Pod Insights Bankless AMA with Stefan Ionescu of Reflexer Labs About this episode Stefan Ionescu is a Founder of Reflexer Labs, the team behind the RAI stablecoin (or is it fair to even call it a stablecoin? Tune in to find out!)
Like all our AMAs, the interview is live and incorporates questions from our Inner Circle Discord and live YouTube Chat. These are hosted the 2nd and 4th Wednesday each month, so mark your calendars, tune in, and ask questions!
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Resources:
Reflexer Labs:
https://reflexer.finance/
Stefan on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/stefan__ionescu?s=20
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This Week on Bankless:
🏴 SotN w/ Cryptex & Element (4/13: https://shows.banklesshq.com/p/sotn-42-ethereum-devs-building-defi
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📈 Market Monday (4/12): https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/coinbase-week-market-monday
🎙️Podcast w/ Hester Peirce (4/12): https://shows.banklesshq.com/p/-the-sec-and-defi-hester-peirce
🧢 Weekly Action Recap (4/10): https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/the-coinbase-tsunami-weekly-recap
🗞️ Weekly Rollup (4/9): https://shows.banklesshq.com/p/-rollup-coinbase-ipo-fei-protocol
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Not financial or tax advice. This channel is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This video is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research.
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Transcript 10,657 words · 3 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:13 Ryan Sean Adams? Hey Bankless Nation, welcome to this community, Ask Me Anything. We have the founder of RAI from Reflexer Labs traded a really interesting stablecoin, or is it a crypto dollar? We will get into the terms and definitions in this community, Ask Me Anything. The first time around, we had some technical difficulty with the livestream, so I hope you're hanging in there. If not, this recording will be available on YouTube and of course, as always, on the podcast. Get your questions in on YouTube, we will put them in queue and try to fit them into the show. David, you ready for this?
0:48 David Hoffman? Absolutely, this is a really cool project and I think really in the spirit of this week because this is Coinbase week and this is the week that crypto breaks into the NASDAQ and we are slowly infiltrating the rest of the world, pulling them into the world of crypto. And then, once you're in the world of crypto, we have this brand new project called Reflexer and RAI, which is a self-sovereign stablecoin, not a crypto dollar, but a stablecoin. And so, we're really pioneering in all different directions and once you come into the fold, we have this system that allows you to be self-sovereign without having to rely on the Fed and without having to rely on banks. And so, I think this is, while Coinbase is making a big splash on the legacy markets,
1:33 David Hoffman? we have, on the other side of things, when you go into the rabbit hole, we have these tools that can allow you to just completely remove yourself. So, these bridges from the legacy world into completely self-sovereign finance are getting really, really strong and the end destination is also getting really, really strong. And that end destination, to me, is something like this project that we're going to talk about today, which is Reflexer and RAI.
1:57 Ryan Sean Adams? Yes, so we are doing this because these types of algorithmic stablecoins are a big deal. But what's an even bigger deal is that this is a self-sovereign, completely bankless attempt at some sort of stability asset, stability mechanism for crypto. That means it's purely crypto native, no meatspace dependency. It is truly in code we trust and therefore hits very much the bankless thesis of creating a self-sovereign, independent, global money system for the world. It's still an experiment, but as David said, we are deep down the rabbit hole. So we are trying to figure out what this experiment might yield and what others like it might yield.
2:41 Ryan Sean Adams? One quick disclaimer, I love the vision for this project so much, I am actually an investor and I hope that this project is successful, but if not, Reflexer and RAI, some other project like it, it really fits the spirit of going bankless and why we're doing it. David, anything else to add before we get in with Stefan and dive into the community and ask me anything?
3:03 David Hoffman? Yeah, Amin Soleimani, who's been working with the Reflexer team, coined this term "money gods" and the money god comes from just the fact that we can build something that is out of our control and it in fact controls us. And this is why Bitcoin is so powerful, right? Bitcoin is not something that can be steered by any one or few humans. It is something that just exists and either we can accept that and integrate with it or we can fight it, but generally people who fight Bitcoin lose. Now the Ethereum app layer, I think, allows that same sort of money god-ness, right? Like we can build applications that control us that we cannot control. And I think that's really a big through line that we're gonna have with this conversation
3:46 David Hoffman? with Stefan and overall the through line for why the Ethereum app layer is so cool. And so to me, it's really, really exciting to see applications like Reflexer, like RAI, come into existence that really resonate with the money god ethos or money god thesis about why crypto is so cool.
4:06 Ryan Sean Adams? All right, guys. Before we get into this conversation with Stefan that I know you're going to enjoy, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible. MetaMask is your go-to wallet for the Bankless journey. If you're going Bankless, you need MetaMask, period. Browser and mobile, get them both. This is your tool to unlock the world of DeFi. Here's my favorite part. Now you can swap tokens directly in MetaMask with a single swipe. This has got to be the easiest way to trade Ethereum tokens. Choose a token you own, a token to exchange it with, and get your quotes. If you like what you see, you hit swap. That's it. What makes swaps so useful is what happens behind the scenes.
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6:34 Ryan Sean Adams? All right, everyone, we are tuning into this Ask Me Anything with Stefan Yunesko. He is on the founding team of Reflexer Labs. He's also a brilliant engineer. This is the team behind the asset called RAI, which is going to be the topic of today's community Ask Me Anything. Of course, as usual, get your questions in on YouTube. We will answer those. But the first section is for David and I to actually ask some questions. We get to be greedy. And Stefan, it's great to have you. Welcome to Bankless.
7:06 Speaker 02 My pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me.
7:09 Ryan Sean Adams? Do you know, I really want to start with the high level for folks here, Stefan. And at a high level, I guess the question is sort of open-ended. What problem do you think RAI is solving?
