AMA with Evgeny Yurtaev, Co-Founder of Zerion

AMA with Evgeny Yurtaev, Co-Founder of Zerion 🚀 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/ ----- GO BANKLESS WITH THESE SPONSOR TOOLS: ⭐️ AAVE - BORROW OR LEND YOUR ASSETS https://bankless.cc/aave 🚀 GEMINI - MOST TRUSTED EXCHANGE AND ONRAMP https://bankless.cc/go-gemini 💳 MONOLITH - GET THE HOLY GRAIL OF BANKLESS VISA CARDS https://bankless.cc/monolith 📈 KWENTA | DEVIRATIVES TRADING WITH INFINITE LIQUIDITY https://bankless.cc/kwenta ------ AMA with Evgeny Yurtaev, Co-Founder of Zerion Zerion (https://app.zerion.io/) is a central portal to the DeFi universe. The goal of Zerion is to build an easy and accessible interface to engaging and interacting with all the various money legos in the DeFi ecosystem. While your Ethereum address is your bank account, Zerion can be your banking interface and middleware layer! You can download the mobile iOS and Google app on your phone, for mobile browsing, and use Zerion to manage your DeFi portfolio there, as well as desktop. Enjoy this AMA with CEO, Evgeny Yurtaev ------ Don't stop at the video! Subscribe to the Bankless newsletter program http://bankless.substack.com/ Visit the official Bankless website 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.

• 0:05David Hoffman?

  Aave is a borrowing and lending protocol on Ethereum, and just recently released Aave version 2, which has a ton of cool new features that makes using Aave even more powerful. With Aave, you can leverage the full power of DeFi money Legos, yield and composability all in one application. On Aave, there are a ton of assets that you can deposit in order to gain yield, and all of those same assets can also be borrowed from the protocol if you have deposited collateral. Here you can see me getting a 200 USDC loan against my portfolio of a number of different DeFi tokens and ETH. I'll choose a variable interest rate because it's a lower rate than the stable interest rate option, but I could choose the stable interest rate option

• 0:48David Hoffman?

  if I wanted to lock that interest rate in permanently. One of Aave's V2 features is the ability to swap collateral without having to withdraw your assets, trade them on Uniswap and then deposit them back into Aave. Aave does all of this for you, all in one seamless transaction, so you don't have to repay loans in order to change the collateral you have backing them. Check out the power of Aave at Aave.com. That's A-A-V-E dot com. Gemini is the world's most trusted cryptocurrency exchange. I've been a customer of Gemini since I first got back into crypto back in 2017, and it has been my main exchange of choice to make my crypto buys and sells. Gemini is available in all 50 states and over 50 countries worldwide,

• 1:31David Hoffman?

  and on Gemini, there are markets for over 30 various crypto assets, including many of the hot DeFi tokens like Wi-Fi, Aave, Uni, and also they are one of the few exchanges that has liquid DAI markets. Having both the option of logging into the Gemini.com website or instead opening the Gemini mobile app has allowed me to be able to access any and all exchange and on or off-ramp services that I've needed to on a moment's notice. With instant deposits and fast withdrawals, I'm able to make my money do the things I want it to when I want it to. You can buy crypto safely and securely on Gemini with the peace of mind of knowing that your investments are insured.

• 2:10David Hoffman?

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• 2:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right, Bankless Nation, welcome to another community, Ask Me Anything. This is your opportunity to ask questions of DeFi founders and interesting projects. We have Yevgeny on from Zirion. Zirion is an interface to all sorts of DeFi protocols. I probably use this tool on a daily basis. It's a great way to view assets across all of your various DeFi wallets and to actually manage transactions. I'd be kind of lost without this tool. This is your opportunity to ask questions of Yevgeny. So if you have a question, go ahead and comment in YouTube, David or I will get to it and we'll prioritize it.

• 3:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  And if you're in the Bankless Discord as well, you can ask a question that way.

• 3:18David Hoffman?

  And that's mainly for the Periscope people. If you are watching this on Twitter, that's fantastic. But if you want to engage with the YouTube comments and get your comments to Yevgeny, you gotta go to the YouTube.

• 3:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yevgeny, welcome to Bankless. It is great to have you. We are in a crypto bull market, I think, my friend. But you were building this during the bear market, weren't you? What was that like?

• 3:42Speaker 02

  It was actually way more calmer. Thanks so much for having me. It's great to be on the show. And actually, this is my first live AMA, so I'm excited for this.

• 3:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  Fantastic.

• 3:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was during the bear market. I kind of like it because, you know, people are not running around and like screaming about the prices. So it's much easier to build. You just like, you forget about the price for a long time and you can actually focus on building stuff. And this is like the currency of the bear market is like what you ship versus like how much it's worth. But yeah, I don't mind the bull market either, obviously. So it's good to be here.

• 4:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  You know, so since this is your first Ask Me Anything, I think it would be great for the Bankless community to kind of get to know you. So can you tell us a little bit about your crypto journey? How'd you end up here?

• 4:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, sure. So in short, I think crypto has been throughout my life, like the only big thing in my, in my whole life. So apart from, of course, like engineering. And so I started as a software engineer myself, like I was studying and like I did a few internships here and there. Uh, but then like since I discovered crypto, that became my whole thing and like the biggest part of my life in a sense. Um, and specifically, I think Ethereum was the most exciting thing among all of, all of the crypto things. It's simply because when I discovered Bitcoin, it was just, you know, it was great as a concept, uh, but I couldn't see how I can participate apart from just holding it.

