25 - YFI: Farming the Farmers | Andre Cronje

Episode: #25 August 10, 2020 ----- Tools from our sponsors to go bankless: Loopring https://bankless.cc/loopring-VIP - trade & pay on Ethereum w/ near-0 gas fees! (use "Bankless" for VIP4 status & trades at 6bps!) Monolith https://bankless.cc/3e2TG4E - holy grail of bankless Visa cards Aave https://bankless.cc/aave - money lego for lending & borrowing Rocket Dollar https://bankless.cc/2C57MVW - tax shelter your crypto ($50 w/ "BANKLESS https://bankless.cc/2C57MVW") (Read this on IRAs https://bankless.substack.com/p/tax-shelter-your-crypto-in-an-ira and 401ks) https://bankless.substack.com/p/how-to-setup-a-crypto-401k-for-your ---- Andre Cronje calls himself just another DeFi dev, but you can't help but wonder, is he's underselling himself with that title? In a few short months he single-handedly created a fleet of DeFi yield farming money robots that locked up over $400m in assets in his yearn protocol. He launched a YFI token that grew in value by over 1,000% in its first week, one of the most explosive price charts crypto has ever seen. No pre-mine, no VC, no founders reward. Maybe a better title is King of the Yield Farmers. DeFi's Satoshi. Who is this guy? What did he build and why is it brilliant? Why did YFI go from $3 on July 17th to $5000 on August 8th? This is everything you need to know about yearn, YFI, and Andre. We cover: How Andre's really feeling What's up with "I test in prod" Why high YFI price can be bad How Yearn automates yield farming Andre's money robots Incenting strategy writers Risks of yearn Launching YFI to scale Why people buy YFI Organic governance Is Andre The Joker? What's coming next Join us next Monday for a fresh episode! ----- Resources discussed: yearn protocol https://yearn.finance/ yearn governance https://gov.yearn.finance/ yfi price chart https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/yearn-finance Acronym helper: LP = liquidity provider yearn (or "Y-earn") = Andre's protocol cUSD, cDAI = stablecoins in Compound TLV = total locked valued in a DeFi protocol https://defipulse.com/ Look up other assets on DeFiMarketCap https://defimarketcap.io/ ----- Episode Actions: Try yearn protocol https://yearn.finance/ - "tested in prod" you could lose it all Get involved in yearn governance https://gov.yearn.finance/ Listen to SOTN#7 - YFI Token Magic w/ Daryl Lau http://podcast.banklesshq.com/sotn7-explosive-special-guest-daryl-lau-yfi-token-magic-eth-pumped-defi-risk Also...subscribe to Bankless YouTube https://www.youtube.com/c/bankless to watch State of the Nation https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLmkdAgtxf3ahHup7h1dxjs0SNwCSGdjVb every Tuesday. ----- Subscribe to podcast on iTunes https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/bankless/id1499409058 | Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/41TNnXSv5ExcQSzEGLlGhy | YouTube https://www.youtube.com/c/bankless | RSS Feed http://podcast.banklesshq.com/ Leave a review on iTunes https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/bankless/id1499409058 Share the episode with someone you know! ----- Don't stop at the podcast! Subscribe to the Bankless newsletter program http://bankless.substack.com/ Watch Bankless shows and tutorials on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/c/bankless Visit official Bankless website http://banklesshq.com/ for resources 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 podcast is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. Do your own research.

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

• 0:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  Welcome to Bankless, where we explore the frontier of internet money and internet finance. This is how to get started, how to get better, and how to front-run the opportunity. This is Ryan Sean Adams. I'm here with David Hoffman, and we are here to help you become more bankless. David, how are you doing today?

• 0:30David Hoffman?

  Just fantastic, Ryan. Came out of an interview with Andre Cronje, the creator of the Y-Earn protocol and the Wi-Fi token. Some people may know this token as the YFI token, the Yiffy token, the Wi-Fi token. Apparently, according to Andre, it's the Wi-Fi token. And this protocol, Y-Earn, just kind of came out of nowhere and exploded into the DeFi ecosystem and got everyone really, really excited, specifically with about how the token came to be, how the protocol came to be, and also the fact that the creator, Andre, allows the token to govern his life. And so that is how Andre came to be on the Bankless podcast.

• 1:12David Hoffman?

  We submitted a proposal to the Y-Earn Governance page that asked for opinions as to whether or not Andre should come on the Bankless podcast. Of course, it passed with flying colors at 95%. And so here we are, recording with Andre Cronje, creator of the Y-Earn protocol.

• 1:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  So he was compelled to come on the podcast. In his words, he had no choice. And you know, as we were interviewing Andre, I was kind of thinking like, what should the episode title name be for this? In fact, like, what is Andre? He, you know, he calls himself just an ordinary DeFi dev, but he's almost like this king of yield farmers, because he's raised both this group of money robots to do yield farming out of all the DeFi opportunities that are out there. And he's also created a cohort, a group of other yield farmers that are writing strategies for this Y-Earn protocol thing. It's incredibly fascinating.

• 2:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  The the group that he's built and the capability that he's built out. This is probably one of the most effective yield farming technologies and yield farming strategies that's out there.

• 2:23David Hoffman?

  While interviewing Andre, I'm reminded of that that old comic. I can't remember who who made it, but it was an engineer that, you know, made made us wrote a script, worked his ass off for 36 hours to write a script so that he could automate his job for the rest of his life. And so he goes into work and just like scroll through Reddit and doesn't do his job because he made a script that did his job for him. And to to make that metaphor concrete, that job is yield farming and the script is the urine protocol. And and so we kind of go into Andre as to like what he was doing that, you know, spun up the wire and protocol. Like first, first, he was using using these various protocols to earn interest on his stable coins. And then he had to update it to add a new protocol and then liquidity mining came out.

• 3:08David Hoffman?

  And so all of these technologies stacked on on top of each other. And so he finally came out with the urine protocol, which is this thing that automates everything together all at once, so that he doesn't have to do any more work. Unfortunately, he's super busy and that's kind of what we we got into the episode a little bit because this turns out this is this turned into an absolute cannonball of a protocol into the DeFi ecosystem. And so we kind of we go through the protocol step by step with Andre to get him to explain it to us. So we can understand it so we can pass that knowledge on to the Bankless Nation.

• 3:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  Absolutely. The one thing I was left with with this interview is that Andre really cares a lot about DeFi and he really cares deeply about DeFi users, particularly people like him, the liquidity providers, as he calls them. And I think in this in this conversation, you're going to hear a lot of acronyms thrown around. Things like LPs, Andre says often, that means liquidity providers. Flash loans, for instance, you know, that's a split second sort of loan that happens in a block within the protocol. You're going to hear all sorts of different asset names. So we get pretty deep into DeFi.

• 4:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  Geek Talk in this episode. I think if you have hung with us for the previous 24 episodes, you should be able to to keep up. But we do try to take some pauses and explain things throughout the interview and summarize things. So I think listeners will be able to to keep up with things, but we will include a few other resources in the show notes with definitions and prior episodes that you can listen to.

• 4:46David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I've gone through a number of different attempts to fully comprehend Yiffy and Urn. And it's just, it's so, it really stretches my capacity to be able to understand these things. As a listener, if you are listening to this and you don't really get it the first time around, like, don't blame yourself. This this shit is complicated. And and what Andre has built is one of the most integrated and composable applications, which makes it really requires a ton of prerequisite knowledge. And so this is, this is like DeFi 401 level content that that we go through. And so even I had a hard time keeping up. So don't don't stress about that.

• 5:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, totally. And you know, you just did there, you called it Yiffy, David, instead of wifey.

• 5:30David Hoffman?

  Hang me up.

• 5:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  See, there you go. So Yiffy, wifey, same product, same token name for the Y Urn protocol. But that's the kind of thing, these these terms you'll hear throughout this episode. It is a fantastic episode for you advanced folks, and I do think beginners will be able to to keep up as well. We should get right into it. But first, let's talk about our sponsors. The first sponsor I want to tell you about is AVE. AVE is a DeFi protocol that you absolutely have to check out. What can you do with it? You can lend, you can borrow, banklessly, all on Ethereum. So you could do things like lend DAI to the protocol. It will magically transform that DAI

• 6:12Ryan Sean Adams?

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• 7:02David Hoffman?

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• 7:47David Hoffman?

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• 8:29David Hoffman?

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• 8:40Ryan Sean Adams?

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• 9:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  Bankless Nation, we are incredibly excited about our next guest. This is a first. I think first in crypto history, first in podcast history, maybe. We have a guest who is on the Bankless Podcast by way of token vote. And we're going to explain what that means in just a moment. Want to introduce you to Andre Cronier. You may know him from the Why Earn Protocol or the Wifey Token, which has been going crazy for the last month or so. But he'd introduce himself as just another DeFi dev. Andre, how are you doing today, sir?

• 10:01Speaker 02

  You want an honest answer or you want a polite answer? Should we continue this call?

• 10:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  You know what? Let's do the honest answer because that's how we roll on the Bankless Podcast. Honest answers only.

• 10:11Speaker 02

  Oh yeah, honest answers only. Well, then I'm kind of shit. Like I haven't really slept in a few days and I um, I, I, there's, everything's just a blur at this point. There's just so much going on.

• 10:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, I don't know. I'll, I'll probably be close to tapping out in a, in a few days and then I'll take it from there again.

• 10:31David Hoffman?

  Is this all because of stuff that's going on with the urine protocol?

• 10:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, there's just too much happening and like it's it's it's gotten too much traction to the point where where I I don't have the support infrastructure to keep up with it. So so it's murdering me like there's there there is such a thing as too big, too fast.