7:21 Speaker 02 Right, so RAI is trying to solve some shortcomings in the usual mechanisms that you see around creating pegged coins, as they call them, or crypto dollars, as the bank fascination calls them. It's mainly the fact that you need, like, we saw kind of a problem with DAI last year in 2020 during Black Thursday, where they kind of struggled to keep DAI close to peg. Like, DAI went way above peg at some point, and they had to do something to bring it back. And the thing that they could have done was to de-peg DAI, so not have it pegged anything, and manage to impose negative interest rates
8:01 Speaker 02 on their holders. So kind of anyone who held DAI was kind of subject to a negative rate that was draining value from them. And that would have made them sell and bring DAI back to the target price or have the peg, as they call it. So we're basically trying to solve problems that are kind of more technical in nature in the pegged coin or stablecoin area.
8:25 Ryan Sean Adams? As I recall, Stefan, this was actually contemplated in some of the discussions in the original DAI design, actually. I forget what it's called, TFRM, something like that, some sort of target reference, right?
8:38 Speaker 02 Target rate feedback mechanism.
8:40 Ryan Sean Adams? Yeah, so like, what's interesting to me is, David and I have made this comment almost on every episode, it feels like, but like, the, the, the, what we're seeing is every experiment in crypto and in DeFi that can be tried will be tried, right? And so, DAI went in its own direction on a number of fronts. They went multi-collateral, they went a bit more governance-driven in terms of their stability design rather than algorithmic. And they don't have the ability to do these negative rates. And so, is RAI sort of a reaction to that? Is it sort of taking some of these concepts and the, the road that was not traveled by DAI and implementing them?
9:18 Speaker 02 It is. On the one hand, I wanted to build this simply to show that the initial Maker team was right, and that it is possible to have an asset that's stable and yet not take anything, and it is possible to have negative rates in crypto. So it was more like curiosity for me to see it can be done and how, and then see how people might use that. So, and I kind of knew about Maker because I, prior to kind of starting to talk with Amin, who's in our founding team, and kind of getting to know him and Nikolai, who also used to work at Maker. I kind of studied Maker for about six months. I just did kind of research on stablecoins and I knew about the purple paper and I knew that they didn't implement TRFM before.
10:01 Ryan Sean Adams? The other, I think, problem that, at least in my mind, this solves, so you're taking this in a different direction, maybe looking to get a better stability mechanism out of it. But, like, the big crypto vision, right, is to have a money system that can operate independently of MeatSpace. And what is MeatSpace, right? MeatSpace is obviously, you know, commercial banking, but it's also, MeatSpace is central banking. MeatSpace is also nation-state governments. I know Amin, in his, in his article that David you referenced, calls, calls this an independent state global reserve. Asset and unit of account independent of the state. This has been part of the crypto vision and we have independent monetary units in the form of Bitcoin,
10:45 Ryan Sean Adams? in the form of Ether today, but these units are not stable. Can you talk about the, I guess, your thoughts on that? Is that part of what Ry is trying to solve as well?
10:57 Speaker 02 Yeah, that's the idea. So we shouldn't like crypto in general. I don't think crypto should fully depend on the dollar or specifically on any monetary policy that's external from the chain. So we should have a unit of account that's just, that just depends on, like it just lives on a blockchain and you can just trust it and it's stable and you can transact with it. So that's kind of the idea, like not depend on the Fed to dictate what happens to what I hold. So yeah, it's pretty, it's pretty much kind of the original crypto vision in a way.
11:27 Ryan Sean Adams? So Stefan, I want to take people to school a little bit here because you know, so someone made the comment I saw on Twitter. It's like, you have to be full time into DeFi and crypto to actually like understand what's going on. And I feel like that's especially true of sectors that are like doing a tremendous amount of innovation. So new projects are coming out in sort of the crypto dollar stablecoin sector all of the time. And it's very difficult for people to come up with. You've got these new acronyms like MFA and you know, Frax and what like, what is all of this stuff? So let's take people to school. I want some kind of an orientation here to help ground the rest of this conversation.
12:09 Ryan Sean Adams? So I think of a few buckets as far as I'm going to generically call them stablecoins. Though I know David wants to have a semantic discussion about what stablecoin actually is. Get to that, but let's, let's start with the first bucket. And I think that's important. And this is stablecoins that are on the one hand, dollar pegged versus stablecoins. On the other hand, that are not pegged to the dollar as a unit of account. Can you talk us through that? So which side does Ry fall on versus other projects and why?
12:44 Speaker 02 So as far as I know, Rye is the only stable asset for now that's not pegged anything. So it's not pegged to the dollar, it's not pegged to Euro or to rather anything. It just has like starting price starts at like, let's say, we started at three point fourteen dollars. That was like Pi was our initial target. And from that point, like Rye and the system behind it uh reprices itself. So it changes the target, it changes kind of the peg where Rye should always come down or up to or it should always come back to.
13:17 Ryan Sean Adams? And just to, just to be clear, uh you guys picked three point one four because you needed a number to start. And you guys just picked Pi because why not? And it there's no, and so the only reason why you picked Pi was because you needed a number. But there's no formal relationship between Rye and Pi moving forward. It just was the starting number and now it's in the past and now it doesn't matter anymore.
13:39 Speaker 02 Yeah, pretty much. So we could have started at one hundred bucks, one thousand, ten thousand. It doesn't really matter. It works the same. It's just maybe the human perception, like you can start really high or really, really low. It's just that.
13:52 Ryan Sean Adams? I'm going to share a screenshot here and this is from the folks at Messari that sort of shows, shows this in the context of the um the possibility trinity. And uh and stable coins, right? So uh what we have on um the right is kind of this uh non-pegged stable coin. This is maybe where where Rye fits. Uh and this um thi- this is different than all of the dollar-pegged stable coins that exist today. So there, there are different really trade-offs here, right? Um but this is similar to like uh you know, a non-pegged dollar stable coin is really similar to a currency of a sovereign nation, right?
14:33 Ryan Sean Adams? So like the, the yen, for instance, it trades against the dollar, but it is not in any way pegged to the dollar, right? And so they have to almost bootstrap that demand for a new unit of account. Any, any just comments in general on some of the trade-offs that you guys are making with the impossibility trinity? And having something that is non-pegged to the dollar?
