DeFi By Design EP#55: Automated Risk Management w DeFi Saver

Transcript

welcome to d5 by design where we talk all things blockchain and cryptocurrency while striving to educate empower and enrich it's your boy andy and welcome back to the defy slate youtube channel smash the like button on this video that really helps us out and sit back and enjoy the content thank you very much what's going on guys welcome back to the d5 by design podcast episode 55 here today and we are with you from a nice cold daylight savings day out here in north carolina and uh we're actually here today with a fellow that we met at liz con out in portugal uh it's been what three weeks now since portugal and i missed that place um you know things have been getting wilder in the markets and we're kind of excited to

just sit down kind of within og of ethereum and nicola from d5 saver talk about the product of d5 saver kind of what what what is happening in d5 right now um you know what the buildings are looking like how you can automate some of your d5 strategies um and kind of you know use your collateralized debt positions on maker or um on different protocols to kind of utilize them um you know in the most effective way we're going to talk about some interesting stuff in the metaverse some maybe some some dow stuff and some nft stuff as well so we're going to cover quite a bit here today um and yeah excited to talk with good old nick from uh the d5 saber lads and pass it over to

rob and uh we'll get right into it yo yo what's going on guys yeah i am stoked to be here with uh nikola from the d5 saver team like andy said we met him over to lisbon and um it was great i mean there was so much energy flowing through the room and it we kind of hit it off right away uh maybe it was because everyone on the team's name is nikola and that was just kind of funny it's a great conversation starter um but really the the intention and the mission that you guys are are fulfilling over at d5 saver i think is is pretty crucial um for mass adoption especially with some bigger players to bring them on board and really automate their d5 positions automate their uh some of their farming positions

and and really bring a level of comfort and almost convenience to d5 which which is just not there yet um so i'm really looking forward to exploring some of those automation techniques and i will let nikola introduce himself and take it from there hi everybody um i'm actually one of the six nicolas on the team right now um and i'm like the community manager over here at deepface area i've been with the project ever since we launched back in early 2019 actually so that's like an og like a very old project in terms of d5 um like like robbie mentioned what our mission has been for the most part is providing users in the fight

with liquidation protection services so that's something i guess we'll talk more on the on the podcast here later on but that's sort of been our mission when we first set out and to create the defense ever as an app as a whole yeah and now we only have over collateralized loans and d5 well at least for the most part we've got like some under collateral that's coming out with uh pendle and maple finance and stuff like that but you know right now defy has been a mad house of just debt spiraling and just pretty much just all sorts of crazy games with over collateralized loans i can only imagine what what the world starts to look like

when we get under collateralized loans and you know start to create credit scores within you know the ecosystem i you know i'm not sure if you thought any deep you know any further or deeper on that but it's just you know i i just can only wonder i haven't personally but i know there are a lot of people like looking into it and trying to build things you mentioned like a credit score of sorts i know that for example the gearbox protocol is working on something like this providing like a credit line that you can use against your collateral that you can then use throughout the file elsewhere that's something that might be interesting and something that we're kind of looking at here at the face area as well but yeah i know there's a lot of people

looking into under collateralized loans as well so i think we'll be seeing a lot of that probably in the next year yes yeah and some of these automation techniques maybe you can unpack a few more in addition to the liquidation protection my my point on kind of how we scale like this this automation um and and bring more efficiency to the ecosystem is you know right now defy saver and my understanding is it's mostly oriented towards those with self-custody protecting themselves kind of a risk management tool that individuals can use and andy brings in kind of this this uh application that's a little bit later

down the the timeline where these automation these let and using the example of uh a decentralized credit score you know that credit score application can use d5 savers automation as as a risk management software where now it's managing risk across this entire ecosystem rather than individuals using automation tools themselves to manage risk um could you explain kind of you know any more the applications of um the automation tools that defy saver and kind of how you see them playing into these different applications i guess we could take it from the start like what what is like a makers owl for example collateralize that position

for starters like the basics are you have ease you want to collateralize these and borrow against it you borrow die using maker dial then you can use die for whatever you want now what people often do is use that diet to get more yeast and then leverage it up that's something that people have been doing a deep server for the longest time because we sort of had the tools to do this since the first day released um but other than that you can really use the dye anywhere and if you're using the borough die to like farm year the yield or something else where you might just want to set up liquidation protection and what that does

