DeFi By Design EP#41: Merging Centralized and Decentralized Liquidity w/ CCAI

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 guys welcome to episode 41 of the d5 by design show here today on a beautiful tuesday after a lot of moving on on my end moving is an absolute but here we are

talking about d5 engaging in crypto we've had a productive day today and getting after uh we're seeing a bunch of stuff happen in the in the market from etfs to new projects being listed and and and created a lot of fun going on a lot of people are focused on price action but there's still a lot of builders going at it and going hard um you know and as usual in this d5 world it's kind of is like the wild wild west and catching up with everything is tough right but we're we are here today to spread some awareness about what's going on in the solana ecosystem in the decentralized exchange ecosystem and some and some interesting stuff to learn about um you know while you prepare for the rest of the year in d5

i'm here today of course with co-host robbie robbie what's going on my boy doing well doing well yeah it's been uh a great week uh you know it's been a while since we recorded podcast it's feeling good um today's june 29th so to give you know everyone an idea of where we are um market recovered a bit so that that's cool to see but like you said you know for for a while now we've been on uh builder mode or survival mode and just you know not really keeping too much tabs on the market just nice to see you know that everyone still has some interest um you know if you're involved in the space you know that there's a lot of opportunities out there to get involved um so yeah you might be able to hear a

little rain outside so it's kind of a cloudy rainy day in florida but you know other than that doing great i will pass it over to hisham let him introduce himself and cc.ai yeah thank you guys for having me um i'm hisham i'm the ceo and co-founder of cryptocurrencies.ai and short ccai at ccai we're building a next generation spot and futures exchange and we've also launched one of the world's fastest decentralized exchanges built of course on the solana blockchain i would love to tell you more about our products and and kind of what we're doing at the company but uh a bit about my background so i've been a product builder for about 10 years now i started off my career as a business analyst and

you know i was fortunate enough to kind of get into um software you know kind of getting involved in a team that was implementing a large scale enterprise software project and that took me for the first time through how products get built at some of the large companies here in the us and by products i mean more enterprise scale products and from there on it's just been kind of like that journey and going through multiple cycles of building products at various different fortune 500 companies um and kind of seeing how things evolve starting from talking to the stakeholders then getting the dev team together to sort of like you know scope out the product build it test it release it provide support for it after going live with the product and

i've just been doing that a number of times and then i landed midway through my career at bloomberg and uh that's where i got introduced to financial technology as a product manager and um you know during that time i was just getting more and more into kind of like emerging technologies and i would always just read articles about all the cool stuff that was happening like with machine learning ai quantum computing and every now and then i would see like a article pop up about blockchain and this was like in 2015 2016 it wasn't you know there wasn't a lot of hype back then but i kind of started to unders just read about it a little bit and get an idea conceptually what it was uh but it wasn't until 2017 early on when i really decided to kind of go home

one day and and just really spend a couple of hours researching this blockchain technology and figure out what it really was and if the way that i understood it in my mind was it really that so just to kind of confirm what i had made up and built up in my mind and it actually turned out once i once i spent like an hour to just looking into bitcoin and um just understanding all the kind of moving parts it made sense right away so um i know for some people you know they become skeptical i was sold immediately so i was like all right this is this is definitely a game changer and um you know i really couldn't sleep that night so i went out for a walk was just kind of thinking about all the different industries this could impact not just finance but like you know given

my enterprise background i also saw use cases and enterprise blockchains and potentially like some form of identity on blockchain and just all these kind of wild things that were running through my mind um and that made the rest of 2017 really like a memorable year right like i started um investing in crypto and started really trying to understand the space and and um and just kind of buying all these different altcoins and trying out all these different products and while it was exciting i also realized i was still pretty early i was one of the early adopters because just knowing that a regular user would not go through all this kind of user experience of having to kind of learn about wallets and having to transfer crypto from coinbase to a different exchange and just going through that ux i was sure

like all right we're still super early um and then from there you know it just kind of happened that i was just getting more and more involved in the industry and just really seeing like like it was like a movement right there was just so much energy going into the space and i just had to be a part of it and get involved and so in 2018 is is when i left bloomberg and decided to go full time into this industry it was probably the worst time since the bear market had just gotten started uh but you know that that did allow us to kind of look at the ground reality and focus on really building a product and focus on how we can add value to traders instead of just kind of speculating and being uh being too much in the the hype bubble

so yeah i'll just pause there for a moment and yeah you're on mute yeah fair enough um one of the most interesting developments of of these protocols that we're seeing created in uh in d5 right now is kind of the structure in which they're created in comparison to you know an enterprise uh you know software as a service company right though you know you've got the traditional shareholders which i guess are the other governance token holders right then you've got kind of like like the corporation and the employees which is kind of like the team right but but the key difference that that i've i've noticed in a lot of these is that you know the software as a service companies are basically for-profit entities that have

