AMA w/ Zapper | Co-Founder Seb Audet and DeFi Dad

🚀 SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER: http://bankless.substack.com/ ✊ STARTING GUIDE BANKLESS: https://bit.ly/37Q17uI ❤️ JOIN PRIVATE DISCORD: https://bit.ly/2UVI10O 🎙️ SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST: http://podcast.banklesshq.com/ 👕 BUY BANKLESS TEE: https://merch.banklesshq.com/ ----- 📢 DEFI BUILDER? APPLY TO FILECOIN ACCELERATOR FOR $20K GRANT http://bankless.cc/filecoinapply ----- GO BANKLESS WITH THESE SPONSOR TOOLS: ⭐️LEDGER - BEST HARDWARE WALLET TO SECURE YOUR CRYPTO https://bankless.cc/ledger-20 🚀ARGENT - GET THE MOST SIMPLE AND SECURE DEFI WALLET https://bankless.cc/argent 💳 MONOLITH - GET THE HOLY GRAIL OF BANKLESS VISA CARDS https://bankless.cc/monolith 🤖YEARN - YIELD-SEEKING MONEY ROBOT THAT FARMS DEFI FOR YOU http://bankless.cc/yearn ------ Zapper AMA with Founder Seb Audet and DeFi Dad Zapper is a home-base for your financial activity on Ethereum. Load up your wallets at https://zapper.fi/ and use Zapper to make quick and easy transactions in DeFi! DeFi Dad on Twitter: https://twitter.com/defi_dad Seb on Twitter: https://twitter.com/sebaudet26 ------ Don't stop at the video! Subscribe to the Bankless newsletter program http://bankless.substack.com/ Visit the official Bankless website for resources http://banklesshq.com/ Follow Bankless on Twitter https://twitter.com/BanklessHQ Follow Ryan on Twitter https://twitter.com/ryansadams Follow David on Twitter https://twitter.com/TrustlessState ----- Not financial or tax advice. This channel is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This video is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research. Disclosure. From time-to-time we may add links in this channel to products we use. We may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. We'll always disclose when this is the case.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00David Hoffman?

  The.

• 2:10David Hoffman?

  The.

• 5:24David Hoffman?

  If you are looking for a mobile wallet to hold and access your crypto, you need to go to argent.xyz and download their smart contract wallet app right onto your Android or iOS device. Argent is the most secure way to hold money on your device while still being able to access DeFi services that we all know and love on Ethereum. Through Argent, you have one tap access to the beloved DeFi apps like Compound, Uniswap, Aave, and you can even invest directly into some yield generating assets right from your Argent wallet. Crucial to maintaining security over your assets is Argent's Guardian service, which allows you to use a friend to make sure that you can always restore access to your funds in case you were to ever lose your phone or for your device to break.

• 6:09David Hoffman?

  You can also use a local hardware wallet to ensure that you can always restore access to your funds yourself. One of Argent's newest features is their ability to route trades through 10 decentralized exchanges, including Uniswap and Kyber, to make sure that you are always getting the best trade on your assets. Similarly, pushing the fold on what we can do in Ethereum and DeFi. Argent has replicated some of the legacy financial services that you would expect from your bank, but put it directly into the hands of the user, such as send limits and whitelisted accounts, ensuring that if anyone were to be able to access your funds in your Argent wallet, they could only send up to a certain amount and only be able to send them to approved addresses, which is creating one of the most safe environments

• 6:51David Hoffman?

  to hold your assets in, which is why people have put millions and millions of dollars into the Argent wallet that they use on their device. In order to see the Argent wallet in action, go to argent.link/banklist and download the Argent wallet on iOS or Android today. We're also brought to you by Monolith. Monolith is your cool new DeFi account, your DeFi savings account, your DeFi checking account, except the cool thing about the Monolith DeFi account is that it gets software updates, right? You actually get to increase the usefulness of this over time. So here are some of the features. Monolith is a smart contract wallet with a lot of the features that you would expect if you've come to know DeFi and what it is.

• 7:32David Hoffman?

  You can add money to it, you can put that money to work in Compound and accessing yield, but you can also swap through Uniswap. What was cool with Monolith is that they will send you a very sexy Monolith Visa card that connects to your Monolith smart contract wallet on Ethereum. So it's a really awesome tool to live a bankless life with a savings account that gets software updates. So this is something that you're never going to find out in the real world, but you can still do real world things with real money, like buy your groceries. So that's just fantastic. Coming soon to Monolith, actually already here to Monolith, is now you can buy DAI and get it sent to your wallet directly, right? So it's also being an on-ramp, so you don't have to go through your centralized exchange

• 8:17David Hoffman?

  like Coinbase or Gemini or wherever, you can just go straight from your bank account right into your Monolith checking account smart contract wallet. So check them out at monolith.xyz.

• 8:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  Hello, Bankless Nation. Welcome to another community. Ask Me Anything. This is an AMA. This is your opportunity to ask some of the most interesting projects, some of the most interesting people in crypto, questions that you have always wanted answered. So, to ask a question, type it into YouTube. If you are a Bankless member, you can type it into the Inner Circle Discord, and we will prioritize those things. David and I, throughout this conversation, will do our best to field your questions to our two guests today. And with that, I want to introduce our guests today. This is part of the team at Zapper. So, Zapper is a DeFi interface. It is kind of Bankless

• 9:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  bank interface, and you can do tons of things with it. It's a fantastic tool. We recommend it all the time. I have Seb Audet, who is the founder of Zapper, and I have Travis Blaine, but you probably know him as DeFi Dad. We just call him Dad. We just have David cause of Dad. I'm not quite comfortable with that yet, but DeFi Dad's okay with me. And he is the COO of Zapper, huge contributor to the DeFi space as well. Gentlemen, how are you doing today? Welcome.