14:56 Speaker 02 I would say the main advantage in a way is full discretion over setting your own monetary policy. So the system can choose exactly what interest rates it wants. It can choose exactly when it wants to attract capital or repel capital. You have more flexibility on. In general, to change from your monetary policy as opposed to pegged coins.
15:16 Ryan Sean Adams? So the pegged coins, though, they've gone in this direction because I think they've wanted to bootstrap their unit of account demand, right? Because everybody uses the dollar. We all know what the dollar is. Rye is an entirely different unit of account, essentially. And people aren't yet familiar with it. Is that some of the trade off here that you don't? You're not able to bootstrap and say, yeah, you know what one rye is worth because it's always like one dollar or flexes around that rate. Can you talk about that trade off?
15:46 Speaker 02 Right, that's a trade off in terms of kind of integrating rye in the ecosystem. People don't get kind of understand how can something be stable and float. And I'm like, well, you can look at the euro, how it floats against the dollar, or as you said, yen or any other currency. So one, for now, it's kind of, education is the hard part. Kind of telling people that this is stable without just referencing something external to it is the tough part.
16:11 Ryan Sean Adams? All right, guys. So that's lesson one. Dollar pegged versus non-dollar pegged. Rye is non-dollar pegged. Let's talk about another bucket that I think in, you know, stable coins of in terms of collateralized on the one side versus uncollateralized on the other. What is collateralized versus uncollateralized? And which is rye?
16:33 Speaker 02 So rye is exactly like dye. It's over collateralized. It's right, right now, the minimum C ratio collateralization ratio in rye is one hundred and forty five percent. That's for ETH. So you can put ETH in the system and mint rye until your position goes to that minimum collateralization ratio. And below that, you get liquidated again, exactly like in Maker or Dye.
16:57 Speaker 02 On, under collateralized, stable coins are the ones that try to go kind of below one hundred percent backing with collateral or even to zero, and they try to maintain stability with different mechanisms. It's not.
17:13 David Hoffman? Oh, now we lost both camera and audio.
17:18 David Hoffman? One moment, guys, while we wait for Stefan to come back.
17:22 Ryan Sean Adams? Maybe internet connection issue this time. We're not having good luck technically.
17:27 David Hoffman? Oh, oh, he's totally gone. He's totally gone. Alright, well, so what he was saying is that RAI is collateralized, just like DAI, and so it's very similar to a CDP mechanism. So you submit Ether and then you can mint RAI, but you can only mint a lesser value of RAI than what you collateralize. And I actually don't know those parameterization ratios at the top of my head. Probably something around 150%, Ryan, do you know?
17:55 Ryan Sean Adams? I don't know off the top of my head, but you know, 150% seems like the magic number for DAI, and so I think a lot of collateralized stablecoins have sort of adopted that.
18:04 David Hoffman? There we go. Stefan, okay, so we lost you real quick, and so we were kind of filling in the gaps. We talked about how RAI is very similar to a CDP, where you stick in your ETH, you collateralize your ETH, and then you mint RAI, just like how you mint DAI. But is there, what's the parameterization ratio for Ether and RAI? Like, is it 150%? What's that number?
18:26 Speaker 02 It's 145%, so it's a bit lower than the one, the usual one in Maker.
18:31 Ryan Sean Adams? Can we talk about some of the trade-offs, right? So collateralized, an example of that is RAI, an example of that is DAI. Uncollateralized, an example of that is maybe FAE? Not sure. What are some examples out there? Maybe empty set dollar? Maybe the original basis cash design would be examples of these things. So what are the trade-offs on collateralized versus uncollateralized? It seems like, you know, one of the trade-offs has got to be, well, with collateralized, you've got something backing it. And so there's like a bottom level of value that the thing can sink to, and uncollateralized, there's like nothing backing it. But how do these trade-offs appear to users?
19:15 Speaker 02 So when you have something backing your Bitcoin or stablecoin, people tend to trust that a bit more. Like, we saw in practice that basis, that doesn't really work. Like, there's always a bank run. People just sell that until it goes to almost zero, so it doesn't really work. You need something to instill credibility to other people. Otherwise, it doesn't work.
19:38 Ryan Sean Adams? Okay, as long as we are taking folks to school, then we've covered two collateralized, uncollateralized, dollar pegged versus non-dollar pegged. RY is non-dollar pegged collateralized. Let's talk about this other area that I think is important, which is governed stability versus something that's more algorithmic. And what I mean by that is, you know, the stability mechanism, the like interest rates for a CDP in Maker are determined by Maker governance, those that own the MKR holder. That's not the case with RY. RY is maybe more algorithmic stability on that side of the spectrum. These are my own terms, but you tell me, like, what's RY?
20:23 Ryan Sean Adams? And what is, how do you minimize governance? How is that different?
20:26 Speaker 02 Yeah, so RY is a bit different compared to DAI because we also have stability fees for every collateral type that's in the system. But in our case, stability fees are more or less fixed or bounded. They kind of price the risk that an asset brings to the protocols. For example, we can price kind of the risk for Ether at 2% interest per year. So when you open a position, you need to pay kind of 2% interest per year to keep it open. We have something else that's used to, for stability, to actually stabilize RY. And that lever is called the redemption rate. That thing is a number on, in a smart contract, that every second is multiplied by the current
21:10 Speaker 02 moving peg that RY has, and it results in a new moving peg for RY. So if the, if the moving peg for RY right now is, let's say, $3, that number, in one second from now, that number will be multiplied by that current peg, and it will result in a new peg. And that's how kind of the redemption rate changes the moving peg that RY has. And by changing the peg, it kind of imposes either a negative or a positive interest rate on holders. Because the idea is that when the moving peg goes up, we have a positive interest rate. So you kind of burn something by holding RY. And when there's a negative interest rate, you lose value by holding RY.
21:55 Ryan Sean Adams? So this minimizes governance. And why is governance minimization important for self-sovereign money?
