AMA#1 - Kain Warwick of Synthetix

Kain Warwick, Founder of the Synthetix Platform, presents himself to the Bankless Nation for a live AMA! We ask him anything! No question off limits. This is a BONUS episode. Regular podcast episode (#26) will be released tomorrow. ----- GO BANKLESS WITH THESE SPONSOR TOOLS: ⚔️ GODS UNCHAINED - TRADING CARD GAME https://bankless.cc/godsunchained - you own the cards - start a free account, play and trade https://godsunchained.com/! 🧙‍♀️ POLYMARKET - BET ON CRYPTO https://bankless.cc/polymarket - bet your beliefs! - use it to bet on DeFi outcomes https://bankless.substack.com/p/how-to-bet-on-defi-with-polymarket! 🌈 AAVE - LEND & BORROW YOUR CRYPTO W/O A BANK https://bankless.cc/aave - earn some interest! 💸 AMPLFORTH - MONETARY EXPERIMENT FOR BASE MONEY https://bankless.cc/AMPL-MINE - learn about this experiment! ----- We do AMAs every 2nd and 4th Thursday https://bankless.substack.com/p/announcing-bankless-amas-every-2nd of the month. Become a Bankless member https://bankless.substack.com/subscribe to get access to the Zoom Webinar and ask questions to future AMA guests like Kain directly! Here's the video recording https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLmkdAgtxf3aiprYrf7xLfJSVYxxoD9GRr. Kain is the founder of Snythetix, a popular synthetics and derivatives market on Ethereum. The Bankless Nation asks him questions about: High gas fees yams lol Yield farming Future vision for synthetics DeF in a Layer 2 Central bank digital currencies The final boss Eth2 What he learned from 2017 Bull market price predictions! And more.... ----- Don't stop at the show! Subscribe to the Bankless newsletter program http://bankless.substack.com/ Visit the official Bankless website for resources http://banklesshq.com/ Follow Bankless on Twitter https://twitter.com/BanklessHQ Follow Ryan on Twitter https://twitter.com/ryansadams Follow David on Twitter https://twitter.com/TrustlessState Follow DeFi Dad on Twitter https://twitter.com/DeFi_Dad ----- 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 is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research. Disclosure. From time-to-time we may add links in this channel to products we use. We may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. We'll always disclose when this is the case.

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

• 0:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  Hello everyone, welcome to the Bankless AMA. We have this special AMA with Kane Warwick from Synthetix. Kane, how are you doing today, sir?

• 0:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, not too bad, not too bad. It's been an interesting week.

• 0:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh man, it's been a crazy week. This is one of the craziest weeks on record. So I'm just going to go over a few of the ground rules. So Kane, this is an AMA. That means folks get to ask you anything. You know, feel free to pass on a question if you wish, but you know, we don't want the Bankless Nation judging you for skipping the hard ones. So hopefully you'll answer a few of our hard ones. Now, as a reminder for Bankless members, you can ask questions in the Bankless Discord channel. So that's open to members. You can also ask on the Zoom chat. We are also streaming this live on YouTube for everyone else. And why don't we just get started? Since I am moderating, I feel like I get rights to maybe ask the

• 1:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  first question. Kane, what is the scariest question you could anticipate on an AMA like this, sir?

• 1:48Speaker 01

  I don't know. That's a really good question. I think probably the scariest question at the moment would be, you know, what are we planning to do for scalability? You know, it's the most topical and I think it's something that, you know, everyone's very eager to see solved. And we've got some plans, but yeah, you know, it's, it's definitely an issue at the moment.

• 2:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, you know what? That deserves a follow-up. What is Synthetix going to do about the issue of scalability? You know, gas fees of 300 Gwai are the new normal. So how does Synthetix adapt to that?

• 2:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, when I say it's the scariest question, it's because I know the answer. But if I provide the answer, a certain person named Jing will probably murder me. So we're working with the optimism team. We've been working with them very closely. As you guys know, we did a demo of their L2 solution, you know, a few months ago now. We're pushing very, very hard to try and get, you know, some sort of pseudo mainnet live as quickly as possible, given, you know, the current gas environment. So I can't give a timeline on pain of death, but it's close. We're working really hard.

• 3:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right, excellent. Well, I'm going to fire off the first question. This one is from Bankless member Oboshi. I'm not sure if I pronounced that right, but he is asking or she is asking this question. Kane, you seem suspiciously normal. How can anyone expect to take you seriously when your nerd factor is so low? I think the question is, how are you so cool? The space is full of nerds. How are you so cool?

• 3:31Speaker 01

  I don't know. I think if you actually spend some time with me, you might question that assessment. I mean, you know, if you come into the Synthetics Discord, we sit around playing chess most of the time and making dumb memes. So, you know, I think maybe it might just be the surface appearance of coolness, but it doesn't go too deep.

• 3:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  So what is your nerdiest habit then, Kane?

• 3:55Speaker 01

  Probably sitting around playing speed chess or yield farming, I would say, these days.

• 4:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right, well, that leads to another question, and this one is from the Zoom. On the topic of yield farming, what are your thoughts on this week with Yam's rise? All right, well, and then also its demise. So this is like a, you know, a 48-hour lifecycle. What are your thoughts on everything Yam this week?

• 4:22Speaker 01

  So it was, I think it was Wednesday morning and a friend of mine pinged me on Telegram when I woke up. It was about like seven or something like that and I was just going through messages. And he was like, hey, it was Santiago from Power Five. He's like, hey, you know, what are you doing about? Yeah. And I was like, I don't know what you're talking about. Like this thing didn't exist when I went to sleep. Like how like I'm doing nothing about it, right? And, and I was like, oh, I guess I'll have a look at it. So I like, you know, started looking at it, read the blog post. And I was like, all right, fine. Like all YOLO in and like SNX in there, started farming it. And then, you know, the next day, like there was the Yam apocalypse and, you know, I was trying to scramble around and like get the SNX

• 5:03Speaker 01

  Spartans to kind of help out and, and, you know, delegate to try and, you know, get that proposal over line. That obviously didn't work. So I think now, you know, the plan is, from what I understand, to try and work out a way of like, you know, launching a V2, have some kind of transition. But, you know, there's a number of proposals. So it'll be interesting because you can't actually have governance now. Like governance has failed, so it's going to need to be this like rough consensus, which for me, you know, I'm probably preferential towards. So it'll be interesting to see it play out now.

• 5:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  Wait, so does that mean you think Yam 1.0 is not dead yet? That there's still hope?

• 5:40Speaker 01

  I mean.

• 5:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  Governance is eliminated?