• 9:43Speaker 02

  Thank you. Thank you, Ryan. That was a pretty good intro. Yeah, we're doing pretty good.

• 9:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  Awesome.

• 9:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, thanks for having us, guys. Yeah, Ryan just makes everything sound exciting. Like, we were here talking a few minutes, and then like the cameras turn on. It's like, hey, everybody, welcome to the.

• 10:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  My kids say I have a podcast voice, and it's totally different. So, whatever. All right, let's start with this question. So, we're going to field some questions for the community, but I think we just want to get a base. So, there are people out there that haven't used Zapper yet, believe it or not. Even people in the Bankless community may have not used Zapper yet. Gentlemen, what does Zapper do?

• 10:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, so Zapper helps you understand your portfolio first. So say you do a ton of different investments in DeFi, you know, you're playing with a bunch of different protocols, you know, Zapper helps you bring all that information and put it in one interface. So that's the first thing. Then the second part is actually, you know, being able to manage your funds. So we help people go into Uniswap pools, balance pools, and reduce the friction around doing those transactions. So instead of doing, you know, a couple of transactions to enter a Uniswap pool, you could do it, you know, with one transaction on Zapper, which we call a zap.

• 11:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's brilliant. Like using zap as a verb, which means you get to like do something really cool in DeFi. You zap into into something. And I guess Travis, I would love your perspective on this too. Like, so what is the the end game for for Zapper? What are you guys trying to do? Is this like a an interface for all things DeFi? All the money verbs, as we call them on Bankless?

• 11:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, that's exactly what it is. I think the like, the high level like mission is to make DeFi easy for everyone. And so, by the way, too, I don't know if we're able to share screens. Like, I feel like

• 11:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yes, we are.

• 11:51Speaker 03

  share a screen if anyone's ever not seen it. But yeah, the goal is to allow you to track your DeFi portfolio, and then to be able to have the same access as others who might be more sophisticated in DeFi and be able to navigate all the different platforms and all the different strategies. By creating a zap, we in many cases consolidate, could be like three to seven transactions into one or two. And so it saves them time, it saves them money, it saves them effort. But I think like more than anything, it's You know, it's like really doing what a lot of fintech has done where, you know, you take away all of the friction points. Robinhood's incredible because you can go

• 12:35Speaker 03

  on and you can trade, you know, with nothing to stop you from putting in as much money as you want into whatever stocks and there's no fees. And I think similarly, we're, we're just trying to enable that, that sort of access through DeFi.

• 12:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  And important to note, you guys never take custody of assets, right? So it's basically a bring your own wallet, bring your own private keys, plug it in, and you get this entire interface. You could plug in a MetaMask, you can plug in your, your Ledger account, Wallet Connect, whatever you're using, right?

• 13:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. We don't custody any users' funds. We're just this, you know, way to plug into DeFi.

• 13:13Speaker 03

  So I've got my screen up here. Is this, can you see?

• 13:17David Hoffman?

  Yep.

• 13:37Speaker 03

  Want to earn yield or do some yield farming. And then you can see here even a breakdown of different platforms that I would have money in here. So like I have some money, some stable coins in Barnbridge that's earning me bond. And so that $3,000 of value here is stake there. The other side of the coin though is to be able to use a Zap. And so this is where I could look for a liquidity pool, let's say with, let's say USDC. I've got the one here for Uniswap and I can just add liquidity by using one of the tokens that's actually in the pool, like USDC or Ether. But I can also use the

• 14:20Speaker 03

  most liquid, stable coins and tokens in DeFi like Dye, Tether, Link, Wrapped Bitcoin. And so at the end of the day, what's happening here is if I were to go in with, let's say, Tether, Zapper will swap out my Tether. It'll split it 50 50 into USDC and Ether. And so this is a, this is a lot of manual work that all of us had gotten used to over the last few years. That's been consolidated now into an automated money software. And then the last piece of the puzzle is just the fact that we offer a Dex aggregator. This is what Matcha is by ZeroX.

• 15:01Speaker 03

  That Dex aggregator, their API is what powers this exchange. So if you like Matcha, if you feel like you're getting the best rates and the least amount of slippage there, you can actually trade within Zapper now using the power of the ZeroX API.

• 15:18David Hoffman?

  So Dad and Dad and Seb, the previous, Zapper is a previous sponsor of the Bankless Podcast. So I guess full, full disclosure there. But the, the way that I described it in, in the ad read was like, you know, the 2017 bull market was like characterized by like pulling out your Blockfolio and just like refreshing it like all day, like all day, every single day. And, you know, that, that was fun times.

• 15:42Speaker 03

  Has that changed? I, I've been doing that for three years now.

• 15:45David Hoffman?

  Well, yeah, but now, now I just go to Zapper and I just hit refresh, refresh, refresh. And like the, the difference between like Blockfolio and Zapper is that Zapper, you load up your wallets. And with Blockfolio, you have to like manually input your, your, your trades, your assets. And, and especially with things like rebasing tokens, like that doesn't even work in Blockfolio these days. And so Zapper, it's, it's like, it's going directly to the source of what the data is. And you can, the best part about it is like you can have multiple wallets, right? And so I think this, this next bull market is going to be characterized by just like refreshing Zapper over and over and over again. But that's just like only one half of the product. The other half of the product is what you were just explaining, Dad, where you were, you're saying you can, you can

• 16:30David Hoffman?

  access DeFi things in a more efficient route. When you put those two pieces of Zapper together, is that the whole product or is there other stuff as well?