• 10:52David Hoffman?

  Okay, tell it. Tell us a little bit more about that, like what what grew too big, too fast? And what is sucking up all of your attention and energy?

• 11:00Speaker 02

  Well, it's it's expectation management mostly, you know, because like like the the building part, that's fine, like that that I do. I love building. I'm going to keep building. I'm going to enjoy building. But but there's so much extra onus now, you know, there's there's there's a lot more interaction required of me on like the the social media side, like I I have so many inbound requests. I'm like, I I I don't want to be that guy that doesn't respond, so I still try and respond to each person that contacts me. Um, there's there's sort of the governance stuff I have to jump in every so often because that's just a I I don't know, it's it's it's it's turning into a little bit of a circle jerk

• 11:40Speaker 02

  on that side. Um, there's just, you know, and and and ever since that's that's that's why I was I was very apprehensive about I I I knew it was going to happen.

• 11:55Speaker 02

  I was worried about the token having a a price component because as soon as it has a price component, people's mentalities change. And and I've noticed this in the governance forums and in in the communication people have with me because the the the people that farmed it, they're they're chill. Um, and and they're some of the strongest supporters and they're actually quite actively engaged and they're trying to to benefit the the ecosystem. The people that bought it, they they feel they're owed something. Um, all of a sudden, there's there's a a responsibility towards them. Um, and like like there's a lot of negativity on that side that that that drags me down quite a bit.

• 12:40Speaker 02

  So yeah, it's just trying to keep up with the pace is definitely getting me.

• 12:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  So Andre, I think what you're saying is, it sounds like what you're saying is it's more, it's not the building that's tiring you out, right? That maybe, maybe, maybe you get energy from that. I'm not sure, but it's more, it's more the social side that's really exhausting you and tiring you out. And now with the launch of the Wi-Fi token and governance and the expectations around that, it sounds like the social aspect of things has just accelerated to a degree that is frankly exhausting. But you've always been someone to dampen expectations, right? So like famously, go to your Twitter profile right now, go to Andre's Twitter profile right now, guys.

• 13:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  Here's what it says in, in, in the bio, "I test in broad," right? You know, that's a, that's a "lower your expectation" type of statement. It means, "Look, guys, I'm not doing all of the audits in this thing. I'm not like, well, you know what? Why don't you explain it? Like, why do you make statements like that? Why do you make statements when you, when you rolled out the Wi-Fi token that this token has zero value? Why do you have disclaimers that say things like, "When I build software, I build it for myself. If you interact with it, use caution, there will be bugs." Why do you do that sort of thing?

• 14:03Speaker 02

  So, so a big reason why, so, so, so originally when, when I, I bolt out the first IRN, sort of first iteration back in, in Jan fairby, I, I had gotten my audits, I had published them, and, and people flooded in capital. And what I realized was people use, people use audits like a blanket safety net. When, when you say it's an audit, they think, "Oh, okay, it's, it's fine. Let's, I don't have to do my due diligence, I don't have to do my own research, I'm just gonna throw my money in." So a big reason why I emphasize to people that look...

• 14:48Speaker 02

  I I I mean, in all honesty, I do still get audits. I just don't publish them and I refuse to publish them because I don't want people to have a sense of of false security. Um. It's important to me that when you manage your money, that's what you should be doing. You should be managing your money. Now, I don't necessarily mean actively. I mean, most of the urine protocol is there to automate your management, but you should at least at a high level know where that money is going and why it is going there. I think those are two very important questions to at least answer before you put your money into something. And and I feel that's that's like a baseline due diligence. But if you have a protocol and you start shouting numbers like hundred million TVL,

• 15:29Speaker 02

  thirty percent APR and, you know, twelve bit audits, then all of a sudden, people, people don't think about that stuff and they just throw money in. Um. And I think that is, that is more dangerous than me trying to shout at the top of my lungs, the stuff is dangerous, please be careful. I didn't build it for you. You're going to lose money. And then they actually investigate. At that point, I have a lot more comfort with them putting their money in it than if they were to just blindly follow because there's a report I published.

• 16:00David Hoffman?

  So I I'm seeing a lot of uh contrast between, you know, a Yiffy and Wi-Fi and urine and uh and why it's so special, why people are so excited about it is the way that it was, it's genesis, how it was created. And so many people like it because it wasn't created by like a VC group that funded a team that, you know, did all the the tied off all the things before they released it, right? Instead, Wi-Fi was, you know, kind of put out there, put out to Ethereum, more more or less like using Ethereum as like test production. Uh. And then it got into the hands of the community basically instantly, and that's why people love it so much. But that's also what I'm hearing from you is kind of

• 16:46David Hoffman?

  uh a big detriment where like there's not a team that got venture capital to, you know, help support you, Andre, like the CEO or the leader or whatever, whatever one title you would theoretically bestow yourself like you are. Uh, they kind of, there's a lot of weight on one single individual who kind of just built out this protocol just for himself. And the beautiful thing about it is that, you know, you turned over the king, the the keys to the community. But then the community is trying to like have things both ways where they are like they love it's Genesis and they love that you donated this this project to the greater Ethereum ecosystem and they love that the VC backing never was there but also at the same time

• 17:27David Hoffman?

  there there they wish there was this VC backed team that had like these salaries that could go and do all these things. How do you see that juxtaposition kind of like playing out in in when your experiences?

• 17:40Speaker 02

  Uh, so so first things first, I agree 100% with what you just said. Um, I as a little bit, I mean, I I also proposed that out of necessity, but I also proposed it as a little bit of a social experiment because I was curious. So, so, so the platform generates its own rewards and fee systems. Um, and and now that it's a very positive um, market cycle, the the the fees are actually high enough to cover like audits, server expenses, you know, all of those things. I mean, it's it's it's not high to run, but but it is there. Um, so I propose, look, instead of any further issuance of the token, um, because I'm I'm actually quite against any further issuance. Um, I I don't believe in liquidity mining

• 18:25Speaker 02

  at all. Um, so instead of any further issuance, let's use the reward systems and let's take expenses out of that. Uh, and it's it's if if you want to have a read on the forum, the the the general consensus, it's a good idea, but dividends should flow to token holders. So so everyone says there should be like a minimum cap, so 5% or 10% or whatever, and everything else should go to the token holders. Now, now I as as a social experiment, I find that very interesting because again, I did not sell this token to anyone. Like, I I was very adamant, if you if you gained this token, be sure you earned it without spending any money other than gas

• 19:06Speaker 02

  costs. Um, but the people that bought it, they feel they bought it for a reason, and that reason is future revenue from the protocol versus the ones that formed it that were most likely already using the protocol. And that's why I did pool one as a a um, the Y curve token, because that means you're already using the protocol and I want people using the protocol to be governing the protocol as a logical sort of next step. Um, they're they're the stronger supporters.

• 19:38Speaker 02

  But again, like, like I, um, the best way I see this playing out, um, and kind of what I was expecting, but I guess it's, I don't know, maybe it'll still fulfill or not fulfill, but, but the, the price has to decline to the point where it's again only in the hands of the people that actually want to govern the protocol and not in the hands of the people that bought it with the idea of future revenue. So, so, so I think it's a lot about, um, it's a lot about the, the intent with which people gained access to the token. Um, and, and there's, you, you, you can see it in the voting structure as well because the, the, the votes are, are more often than not either not quorum or, or last minute flips.

• 20:21Speaker 02

  Um, and, and it's often quite a big difference between, you know, the, the, the original miners, let's call them liquidity providers and the, the token purchasers. So, so, so there's a definite conflict between those two. And, um, I, I actually, um, last year or the year before, I, I need to go check, but, but I published a few articles about this specifically, where, where you, you, you have this conflict between, between a token's purpose and an investor's value. So, so, so even if we look at Ethereum, right? If we look at Ethereum, Ethereum's, there's a lot of ideologies. So I'm not going to go into all of them. Ethereum is money, et cetera.

• 21:03Speaker 02

  At, at its base, Ethereum is gas and it's meant to be paid for computational execution. Now, now there's a certain equilibrium there between how much does it cost the network as a collective of miners in the amount of electricity they're spending to execute that instruction and thus secure it? And how much are they being rewarded in financial value for that? Now, now at equilibrium, it should be, it should, the value of the token should be slightly more than the cost of their electricity. But now if you add speculators into the equation, they're not using the token. So it's not cycling between these two. So all of a sudden you're removing supply out of the equation. And at the same time, this, this, this band keeps increasing because it's not circulating.

• 21:46Speaker 02

  You're moving more and more and more, it's supply demands, a supply side crisis. And you end up with a token that increases to the point where, where the users, who are supposed to be paying for this execution, no longer want to pay for these execution because it's too expensive. Miners are still happy. They're, they're walking away with extra profits, but the users don't want to use it anymore. So so as soon as you add speculative value to a lot of these tokens, you end up destroying the reason they exist. Um, and that that only cycles back to its equilibrium point when when its value normally decreases. But now, at the same time, we're in a market where it's predominantly investors.

• 22:28Speaker 02

  And your your product is only as good as your green candles or your red candles. So if if your if your token is going up in value, you're you're a wonderful product and you have the most amazing leadership and everything is wonderful. If that thing starts going down, you're a scam and you lied and and this this insert any random fud you can possibly think of. And the second it switches to green again, all of a sudden, you're the most wonderful project ever. So so I'm I'm very worried about that because on the one hand, I need that value to significantly decrease for it to have its effective value in the ecosystem. But when that happens, people start saying the protocol is shit, the platform is shit,

• 23:13Speaker 02

  and it doesn't work as intended. Um, and and I'm I'm curious to see how it plays out. Like, I I I have no ideas how this is going to turn out. I I in none of my models that I expected to turn out the way it did. Um, but but but right now, there there is a definite conflict between between governance and speculators. That much I can see in the forums.