in its current iteration of the phase series that it automatically unwinds your position at a configured like ratio so instead of letting you go underwater and get liquidated and suffer like a thirteen percent i think it is in make it out liquidation penalty you'd get like a minor service fee for pay to defer saver and you'll get your asset protected by deleveraging the position the whole process is done is done trustlessly non-custodially and it just protects your ass or assets let's say um i'm just thinking to myself um may of this past year um or this past like you know six months ago or whatever

just that day that i think was may 13th i'm just thinking to myself like damn that has been really useful i think it was may like 17 and it was march 13th last year or something like that like last year yeah black thursday yeah this year exactly yeah both of those days were kind of crazy so did you guys have a lot of positions that you saved on those days we had yeah we i think we had like 700 or 800 positions automated during the may crash this year and at the point like before the crash that was i think close to 1.5 billion assets collateralized and automated or protected however you want to put it wow and is that just on maker or is that

of a no no that was that was on maker compounding yeah we have we have all the animation available for yeah for all three protocols we're currently working on support for reflection and liquidity as well so i guess that's a bit of a teaser we hope to find that out by the end of the year and so what's the cost like um somebody go ahead and you know says okay you know i've got uh you know 100k of collateral in ave you know i've borrowed 34 you know you know however much amount and you know i would like to put my put my position on d5 saver like what is the cost for the user it depends how you look at it like there's no cost for specifically like keeping a position automated so you can just leave it on and have it like monitor your position that doesn't cost

anything per se it's just being tracked by the system and and that's all uh the only costs that happen are when there actually are like some automated transactions happening and in terms of that they're the costs are twofold sort of because you've got the transaction fees that still have to be paid which is also charged to the position as well as the minor service fee which is 0.3 percent right now for any automated transactions happening but the problem is like we're currently only live on ethereum one and transaction fees are very frequently higher than that service fee so that's that's kind of a pain point for our user right now yeah definitely yeah that's that's the

summary of fees i i think that's that's about it yeah and on another like user experience question how how customizable are these uh strategies or these tools um and like what i'm getting at is kind of like a parameter where maybe we can adjust slippage and you know as d5 saver is unwinding our position it's only doing so at a certain slippage tolerance slippage slippage limits are there in place like i believe like default slippage limits so d phase error 0.5 or something like that percent uh but outside of that we don't really have much configurability right now that's sort of because we try to keep

everything like fully trusted it's everything set up on chain but we are working on a bunch of updates in terms of automation um right now you can only set up like automated liquidation protection or or automated leveraging which works when markets move down or up uh but what we're working on like in addition to these options are features that will allow users to like configure transactions to happen only on below certain gas prices for example um as well as the options to fully close positions instead of having them being unwind and mount repeatedly

like during market crashes um so that would be like a full stop-loss kind of option as well as a big profit option on markets moving up and we are working on like automation features for other other use cases as well we're mostly focused on landing protocols and our our core user base sorry is those that of people leveraging assets but we are also trying to get into the liquidity providing space and [Music] you might see some options like for unisof v3 positions or something like that cool yeah i mean there's a lot of the there's a lot of um liquidation you know kind of

options in d5 i mean a lot of them come from just being you know there's a ten percent you know uh reward for those who do liquidating you know that's a penalty for those who pay it's different for different assets you know obviously you get a dydx or something like that um you know any sort of margin trading it's a bit more hefty um in terms of liquidations um you know and then you've got this kind of concept of these liquidation bots that are out there running that you know have these scripts that um make sure that these protocols are solvent do you have any experience with anything like that or anybody on the team or you know and if you do you know what's been the experience or um you know what what is your knowledge of those

well i can tell you that we don't have any experience in this because running liquidation bots would basically be running like like running them against our users which doesn't make much sense so we're on the other end of the line and we try to keep like positions and users above the border above liquidation levels but like in terms of liquidation bots i know that space has grown like incredibly compatible like if you've seen like liquidations on on some of these large market crashes like during may that's that's been amazing profit so for liquidators but at the same time they they've they have the same problems like all users do on ethereum currently which is high transaction fees so you can also