a bottom line and are aiming to basically create uh a profitable company in order to you know have a profitable business but with these protocols it's almost like um i wouldn't call them non-profits because they're obviously making money but it seems like the way in which that they're making money off of their governance tokens and off of the appreciation of such as well as the inflation schedule you know is a bit different than a typical uh you know enterprise company so i'm i'm kind of curious what you think about the development of protocols as sort of these um neutral um organizations like dao's effectively you know that are they're certainly not nonprofits but they're certainly not they certainly don't have a bottom line

and cash flow in terms of like customer base into a software company that has the expenses and then you know you pay out of salary so um i i suppose what i'm getting is i'm i'm i'm curious what you uh think about the development as of protocols as they are now in terms of these decentralized organizations versus kind of how a traditional software protocol or company is built and any insights that you can provide um you know based off your experience yeah i mean it's definitely this concept of programmable money is just super powerful and this is something that you know had crossed my mind a few years back when i was getting into the space is we're gonna see so many creative kind

of ideas come to light so much development will happen that we can't even contemplate and even today i feel like we'll see so much amazing and creative stuff come out of this like dolls you mentioned right like which is like just unknown territory it's like cutting edge bleeding edge going into like this new area and just kind of developing and and building something where there is really no good example um and all that is pretty exciting but kind of looking back and comparing that to an enterprise company when you think about you know how software gets built in an enterprise company there's typically you know a pretty structured approach right you have a huge budget you're either building it in-house or you know build bringing in an outside third-party company to come and kind of help you execute on the project

um you know there's clear leadership there's a budget there are teams around it and they're pretty sizable teams like they're it's not unheard of to have like a team of like 50 to 100 people working on a project to bring a product to life so it's it's a lot of resources go into it in an organized way and it could still take two to three years sometimes even more to build it to get adoption and and all that kind of stuff um and so that's sort of like what happened in 2017 is we had all these brilliant ideas and possibilities for the blockchain right but you know given the open source nature given that there was really no like kind of organized team or budget or anything like that that execution it would take

time it could take a couple of years before you start to see some examples come to life and then we see that in 2020 when d5 starts to come to life a couple of years after the 2017 kind of ico boom in the idea phase like a lot of these things we had kind of heard of like oh we will have you know this decentralized concept that concept but it just takes time to build um and for that validation to kind of happen given where we are today i mean i still feel like we're super early um you know just because we are still trying to figure out what these governance tokens are really going to mean in the future dows are just getting kind of like becoming reality or realistic and you know even we're internally kind of thinking about you know what that what that future could

look like like could we get involved like you know how could we contribute to this because that's that's super interesting um but one thing that we've seen is kind of like you know all this global talent that has come together like everywhere across the world everybody's kind of uh contributing to this ecosystem this space um it's it's definitely super exciting so it's def it's it's an unknown kind of uh territory i don't think it's going to reflect exactly how enterprise world works today we'll definitely see new models um tokens create another kind of interesting dynamics because you can really get creative with it right like you can create different kind of incentive structures different kind of distribution structures and we're seeing that with like just these fair launches for example where it just throws the traditional kind of model out the window and

you know you don't really see that in the traditional startup space so i've i personally feel like there's going to be a lot of new um ideas and new kind of projects coming to life and it could take another two three years and it's probably even hard to predict right now what they could look like but at least it's great to see like the fundamental layers are being kind of laid down there right like the foundation is being laid for that and we've already started to prove out some of these use cases and some of these products with like you know tens of billions of dollars now locked in defy it's it's looking more and more real and it can't be ignored like it's it's something that will just be inevitable right just like bitcoin um i'm sure we all believed would be inevitable even

when people were not taking it that seriously it just had to happen if you knew and understood the technology and you just kind of knew how you know efficient it was in the use cases it was solving so um i feel the same way about d5 right now but we're still super early right and one of the things that we hit on a lot on on the show is kind of bringing d5 to the masses as as best as possible right so we try to make our content as simple as possible we're trying to make these applications you know these uh these exchanges as easy to use right there's all these interfaces that that we have to use and i think that's that's something that is you know kind of as you say in the dark we're just kind of going uh where there's never been anything

created um and so i think it's it's crucial for us to basically make things as simple as possible to be able to bring d5 you know to the masses um you know rob i i i think you might have something to add on to this um kind of in align with with the ethos of what we preach yeah yeah so absolutely um removing middlemen kind of bringing d5 to the masses in a peer-to-peer way really is what we're building in a decentralized network all right so you know the the way that these um you know and you compared them to nonprofits because they they were they reflect some of the similar properties to nonprofits but these daos are