• 5:12Speaker 02

  Uh, and that seemed like a very boring thing to do. So, uh, when Ethereum came around, I guess many software engineers felt that. So that you can actually start writing things on top of this machine and that is, you know, groundbreaking concept. So this is how I got into it. Um, my co-founders, they are also fascinated by the concept. So we just got together and, and wanted to do something. We didn't know like yet what's gonna happen, but, uh, we really wanted to be a part of this journey. So it's, it's been since like 2015, I think we've been, um, on this. Um, and yeah, we never, we never stopped since we started.

• 5:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  And so what, uh, wha- what's the idea behind Zerion? Like, um, you know, did, did, did you envision it would become what it is today? Or did, did it start with a different premise? Why did you decide to, to build it? And like, what is it?

• 6:07Speaker 02

  Yeah. So first of all, of course, like any product is a series of iterations. But I think the core ideas and the core concepts that we had in mind when we built this particular product were there and they're still here. Um, um, while we were making changes to it. So essentially when we started, we noticed this fragmentation. Like we knew that it's, it's not there yet in a sense, because like we, we only tried out what D swap and maker and compound, I think by the time. Uh, but we just realized that it's gonna be a way more things on, uh, in, in this DeFi thing. So, uh, people will need tools, uh, to make. Sense of it and looking at the the number of tokens that are appearing on the blockchain.

• 6:48Speaker 02

  It's like in thousands every single day now, probably like it was in thousands of months before. And given number of protocols, you know, just to compare that in twenty nineteen, we integrated about five protocols in the whole year. And then in twenty twenty, we integrated over fifty. Actually, I lost.

• 7:06David Hoffman?

  My god.

• 7:07Speaker 02

  So that is like just to show you the scale of how many new financial instruments are appearing. So I think in the future is similar to how internet was evolving. So you know, in in the beginning, you only had a few websites out there and people knew them all by heart in a sense. But then you have, you know, this explosion of new different things and you need to keep track of them, you need to find them, you need to evaluate them. And that's that's what Zerion helping you to do. So we help you to keep track of your D five portfolio. We help you discover all new assets and we help you execute the trades at the lowest rates possible. So yeah, that's the that's the core premise of Zerion.

• 7:48David Hoffman?

  So Yevgeny, I want to I want to hear from you how you would explain Zerion to somebody who, you know, knows about Bitcoin. Maybe they've heard of Ethereum, maybe not. But they are and they understand that there's this weird crazy thing called crypto. How would you explain Zerion to somebody like this with this sort of understanding? And so I think what I'm asking is like for people that are looking for like legacy mental models to map on to.

• 8:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:13David Hoffman?

  How would they understand Zerion? And then maybe after you're done explaining that to them, how would you explain the the features that Zerion that Zerion has that they would never be able to find in the legacy world, yet they could probably still resonate with?

• 8:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think the the closest to in in the traditional world is, I think many people use this analogy, something like Robinhood. So looking at Zerion, it's an asset management tool, it's an investing app. So you can find any asset, you can click to buy it. And we were actually were inspired in many like UI decisions and UX decisions by Robinhood and other.

• 8:49Speaker 02

  Investment, investment apps. So essentially, I think this is the closest as an analogy as it gets. Um. In terms of like how, what are the features that Zerion has, I think the biggest one is this, you know, it's the whole narrative of Web three. How you have um an address that you plug in and you instantly get all the data. And it comes with this address right away. So you don't have to start it over again. You don't have to deposit money again. So uh this gives you a whole lot of freedom and the people who are complaining about the UX of crypto. They just haven't tried it fully. So you, they haven't really used it much. So once you get to, to use MetaMask on a daily basis, you, you get to, you know, understand how frustrating it is to sign up every time and like

• 9:34Speaker 02

  connect your credit card and connect your, you know, fill out the details of your account and everything. So I think this is the biggest benefit and just us as a company, we, we're taking a lot of advantage of, of that because we can get a bunch of information just from the blockchain and users are getting this amazing user experience right away and all the assets, they're all public on, on chain, all the transactions are still there. So you don't need to build out this uh, your, your relationship with the user and your journey with the user is actually much, much shorter. So you can start quickly and start helping them quickly. Uh, and this gives, and for the users as well, this is beneficial because uh they can, you know, if, if the UX really sucks, they can just switch.

• 10:17Speaker 02

  Um, and I think this keeps us, even though it's like a lot of competition and it's harder to um make money out of that and like be rent seeking, but I think that's a good thing overall and crypto will win because of that.

• 10:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  You know, another analogy I like, uh, Yevgeny is like the early internet type of analogy that, that you, you talked about in the early internet. There were just a few websites to keep track of now, like in crypto, there's DeFi, there's all of these different money protocols to keep track of. Zerion is almost like a, a Netscape Navigator, I feel like, right? So you kind of, all you have to do is completely non-custodial, right? So all you have to do is bring your ETH address, whether that's on a, a hardware wallet or whatever wallet. Wallet you have in MetaMask, whatever you have. And then you just plug it in and then the world of DeFi kind of opens up to you. You get a bird's eye glance of all of the assets inside of your portfolio. You have the ability to interact with these various DeFi protocols and money legos.

• 11:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  Do you, what do you think of that analogy, right? So like Netscape really helped to mainstream the chaos and the navigation of the early internet, right? And so a user interface like Zerion is kind of helping to mainstream this internet of money that is DeFi.