find like a bunch of small positions like if there's somebody who left a tiny bit of assets from like two years ago for example if i deposit like 30 die two years ago into compound and have 15 died borrowed or whatever like a position that's worth so little that's underwater like that's that's remaining underwater nobody's going to liquidate that because the transaction fees will far outweigh any profit there yeah most definitely i mean that's definitely been one of the biggest um recurring kind of issues is the is the ethereum scaling so you know i'm curious what your vision of the ethereum's you know scaling space race kind of is um you know in some ways d5 has been worse on ethereum um since 2020

because of this but also it's be kind of kind of become a lot better as well because there's um a lot more products and a lot more protocols and you know d5 and ethereum is kind of like uh you know it's kind of establishing a large kind of security layer for ethereum block space which is really which is really important you know it's kind of like um saw some post on twitter it was like it's like a pleb barrier now you know it's just you know sort of yeah right which is you know kind of a negative outlook but you know i'm curious what your vision of these uh scaling space race is and you know how uh how you'd like to see protocols um including d5 saber kind of integrate these without you know sacrificing decentralization and uh and the ethos of

why you're here um but yeah what's your vision of scaling and how do you want to fit in there that's that's sort of our thing that we are like an ethereum first team so we've kind of been stuck with ethereum so to say and it's high transaction fees so far but these l2s like optimism rpg and even z zk sync are finally here and like we've we're seeing adoption growing and protocols gradually launching there so our vision is to launch everywhere and on each like ethereum l2 as long there's users there and there's landing protocols there there as long as there is anything to support there we'd be more than willing to to join

to join the party there um like in terms of what we'd expect to see first i guess launching an arbitrary and optimism is likely to happen the first yeah uh there's actually still no like major planning protocol launched on any of these but we're kind of hoping to see ave by the end of the year yeah fingers crossed yeah and then as soon as the lab is there like we're on it we will be there just just the day after that i guess yeah yeah the thing with sorry the the thing with default server is like we're an app building on other protocols we're not a protocol per se we're more like a service a tool for some advanced options

but in the end it's all built on these protocols that we need to see launch first yeah is there any any apprehension that you have to going on other evm compatible chains um the decentralization maxis right here yeah i mean that's that's the thing yeah we've been building on ethereum since 2017. that's when the the center team has first started working together and we've had a bunch of project building here on ethereum and yeah that the current transaction fees are a major problem but it's a stepping stone it'll be surpassed and sold soon enough i think

yeah i remember at liz con they were talking about um the merge coming and of course you know what comes with that which is obviously very exciting now i'm definitely excited for arbitrary optimism as well um those are you know those are the leaders of of of scaling it has been slow but i mean arbor trims up it's live there's there's plenty of apps there i'm kind of surprised that um none of the lending protocols have gone there yet i mean it's not just ave now you know there's there's almost like a bunch of lending protocols from ave to compound to to my finance um you got the forks of each on separate chains cream diced you know those type of protocols um

yeah i mean arbitrary ecosystem is definitely still small um have you had you toyed around on arbitrary at all yet i haven't personally no i have to admit i haven't um but like i've been with people on the team who have so i've seen it in action and it works amazingly fast so it's it's awesome to see and transaction fees are like 10 times lower at least than on ethereum one and they should grow lower as as adoption and usage grows so it's looking good yeah that was one of the most interesting things that i heard from from one of my conversations that liz khan from uh jordi over at the hermes team was describing how this merkle chain as it grows

it becomes more decentralized and cheaper to use exactly especially in zero knowledge like change as far as i know yeah yeah i found that really interesting because it's it's now putting together a scaling solution that's going to get better over time compared to any evm scaling solutions which still have the potential for congestion and and still could see gas prices you know kind of grow exuberantly even like what happened with polygon um exactly they had to pump up like gas prices to something noticeably higher right yeah to 35 where gas before i mean you could get could have got a transaction through it i mean fees are still like sense there i guess but right yes the problems definitely repeat