• 23:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  This has been so helpful to to understand sort of how you think about things. And I've got some other questions, want to dig into your background a little bit later. But you you mentioned so much there. One of your points was about, you know, speculators versus sort of the the users and there being sort of an inherent mismatch there in terms of alignment. Um, part part of that, I wonder, maybe we could dig into later is like, is there a difference in your mind between the the short term speculator investor and the long term investor? Right? So that's something we could talk about. But but let's let's put that aside. For a minute because I'm not sure that everyone listening is actually familiar with some of the things

• 24:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  that you just said and sort of the story of wire and the story of of YFI. So we want to set some some context for them, for for folks who might be new to it, new to to what's been going on. Can we start with maybe the why earn protocol? What is the why earn protocol? Can you do and explain it like I'm five for what the protocol actually does?

• 24:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, um, the, the, the very original first iteration, I'm, I'm, I'm just going to start there of, um, of wire and back when it was iron, um, which, by the way, the, the, the name swap, um, not are from Zappa actually recommended the, the why? Because then it's you earn instead of I earn, which had a much nicer collective idea, which, which I enjoyed. Um, but very simplistically, back then I, I, I, there's a longer background that we can dig into if we want, but, but I'm just going to start from. I, I was at X point where I was managing a lot of friends and family's money. Um, and I, I, I'm not a trader, I'm not a speculator, I don't understand any of these things.

• 25:29Speaker 02

  I think TA is flipping a coin and good luck which side it's going to land on. Um, so I, I had moved almost everything into stable coins, but I still wanted to offer people certain amount of, of returns because they had entrusted their money with me. Um, so I started looking at options of putting stable coins to work. And at the time there was Ave, there was, um, Fulcrum, there was Compound, there was DYDX, there, there was a bunch of different services. And I would wake up in the morning and I would see which one's the highest APR and I'd move my funds around. And I did this for probably a few days until I finally got annoyed at one, moving it around and two, having to pay gas fees the whole time.

• 26:13Speaker 02

  So I started thinking, look, I can automate all of this. So the first thing I did was just write a few normalization smart contracts that reads in the different APR numbers from the different systems. And then gives me standardized output, which I can compare. So that at least I don't have to compare them individually and I can just look at the script and the script. Smart contract will tell me where to send it. So that was sort of step one. And then step two, I started with this concept of having the tokens do it themselves. So I wrote the first iteration of the Y tokens, which Y die, Y U S D C, Y U S D T and Y T U S D. And very simplistically, they read this normalized APR output. And then they see which one it's supposed to be, and then they have integrations into all of the downstream sources.

• 26:56Speaker 02

  And dependent on what that response is, where they're supposed to go, they move between one of those. Um, and, and I used that as my baseline for, for quite a while, until I got to the point where I started realizing. Um, number one, there's, there's no net loss to me opening this up to other people, which is fantastic. Number two, the more people that interact with the protocol, the, the more effective it gets. So what I mean by that is every time someone deposits or withdraws, it sees if it should rebalance. So the higher the frequency of interaction, the more it shifts between protocols to maximize its own yield return. So by opening it up and allowing other people to pull into the protocol.

• 27:38Speaker 02

  Uh, they're getting the highest yield from any of these aggregate sources because it's moving. And because there's more people interacting with it, it's moving more frequently, which means in aggregate. It gets a higher APR or return than any of the downstream sources. Uh, and that was the original, that was the original iron, uh, now yearn. Uh, so, so a really, a really simplistic concept and a simplistic idea. It's, it's what, it's what lenders do nowadays as well, you know, you, you move your capital to where you get the highest returns, just automated and with smart contracts. I don't know if you want to stop there or you want to now continue digging into how the rest of the platform continued expanding.

• 28:15David Hoffman?

  A few quick questions there as to the technical details. So you said that the tokens move in order to find the best yield. Can you just go into the details as to how the tokens know where the best yield is? And then who pays for that? Who or what pays for that gas for those tokens to move?

• 28:33Speaker 02

  All right, so, so gas is paid during interaction. So when I deposit or I withdraw, then it checks if it moves that gas is added on to that deposit or that withdrawal. So it's basically an unlucky lottery. Whoever is going to hit the contract when it's time to rebalance is going to be paying that extra amount.

• 28:51David Hoffman?

  But they, they were going to be paying some amount of gas anyways, right? It's kind of just like they're also the, the movement of the tokens are kind of just rewriting on that transaction.

• 29:01Speaker 02

  Correct. And I mean, back then, you know, gas was what six squae? So, so it wasn't, you'd be paying two bucks instead of, you know, 1.5 bucks. Now it's a little bit more significant, but the system also works very differently now. So, so, so the tokens themselves are, are the, the Y token is really just a, think of it as a pool. And in this pool, you have a bunch of, let's take die, and you have a bunch of die. So when I deposit, I deposit a bunch of die. And when I deposit or withdraw, then it asks the APR smart contract. For practical purposes, I think it's Oracle. I don't like using the terminology Oracle specifically because it's not using any off-chain sources. It's just normalizing on-chain information.

• 29:41David Hoffman?

  Like an internal oracle.

• 29:42Speaker 02

  For practical purposes, let's call it a, a APR oracle.

• 29:45David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 29:45Speaker 02

  It asks the oracle, where is the highest APR currently? And the oracle tells it, Ave. And if it sees Ave, then it goes, okay, so now I take this, all of this die I have, and I deposited into Ave. So now I have eight tokens and Ave has my die. And now I'm sitting with that and I'm earning interest. Now, next depositor comes along and deposits. It checks that again. It sees, oh, okay, I should be going to compound. So it withdraws the die from other and by returning its A tokens, deposits into the compound and now I have C tokens. And that's all it does. So every time someone interacts, it asks the question, where should I go? And then it simply withdraws from where it is and it goes to where it's supposed to be.

• 30:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  So it's like a robot that finds the highest yield. Okay, so I think that's pretty simple for folks to understand. I have one question on that. So when we talk about reward, right? Like putting on an investor cap, we're think about risk adjusted reward, risk adjusted returns, right? So it seems like the money robot, the wired money robot is basically, you know, showing you the highest yield protocols and investing in that, but it can't quantify risk. Is that sort of a blind spot of the protocol?

• 30:56Speaker 02

  In the V1 version, yeah. So in the V1 version, I remember we were at about 2 million die. And that was just when BZX had their, their, their, whatever you want to call it, Black Thursday event or however. And we managed to pull that out. I told the script to no longer use fulcrum and then it removed fulcrum as an option. And then it pulled everything out and we were very lucky at that point. But after that, we started looking at things like how much, how much tokens is it the downstream source? In other words, how liquid is the source I'm putting cash into now?

• 31:40Speaker 02

  And it would check how much of that liquidity has moved in X amount of time. With a V3, I also wanted to include the FIVE score, I believe it's called, what Jordan and them are working on, but I never ended up getting to that V3 because V2 ended up integrating with Curve and it just, it's not going to get much better in terms of its yield than where it's currently sitting at. So it started adding a few smarter things, like it would start looking At how big is the pool that I'm moving to and will I affect its APR? Because when I first started, you know, there's ten, twenty thousand dollars in there and that doesn't affect APR when it moves.

• 32:23Speaker 02

  Within a few months, there was two to five million in there. So now when it moves to one of these downstream sources, it actually changes the APR from ten percent to five percent. So now I have to start calculating and okay, what is the APR going to be if I move and only move if it is a net benefit with move plus that? And then it would look at how much liquidity is the downstream source? In other words, is it safe? Can I still get out? And it would do smaller adjustments. So it would see, okay, I can move half of it here and get this amount of yield and the other half that side and get that amount of yield and in aggregate that's more. But in terms of intelligent risk, no such thing exists as data on chain currently.

• 33:06Speaker 02

  So it was largely my own perceived perspective of these protocols, risks and their dangers.

• 33:16Speaker 02

  I'm not sure where the five score is at in terms of their on-chain codification. I think they have done it as an oracle stream already, but I haven't touched it recently, unfortunately.

• 33:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. And so for folks that aren't totally familiar with some of the things you talked about, so you know, just so I can kind of understand, so what you're talking about is obviously annualized returns, right? That's when you were saying APR, that's annualized returns. And the risk modeling that why Ern is taking into account is from two places right now, or in the future versions will be maybe in V2 it is, which is the liquidity of the underlying protocol, which is certainly one measure of risk, not necessarily an intelligent measure of risk, but it does help somewhat. And then also there is this, I don't know, agency, I don't know what you call them, but a project called DeFiScore,

• 34:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  which is a consensus project that is actually trying to quantify risk, almost like a

• 34:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  Morning star, I suppose, or something in the traditional finance world where there's sort of a, you know, risk quantification of an underlying asset. And they're trying to score each of these protocols. And possibly you could, you could integrate that, but even those two, two, I guess, sources are fairly primitive. I suppose now, I don't know if this is a, this is a problem for finance, right? How do we, it's not just a problem for DeFi, it's a problem for finances. Like, how do we quantify risk? Like, humans are really bad at quantifying risk. But do you think we can start getting better in DeFi about quantifying the risk across various protocols? And if so, how?