22:02 Speaker 02 We at Refector generally believe that human discretion will be the main thing that will make an asset unstable in the future. So, human discretion in general means that anyone can come, they can impose their will on the majority of the people and they can say, "I want this thing to work like X," even if it's suboptimal. So, we think that the ideal way to build this stable asset is to just put the system in charge, put an algorithm in charge and let it work.
22:33 Ryan Sean Adams? Yeah, in a way, this is a very Austrian idea. It's a very Bitcoiner idea. It's a very Hayek idea of like, there should be these private money systems that try all of these various experiments and the best one will win out. This is why, it drives me crazy, by the way, when you have somebody who's maybe a Bitcoin maximalist, who says things like, you know, Ether and Ethereum-based money systems, that's all fiat, right? Like, that's not Austrian at all. Like, hard money, fixed supply is the only way to go. I'm like, Ethereum's trying a massive amount of Austrian hard money experiments that don't have human discretion.
23:16 Ryan Sean Adams? Like, go look at RAI, which brings me to maybe in our education series here to get grounding the last bucket here, which is trusted versus trustless stable coins. And I think this is an important one, because in order to be on the more trustless side of the spectrum, and guys, it is a spectrum here. There's nothing that humanity has ever created or can create that is 100% trustless. But the more trustless it is, the more self-sovereign a money system can become. If you believe in the protocol sync thesis as David and I do, then more trusted systems will sync to the bottom of this. But like, trust can come about
23:58 Ryan Sean Adams? in the form of governance, as we just talked about, but also in the form of what collateral assets are backing the system. And this is what's kind of interesting. Here's another chart from Messari. I think, David, I see some of your Handiwork in here from from some triangles you put out on Bankless. Yeah, we like triangles. But so what we have here is a comparison of of money systems, right? You've got the reserve asset at the bottom. And if we're looking at old analog systems that used to be based on gold. And then dollars were really collateralized at one point in time before we went off the gold standard. Buy that gold as a reserve store of value asset. And then kind of banking was built on top of that.
24:42 Ryan Sean Adams? This is similar to what RAI is doing. Ether, as I understand it, is the collateral for this. And why Ether? Maybe you'll tell us, but I think it's probably because it is the most trustless collateral source. Found on Ethereum. And then you could build a more stable currency on top of that collateral resource. And then, of course, we have DeFi that can be built on top of this and and tap into this. Can you talk about that? Am I right that Ether is the the form of collateral? And can you talk about why Ether?
25:16 Speaker 02 That's right. So the main reason why we picked ETH. It's is because it's simple. It's the most trustless asset on Ethereum. And it's also simple to governance minimize the protocol in general when you just have Ether. Like you don't have external trust assumptions like UADC, for example, or RAPBTC. So you don't need to kind of fear that some other party can just take your collateral and the system breaks. And it's also, again, easy to governance minimize the protocol. So we can automate everything. We just have one collateral type. It's pretty easy to kind of put some smart contracts, put some code in place, make every all the parameters kind of change themselves. And people just put ETH in the system and it just works. Like, that's where we want to get. That's the point where we want to get.
26:01 Ryan Sean Adams? Why did Maker go in the direction of multi-collateral? Versus you guys are remaining in the direction of Isom's part of the original die, you know, single collateral die version, which was just Ether. I mean, I think one of the reasons I've I've heard is so that they can have more economic bandwidth. Let's call it to to increase the supply of DAI. Can you talk about maybe some some trade offs you guys are making there? Why they went in this direction versus you?
26:29 Speaker 02 That's right. So kind of ETH, the kind of total market cap of ETH is kind of the max kind of value that RAI can have. ETH is kind of the economic bandwidth that that's kind of limiting us. And we took this decision again because we want to governance minimize a protocol. We want to have at least one of these protocols that just doesn't depend on humans, even if it maybe remains a bit smaller than DAI or other systems. We can use it and we don't need to trust like some other third party that and we don't need to think that the system breaks. So we just want to have like one of these experiments that just works and doesn't depend on anyone else.
27:08 David Hoffman? So just to drive this point home, RAI, RAI has committed to not ever including any other collateral other than Ether into its collateral type, because the introduction of other collateral would be would necessitate the requirement of actually voting that collateral in, one, and also trusting the issuer of that other asset. When Ethereum was born in the first block and also the next like 10,000 blocks, there was only one asset and that one asset was Ether. There were no other assets. Other assets came to Ethereum because humans issued those assets. Those assets can't be used as collateral inside of RAI
27:49 David Hoffman? because one, it would have to be like human determined to be included. And also it would be a trust mechanism on those other collateral. So RAI will only ever be collateralized by Ether ever due to the nature of Ether as the primary asset of Ethereum.
28:06 Speaker 02 Yep, that's right. That's right. So it's again, this this system should be simple so we can governance minimize it and it should be trustless. These are the goals. We took this decision because we want to fulfill these two.
28:18 Ryan Sean Adams? The math here is pretty simple here, guys, too, as far as like we've called Ether a trustless source, a source of trustless economic bandwidth in the past. And so if Ether's total market cap is like 1.45 trillion at some point in the future, that means RAI can at maximum be like close to a Trillion. It can't be beyond that because it's using Ether as its source of collateral. So that's kind of the constraint that you were talking about. Of course, that's less of a constraint if Ether is 10 trillion, 20 trillion, 30 trillion dollars, right? So there's a little bit of a, I guess, a bull case assumption for people valuing
29:01 Ryan Sean Adams? trustless collateral and trustless economic bandwidth that is part of the die case here. David, I want you to maybe introduce kind of your question here because I saw you tweet this out a couple of weeks ago about the semantic definition and the difference between crypto dollars and stable coins. Because crypto dollars is also a term the industry uses. Maybe you can explain that and introduce that.
29:23 David Hoffman? Right. I saw Stefan tweet out, I think perhaps out of frustration that people kept on calling RAI a stable coin. When he's like, no, RAI is not a stable coin. Because people, when they say stable coins, they're talking about on-chain dollars, right? In my mind, the right, and this is just a semantics conversation. This is like, what words do we use to describe these things? In my mind, if we're going to use the term for things, tokens that are redeemable for a dollar or worth $1 on Ethereum, we should call them dollars, especially USDC. Let's just call those dollars. Because it's not like when I have dollars in my Wells Fargo bank account, I call them Wells Fargo dollars, even though that's what they are. They are a claim on dollars that is provided to me by Wells Fargo.