themselves on ibm chains yeah so yeah when you think about scaling to like you know millions and then eventually billions of users um yeah i mean that that's when you get to the case of of you know seeing what can actually scale so i think zk is something definitely to look at but it seems like they're kind of where arbitrary optimism were say you know three or four months ago in terms of their development do you know do you have any more info on zk sync i don't have any insight info sorry but yeah what you said i think is correct like we're bound to use like optimism arbitrary for now and like the zk options like the ultimate solution but they're a bit further down the line yeah they'll need a bit more

development until they're fully public live yeah and what's interesting about d5 saver this starts to get away from scaling a bit and more in in to what defy sabre is doing on you know the automation that you you have now isn't like you said it's not really a protocol maybe it's an application but it's really like a tool or a service and it it's still a wide enough scope that it's not just contained to like this liquidation engine or or like one tool in particular which to me is very interesting because we've seen uh for example like like yield compounders um you know they they take some lp position from the lending borrow

and then will compound your yield for you which to me is like an automation tool but it's a it's a tool or a service that developers have deployed in their own application whereas defy sabre kind of is open-ended to the amount of applications and the breadth of applications that it can be applied to so yeah that's sort of our thing we've been mostly focused on end users and not that's going to continue to be our focus like on actual end users like for example you'll see why you're in building like they're like you mentioned yield aggregating tools and vaults but then we're we're an app that will include and support wire and we already have wire

and integrator for example so yeah you have those those kinds of apps that are like middle layer apps and then we're fully like focused on end users and we we aim to provide like end users with options to set up and create custom automated strategies that's that's kind of the end goal for us yeah are you a believer of the um fat protocol thesis where you guys are as a as a money lego almost on like the on like the ethereum's the island and we're building on top you guys are like in like the higher level of the castle and down under you've got like stable coins you you've got all the money legos you know as you've gone over you guys are kind of like a service for protocol so i almost

consider you guys to be like outerwear if ave is like the middleware or like the or like a lego you guys are built you know on top right and keeps going um you know do you believe that all that value is is you know accrued to ethereum and then also you know with these other layer ones happening right now in their evaluations like like um solana avalanche and phantom harmony all of them have surged in market cap recently because of probably people believing in this thesis but you know specifically for ethereum is that kind of how you view apps on you know accruing value to ethereum or do you have a different you know way of uh addressing the value of the ethereum network um you know or is it or do you align with the fat protocol

thesis i think i agree with the fat product of these yeah what you said mostly makes sense to me so i'd agree but then in terms like of the sorry of the of the value on other chains like constantly growing like i i'd like to consider that it's partially due to a bunch of like yield farming options and like in liquidity incentives launching there so people follow that kind of stuff so it's it's bound to to so gross to show growth sorry for for any like chain that introduces such such options but at the same time like people need places to to try these things out as well

like there's no way for me to onboard like friends and family to to ethereum l1 like right now that's that's just not doable like these transaction fees so yeah if i'm going to like educate someone on how to use fifa and or evm chains in general i'm going to do it on polygon or something like that of course but in the end does it all pour down back into ethereum i think it will but yeah you can also call me an ethmaxy so but that's even like a bigger question not even is it just the money legos built on ethereum but all of the other chains that are evm compatible that also have their own money legos you could argue that not

only does all that value accrue um to the to their respective change but but avalanche phantom harmony polygon all of those chains value also accrued to ethereum so you can take all the market caps of them and consider that value all of that monetary basically structure and liquidity is basically ethereums if you want to think about it like that and yeah i mean then when you combine that well i haven't i haven't like kept track of how much of the assets deployed on other chains are bridged from ethereum there like that'd be an interesting like metric tech check i guess so that will potentially confirm what you're saying mean i i think it's kind of like the hub and spoke model that we

we've you know we talked about that on on d5 by design quite a bit just you know the the country model where you've got you know like a home base and you've got you know hub and spoke model for um with regards to other places and i think you know arbitrary optimism and um other layer twos they might be like closer if you will to the mainland but they are also in them of themselves um you know part of the part of the hub and spoke model but it's just really interesting to see how pricing of block space um shows security and kind of like legitimacy um you know it's tough to say with fees generated um you know but that's just kind of how it is you know it's it yeah so it's it's