• 11:36Speaker 02

  I really like that analogy. But I still, I would probably say that MetaMask is this Netscape browser as a better analogy at this moment. So for ourselves, of course, we're currently non-custodial. But for the new users, where like we think that at some point we'll roll out the support of the wallet itself. So people will be able to create a wallet on Zerion. And hence they can explore other interfaces outside of Zerion eventually. So I really hope that Zerion turns out to be, you know, Chrome browser rather than Netscape. But I think that's a great analogy. We've been thinking about that for a while. You know, the DApp browser idea did not materialize, which is a bit sad, I would say, but kind of expected. And I think

• 12:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  What do you mean by the DApp browser? What was that?

• 12:25Speaker 02

  So with the DApp browsers, you know how on mobile phones, all the wallets, they were trying to push this DApp browser thing inside their wallet. But like the usage is really low and it's much harder to kind of to trust the websites and everything. That's why actually we, with the Zerion app now, it acts like a DApp, like a native DApp rather than a website inside of that browser, if that makes sense.

• 12:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  It does, yeah. I don't know if people are familiar with the DApp browsers you're talking about, but like I get the picture of like, I remember in 2017, like the state of the art was something like the Coinbase wallet on mobile. And it was fashioned very much after like an App Store type model, right? Very skeuomorphic to like what came before, which was an App Store. So it would have like little tiles that you would, and it wasn't very crypto native. It wasn't very user friendly. You could do a lot with it.

• 13:19Speaker 02

  Right, exactly. And I think later on, Apple also went after these types of browsers. So they pretty much kicked everyone out if you were trying to replicate some sort of App Store functionality within your app. So I think on iOS, it resulted in all of the wallets deleting their app browsers, which essentially means that your crypto is locked and you cannot do much with your crypto if you have a mobile wallet. So yeah, I think that's the like one of the reasons why we wanted to have this wallet connect connection to all the wallets natively on mobile. So you can actually start doing more things with your money, even if they're on your mobile phone.

• 13:59David Hoffman?

  So I want to get into some of these questions that we're getting in from the YouTube. And the first question I I think is a good question to start with is we are curious as to how Zerion monetizes. How do you how do you guys actually fund the business? Do you take transaction fees on actions executed by Zerion?

• 14:18Speaker 02

  That's a that's a good question. We get it quite quite a lot. So at the moment, Zerion does not earn pretty much anything. I would say that. So for full transparency, the only thing that we're currently making is the referral fees by one inch. So whenever we post a trade to one inch, they share some of the revenue that they generate from the transaction. And they share, I think, about twenty seven percent of the positive slippage that they take. So this is not something that we really like wanted and envisioned as a long term business model. But this is just something that happens. And we didn't make too much out of that. The largest, I mean, the only way we're funded is by the VC money at this point.

• 15:03Speaker 02

  So we took money from Placeholder as our lead investor about a year and a half ago. And yeah, we're still running off of that money.

• 15:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  What are the possible models for you into the future? Have you given any thought to that? And of course, the topic, if it hasn't been asked in YouTube, it's about to be asked about like the potential for a token as a consideration in that. What are the possible models? What have you guys battered around? Is the idea of some sort of a token appealing to you or not yet?

• 15:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, so starting with the models that we'll start expanding as soon as like Q1 of this year is actually taking transaction fees, but we want to be, we don't want to be rent seeking, as I said before, because it doesn't make sense. The users would just, you know, leave us if we're trying to be, you know, squeeze the fees into everything. So what we will be doing the fees only on the things where it makes sense when we're actually helping the user. So imagine you're trying to buy like a Y earn strategy that is like takes you, you would need otherwise to make about like three to four transactions in order to keep that. Or you would get a lower rate or you'd need to manually go to some other aggregators

• 16:17Speaker 02

  to find the best rate first to exchange and then only to deposit into the strategy. So stuff like that where we are simplifying the experience and making you your life easier, then I think it's justifiable, justifiable that we take the fee. So this is something that we have in mind for the short term. I think in the longer run, yeah, we can talk about the token. So we're definitely not anti-token. We like the ideas of tokens and we think that pretty much any company in the crypto space is going to have a token at some point or like die in a sense.

• 16:53Speaker 02

  Because like, you know, because this is just a new way of doing equity, I would say. And I think it's inevitable that this is just a better instrument to do equity and it makes perfect sense for us. It's better to reward users using that and it's much more flexible and you can be, you know, as crazy in terms of actual implementation and the model itself.

• 17:22Speaker 02

  We will never do the token just for the sake of the token. So this is like definitely not our plan. Um, and the airdrop, like people are going crazy on Twitter asking about the airdrops.

• 17:33Speaker 02

  We're, we are considering that. So I'll just say that. So keep using Ethereum if you want to be part of the airdrop. But I don't, I'm not making any promises here.

• 17:42David Hoffman?

  Of course, of course.

• 17:43Speaker 02

  Let's say that.

• 17:44David Hoffman?

  So, uh, Yevgeny, a token can do almost anything because that's the power of Ethereum. That's the power of tokens. Yet we've seen tokens be tools to achieve the decentralization of some aspects of a project, right? It's a way to turn governance over from a centralized team to the hands of the token holders, right? What things about the Zerion platform do you think you could hand over control to a set of token holders? Have you guys thought about this?

• 18:11Speaker 02

  Yeah. So this is the biggest challenge, I would say. So we're not a typical DeFi protocol company. So if we're taking Compound or like Maker, this is pretty much all of their business is on chain. So it's much easier to, you know, just decentralize the governance over that stream of money and have it all worked out by the, and controlled by the token. So with our case, most of the value is actually not on, on chain. So we only have pretty much a small portion at this point on chain. And most of the things are happening either on the front end or on like, or the data that is streamed on the, from the backend. So this is the biggest challenge that we see.