different way of organizing people and coordinating human capital um that is much more efficient that you know as we've seen it it can unlock some interesting incentive structures so um it it really is innovative in that way uh and i i think you know hisham like you said it's it's almost inevitable um and you know as they continue to grow they're i i think they tap into a market that really has great potential because um there isn't as much uh waste from the system right if we're measuring some sort of like economic waste

um there is essentially none in a completely decentralized system um but in a centralized system it starts to have some strain on that community as a whole from that surplus that's created so you know once it all goes back to the community i think that removes the surplus and ultimately kind of you know invigorates people it brings people back to um much capturing much more value that that's added to the system so you know i'm curious kind of hashem from your experience and and um not only going back to 2017 but really uh founding and starting to build uh cryptocurrency ai what uh

you know what have you seen it has worked and ultimately what drove you to um you know create this this company and and kind of where do you see it where do you see it going in the future you know it reminds me sort of like the way that we're thinking about simplifying d5 today um i remember we were talking about simplifying um crypto related c5 in 2017 right because even at that time and that was sort of like my aha moment is when i started using the exchanges and realized all right this is super uh you know not user friendly and you know in 2017-18 if you were trading you couldn't even get your p l on an exchange like you literally have to do

like a dump into excel and like run your own formulas and there were videos on it and people were like sharing these excel files with like you know here's how you plug in your trades and here's what it's going to tell you and i feel like the industry since then has kind of come a long way but that's what motivated me to get into this industry i knew that you know kind of from my background my strength was understanding how to build a product that is going to be user-friendly that people would want to use that's going to add value to them and make things easier for them um as opposed to going and trying to build something that i was obviously not experienced at like you know building like an ethereum competitor or killer as we used to call them um so you know the same problems that we

had three years ago we have today with defy and that was sort of like the the the principle that we founded our company on was how we're gonna build bring a better trading experience so we started actually to kind of focus on what the current exchanges were doing and what they were offering to traders so we had like coinbase which was like this gateway into crypto right so if your friends or family members asked you like hey i want to buy some bitcoin what would you where would you recommend for me to go we'd most likely say go to coinbase right that's like a safe option you probably won't get lost and you'll most likely end up buying some bitcoin with with ease um but anything beyond that you know you kind of had to be like a sort of like a trader for you kind of graduated from that level

right or you had more needs um or you were more looking deeply into the space into other altcoins and then you would have to transfer your crypto out to let's say you know binance or bitfinex or or some of these other exchanges um and and and that was that but all these other exchanges were also offering very like comparable type of technology like it was similar type of interfaces similar type of like order types and and stuff like that so um we decided and came up with this concept of smart trading right and smart trading is really a you know simple way of saying we offered uh more advanced tools for traders to have better control over their portfolios and they can automate things they can customize um with more advanced order types for stop losses take profits and all that stuff

built in a trading view integration so there's a bunch of stuff that we decided to build into this smart trading um and how that can kind of benefit the traders who just wanted to get more out of their trading experience but not only that you know even if you weren't looking for advanced order types we wanted there to be an easy way to kind of manage your portfolio look at your assets and i feel like with defy that's exactly what we need right now is to have these interfaces and have these you know projects kind of provide tutorials tool tips on how people can get onboard it feels like an exclusive club almost especially in 2020 like you know um it was just like a small group of people who were getting in and doing all these crazy yield forums and um you know the rest of the folks were

just kind of learning about it either later on or were kind of clueless right like what is yield farming you know what is impermanent loss i mean um some of the wording and some of the sort of like the the concepts which existed even before defy were kind of rebranded as and made it even more complex and i don't think that really helped things out in terms of bringing new people into the ecosystem so um touching a little bit on like what we're doing with d5 you know we decided to get early into the solana ecosystem and build a decentralized exchange and the reason we wanted to get into the salon ecosystem is because of the speed and sort of the low cost and we had seen the issues that happened with ethereum every bull run or every time you know the market gets hot and so

we saw that this had a real chance of kind of um competing on some of the products again you know with ethereum and if this was going to be something that was going to succeed and by this i mean solana blockchain and solana ecosystem we wanted to be there early and we felt like it really aligned well with our you know mindset of user experience um and with that we decided to build a dex that's actually more user-friendly like it's better designed you know it has better ux you know we built in all these kind of like pop-ups and informational messages and and things like that so that when a user comes on like they they find it easier to navigate there's no reason for it to be complex um once we launched the decks you know we realized that the wallet experience on solana was was pretty raw