• 16:42Speaker 02

  So like we see Zapper, there's two aspects, right? There's the UI aspect. So there's, there's, there's the zapper dot F I. You know, the interface that everyone sees. But the other side of the product that isn't as well known is, you know, what's powering all these possibilities through those transactions? So it's the UX part, right?

• 17:04Speaker 02

  And that's a part of the product that, you know, we're working to gear towards more developer audience. So basically could, you know, help us build out new apps. So yeah, I mean, right now, the more well known of the product is, you know, the zapper dot F I that everyone sees. But there's also another part, you know, which is in our docs, where, you know, people could actually play with saps and build out to new variations of them.

• 17:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  So cool. It's almost like a Netscape, you know, a Netscape for seeing and being able to do something with all of the money legos that are being built out on DeFi right there. So like, that's an early internet analogy. I also want to talk about another kind of early internet analogy, which is how you guys built Zapper? Like, what's the story there? Cause right, so you, you think about if somebody wants to start a fintech company on traditional banking, on the traditional banking stack, it is really damn hard, right? Like all of these APIs, you have to plug into all of these kind of regulatory requirements, all of these relationships.

• 18:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  You have to have, I think that's different when you're building on Ethereum, when you're building on DeFi. Because Seb, correct me if I'm wrong, you guys started as a hackathon project, right? Can you tell us the story of how Zapper was actually built?

• 18:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. So Zapr's story is kind of like a interesting one where it came from two, you know, small side projects that got together. So the first part was DeFi Zap, which was really the transactional aspect. So you would go on the website and be able to enter a pool with one input. The other side was DeFi Snap, which was this pretty much what you see on Zapr today when you land on the the front page is being able to just track all your assets. So I came from the DeFi Snap side. So perhaps I

• 19:11Speaker 02

  could tell a bit more of, you know, that that side of the story. So yeah, during fall, that's where I I really started to, you know, look into DeFi, do a little bit of investments here and there. And, you know, at one point, it was just really hard to track my my own assets assets. So yeah, I had this crazy spreadsheet going. It was becoming really hard to maintain. At one point, it was almost like, okay, well, building a web app that would do this would be easier to just maintain my spreadsheet. So yeah, that's where I started DeFi Snap. And originally, it was just a very small use case. It was just Synthetix and Uniswap, because those were the two projects I

• 19:52Speaker 02

  was using the most. So it was just something I built for myself. And then, you know, just published a link on the the Synthetix Discord in January. And from there, it really, you know, just had this this crazy snowball effect.

• 20:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  Wait, was that January of this year? January 2020?

• 20:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 20:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  Wow, okay. I didn't realize it was it was that new. Wow.

• 20:14Speaker 02

  No, no, yeah, it's it's crazy. Like, I mean, last year to this day, I was, you know, I had another job working at Chekpay in Canada. So yeah, it's crazy how fast all of this happened. And, you know,

• 20:30Speaker 02

  I think the, you know, and May 1st, we merged. So that was the official day that Zapper was founded. And it was kind of like being at the right place at the right time because we never saw yield farming, you know, exploding like, you know, I guess nobody really saw it. And Zapper was in a perfect, like, place in the market to leverage that because we help people go into pools and stake those assets. So we were just like the yield farmer's product. And from there, that's kind of like where we got all this, this crazy traction.

• 21:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  Less than a year, small team built it, didn't need to ask anyone's permission and it's already as powerful as it is now. I think that's, that's the story here. Seb, I think this is a perfect time to ask the first community question.

• 21:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  I'm going to ask this. This is from an anonymous source. It's not from David or I. So let's talk about DeFi Zap plus DeFi Snap. So Seb, you were a main coder there and then Noter was the other coder. Who is the better coder between you guys? Is Seb better or is Noter better?

• 21:34Speaker 02

  Oh my, well, so Notar doesn't code. He codes a bit.

• 21:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay.

• 21:39Speaker 02

  On the DeFi Zap side, there's Notar and Suhal. Suhal is a magician with smart contracts. So Suhal is definitely better than me on the smart contracts. Notar is more like this, you know, financial engineer. He has this, these really good ideas around, you know, building these new Zaps. And I'm more of like the, the front end. So like, I can't say who's the, the best coder per se. We all have kind of our own, our own expertise.

• 22:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  And you definitely have one of the best educators in the space, DeFi Dad. That's, you know, fantastic pickup. DeFi Dad, when did you join the team?

• 22:15Speaker 03

  Gosh, I only joined, I think it was what, end of August or mid-August. So I, I had been using Zapper forever, like, like all of us. And by forever, I mean for six months or whenever.

• 22:29Speaker 03

  DeFi zaps back in November when Nodar and Su Hale had launched around, it was like November 2019. And that was, I mean, at that point, we were all so excited because DeFi was gaining traction and we were headed towards a billion in total value locked. And then along comes this idea of zaps, which to me was like, whoa, okay, so I no longer have to explain all these steps for one of my friends to get into a liquidity pool. I can just send them a link and just say, just follow this and deposit your money and it'll do all the hard stuff for you, splitting your tokens and creating the liquidity provision. So then when they combined forces,

• 23:12Speaker 03

  being able to track your portfolio plus zaps, it was like, all right, now this is like becoming like a hub for both newbies and sophisticated users. And then, yeah, I mean, I feel just really lucky. Like I was, you guys know, I was working at Consensus. I mostly focused on the Ethereal Summit. And, you know, I was spending all of my time creating tutorials and trying to educate on DeFi. So it made a lot of sense to work on a platform that is like an on-ramp for DeFi users. So yeah, been since August and just, it's, it's been really, really fun. I mean, my, I have a tough time shutting off from work right now.