• 5:42Speaker 01

  I think, I think Yam, the concept is not dead, right? Like, you know, the transition from Yam 1.0 to 2.0 still requires the Yam community to kind of like come together, right? So it'll be a question of how do you coordinate that when the on-chain governance component has, you know, exploded?

• 5:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  So this is actually a question that we're going to be putting out tomorrow in our Friday open thread. But it seems to me that the Ethereum community is somewhat divided over Yams. So there, there's a whole chunk of the community that's basically like in DeFi community. That's like, it was a complete, you know, sham. We shouldn't be promoting this sort of monetary experiment. You know, it wasn't unaudited, unsafe. And there's another side of the community that's like, hey, we're all adults here. And, you know, this is a permissionless system and the creators of Yam like can't be held accountable for the rapid success.

• 6:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  What side of that debate do you fall on? Was Yams a net positive for Ethereum and DeFi or was it a net negative?

• 6:46Speaker 01

  I think it was a positive, right? And maybe I'm a crazy person, but you know, my view is I like experimentation, right? Now typically, you know, in in the synthetics community, we talk about doing like small experiments, right? So you know, we might do like a four week trial of like $10,000 in incentives, right? You know, what's what I think we've seen play out with a lot of these, you know, initial yield farming incentives is they start out with the intention of like, okay, we're gonna put even comp, right? You know, I'm sure internally they were thinking, you know, it's gonna be a few hundred thousand dollars of incentives a week or something like that, right? And then it went from a few hundred thousand to tens of millions of dollars in incentives a week and everything blows up. So I think, you know, it is really hard to kind of constrain that because there is so much irrational ignorance and excitement.

• 7:30Speaker 01

  But you know, I still have a view that small scale experiments and and you know, on the grand scheme of things, $750,000 was, you know, lost or locked. You know, it is a small, a small amount, you know, collectively, obviously, it's not ideal. But you know, you're right, like, everyone is an adult, everyone, you know, makes their own decisions, you know, self sovereign money is, you know, a double edged sword, right? You know, it's it's both the, you know, positive in that anyone can do whatever they want and negative in that people can do dumb things if they want, right? They can do risky things, so.

• 8:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  Is it the case that you you are pro experimentation? Because it it seems to be the case anyway. That's sort of how synthetics found its product market fit anyway, a series of small experiments. And if somebody said, hey, those experiments are not allowed, you shouldn't do those experiments. It seems to be the case that maybe synthetics would never have found its product market fit. Is that is that a right way of thinking about it?

• 8:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, you know, it's not even if lots of people said it, right? Lots of people said, you're bad people, you shouldn't do this, like, this is a bad thing to do, don't experiment, like, it's too crazy and high risk and everything. And you know, as much as we were pushing fast and iterating, you know, rapidly, we have some people, you know, core contributors like Justin, for example, who comes from, you know, a a large scale enterprise software background like MongoDB. You know, he's not a lunatic, right? Like, he's, I mean, he constraints me, I'm probably the lunatic in the group, right? So, you know, he's constantly trying to ensure that, you know, we've got as much structure around this stuff as possible. But yeah, if we if we weren't allowed to experiment, there's no synthetics, there's no question about that.

• 9:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  Let's stay on the subject of yield farming for a moment. So this question is from Gin Tama from Bankless Discord. So asking what your thoughts are on how yield farming is evolving. So that's another kind of area that's faced a little bit of scrutiny, right? Now, I would say in some ways, you know, synthetics has been sort of the pioneers of yield farming, right? Like the YAMs, the YAM smart contracts were really a fork of the synthetic smart contracts. But yeah, at what point could yield farming start to get, you know, toxic or net negative for the entire space? And how do you see it evolving? Is it evolving in a good direction?

• 9:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  Or what's like the next chapter of yield farming, like the 2.0?

• 9:59Speaker 01

  Well, I think it's it's kind of multi-dimensional, right? Like what we've seen is in one dimension, it's become, you know, more open and permissionless, right? Like we're seeing, you know, these no pre-mine, no, you know, VC, no team holding token kind of experiments, right? And I feel like the the community is much more forgiving of those sorts of things, right? You know, if people write some software and they deploy it, they don't get any, you know, privileged position within the system. They've got to participate just like everyone else. That feels sort of, you know, more fair, right? Even if it's maybe less fair from a traditional startup standpoint, that like the people who create a thing should get some stake in it. So I think that as we push in that dimension of, you know, more openness, more sort of, you know,

• 10:45Speaker 01

  permissionlessness in terms of, you know, who can participate, it opens up the ability to do more experimentation, right? Because people are more forgiving of those experiments. And I think that that's really exciting because when you take some of these things like, you know, even I was just reading about Based this morning, right? Another thing that like popped up last night. And, you know, it's, I think what it comes down to is you're distilling the incentives down to their essence, right? And that's how we really start to see like what is effective and what is not effective. You know, so I think that these experiments, these, you know, cryptoeconomic incentive experiments are really valuable. And, you know, we're seeing them play out and, you know, they're playing out in a safe-ish space, I think. You know, the scales may be a little bit bigger than

• 11:28Speaker 01

  we would like, but overall, I'm really, you know, I think it's a net positive.

• 11:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  Alright, so on the subject of experimentation, you know, YFI and the urine protocol has been a major experiment in DeFi lately. So this is another question from Bankless Discord. What are your thoughts on urine, including how synthetics is being integrated with the project? I'm actually not familiar in what way synthetics is being integrated in the project, or if it is, maybe you could comment on that.

• 11:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, so you know, it's an interesting kind of backstory to how this all came about, right? So, you know, Michael and I were discussing creating an SUSD pool, right? And, you know, there was a little bit of tension there about how we should do it and, you know, what was required in terms of effort and stuff. And the conversation kind of broke down, right? And Andre, you know, this is how good of a guy he is, right? Andre, you know, came to the rescue, right? And like Paul, you know, said, "You're both being idiots, right? Like, let's actually, you know, come to the table and discuss this. Like, this is a good thing, you know, let's make it happen." And, you know, he talked to me, he talked to Michael, he brought us together, and, you know, he got the SUSD pool started, the incentivized SUSD pool started. And so then I think, you know, that kind of meta pool that was created,

• 12:41Speaker 01

  the Y pool, then, you know, took off and, you know, grew huge. And then obviously, you know, Andre kind of left for a while. And then I think when he came back, you know, and he started this, this new, you know, the YFI craze, right? You know, he took that same pool, but he didn't actually use the SUSD pool because the gas costs were too high and there was some other friction around it. So it's kind of, it's a really interesting story about how it's kind of evolved. But my view is that, again, you know, I think it's a really interesting experiment in this idea of kind of, you know, I guess, industrialized yield farming, right?