at the time and since then a lot of cool projects are actually launching wallets which is great to see you know our our idea was not really to launch a wallet but we were kind of forced into it because you know some of the feedback we were getting was um hey you know like we're the solana wallet is pretty raw and like people can get like lost and lose funds and stuff like that so we just decided to create our cci wallet and make it more user-friendly you know kind of just giving reminders and pop-ups once again uh for users to like save their seed phrase and how important it was and those kind of things and i feel like it's little things like that you improve a little bit in all this kind of journey of user onboarding and in the end overall they have a

better experience and they feel like you know they were navigated and they got to the place where they wanted to be as opposed to just like throwing them at a platform and like hey go figure it out right like with like very little information and like you have no idea what you're doing and you have to go and like either research or or watch youtube videos to figure out how to trade or how to buy or how to use farm it definitely doesn't make it very accessible to the mass majority right and that's kind of what we're all about here again and just making it as easy as possible so this exclusive club becomes you know a lot more inclusive for the people who are willing to learn right you know at some point you still have to be willing to you know get get your hands dirty and

learn right so you know you can't base you can't onboard people for themselves but yeah we can make it as easy as possible um you know and there's definitely ups and downs for both you know exchanges like coinbase and finance and and decentralized exchanges like uh unit swap and sushi swap and all that good stuff right and there's kind of a happy medium which i like to think that you're you're kind of going for with ccai so you know i'd like to hear more about how you kind of came to this choice of having this happy medium of using both you know the centralized exchanges and the decentralized exchanges kind of how look how the liquidity works you know and you know how that helps the end user overall

absolutely so as i was you know telling the story of how we got started towards kind of building the centralized exchange part um in 2020 you know we kind of took a pause on it we were actually doing a closed beta we had we had gotten some really good feedback from the trading community but with the rise of d5 it really got you know my co-founder and i excited because we got into the space with the promise for the promise of decentralization right so it was naturally something that attracted us uh to the point where we were like all right as a team we need to rethink what we want to focus on and so we put a hold on the development for the centralized product um started exploring what we could do in d5 and so instead of just kind of like cloning something on ethereum you know

and and doing something that way we were like all right we need to do something where it's kind of more value-add hence the jump into the solana ecosystem in 2020 which was you know we got lucky we kind of learned about it and and got into the space early on and started building in that in that ecosystem so the idea for us at ccai is there's no reason like you know we want to kind of separate the two and and cause more confusion um so we want to kind of bridge this gap um eventually we'll also be launching in the near future or centralized product uh which i'll tell you a little about in a bit but the idea is that you know we can have it all in one ecosystem in one platform if somebody wants to trade for example on a centralized exchange and let's say

they want to trade futures and 100x leverage they should be able to do that and then if they want to go and buy something that's like a newly listed coin on a dex then they can just easily transfer those fonts to their wallet within the same exchange or same platform let's call it and still be able to participate on the d5 product suite so our goal is to kind of bridge this gap make it as connected as possible and offer both and so we started off with our decentralized exchange we built our decentralized exchange with another project as sort of like our tech stack which is called serum so serum is this order matching engine that was built on the solana blockchain and it's basically a really neat technology that enables the creation of dexes and other tools on top of it so we took that and that also comes with

sort of like the the liquidity behind it being provided by i believe it's jump trading and alameda might also be kind of market making there so it had some some coins already on it it had some market makers already connected to it and we thought that it would be better to kind of use that as a building block for our decks so we did that on the on the deck side and then since then that kind of allowed us to focus more on the user experience the interface uh creation of the wallet the analytics page and a lot of the other things that we've built since then um and then on the centralized exchange side you know we mentioned that we're building sort of like the smart trading and all these advanced order types we wanted to launch this advanced features at the same time making them

easy right so like anybody a trader of like you know a beginner trader can also go and kind of take advantage of them and the end goal is to really launch both of these products and have them under the same ecosystem same brand so you don't really have to go and trade on many different exchanges you can stay within one ecosystem go trade on a centralized exchange go trade on t5 site if you want and i also feel like the biggest users are going to be entering into d5 from crypto c5 right like it's crypto folks understand will probably understand d5 the quickest and the best as opposed to somebody that doesn't even understand crypto and then you start explaining defy to them they completely get lost like that's just too much um to kind of throw at somebody uh early

on right so like the best way for for users to kind of get converted into d5 is through crypto c5 and we feel like uh we can create a gateway for that right so like the centralized exchange can also be like sort of like a gateway into the decentralized exchange and we get to benefit from both right so our business model is such that we get to benefit from fees on both sides so we don't really have a preference over one or the other um personally i have a preference over d5 of course but like um realistically i feel like you know centralized finance is still here to stay and and it's it's not going to be going anywhere or disappearing anytime soon so this can be sort of like a a funnel where users from centralized exchange part can also start trading on on the defy side um and hopefully we can