going to be interesting to see how in you know two three years what if if ethereum is is going to be you know as expensive or more expensive or less and what that you know what that kind of world looks like in the multi-chain world um yeah i'm definitely yeah that's something i wanted to add perhaps the future is perhaps it's multi-chain like who knows like i just i like to highlight i'm not a developer personally so this might be a bit over my head but we'll see i guess yeah definitely yeah yeah andy as you were describing again the money lego mental model um and kind of along with the hub and spoke i see you know potential for horizontal integration and vertical integration we

have ethereum that is kind of like the hub with with spokes out to these other kind of perimeter layer ones and then you can kind of build on top of those spokes um you know with different applications and and then applications can stack on top of one another and where i see defy saber kind of inserting themselves into that mix is almost with uh like fluidity between these applications you know if you think about like the money legos not necessarily composability between these exchanges and these different applications but kind of like glue that holds these legos together um left to right rather than up to down because of course you know they

can stack easily with with with smart contracts but the tools to interact application to application you know that's almost what d5 saver is automating and bringing more efficiency to that's something that might become very interesting like in the coming months actually because there'll be a lot of interoperability works between like l2 chains i think so it might become quite interesting yeah yeah and i think that if the product will hit hard on on arbitrary optimism there's no reason to not use something like that um on a in a low fee environment exactly yeah is there any any plans to start building out interoperability between

applications because like you mentioned right now it's mostly application and user that the automation is in interacting between you know is there anything application to application in the works uh not specifically not that i know yeah cool i wonder how that would look um you know basically being able to operate as if you could you could manage positions like i'm wondering if you could manage positions across um you know is there a way to provide liquidity to be a position manager like um where how does the uh how is the debt paid back on certain

positions or how is the collateral added and how are the how is that liquidity being benefited benefited by whom sorry yes so in the instance that there's a position that is going to be under water where is the where does the collateral come from to add or to pay back some of the debt and then how does exactly from the sorry yeah do finish sorry okay yeah and then basically how is that you know i don't think i'm understanding um where the collateral is coming from properly because the way that i'm looking at is like okay if i'm gonna be helping out um these users i'm gonna earn some sort of yield from this um and my and my collateral could be used um to you know

to pay back and that's my opportunity cost um is paying the yield but i think you would get you were getting to that the uh position is actually paid back by the same user yeah exactly it's actually payback the depth is paid back but the position itself it gets unbound uh the debt is actually paid back by the collateral a bit of the collateral gets sold to pay back the part of that it sits the position is over collateralized that small bit of collateral pays back a larger like percentage of the loan so the ratio goes up the position safe again and it's all good for until the next drop in price happens i guess yeah but then in terms of what you mentioned like some similar options to that yeah

we'd like to like provide a bunch of other options for example one thing people have been asking for the longest time is like having the automated option to pay back their debt with the assets that have been deployed to a different protocol so that's something that we'd like to to add and support in the coming months as well for example if you borrowed like again die and deploy that into wire into your your turn some yield there um it would be awesome to have the option to pay back that with that die from wire and instead of selling eures to to cover the depth so pull it out and then use it yeah exactly yeah that was really cool yeah that would be really cool um i had a random question for you nicola um how many uh dns names do you own

um i think i actually currently own three i think it was four until recently nice yeah what they dated it has dropped is it like like four or five hours or something yeah i think it's in five hours what do you think is ens going to be absolutely massive as like the the name or the like the web 2 um you know if you bought chuck e cheese dot com or um you know i love food.com or or crypto.com you know is it is something like lol dot eth or um or vitalik.e is that worth you know hundreds of youth or is it kind

of is it the same you know is that digital real estate in web three years is right quite interesting i love enes uh i think we've already seen like things like that happen i think it was budweiser like the american budweiser that bought beer.eth for like a couple couple hundred east or something it was a bunch of money i think uh but yeah but i think we're already seeing like dns becoming like the dominant domain name service on ethereum and like will they stay on top i i guess so it looks so right now i'm i mean the any competition they had so far has been beaten i guess um yeah i haven't seen any competition yeah i mean there's unstoppable