• 13:23Speaker 01

  Of like, you know, really optimizing yield farming and ensuring that you're getting the highest yield possible is a really cool direction that we're seeing people experiment in. And, you know, Andre is the king of that by far.

• 13:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, absolutely. He is the king of experimentation and yeah, quite an interesting fellow. So check out our podcast that came out this week on Andre. It was one of the most fascinating podcast episodes I've, Dave and I have done. On the subject of criticism though, because Andre has been, I guess, no stranger to criticism. And it does seem to be the case that a lot of DeFi criticals, even Ethereum itself, have been criticized at the very early stage of the project as like this experimentation is dangerous, or this will never work and that sort of thing. What are your thoughts about some of the criticisms of synthetic? So this is a question

• 14:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  from Dorica. The criticism on synthetics being a bucket shop, or the possibility of a cascading liquidation effect coming from traditional markets, similar to Make Your Doubt in March 2020? I guess everyone remembers the Black Thursday event in March, and the question of is synthetics prepared for that? Or are there some risks in the platform that aren't immediately clear? If there's some sort of a black swan type of that, another Black Thursday, March event?

• 14:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, you know, it's a very high risk. You know, and I say this all the time, like synthetics is still highly experimental, right? You know, and it's kind of fallen into the same camp of these experiments that have grown very large, right? You know, and so when you have the SNX market cap, you know, edging up towards a billion dollars, that's a little bit scary. There's a lot of value, you know, locked in there. And one of the things that we have as a kind of offset to that, I suppose, is this very high buffer, right? The collateralization ratio buffer, right? So, you know, it was at 850, you know, a few months ago. Yesterday, interestingly, there was a proposal that passed to reduce it to 700, which I was against,

• 15:29Speaker 01

  but no one listens to me anymore in Discord. So, you know, that's just the way it goes, right? So I still think that we should keep it, you know, as high as possible for now. We need that buffer, even with liquidations. But, you know, people... You know, are pushing for a lower collateralization ratio. So that's one way that we kind of offset that. The second way is obviously having liquidations, but you know, liquidations are dangerous because you can't have this cascading. You know, failure. Thankfully, we've never got to a point where, you know, the the system was even close to the liquidation threshold. You know, so I think that buffer is doing its job. And the fact that we have like weekly claims which force people to fix their ratios.

• 16:09Speaker 01

  But, you know, as we saw with Yams, interestingly, right? Like, so the price of S and X was sitting around five dollars. You know, forty eight hours ago, whatever. Yams switches on, a bunch of people start buying S and X to farm Yams because it was one of the highest. APYs, right? Price goes from five dollars to six dollars. Yams collapses, price goes from six dollars back down to five dollars again. You can literally see like. The, you know, so it's still reflexive, right? Like, it's still highly, highly reflexive.

• 16:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  I I've seen people call that the Yamplification effect as it was going on. There's so many good puns with the Yam meme. I I just. I love it. Um, okay. So, but but on that subject, is there a point at which synthetics, you you would call synthetic safe? Or like, like reasonably safe for more retail investors? We don't feel like you have to like put caution tape around the entire project and say, look. You know, you could lose everything if you put it in here.

• 17:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, I I mean, I don't, I don't know how long it's going to take for any DeFi. Protocol to, you know, because we've got platform risk, right? Like, there's platform risk on top of platform risk. So you've got Ethereum platform risk. You've got scalability, you know, issues. You've got all of this, you know, inherent platform risk just in being on Ethereum. And then you've got the actual smart contract suite itself, you know, which is complex and, you know, the, yes, more time helps, right? You know, in two years' time, but when you're upgrading that smart contract suite, every time you upgrade it, you lose a little bit of that, right? Now, some of the contracts stay the same, some change, but the interaction of those contracts, you know, is where the complexity lies. So until we get to a point where we stop upgrading the contracts or, you know, we we've kind of locked down the core of the system. I think there's still going to be a lot of risk there.

• 17:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  Got it. Alright, so let's talk about stablecoins for a minute. So you guys have SUSD, of course, which is a pretty unique stablecoin that's going out there. But a question came in about, I guess, the other side, less of a crypto-native stablecoin and more about central bank digital coins. What's your take on central bank digital coins in general? So it seems like the central bank of China, People's Bank of China, is moving really fast in creating a Chinese central bank digital currency. It's likely that Western nations won't be too far behind. What's your take in general on central bank digital coins?

• 18:29Speaker 01

  My history of stablecoin predictions is littered with abject failure to predict all kinds of things. So I would not listen to my prediction in any way. Like, you know, I was saying, nothing like USDC can exist like a regulated stablecoin for years, right? Like, all through like 2016, 2017. I was like, just can't happen.

• 18:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  Why did you think that, by the way?

• 18:50Speaker 01

  I just, I, you know, I, maybe I thought that regulators would be more skeptical of, you know, having something, having an asset like that. You know, we knew that there were issues with Tether. It was operating in kind of this gray regulatory environment. I just thought, you know, if you turn up to a regulator and say, hey, we want to do that thing, right? But we want to do it, you know, under kind of some regulatory regime, that they would laugh you out of the room. You know, it's amazingly impressive that, you know, the sort of center consortium was able to get that over the line. I still find it really impressive. Same thing with Paxos, TrueUSD, all the regulated stablecoins. I think the fact that they even exist is pretty impressive. You know, obviously, a central bank stablecoin has a lot of advantages in that, you know,

• 19:33Speaker 01

  it is made by the regulator, you know, the same regime, right? The regulatory regime that, you know, is kind of dominating that particular country. So I think that they're more likely to happen. What the impacts of them are, I don't know. I mean, my hope is that, like the other stablecoins that we've seen, that, you know, it makes access to legacy finance easier and it creates like a, you know, a better bridge. But that remains to be seen.

• 19:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  Do you think it's good for crypto?

• 20:01Speaker 01

  It depends on what they're built on. You know, I think if they're built on like their own permissioned chain, that's like a fork of something, then like maybe tangentially. But I think if if central banks start actually issuing stablecoins on Ethereum, you know, that there's no question that's a net positive, right? That's a a big indicator that, you know, large entities like, you know, nation states believe that Ethereum as like the global sediment layer is a thing. So I don't know how likely that is, and I don't even want to predict it because I'll probably fuck it up. But yeah, that's that's that's my sense.

• 20:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right. So this is a question from Crypto Mooniac. So Crypto Mooniac wants to know what the vision for synthetics is for the next few years. So the entire DeFi space is rapidly involved evolving. What's what's the place of synthetics in that space? What are the aspirations of the synthetic protocol?

