and how you can also participate in strategies and everything with with the new launch of babylon i'll turn it over to robbie um how you doing today

robbie what's going on i'm chilling andy yeah we had a great morning uh with the team definitely getting updated and making some moves on some really exciting stuff i'm super stoked to be talking to ramon i haven't used babylon too much uh but it's not launched yet dude that's why i haven't used it so there you go so i am super stoked to learn about it and and get involved from an early stage uh and you know as we learn about it um you know hopefully you learn right alongside with us so i will pass it off to ramon how you doing today ramon and and kind of give us the inside scoop on what's going on in babylon cool thank you a lot happy to be here and happy to be sharing a bit more about babylon finals that we are going to be releasing the beta next

month um basically i can tell you first a little bit about how the story and how the idea came sounds good cool yes sir basically um for the last few years you know as every other person that is in crypto i have a lot of friends that are always asking me oh should i buy crypto right now should i buy ethereum so they buy cardano and it's like you know eventually it gets old um so at some point i i decided okay enough let's let's create a smart contract let's create a dragon channel and let's discuss about how we can pull our money together and how

how we can make stuff happen so i created in the last fall this telegram group with 20 of my friends and i created this smart smart contract private and then we we all put money together and we executed different defense strategies and then we were able to generate a really nice return so then that was like the the the start of babylon then from there it's like okay how we can give this to everyone how we can give this gift to the world so not only people that know me are not only people that are insiders of defy or only people that live in silicon valley can access to this opportunity because the the meta point is like the investment landscape has changed a lot in the last

20 30 years you know um our parents they all our parents live and the world 30 years ago was totally different you know interest rates were like 15 you know imagine like having your money in the bank account and getting 15 per year that's a totally different goal that we live right now right now the bank doesn't give you anything so uh and the interest rates now are at zero the the governments because of the pandemic and even before that they were already printing printing as much money as possible to kind of overcome the great financial crisis crisis that happened 12 years ago so i believe in the next two decades the best places to preserve your wealth and grow your wealth is going to be crypto because it's going to

be this new exponential age that is going to lift our boats and then crypto is going to suck a lot of capital into the space and we just want to give people access to this opportunity yeah and it already is i mean it's it's it's grown by the trillions in the last year um you know the overall market cap of bitcoin and just all the space d5 is growing massively the crazy part is like people are talking about like the end of this cycle you know from like 2017 but like d5 makes up six percent of the total market cap right now and like i would say 99 of of like the active social capital and intellectual capital in building yeah it's absolutely nuts um so let's get off with the basics you

guys are launching on ethereum correct why did you guys choose ethereum to launch on yeah great question i mean basically because that's where the developers and the projects are and that's where device right now you've been seeing a little bit more happening on binance and a little bit more is starting on polka dot but it's still really early it's it's like the ethereum has all the all the main projects you know compound you need swap maker and i mean two years ago there wasn't even differ but now if i started uh with maker you can you can say like two three years ago but then last summer is when really the summer of the start and then all the projects have come together to the platform where there has been more innovation and there are more

developers tinkering because the the cool thing about the ethereum is all the code is open you know it's not like in a web 2.0 that facebook released something or twitter really something or apple and then you need to ask permission to become part of the apple store of the google play store or facebook right yeah here is totally different you know as a fun fact i used to work for synga you know the people that used to create games on facebook like and all this guy you know and they over time they change the algorithm of how they serve ads for games and they basically tank sync as revenue by 30 which was nuts nobody can do that anymore on the feeding wall and that's that's a plus for builders that's awesome yeah so we have a uh we currently have

a a a d hedge pool which i was i was speaking to you about prior to to the recording turning on but i was also kind of voicing to you some of the uh the issues that we're facing with uh as far as gas fees goes on ethereum and you know i know that l2s are coming out and all that but you know what's your broad take on the state of the etherium gas crisis you know do you view it uh in in like like in what outlook do you view it as for the state of aetherium as a whole um you know whether it's bearish or bullish or positive or negative kind of like what's your take on the ethereum gas fee situation currently yeah everyone is talking about it i mean let's start by saying that it's a good problem to have you know when if you