• 34:59Speaker 02

  I mean, like, I guess a baseline, what, what do humans consider as low risk versus high risk when it comes to financial things? You'll, you'll go to the bank that's been around for longer because they've got the track record. And you'll go to the bank that has more capital because they have less chances of going over. So, so, you know, those are sort of the, the normal human psyche things we quantify. So I think for a large part, that's still very much true in DeFi as well. Cause, cause, cause even in DeFi, in, in, in which product do you rather put your capital? You know, the, the one that's the, that's the, the SF backed, VC backed, funded

• 35:46Speaker 02

  hundred million dollar protocol? Or the a non-user that no one knows who they are, but they deployed a bunch of smart contracts onto chain.

• 35:57Speaker 02

  I mean, right off the bat, I can tell you which one I'd feel safer with my money, even if that is completely, you know, just based off of human perception. So, so I don't know. I mean, I mean, if, so, so my general rule with anything I code is if, if I can quantify the steps in a logical way, then I can codify the steps in a logical way. I, I, I can't, I can't in an analytical way tell you how I measure risk.

• 36:28Speaker 02

  So I'm not sure how that would be codified other than a certain level of perception based.

• 36:36David Hoffman?

  So Andre, let's pick up the thread with the development of the Urn Protocol. We left off with talking about how stablecoins move around in order to get the best yield in the various DeFi protocols. But the Urn Protocol didn't stop there. What's the next step in the composition of Urn and Wify?

• 36:56Speaker 02

  So after I had this thing where these tokens move between lenders, about the same time Curve came out with their

• 37:08Speaker 02

  stable swap system, which now is the Curve Protocol. And the very first pool they launched was the C-Di, which is the Compound Di, and C-U is D-C, which is the Compound U S D C. And I started speaking to Mitch and we started discussing this idea, but okay, if you can do these swaps with with these healed tokens, could you do them with the healed profit switching tokens?

• 37:37Speaker 02

  And we ended up deploying the Y Pool, which is built off of the four base layer Urn tokens, the Y-Di, the Y-U S D C, the Y-U S D T, and the Y-T-U S D. And we also later launched the B-U S D Pool, which is Y-Di, Y-U S D T, U S D C, and Y-B-U S D. Yeah, the Binance U S D one. So this offered another layer on top, because we knew that if you're in Curve, there's a certain level of stability based on the tokens, as long as Di can manage to keep peg.

• 38:13Speaker 02

  And that allows you to have the healed maximization with trading fees on top. And when it started, it was fantastic, because the volume far out exceeded the liquidity. So we would have 100% plus days, which was phenomenal. As liquidity increased, you know, we're at less than 10% utilization now, so fees don't make up as much as they used to. But that was basically the pinnacle of yield at that time. There was nothing other than centralized services where you could get higher yield than you could in the Y Pool.

• 38:48Speaker 02

  Um, and, and that, that sort of stayed for, for quite a while. So, so there was a bit of a, a lack of new yield opportunities. So to stimulate yield opportunities, I started looking for things to build that improves yield. So one of the first things I started looking at was how do I get people to trade more on curve? Because the more you trade, the higher the fees, the higher the fees, the better the yield. So I started building things like, uh, Y trade and Y leverage. We've both were just leveraged, uh, stablecoin trades. Y leverage was based off of flash loaning, um, USDC from,

• 39:31Speaker 02

  yeah, flash loading USDC from DYDX, putting that into Maker as collateral. This is just when they released their USDC A vaults. Uh, minting DAI off of that, selling the DAI to USDC because DAI was trading above peg at about 1.02. Uh, returning the flash loan USDC and you get the difference in profit. And then when you want to close the vault again, it just does the inverse. So in other words, borrow the, the, the DAI, close the vault, take the USDC, sell back to DAI and then return that. Um, if you close it out of profit, you have to add in the rest. If you close it in profit, you get profit on both sides. Y, Y trade is the, is the leverage system. It can go up to a thousand X leverage.

• 40:16Speaker 02

  Um, on the UI, we limited to a maximum of 250. You, you can go higher, but then we want you to interact with the smart contracts. Because any higher than 250 and you're liquidated in less than a day. So, so that's for a lot more experienced people. And for the, the basic website, we only allowed up until five X. Because then at least you have a few weeks and months before you get liquidated because of your borrowed position. And that's simplistically LPs could provide their Y curve token. When a trader comes in, it unwinds the Y-Curve token into the, one of the native assets, DAI, USDC, TUSD, or USDT, and then it sells it into Curve for the opposing asset, whichever you want to do. So you'll do DAI to USDC.

• 40:59Speaker 02

  And now you have a short DAI position and you have a USDC amount on the books. So that's just allowed people to do higher frequency trading. I, I had closed that down, I think around either early June, maybe late just before that, because I wanted to rework the whole way I did, designed that and everything. While I was busy with that rework, I started looking at Y-Swap, which is the single-sided AMM solution. That's, that's a lot more technical, so I don't know if we want to go into that because there's quite a lot of detail to unpack around that. But, but it's just a way to, to, to do uniswap basically with just providing

• 41:44Speaker 02

  a single asset on the one side and having healed aware systems. But, but everything I built and everything I designed and the whole year ecosystem and even the vaults that I have now, and the vaults I had to design because the healed world just became massively complex in the last two months. So it needed a whole new solution. But, but, but everything has a singular goal. Maximize yield for LPs that provide, that provide liquidity into the ecosystem. But, but I have, I have two very fixed rules when it comes to this. Number one, I, I don't swap what you put in. So if you put in DAI, I'm not going to swap that to TUSD and put that into M-stable because it's going to get a higher yield.

• 42:27Speaker 02

  I'm going to keep it in DAI. So you might not get the highest possible APR strategy, but you will get the highest one for DAI. And the reason for that is I did have a solution back in the day that swapped between the stable coins for the highest one. But, but I've noticed that

• 42:44Speaker 02

  Most LPs aren't long-term LPs. They're LPs for a few days. So, so they ended up losing more because of slippage than they would actually make in, in interest gain. So for, for purposes of keeping it more simplistic for them, I, I decided I'm always going to keep it token to token. And then the other rule is no experimental systems, but that again is based on my own perceived level of risk, which, you know, I, I, I try and do as much due diligence on these platforms where the money goes as possible because any of my solutions, my money will be the first one in. So I expose myself to the risk of wherever that goes. So I'm, I'm very, I'm very apprehensive about that.

• 43:26Speaker 02

  So, so it might also not always be the absolute maximum APR you could get in DeFi, but it is what I consider to be the, the, the safest APR without having any losses on the original asset you put in.

• 43:39David Hoffman?

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• 44:22David Hoffman?

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• 45:53David Hoffman?

  All right, let's go ahead and get right back into the interview with Andre so we can finish up learning about the Urin Protocol.

• 46:02David Hoffman?

  Okay, Andre, so let's, let's do our best to recap where, where we are so far. So you first built out this stablecoin system that moves stablecoins around to access the best yield in the various DeFi protocols. And that was, that's kind of like layer one. And then Curve gets introduced, which has the Curve tokens, the Curve stable tokens, which kind of do this in a more or less automated way. And then you started to stitch that into the Urin Protocol as well, kind of like as a layer two on, on top of it, right? And so, and then you created these products from the Urin system that were, are useful products, useful building blocks in DeFi, useful money Legos, and that they also encourage

• 46:47David Hoffman?

  activity in the Curve system because the Curve system and the Urin system are very, are like siblings, right? They're like stitched together very, very tightly. And, and we're not done yet, right? Like we still have like another layer. Perhaps even two layers to go before we're really finished off with the all encompassing urine system. However, at this point in time, how would you describe in a concise way as possible? How would you describe the urine protocol up to this point? Like, what is it? What does it do for people at this stage in the game?

• 47:21Speaker 02

  It automates yield. That's that's the most apt description I've managed. I sometimes refer to it as a smart savings account, which I'm not a huge fan of because, you know, your money is always spendable, like you never lock it up. But but but it's it's it's a yield optimizer. That's that's its entire purpose.

• 47:43David Hoffman?

  Okay, now, where's the next stack? Because at some point in time, yield farming with governance tokens comes into play here. Are we at that point yet?

• 47:54Speaker 02

  This this is now when Comp launched, yeah. So when Comp launched, they they they were very kind to to both destroy and recreate the whole game, which was very exciting because it it gave me

• 48:08Speaker 02

  a lot of reinvigoration to to engage. And so technically, this isn't actually completely true. So so in after Ypool, at that time, the Synthetix team were looking for for something to help their their SUSD keep stronger to peg. So started working the urine protocol, the curve protocol and SUSD. And we launched a new pool, which was a meta pool between the Y tokens and the SUSD token. And the output token of this, the LP token you get for depositing into this pool, you could stake in the rewards contract. And it's that same rewards contract I used for my Wi-Fi distribution. And that's how I knew about it.

• 48:50Speaker 02

  Because back then, you would stake the LP token and you would get SNX every week. And it was it was by far the most profitable strategy of all of the yield strategies. So so technically. I stand corrected in saying that, that like, like the cycle definitely started because of that hype. But, but liquidity incentives or liquidity mining started there. Like, like that, that mentor rewards pool from SNX was, was, was the first of its kind. And, and I think everyone else is just playing off of their playbook.

• 49:28Speaker 02

  But what did happen with the, the, the comp token, it, it added a new option. So, so now it was a question of which one is higher yield. And, and the intricacies of the comp token made it also more interesting. Because for the first few weeks, you ended up borrowing as much VAT as possible. And then winding a leveraged position so that you could earn as much comp. And that's because of the comp distribution model at the time, which was based on the size of the, the, the debt that is accrued on the market. And then they changed that model and it changed to, to a leveraged position and die.