• 20:59Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I mean, this is going to be a bit of an alpha leak, I guess. But yeah, that's kind of the point of these things, right? So I think, you know, back to your earlier question of like, when do we get to a point where synthetics is not so high risk that, you know, a normal kind of user could feel comfortable coming in and and participating in the ecosystem? I think there's a number of things post synthetic futures, which is or to launching that will help to reduce risk. So one of the things that we're we're kind of doing some research on in the background is the idea of siloing the different debt pools into asset classes. Right? So at the moment, you've got this undifferentiated pool where you've got, you know, potentially equities, crypto, commodities, etc.

• 21:40Speaker 01

  You know, when we talk to large scale market makers, they think that's crazy. And it is crazy, right? Like, there's no question having this undifferentiated pool is is pretty wild. But, you know, it makes sense kind of for bootstrapping in the early phases. So one of the things we're experimenting with is this idea of separating out these pools. The other is, you know, when when we have some kind of open interest cap on positions in the system to switch over to some kind of hybrid model. And we're also experimenting with that with options, right? Where you've got The bidding period where you know it's against a pool and then the the tokens are issued and then you have to go out to some other secondary. Uh, you know, exchange an AMM or something like that to trade the options. Um, so I started to experiment with a number of things like that, that I think, you know, it's going to take.

• 22:25Speaker 01

  Probably, you know, twelve to eighteen months to see that kind of play out and and get to that level of scale. But at the moment, still very focused on, you know, this core undifferentiated debt pool.

• 22:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  So we did a tactic recently on your new binary options that Synthetix released. How's that going?

• 22:41Speaker 01

  It's going, it's going well. I think the thing that's missing right now is like the vertically integrated uh UI. Right? Um, so you know, one thing that Synthetix has kind of not. Touched is this idea of bilateral trading, right? This idea of creating a venue for people to trade directly against each other. Um, you know, we've, we've stuck with this AMM model. And so what it means is that, okay, people can participate in the bidding period, but once it gets to trading, there's actually no place for them to trade. So what we're hoping to do through our um our grand style is fun. So if you're listening to this and you're looking for something cool to do. Uh, building like a fully vertically integrated uh binary options trading platform, which, you know, hooks into the Synthetix protocol during the bidding period.

• 23:21Speaker 01

  And then switches to either, you know, an AMM like Uniswap or Balancer or something like that. Or even uses like a some kind of order book uh style mechanism. Uh, we think that that's going to be really powerful. And until we have that fully vertically integrated solution, I think, you know, there's it's high friction. So.

• 23:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right, Salem, what's the incentive for them to build something like that, Kane?

• 23:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I mean firstly, funding, obviously, you know, the the grand style will help to fund it. Um, the second thing is that we've got a program that's going to launch, uh, I think in the next two or three weeks. I'm I'm not a hundred percent across all the low level details, but it will essentially provide rebates for volume. That's put through the Synthetix protocol. So if you are an integrator or you have a DAP or you have a mobile wallet or something. Um, you can essentially apply to join this program and get paid a rebate. So if you are, you know, building this options platform, you can essentially get paid rebates for the volume that you put through the protocol.

• 24:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  Gotcha. Very cool. All right, let's talk about um ETH two for a minute. So. Uh, do you think ETH two will have a big impact on the Synthetix trading volume? That's a, that's a question that actually came in from YouTube.

• 24:30Speaker 01

  I think it's too far away to tell. I mean, there's, there's a lot of uncertainty around exactly how we will implement, what the transition looks like. You know, our focus is at least, I would say for the next two years on, you know, ETH 1X, right? I think that's where the vast majority of volume will happen. And in order for that to be viable for the next two years, we need L2 scaling. So we need to be on optimism on the OVM.

• 24:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  So we're, we're still getting a lot of questions from Fez, from others on layer two. I just think it's top of mind because like we're, we're still dealing with these high gas prices. And people are like, well, it's not even, it's not even worth withdrawing my yams if it costs more than, than, you know, what I put in. Let, let's talk about that in the context of ETH two first, and then maybe we'll pivot to, to layer two and DeFi. So in the context of ETH two, kind of my impression of the ETH two roadmap is, is basically like you said, like, you know, phase zero is not going to help with scalability at all. Neither is phase one, really, quite frankly, maybe. But phase one dot five, before we get to 2X, we have sort of this, this data layer

• 25:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  that could potentially host rollups like optimism. Is that going to start to be helpful? Is that where I guess some of the, the ETH two scalability promises start to kick in, do you think?

• 25:50Speaker 01

  I think so, but there's a, there's a big thought there, right? Which is like, you know, the composability issue. And that's still the issue that we have with all of the L2 solutions out there, right? And so, you know, we need some sort of coordination mechanism for the existing DeFi protocols to ensure that, you know, we don't lose composability because if you lose that, you know, these experiments are going to become much harder, right? A lot of the stuff that's happening at the moment becomes much harder.

• 26:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  So let's talk about that because you guys are, are implementing your solution and sort of an OVM, right? Kind of a rollup. What are the rest of the DeFi projects doing? Are you coordinating with them at all? I, we were talking to Joey Krug on the podcast recently and sort of, you know, use the analogy of the main chain is, is a little bit like Manhattan, right? It's getting really Expensive to live there and not everyone needs to be there. But a lot of people want to be there because Wall Street's there because you know it's got all of the perks of of being in Manhattan, right? You've got great restaurants, all of these things. So there's almost a like a game theoretical aspect where it's just like,

• 26:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  okay, Maker, you guys move first and then maybe we'll move, you know. So no one wants to move from the main chain. How how are the DeFi projects coordinating about Layer 2 now, if at all? And how do you think we solve that problem of coordination to to figure out what the composite most composable Layer 2 solution is and and sort of settle on, you know, a set of those solutions?

• 27:24Speaker 01

  I mean, you know, personally, I'm a big fan of Brooklyn. That's where I spend my time when I'm when I'm in New York, right? So, you know, I think the plan is we're going to set up, you know, a nice area in Brooklyn where everyone can come and hang out. And, you know, you can come willingly or you can come by force, right? So, you know, I think that the the coordination is going to be getting at least a few of the projects to, you know, migrate across. And, you know, do it in a way that ideally doesn't break composability. So for us, what that means is minting, you know, the the actual issuance of debt can happen on L2 without impacting composability too much, right? It's the trading and the, you know, transfer since that needs to happen, you know, on L1 for now.

• 28:05Speaker 01

  And so I think what we'll see is a phased transition to allow minting to happen, you know, at low gas costs, right? And then you'll be able to transfer those assets back to L1 and use them and then slowly edge our way out of L1 on to, you know, fully L2 with the the exchange and everything.