• 23:55David Hoffman?

  And for all those people that have watched my Ether triple point asset talk at Ethereal, you can thank DeFi Dad for that one. He's the one that got me up on that stage. So tip of the hat for that.

• 24:06Speaker 03

  You know what's interesting, David? Go back to Ethereal in Tel Aviv in 2019. So this was in the fall. It was, I think, September. And we had a stage dedicated to DeFi. We called it the DeFi Stage. Now, granted, DeFi already had like a pretty awesome community, like, you know, maybe like a few thousand that were paying close attention, a few hundred that were really like hyper involved. And man, I had so much pushback from so many people like, why are you dedicating all this time to this topic?

• 24:37David Hoffman?

  What's this DeFi thing?

• 24:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's where your talk on Ether as a triple, triple point asset, we had a bunch of folks like Pool Together was really new as well and Kyber Network was very well established. Actually, also like, you know, our, our brothers from, from Zirion, they were there as well, talking about all the cool stuff they do tracking DeFi portfolios. So it was, um, you know, it's, it was only a year ago, but it's nuts how so much of this now has become accepted truth to all of us that DeFi is here for the long run and that 15 billion in total value locked is nothing compared to where we're going.

• 25:21David Hoffman?

  Yeah, that, that's where I met Leighton from Pool Together and that's where, that's where I met Tom from, from Delphi. And so like, that was the hot stage. So like Dad, like you've, you've been leading the charge with making sure that DeFi is in everyone's brains.

• 25:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. So, so much fun. So, I mean, we've had a great year. It's been, it's been a really exciting year.

• 25:41David Hoffman?

  I do want to go back to what Seb was talking about with, uh, so, so there's the, the world of, um, building smart contracts, right? But, but Notar is the financial engineer and that's almost like a coder in of them, in of themselves in the DeFi world. Like you need, you can't just have somebody who's good at solidity. You have to instruct them, okay, what are we going to do with all of this, like financial, like all these financial, like money Legos? You need an engine, literally an engineer to put all the Legos together and construct them in a, in a particular way. And what I see going on in the, in the background of Zapper is that you have, uh, these financial engineers who I guess is, is Notar and I'm sure there's others as well, who are learning how to construct these money Legos into like actual structures that you turn into

• 26:26David Hoffman?

  products on Zapper. Uh, Seb, can you talk about like the, the side of financial engineering and how important that is to Zapper?

• 26:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, it's a super important side because, you know, when, you know, building a smart contract, like you could be like a smart contract ninja and know all the solidity, you know, tricks, but if you're missing all the financial context, then you can't really, you know, build a useful, you know, smart contract within the application of DeFi. So, you know, there's a whole side of, you know, building the smart contract, which is the whole, you know, financial context. And that's definitely something that's very hard to do as, you know, a lot of, like, a lot of the, you know, exploits or, you know, hacks we've seen, they're not all, you know, smart contract bugs. A lot of them are smart contracts that didn't, you know,

• 27:18Speaker 02

  think of all the economic context that was, you know, going around that smart contract, which is super important to, to keep in mind when, when building. So yeah, that's a side that we're definitely very focused on. Because, yeah, like, you can't just focus strictly on the code itself and not think of all these different moving parts. I think, you know, I've read a lot about, I think Kane or another Synthetix team was talking about how their, you know, process for developing new smart contract changed as, you know, more synthetics pieces got, not swallowed necessarily, but, you know, plugged into other protocols. So that's a whole new side of things that you have to factor in.

• 28:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  Got a question that I want to throw in that is a fairly well upvoted in Discord and on YouTube from Corpy. So, do you guys plan to have a token? And if the answer to that question is yes.

• 28:15David Hoffman?

  Why is the answer yes?

• 28:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, let's assume that, you know, there's some optionality here. If the answer is yes, what would the token be used for, is the question.

• 28:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I mean, that's always a tricky question to answer. Like, we kind of repositioned that whole question into thinking, what do we see, you know, Zapper being long term? And we see Zapper as being this community-owned project. And the way we kind of tackle it is, you know, we don't see Zapper, well, the core team being able to build, you know, all those apps and all the new protocol integrations, like we're seeing DeFi explode. And, you know, it's hard for us to be able to track everything and add things. We also don't want to be in a position where we kind of, you know, decide which protocol to add. Like, we don't want to be some sort of, you know, DeFi referee either.

• 29:07Speaker 02

  So moving forward, you know, we're trying to figure out what the best model is to achieve that long-term vision. And, you know, if a token is the way we go there, then yeah, that's something we'll look into doing for sure.

• 29:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  Let's throw in another reader question here. So this is a question about

• 29:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  your plans to expand beyond ETH to other blockchains. Any thoughts on that?

• 29:37Speaker 03

  Seb, you can answer that. Yeah, yeah, where does that fit into the product roadmap? It's definitely something we, for sure, but, but, uh.

• 29:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  And, you know, maybe also include Layer 2 in that. I suppose that's part of an ETH offshoot, but it is, in a way, it's another kind of blockchain.

• 29:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think like, right now, we're definitely focused on Ethereum. That's where we believe most of the DeFi activity will come from. But we're also like, if we see a lot of activity going on other chains, you know, we definitely want to put aside our own beliefs in DeFi and focus on our users. Like what, like, we basically want to help users participate in decentralized finance. And, you know, if DeFi is going to be a multi-chain thing, then we'll definitely want to support people across chains. So far, we don't see that much, you know.

• 30:33Speaker 02

  Not necessarily traction, but users, you know, asking us to integrate other chains. But that's something we're, you know, always keeping in mind.

