DeFi UX

Transcript

hello everyone i just want to check like back there if you can hear everything okay that we're going to be talking about yeah good awesome thank you um so defying ux i think what we'll talk about mostly is how far along are we with d5 when it comes to making it accessible for many instead of the few so that'll be our topic um i'm gonna be asking these wonderful gentlemen uh a few questions uh and and see where they agree see where they might have some some different views to go into um i'm hester i work for status we're

building uh in short web 3 discord can go into links about that but for another time here maybe following up on mariano's introduction we have evgeny of xerion i believe you started as a software engineer for a few years before founding xerion in 2016 which is ancient by now so congrats on that sticking around we have sep i believe you have a background in product design which explains a lot about how zapper works as well so kudos from the design

community well done sergey long history in it and software development and security audits on youtube i checked out the youtube channel um still has a lot of followers subscribers and founded one ins in 2020 i believe it was maybe a little earlier 2019 we have built one inch on a hackathon in nth new york 2019 okay and sauron with years and years of experience starting at ibm but i don't know what you have not done

in between iot and e-governance and now director co-founder of owazolabs building oasis as a application so i think a great panel to understand where defy is at and i would like to ask from each of you and please jump in wherever you can where do you see dfi at now are we reaching the many and maybe you can go into a little bit of who who's your user base now who do you actually see using your product so the answer to this question has changed a lot with time

i can give a bit of like the evolution of the user base we've seen in zapper and how we've kind of adapted the product so initially and that's happens a lot in you know new you know tech paradigms or new tech shifts you can think of the the industry as being mostly thinkers developers really people that are just purely curious trying stuff out um i didn't really fall in that category in the early time of defy i actually came a bit later when we got like the first major protocols and at that time there weren't any products that kind of fit me as a user right i wanted something that was easier to use and i didn't want

to have to like use a bunch of different products you know synthetics uh ave uniswap so to be able to put that in one kind of platform was really important but with time we're seeing that there's been a dramatic shift in our user base where they actually they're not you know these djen defy investors that try to seek every protocol they actually see convenience and they're not going into like 50 protocols like say a year ago they're going maybe in four or five and they're trying to use like as not as many you know platforms and so that's really changed the way we've kind of designed zappers to be like really this one-stop shop to be able to do most of what you can do in d5 and focus on

really people that are kind of entering the space that really want convenience i'm curious how is that for i'll give you my microphone how is that for xerion as in maybe attracting a slightly different generation starting out a little bit earlier in the crypto space yeah sure happy to to give our perspective on that so i think it was uh in a way similar to how the evolution of your audience has been so obviously like users of xero were the ones not necessarily all familiar when they started with define they just kind of progressed through and i think now we're seeing even more and more people who are like you know just coming to the d5 space through the nft market for example and uh they use zero and as like again the starting

point to see their collection person they they kind of get into the defy space uh through that um yeah so uh in terms of uh they i wanna say as well so uh with the ux evolution i think uh it's it's actually getting easier and easier to and also like the chains new chains coming up um on the market we see you know the barrier of entry dropping significantly so now you know before ethereum was pricing out a ton of people from just like using all the d5 protocols and now we see you know people just jumping in and starting with polygon for example versus ethereum and i think this is how d5 continued to grow and evolve as a user base thank you soren i'd also like to hear from you because we're talking about the

application layer you're also chairperson for the dye foundation defy being used by the many how do you see dye being used by the many currently well uh you we can go and look at how much is in circulation but it's clearly the glue of d5 it's clearly what we also worked on before is yeah making it available as as actually digital dollar for people in south america africa and so on right now we're challenged on that due to the high gas prices of layer one so yeah we have some scalability challenges so

yeah let's let's try and take a little bit you say how do we get d5 to the menu i will say a little bit about where we are today with the oasis app and where we are going because yeah there is a huge potential and we clearly aren't there yet and we have to take some steps and what we're focusing on so far we have been delivering a front end for the mega protocol users where you kind of generate dye for collateral and we had over 8 000 wallets connect to oasis last month we had over 600 yeah not a lot but 600 unique users creating over 1 billion of volume in transactions through oasis and