• 28:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  I think what you're saying is basically you're okay with moving some things to Brooklyn. You want to invite some, you know, other friends to move to Brooklyn too. And then you're going to make Brooklyn so awesome that everyone else wants to move to Brooklyn too.

• 28:33Speaker 01

  That's the idea. Yeah. Invite's a strong word, though. Strongly suggest that they join us over there.

• 28:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  Got it. Got it. Let's talk about and and guys, everyone who's watching this, we are about 30 minutes in. So that means 30 minutes left for your questions. Keep them coming via the Bankless Discord and also Zoom if you're there as well. Let's talk a little bit more about stablecoin. So this is a question from Joseph I T. Let's talk about SUSD when it's over a dollar. How is that dealt with Maker has had a lot of trouble recently maintaining its peg at a dollar. How about SUSD? Do you guys have some secret sauce for that?

• 29:15Speaker 01

  I think there's there's kind of two levers that we can pull. The strongest levers within the synthetics ecosystem. The first one is the collateralization ratio. So one of the reasons why that lowering of the C ratio passed was to ensure that there's more since supply out there. The reason why I was against it is because I think it's less about the C ratio. There's enough since out there to get into the curve pool, get into some of these AMMs and reduce the premium. Which isn't too, you know, I think it's it's less than a cent, but it's been hovering around that mark for a while now, which is not ideal. So lowering the C ratio is one way of doing it is you increase the supply.

• 29:58Speaker 01

  The issue that I sort of see though is more of an educational one, right? There's no interface that clearly communicates to you why this is a good idea, what the benefits are, et cetera. And so we're in the process of doing a bit of a brand refresh. And alongside that, we're going to migrate Minter, the Minter interface to staking dot synthetics. And that's taking interface is much more educational. It's much clear about what your role is, what the trade offs are, risks, et cetera. And one of those things is going to be to try and get more supply out into the market. And I think that will help to reduce the premium and get it back to the peg.

• 30:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  Overall, how does a SUSD compete against some of the other stablecoin options that we were talking about? Like on the one side of things, a central bank issued fiat coin or even a, you know,

• 30:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  a CUSD or excuse me, a like a USDC or a tether or something like that?

• 30:58Speaker 01

  I think, you know, there's, there's two broad trade ups, right? You've got the, the very hard pegged redeemable assets like USDC, USDT ish, you know, true USD, et cetera. And then you've got DAI and SUSD.

• 31:14Speaker 01

  And, you know, there's some new, uh, you know, types of, uh, non redeemable stablecoins, right? Like crypto asset backed stablecoins coming out. Um, and those just have a fuzzier peg, right? There's more risk around the peg. Um, you know, it's harder to kind of keep them really tightly pegged because they're not redeemable for the underlying asset. So there isn't like a really tight arbitrage loop to, to bring them back to the peg. But they have other cool properties, right? So, you know, uh, with DAI, um, obviously it's permissionless in a way that USDC and, and, uh, USDT aren't, right? With SUSD, it's also permissionless, but you have this cool property of being able to convert it, uh, via synthetics exchange or via the protocol, uh, to, you know, synthetic Bitcoin, if you want, right? If you want price exposure to Bitcoin.

• 31:55Speaker 01

  So I think that there are advantages to the permissionless ones that, you know, trade offs, right? Like the, you, the peg is a little less tight on the permissionless side, um, you know, on the crypto asset backside. But they have some interesting, cool properties that, um, you know, if you're building DeFi are worth looking at, right? And I think for most people, you know, they, they kind of get those trade offs.

• 32:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  So here's a question that came in via Zoom. What were some of the lessons you learned from the 2017 ICO boom and Haven's raise? Maybe that's the context of thinking about like, you know, 2020 is starting to maybe look a little bit like 2016. So what things did you learn in 2017? And, uh, what advice would you give for 2020?

• 32:39Speaker 01

  So, um, you know, prior to Haven, I was, uh, running like a Fiat, uh, payment gateway, right? And we worked a lot of the exchanges in, in Australia. And so we were facilitating, you know, even back as far as like 2016, millions of dollars with the Bitcoin purchases, right? Uh, and then I think it was either late 2016 or early 2017, we enabled, uh, ETH, direct ETH purchases for the first time, right? And, you know, we saw a lot of demand and I got really excited about ETH. You know, I'd been, I'd been kind of following since, uh, the Dow. Um, you know, because this idea of like decentralized capital formation to me was really interesting. Coming from a place in Australia where we don't have a VC ecosystem. Um, there's a lot of brain drain, so you don't have good founders that have been successful that are kind of like giving back to the community.

• 33:23Speaker 01

  There's a lot of Australian founders that are very successful, but they live in fucking San Francisco, right? They don't live in Sydney. Um, and so, you know, so it's a, it's an issue that we've been dealing with for a long time. And so this idea of being able to like bring capital formation, the Dow was like the most exciting thing that I'd seen in a long time, right? I was, I was super excited about it. And when, you know, twenty seventeen came, uh, you know, I was participating in ICOs. I was doing all that sort of stuff and, you know, holding ETH. Uh, and I think from me, uh, you know, it just, it, it really, it was probably like late twenty sixteen. Um, I started thinking about, you know, how, how can we solve some of the problems that we have? And, and you know, in the other business that I was running, one of the problems we had was this like crypto premium.

• 34:08Speaker 01

  Um, that had kind of crept up like the, the kimchi premium that, that we saw in, uh, um, in Korea. And so we, we were like, there should be an easier way to move money around, right? And so this idea of stablecoins, I really went down the stablecoin rabbit hole and, and that's what got me in. In terms of like lessons learned, I guess, you know, uh, certainly for us in twenty eighteen probably is where we learned the most lessons, right? Like that was where it was the most painful. Twenty seventeen, I think in a bull market, you just need to, you know, kind of, uh, strap in and, and be along for the ride. It's in the bear market where you need to kind of batten down the hatches and, and really focus and keep building. That's, that's where most of the, the hard lessons were learned.

• 34:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  So what do you think? Are we in a bull market? Are we heading towards a bull market?

• 34:48Speaker 01

  I mean, you know, ETH this morning, like hovering around four twenty, you know, it's, uh, I, I think we're getting close to it. Um, you know, we had that, that kind of false rally back in, you know, July of twenty nineteen where, uh, things started to, to kind of heat up a little bit and then, and then fell back. Um, my sense is that we're getting close to that. But I think the big difference between twenty seventeen and now, uh, and I said this a lot of the time, none of the things in twenty seventeen did anything. Like it would, you know, and. Even the things that were, okay, that's, that's probably not fair, but like.

• 35:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's pretty fair, I think.