unstoppable domains but they're a bit behind yeah you can buy dot um dot bitcoin um dot you know other things there as well but yeah as far as culture goes i mean ens is one just about just by twitter exactly and the adoption you're seeing on twitter like from yeah well famous people it's it's getting out of hand really so it's really cool to see like you're gonna huddle this airdrop aren't you you're in no way you're selling it yeah i think i am i'm gonna hold it yeah yeah yeah same here i was thinking this morning like facebook.etha has got to be like stellar buy yeah

yeah is zuckerberg going to come in and pay a few hundred eth for facebook.ed wait he needs me the metadata right now right yeah yeah exactly yeah exactly i mean it's just such a powerful way to to have a public address that is connected to your wallet that's so easy like that is that is so much better than ethereum addresses and i think that's something that could be as big as it's even bigger than i think that we can imagine because it's such a problem for newbies and for even us still men people who use eth all the time like having to copy and paste addresses instead of just having instead of being able to just write like oh to defy slate or to you know andy.e or something it's

it's it's nuts it's massive and that's not like even the best i think use case like i really like using ethereum accounts like global web accounts that's something that i think has a big future like signing in like logging in into like any web services with your ethereum account instead of having to like create a new account with your email that's that's something yeah i'm really looking forward to like authentication where you can just click sign up with ethereum rather than sign up with apple or sign up with facebook or exactly yeah yeah i'd like to see that happen yeah interesting so ens did a really good air drop where they brought you know

they did like a time based and by how many domain names you own and they made sure that that if you were squatting on hundreds that you you had to be active and they had to have a certain amount you could see where this is going by the way yeah and so i'm kind of curious like for all of our d5 savers out there what are you thinking about these d5 savers out there how's the team thought about this you know what are your personal thoughts like in terms of very drop hunting like the deface area drop right was that the question actually uh this phenomena of airdrop hunting has become quite interesting let's put it that way um

i think people are going way out of their way to run perhaps pointless transactions and waste it needlessly on transactions that perhaps don't have much sense in terms of what any certain like app is meant to be used for and we're seeing like a bunch of random transactions happening like a deface error which are i'm guessing pretty obviously because of people trying to really hunt an airdrop yeah you'd see like people swapping like 0.001 east for like to die and stuff like that that transaction fees that are in hundreds of dollars that i don't think that makes sense to

do and but in terms like what the actual like the rules of an airdrop would be annoyed you like it's it's not happening at least not so far i've got no inside nipples sorry no leaks no teasers no nothing so it it really hasn't been discussed as the focus is kind of on product first and i assume you're a believer of that model product then token yeah we definitely are like something i mean i don't know maybe maybe never but maybe some time but yeah we we like to get the product like polished very nicely and then think of

the next steps like for example what the idx did i think that's that's amazing like the their l2 pro product is it works so amazingly well and that's the point which when you go out and say okay now now's the time to like fully decentralize and get governance in and figure out a token and set some token economics up and everything that's that's one project i really admire um i don't think we're currently there just yet i mean has the talking never been talked about internally of course it has but has it been considered not just yet um but it's very interesting like we've come

like we've started working at a time like working on device area at a time when talking tokens were like considered like a very bad thing like if project was launching a talking it was if you don't want to play with this thing like it's probably going to just dump on you and just disappear forever in like three weeks or something that's the bear market vibes yeah it is yeah 2017 everything's a utility token things have changed quite a bit nowadays though i mean we obviously are still going to keep seeing stuff like that happen but uh like sharing the value value accrual of a certain platform with its users early adopters and everyone

that's something that's that's awesome the the way that ethereum and these token tokens enable this that's amazing and is this something we'd like to see happen with defacer as well i mean certainly but there's just no plans for that just yet we've heard like a few different projects mention you know sufficient decentralization as that that barrier um or really that threshold to meet before going and investigating a token and you know potentially using that in their protocol for for some instance what does that look like to you i guess maybe from a general perspective and then you know on on d5 saber specifically what what does

sufficient decentralization mean to you oh i i think that's quite a difficult question to answer actually um because the centralization really is a spectrum that there's no other way to put it i guess um in terms of device saver when when's the point we can say that i think it's the point where we're sufficiently like satisfied with all the features available in the product we are happy with everything that's put together there's a then we've also prepared ways for other people to permissionlessly add support for additional protocols and we also need to figure out like a