and by the way 10 percent of that was our newest product multiply where you kind of automatically can increase or decrease your exposure to some assets so so it it's it's like a very distinct user and for the short future we are also really looking towards users who has at least 100 000 dollars worth of assets to kind of deploy and manage into d5 to get more out of their their worst and and also get stable returns so both they can kind of have exposure when the market goes up but also have some safe haven when we have a fair market and that's that's

really our focus now and we do believe that that also has a huge potential so i think we need to go in steps so it sounds like you also looked at the distribution of people using using dye and how many assets they hold or yeah that's a big study right yeah and and and again i i would really say die die is a glue it's it's it's very convenient to to kind of deploy into all kinds of assets and so so clearly we see that's the best the best meeting for that

i'm curious jumping ahead a little bit at what uh what can influence building d5 for the many correct me if i'm wrong i understand one inch is also deployed on a other chain yes yes we are only furious of course started on ethereum next move was to expand to one smart chain polygon optimism arbitrarily and as soon as zika zinc is in a magnet we also will release on layer choosing sync as well right so i'm i'm curious uh very specific question but i'm curious how you all feel about uh like deploying d5 applications across

different chains aggregating applications from different chains like to what extent should you um adopt more centralized change in order change in order to reach more people how do you see that maybe starting with you sergey so um i see uh the side chains layer one like banana smart chain polygon uh it's only a short term thing uh because we have already great solutions we have already layered two of of course optimistic relapse from our point of view it's not the best solution but uh

a good solution and uh as soon we have zika sync we will have really great throughput of 20 000 tps which would mean lower gas costs and yeah more user we can onboard on that aggregating among multiple chains it's difficult to achieve swap for example across multiple chains atomically and this is a pain there are some risks and i don't see any value in that of course the liquidity is distributed right now this part is in ethereum it's like around 60 percentages i guess of the liquidity right now in whole device and ethereum the other uh parts are on

one as much and polygon and we have bridge and on our side we integrated uh every chain is like a separate environment just if you want to swap move to another chain with your token use dc for example and swap there and you will get at least what you expected uh on on the swap yeah i i think our approach is somewhat similar so um we actually tried to support the way we approach protocols and all the protocol integration is that we actually try to cover as many of them as possible um because i think in in d5 it's really hard to predict which one of these are actually going kind of like to make it uh in the end so you know some

chains might start more centralized and maybe decentralized in the future so defy is really evolving so trying to kind of become the judge of like what users should or shouldn't be doing on blockchains uh i think uh not the right approach so that's why we just we try to be you know open to what we integrate and uh yeah see what gets more usage i guess in the future and uh yeah that's how we approach feature prioritization there i i just want to add that clearly defy has growing pains from the buildup perspective but if we turn it around and look from the user perspective we believe there's millions of users out there who has the capital

and the knowledge to actually use financial services they cannot get access to and defy can solve that but right now they have to jump through multiple hoops right different apps now even different chains and and it is just so confusing for them new users they don't really know where to start and what to trust and that really is kind of what we from oasis focus on trying to answer these two questions because we really believe that will unlock a lot of new users yes i'm curious how you see that as someone with a product design hat um at

least that you've worn in the in the past um i think what someone's describing is the role of user experience uh in like reaching the many how's zapper doing that yeah well specifically for like the multi-chain world there's definitely a lot of ux you know issues or things to work on we actually our design philosophy has never to be like to abstract you know crypto away is actually to let it shine and educate people on how to use it and so i don't it might change in the future but i don't think like all these things will be hidden away from the user they'll

actually be born with these tools and for them you know ethereum will be a city and you know polygon polygon will be like this other city that has you know different products built there a different economy right i don't see it being abstracted if you look at the people they're actually very curious they want to explore so they're not looking for abstraction they're looking for tools that allow them to freely browse like this new web right got it i'm going to tune uh for a second to uh people here in the audience asking a very i'm a ux researcher at heart so a basic ux research question i often ask is how easy or difficult