• 50:04Speaker 02

  So you would again wind your position like that. And, and that had the best ratio. And then, and then I think next it was Balancer that came out with MTA. And I mean, shortly after that, it was, um, ah, Balancer with Bell. And then it was MStable with MTA. Um, and we're still waiting on the Curve token to come out. There was another one that I'm missing. Oh, um, Uma with their YUSD. So, so all of a sudden, all of a sudden, my, my yield system was insufficient. Because it, it no longer was aware of what the best yield strategy was. Because what the best yield was, the definition thereof had now changed.

• 50:46Speaker 02

  A few months before that, it was, it was, um, it was which lender provided the highest interest rates? And in aggregate, which of those could I get while depositing into, into synthetics? To be a liquidity provider there and get the liquidity incentives? Um, but now all of a sudden, you started having to do calculations about, okay, but what is my, what is my wound up? That position and how much debt am I accruing? And what is the token value? So what is the financial dollar value of that debt versus the amount of comp I'm getting and the comps dollar value which offsets this interest? So, so, so now there's so many data points that, that all of a sudden becomes a lot more tricky to manage.

• 51:30Speaker 02

  And, and one thing we know is that price data on chain is a very dangerous thing to use. That's a very easy way to get attacked and that's why we need secure oracles. The available secure oracles though don't have data for all of the things I just mentioned. So, so yield farming now all of a sudden was at a point where, where, where robo advisors could no longer do their job. Because they could not get sufficient data to do their job and they could no longer predict how to do this job. So I started thinking about, okay, but now I need a model, how to crowdsource this information. Because there's a bunch of us that are constantly in defy and we're constantly hooked in and we, we all have sleeping problems and, and none of us get more than half an hour sleep every, every other four hours.

• 52:14Speaker 02

  So, so, so we know what's going on and we know where to be. So, a large inspiration of why, why the token needed to become into existence is to have a, a protocol to, to, to help these, these yield farmers be able to make decisions such as what is the best strategy? So objectively speaking, what is the best yield strategy at this time? And then based off of this decision, they needed to be able to update which strategy we go to. But now, now I, I have this problem where on the one side, you've got people that, that know that's the best strategy, but they can't necessarily codify the strategies. And I need someone who can codify these strategies as well.

• 52:58Speaker 02

  And I needed a way to incentivize them to actually codify these strategies. And then of course, on the other side, there's the LPs that still need to provide the liquidity for the strategy and then get the rewards. So, so that's where, that's where the V two came out and that's, that's my new Y vault system. Where, where.

• 53:16Speaker 02

  Strategy writers can codify these strategies and if approved and voted in by governance, that becomes the de facto strategy for the current LP vault. And as I mentioned before, you'll have one for USDC, one for DAI, one for Y curve, etc. Strategy writers are incentivized because they get a percentage of additional profit. So what I mean by additional profit, and this is where the system generates its rewards as well, is based interest that the users get, and that's to LPs and nothing else that's not touched. Then there is additional things, you know, there's, there's comp, there's MTA, there's Bell, there's SNX, there's, there's all of these other things in this ecosystem that, that has additional value. And, and all of that additional value, that's where their rewards come from.

• 53:59Speaker 02

  So, so the strategy writer, for argument's sake, gets 5% of all of those liquidated rewards that go back to the LPs and the governance decision makers, they get, let's say, 10% or whatever. Governance needs to decide on those numbers. The ones I've been using have just been, I think, no, I'm going to lie to you now, it is 80, 10, 10. So, so I needed to create this new ecosystem to be able to move fast enough to keep up with what is now happening in this market. Now, I don't necessarily think it's going to last this way very long, because I, I, I do think liquidity mining is a, is a negative game and

• 54:44Speaker 02

  we shouldn't try and incentivize it for too long. But while it lasts, I need this ecosystem that can manage these heel choices and do it in a way that is not based purely out of analytical data it can get on-chain. And that is the current, that's the, the first iteration of a Y vault I did, which was things like the, the Y USDC and the Y curve vault. And then, as a little bit of a sideline, I was doing this delegated vault work with, with Ave, where they want to do delegated credit. So they want to be able to say, okay, well, I'm a, I'm a depositor in Ave and I have $10,000 worth of, of a credit line and I'm going to assign a thousand dollars of that to my, to my buddy.

• 55:28Speaker 02

  Um, so he can then borrow from my vault, he can borrow his credit line. So the delegated vaults were actually a continuation of that idea where I use the original capital and then deploy the underlying best asset for the highest yield strategy. And then it, it ends up being this, this whole buyback strategy that benefits the vault. And I'm actually really happy with how that turned out. It actually turned out much better than I had originally expected. Um, and that's, that's sort of the current iteration where we're at. So, so it's, it's, it's gone from everything happens on chain to I need collective information off chain to be able to, to, to manage and dictate the system.

• 56:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay. So this is brilliant and I hope people are starting to understand the brilliance of what Wyner's put together, Wyner has put together and what Andre has put together. But, but let me just recap for folks that are getting lost in some of the asset names and that sort of thing, like here's the through line. So we've been talking on Bankless about, uh, yield, right? Ever since inception, the first chapter of yield has been lending and borrowing yield in DeFi. And then the second chapter, which opened up, we had a Dan Elitzer on the podcast. We'll, we'll add a link in the show notes, but that chapter, um, started with the comp token and then yield was supercharged with these governance tokens, right?

• 56:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  And I've, I've often joked that like I, I'm in the space 24 hours a day. So is David and we can't keep up with all of the yield farming opportunities. I've, I've joked that I need to hire somebody to go deploy my capital to keep up with all of the yield farming opportunities and optimize that. So this is what, this is the beauty of Wyner in Andre's system is that rather than hiring someone in a fund, you can hire the Wyner money robots, Andre's money robots. That's why people. Love this because the money robots are really finding the highest, most optimized yield farming opportunities in both lending and borrowing and now these governance tokens.

• 57:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  And what Andre just said is the first phase of all of that has been money robots that he wires up and programs himself for his own use, but then he makes available to the public. But now the next stage of that is to get strategy writers to tweak the money robots and create these new money robots and then send them with Wi-Fi tokens, Wi-Fi tokens. That's what this is. That's really what we're talking about, guys. I hope you see the through line. This is sort of a way, instead of hiring the guy to go find all the yield farming opportunities, you just hire the robot and everyone kind of crowdsources the most optimal way to do it.

• 58:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's really genius. Andre, I want to ask a question here before we get to the Wi-Fi tokens themselves and talk a bit more about the crowdsourced yield farming strategies. Can you just do a quick recap of what some of the risks are here, just like high level? So if I'm depositing my funds into Y earn, what are the risks? Like, I could lose it all, but how would I lose it?

• 58:43David Hoffman?

  Like, what are the protocols that are dependent, that Uranus dependent on, that are critical to its function?

• 58:49Speaker 02

  I mean, highly dependent on the strategy. So if you look at the protocol top level and you look at what it operates on top of, I'd say everything. There's nothing in DeFi that, there's nothing in Ethereum that it doesn't touch us. If you look at a specific vault and a specific strategy, then it's more isolated. So then it's, then it's, it might be a balancer pool, or it might be a bank or a V2 pool, or it might be lending and compound. So then it's slightly more isolated. I mean, your number one biggest risk is always, I always start at where is the money?

• 59:35Speaker 02

  So, so if, if the, the money is sitting in a balancer pool, then that is your highest risk point. Because that's where people see the money and that's where they attack it. Now, luckily, and this is why I also only like to use protocols that have, you know, stood a little bit of a test of time. Or are so simplistic that, that it is only a smart contract and nothing else can happen.

• 1:00:00Speaker 02

  So, so, so that's normally your number one point. But, but that's normally also a little bit safer because these are normally large corporations and lots of audits and lots of eyes looking at it. Lots of scrutiny, which is good. Your, your next layer is, is always my code. There, as, as, as much as I, I, I try and make sure, as I said, my money goes in, which means I, I, I need that for my livelihood. But at the same time, that's your, your technical biggest risk. Because it's one guy that wrote it while he was sleep deprived. It's not a good, good combination, like, like that's not, that's not where you should be putting your money.

• 1:00:40Speaker 02

  So, so, and, and since that can be the, the entry and the exit point, which means it does the calculations on how much of the underlying asset you get. So that's, that's a very high danger point because that can be manipulated and I've, I've seen it be manipulated. So, so definitely a high risk there. Uh, you, you start talking about, about lower risk, but probability risk stuff. So like a, a, a, if, if USDT now, for example, were to add a fee to their token transfer, which, which they can do because it's in their smart contract, a lot of my systems would break. And when you deposit, you'd actually get back less than what you put in.

• 1:01:20Speaker 02

  If, if there's a, if there's a compiler bug in the version I use, which I'm, I'm, I normally, I, I have a leniency towards 5.17, then, then that can be exploited in all of my contract systems. If there is a liquidity crisis in one of the, the downstream sources. And, and this can happen a lot because remember you're, you're, you're often in, in a lending position, which means there's a borrower on the other side. And if, if something horrible happens and there's a price collapse, that's when you want your money out. But that's also when most people are borrowing the money and the utilization rate is high, which means you can't actually get access to it.

• 1:02:01Speaker 02

  So, so, so that's definitely a systematic risk. I, I, I like to call it impermanent locks. Because, you know, based on the time, it can be locked, but in, in its entire position, you, you will always have access to it unless it's drained from the underlying position. Um, I've mentioned code vulnerabilities. I've mentioned the, the asset, the, the composability is always dangerous. I mean, any system, each time you add a, a, a building block, you're, you're exponentially increasing um, potential risk and, and mismanagement.

• 1:02:33David Hoffman?