don't have any transactions it's really easy to to say oh arduino transactions are totally cheap you like other networks yeah because nobody is using them so it's a really good thing that blocks are full and people want to do stuff and then the gas prices obviously are increasing and this is similar to what happened three years ago or during a different state but you remember cryptokitties cryptokitties also clogged the defending network for two weeks and the gas prices were also insane and but right now the difference is there is a lot more real applications so it's clogged pretty much on a 24 7 and it's 2.0 has been taking longer than we all wanted so in the meantime there are there are different ways that you can mitigate and alleviate this problem one of them is going to

to layer to you but for example for us um we are using we're integrating with all the other d5 protocols you know from harvest synthetics balancer unit swap compound abbey so until all of them are on layer two it doesn't make sense for us to move to layer two because we are an aggregate play and we make it easy for everyone to participate and use all these other defined protocols so for us we are waiting but we are looking into into optimistic we are looking into arbitrary we're looking into into polygon as well matic um and as well waiting for is 2.0 because there is a chance that if they meet the deadline all this in a year is a solved problem

but of course this may not be so we need to have alternatives yeah yeah and you know we've seen a large uh kind of limitation on the amount of trades that we can do over at d hedge because of those gas fees but more kind of getting into babylon and how you guys operate can you highlight some of the differences between d hedge and babylon you know at the surface level they're both decentralized asset management protocols basically copy trading types of applications you know can you highlight some of the difference between yourself and d hedge um and you know anything that different differentiates babylon from that copy trading uh kind of concept and ramon real quick just prior to hopping into that um could

you just kind of explain to our audience what the thesis is behind creating these decentralized asset management protocols you know and why they're important to the d5 space into like the whole financial ecosystem and then kind of let's let's get into you know what rob's saying like we'd love to kind of hear more about what the what the differences are yeah happy happiness a great question yeah asset management space let's start that huge you know in the traditional market is like in the trillions of dollars every year so it's a massive space and basically asset management makes it easy for people to invest in in assets and generate a financial return in the defy space um it's really important to have this decentralized asset management place you know there

are some things like like d heads or you can see things like jiren or set also as decentralized asset management and the way that it works right now the space is kind of fragmented in in two different buckets of one on one side you have the ones that are kind of active management place and something like where you have like fear of a manager that cannot decide so let's put the money here let's put the money there and in a similar way set some of their social trading sets operate in the same way and then on the other side you have like the passive ones that are things like yen things like a an index the bi where you just put the money save it and forget it that is more like your traditional vanguard fan or your robo index funds

but we believe that there is a huge gap in the market because they are on opposite ends of the spreadsheet because yeah and stuff is they are like totally trustless so you need to trust the smart contract but the active ones you need to trust the manager they have mimic the the old world on chain for example dh still uses terms from the hedge fund industry still uses the 220 fear structure and so we believe there's a huge gap for creating like community-led asset management where it's totally trustless totally centralized but there is not a single figure you know there is no reason why having the the trust technology that is ethereum that allows you to coordinate different players there is no reason why there should be a single manager for your group of friends that that needs to create a

strategy you can create a group of friends uh a group and then all of you can suggest the strategies and you can both together and decide how to allocate the capital so that's basically what we are doing at babylon we are creating this these gardens that we call that their communities and every community and can have a different investment thesis for example you can have a community that loves nfts and they get together and then together they decide to buy different fts and then sell them later you can have another community that is really risk averse and they are going to just buy stable coins and deposit the stable coins in balanced pools or any other amms to earn a return and you of course you can have the djs as well that are just going to use their harvest alfa camara and all these