make that process really easy and smooth for them yeah i i think there is a problem that you guys are solving there that um is the fragmented liquidity between c5 and d5 you know if serum is able to aggregate all that liquidity on the face of it it sounds like ccai is kind of like a more advanced zapper right but when when you dig into it zapper which you know i'm sure you're familiar is a aggregator for a lot of ethereum right the main chain side chains um and it's a great tool to manage on ethereum but um you know it hasn't really crossed the bridge into

cross-chain uh types of aggregations right um so if your offer there is to be that all-in-one suite um that's not not only cross chain and i'm not sure if you've you know explored any cross chain functionality but um it seems like the main the main focus right now is the bridge crossing centralized exchange and decentralized exchange which again has you know fragmented liquidity and then again fragmented liquidity between chains within d5 so an aggregator that can bring all of this together is gonna you know just uh trip is going to continue towards market efficiency right and if

you can you know exploit those market inefficiencies then ultimately you're led to a successful product um yeah so that that you know it is great to see for ccai um in terms of product market fit i'm i'm interested kind of the the ai part you know what kind of artificial we don't you know we talk a lot about define liquidity and interest rates yield farming and meme coins but you know what has been your experience with um artificial intelligence building a product with it um kind of the different mechanisms that you use and just yeah your your kind of overall thoughts on you know where it's headed and kind of how you how we can benefit from it

sure so just to touch on your first point um i i personally feel like there will be a time when users will just not know you know what chain they're trading on and stuff like that right like there's no need for someone to kind of have to pick one chain over the other or or something like that and have to even like kind of uh worry about that because to them it shouldn't matter right like if you want the user to be investing and trading um like they shouldn't have to worry about is the solana is this ethereum or any anything like that so i think that's a future that we'll go towards although we're focused fully on solana right now um there's absolutely like you know we're keeping our eyes op eyes on everything like

we're seeing where the industry is evolving and where the growth is gonna come from um and then on the second point it's funny enough actually our name um it was really hard for us to pick a name uh you know we spent like two three days as a team we're literally like all right we're gonna call it this that and we just couldn't come to a specific kind of name on it and i had bought the cryptocurrencies.ai domain recently just because i just thought it was like a cool name i was like all right i'm just gonna buy this and see what i may or may not use it but i'll just buy it and towards the end we're like all right we can't pick a name let's just go with this and and see see what happens so the so the ai initially you know was kind of for

actionable intelligence and the reason being when we were launching the product it was going to be the idea was like we're going to do something like bloomberg for crypto so it will be like a data analytics kind of platform and stuff like that right so um and then we we just kind of pivoted from there the market changed in 2018 with the bear market there was really no longer a need for an interest let's call it in all these different altcoins and kind of aggregation and data analytics because all of the interest went back towards bitcoin trading ethereum trading and sort of like the main cryptos so we dropped that and we kind of changed our focus and started focusing more on the trading tools and and uh the exchange idea um but you know the ai stands for actionable intelligence however we did experiment a

bit early on with um some sort of like sentiment analysis sentiment models based on twitter data we were doing some sort of portfolio optimization models but those things were just i feel like they were just too advanced for their time in in 2017 there was like this excitement and all these coins but then in 2018 bear market nobody really was kind of looking for these tools so they're catching dust you know we have some code written and it's just catching dust i haven't been able to kind of use it or build a product around it but you know who knows maybe in the future we'll kind of go and revisit all those things and ideas that we had initially yeah it's definitely a cool name i mean it's it's ai anything it's been big encrypt i remember in 2017 all the ai white paper coins just got

pumped it was like all right we're going to combine crypto and ai and boom boom is funny man it's uh it was quite quite the change back then in 2017 to now it's been it's been good to see the growth i'm definitely excited for three four five eight years down the line um you know let alone even longer than that right and you know i think a lot of the same trends that we see in in crypto get replicated or a span of the bull market and then the next bear market if you will brings upon a new phase so kind of you know early early early on it was bitcoin all bitcoin then we got into the ethereum and kind of like that and then it was the icos

and then now it's been nfts and d5 and kind of the same things have been replicated over and over again so what i mean by that is during the ico craze we had like 18 different ai projects and 18 different um uh let's let's call them um you know utility and storage tokens right and then in nfts we kind of got the same type of art over and over again right and then we've in d5 we kind of got this trend of like decentralized exchanges everywhere like everybody's launching a dex um you know and so i'm sure the next phase will be something where everybody kind of launches and the like the best stay in the best remain but it's sort of this this this pattern of repetition that that i've been noticing and

you know i think right now it's it's definitely the decentralized exchange um kind of pattern so what do you think about competition in terms of the decentralized exchange world and you know if if if somebody's listening who wants to start a decentralized exchange if it would be better to uh instead of creating their own contribute to one that's already been created such as ccai you know in the dows of of uni swap or sushi swap you know or if if you've been creating a dex is uh is still a better move than you know kind of contributing to ones that have already been created yeah i mean i would love for your audience if anybody's interested uh you know what we're hiring we're growing our team get get in touch with us