• 18:50Speaker 02

  And for, I think there are not many examples at this point when companies like ours were able to introduce a token that was like representing the core portion of the business. And I think we're going to continue to work in that. So I think the easiest way for us is to decentralize governance over the DeFi SDK. So DeFi SDK is becoming a more and more important piece of the Zerion stack. So essentially pretty much any balance that you see on the protocol is fetched through the DeFi SDK. So this, this is what we call read adapters. And yeah, just for the ones who don't know about the DeFi SDK, let me just take a step back here. So the DeFi is the

• 19:32Speaker 02

  SDK is this smart contract layer that we've built uh that allows you to first fetch all the balances for across different DeFi protocols. As well as execute or multiple different actions across different protocols. And whatever is, the only thing that is needed for the DeFi SDK to work with a new protocol is this adapter. Uh, and it can be built by either us and we have, we've built most of the adapters, I would say, um, by this point. But we're starting to get more and more protocols building the adapters themselves. And uh, thank you guys for, for doing that, if, if anyone is listening from the protocol side. So this is really help, helping us because we just, you know, we, uh, we look at the pull request and we click um to push it.

• 20:14Speaker 02

  And now we have this new support for the uh new protocol that we have, we haven't really even researched. So essentially this allows us to mix and match all the different transactions through the same smart contract layer. And we are already routing the one inch trades through the DeFi SDK and we'll add um uni swap trades and sushi trades through that layer too. So that means that pretty much any transaction that is uh involving the trade on Zer and will go through this layer. And it will be as cheap as going through the native smart contracts. So that is like the, the big benefit um and we'll continue to do, to kind of unify the interaction layer through the DeFi SDK.

• 20:56Speaker 02

  Uh, on Zer, which will allow us to essentially see all the transactions that are generated by the Zer in UI. And hence uh, understand how we can distribute the governance over the adapters within the DeFi SDK. And the fees that i- i- if we potentially take them on the DeFi SDK level. So that is uh like the simplest path uh to token that we see at the moment. Um, but we're actually, I think we're just lacking the tools at the moment in terms of the decentralizing control over GitHub for, for instance. So that would be of course ideal, but it's, it's not, we're definitely not there yet. So imagine having a token, token holders controlling what kind of code is running on the backend and this would be amazing.

• 21:39Speaker 02

  Uh, so if we, if we can have like the team that is rewarded by the token holders in a sense. Uh, and like just shares the part of the profit goals to the team that maintains the backend system. That allows you to find the best uh trade. So yeah, all of that is just the distant future that um is a bit hard to envision right now, I think. Uh, but it's uh, it's gonna be there at some point.

• 22:02David Hoffman?

  So you were talking about the DeFi SDK and this might be my naivety about technical level details, but we have a question from the YouTube about whether or not Zerion uses the graph in the protocol. Does what you were talking about about querying data using the DeFi SDK, again, this might be naive, but does that have to do with something similar to the graph and do you guys use the graph in your backend?

• 22:31Speaker 02

  We, so that's a good question, first of all. And we currently do not use the graph and we have, we have built the system, which is pretty much similar to what the graph has, but it's more towards the words, the DeFi use case. So the graph is kind of like the, the one backend trying to fit it all. So they allow you to essentially extract logs from different smart contracts and you can build the backend based on the graph and query the data using the graph. But stuff like cross associating between protocols and building your own things on top of the graph is becoming harder. So it's essentially a lot of customization needed in

• 23:11Speaker 02

  order to create an interface like Zerion. So we have, so we, we actually started the Zerion back in the infrastructure long, long before the graph was published, like public. So that means that, you know, we have built pretty much the same or sometimes even more than the graph has, allowing us to do a lot of stuff that other interfaces cannot do.

• 23:35David Hoffman?

  This, this middleware piece is like absolutely necessary for the kind of stuff that you're doing. Are there other, so you've got the graph, you've got your DeFi SDKs. Are there other kind of middleware layers out there that are, I don't know if competing is the right word, but like, yeah, what's the, what's the, what's the middleware layer look like for somebody who's trying to build something on DeFi right now?

• 24:00Speaker 02

  There are actually not many. So DeFi SDK is the smart contract solution to that. But DeFi SDK is not, does not fully solve the problem because it only allows you to fetch, let's say, balances on, you know, stake balances or deposits in multiple protocols. But there are a lot of things like, you know, asset prices or historical portfolio performance. So stuff like that, matching that with pricing is, is more complicated. I think in a way, Dune Analytics is similar. So they allow you to query a bunch of data and like use SQL to extract whatever data you, you want. But it's definitely not real time, as you probably know.

• 24:41Speaker 02

  So I think at the moment, there are not many alternatives to what we have as an API. Probably, I think the closest one, Alchemy has some form of an API for like querying balances, but it's definitely not as DeFi focused as what we have.

• 24:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  I want some people who maybe are less technical, maybe zoned out a little bit when we were talking about APIs and SDKs, that sort of thing. I, I, I want you guys to realize how important what like SDKs and these APIs actually are. Because this is the type of stuff that got built out during the last two years of the bull market that essentially needed to be built out, bear, bear market, excuse me, that needed to be built out in order to enable something like Zerion today. And now it's built and other apps can essentially use that same scaffolding. Like we have some of the highways in place that we didn't have back in 2017, 2018. So it's got to make building a lot faster this cycle.