• 30:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  Is there, is there anything of those chains, like anything kind of on your radar a little bit? Like maybe in the Cosmos ecosystem or in the Polkadot ecosystem that you're not like, you haven't put to the, to the front, but you're just monitoring and seeing how they, how they emerge? Any interesting projects or ecosystems that you think are out there?

• 31:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, I mean, Polkadot, there's a few side chains that are, a pair of chains, sorry, that are looking to integrate the EVM. So it'd be really interfaceable with Ethereum, which I find super interesting. So when that is actually launched, we could see some, some traction there. Other projects, I mean, we do see traction from Binance Smart Chain. We haven't really researched on it. We don't have, you know, any opinion so far on, on that. But we do see some DeFi projects specifically in Asia tackling that market. So it's definitely worth, worth it for us to, you know, take a look and see, see if there's possibilities there as well.

• 31:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  Can I ask you about like, so it's something I've struggled with. Neither of you guys can answer here. It's like, at what point, at, at what point does a base chain get to the point where we can no longer really call it DeFi? Right? So if Coinbase had an EVM on a Coinbase, like maintained ledger, right? And anyone could develop on it. Maybe you don't require Coinbase's permission. Is that DeFi? Is the Binance chain DeFi if it has hand-selected validators from Binance?

• 32:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  Is Polkadot DeFi if it has governance in the hands of a small set of individuals? It's something that I personally like, struggle with the definition of DeFi, which is why I think David and I have talked about before. We like the term open finance a little bit better because it sort of embraces all of them. And sometimes when we, and I, I like, we go with the meme DeFi, right? DeFi, DeFi, of course, but it's not always decentralized. How, how do you guys think about that?

• 32:59Speaker 03

  I can chime in here. I I recognize that DeFi has become somewhat of a marketing term. But when I, when I try to classify like, what is DeFi? I think about, am I 100% in control of my funds?

• 33:16Speaker 03

  Ideally, there should not be an admin key that can put my funds at risk. But then, what I just said, I've clearly been forgiving with projects that are in the spectrum of moving towards being truly decentralized and getting rid of some of those admin keys.

• 33:36Speaker 03

  Gosh, what else there? I, I think about, of course, there being no middlemen, just the usual stuff, like only interacting with smart contracts. And it's hard to ignore the fact that there's just, all the momentum is on Ethereum right now. But I think we as a team have been, we definitely have a philosophy on the team of trying to be open to new ideas and curious about what's being built on other chains. And I, I think you guys have called them out already. We have, we've definitely been thinking and watching, I guess, like a Polkadot, Cosmos, Binance Smart Chain. I think Binance Smart Chain comes up the most from, you know, we have a lot of Zapper users in China and other parts of Asia.

• 34:21Speaker 03

  So we, we really try to listen to them. We do, every Friday, we do like an open forum and folks can just ask DeFi questions or give us feedback. So that's some of the feedback we've gotten. I, I will say this, the, probably the lowest hanging fruit for us to integrate another chain is Bitcoin. We could show the balance of Bitcoin in, in a Zapper portfolio. Hopefully in the future, we've actually gotten a lot of good feedback from our community saying, yes, I would love to see Bitcoin, just whatever I've got in a wallet. Because frankly, you can't do anything else with Bitcoin. You can just see it in that wallet if it's on the Bitcoin blockchain. So that would be really, I think, interesting. And I, I'm hoping that that's something that

• 35:07Speaker 03

  We can implement sooner versus I think the the more challenging endeavor of of incorporating other smart contract blockchain.

• 35:15David Hoffman?

  And that would be native Bitcoin on the Bitcoin blockchain rather than something like a wrapped BTC?

• 35:22Speaker 03

  That's right. That's that's what we're talking about. I even I don't think that we're looking at this now, but like I've definitely thought before, you know, I mean, maybe in the future for folks that are using like a centralized finance service, you know, something like a BlockFi, if they've got, let's say Bitcoin there, like, maybe that's something we'll do. But like, just, I think like the key takeaway here is there is so much to support right now just in DeFi. It's so overwhelming.

• 35:53David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I guess.

• 35:55Speaker 03

  And I think I have a fresh perspective as someone also who's not a developer. I like, look at what Seb and the team does. The team is composed of seven engineers and then two of us are not engineers. And I mean, it's just overwhelming. I don't know when Seb or the others sleep. It feels like we're just always having to support a new yield farming pool, a new token. So yeah, it's it's a it's definitely exciting times.

• 36:27David Hoffman?

  And Ryan, the way that you presented this question is like, well, is Polkadot DeFi? Is is like Binance Chain DeFi? Well, also, we have like that same question natively on Ethereum, right? Like, are NFTs DeFi? Because like, who makes who makes the legitimacy of an NFT, right? Realty, tokenized real estate on Ethereum, is that DeFi? Like, you can use it as collateral, but the the house is like secured by a company, right? So there's this big spectrum of things that have questions that how do we even answer this question? How do you even ask the question to begin with? And when when the question turns to like, okay, if it's the assumptions that I'm making that if if it's close to DeFi, and the power and because of the power of Ethereum, Ethereum can figure out how to

• 37:10David Hoffman?

  latch on to it, right? Like Ethereum, the way that Anthony Cesano keeps on presenting Ethereum is as this like economic nexus, right? And and Zapper.

• 37:20David Hoffman?