kind of things so so we accommodate all these different d5 protocols so i could say that the main difference is like in babylon we kind of restructure all this all all this structure from the ground up from crypto principles for example instead of a 220 fee structure where traditionally you know there is a two percent management fee and a twenty percent carry twenty percent of the profits in babylon this gets split between the different participants so in a garden you have the people that create the strategies that are called strategies and for a successful strategy the strategies will get ten percent then there are the people that create a strategy that we call stewards or curators

and these people they also have a skill in the game because if they vote for successful strategies they will get bubble we can go into the mining program later and also part of the profits and then you also have the traditional piece so basically we we split the the twenty percent of profits between the strategies and the voters and then the rest obviously goes to all the peace and with the caveat that to be honest strategies or to both you also need to be an lp in the same community so everyone is aligned there is no freelance here and if for example if a strategist i create a really bad strategy and i lose my stake as well so we have designed the the game the incentives for all the participants really carefully to make sure everyone is aligned because another thing that happened and we

mentioned in our latest post is like in most of the professions right now people that know can transfer the risk to people that don't know and it's what happened in 2008 you know people that know about about cdos and how to create this this garbage products of putting all the mortgages that did them that didn't have any value and then sell them to other people uh and they make a lot of money in the pro and you are transferring fragility so in the end you are transferring the hidden risks to other people but in babylon if you do that you're gonna get the slash your stake and your reputation and you're not gonna get any profits and you're not gonna get any bubble so that's that's the main change seems like a very dow centric community owned um kind of platform which also rings a bell in my head

as far as uh risk management with uh with all sorts of legal jurisdictions especially in the states um you know it's gonna be it's it's it's easy to argue the non-custodial angle with with protocols like d hedge enzyme you know even urine and stuff like that but it's almost it's so much easier when you have a community that governs the strategies rather than a sole person that's kind of like one thing that we're working on is to get this our dow off the ground sooner than later so we can grow our own strategies on you know d hedge and babylon and enzyme etc right and not feel this kind of legal uh rip of like ah are we supposed to be doing this like ah because we truly feel like we're helping people when we're doing this and we

we are not hedge fund owners we don't we don't offer any financial advice and it's all non-custodial right but when you add the community aspect to it and it's truly governed by those who like you say have skin in the game then i mean there's no room to say that this is anything like a 2 and 20 hedge fund with which has a custodial aspect to it and is very much so like um you know a direct uh you know a direct service of of the traditional finance world what do you think rob yeah yeah no that and i think that's going to be the best way to mitigate risk over the entire ecosystem you know let's take babylon um and you guys are spreading risk among different communities rather than consolidating risk in the individual you know like you said when

people are in the know they're able to transfer risk and fragility into people that aren't in the know and then that risk compounds and it compiles into these individuals by spreading the risk across a larger population this was something that hugh from nexus mutual dove into about how to really grow the ecosystem as a whole and make it less risky for any one individual is to spread that risk over a larger population yeah especially when it comes to insurance you know they want to ensure you know this is a little bit off topic but they want to ensure as many protocols as possible therefore like you know having all their eggs in in every basket possible instead of all in one you know in a similar sense that that's kind of where i view that

i view uh the community aspect of of babylon so you know what's kind of your plan to attract um some of these community gardeners if you will you know like how are you going to get get people to say yo like sure i want to create a strategy you know i know you touched on the incentives a bit more but what's your plan for that yeah great question we've been really really careful from the beginning the the way we design it our systra for example we have um 80 people that almost 80 people that participated in our citroen and they are all of them defy espers and they are knowledgeable in the space so we we expect them to be our first gardeners our first

strategies that suit the platform and at the same time we started this settlers program that is what we call our beta and and we open it and we are we have a an email list that we are gathering and next month we are going to start inviting people from these sectors beta and yeah it's going to start soon and it's really interesting what you say those about insurance and rates for example we're talking with nexus mutual as well and we totally agree for example imagine that you can create a strategy in a garden and then for example you do this complex operation in different ways you say okay i'm gonna deposit this ethereum compound then i'm gonna die with it then with this die i'm gonna buy