do you find this application to use now so maybe by raising hands on a skill of one to five where do you see d5 applications now where one is very difficult to use five is very easy to use one two okay three that's pretty good four yes any particular application in mind in general that's a good score um just for sake of completing the round five very easy to use right now

okay okay so there's some work to do i guess okay what what um we touched on um multi-chain supporting multiple chains to reach more people uh i think sauron mentioned gas cost briefly that's definitely a factor experience design what other things do you see currently impacting more people using d5 so in our view i think the biggest blocker that we've seen was the bullet experience i think there's a you know a lot of misunderstanding of

how web 3 should be different from web 2 and you know some people try to adapt the patterns from the web 2 and try to apply them and use like the account experience and the wallet experience to kind of make it similar to how would you experience revolut and it kind of or like you know robin hood or others but i think within d5 and web 3 it's just a complete different experience so by kind of like applying the old patterns to the new world you are uh not creating you know you're limiting the user essentially in what they actually can achieve so i think this has been a big struggle for a while now in this space and i think there's a lot of potential to you know make it better there well

there's loads of barriers there's the technology scalability security part there's the regulation the elephant in the room but there's also business models we still need to get yeah a way for example to ensure what i deploy into dfi not just ensure against smart contract risk and stuff like that so there's a lot of restrictions in all of these areas but there's still a lot we can do with the current restrictions right now so so from again from our point of view where to start what to trust that again take it from the user's point of view what is that job to be done because users today to accomplish

something in d5 they have to use i don't know how many different apps for example we surveyed our users the the mega protocol vault holders and they go at least four other places to kind of figure out what to do first they need to figure out what is the the market sentiment how should i make my strategies then they have a home spreadsheet to kind of look at how is my investment performing what are the risks but then they also need to follow up what are the system changes are the stability fees changing and stuff like that and finally go and and also yeah where are the new opportunities and and that's ridiculous

and obviously we can't fold all of that into one but we're really looking towards we're trying to give users one number to follow the investments and and we are we're giving a first step with with a profit and loss overview soon but yeah won't be perfect but but again take it from the user's point of view what is it they want to accomplish i think that's that's really what we can tackle with all these other barriers that are out there want to chime in sam yeah no i i definitely agree i think too um finance right isn't like the most sexy thing in like traditional finance right and so it's one part very intimidating for people coming in

um you know they take a lot of assumptions that they know of finance from the traditional world and you know we want to break those assumptions kind of because everyone should be able to you know participate in finance we want everyone to be financially empowered but i mean we've never really invested in financial literacy ever right in the at school right when did we actually learn about finance never um and so it's really important to kind of break those pers you know perspectives or like perceptions we have on the traditional finance and try to you know welcome people as much as possible and not make it as intimidating as it is and especially like it's intimidating for

people in this space like even us right it's very overwhelming everything that's going on so i can't even imagine someone that's just entering the space right so financial education like building a future where people are actually more financially literate than rebuilding kind of fintech and traditional finance 2.0 we want people to be able to make you know self-sovereign decisions with the finance but that's i think one of the the big challenges right to overcome is not just from a technical perspective is it's also from how can we um you know build this trojan horse with refinance you guys have a wallet i think zapper is

also working on a wallet in this troy horse thinking of okay i guess that answers my question what is the rule of wallets um in making d5 accessible what's the entry point there from our point of view a wallet is as a tool to onboard new people so it should also provide a security for the users so we have seen a couple of facts that someone was hacked like on and signed the transaction uh and the

tokens were transferred to hacker and such kind of things should be improved yeah so that's why we just introduced one inch wallet and you can also sign with you apple watch the transaction you see what happens it's described you swap if you don't you die you get this amount you paid this amount of fees we need to prove the the usability here in the device space we just think that volt is a crucial component of like your you know d5 metaverse journey um it's kind of like your home base so without having this home base it's