  Is looking at the heart of that nexus and kind of growing out from there. It's like, okay, here's a token that everyone uses. Here's an app that everyone uses. Let's integrate that. And because of the power of Ethereum has the ability to like grow its arms, grow its tentacles into every single other chain via bridges. I think it's reasonable to like assume that at some point in the future, it's going to be able to like, you can query Ethereum to get a Bitcoin balance on the Bitcoin blockchain, right? Uh, and so you can actually go through Ethereum to Binance chain, to the Coinbase roll up, to, you know, insert your bridge here. And you can use Ethereum as that economics hub to reach out to other blockchains and query data and create a zap around other blockchains that integrate with other blockchains

• 38:03David Hoffman?

  as Ethereum becomes able to integrate with other blockchains. Cause what Zapper really needs is data about other chains. And what Ethereum needs is data about other chains. And so if, uh, these teams that are working on building out these bridges do their job correctly, to me, it seems to be that Zapper could just follow in the, the bridges that are built. Uh, I mean, I'm not very technical, but, but Seb, did that resonate with you? Does that sound about right?

• 38:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, it does in a, in a, in a sense that that's kind of like, you know, what kind of, you know, is happening with Zapper where it started from a few, you know, tokens and then, you know, they got wrapped and then they are put in the pool and then that pool is put somewhere else. And, you know, it's just this, you know, it's just spreading.

• 38:46David Hoffman?

  Just growing out from there, right?

• 38:48Speaker 02

  Exactly, exactly.

• 38:49David Hoffman?

  I think you guys are going to be quite busy with layer two as well, when that, that comes up on Ethereum. All right. I want to get to another, uh, YouTube question that goes off a little bit of what you're saying. And, uh, the, the comment is first, I love Zapper, but only a tiny fraction of my assets are visible on there. Wish there was a way to add my own assets and farms. Maybe there is, and I just don't know. So I think that goes to what you were saying earlier, DeFi Dad is like, you guys are just trying to keep up with everything that's going on, right? And add features for all of the, you know, the, the money leggers that are going, that are happening, but there's going to be some that you haven't quite got to yet. And is there any customization ability for users coming down the pike?

• 39:32David Hoffman?

  How do you think about that, um, use case?

• 39:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, we've, we're actually starting to implement some, you know, a process where, you know, users will be able to add their own tokens. As for like farms, it's always a bit tricky because, you know, we don't want to add stuff that could potentially be dangerous or not vetted, like we've seen so many, you know, rug pulls. And, you know, we're always very careful with, you know, the things we add support for on Zapper.

• 40:05David Hoffman?

  Like Seb, like something like sushi when it came out, what, like, did you add it right away or did you not?

• 40:11Speaker 02

  So we added the ability to like viewer balances, but transacting, like, we didn't add it yet.

• 40:21Speaker 02

  So that's kind of like we had, you know, there's two sides. One is just being able to view their balance. So on that side, we're much less, you know, strict on whatever we add. On the transaction side, like, we don't want people, you know, putting money into something that might be, you know, rug pulled in the future. So we're very careful, you know, with, with what we had. Like for yield farming, you know, most of the contracts were all the same, you know, they're reused smart contracts. So a lot of these, you know, farms was, they were safe to add because we knew, you know, those smart contracts and, you know, they were very tested, a lot of money came through them. So, yeah, we, we felt safe to add those.

• 41:05David Hoffman?

  So we got another question from, from Callum from the YouTube. Thanks, Callum, for the question. What are your thoughts on the Infura outage and how did this affect Zapper? Any thoughts on solutions to these kinds of issues?

• 41:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, we did have a bit of downtime because of the Infura outage, but we, right now, we have a strategy where we use, you know, multiple node as a service providers. So the first is, you know, Infura, and then we've been using as a fallback Pocket, which is a decentralized node infrastructure, a protocol. And in the future, we see, you know, much more of that, you know, being brought forward as a solution. Now, the thing is like, these decentralized protocols aren't at the point where it's, say, as fast or reliable as an Infura. Like from Zapper's standpoint, our goal is to have, you know, balances load as fast as possible.

• 42:03Speaker 02

  So that always, you know, factors in the the decision to choose the right infrastructure. So right now, yeah, our strategy is, you know, we have some fallbacks to different nodes. But long term, we do want to align with more of a decentralized, you know, node infrastructure.

• 42:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, so I guess a follow up on that. A lot of, there's been a lot of, I guess, FUD out there about DeFi being centralized on Infura. What's what's your take on that in general? Are there many node providers out there that like, it feels like your team can use? Or is it a legitimate problem?

• 42:45Speaker 02

  I think it used to be much more of a problem, but right now, I think, you know, there's a lot of options out there. You know, there's Infura, there's Alchemy, there's QuickNode. It's also much easier to run your your own node. And there's more decentralized projects, you know, popping and, you know, potentially this, you know, Infura outage will just create more market pressure into creating these decentralized products. So I really don't see it as big of a problem as it used to. It's definitely like, it is, you know, something we have to to look into because, yeah, a lot of, you know, products went down during the Infura outage.

• 43:27Speaker 02

  But yeah, hopefully it does create this this market pressure.

• 43:31David Hoffman?

  So with the, go ahead, Dad.

• 43:34Speaker 03

  Oh, just saying, there's always room for improvement and, you know, I think that was a bit of a scary thing yesterday. I actually fortunately wasn't awake. I like woke up and it had already been resolved, but I, I think that goes back to, what's the term that I, I've heard you guys use it on your podcast, like anti-fragile?

• 43:54David Hoffman?

  Anti-fragility, yeah.

• 43:56Speaker 03

  Anti-fragility, yeah. And so like, anything that doesn't kill us makes us stronger and I, I, um, I do feel like that was yet another thing that is not something to like brush under the rug, but also at the same time, like, we're still here.

• 44:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, and I guess for folks that don't know about it, just real quick, right? So Infura provides a lot of like node services, Ethereum node services to applications, but also wallets, right? And they are a consensus project.