these two assets to put them in the liquidity pool in harvest and then i'm gonna i'm gonna use those lp tokens and i'm gonna stack them and then i'm gonna buy a insurance of nexus mutual for all these protocols that i'm using in this strategy so you can ensure all the strategies that the community is using using nexus material so that this is something that we are also planning and because it's really important that um if we wanna attract more people to defy it needs to be uh both uh easier on the on the ui level but also on the on the risk level so it needs to be more approachable again in the level of of legalities like you know a lot of these hedge funds two and twenties are

insured almost by um i guess fdic but more so like by their by their backing of of of supporters and basically by the banks right in this case you could offer community management uh investing style strategy style which would likely outperform due to like the sheer way that communities rallied together but you can basically also offer this idea of uh in sharing your assets in case of any hacks um which i mean is definitely one of the biggest things that has stopped us from like um doing massive amounts of outreach um to get people into our our current pool it's like well hey we don't really know what we're doing but i mean we we've crushed it but b

it's like we don't really have any backup plan if like keys are lost or if or if d hedge goes down or you know right stuff so it's like it's like having that ability to have insurance is going to be huge for um you know asset management and honestly i think this is one of the biggest sectors of d5 that people are sleeping on because i think this is one of the easiest ways to get billions of dollars into d5 because ultimately i i i'm not a pessimist but i simply view people as as wanting to have work be done for them in a lazy way and what better way than to be able to put your money with people who you trust who is non-custodial and is uh insured and through through uh some sort of cover right and basically not have to do

anything pay a tiny bit of fees to be a part of of the group or of the strategy and then all of a sudden you know you're making money and active in d5 without you even even knowing it i think that's kind of like huge like do you see a future where you know you can have like a one-click button that enters you into a babylon strategy on an app like you know like uh like a robin hood right or like a argent right where like you know you like instead of seeing all the detail strategies and all the fees and all the community you just oh yeah i like that one it's like it's like it says you know you know either like kind of aggressive or medium or you know conservative okay done right and that they're literally putting it into like a babylon strategy that has so much

code and smart contracts behind it but to the end user it's just investing in crypto passively exactly that's that's the way we are we are architecting this um in the end you know um every different garden every different community has different investment thesis different levels of risk so you as an individual say oh i like this garden that is super safe i'm gonna put 70 percent of my portfolio there and this one is in secure and then for five percent of it then i'm going to put in this other super risk high garden that maybe is not insured so you can create your portfolio by investing in different communities and it's really important as you said that um for lps for normative peace it's just a one-click thing you can just deposit and forget about it then if you wanna

get additional rewards if you're gonna get extra profits you can learn and you can suggest strategies or you can vote and you can create strategies and that way you can have the potential for greater return but also you can you can lose money so we designed the instance so only people that provide signal are gonna get extra rewards so you cannot just click buttons randomly like a monkey because you you can lose so we are the babylon is gonna reward accurate signal yeah so you guys are going to be able to use strategies on like most d5 protocols like it's going to be like an open kind of world of like anything goes ultimately that is like you know um that you're able to do with these protocols like

like you said like if you want to go to compound and deposit some eath and then borrow stables and then go farm and then lp you know on on on uniswap and then bring that token over to elsewhere like basically all these capabilities are going to be available so this is truly like you know this isn't just like trading this is like everything everything in d5 can work here yep exactly lending a m providing liquidity insurance and we we are working hard to make sure we we give all the tools so and then every community can choose how to what to do with those tools to create the the product that is work for the for the community another way to think about it is we are similar to instadub or syrian or this place but instead of just for