• 35:23Speaker 01

  Very, like, very few, right? Very few of the things, uh, you know, uh, were real, right? Actually did anything. Uh, it wasn't until, you know, we saw the launch of like DAI, um, you know, we saw the launch of, uh, of a number of things in like late 2017, early 2018, where like real stuff started to, you know, arise that you could actually do stuff with. Um, and, you know, even a lot of the tokens, like, okay, there were tokens, but there were this, like, you know, payment, uh, chip that you could like use for some ecosystem that didn't exist, right? Like, it was not real, right? And I think now what we're seeing is that, and you can see it by gas prices, right? Like, you know, uh, we're seeing that a lot of stuff is happening. There's a lot of activity. There's a lot of demand for access to, uh, L1.

• 36:04Speaker 01

  Uh, and that's just a very different, you know, so it, I think, uh, to, to kind of, you know, to, to close it out, like, yes, it feels very frothy in, in the way that 2017 did, but it also feels more real than 2017 did by an order of magnitude.

• 36:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  I'm gonna have to agree with you on that. I, that's, that's exactly what, uh, what I think I see. Here's a question that, um, AMA Dio is asking in the Bankless Discord, and he's linking an article here. She's linking an article here, Washington Post. I can't open it, but I think it's a story about the US seizing millions in cryptocurrency meant for terrorist groups. Um, and the comment is they want to get miners to give assets over. I've not looked at this article. I don't know the news. So maybe this is sort of a general question on, you know, what crypto calls kind of the, you know, the final boss. Back to your fear, what you were talking about earlier, that, um,

• 37:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  you, you know, governments would never let stablecoins get away with issuing, you know, stablecoins that, um, USDC shouldn't exist, or you didn't think it would ever exist. Um, how do you think crypto can survive the final boss? And do you think the final boss, being the nation state, will eventually crack down and turn its head our way? Are we just too small that, you know, they just haven't done it yet?

• 37:28Speaker 01

  I mean, I think it's possible, right? And, and you know, there, there's certainly some component of like a race against time, right? Like the SEC is not the US government. They are different beasts, like completely, right? You know, so the SEC might say, well, Ethereum is sufficiently decentralized that like, we're not going to bother it. That doesn't mean that the US government or, you know, or China or the EU or, you know, someone doesn't, you know, decide that actually it is worth, you know, trying to crack down and set an example, you know, something like this. But I do think that we are getting to a point where these systems are open and permissionless and shutting them down. You know, there were these kind of quaint theories in like 2015, 2016 of like, people are going to go after miners and like going with hammers and smash all the mining gear and stuff. And like, yeah, okay, fine.

• 38:13Speaker 01

  But like, it gets to a point where, you know, and this is where you need 2.0 stake, where you don't need giant, you know, mining rigs and proof of work, where it becomes really, really hot. Like, unless we're talking like door to door sweeps of like anti crypto, like, it turns into like a kind of crazy, like apocalyptic, you know, scenario to really shut it down. Maybe we get there. I don't know. Like crazier things have happened in the world, right? But, but my sense is that the cat's out of the bag. It's hard to, to kind of unwind this now.

• 38:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is back to kind of the point. You know, the shirt and the movement says bankless. But I actually don't mind the fact that banks are starting to, to join the JP Morgans of the world. For instance, they just made an investment in consensus. They're building out their, you know, JP Morgan coin, Coinbase itself, you know, maybe going public. They'll have sort of Wall Street buyers. It does seem like maybe that provides a layer of protection on the industry because crypto becomes more and more useful to the world outside of the, you know, self sovereign individual crowd that, that maybe we come from a little bit more. Do you think that's a, a protection for us getting some of the banks involved and building on top of an open critical like Ethereum?

• 39:27Speaker 01

  One hundred percent. You know, so banks have this interesting property where there are these regulated entities that have databases that are money. Right? Like they're they've got these, you know, little walled gardens where like whatever they say happens in there like that's money, right? And then, you know, they have to talk to each other and the way they talk to each other is like nonsensical, right? Like it might as well be carrier pigeon, right? And so, you know, the question is like, how do you wire these things up? How do you have like an open and permissionless settlement layer? And the hardest thing when you're dealing with legacy infrastructure, legacy, you know, entities and organizations is that they can't agree on anything. They can't even agree internally on what they want to do, let alone externally, right? So you try and get these consortiums together and it takes years and like millions of dollars, billions of dollars, and it goes nowhere and then the whole thing collapses.

• 40:11Speaker 01

  I think if you forcibly move them on to this, you know, global open permissionless settlement layer that none of them control. And and it's wired up to these, you know, old school databases. I think you get a really, really powerful kind of next phase in the evolution of crypto. And I think it's kind of necessary, you know? So if you want to live in the ether and never touch legacy financial ecosystem, great, right? But there are people that don't want to do that or can't do that for whatever reason. And having Ethereum wired up to every single bank and being the settlement layer for all of those banks is, I think, inevitable. And going to just, you know, usher in like even more, you know, interesting stuff. There's a there's a funny story though about this.

• 40:54Speaker 01

  So Brian Armstrong tweeted, I think, two or three weeks ago about how bank frick in in Lichensheim, which is a, you know, a regulated bank. Had started accepting USDC as a settlement option. And I was super excited about this. I was like, holy shit, this is exactly what we were waiting. It's happening, right? Turns out, not so much, right? So I actually, I actually took the time, I went and I got in touch with with the bank. And I got in touch with someone there and it took, it was painful, right? But I was able to get through it and actually what happened is they basically, you know, they support. They've got a brokerage partner, right? It's not even the bank themselves. They've got a partnership with a broker that you can send Bitcoin and he and they will convert it for two percent fee, right?

• 41:37Speaker 01

  And they'll settle it into the bank in euros or USD, right? So it's not that exciting. And all they did was add USDC as like an accepted cryptocurrency. So it's not even close to what we were hoping for. So like, I was really excited. I thought we had like, kind of bridged that gap, but we're not there yet. So there's still a bit of work to be done.

• 41:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, you gotta, sometimes you gotta dig behind the headlines and see what's really happening, what's really going on. But it is interesting because I'm not sure all the banks will survive this transformation. Right? So DeFi, it seems to me, is disruptive to banks. The way that the communication protocol of the internet was disruptive to media companies like newspapers and such. And some of them adapted. Some of them are still around. Many of them are not. Many of them just couldn't cross the chasm and bridge the gap. And so I think many banks are just stuck with their existing models. And it'll be very hard for them to see kind of this new paradigm. I have a question that came in Bankless Discord from QAZ. This is a bit more specific to synthetics.

• 42:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  When can we expect limit stop-loss stop limits in other advanced order types on the synthetic exchange?