  Um, so with regards to the, the various DeFi protocols that are uh, an option to receive yield in Urine, like there's, you know, Compound Balancer, M Stable, like all these different DeFi protocols. And each one is a risk, but with regards to where the funds are currently deposited by Urine, there's a chance that like something breaks that doesn't actually impact the current uh, way that Urine is receiving real yield, right? So like Urine could be depositing most of the, of the funds into a combination of like M Stable and Balancer and Compound Breaks and, and Compound Breaking doesn't actually impact Urine at that present moment because the funds haven't been deposited there.

• 1:03:14David Hoffman?

  But yeah, Urine Governance needs to remove Compound from the uh, algorithm

• 1:03:20Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 1:03:20David Hoffman?

  before it, something does happen. Is that, is that right?

• 1:03:23Speaker 02

  That is a hundred percent accurate. So, so, so I've been, I've been manually managing that since Jan FEM. Um, but again, it's based purely on my perception, which is a lot nicer if it's, you know, a crowd-based source decision. So, but, but a hundred percent correct. If, if there is all of a sudden a, a scare that there is high vulnerability somewhere. So there's some rumors that something bad is happening at X, and it's up to Governance to pool those funds as quickly as possible.

• 1:03:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  So one other primitive that possibly could be incorporated in this is if we had some sort of DeFi insurance primitive, right?

• 1:03:57Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:03:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  We could use the composability of DeFi to our advantage. Um, Nexus Mutual, any, anything popping in mind for that? Because I'm sure you'd love to incorporate some insurance if it was available and if you could.

• 1:04:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, I've, I've, I, I Actually spoke to to to you from Nexus Mutual in this week. They're they're going to roll it out either, I think, this week or next. That that it has a a base layer staking system, which allows me to take a percentage of deposits at the user's opt in choice. And then it takes that percentage as a as a base layer stake in Nexus Mutual, which then gives them cover on the other side.

• 1:04:40David Hoffman?

  Very cool. And that would cover them for smart contract technical style hacks. Is that correct?

• 1:04:45Speaker 02

  Technically, no, because the way the way Nexus Mutual works, it's it's like like I I I always like to say it's not actually insurance. It's more like a binary option. So so the people that are the people that are staking funds against a smart contract, they're saying they have confidence it's not going to fail. The people taking insurance are saying, I have confidence it's going to fail. But but it's actually just a hedged binary bet. But but it's up to it's up to the people staking on that contract to actually decide what they pay out for. So so so Nexus Mutual has paid out for things that were not smart contract hacks because they they felt it it it was good to pay those risks out.

• 1:05:27Speaker 02

  So so they it's it's a lot more about perceived about what happened. So so from from the payouts I've seen, basically Nexus Mutual pays out when they feel the the there was nothing the user could have done to prevented it. But if there was something the user could have done to prevented it, then they don't pay out. So so so it's it's less technical and and more what do those stakers vote for when someone submits a claim?

• 1:05:53David Hoffman?

  So Andre, we've gone through what happens when you deposit stable coins, crypto dollars into the urine protocol. We've gone through how you've developed this yield maximizing system. Then we went through how you integrated the the yield farming and liquidity mining revolution of DeFi so that the value of the governance tokens being earned are also integrated into the profit maximizing system. Now we're at the last layer, the YFI token, the YFI token. This is the capstone to the whole thing. And in my mind, I kind of view this thing as like a, it's a structure, right? And it's building itself. And then at the very top of the structure is the YFI token.

• 1:06:35David Hoffman?

  Can you explain the role and reason of the YFI token in the urine protocol?

• 1:06:43Speaker 02

  So as mentioned with this new vault structure, there needs to be certain off-chain decisions that need to occur in terms of what is the highest yielding strategy? And at its highest level, that is its pure function. It is to make those decisions. But if you drill it down, there's a lot of minutia. You know, there's what percentage goes to the contract creator? What percentage goes to the original urine protocol and the people using that system? If a new token were to be airdropped for whatever reason, what goes to LPs and what goes to whomever? So there's a lot of unknown, I want to say, and a lot of known,

• 1:07:26Speaker 02

  which are protocol decisions that need to occur. And for the longest time, I've been making these decisions my whole time. But it's also getting to a point, like you mentioned, you need to hire someone that's capable of watching this the whole time and being aware of this the whole time. And then I'm in that same position. So I need to crowdsource that information. I would like to have a solid eight hours sleep, not having to wake up every two hours because there's a new yield farm that popped up and it's only going to last for the next 40 minutes. So in those cases, it's good to have this ecosystem. And like I said, and it wasn't tongue in cheek, it was sincere. The original reason I distributed this token.

• 1:08:11Speaker 02

  And I also want to emphasize that it was a token distribution, it wasn't a liquidity incentive. But the original reason why I distributed this token was to be able to hand off some of these responsibilities. So it's not just me taking care of it. It's not just me making these decisions. It's not just me implementing these strategies and deciding where the capital should go.

• 1:08:30David Hoffman?

  That's how you're scaling it, basically.

• 1:08:33Speaker 02

  That's how I get to scale the system. That's how I also get to take a little bit of time off. And I know it's in the hands of people that are also as healed obsessed as I am. And that's why I distributed to the three protocols I considered to be where the healed farmers are farming the most healed. Because I wanted to get it into the hands of people that are as intimately familiar with everything that's going on as I am.

• 1:08:57David Hoffman?

  So as a mental model for our listeners, this is not unlike MKR and MKR governance. Where, you know, we call Maker DAO a DAO. And in the name DAO, it's a decentralized autonomous organization, right? And so the important thing is like autonomous is a little bit nebulous because Maker DAO needs concrete like proposals for the DAO to vote into the protocol, right? And so at the end of the day, humans with MKR vote in governance proposals. You know, what collateral to accept, what risk parameters to provide them. They manually vote in those parameters. And that's the same thing that's going on with the YFI, the YFI token in the urine protocol.

• 1:09:38David Hoffman?

  Where somebody is proposing a strategy. And then with YFI holders are accepting or denying that that contract, right?

• 1:09:50Speaker 02

  That's exactly it. So at its highest level, that is its primary function and purpose. It is to enable people to be able to make those collective decisions on the system and the protocol. For their own greed and the greed of the LPs. And with the YFI token, it means those two are aligned.

• 1:10:14David Hoffman?

  So unlike how MKR was distributed and unlike how any other DeFi token has been distributed, Wify token was distributed in this very unique way. Can you kind of go through your thought process and your decision making with how you enabled the Wify token to be distributed among Ethereum?

• 1:10:32Speaker 02

  I wanted to distribute. That's, that's, I needed to distribute a, a mechanism whereby people have a voting right to these decisions. Thanks to the, as mentioned previously, the, the yield farm with the SUSD. I had intimately worked with the, the SNX rewards contract, which was developed by Anton from One Inch along with Kane from Synthetix. And, and it was a very elegant distribution mechanism. So simplistically, every week, they would, they would transfer tokens into the contract and then they would notify the contract that they have transferred tokens into it. And then over that week, the tokens are distributed to the LPs, to the people that provide liquidity

• 1:11:17Speaker 02

  to the SUSD pool.

• 1:11:20Speaker 02

  So I thought this is the perfect mechanism because the, the people using my system are using Y-curve because Y-curve is built on top of Yern. So these are the people that are the healed hunters and that is why I launched the Pool 1 and that is why I, I distributed to there the first time. Now, now, now people always want to know why, what decisions and, and, and what rationale and I, I, like, I, I, I think people want to believe I'm smarter than I am when, when the, the most logical answer is usually the correct one. I'm, I'm a very strong believer in Occam's razor and, and the reason I chose 10,000 wasn't

• 1:12:04Speaker 02

  some meme, it wasn't, it wasn't for any purpose. It was just, I wanted some low number that can represent voting shares. You know, I didn't want someone to have 1.3 billion voting shares and I also didn't want someone to have, you know, 0.04. So, so it was just a nice round number that I could use that, that when it comes to voting is sufficient. And originally I wanted to do, I wanted to do four pools because I actually wanted to incentivize my other products as well, Y-Swap and Y-Trade. But after the first two pools blew up, I didn't want to incentivize those two because they were, they, I, I consider them higher risk. Than the rest of the protocols because they haven't withstood the test of time yet and

• 1:12:46Speaker 02

  they haven't had as much AUM and as much eyes on them. So I decided not to incentivize those two because I was worried that the capital goes in is going to attract the wrong type of attention. So I switched that instead to things like Balancer and the Curve Pool again. But really, there was no master plan, there was no thought out solution. It was a accidental and somewhat lucky sequence of events with a positive outcome, but it was really as simplistic as that. It was, I needed a distribution mechanism for people that use my system and here's 10,000 tokens to make decisions on.

• 1:13:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  So some people in DeFi would argue that this is the fairest launch of any token ever. There was no premine, no founder's reward, no VC. Some people are even comparing you, Andre, to the Satoshi of DeFi, which is kind of funny. But when you launched this in your opening post, you emphasized, you couldn't have made it more clear. You said, "We didn't stress it enough. This token, Wify, has zero value. Don't buy it, earn it." And yet, when I look at the charts, it's like, Wify is one of the most explosive price charts I've ever seen in crypto. So it started at $3, you know, kind of at launch,

• 1:14:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  and then a week later was up 100%. So people don't believe you, Andre. People think it does have value. Can you explain why a rational actor would pay for Wify tokens?

• 1:14:25Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:14:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay. Why are they doing like, so I think what you're saying in that is that these are not rational actors.

• 1:14:34Speaker 02

  So the one thing I really like, and the Vons, the framework guys, he was the first one to pick it up, which I had it in the back of my mind, but I never really thought about it. And it was very interesting because I had always thought about the yearn system from an LP perspective, because that's what I am. You know, I want to put in 100 bucks and I want to see Ten percent whatever growth over the year and then when I pull that out, I want to see 110 bucks and then I'm happy.