yourself you you can do it for your family you can do it for your group from friends and you can do it for your for your community yeah yeah that's awesome because it it you know differentiates from something like d hedge which is more of an actively managed fund and starts to look more like what you're saying instadap where you know you can aggregate a bunch of these different d5 protocols and then interact with all of them at once and when you first mentioned i was a little bit confused on the gas situation because you know why well the reason was because um you know i guess i didn't understand quite the extent that you guys had interoperability and once you are connected to these different dapps if they're on one l2 and another dap is

on another l2 then that presents a problem for you because you need to be but you need to find a way to connect to both of those at the same time so you know it seems like there's going to be maybe some limitations when it comes to gas fees on on uh maybe you guys need to use different bridges to connect to different blockchains to to be able to integrate all of these different applications yeah the simplest ways that we're thinking to optimize our gas costs right now are you for one all the voting to both strategies happen with signatures so it's free so that way we there is no gas cost for participating in your community and both on strategies

and the other thing we are doing is we are sharing all the gas costs of strategies so if if if you execute a strategy the gas codes of executing a strategy are shared amongst all the participants so for example if you have 50 members even if the even if they cost to execute a strategy is like 600 it's it's not that much it's 12 dollars per person so suddenly it becomes reasonable if you have a big a big community so that's that's why we are socializing the gas cost in a way so like with this dow that we're creating say by the time you know a few months go by we've got you know 50 100 people in there basically what we could do is we could

all put some money in there together um and then we we we'd be able to basically vote on how it's used um and the structure so what is the what is the uh the proportion of payouts look like is it like okay the pool starts with a hundred percent and then as everybody adds into it you know say if say if 20 people add five dollars you get a hundred dollars and and and everybody owns five percent of the pool or is it you know like like how does that how does the proportional profits work yeah we explained all this in the like that because a little complicated yeah basically when you deposit money into the garden then based on the net asset value of the garden or the community you get you're talking participation that

represents your partner's basically the garden yeah and then it's basically like a proportional yeah exactly okay cool also it's important to know that um you know the strategy for example a strategy may be active and you may join after the strategy has become active so then you wouldn't get the rewards or the profit from that strategy if that strategy is already in flux so so there are a few capitals there and one way one thing that they wanted to mention too is like we we designed it to be like capital efficiency uh and so the money is always gonna be gonna be worth it's not like in that if the the manager gets more money he needs to allocate it to the strategist here if a government receives more money and there

are active strategies automatically the guardian will allocate the money to the strategies that are active so there is no need to to kind of be looking it's like oh i receive more money i need to put more ends to put more no automatically rebalances facts yeah that makes sense as that's exactly as it should um you know as it should work i i i got a bit of a controversial question for you know a lot of people come into d5 and they think about wanting to be their own bank and to take control of their finances and obviously this is just a single subset of folks but there's certainly a lot of them around you know what's your answer to when somebody says why should i invest you know in in in a fund or or in a in a garden or in

this kind of aspect when the whole reason why i left my financial advisor was to kind of come into defy and do it on my own you know like like what's the what's the alert to doing decentralized asset management you know if the if the whole point of d5 is kind of being bankless and kind of you know doing your own you know your own transactions and finances yeah that question has different angles i mean in a way you're still being bank bankless you are not using a bank and you know in babylon is the sign that still you know if you deposit into a garden nobody can touch the money uh that you deposited directly not the strategies not the creator of the gardener so you are the only one that can access it so if there is no smart control

vulnerability and we're working really hard to make sure that doesn't happen there is no way anybody else can access that your deposit so it's similar to compound that is like oh i'm putting my money in compound so but yeah still compound cannot as a protocol cannot take your money so in a way you're still being back but i also wanted to make the point that um this is uh this is a range and it's kinda it goes from zero to a hundred so it's not gonna be like oh zero percent totally backless or 100 percent i give i give my money to someone to handle it um so i think if we want to bring more people to the space we we need to offer several layers for people to feel comfortable you know my grandma's