• 42:46Speaker 01

  So this is a story of decentralization, I suppose, right? So we, we put out a grant style RFP to a bunch of groups to build a limit order functionality because we just didn't have the capacity to work on it as a part of our core roadmap. And so a team stepped up and they built it. But unfortunately, you know, the complexity of the synthetic contracts is such that, you know, when we went to actually deploy it, which was a couple of weeks ago, the contracts themselves worked, but the actual infrastructure for, for, you know, acting as a relayer, just wasn't capable of handing the, handling the throughput that we needed. And so we've had to put another, some additional resources to kind of build that out.

• 43:29Speaker 01

  So, you know, it's one of the challenges of having these decentralized contributors that maybe don't have as much awareness of the core protocol. You know, it does slow things down, but I would say limit orders are probably two or three weeks away. We're hoping to get them out by the end of the month. So the contracts are done. The relayer stuff is, is still to be, to be built.

• 43:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  Sometimes, Kane, in crypto, in DeFi, we talk about 1 billion users, right? Like, we want to onboard that 1 billion users. Here's a question from Joseph Turner. What do you think the weak link or the bottleneck is to getting those 1 billion new users into DeFi into crypto?

• 44:07Speaker 01

  So, you know, again, coming from a Fiat gateway background, right? And you're having, having built a business that did that. The on-ramps and off-ramps are still very poor in, in a lot of places. You know, we need either really powerful decentralized infrastructure to solve this problem, or we need better integration with legacy finance or both in order to be able to onboard, you know, someone who's in Southeast Asia or, you know, in South America or, you know, somewhere that maybe they don't have access to like a brokerage account for equities or something like that, but wants to have a price exposure to, you know, equities. Synthetics can solve that problem, but you have to get them into the system first.

• 44:50Speaker 01

  All right. So, you know, I think that having those, those really, you know, frictionless and low cost critically, you know, it has to be low cost as well, on-ramps and off-ramps is, is a critical component that's not quite there yet.

• 45:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  What are you seeing? Is there any progress on that front? You know, I've seen things from Ramp, for example, also from, from Wire. Are those kind of the, the types of solutions that we should be looking at for those Fiat on-ramps for that bridge?

• 45:17Speaker 01

  I, I think so, but you know, people forget, you know, in Australia, for example, we've got, I think, the highest adoption of like tap, you know, NFC-based payments, right? In the world and like literally, I don't even carry a wallet anymore. I never have cash. So we, you know, we forget that a lot of the world operates on cash. Like go to Berlin, right? And everything's cash, like, you know, you ask someone to pay with a credit card and they're like going out the back to find the credit card machine, right? So still, you know, like, and that, there's a lot of places in the world that are still heavily, heavily cash-based. And so I think you still need cash, you know, actual Fiat cash on-ramps. You know, particularly in, in emerging markets, it's, it's critical. So, you know, Wire is amazing and that's great for like the US.

• 45:59Speaker 01

  But, you know, there's a million different ways you can get money into crypto in, in America. You know, we need it for, for, you know, other, other markets for sure.

• 46:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  Just an observation, it seems to be the case, though, once money moves into crypto, it tends to remain sticky in crypto. So I found myself even when, you know, crashes come or I want to decrease my exposure to crypto native types of assets, I don't move to US dollars to the traditional bank account anymore. Traditional bank accounts kind of suck, to be honest. I moved to something like, you know, a stablecoin. It does seem to be the case that once the money does cross the chasm and bridge to the other side, it tends to stay there. Are you seeing that too?

• 46:42Speaker 01

  I agree, but you know, again, it depends on what money we're talking about, right? Like if you're talking about, you know, your investable assets that you don't need for day to day living, then sure, right? But you know, it's not necessarily that easy, you know, to turn up and buy lunch with USDC, right?

• 46:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  Right.

• 47:00Speaker 01

  Of course, there's some places where you can. And so again, I think, you know, we need, we need ways to kind of close the loop, right? And allow people to spend crypto, you know, there was a lot of, a lot of effort and time and money invested by Bitcoin maxies back in the day to try and get people to spend Bitcoin, which, you know, was a bit of a, a bit of a, you know, a foregone conclusion, right? That was not going to work out. It's just too volatile. And I think we, we know that now, we understand that. And so, you know, we need that next. I think a lot of people looked at that and said, oh, well, people don't really want to spend crypto, right? It's all about spending crypto. It's, you know, people want better payment mechanisms. They want better payment rails, right? They want cheaper payment rails, less friction,

• 47:45Speaker 01

  et cetera. And so I think that we can do that. And you know, particularly with, with L2 solutions, you know, spending DAI, you know, is something that I think is, is, needs to be much easier. You need to be able to spend DAI and SUSD and other stablecoins anywhere in the world.

• 48:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  Hold your ETH, spend your DAI, spend your SUSD, but hold your ETH.

• 48:05Speaker 01

  There you go.

• 48:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's the mantra. All right. Let's do some rapid fire questions.

• 48:08David Hoffman?

  Hang on, Ryan, can I hop in here with a question?

• 48:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  Do.

• 48:11David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 48:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  David.

• 48:12David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so for those watching on YouTube, you won't be able to see my face, but everyone in the webinar can. So Kane, we've been talking a little bit about on-ramps and we've also been talking about fractured L2s, right? And so L2s are going to be not really all that interoperable. There's going to be some friction there. And so that's going to kind of fracture liquidity. And we're also, you just mentioned how we also need on-ramps. And there's also plans for Synthetix to migrate to L2s into the future to encourage trading volume. And it sounds like that we can also talk about on-ramps directly into Synthetix, into their, whatever L2 platform that Synthetix is on. So is there a potential future where there's an on-ramp that goes straight from, you know, the fiat world right into the Synthetix platform?

• 48:57David Hoffman?

  Bypassing Ether, bypassing DAI, bypassing USDC and just going straight from bank to SUSDC?

• 49:05Speaker 01

  Potentially, potentially, but I think we're still a ways away from that, right? Like I still have a sense that, you know, most on-ramps are going to go via ETH. You know, and there will be versions of ETH on these L2, you know, shards as well, these L2 chains. So, so I think that, you know, some kind of tokenized ETH that's, you know, low cost to get access to is still pretty likely. But, you know, it could be DAI, it could be SUSD, it could be even, you know, USDC or one of the other stablecoins. I mean, one of the interesting things about Synthetix is that we've got, you know, other denominations of, of stablecoins as well, right? And you can convert between them pretty frictionlessly.

• 49:45Speaker 01

  So, you know, if you, you know, want to get in with Euro or, you know, or something like that, then, you know, you've got access to that. So I think that that is something that again, you know, we need the infrastructure side as well. L2 helps, but it's the actual, like on the ground, infrastructure that's missing right now.