30:08 David Hoffman? USDC is a claim on dollars provided by Circle. USDC is just a dollar. If you want to get more specific, we can call it a crypto dollar. Stable coins don't have the term dollar in them. And so, stable coins to me as a word are illustrative of a coin, a token, that is stable. And if it was a dollar, we would call those a stable dollar coin, or a crypto dollar, or a dollar. But I think a stable coin leaves room for specifically something that is not a dollar. Because if it was a dollar, we would just use the term dollar. And so in my mind, RAI is actually the only stable coin on Ethereum. Stefan, how do you feel about this take?
30:48 Speaker 02 That's pretty much correct. Again, I'm Generally, when I try, when I explain something, I'm trying not to fight people. Like, they have like a certain framework that they use to think about things. And I'm like, okay, you can use that framework. I'm trying to kind of build a new one. That's kind of right. A couple of years ago, like even before DAI was released, stablecoin was meant to mean low volatility or dampened volatility compared to something, compared to ether or compared to anything that you can think of. So RAI is kind of, at least to my knowledge, the only stablecoin for now.
31:22 David Hoffman? I think also importantly, the calling crypto dollars stablecoins does too much, gives too much to what the dollar is. Because the dollar is perhaps actually not all that stable because it loses value every single year. And perhaps it doesn't lose that much value. But the reason why people assume the dollar is stable is because we don't have any other frame of reference for it. Stability is always a referential thing. It's always relative. You can't have stability in one asset without comparing it to another asset. And so now that we have something like RAI, maybe we'll actually be able to chart the value of dollars versus RAI.
32:04 David Hoffman? And we'll find out that RAI is actually a better store hold of wealth over time, perhaps making it a better stablecoin than a dollar.
32:13 Speaker 02 Right, for now, right now, we're still at the beginning. The system is still kind of tried out. It's still kind of a demo and it's still an experiment. And I would say that RAI for now is kind of devaluing faster than the dollar. People still are still learning about the system and they don't really know how to interact with it. But I guess, yeah, we will see how RAI will behave in one or two, five years from now.
32:38 Ryan Sean Adams? David, just for what it's worth, man, I'm on your team on this one. Like, I definitely believe the term stablecoin is more accurate for something like RAI and is not accurate for something like USDC. Those are more crypto dollars. However, if we're gonna kind of push that narrative forward, even if it's the true narrative, I think it's gonna be an uphill battle, my friend, because the whole industry just buckets all. of it and calls it all stable coins and there's not unless you're deep down the rabbit hole. I don't think the average user knows the difference between using USDC versus DAI versus versus RY and the different trust assumptions that you're taking on there. But it's definitely a narrative battle. I'm I'm happy to fight.
33:24 Ryan Sean Adams? Progress.
33:25 David Hoffman? This is 100% a semantics conversation and Stefan as the CEO of a brand new DeFi app. I can totally understand why you are not interested in fighting that fight. However, we will fight that fight. We will fight that fight for you. That's what Bankless does.
33:38 Ryan Sean Adams? Well, the other, the way, the way Stefan can help really is like, or RY can help is get on the radar. Right. Is like be successful. That's what will really turn the conversation. So can we talk about that? Stefan is like, so how many weeks or months are you guys from from launch to mainnet at this point in time?
33:59 Speaker 02 About two months. We're close. On 17th this month, we will have two months since we launched.
34:05 Ryan Sean Adams? Okay.
34:06 Speaker 02 So it's not a ton of time.
34:07 Ryan Sean Adams? So two months in, let's talk about this a little bit. First, so post-launch, how has RY maintained stability? What were kind of some of your expectations and how has it actually gone? And while you talk, I might bring up CoinGecko to sort of, we could focus on YouTube and see this on the charts. But how has it done as far as, you know, stability maintenance?
34:30 Speaker 02 So in the beginning, for a couple of weeks, actually in the first month, RY traded way above kind of its moving peg for a long time. There was kind of a ton of demand because we had some incentives in the system that made people just trade RY way above the moving peg. Now it's a bit more stable. So it managed like up for one month, it managed to go below the moving peg. And then the moving peg started to go up because up until that point, it just went down, down, down. Because if RY was devaluing itself and now it's starting to go up again. So we kind of expect in the long run, we hope and we expect to see RY kind of just oscillating around that moving peg and not just continuously devaluing itself.
35:16 Ryan Sean Adams? So what is that moving peg then? Is that the the pie three three dollars and fourteen cents?
35:21 Speaker 02 So that was the initial moving peg and now it's around three point oh two because we were also kind of tuning the smart contract that that's in charge with kind of changing the moving peg inside the system. And now kind of it's tuned, but we're still waiting on the market to kind of learn about RAI and learn how it works. So right now it's about three point oh two dollars.
35:45 Ryan Sean Adams? How has that performed versus your hopes or expectations?
35:49 Speaker 02 It's pretty much in line with them. I was expecting people to trade way above the moving peg and why devaluing itself. I think we will still see a couple of weeks of that, if not a couple of months. But at some point, I we hope like by pushing kind of educating our community, we hope to see kind of RAI stabilizing stabilizing itself a bit more.
36:11 David Hoffman? So Stefan, I actually started tinkering with this around launch a couple of days after after launch. And as bankless listeners might know, I'm really bullish on Ether. And so I put some Ether into into Reflexer and I borrowed some RAI. And then I sold RAI into Uniswap for more Ether and I put that Ether back into Reflexer. And so not only was that good because Ether price went up and I got more Ether, but also RAI has gone down in price. So my collateral that I leveraged up, which is not financial advice, don't do that unless you know what you know what you're doing. That went up and then the what I owe went down.