never gonna feel comfortable using the the ui of any defy application these days but they may feel comfortable using a other layer of attraction that kind of looks like a bank or a fintech company right now and just clicking one button and she can deposit money and then button to withdraw and and we need to offer this these layers of structure so right now and what you mentioned before like one click button and for example babylon could integrate later with applications like dharma for example and just have one click button and a mobile application that lets you do their own ramp so you can but you can run transfer your dollars into crypto and then use those quick dollars to get into a garden yeah yeah that's awesome and and it kind

of uh speaks to the concept and the theme that we've been seeing across a lot of um new protocols popping up working on bridges um going straight from a centralized exchange or some sort of fiat account straight to layer two um and one click buttons are gonna be a great way to do that i think what you said about um kind of scaling the the bankless journey um it's really important because you know andy and i are degens so we hopped right into crypto it was very appealing to us right away but someone like you said a grandma or someone that just has some more i guess i mean it's not responsibility but just

is a little bit safer with their money they're a little bit more risk adverse um they're they kind of need their hand held as they dive deeper and deeper into crypto and someone you know isn't gonna be ready to just start picking out coins and investing in things right away even if it's you know some of the more blue chip type assets um you know that that's why the different uh like sectors of traditional finance exist right some people are managing their own money other people do just have a savings account in a checking account but then you get into some you know different more creative ways to manage your money and you start to tackle in index funds and money markets and those are the applications that

we're starting to see on on defy babylon being pretty much the community driven index fund um that is very customizable and and can be created by anyone and ramon on that note of of particular subsets of people that are interested in in managing money um you know and are part of the world economy what subset do you think is the most important to bring into d5 as soon as possible is it institutions is it is it people who have 401ks with with advisors is it the young people who are graduating out of college is it the millennials who've been in the workforce for a few years is it the older people you know like kind of what who do you think what

generation is most important to bringing to d5 you know to reach critical adoption and why do you think it yeah that's a great question as well um yeah i i see the adoption as an s-curve the same way it happened for the internet and i would say we are still in the early stages we are maybe in the early majority and then to be able to bring the the skeptics that is usually majority like majority and the laggards you need to have more it needs to be perceived better so i think institutional adoption is helping and you see it right now with with fidelity for example and a lot of the big the big headphone managers in the world have been talking

really positively about cryptocurrencies like raul paul and so and that's helping so and once the institutions uh adopt it you know it gets legitimate more people see it as legitimate and the other thing is as the market size increases the volatility goes down with for some people also see it as a bar i see it as a feature you know because if you want a symmetric upside if you want upside do because what you want is a call option on the future so you want a lot of upside but little downside but most people say oh the volatility of bitcoin is crazy well if you want it to go up it will it will need to have volatility if you just wanted to to not do anything you can buy a three at least rebuild you can buy a one-year treasury and

it will just stay the same way you have it so um in terms of what do we need right i think um we are going to live frog because the internet took like 25 years you know the internet started in the early 90s but then until 2005 or so you didn't see kind of like the unique things that the internet could do like things like uber and things like airbnbs that have disrupted a lot of markets but at the beginning you are you asking deny this and there is an in there is an interview with andreessen asking them oh what did you foresee to be the best application of the internet the only thing he could think about was like an internet library you know because he's kind of taking something from the old model exactly onto the internet and the same way i think right now a lot of crypto

applications i kind of move in the old model onto crypto but in in five to 10 years we'll start seeing and we're seeing them already like things that you can only do on crypto that you could not do before it's not just all just put insurance on change let's put derivatives on chain let's put futures on chain or all those things that are necessary and that will happen the same way i believe that in the next 5 10 years all the assets are gonna be tokenized so i mean you can do it right now with synthetics as well you can buy gold you can buy bonds you can buy stocks and with luna and terror the same thing yeah but all these things are gonna happen but this is gonna change really quickly in the next five to ten years so i could just focus on gaining legitimacy