uh but you know this is an interesting question if if you had if you had kind of looked at the exchange landscape on the centralized exchange because space because that's been around for for many years now right in in 2016 and uh that's something that my co-founder and i usually kind of laugh about um in 2016 he felt like the centralized exchange industry was like done like it was over right like you had all these main players who had come in and established themselves and um you know there was like this and in 2017 there was like bittrex poloniex all these kind of existing exchanges coinbase um and then we saw binance come along and just kind of come out of nowhere and just take off right um obviously a lot of it was

good timing but they also had just kind of more robust technology so when every exchange uh was stopping or or kind of you know pausing signups because they couldn't handle the load finance was able to and they kind of took off and and since then we've seen a lot of new kind of centralized exchanges get launched and become really successful so i feel like in the decentralized exchange space will probably not be any different like there's always room for somebody to come in be innovative and and just kind of adding value especially i feel like around you know making it easier user experience and these kind of things are super critical and important um to go mainstream and to bring more people into the ecosystem so if somebody wants to build i would always encourage them to kind of build and if they feel like they can bring

something unique or a game changer into the industry then they should definitely focus on that and you know at ccai that's the reason we got started you know there were centralized exchanges you know there were even dexes when we when when we started on the decks idea so for us it's never been about like okay are we the first but it's about you know how we can add value to the users and to the traders and so when we do demos and kind of tutorials or beta testing for example on our smart trading and just getting that feedback from traders who initially was were kind of finding it difficult to navigate and then through iteration you know kind of getting it to a state where users were able to use it and just getting great feedback you know when traders tell you hey like this is exactly what i need or oh

man like to solve so-and-so problem for me or like you know i don't have to use multiple products anymore it's all doing it for me that kind of feedback is great and i feel like you know that's the stuff those are the kind of products that that we personally ourselves want to build but if other people want to come into the space um there's definitely room for for growth right the whole industry itself is going to grow in the next five ten years so i wouldn't be surprised if you know we're like a 10 plus trillion dollar industry and some of these main uh besides even bitcoin and ethereum and some even like these application uh kind of products are going to be potentially at hundreds of billions or maybe even a trillion dollar market cap that is totally in the realm of possibility in the next 10 years

if we're going to have that talk to that type of a long-term kind of view on where this industry's growing so once you look at it in that kind of frame where it could be you know a multi-trillion dollar industry then there's definitely room for a lot of players to come in and and maybe even localize right like we see a lot of centralized exchanges that are pretty local in different regions because they either you know focus on on kind of their marketing they understand their local communities better so they're able to market it better right it doesn't even necessarily have to be a technological advancement it could just be that you understand a specific kind of you know mindset of a community and you're able to kind of you know bring them on board to use your product so there's definitely room for many different exchanges to come in

um uni swap will probably continue to kind of you know grow but then uh we're also expecting this exchange that we've launched at ccai dex to be the one that can bring on millions and millions of traders right um and and kind of get the same experience that they get with order book trading on the on the on the centralized exchanges so yeah i feel like there's definitely room for growth here for everyone so we've asked this question to some some founders and and on some podcasts in the past um what is the one thing you think is most necessary for the d5 ecosystem that's still missing that uh cc.ai is not working on man i feel like there's always and it's

a tough problem right with all these like um should i call it exploits i mean they're not really hacks but like with all the stuff that's happening on with flash loans and just people kind of losing money um because it's very you know cutting edge innovative a lot of stuff being built that's the first thing that comes to mind is like you know anytime people lose money in something obviously that's not good it hurts the space uh it kind of you know makes people more afraid of getting in and kind of using products and getting involved so and you know i don't think we're doing anything like special or extra for this but yeah there's there's usually there's been a lot of news lately about you know just kind of compromises and and you know rock polls and all this stuff um the less of the stuff we can have in

this industry i think the better it is we were experiencing this with centralized exchanges for sure um and now with with this kind of stuff happening in divi i think also it kind of uh could scare people off a little bit um that's probably the first thing that comes to mind i see i think that is an incentive problem where these bad actors um have more of an incentive to go after these drug pulls and and malicious attacks rather than contribute to the project themselves so my understanding is it's a pretty small um a relatively small number of uh individuals that that you know have the specialized skill to make these attacks but um you know even even if we can kind of weed out those those few bad actors um it still seems