36:50 David Hoffman? And so when I finally repay my RAI, I'm gonna have to buy that off the secondary market and then and then go back to Reflexer and and burn it. And then I can get my ETH back. So yeah, pat myself on the back. That that was a good move. Let's talk about these market forces, market dynamics. Why? Why did you suspect that RAI would devalue itself initially? Why was that your your assumption? Is it because of degens like me?
37:17 Speaker 02 Yes, and also, generally, you can see dollar coins, pet coins, trading slightly above the peg kind of for long periods of time. So we were kind of expecting, especially in the beginning, RAI to devalue itself in order to kind of bring the market price down.
37:36 Speaker 02 This kind of, and also the fact that we have a, an incentives campaign running, that kind of messed a bit with how the system works. We kind of expected the system, or RAI, to go down in value at least initially.
37:51 David Hoffman? Okay, and so what, what do you expect to happen out in, in the long run? Do you expect it, like, let's go out two years, let's go out in the next two years. What would you expect RAI to do o- over that timeframe, or is that even a possible question to ask?
38:07 Speaker 02 It's tough to say, because the system is just meant to look at what the market does, and then it reacts to the market. So if the market trades RAI at a premium, then RAI will go down. If it trades RAI at a discount, it will go up. So it's really hard to say, like, in two years, what will happen. My, I would say that, at least in next year, RAI might have a slight bias to go down. Because again, there will be kind of adoption, there might be demand, and people will trade RAI at a premium.
38:37 David Hoffman? Okay, so if there is RAI demand, that is going, what is that going to do to the RAI price?
38:45 Speaker 02 So if, if like, the market price of RAI on Uniswap, for example, is above the target that we want, this target will start to go down, because the system wants the market to bring the market price down and close to the target, even kind of below the target. So kind of, there is kind of, we, we saw that in our models when we kind of simulated RAI. We saw that if there is kind of a continuous premium on the market price, RAI will just probably reprice itself to zero, which is like, not that good. So we have some ideas now to kind of tinker with the controller and make it work, even if there's kind of a constant premium for a long period of time.
39:26 Speaker 02 But that's kind of what you can expect. So if the, if we don't do, like, we will change some things, but if we don't do something now, you will kind of see a slight bias to go down in terms of kind of RAI value.
39:37 David Hoffman? So the way Amin shows this or describes this is kind of like as a spring, right? It kind of like oscillates back and forth. But the the goal of the spring, the controller, as you mentioned, is to restore and return Ry to some equilibrium point.
39:55 Speaker 02 Right, the idea is that in Ry's case, there's not a fixed equilibrium, like the target changes. It's not like fixed to one dollar or to something, if the target itself changes instead of doing something else to bring the market price to a target.
40:12 David Hoffman? And what determines what that target is? I think you mentioned this earlier, but that's always the part that gets people hung up and including me.
40:21 Speaker 02 The system itself, so we just said in the beginning, like Ry is this, like it's 3.14 bucks inside the protocol. And from that point on, just the controller or like, yeah, the smart contract that changes the moving peg just did its job and changed the moving peg down. Because it wanted people to just sell Ry and bring the market price back down to the moving peg.
40:44 David Hoffman? And what are the inputs to that system?
40:48 Speaker 02 So kind of the controller, the PID controller kind of has three terms. It has P, I, and D. P is the proportional, so it kind of takes into account the current difference between the market price of Ry and the target that we want for Ry. The integral kind of sums the error that kind of over, let's say, 24 hours, that all the errors that we saw kind of between markets and target price. And it kind of sums all of these and then it sums the I term with the P term. And then it kind of spits out the result and that result is kind of the pace at which the moving peg changes in the protocol. And that basically the market kind of affects what that pace is and how the moving peg changes.
41:31 Speaker 02 Like if Amin likes to use this example, if Joe Lubin comes tomorrow and puts like 10 billion in ETH in the system. He can crash the protocol and then the moving peg will quickly start to go up. Because it wants people to buy Ry and bring the market price back up. So in a way, kind of the market decides.
41:51 David Hoffman? Is it something like a trailing average of of Ry price? Is that kind of the net effect of this or is that not accurate?
42:00 Speaker 02 Uh, not really, like you can think of that in terms of the integral term, uh, but it's not really a trailing.
42:07 Ryan Sean Adams? Uh.
42:07 Speaker 02 It's not, it's just, it just is. So the price just is. And then at every couple of hours, the system says, okay, the market price is this, I want this to happen. So I will make the moving peg now go that way. And that's it. Like it just is.
42:22 Ryan Sean Adams? And is there, is there an oracle in this system coming from the Uniswap trading pair?
42:27 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah. So we have, uh, we use, we use Chainlink for ETH/USD, uh, for now. And we use Uniswap B2 or pool to get the right ETH price. And then using Chainlink, we get to raw USD and then that goes in the controller.
42:40 Ryan Sean Adams? Did I, did I notice a hint of, uh, uh, wishing for better oracles in that, in that, that comment? Yeah, perhaps talk about that.
42:49 Speaker 02 We, we love Chainlink, like it was really easy to use them. We still want to use something that doesn't really need human management. So ideally also another Uniswap pool that just takes the ETH price and we use that in the system.
43:03 Ryan Sean Adams? Do you think that's coming?
43:06 Speaker 02 Hopefully, yes, especially with, uh, Uniswap V3. So hopefully, yeah.
43:10 Ryan Sean Adams? What's so interesting about this from a high level, right? Is we've, we've had kind of like David uses term money gods, right? Which is really the, the math or the code, the, the, the protocol behind the, the force of money, right? So most famously, the trust in code for Bitcoin is there shall be 21 million and fixed supply, and we cut it in half every four years. The trust in code for something like RAI is you have ETH and then it's this PID. That's, that's the code, the spring mechanism behind the system is the thing that you're trusting in. And that is all written in smart contract code on Ethereum.
43:50 Ryan Sean Adams? So it is also equally immutable as the entire Ethereum platform. I think that's super cool.