• 25:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  And I think like, well, I, I'd actually like your thoughts on that. So Andre from YFI recently put out a post saying like, some, I forget the title is like, building DeFi sucks, right? Part two or something.

• 25:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  What, what's your experience building in DeFi? Does it suck?

• 26:02Speaker 02

  I would say no. I think, I think the biggest reason is that we don't have a token.

• 26:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, okay.

• 26:10Speaker 02

  And he, he, in his post, he is complaining quite a lot about the token, specifically of how token came into his life and pretty much made a big mess there. And this is like a one worry that we have about the token, of course, is that this does slow down the process. So, and, and when, when you're the sole decision maker in, in the whole thing, it's allowing, it's allowing you to move much faster. And that's why, like, you know, building does not suck. Because you're only making whatever you like, in a sense. But over a long time, of course, it's better to have multiple people who are responsible for the decision and involved in decision making. So I think it's, it's kind of natural that he's saying that.

• 26:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, our experience, I think fundraising in my, in my experience sucks, but everything about building is great.

• 27:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, Jenny, I was curious how Zerion measures its growth and its success, right? So you might look at a DeFi protocol like Uniswap and measure it by trading volume, right? That's something Aiden Adams puts out quite frequently. You might look at something like, like Maker and Compound and measure total locked value, assets under management, that sort of thing. For Zerion, is it number of users? Is it number of wallets, like a wallet being like, almost like a DeFi bank account? Is it assets inside of the platform? How do you measure growth and success? And how, what has the trajectory been like?

• 27:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, so we actually use multiple different metrics and KPIs that we find important. I think the, the one that is the easiest to track is the number of users. And that we measure by how many people connected their wallets. So we, we identify the user as someone who connected at least one wallet to the Zerion UI. And that, the trajectory of that metric is

• 28:03Speaker 02

  Almost parabolic, I would say. Obviously, like over the summer, we had a bunch of new people coming into the DeFi with the yield farming craze and they needed tools to watch their portfolios. Now, it is another bull market and it's more the crypto side, less of on the DeFi side, but at the same time, people are now discovering all these new different assets, so they're, you know, sharing zero and links to different assets, just like they would use, you know, CoinGecko or CoinMarketCap. But this time, they can start buying them right away from the same experience. So you see the price performance and you can buy it right away. So I think this is helping us quite a bit in terms of funneling the traffic into the product.

• 28:41Speaker 02

  And, yeah, in, like, in December, we had over fifty-three thousand people using us across three platforms. So we find that, and this is probably like a very underestimation in terms of the number, because a lot of people use ad blockers and stuff. So we don't know the actual number, and it's by looking at the, comparing the on-chain volume with actual analytics that we have, we see that discrepancies up to fifty percent. So it might be that, you know, it's, the number is much, much bigger than that. But overall, yeah, we're pretty happy with this growth in terms of the users and we're hopeful that in the next year, it's going to, you know, continue to be the case.

• 29:23Speaker 02

  But other metrics that are more interesting in, in our view is the market share that we started to measure recently. And we do that by looking at the on-chain data. So we, so with each protocol, all the data is public, which is great. So you can start looking at how many users interacted with a particular protocol and how many of these users were using zero in a given month. So say, we, we identify users, and by users, I mean wallets in this case, so wallets that interacted, say, with four different protocols in a given month. And among these users, we have over forty percent. So we, we call them, you know, power DeFi users.

• 30:03Speaker 02

  And these are, like, among power DeFi users, about forty percent use zero in every month. So that is like one metric that we look at. Also look at, we call them active DeFi users uh who use at least two protocols and among these we have over twenty something. I don't remember the exact number um yeah percent. So that is what we look at. And of course, the transaction volume is kind of the recent thing we started looking at since the release of the trading, the full trading experience um in the late September. Um but yeah, tha- that's the three things that we're keeping our our eyes on.

• 30:44David Hoffman?

  So, Yevgeny, um we have, we have crypto banks like Coinbase where like, that's kind of where people get started when they are trying to like get into the world of crypto. And they want to keep that familiarity. It's like, oh yeah, I know how to operate Coinbase. It kind of works like my Wells Fargo. And I think that's using crypto in like the two D sense, right? Like the relatively unimaginative sense. And I think like Zerion is like a new sort of like crypto bank account, crypto bank in the three D sense, in the sense that like you actually have the ability to load up your bank account into like the Zerion portal, right? Into the Zerion interface. But in that same model, like, you know, crypto banks and actual, you know, normal bank banks and also like legacy brokers.

• 31:27David Hoffman?

  They have leverage when they have more people using their product, right? If they have more capital flowing through Wells Fargo, uh flowing through TradingView, uh flowing through like whatever, uh Charles Schwab, they have more leverage, they can get better like market prices. What, does that model exist as well with Zerion? When more people use Zerion, are you guys able to like advocate for your users for better rates? Or like, what, what are you able to do uh in a more advantageous fashion when more people use Zerion?

• 31:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think this model is pretty much the same. So uh I I'm hopeful that in in DeFi, we're gonna have something more smart um in terms of the business models, but I think the exact concept applies. So looking at. Uh one inch, for instance, they are already doing that. So whenever you get a quote, you sometimes get a quote from private market maker, uh as they call it. So essentially, that is something that only they were able to to get for their users, because these private marketers are um providing these quotes only for one inch users, and especially for like bigger chunks and bigger bigger trades. And the similar thing happens with with Zerion. So as we get more and more um trading volume, we would be able to secure the deals with market makers uh in this space and provide better quotes.