like an an inefficiency in the incentive model you know i'm not i'm not sure where but um hopefully it you know gets sorted out and those bad actors get removed yeah hopefully i feel like when when everything matures you know there's going to be it's going to get harder and harder i do feel like insurance is definitely an exciting area um yeah insurance definitely sounds pretty exciting like the decentralized insurance model it's it's something that was missing in the space and we're starting to see projects that are offering those solutions and it's pretty cool have you ever used uh have you ever used an insurance protocol to insure any of your funds in a smart contract i have not um but it's exciting and that's why i asked because i knew it was going to be no one

uses it that's the problem it's like it's used right obviously people use it but nobody uses the insurance you know maybe because we just have not done something where there's a lot on the line and yeah right so i'm sure there are users and traders or some kind of use case for it uh when there's real stuff on the line um and not just a couple of thousand or or something like that so i'm sure there's a huge use case for it we just haven't like seen it kind of come come i think it's got to be like with the institutional capital the the people that are managing money for others you know less so what what you're managing for yourself but like if you have clients that need to have you know and traditionally they're used to having their money insured by the fdic and such

right but now if you can have if you can show proof of insurance through i think that's going to be a big use case yeah i definitely think that if we see regulation you know that that is actually friendly to crypto and works with it in a way that kind of promotes the inner workings of crypto right rather than um putting maybe traditional insurance metrics on something like a d5 protocol um if they work with these insurance protocols uh it you know promotes the the ecosystem and it grows as a whole so yeah you know regulation can be friendly or unfriendly it's just interesting how it'll play out for sure sure sean what do uh what is your uh

your your suggested um kind of well i guess like more of your mental model uh and framework for new investors and participants in the market of d5 there's all these things going on there's a lot of there's a lot of yield farming opportunities there's a lot of places to get in and and buy and sell and do this and that you know so i guess what i'm asking is what's your mental model for kind of staying sane as an investor in such a new technology in the wild wild west and how do you stay safe but still positioning yourself for that asymmetric upside yeah i would just recommend um you know first of all to start focusing on on the bigger projects right like if you're just getting in

just like when somebody asks me like hey what crypto should i buy i'm usually telling them just buy some bitcoin you know buy bitcoin for sure but like buy some ethereum and just kind of start with a safer options um i would probably say the same thing to to anybody getting into d5 is you know first of all try to use the products it's pretty interesting like once you start to use them starts to make more sense and you know you can kind of navigate your space and you can understand what's happening um a lot better once once you use it once you use it um yeah and i mean anything that's just kind of i would say just due diligence like you know look at look at teams look at what they're building look at uh you know some if something's offering crazy yield like it's it's definitely

not sustainable so you know don't throw like all your money into it and stuff like that just be careful um and in trading just like you know we tell everybody like you stop losses proper risk management it's the same thing with d5 like you know if you're if you're getting in and kind of trying to do yield farming and trying to look for really crazy upside just know that it comes with really high risk and that's why there's such a huge upside uh potential there right so i think a lot of this stuff is pretty common sense as long as people just kind of take more of a cautionary approach take it step by step learn what they're getting into read about it understand it more the one thing that i really enjoyed is like there's so much great content out there on youtube like some of these

content creators have done an amazing job really explaining things you know using all these products and kind of um even when the products themselves didn't really have a great onboarding you know you could totally find somebody somewhere kind of explaining it with the tutorial especially the the big ones right and yeah you can kind of use that as a as a way of learning um a sense there is such great content out there so better to learn and understand the space before you just throw all your money at it yeah i think that's one of the biggest things about d5 that was awesome to see was being able to use the products and then see which ones you you want to invest in based off the ones that you use i mean a pretty good framework is if you if you use it on the daily or or on the

weekly if it has some funds in it it's something that you have conviction in to invest in and i think kind of on the upside conversation i think the solana ecosystem is really blossoming right now i think i think the wallet issue is something that as you're saying is definitely needs to be hit on the wallet and the bridges i think renbridge just came out with a bridge to solano which is definitely big for a lot of ethereum users a lot of ethereum users are definitely early ren ogs i'm kind of in the dark node and um hiding your bitcoin kind of concept um you know so i think i think that's going to be big for salonist the wallet goes y'all's wallet is basically what to be wanted to use in the most convenient world so if i want to try it i just head over to

cryptocurrencies.ai and i'm able to um to to use a wallet now is it a web wallet is a downloadable wallet kind of what's that what's the run down there yeah it's a web wallet um and you know we also have uh an extension now um and you know there's there are a couple other wallets that are now starting to launch and and uh provide services in the salon ecosystem so i think it'll get better and easier uh with other wallets coming out we launched ours because we felt like there was like an immediate need yes to get the traders you know something that they could kind of use because you can have an amazing decks but if the first interaction or touchpoint is going to be a wallet and that experience sucks then it kind of makes it hard for for people you know it's possible they'll just drop off and

never kind of uh go through the through the whole kind of life cycle of onboarding so um yeah solana ecosystem has just been exploding it's been fascinating to see i think that's what happens when you have like a great team building a great technology and then again you tie that with like you know good marketing and kind of branding and that's what we're seeing it's just like all these things are coming together and creating the perfect storm uh yeah i think it reminds me of like uh of define ethereum in like may of last year or so just kind of exactly just blossoming with a bunch of new products and i mean there's you know you've got like the compounds and the aves and the uh and the options trading and a bit of leverage trading and you got a bit of

yield farming opportunities but yeah it's it's so nascent so it certainly can provide an opportunity but i think the big thing is getting people over there um you know getting people on um you know onto the solana blockchain and getting people to be able to to actually use it um you know as as easily as possible and then i think once they see the experience using your platform it's going to be like why would i trade elsewhere exactly and that's that's been our goal since since last year is to kind of be that go-to exchange on solana like you know really just kind of capture that market and you know provide all the all the tools and services that a trader would expect um you know with great onboarding great design user experience and just kind of bringing their trading

to the next level and there's a lot of exciting stuff that we're actually building uh can't speak too too much about it hasn't been announced or launched yet so you know there's more to come we're definitely you know kind of continue doubling down on solana and launching new products and making trading basically enhancing the trading experience like bringing some of the smart trading functionality to our decentralized exchange as well yeah and and bringing some of the the liquidity from ethereum i think is is going to be an important part of that um it you know its main competitive solana's main competitive advantage over ethereum is it's faster trading um do you see that you know as ethereum scales solana's

impact is gonna you know be kind of cut into or do you think solana really has the potential to you know expand on top of ethereum and build um a substantial value add to the to the ecosystem overall i think solana is definitely going to have its own ecosystem and be a really strong competitor to ethereum and we're seeing already like this this the future is not going to be all on one chain right like every some chains are going to have one advantage over the other so solana is cheap it's fast and we're expecting it to get even faster over time so i feel like you know right now is what matters solana is here it's available today

products are being built or dex is available you can go trade on it it's super cheap it's really fast it's really like that experience is really powerful so i would encourage your audience you know obviously to promote our brand but not even only that like just for themselves to go and experience you know what solana kind of brings and what ccai brings on top of solana you know i really encourage everyone to just go create a wallet try it out just take it for a test drive and and you'll see the difference immediately and that's what happened with me right like so when we were building the first kind of beta or you can call the alpha version of our decks and my team was like hey you know it's ready you can make a trade now that first trade that experience was just kind of awesome right like just

seeing how fast it was how cheap it was i knew that it would be a game changer and i think that's why uh you know so many people are getting into the ecosystem and you know kind of we've continued to build on it and and we'll do so in the future it's just what it offers and and it offers it today right like it's not some promise of the future or anything like that um and and we'll see where the industry grows but um solana definitely has been i feel like purpose built for trading and trading kind of products so we'll see a lot of cool cool things um and there's a lot of products that are trying to like build options and all these you know kind of advanced products on solana and i think the ecosystem will definitely continue to grow it has some of like the top investors in

the industry that are that are backing it investing in it you know some of the best minds in the industry are building on it so i'm super bullish i think i think we'll see a great future yeah yeah rob's in a theater maxie so he's getting his panties nah they move they move at an incredible pace it's a lot yeah man i think as ethereum takes more of a store value narrative they're slowing down the pace um so it's interesting to see like you know if uh ethereum just stays conservative um you know and solana takes its place as kind of a front runner of like an internet of blockchains or if uh ethereum you know takes the kick in the ass and and picks up the page

so you know time will tell i see a theory yeah personally i'm like a fan of like all these different blockchains right they all add value um even if even if let's say one of them were to become obsolete or get left behind you know no worries like it helped the space move forward eventually and i think it's all about the space in this industry like it's you know as long as we're all moving forward that's that's really what matters right yeah yeah i mean with regards to specific change kind of use viewing it as like a theorem as like the mainland and and solana as like the like like the second mainland um you know currently and i think that's powerful because it i think it helps both like the competition like like the like the word

competitor is great but it's almost like uh like it's like a co-op you know if we can get a bunch of transactions on solana that's awesome because that means that ethereum gets cleared up a bit and we can have you know only you know i think large players go to ethereum for the main chain for the security right stuff like this so yeah i mean it's super bullish on solana on ethereum and on ccai uh hashem thank you hasham thank you so much for coming on my boy was an absolute pleasure um and yeah we will definitely stay in touch and keep getting after it uh closing thoughts are check out see cryptocurrencies.ai guys um i know i will and i'm gonna get a solana wallet and running and robbie we probably got some video demos coming up

as well so um yeah man thanks for coming on and uh yeah it's great yeah it was great being here thank you for having me sir