43:57 Speaker 02 Yeah, that's, that's what we're shooting for. So many people ask like, but why not put more collateral types in RAI? And I'm like, well, we can have RAI and then we can have other systems like RAI, which would be great. So like nothing stops us from experimenting a bit more with money gods.
44:15 Ryan Sean Adams? Okay, very cool. We're going to get back to this conversation with Stefan. I know David and I have dominated. I've just got a couple more questions about how RAI has done since launch. And then we're going to get into some of the listener questions and maybe we'll get some spicy takes from you Stefan about some of the other Elgo coins that are out there in recent events. But before we do that, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible.
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47:21 Ryan Sean Adams? So Stefan we talked about the one measure of success of RAI as being a the price stability of RAI as a unit right now I'm showing a dashboard that is on the reflexor.finance website because I want to ask you about another success criteria of a an aspiring staple coin and that is total supply how many units are out there right now so how many units of RAI are out there right now what is the market cap of RAI and is that meeting your expectations so far
47:54 Speaker 02 So the market cap is around 100 million dollars right now the supply kind of flows between 32 and 34 million RAI it's pretty much in line with what I expected we actually expected a bit less simply because people don't yet understand right so it's going pretty well
48:12 Ryan Sean Adams? You know mentally I mentally for a second there that math didn't check out to me but then of course I remembered that rise of course worth $3 right and not $1 so it you know that math checks out now let's talk about another I guess area of the success of a staple coin that is what it's being used for ultimately a stable Bitcoin has to ascend through a, I guess, monetization path. Maybe the first step, some would say, is being used as a collateral source for other assets, maybe a collateral source in DeFi. But eventually, you've got to start on being used as a medium of exchange and a unit of account,
48:55 Ryan Sean Adams? and that can happen sporadically in all sorts of different ways, as we've seen with Bitcoin and Ether so far and other stablecoins. Where are you seeing the use cases for RAI right now? And where do you expect to see them in the future?
49:08 Speaker 02 Right now, I would say use cases are pretty much DeFi-centric. So kind of money markets, derivatives, so that kind of stuff. Actually, RAI can be used in two money markets right now, and we will have a third one by the end of the month. So we have like money markets on pre-Im and on Fuse. And we're also working with a couple of people, for example, to add RAI as a collateral type in projects like Uma and other synthetic platforms that will probably come in next months.
49:36 Ryan Sean Adams? So what's the plan to grow? This is a question from, actually, someone else on the Bankless team, our editor. What's the question to grow from 100 million where you are today? Which is not too shabby, by the way. In the not-too-distant past, that was where DAI was. In fact, I think, David, if I'm remembering correctly, when we had Mariano on, it was like around 100 million or so. That was in 2020, so sort of mid-2020. You guys are already there. What's the plan to get to 1 billion, 10 billion, 100 billion?
50:10 Speaker 02 Right. I think it's mainly use cases. So as you said, RAI needs to become a medium of exchange on Ethereum. So people need to use it for something more than just DeFi. They need to use it for payroll. They need to use it for bounties. So I would say implanting the idea of RAI as money is important for RAI to grow.
50:31 David Hoffman? So this brings me to a question from one of our listeners, came in from the Discord, Iggy. Does Reflex Labs have a token yet? And like, of course, we're talking about RY as a token, a monetary token. Is there a token associated with Reflex or Labs? And if yes, what does that do?
50:54 Speaker 02 Yeah, so we, we plan to have a token. Tomorrow, we will actually have the first Genesis community distribution for that token. The idea is that the token is very similar to MKR in a way, because the protocol RY is very similar to DAI. The token will act mainly as a backstop for the system. So we will protect the system. It will kind of ensure the system against a black swan event, for example. And in the long run, even if like RY is meant to be governance minimized, like very, very few components will be governed by humans. There will be some things like oracles, for example, that need to be upgraded in the long run. And people can vote on those upgrades using the token.
51:39 David Hoffman? And then is it also theoretically possible to vote out governance? Like, we're like, oh, you know, we've upgraded to Uniswap V3, there's liquidity on Uniswap V3. We don't really see any viable like upgrade paths ahead of us. Which means that the only viable upgrade path after that is to vote to have no more votes ever. Is that something that you guys consider?
52:02 Speaker 02 That's what we want to do, although the idea is that like we remove control, we remove most of the control. We kind of show the community that we're very serious about not having humans in the protocol. And then we hope that the community will just take, will take our kind of position and they will vote most of the other remaining control out. If possible, if not, they need to decide.
52:25 David Hoffman? Right, so it's a, it's a governance minimization process and hopefully it ends at, you know, zero governance. But, but there's more to the, to the token as well. You, you talked about it's a backstop for the system. So let's talk about that for a little bit. But maybe the, maybe let's also talk about the way that the system as a whole captures value in the relationship of the FLX token in that scenario.
52:47 Speaker 02 Right, so again, FLX is very similar to MKR. It has kind of exactly the same mechanism for now. There is kind of a stability fee inside a protocol. People need to pay that stability fee when they mint RY. These stability fees accrue in the protocol's balance sheet. And after a certain point, the system itself will try to auction a portion of these stability fees in exchange for FLX tokens. And then these tokens are automatically burned.
53:16 Ryan Sean Adams? For the FLX token itself, is there any sort of incentive system that you guys have going, any kind of liquidity mining? What does that look like?
53:25 Speaker 02 Most of our campaigns and rewards right now are focused on kind of growing RY, having liquidity to make sure that Uniswap is liquid, that the price feed cannot be manipulated easily. We don't really have any plans for FLX. We kind of focus on growing the protocol, making sure RY is healthy. And then we will see if something else comes up.
53:47 Ryan Sean Adams? Very cool. Here's a question from Bankless Listener Above Average Joe. Is Float on your radar? And if so, how would you compare their plan against RY? And I've got to be honest, I actually don't know what Float is. Maybe you do, Stefan.
54:02 Speaker 02 Yeah, it's another attempt or design at creating a non-peg stable asset. I don't think it's live yet. I just heard about the protocol. I didn't really check it.
54:15 Speaker 02 I think they wrote an article about them and us and comparing us. I didn't really check them in depth.