• 50:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right, we've got a few rapid fire questions from the Bankless Nation. I want to try to fit these in, in the last seven minutes here. Here's one, what do you think the weak, wait, actually, we asked that, we asked that one already. If you could snap your fingers and fix a problem in the crypto space, which problem would you solve, Kane?

• 50:21Speaker 01

  Scalability.

• 50:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, how about the current incentive programs in synthetics? They meet your expectations? Do you plan to keep them? Are you going to tweak them moving forward? Is the community going to tweak them moving forward when this current phase ends?

• 50:37Speaker 01

  So the next big incentive mechanism that's coming out is around this rebate for integrations as well as direct trading volume. So that's something that we're pretty excited about. And I think it's going to have a big impact.

• 50:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  How about gas fees? Do smaller stakers of synthetics, are they them being priced out of staking, claiming rewards? Has that had a material impact to your synthetic ecosystem so far?

• 51:01Speaker 01

  It has a material impact to my sleep at night. You know, it doesn't sit well with me. So, you know, I wouldn't be surprised if you're a small staker and you're obviously civil attacks notwithstanding, right? If you're a small staker and have been a small staker, I wouldn't be surprised once we get you on to an L2 solution that lowers your cost if you would not expect some kind of incentive or your compensation or something like that from the synthetic style for your troubles over the last three months.

• 51:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  Who is your historical founder that you identify most? Is it a Musk? Is it an Edison? Is it a Tesla?

• 51:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a really good question. I'm a big fan of Ben Horowitz. I love, I'm actually reading, you know, what you do is who you are right now. I'm a really big fan. I think this is approach to, you know, to running startups is not necessarily unique, but like it's, it's very much his own style. And it's something that, you know, the hard thing about hard things, when I first read it really resonated with me. I, you know, I enjoy doing hard things myself, so.

• 52:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  That was a fantastic book. I, that's one of my favorites as well. Is Argent your favorite mobile wallet?

• 52:16Speaker 01

  My favorite mobile wallet? It's, it's up there.

• 52:22Speaker 01

  You know, I like, I live on desktop and I live with my Trezor. Like I don't use mobile wallets that much. There's a bunch of them that I like, but Argent is definitely, definitely really cool. Although I saw that they're not paying for gas anymore for obvious reasons. So, you know, that's not ideal, but it's just the world we live in.

• 52:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  Maybe you should get them to move to Brooklyn with you, Kane.

• 52:42Speaker 01

  Working on it.

• 52:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right, this is a fun one. Price predictions. Give us your bull run price predictions for our first Bitcoin, then Ether, then SNX.

• 52:55Speaker 01

  So Bitcoin, I think if if this is genuinely the bull run that you know, we've been waiting for 50 K plus is definitely possible. For ETH, I don't have an upper limit. I don't want to look like an idiot in 12 months' time. I think that you know, ETH is highly reflexive and you know, if we get some of the things that we're hoping to around L2, etc., you know, 1400 is going to look laughably cheap in the future.

• 53:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  How about SNX? You want to do that one?

• 53:27Speaker 01

  I mean, $6 was the was the meme, right, that we all like kind of laughed about back two years ago. So you know, I'm happy with $6. I think we we touched $6 yesterday. I'm I'm pretty happy with that for now.

• 53:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  Price prediction for SUSD, still a dollar, I hope?

• 53:40Speaker 01

  If it's not a dollar, we got bigger problems. So yeah, like a dollar plus or minus.

• 53:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right.

• 53:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  Do you see tokens? This is a question from Sid Powell. Do you see tokens in the future more taking the form of like an equity revenue sharing in the platform or more usage utility like paying fees in MKR? The comment is synthetics appears to be a hybrid between the two. I guess the question is, how do you see DeFi tokens in the future accruing value?

• 54:11Speaker 01

  I mean, I think, you know, there was a long time where there was no value being generated, right? Like there, you know, there were these these proposed ecosystems that didn't do anything, right? And I think we now have a bunch of different systems that actually generate, you know, value, right? Like they provide a service and people are willing to pay for that service. And so the question of how you accrue that, whether it's a burn model, whether it's, you know, direct payment for, you know, whether it's through some kind of inflationary incentive, etc., I think, you know, I'm just happy that tokens are not this, you know, black mark and and you know, this this kind of unmentionable thing anymore, right? There was a period where like having a token was like the worst possible thing you could do. So the fact that we're back to like, understanding tokens are a coordination mechanism that, you know, is really powerful.

• 54:55Speaker 01

  That's more than enough for me. I'm I'm happy with that for now.

• 54:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right, guys, we have two more minutes for questions. We might be able to fit in one or two. This is this is one for me. What is your favorite DeFi collateral for synthetics? Besides SNX.

• 55:12Speaker 01

  I mean ETH, obviously, but you know, aside from ETH, I would say probably right now, ren BTC is the thing that I'm most excited about. You know, I think that that will be a thing that will happen. I mean, we like market forces to determine things. So any permissionless BTC implementation. So you know, obviously, TBTC being the other option, we will definitely consider and maybe both of them will be included. But you know, we need to get BTC collateral, I think, to pull the maxies into ETH land.

• 55:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  Kane, is ETH money?

• 55:43Speaker 01

  Of course, absolutely. I think I think I gave it to someone, but I had ethismoney.e for for a while as an ENF domain. And then I gave it to someone on Twitter, maybe even I can't remember who it was, Scott, or I don't know, maybe you guys.

• 55:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  I would have liked to stash that one up, actually.

• 56:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, I gave it to someone. I gave it to someone, so. My money is on the air, Connor.

• 56:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, probably.

• 56:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, Eric, that makes sense.

• 56:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  He tries to front run everybody on those things.

• 56:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 56:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right, we've got one minute left for so it's time for our final question. And Kane, thank you so much for spending some time with the Bankless Nation. Bankless Nation, thank you so much for your questions. This has been an absolute blast. We will post the recording. I think the recording actually will be auto posted on YouTube. Thanks for all of the participation. Yeah, immediately, David says. So the last question is Kane, how can the Bankless Nation help Synthetix?

• 56:41Speaker 01

  I think what we need is, you know, more people participating in governance, right? So we have this rough consensus process, but you know, there's a lot of things that are still open questions and experiments that are running. And so we need more people scrutinizing, you know, the things that we're doing and participating in that governance process to ensure that we've got, you know, really strong checks and balances on the direction of the project's moving.

• 57:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  Fantastic. We're getting great feedback. People are saying great AMA. Thanks to all Kane. We want to thank you again for spending some time with us. Have a great day.

• 57:11Speaker 01

  Thank you, guys. This was really fun.

• 57:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  Take care.