really you know it's dangerous out there um there's so many like scams and the fake projects and fishing etc so a wallet is like where you start and this is how you're going to secure and you know compound your assets so i think that's a it's pretty important bit and i think this is not you know it's been a while and they still haven't been sold i think so that's why it's probably like almost everyone on the phone is working i'll consider this a call to wallop providers to up their game the the real reason everyone's building a wallet is because we're tired of all doing metamask customer support yeah but

you really also point the point to this thing a lot of our users they use hardware wallets and and again how can they actually they look at numbers on this small display and we see from time to time they actually yeah send it somewhere wrong we really need a way to also make sure that no one can interfere between all of this stuff and it's still clearly readable for the use of what is it actually they're sending these money to and trust that this is the right thing so so yeah wallets are crucial so what would a um say the usability doesn't get fixed in the web 3 world the wallets don't improve

gas costs say hi what's what do you see as the biggest risk uh in achieving d5 for the many okay so i i just think there'll be bumps on the road but i also think it's clear that the decentralization this is not just in d5 but this is all over the plate is something that brings more reliance and and it will come eventually the question is will will we succeed or will someone else succeed from our point of view it it really is yeah are we able to execute and i would say for for us the biggest risk is

we can't hire qualified people fast enough that's really what what is the risk for us right now and uh what sorry to interrupt what if c5 succeeds [Music] i like c5 has some benefits because they are regulated yeah most of them and they have to somehow to work in this compliance framework and it's coming for d5 for sure i see it like next year coming so we have seen already there are some investigations uh right now and uh and uh like blacklisting security tokens uh on

industrialized exchanges uh what makes sense from our point of view as well um and from our point of view we should introduce a compliance protocol something like that so everyone can use it integrated since money lego and we are safe maybe it is a room for a doll to uh kind of compliance though there maybe we can also offer kyc and ml as well so and we use an internal article on smart smart contracts to just ensure that we are compliant and regulators will not just start fighting against us yeah and if they start yeah we will see we will see a lot of pain and blood

approaching the end of our panel uh i have a quick rapid fire round for you i'm gonna start on that end favorite stable coin favorite sable coin difficult that one which is not yet there sorry that one which is not yet released die no i mean yeah obviously die

lusd same actually okay what's next for d5 daos i think the intersection of d5 nfcs define nfts okay once again what's next for d5 uh regulation probably yeah that's that's coming and from our point of view it is really providing this trust so we can get the masses in because yeah right now getting into device like being accepted into a masonic lodge right so yeah trust

building trust alrighty sergey starting with you favorite eat client that's not prism once again favorite client ethereum client that is not prism not what not prism favorite client favorite client yeah ah okay you mean not like uh like not clients okay my favorite not client actually uh parity did really great job uh in one word okay sorry uh yeah but previous imperative but yeah same

okay that's guess right you said guess yeah open ethereum that's what just because we use it actually there's a there's another one and every one wait this is i forgot there's a new one that is just slowly getting adoption um i think we're looking into it that's in the in the arena of new stable coin the new whatever new comes out siren what's your question the favorite client yeah what favorite these two clients node or what this is my last question guys i should have prepared that better favorite eth2 client

to be honest i don't really you know i have no favorite easter client yet okay i have i have a question do we need really ethereum2.org this is a huge question do we need really if you doing 2.0 this basically can you repeat that once more there's no need for a feeding tutorial from our point of view so uh and uh i don't have my favorite client for ethereum 2.0 because like we are fine we see one one one which should be just upgraded with proof of stake not more not less and scalability would come through layer 2 for because layer 2 is ethereum you're starting a whole new debate here

okay any any comment on that last comments i think it's an interesting thought because we you know we've we've kind of given up on uh expecting it to be released so uh it might never happen okay so focus on each or a layer two solutions okay that was our panel uh i want to thank you very much for uh your patience and diligence answering some of my questions and enjoy list khan thank you i think you did a great job