• 1:15:11Speaker 02

  But at the same time, you know, now this thing was sitting with with with 100 million plus in capital. I mean, at its peak, I think it was just over the the 600 million dollars. Which, by the way, terrified me to no end. It's far too much money to put in my contracts. Don't do that.

• 1:15:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  600 million. I mean, what that was got to be the top five in the total value lock charts, right?

• 1:15:33Speaker 02

  I that that's a different discussion. I mean, TVL, I think, is such an absolutely pointless metric for us to use in the space. It is insanity.

• 1:15:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  Sure.

• 1:15:42Speaker 02

  Because like you, you can have a billion TVL, but no fees. And then it's it's it's a much less than the guy with a thousand bucks, but 50% fees. But anyway, that's that's a different conversation in terms of P E ratios on systems. But but a lot of these, a lot of these VCs and trading firms and things, they they started looking at from the perspective of being the controller of this ecosystem. Because now if you're the controller of this ecosystem, all of a sudden, you're you're not just this degenerate yield farmer that just wants to maximize your own gains because you're an LP. But but but but you're a capital deployer. You you have 100 million dollars of capital now that you choose where it gets deployed to.

• 1:16:23Speaker 02

  And that is also an incredibly powerful leverage tool because now all of a sudden you can start having a a very different conversation with, you know, a a or a compound or whatever. And you tell them, okay, but I can deploy this capital to you. Can you give us extra incentives? So so so so all of a sudden, being able to make those choices is basically being able to make the choices of, you know, one of one of the biggest funds in the decentralized space. Because that's what Urn has ended up becoming, one of the biggest funds of deployable capital.

• 1:17:01Speaker 02

  And and I It it it was this amazing like like lightbulb moment when when he tweeted about it and and I read his tweet and I was just like, holy hell, this guy gets it. Um, so so I sort of understand it from that perspective. And I I I get it from from the LP because, you know, his money is in that system. And so he wants to have a vote in where it goes because he wants to maximize it, otherwise he's going to move it out. But but there isn't really an alternative to move it to other than you need to do it yourself. Um, because because a lot of the guys I speak to on a daily basis, even even they, when when they want to go away for the weekend, they

• 1:17:41Speaker 02

  they they they they take their funds and they throw it on my vaults because, you know, they they they know how to farm themselves. But when they just want to take a little bit of a break, they'd rather have the vaults to it because they know that then they don't have to worry about it. So so so from the LP, there's a reason why I want I want some say in it. From the capital deployment, there's a reason I'd want to say in it. So so I I I guess that is my most logical explanation for why someone would attach a financial value to that kind of control. Um, I still don't get it, but but as mentioned, like fairly early in the start, I I don't understand the speculative side.

• 1:18:24Speaker 02

  I've never understood why a token really goes up or really goes down other than something to do with green frogs and something with 4chan. So so so so I I can't fully understand the why. Um, and and I'm not someone that that that bought tokens for speculative reasons other than if I was going to use it. So so I'm I'm also probably not the most informed to answer that question. But but if I had to look at it from a very from a very. Governance control perspective, I'd, I'd, I mean, I want some of the token so that I can at least ensure that it doesn't go to a place that I don't trust.

• 1:19:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  Right. So, so I think so, Vance, you mentioned from framework, right? They're a, they're a fund, basically. And I believe they announced this week, or maybe it's last, that they purchased a bunch of Wi-Fi tokens. And the blacklist thesis for some of these governance tokens is basically sort of along the lines of what you said, but you know, it's, it's sort of a next step too. So, once you have tokens, once you have governance over the protocol, that gives you voting rights. That gives you the ability to vote in cash flows, potentially, and convert a mere governance token to a capital asset, essentially. I think that's along the lines, possibly, of what VC groups like, and investors like Vance are thinking. Does that sound plausible to you?

• 1:19:49Speaker 02

  I, I do not have enough knowledge or information about like, like that world. So, so I, I can't make an informed decision there, unfortunately.

• 1:19:58David Hoffman?

  So, I'm going to hammer on this one more time and see, just to see if I, I can get something out of you, Andre. The way I evaluate with the Wi-Fi token is that it, it's a great way to earn interest on your crypto dollars, on your stable coins. And at the same time, it's also a great way to responsibly earn governance protocols. And so, why earn, why earn is not only a, you know, crypto dollar yield farmer, but it's also a governance token yield farmer, right? And so, it seems to me that it kind of fits like this barbell strategy of investing, where like, you have your, you know, your non speculative stable coins, and you earn, earn an interest on that. But at the same time, yearn is also

• 1:20:41David Hoffman?

  earning the governance tokens of other protocols, right? And so, the Wi-Fi value capture system has baked into it like two upsides. It's the interest, it's the earnings on the stable coins, and then it's also the earnings on the governance protocols. So, like, it's a, the YFI is a governance token that earns you governance tokens over any DeFi protocol ecosystem's governance token. And so, like, you know, insert your next DeFi protocol here, Compound, Balancer, Metastable, Curve, anybody that has like a governance token that governs over the cash flows.

• 1:21:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  The Yern and YFI token is a system for accruing those tokens. And so it's like a meta governance token accrual system. Does that, did I go wrong with that? Is there something wrong with that analysis? Or is that generally on the right track?

• 1:21:35Speaker 02

  So, so I don't want to admit that that's on the right track. Because then there is a definable financial value you can attach to it. And I really don't want people to do that. Like, like, stop attaching financial value to the dumb token. Just use it for governance. Just make protocol decisions, people.

• 1:21:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  We'll see.

• 1:21:54Speaker 02

  But, but, but yes, your, your, your, your summary is correct in that by virtue of having that token, you make those capital deployment decisions. And by virtue of those decisions, you, you, you, you end up choosing which of those. I don't know if we can call them governance or liquidity tokens, but whichever it is, you, you, you indirectly can make the choice of which ones you actually farm up.

• 1:22:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  The funny thing about markets is that they are so unpredictable. And who would have predicted that such value would be assigned to the YFI tokens? Certainly, it's hard to predict even for folks who are in the space every day. But let's, let's talk more about the, the governance itself. So there is a thriving Yearn governance community. It's one of the most, I would say, organic communities I've seen in, in DeFi. And I think Yern and yourself, Andre, should be really proud of that. Can you talk about some of the decisions that governance has made already? Maybe, you know, one that comes to mind for me was actually a, a fixed cap for the token itself,

• 1:23:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  like an issuance schedule for the token itself. Maybe talk about that or some of the other governance decisions that have already been made.

• 1:23:13Speaker 02

  I I I don't really think there has been an impactful decision made yet.

• 1:23:20Speaker 02

  The first vote I thought was going to to cap issuance and I was kind of happy with that.

• 1:23:26Speaker 02

  And then that got overturned at the end and now we've we've got this open ended issuance, which was interesting. And then substrate had done his synthetics based proposal, which which I really liked. But I'm also I'm also glad that it didn't pass. Specifically because, you know, there's there's there's no reason yet to mint more token. And and and I like to do it the the the need first way around. So so I'm a very strong advocate of of let's identify an expense and then let's vote on that expense. You know, instead of let's have capital and then decide where we deploy it.

• 1:24:10Speaker 02

  There's there's there's definitely a a a lack of of quorum on that one and and which way it's going to go. So so so I find it very entertaining watching. I was annoyed with the the proposal thirty. Because that was that was the issuance of the S and X style system, which I had then coded those contracts. And then an hour before, and and I mean, four was winning by by a resounding mention. And then Andrew Kang went on a whole campaign on Twitter and he ended up getting a bunch of the big holders to to swap their vote. I think it was like an hour or two before closing and then I was sleeping then. So so I I wake up and I see the vote failed.

• 1:24:55Speaker 02

  And that means I wasted all of that time building the smart contract, so I'm annoyed about that. But but that's that's fine.

• 1:25:02Speaker 02

  I I would have preferred spending that time on my vaults, but anyway.

• 1:25:06Speaker 02

  The the which vaults get voted in next was quite a cool one. Because that that allows other communities to rally around it as well. That was vote. Thirty-three, um, and the, the, the link Marines managed to, to overthrow that one quite easily. Um, me being on this podcast, another, another good example. Maybe the best. So, so we'll, we'll, we'll put that right at the top. Um, so, so, but it, it kind of makes sense because we're still early days, but, but for now I'm still seeing a lot of indecisiveness. When it comes to, to the way forward and, and I understand that as well because I, I think a large part of it is a knowledge gap.

• 1:25:49Speaker 02

  Cause like a lot of people, a lot of people bought into this and, and they wanna get strongly involved, but, but I, I am just a dev. Like, like I build, I deploy. So, so I'm, I, I don't have a bunch of marketing materials. I don't have executive summaries there. There aren't, you know, extensive pages of documentation. Um, so, so, so a large part of it, I think is this knowledge gap between what I've built and what they know about it. And like catching up to it and then understanding where are all of the points of control and all of the decisions. So, so I think the indecisiveness is good from that perspective because it, it's indicating to me that people need to learn more first.

• 1:26:29Speaker 02

  But it's, I, I, I can also see the engagement is decreasing because of the indecisiveness. Because a lot of people feel, okay, but you know, if no decisions are going to be made, there's no point in me participating in the decision. Um, so, so I do like to sort of flip it between more serious decisions and then smaller decisions. Just, just to keep it a little bit more engaged. Uh, but, but it's, it's interesting to see how it involves. And, and it, it's very interesting to see the very distinct different communities, you know, the, the people that are, are looking at from a, a purely, a purely token governance perspective. Cause, cause there's definitely a group that doesn't really care about governing.