• 44:27David Hoffman?

  And famously an attack vector from Bitcoiners who are like, oh, Ethereum's don't run their own nodes and that's bad, blah, blah, blah, blah.

• 44:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  Right, right. And MetaMask runs on it and they had an outage because they were using a old version of a, an Ethereum client, Geth essentially. How long was that outage? Just a couple of hours? And it sort of sent DeFi into some tumult yesterday. So anyway, that's the TLDR on that.

• 44:53Speaker 03

  And also too, like those criticisms normally come from people who push you to put your crypto on Kraken, block by.

• 45:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, yes.

• 45:06Speaker 03

  Critical of the, of, of all the experimentation and yet, you know, there's just so many folks that are so reliant upon that centralized exchange infrastructure and I, I just, I, I just don't get it. You know, we should all be, we should all be pushing for these new innovations and thank God for the Ethereum community continually pushing the envelope on this.

• 45:29David Hoffman?

  So we have another question. I want to ask questions about Ethereum staking in Phase Zero. But first, I want to get to this question from YouTube is another idea, totally degen perhaps, but would you allow devs to create strategies as zaps? Perhaps you can have a list of zapper, a list which zapper, the zapper's team deems as safe and which ones are like wild. And that kind of makes me think of how like the Dune Analytics boards have like community generated boards that you can go and check out. And that's a great way to just like, put the ball in the community's court and saying like, here, here's a Dune Analytics board that I use. Maybe you kind of find it useful too. Maybe that's something that you guys were thinking about, like here's a zap that I use and maybe you can also use it as well.

• 46:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's such a cool idea and we're aligned with trying to like make it easier for folks to build zaps and then in some way or another, I guess you could like maybe rank them like you were saying, but.

• 46:27David Hoffman?

  And by the way, have you guys ever used that program, if this, then that? It kind of reminds me of that idea, right? Like where you have these modules, you just kind of string together. Go ahead, Seb.

• 46:37Speaker 02

  No, yeah, that's, that's like a great idea and something we're really, you know, looking into, into building is like zaps have a bunch of, you know, different blocks that, you know, are consistent across all our zaps and people could just use, pick and choose from those and, you know, create a new zap. And then essentially the community could create all the, you know, community generated zaps and rank them. There could be like a safety metric where you could see the volume that went through. So yeah, that's, that's definitely something we're looking into.

• 47:14David Hoffman?

  Okay. So with Phase Zero and the beacon chain up and running in the deposit contract here, is there anything coming out of the zapper camp to kind of help facilitate this?

• 47:26Speaker 02

  So so far, there's there aren't any plans or still our our roadmap is filled with new protocol integrations, you know, you know, these low hanging fruits. But I mean, if it's something that's heavily requested by users, we'll definitely, you know, look into it. That's kind of our roadmap basically changes all the time. You know, sometimes I don't even know what I'm going to work on the next week, or even like just tomorrow, right? Something can happen, maybe. Okay, let's add this one. Then. So yeah, we always keep a pulse on, you know, what our our users are asking.

• 48:03Speaker 03

  I think that's a week ago, whenever the deposit contract launched, I think someone on the team was looking into like, how could we potentially in the future show like, let's say you you deposit into that the beacon chain contract, the the the talk was, could we show that and support that? So I think, as Seb was saying, like, we're normally just reacting as quickly as possible. But this seems like a pretty big deal. I mean, I would anticipate the what the first deadline is December 1. And then the other one's the 24th of December. So yeah, if if folks are interested, or just want to like voice their

• 48:46Speaker 03

  support of that, which I'm sure there's like, unending support for this, you can hop into our Discord group. If you just go to zapper. Five, there's a link to go there. Also, too, don't be afraid to I'm going to regret this. Don't be afraid to DM me on Twitter.

• 49:05Speaker 02

  And just to clarify, you can see your stake balances in the the staking contract.

• 49:10Speaker 03

  Nice. What else? I didn't know that either. See?

• 49:15Speaker 02

  Yeah. So there's so many things going on, you know.

• 49:20Speaker 03

  Good job, team.

• 49:22David Hoffman?

  Is there anything about like the ETH 2 roadmap that you guys are thinking about? And like, that's impacting the development of Zapper? Like, how does how does ETH 2 impact what you guys are doing at Zapper?

• 49:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's such a good question. And honestly, I have like, I don't have, you know, any like immediate ideas about how we'll do it. There's so many, you know, there's a lot of, you know, it's very nebulous. And I think a lot of devs. And as we move more towards that, we'll definitely look into how Zapr interfaces with ETH2.

• 49:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  So this is a question from Jag Tapper, who is asking what the long term game plan of roadmap is for Zapr. Says zapping is super convenient, but I'm sure you've got more ideas in mind. I feel like we've been talking about a lot of those ideas. So like, take that question and also reframe it a little bit. We've been talking about Zapr as almost like a Netscape, right, to all of these money Legos. And there was this, this moment in the early internet, people call it the Netscape moment, right, where Netscape came out, and people used it, and they saw, wow, there's this entirely new digital world that's opening before us. And

• 50:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  Netscape was sort of the browser into that. When do you think, like, is DeFi going to ever have its Netscape moment? And if it does, how is Zapr going to be involved? What's it going to require to take DeFi mainstream?

• 50:57Speaker 03

  Hey, guys. By the way, I've got to hop over to Yield TV. I just wanted to quickly say thank you. Seb's gonna keep going here. And Seb's the person you need to talk with more. He's got all the answers. But just thank you so much. This was really fun. And I always appreciate just what you guys are doing at Bankless. It's the Lord's work in DeFi.

• 51:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  Thanks, DeFi, Dad.