and i think institutions are good and then slowly you will get more of the silicon valley ties more of the fintech layer and as the fintech player gets more integrated that is happening of course twitter and square are looking into it jack being super super bullish on bitcoin so it's going to happen it just takes time the certain answer is it takes time yeah yeah and it's super interesting to see just kind of the evolution of crypto as kind of a natural consequence of the internet right like first we put information on the internet and now we're putting money on the internet and crypto really is like an internet of money um so it might be a uh interesting exercise to just kind of think about like

what is the next um integration of the internet into like our social lives um and i i don't have any answers like right off the top of my head but i think there's gonna be certainly like things that continue um on this path of tokenization uh like real estate you know i'm sure there's gonna be some business applications there where people start to tokenize their homes and then we can you know shape up how mortgages are paid and and given out um and potentially like split and underwritten a different way so i i definitely think the the instantiation of real assets into a blockchain as far as uh tokens and and more virtual assets

uh will allow kind of even more interoperability between the digital world and the the physical world it unlocks in the end it unlocks more gdp you know because right now there is a lot of value that is locked for example people that were trading cars locally physically in their that value was unlocked and the same way people playing video games where they didn't have a monetary value plays through their skill but right now with the metabours and esports is also growing i use sports and cryptocurrencies one area that is gonna intertwine quite nicely so you are gonna be able to price everything on real time and associate value with it so this is gonna unlock a lot of gdp that wasn't there before so it's not like oh it's a part of the pie no we're

making the pie bigger and in the end this is what why i'm really interested into crypto because it's like we are increasing the freedom for every cities in the world because a lot of strengths in the physical world are going the opposite direction so i'm really hopeful that crypto can be the the thing that gives more freedom to everyone the same way that 300 500 years ago only the charge could print books and then we took that money away from the state you know hopefully uh being able to handle your money is something that can be up to each individual as well yeah yeah and it's gonna be super interesting to see how how much people take that opportunity um you know we certainly we are certainly

aware of it that it's going to continue kind of making itself prevalent as time progresses um and you know it it just kind of speaks to me like we're all still early you know even though prices are super high and and you know they might correct like in terms of technology op adoption i think it is certainly very very early still um because people are are frankly scared of having custody of their own money i think people see it as as frightening um more taking on more responsibility rather than a freedom yep and that will still happen you know some people will never want to take to take ownership because they are scared of themselves or they don't trust and they will pay other people to do it but the key thing is like this other

person can do it in a way or through one pro or this protocol that still you know doesn't have total ownership of the of the money only you in reality have so we can put these layers of abstraction so it's still it's still better than the traditional wall but if you don't want to worry about your money you don't have to somebody else can can take that burden for you and you can pay for that service yeah yeah it's it's really interesting what's what's been coming about um you know i'm kind of curious what your favorite part about d5 is right now you know like what what's your favorite uh aspect of d5 yeah i mean it changes so fast you know as you know

every day there is so so much new stuff that is difficult to keep up even working on the space 24 7. and lately i like for example quite a bit alchemics like the the concept of self repaying loans i think it's really powerful and it can be another primitive that is reused lately as part of the d5 stack but in the end i mean the basic the basic concepts of uh compound and nabe i think are really powerful and they have unlocked a lot of innovation and now i hope the the concept of communities and communities being able to to unify their efforts and their money and direct them to towards a uh common cause i think it can help a lot of people because

there are really few people in the world that understand different you know you put it in percentage terms it may be like 0.001 percent people that now define the world so it's like how we can give this opportunity to more people so if you have these communities where there are a few people that know how to defy and then they bring their friends together then we are bringing everyone along so that's that's the goal with these communities and these gardens in babylon people that know share their their knowledge and then they get rewarded for it yeah and and you can tell that babylon is is solving this problem and impacting it directly um you know you like like you said at the beginning of this podcast babylon is all about bringing the tools to the people so that