• 1:27:11Speaker 02

  Um yearn, but instead care about governing the token itself. Um, and, and I, I, I, I do attribute a large part of the token success. And when I say success, I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's acceptance, it's distribution. Um, because I'm very happy with, with the, the, the distribution percentage and you know, how, how, how, how little is centralized to, to a single entity or group. I damn it, I lost my train of thought there because I went into a different thought from the first one. Well, what did I say just before that?

• 1:27:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  You know, so I have a question for you. So, you know, I, I was mistaken. Uh, you, why, why, why fee issuance hasn't been decided yet by the governance process? But you have the platform today on, on bankless. What, what would you like to see? Like personally, what would you, what would be your choice for wifey issuance?

• 1:28:03Speaker 02

  I don't see any reason to issue more. I, I, I, I don't see value in incentivizing liquidity providers because they're just going to move their liquidity as, as soon as, as it's no longer there. The, the, the, the, the rewards and the fees generated by the system, if so chosen, can cover the current operational expenses, which you know are small because that's the beauty of deploying stuff on Ethereum. There's, there's almost no OpEx other than the website. And you know, that cost me a few hundred dollars a month. Um, so, so depending on, on how you want to scale this thing up, there, there isn't a requirement for additional capital.

• 1:28:46Speaker 02

  Now, the one reason why I originally wanted a longer distribution schedule was how I had pictured this play out was the first week goes by and probably no one gives a damn about it. And it's just me sitting there with the little bit of money I have in the reward system. Earning these tokens and I end up having the majority of them. And then I use those tokens I earned as the next week incentive and then hopefully someone else comes in and you know, takes five percent of it and then the next week I use the ones I got again. So, so I, I, I had originally considered a much longer issue in systems because I thought it was going to take a much longer time to get it to a level of distribution where it wasn't just, you know, two or three guys that have all of the tokens in their wallets.

• 1:29:29Speaker 02

  Um, but first week cleared that without any issues. Um, so, so, and, and I'm, I'm confident that a very large portion of the token holders are, are healed farmers or at least involved in the healed space in some fashion so that they are the right people to make the, the protocol level decisions. Um, so, so personally, I, I would like to see a little bit less focus on the token issuance. And, and just touching on the previous point I forgot to mention is, is I, I wanted to comment that I think a large part of the success of the token is because governance controls the token. Cause I think that's something that definitely differentiates it from most other tokens out there.

• 1:30:12Speaker 02

  Um, but, but, but that not being the point now is that, is that there's, there's, there's no, what, what benefit is there assuming non-financial requirements to issuing more? The, the only reason you would is if you wanted to, to add a, a new partner that you think could add value and then you do a standard shared illusion, um, which I don't see happening anytime soon. Uh, I don't see purpose in doing liquidity incentives. There isn't a capital requirement. It's distributed enough to the point where, where the correct people are making the governance decisions. So, so why, why, why add more?

• 1:30:48David Hoffman?

  So I have a potential answer to that question because at, at the beginning of this podcast, you, you came on and said that you're really tired and that you don't sleep very much and that you're kind of overworked and, and you kind of want to take a break. Uh, and I see that as a symptom of this super fair distribution that has gone on, which is a, a one unfortunate repercussion of that is that we don't have a way to fund. Development, right? And again, this goes back to why VCs exist in the first place. And so do you do you see a role for urine governance to direct cash flows to a a fund that pays for, you know, urine development?

• 1:31:33David Hoffman?

  And that could even go to compensating you, Andre, if that's what you're interested in, or it could just go into hiring a an assistant for you, or just building out the development and formalizing the development of the urine system out of either YFI issuance or capital, you know, fees on the capital in the protocol being directed toward the team. Are you interested in either of these two things playing out?

• 1:31:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, so the proposal I proposed on the forum currently, and I'm waiting for people to to discuss before I open a new improvement protocol, is specifically, let's let's redirect all of the current system rewards into a a capital pool, and we take expenses from that. And then whether it's, you know, quarterly or annually or whatever it is, at that point in time, pay out dividends to the token holders. But before then, everything goes to to to to OpEx expenditures. So so that is the proposal I made, but it seems most token holders would rather have the dividends than

• 1:32:39Speaker 02

  an operational company. So we'll see how that one plays out. I'm curious to see. But but but that is what I I currently have suggested. And and to to add on to, I think a large part of my current fatigue is is that that informational gap, that knowledge gap I spoke about like a few minutes ago just now, is that is that a lot of a lot of my energy is being pulled from people trying to understand the system better. And that's a good thing, because they're trying to to to educate themselves to the point where where they are then capable of autonomously doing it themselves. But they need that knowledge transfer first. And and that knowledge transfer is is tapping me out, because because that's

• 1:33:22Speaker 02

  that's that's where all of the engagement is happening. And like, I've I've spent fib till now, you know. I I I haven't really spoken to anyone. It's it's full lockdown year, so I haven't even left the house since then. Um, so so now having high social interaction is is is very draining. Um, but but I think it's to do with that knowledge transfer. And I think when that knowledge transfers has occurred and everyone knows all of the caveats of the system, then then that picture will look better. And and then I think there is enough operational cash flow to incentivize those people to do it in a more full-time or at least committed part-time perspective.

• 1:34:08Speaker 02

  And and and just closing the loop, that's why that's why, again, I I don't think additional token issuance is required other than people that, you know, want to increase their own capital value and or increase their own rewards, which which neither I think are are healthy.

• 1:34:26David Hoffman?

  So Andre, with the Urn system, the Urn protocol, no one can really predict the future because it's up to the governance, right? Like, the governance decides what the future is. However, if you had to guess what Urn would look like in two, three, four years, or maybe what you are hopeful it will look like in that time period, can you kind of paint us a picture of of what you are envisioning when you see a maximally successful Urn protocol?

• 1:34:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, so so there's there's there's always this quote I love to give people, um, because people always assume that I have a plan, or they always assume I thought any of this stuff out. Um, it was in the the Heath Ledger Batman movie where where where he tells Harvey, um, do I look like a guy with a plan? I'm I'm I'm just a dog chasing cars. I I I I wouldn't know what to do with one if I caught up to it. Uh, summarizes me perfectly.

• 1:35:20Speaker 02

  So I I know what I want to build tomorrow. And after I've built that, I know what I want to build after that. But there is no way in hell I'm even going to try and predict what this thing looks like a month from now, let alone two years from now. Um, a month ago, I couldn't have told you. We would be having this conversation now about what has happened and when I started building it in February, definitely not. So, so, so I'm, I'm, I'm not even going to attempt to, to play that prediction game. Um, if you want to know what I'm currently working on, I'll gladly share, but don't tell me, don't ask me further than that because, because I, I, I'm as informed as everyone else is.

• 1:35:58David Hoffman?

  Yeah, okay. So what is actually concretely in the roadmap or not in even in the roadmap, but currently being worked on? What, what are the concrete things that are in development, quote unquote?

• 1:36:08Speaker 02

  Well, the, the delegated vaults, I'm very excited to finish off now. Um, after I've finished the delegated vaults and we've voted in a few more of the, the native vaults and we've added a few more strategies, which probably the next two to three weeks. Um, then I'm planning on going back to Y trade and finishing that off because those leverage trades is still very, very good in terms of, of, of healed on the, on both the LP side and the additional volume on the pool side. And now that we have so much capital sitting in those pools, we, we can do much larger trades, which is also very nice. So, so I'd, I'd like to see that as a sort of, you know, um, stable coin trading platform. Um, I, after that, I did want to go back to, to Y swap my AMM, um, but at this point, you know, uh, one inch is launching one, um.

• 1:36:52Speaker 02

  Black hole swap is coming out with their one, uh, bankruptcy two is now released. So, so, so I'm first going to see if one of these guys covers the bases, um, the way I wanted to do it. And if they do, I'm just going to use their systems because I also don't want to spread out my development capacity too thin.

• 1:37:09Speaker 02

  Rather do one thing well than three things kind of shitty. So, so, so, so that I know I'm going to be busy with for like the next month, um, and then after that I'll reevaluate and see what's going on in this market.

• 1:37:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  Andre, I want to thank you for coming on the Bankless Podcast, even though you didn't have a choice. You were voted into it, but we had fun and we hope you did. I'm hopeful that you get some rest in the coming days. I know the DeFi community, the Ethereum community is thankful for the work that you've contributed. And I love what you said at the ending. It can be a strategic advantage not to have a concrete plan that stretches far into the future and just be agile and flexible. Thank you so much for spending some time with us, Andre.

• 1:37:55Speaker 02

  Thank you for having me, guys. It's nice to have a little break and be able to talk so that there's a little bit of perspective coming back as well. So I really appreciate it.

• 1:38:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  Absolutely. All right, Bankless Nation, some actions for you guys. We will include a link to the Urin Protocol. And remember, this code is tested in prod. So if you put funds in, Andre would be the first to tell you, you could lose them all. We'll also send a link, we'll also drop a link to the Urin Governance Form, and you can see all of the organic activity that is happening there. Lastly, last action item for you, we have a State of the Nation, Episode 7, where we talked with Daryl Lau, who is a governor of the WIFE Protocol. So catch that if you haven't yet. That'll give you some more background

• 1:38:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  on the insanity and the craziness and the fun that is going on with WIFE right now. Lastly, and this is super important in an episode such as this, risks and disclaimers, none of this has been financial advice. Ethereum is risky, DeFi is risky. We say it every single show, you could lose what you put in, but we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the Bankless journey. Thanks a lot.