• 51:19Speaker 03

  I'll catch you guys.

• 51:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  See you later.

• 51:21David Hoffman?

  Thanks for being here, Dad.

• 51:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, Ryan, that's such an interesting question, because like, it's it's hard to say like if DeFi is going to have a Netscape moment like this, oh my god, like this is this is amazing. Like what we've seen so far is, you know, there's these moments in DeFi where, you know, like the yield farming craze, that was like a huge moment for DeFi where a lot of people came in and, you know, obviously some left, but a lot of them stayed. And, you know, what, you know, will that next big thing for DeFi be? Will it be like this this Netscape type moment? Um, I I talk a lot about DeFi to my friends and see, you know, how how DeFi can like tap into the market, which is, you know, exterior to crypto.

• 52:10Speaker 02

  Because if you just look at DeFi, right, it's still, you know, digging within the crypto market. It's I don't see often people, you know, completely out of context of crypto hopping directly into DeFi.

• 52:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's all crypto native still, right?

• 52:22Speaker 02

  Exactly, exactly. So like, do you refer as that Netscape moment where, you know, it goes outside of the crypto native space?

• 52:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, a bit more. I think that's the idea. That there's this one moment where the world just becomes captured by DeFi and crypto and floods in.

• 52:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, I

• 52:45Speaker 02

  man, that's that's such a good question. Like, I think we still have ways to go to have a non crypto people. Like, I think crypto still needs to be more, um, perhaps like just in the back of people's minds. Um, like, I think the current economic situation has brought a lot of that.

• 53:06Speaker 02

  But like, uh, I kind of lost my train of thought there, but yeah, I mean.

• 53:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's getting to the point, though, with Zapper, that normies can use this stuff, right? So like, are your friends able, your non-crypto friends, are they able to use Zapper? But you're saying like, they just don't have the use cases that would just draw them into it at this point in time? Um, but, or is the UX still a little too difficult?

• 53:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think it's a lot on like the information side, like everyone, you know, can click around the buttons on Zapper, but like if the information makes absolutely no sense of them, you know, they're not gonna go through. There's a lot of like context to bring.

• 53:47Speaker 02

  And, you know, a lot of financial education. Cause you look at a lot of people using DeFi, um, a lot of them have a good background or some sort of background in finance. But as DeFi is making, being easier and easier to use, you know, more of this is being abstracted away. And like, there's kind of, I see it in two ways, like one is, you know, will DeFi just uh, reduce the information, information asymmetry and the uh, asymmetry in opportunity? And, you know, more people would, will use it, or will a lot of DeFi just be completely abstracted away? Uh, kind of, you know, more like a, uh, really easy to use banking app, you know, where you put money and then it earns yield for you, so.

• 54:30Speaker 02

  It's gonna be interesting, you know, what ways it's gonna play in, like at Zapper. Our thesis was, is always like, we're not focusing on the market outside of Zapper, like we see, you know, DeFi as this circle that keeps expanding and all the, where we want to be is at the edges. Cause that's where we, you know, we acquire new users and new customers and we're focused on, you know, that ever-expanding, um, you know, circle and look, looking to add features just at the edges of that circle. And eventually we see that, you know, blowing into, you know, uh, much more, you know, mainstream audience.

• 55:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  Reminds me a lot of our conversation with Andre from, uh, from Wire and Protocol and how he said, like, I don't have a long-term plan. I'm just building the next great feature and that's gonna keep me busy and as long as I'm doing that, we're making progress. So it's, it sounds similar, maybe we're all in that camp.

• 55:23David Hoffman?

  Well, how can you have a long-term plan in DeFi, in crypto, right? Like we, no one saw yield farming coming and there's gonna be something new in two months and no one's gonna see that, that coming either. It just feels like that, that Wallace and Gromit gif where, where, uh, I think Gromit is the, on the train and he's just throwing the tracks in front of him, right? Right as he zooms forward.

• 55:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's definitely a day at the office at Zapper.

• 55:47David Hoffman?

  Well, I mean, being able to be nimble and move quickly is really, really advantageous. And that's definitely what we see coming out of the Zapper camp. Seb, are you guys hiring? How can people help lay the tracks for Zapper?

• 56:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, we're always open to get new people on board that, you know, believe in DeFi and our vision of Zapper of making DeFi easy to use. So yeah, I mean, we always have positions open, whatever the position like we, we kind of have the philosophy where you come into Zapper and you create your own role. And yeah, very open.

• 56:22David Hoffman?

  Very cool. And so last question, just to wrap this up. How can the Bankless Nation help Zapper? Like, what can Zapper do for the Bankless Nation? And what can the Bankless Nation do for Zapper?

• 56:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, happy to get any type of feedback if there's things that Zapper is missing or types of functionalities. Happy to get any feedback. You can, you know, hop in our Discord. We're pretty active there. And, you know, we, we have a really fast development cycle. So happy to build anything that the Bankless Nation requests.

• 56:56David Hoffman?

  All right. Very cool. Seb, thank you for being here and also thanks to DeFi Dad who had to hop off. So yeah, guys, check them out, zapper.fi, load up your wallets, see what it shows you. I always like to tell the story of like, when I loaded up my Zapper wallet, I found like $25 of liquidity in Uniswap that I forgot that I had been supplying. And so I was like, oh, like, nice. I found some, found some money in a pocket that I didn't know I had. So that's always, always a fun time. So Seb, thanks, thanks for being here.

• 57:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, thank you very much. It was great. Thank you, David. Thank you, Ryan.

• 57:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  Appreciate it. Take care.

• 57:29Speaker 02

  All right. Bye, guys.

• 57:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  Bye.