the communities can organize themselves and then use the tools appropriately yeah um and these tools can benefit each community a little bit differently and everyone can use them to their fullest potential so it's super cool to see and maybe we can bring it back to you know actually the features on babylon and how they're uh coming out over the next few months um you know you mentioned the investor alpha and then some of the different mining programs can you speak to kind of that liquidity mining program when it's coming out um how we can get involved and and uh kind of the goal with that that uh liquidity mining program perfect yep um we need to propose it and the community will need to approve it but basically you know a bubble there is a governance token associated with the protocol

and there is going to be one million bubble and it is like 50 of all the bubble is going to be designed it's going to be allocated to the to the mining program so and babylon needs to be owned by the users for completion the the team is only taking 10 percent and the rest is going for to investors and some for the liquidity program so around 70 of the bubble it is going to all the to all the users of babylon and the mining program is designed to last more than 10 years and it's kind of front loaded so the rewards of the first quarter the people that use the platform in the first quarter will get more bubble and basically we're gonna give bubble to people that create successful strategies people that start gardens people that deposit people

that vote and depending on how these things perform and how accurate is that signal that they are providing if you are both for example if you probably create a create a create a strategy and then someone else votes on it then if the strategy performs well you will both get rewarded obviously you will get rewarded more because you created the strategy but the other person will also get rewarded for providing accurate signal on that of that strategy and so we are using the bubble to both align the incentives of all the participants and then as a governance to decide in the future you know which other resources to add which other integrations should the protocol work with and so on you know i i know we're running kind of close on time here

but i wanted to put out there um the the concept kind of reminds me of uh wall street bets like i'm sure you know you were aware of wall street bets when they took on uh i forget that the name of the hedge fund but it was around game stop and you know yeah hedge fund had a huge short squeeze so everyone knows the story and i i i saw that wall street bets announced their own token and and they're doing you know kind of a similar idea with community investing and trying to remove like that big information gap between retail and and institutional i gotta say i don't know i don't know enough about their token to to suggest any kind of like collaboration between babylon or

or highlight any differences between babylon and wall street vets but it definitely sounds like philosophically their their synergy there um between you know the the different communities of babylon and end of wall street does yeah definitely there is some synergy we have actually talked about it we are taking different approaches they don't have so so much information also publicly at the moment so it's difficult to know exactly what the plans are at the moment but we are open to collaboration because as you said philosophically we we are aligned um i mean we are not so focused on the stocks like for example the wall street best community traditionally we are more crypto native for example i work on open sampling before other person other co-founders on

our team we also work on opensupply as well so so we come more from the inside crypto crypto native um well they are approaching it more like the reddit community and bringing the running community unchained and that may cause some we are both attacking a similar problem from different angles and in the end this that's the beauty of this of this ecosystem everything is open so you can you can plug into each other if you need to and you can build on top of each other and in the end it would benefit the whole space yeah yeah it's certainly a uh it's an apparent problem and it's you know being attacked from a few different angles like you said so hopefully we can find a creative solution um you know to this problem that ultimately makes

the the more average person um right more free and that's accomplishable through cryptocurrency and d5 yeah i agree awesome it's awesome yeah i'm moving forward to the launch hopefully in june here yep do we give a bit more details about the timeline we are testing the alpha right now and we'll soon invite our seed investors to test the alpha and then next month we'll start our beta program the settlers program and then we'll kick off the mining rewards and then in june june july it will be like the more public launch awesome yeah you all have been working on this for a few months now i i honestly thought it was already launched

so uh that's a pleasant surprise to me we're still at the uh the predecessor steps to this mining program which is super cool um everyone can get in early stage and and start to uh stack babble yep and look we are looking forward to all the feedback that we can get our light paper is also published and we have a discord and telegram groups where you can if you're interested please come and share your thoughts beautiful thanks so much for coming on and talking about babylon and everything that you guys are doing to build uh we had a pleasure and i learned something um you know i enjoyed the conversation and looking forward to

to the launch and supporting you guys through it thank you both this was great yeah this was superman thanks for coming on