way for people to run their own like automation bots and things like that that's the point where the face here can become like sufficiently decentralized i think how long away that is right now really not sure because we've got a quite a lot of things to figure out in terms of the features we want to provide for now and yeah yeah yeah i mean it's definitely a spectrum and it's it's a matter of kind of where you know when you when the team is is ready but it's it's it's more so

um you know as you say that mindset of kind of launching a token as a negative um it's an interesting one and there's legal and there's you know there's there's concepts of dowse and um you know there's a lot of things that they go into it it's kind of interesting that you mentioned building in that time um you know i would love to just take like a minute or two and just talk real briefly about that time that you guys weren't because frankly we didn't come along in d5 space i mean we've been in crypto since like 2017 but kind of took a break in the bear market um you know of course right and came back in early 2020 and found d5 good for you right but whereas you guys were building d5 all along with you know synthetics and the ave guys and eventually compound

started their first yield for me ever so what was it like in you know mid 2019 building d5 like what was the ethereum community like you know and what was the e5 like it was quite a bit different but no for example like at the time when we started like in i think we launched like the first maintenance release in april 2019 and at that point there was maker dao and there was compound and compound launch in december i think that was compound b1 at that point so like the the ecosystem at that point was quite a bit different um thing was things were quite a bit slower and that was the case like for multiple reasons

firstly there were there was not like that many protocols nowadays we see like new protocol launch every day potentially especially given how much change we have like that are active right now uh but at the same time there weren't that many users like maker dao at that point like maybe had 50 million die in circulation or 100 million die in circulation compared to 8 billion today so that's that's a completely different space like back then there was like i think it was literally like hundreds of leafy users at that point so it was i'd like to say it was nice but that's just because it was slower nowadays it's really hard to keep

up with everything especially when you work in dfi because you've got a lot of stuff to handle on your end and then you have to keep up with everything that's happening outside it gets pretty wild but it's definitely nicer nowadays because there's so much more happening there's so much new things like being built that simply weren't there just maybe even being figured out for the first time in economics it's it's amazing really yeah yeah yeah it's super cool seeing um kind of like a lot of different breakout points show themselves now whereas in 2017 i mean they were almost a lot of them were only ideas and and a

lot of them hadn't even been thought about yet or discovered um and i mean we had like maker doubt was there in 2017 he just wasn't i think they actually even launched the earliest version in late 2017 or something i can't quite remember there was no units there was there was no uni swap definitely no yeah there was eth land for example that was the diabetes of it there were things happening but it was taking taking a while to get where we are now but to just look back at it and like we had two protocols in 2019 and to just see how much stuff we have today that's in two years that's amazing

yeah it's interesting getting a little bit back to that fat protocol thesis how when the protocols were around there didn't seem to be much use case right because that application layer hadn't been developed yet so i was like well what are we going to use maker dow for why do i even want an over collateralized loan um but now after seeing the use cases seeing the applications like you can really you can really understand the uh the foresight from like the maker diode team and these early protocols to see like okay you know these are the applications that we're building for um and and then it was really just about the primitives that that started to unravel

as a result of the protocols and the applications and then starting to combine like these different legos it's very cool that's yeah absolutely insane um what do you guys have coming up nick for uh upcoming releases updates you know what can the d5 saver community get excited about um as we kind of wrap this up i guess we partially touched on it already but like the major things we have coming up in the coming months is l2 support and more automation options like those are the things we're betting on like hugely um and those will be like the two major things for us to to roll out but other than that we like constantly push out

user phase user interface sorry updates and tweaks and just last week we launched like a new portfolio page that's quite a bit nicer than the old one has support for a bunch of additional protocols uh this week we're working on allowing users to batch like a number of different actions in any of the protocols we have supported we're like constantly trying to like optimize and get the most out of the interface and to enable like users to just do the most that they can like make them power users provide them with the power tools for d5 sweet that's awesome yeah um can can we find you on discord twitter

and absolutely absolutely you can find me on twitter and you can find me in the d5 discord 24 7. so hop in and i'll see you there amazing well thanks thanks for coming on nick and chatting about all things d5 defies thank you guys for having me yes sir it's pleasure likewise