• 32:42Speaker 02

  And um yeah, and I think this is like the most straightforward um path to to getting like more value out of um more usage. Uh but at the same time, I think as we as we enter the era of L twos, we're gonna have even more trading volume and uh L twos are in a sense more separated than than the shared liquidity in the L two of Ethereum. So then I think that will be even more uh of of a thing. So being able, actually having all these users on your platform and trading will have a direct impact on what kind of uh quotes and trades they are getting uh on the specific layer two solutions. So that is a bit unfortunate uh that we cannot really share all the all the liquidity.

• 33:27Speaker 02

  Uh but I think um overall, we'll we'll figure something out and something probably more interesting than just commissions and fees will arise as the business model.

• 33:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, um we are going to be back for this Bankless Community AMA in just a minute. But first, we want to tell you about our fantastic sponsors who made this possible.

• 33:48David Hoffman?

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• 34:31David Hoffman?

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• 35:07David Hoffman?

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• 35:48David Hoffman?

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• 36:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  Guys, we are back with this community AMA. We have Jeff Jenny from Xerion and we are talking all about the Xerion platform and what it can do. So just before our sponsor break, you were talking a little bit about Layer 2. And I think that's top of mind for Bankless users right now and DeFi users in general, because gas fees are too damn high right now. It's very hard to get our transactions out and it's expensive to do so. But Ethereum is developing this whole Layer 2 world that you alluded to. Can you paint a picture of what that world might look like?

• 36:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  And how Xerion might be involved as sort of an aggregator across these Layer 2 chains?

• 37:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, for sure. And speaking of the gas prices, by the way, I think that really helps the Ethereum price go up, because when are people trying to sell? It's too much gas.

• 37:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 37:17Speaker 02

  Not selling.

• 37:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  Exactly.

• 37:19Speaker 02

  So we gotta keep that for a while. So with L2, yeah, I'm being serious here. So with L2, I think this is the first I want to describe the experience and how that might. I think the good analogy is iMessage. I don't know if you've tried that, but essentially whenever you make, you send SMS, you get this green bubble and it takes a pretty long time to deliver. While with iMessage, you instantly click and it sends right away. So I think that is going to be, that's how it's going to feel with L2 and all the transactions. Because all of the people in the crypto space, they kind of got, get used to the fact

• 37:59Speaker 02

  that your transaction is, you know, taking 15 seconds or so to mine, sometimes a bit more. And yeah, this is, this is fine, but sometimes gets frustrated when you're trying to actually execute on a really important trade. So over a long time, I think most of the trading volume, pretty much all of it, will be concentrated on the L2 solutions. And at the moment, there are probably over six different L2, different approaches that exist in the Ethereum space.

• 38:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  And yeah. Yeah, so that's the part we're worried about, right? So I think we see the promised land of an L2 where transactions are fast and cheap, but we're worried about it breaking composability, breaking all the money legos that we developed on the main chain.

• 38:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, so as I was saying, so essentially, we've been just speaking with quite a few teams, and I think the general consensus among them that over a long time, it's going to be possible that all these L2 solutions will be interoperable, or at least some of the most important ones will be interoperable, and will have the same bright future for the DeFi space. So you don't have to, and in a way, they're all going to be interoperable by the fact that you can withdraw from the layer two and deposit into some other layer two. So this is like one step, but it will probably be, you know, slow and not so efficient. And I think over time, with potentially the help of aggregators like Zerion, you'll be able to instantly move from one layer two to the other

• 39:29Speaker 02

  without actually the need to move back to the layer one. So I think this is the place where aggregators will play a good, like a big role. And same goes to existing trading experience on layer one, just like one inch is better than just going on a single dex.

• 39:47David Hoffman?

  So you imagine a world where just as Zerion has aggregated all of these different DeFi protocols on Ethereum, you're also aggregating all of these layer twos.

• 39:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, so we're only starting on this journey. So you probably have heard that layer two are only spinning up and like there are a few announcements planned for this year. And we're going to see, I think that this year is going to be the year of L2s. And we're, the first thing that we're going to start with is just supporting the balance across these different where two solutions and among the most popular ones. And then as this ecosystem develops, we'll start adding actual trading functionality to the, to allow Zerion users to exploit, like you take advantage of the lower fees on the L2 solutions.

• 40:32David Hoffman?

  Well, I was told that this is going to be the year of lightning. So that's going to be an interesting take to see what happens. All right, so again, we have a number of quick questions I want to burn through out of the, out of the YouTube channel. First is, I would like to ask about the graphing system that you have on the site. Are there plans to integrate charting tools like TradingView?

• 40:53Speaker 02

  Oh, uh, we actually, I don't think we have considered that really, um, we, we did think about it for a bit, but we really didn't think, think of this serious. I think the be- the best way to proceed with that is to publish that on roadmap dot zero dot I O and try to get the supporters to upload that. So, um, if, if you do, we're happy to integrate that as well. So we just so far haven't seen too much of a demand for this, but I don't think it is something unfeasible.

• 41:21David Hoffman?

  Okay. And then we have two questions about integrations. When will Pool Together be integrated into the Zerion UI? And then also somebody's asking about Celsius, Celsius Network staked assets also viewable through the Zerion dashboard.

• 41:37Speaker 02

  So on the Pool Together, we do track balances as far as I understand. We don't support the actual, uh, like the lottery functionality, uh, but honestly, like, uh, I think the answer is the same. So i- if you want to get something integrated, it's either if you are a solidity developer yourself, you can build an adapter for that and, uh, that, that is the, the easiest path for us to integrate. Otherwise, um, we just didn't see too much of a demand and Pool Together UI is great for their use case and it's less of a, you know, financial one, I would say.

• 42:11David Hoffman?

  Okay. So that kind of leads into this question. How do you guys decide which protocols to integrate and with so many new ones being built?

• 42:20Speaker 02

  Yeah. So we, we are looking at quite a lot on the, as I said, the roadmap that you're, your people are super helpful. The Zerion community is very active and our users are constantly just telling us what protocols we should be focusing and paying attention to. Uh, so this is, I think, the, the most straightforward way we do that. Otherwise, we of course do our own research. So whenever we see something cool happening and whenever we feel like this is something we should worth supporting within the UI as fast as possible, we try to get it done quickly. Um, yeah, uh, and so far there is no, I, I think we're trying to get as many things as possible. So it's not that we're being discriminative in any form.

• 43:03Speaker 02

  Uh, it's, uh, yeah, but at some point I hope, uh, that most of the things will go through the DeFi SDK route to show people and protocols. They will integrate things themselves, uh, and we wouldn't even need to worry about that. Um, yeah.

• 43:18David Hoffman?

  So one question I have that, and this is, seems to be a pretty big problem in the, in the, in the space as a whole is because there's, there seems to be one, a difficulty finding a single source of truth, especially with regards to crypto prices, right? So if I load up my wallet into Zerion, and then if I load up my wallet into Zapper, and then if I also look at my wallet on EtherScan, or any other like platform, it'll tell, it'll give me some sort of like, you know, 1 to 2% discrepancy on the price of these things. And so I would imagine that like, accounting and getting prices accurate is a really difficult task. Can you talk about like, the difficulty behind, behind that, achieving that goal and, and what you guys are working on to refine that?

• 44:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, for sure. And this is actually the, the biggest problem that we're trying to solve. So, and being, presenting the accurate portfolio is, it seems like an easy task, because all the data is on the blockchain, right? But in fact, it's not. I think that the biggest challenge is the pricing, as you said. So you can fetch pricing from multiple sources. There is, I think, one reliable source that we, we think is great is CoinGecko. We use it for many different assets, but even CoinGecko sometimes does not track the prices of weird things, and that live on the blockchain. So for that, you have to use Uniswap sometimes, or sometimes these assets are not on Uniswap, so you have to use some other source. So essentially, this is the biggest issue,

• 44:48Speaker 02

  and building something that would be able to keep track of all different price sources, and aggregate across them, and probably take volume into account. So that is, that is a challenge, and there's not, not many companies are, were successful, have successfully built something in, in this area. And second is just, understanding what kind of assets the wallet has. So because, because of the nature of blockchain, you cannot tell that a specific token belongs to a certain address. You need to first find this asset on the blockchain somewhere. And on the blockchain, there are so many different assets in

• 45:28Speaker 02

  They appear every day and we as an infrastructure, we we use Uniswap as our source of finding new different tokens. So as soon as the someone pool puts a Uniswap pool, we decide that this asset isn't like a particular token that is worth tracking. So that's how we solve this issue and I think this is the biggest issue, the biggest discrepancy, where the biggest discrepancy comes from between us and Zapper. Because Zapper manually whitelists all the different tokens and we try to find them automatically on the blockchain as soon as they appear on Uniswap. But this system is of course not complete and we will need to track more sources and more contracts.

• 46:09Speaker 02

  And ideally, we need to look into every smart contract that is deployed, understand that this is a token and then start fetching the price. So that is like the two biggest issues, I think, in finding the balance.

• 46:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  I will tell you, you guys have done a very good job. A hidden use case I discovered for Zerion this year was figuring out how to, figuring out what I actually did in my DeFi transactions, right? In order to like calculate taxes, right? Like, try to figure that out on EtherScan. Very difficult to understand what you actually did in a year if you're an active DeFi user. But Zerion has this great sort of history where it kind of categorizes all of your transactions. You can look through and actually figure out what you did and even like click a button and export that to your tax software.

• 47:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  So it's it's stuff like that that just makes DeFi, using DeFi, much more user friendly. It's like indispensable. I don't I don't know if you envisioned that as a use case, but it's something that I kind of just discovered this year through using Zerion.

• 47:17Speaker 02

  We actually, when we were designing the history page, we didn't think that it's going to have this much success as it has now. This is like, I think, a feature that most of the people mentioned when talking.

• 47:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, so speaking of the history page, calculating taxes was was one thing that, you know, the token tax suggested we do, and we did it in a very, you know, but it turned out to be a big and useful feature. Can you hear me? By the way, I think my connection is on.

• 47:54David Hoffman?

  Yeah, we can hear you. It's not it's not perfect. Your video is paused, but so far the audio is good enough.

• 48:01David Hoffman?

  So I'll have a follow up question to that, Zerion, or excuse me.

• 48:07David Hoffman?

  Are we are we are we still stumbling? I think we're I think we're coming back slowly but surely.

• 48:14David Hoffman?

  I'm gonna take a pause here.

• 48:15Speaker 02

  I can I can hear you.

• 48:17David Hoffman?

  There we go. Okay, cool. So what other than getting accurate pricing data, what is what are the other hard problems that you guys are trying to solve? Like, what else is like the, you know, the big obstacle that you guys are trying to overcome?

• 48:32Speaker 02

  There are some, I would say, like, challenges that are similar to the, I think, the early internet that are only starting to kind of present themselves at the moment. And this is like, we only had, let's say, 300 wallets and addresses using DeFi stuff by by this moment, probably a bit more, maybe like 500,000. But this is a very small number, and the number of assets that we currently have, it's still kind of small. So it's like, probably in tens of thousands of assets. But as we as we grow, we have this problem of, you know, in DeFi, there are going to be way more assets than in the traditional finance. So on whatever you can find on NASDAQ is very limited. It's like, maybe in thousands of different

• 49:16Speaker 02

  real stocks that you find and trade on NASDAQ. But with DeFi, you're going to have, you know, millions and millions of them. And you will have, you know, millions and millions of users, obviously, and probably billions at some point. So just being able to match and like map these these things together and finding, as I said before, finding these new assets, understanding what their prices are. So this is this is a big, hard challenge. Pretty algorithmical, I would say. And yeah, we would probably need a lot of servers to do that.

• 49:47David Hoffman?

  And have you have you even scratched the surface on the NFT assets, or is this all even just tokens you're talking about?

• 49:53Speaker 02

  I'm only talking about ERC 20s and this is like one of the standards, right? We're going to see more of different types of tokens and NFT is another one, another big class that we haven't touched on yet in, I mean, within the Zerion experience, but this is something that we'll have, we'll get it, we'll get to it. Because this is part of your portfolio and many things are worth quite a lot of money. As we've seen recently, so.

• 50:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  Speaking of.

• 50:21Speaker 02

  Art is great.

• 50:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  Speaking of being worth a lot of money, this is a question that's been asked on YouTube a couple of times now, so we got to get to it before the end. I love Zerion. Can Zerion add Bitcoin values? Are you going to have this asset that is going up Bitcoin on Zerion soon?

• 50:38Speaker 02

  Do you mean like tracking Bitcoin wallets?

• 50:41David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I think Bitcoin, native Bitcoin wallets. Yeah.

• 50:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  I think native Bitcoin wallets rather than WBTC or an ERC 20 version of Bitcoin. That's the question.

• 50:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, this is something that Zapr did not so long ago. So we don't have plans yet at like at this moment, we don't have clear path to implementing Bitcoin right away. But I think that is going to be the part of the Zerion experience. Once we have the wallet integrated into like the Zerion wallet integrated in our apps. So as soon as you create a wallet on Zerion, this is something that we were working on. You'll be able to create a Bitcoin wallet as well and track the balance of it in the same UI. So that is something that we have in mind.

• 51:25David Hoffman?

  So Yevgeny, when you're not focused on Zerion and you're tinkering around in DeFi, what are some of your favorite things to do? Like what other projects are you interested in and pay, what other things do you pay attention to?

• 51:37Speaker 02

  That's a good one. I thought you were going to ask me about my hobbies outside of.

• 51:41David Hoffman?

  No, we don't. You have hobbies outside of crypto?

• 51:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, we just want to make that assumption.

• 51:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, sure. Let's talk about DeFi. Keep it simple. So with DeFi, I think. The stuff I like, I think lately is the rebasing tokens. I think this is amazing. It's like this is one of the concepts that was not possible with legacy finance, just like flash loans was like the first one. So now I kind of excited about the rebasing ones, especially the ones that are not just ample force, like the ones that track a particular price, like one dollar and have a target fixed a target price. But the ones like, what is the base protocol, I think it's called, where it tracks the cryptocurrency market capitalization over time using rebasing mechanisms. I think this is, this is something, there's something about it and something cool about it.

• 52:35Speaker 02

  And probably we're only like, very early in this process, but we'll probably see some more cool applications of that in the future.

• 52:44David Hoffman?

  So I would imagine that that would be an extremely difficult thing to get tracked inside of Zerion. Was that a challenge to get that done?

• 52:51Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 52:53Speaker 02

  Quite a few bugs related to that because, you know, these rebalancing tokens, they are not like this, they're not tracked in the same way. So we were giving users crazy like gazillion dollar value.

• 53:07Speaker 02

  All the Twitter went crazy about it, but yeah, it's only been there for an hour. Sorry, guys, who made you feel super rich for only an hour?

• 53:16David Hoffman?

  Evgeny, it's been fantastic having you on the Bankless AMA. For all the listeners out there, I want to remind you to like and subscribe. If you like this video, Yevgeny's face will get posted all over YouTube more. So do that and also subscribe to the channel for future AMAs. Ryan, do you have any last questions for Yevgeny here?

• 53:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  No, I think we're all set. Yevgeny, thank you for building Zerion. It's an app that I use on the daily and you've made the lives of many Bankless listeners easier because we have that tool. So thank you. Appreciate your work.

• 53:50Speaker 02

  Thank you, guys, and thanks for building this amazing community. I think that cannot go, like we cannot build anything without the people who are using it.

• 53:59David Hoffman?

  Absolutely. And if you guys have not yet tried out Zerion, you can go to xerion.io and plug in your wallet. It also has a mobile app as well, which is really useful. Not going to show it, but it's on my phone. And it's also got a nice little widget, so you can put the widget into your home base. So you don't have to actually like actually open up the app. It's just right there in front of you and you can tell, it'll tell you how much money you made or lost in the last day. It's a really addictive thing to look at your phone for.

• 54:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  Absolutely.

• 54:28David Hoffman?

  Alright guys.

• 54:29Speaker 02

  The only thing how to use it now.

• 54:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  Absolutely. It's more fun to look at this during a bull market. So download Zerion during the bull market.

• 54:36David Hoffman?

  Yeah, delete it in bear market.

• 54:39David Hoffman?

  Don't delete it.

• 54:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  Alright guys. Thanks a lot.