54:22 Ryan Sean Adams? Can we talk about that as a category? Because we're in kind of recent news. Faye has been an attempt at a crypto dollar, maybe using our terminology, that is uncollateralized and that has recently come to the scene with like with a massive amount of market value at the very beginning. It's been a little bit shaky since that. What's your take on Faye and similar designs?
54:53 Speaker 02 I would maybe just comment about mechanism design in general.
54:58 Speaker 02 A mech- I don't think a mechanism should force the market to do something. I think the market should be allowed to do anything. Uh, the mechanism should adapt what the market uh does, not like not the other way around. So I think people who, anyone who builds a protocol or a mechanism should take that into account.
55:17 Ryan Sean Adams? And is that something that they didn't do? I I haven't been tracking Faye myself to the nth degree, but it seemed that there are a lot of kind of non-mechanism, human intervention sorts of decisions that were involved and are continuing to be involved to get it back to stability, what it needs to be. Is is that sort of what you're commenting on?
55:39 Speaker 02 Yes, I guess. I didn't really analyze their mechanism kind of in in detail. I just know that they they probably need to pivot right now. Uh, I think that's what the team is doing and I hope that they manage to bring uh Faye back to one dollar.
55:58 Ryan Sean Adams? What are some?
55:59 Speaker 02 System.
55:59 Ryan Sean Adams? Do you thi- do you think uh maybe this is a philosophical question, but do you think uncollateralized stablecoins can ever be or crypto dollars can ever be successful? Or are they fundamentally flawed?
56:11 Speaker 02 We have an example, a model. Uh, there's kind of an asset called Frax that's uh right now backed mostly by USDC, uh but their capitalization ratio is on average below one hundred percent. And they managed to kind of make that work up until this point, and it's working pretty well.
56:30 Speaker 02 I think people might manage to build something that's maybe below one hundred percent. But in general, I don't really see these mechanisms kind of long lasting. In general, I kind of think over capitalization is the security buffer that every stable asset needs to have.
56:46 Ryan Sean Adams? So Frax, to your point, that's kind of a hybrid, right? It's not completely.
56:49 Speaker 02 Yeah, it's a hybrid.
56:50 Ryan Sean Adams? Realized.
56:50 Speaker 02 Yeah.
56:51 Ryan Sean Adams? Um, what other stablecoin designs are out there that that you do actually like?
56:57 Speaker 02 I mean, die, of course, because we we took inspiration from them. Um, I just hope they would at some point maybe take the same decision that we took and they detach from the dollar and have negative rates.
57:11 Ryan Sean Adams? Do you know what? It's like I um, I actually like, I get where you're coming from. And there's an element of me that hopes for that, but um, there's also an element of like, I'm glad that experiment is running on the side and that RAI has its own experiment and that both of those experiments can come to fruition. We get to see what the best experiment actually was. I feel like that adds some additional uh, resiliency to all of Ethereum's monetary experiments. Um, but I get where you're saying. I've got another question coming in from the Discord about plans to migrate RAI to Ethereum Layer two. What are plans there?
57:47 Speaker 02 So we cannot really migrate the protocol itself, like smart contracts are already deployed. We cannot really migrate the all the ether that's in the protocol. We can instead bring right L two, for example, on Loopring or some other chain, side chain or L two where it can be traded or used in DeFi. And that I think that's the long-term plan.
58:09 David Hoffman? And the Reeve, the the RAI system, the protocol has to actually stay on the L one to maintain that governance minimization, uh, because L twos are don't have the same level of trust assurances that the L one does. RAI can go anywhere, but the RAI uh, credit facility, the actual protocol, the actual application that has to stay on L one, right?
58:32 Speaker 02 Yeah, that's the idea. So we we we need RAI to live in Manhattan and then it can kind of go and take a trip on other streets or cities or whatever. So yeah, that's that's the idea.
58:44 Ryan Sean Adams? Love that Manhattan analogy. Uh, Stefan, uh, for folks that have been intrigued by this entire conversation in the Bankless Nation and they're looking to kind of get involved in what Reflexer and what RAI is up to you, how can they get involved?
59:00 Speaker 02 I think the best way is to check our Twitter. So we are at Reflexer Finance and we also have links to our Discord there and our website.
59:09 David Hoffman? And that will be in the show notes as well.
59:13 Ryan Sean Adams? Guys, of course, if you are a Dgen like my co-host David Hoffman here, you can also experiment with going margin long on your ETH using the Ry platform. There's definitely some alpha to earn if you do it well. But of course, risks and disclaimers. As I say that, ETH is risky, so is margin, so is crypto in general. In fact, all of DeFi is risky. You could lose what you put in.
59:38 David Hoffman? ETH is risky and re-ETH on margin is even riskier.
59:42 Ryan Sean Adams? Thanks, David. I feel like you said that for yourself, too. We are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but thanks so much for joining us on the Bankless journey.
59:54 Speaker 02 Thanks for having me.
59:55 David Hoffman? Thank you, Savan. Hey, we hope you enjoyed the video. If you did, head over to Bankless HQ right now to develop your crypto investing skills and learn how to free yourself from banks and gain your financial independence. We recommend joining our daily newsletter, podcasts and community as a Bankless Premium subscriber to get the most out of your Bankless experience. You'll get access to our market analysis, our alpha leaks and exclusive content, and even the Bankless token for airdrops, raffles and unlocks. If you're interested in crypto, the Bankless community is where you want to be. Click the link in the description to become a Bankless Premium subscriber today. Also, don't forget to subscribe to the channel for in-depth interviews with industry leaders,
1:00:37 David Hoffman? Ask Me Anythings and weekly rollups where we summarize the week in crypto and other fantastic content. Thanks, everyone, for watching and being on the journey.
Previous SotN #42: Ethereum Devs Building DeFi | Preston Van Loon and Will Villanueva Next ROLLUP: 3rd Week of April (BTC & ETH ATH, $COIN, Berlin Upgrade, Gary Gensler SEC, Bull Market) Page updated October 26, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated