What is Alpha Finance Labs?

Yeah, so that's when I think it gets more interesting with what we're building at alpha finance lab. So So instead of focusing on one particular area, or sector of DeFi, we're actually going to focus on the end goal of what we're going to achieve for the users. So we think that the end goal that we want to achieve is how pretty much maximize the returns and minimize the downside risks for users. And we think that, you know, that's the ideal goal of financial products suites, right? Because no one's gonna use the product if they cannot maximize the returns. Versus you know, if maximizing the returns and they don't know how to hedge the risk, or there's no way to hedge that risk, then that's also not ideal. So when we come up with that goal, instead of a particular clear that we want to focus on, then we kind of backtrack, to see how do we get to that goal and pretty much to get to that goal, it's pretty much that we need to do a number of alpha products to work together to achieve that goal, because it's pretty much, you know, very hard to optimize for everything from one product. And especially on the blockchain too, there are a lot of limitations on that.

So in order to get that goal, we need a number of alpha products to work together. So that's where kind of backtracking to alpha Homora. So for alpha Homora, we're focusing on maximizing the returns for the users and pretty much we found that, like, the lending rates on DeFi are actually pretty good. But we were actually spotting and opportunities starting from Ethereum lending, right, as there are a lot of ETH lenders, and they are actually bearing quite a low lending interest rates on these. And we think that if we can find a way to engineer an innovation on the borrowing side, then we would be able to unlock a really high lending interest rate on ETH. And, you know, capture a huge demand from from ETH lenders, right?

Yeah. So that's what came from for the first version of alpha Homora. And the way that we innovate on the borrowing side is by doing leveraged farming, so it's the first time that leverage the farming came into the picture. And I think that you know, received pretty well, product-market fit, because there are a lot of yield farmers in the space and, and they're, they're still going to search for higher yields because the yields nowadays are not as high as June last year. So they're still gonna search for higher yields. And this is the mechanism that allows them to get that higher yields without having to do all of the steps manually. And vice versa, as the lenders would be able to get the high lending interest rate on ETH.

Because of these leveraged borrowers who are actively borrowing these ETH, to do more yield farming. So that pretty much knows the backstory of alpha homora. And in the future, or later questions, I can also explain more of like, why we decided to build v2, what're the differences are? And then what are the other alpha products that we're going to build, but you can see the whole picture that it's going to work as a whole ecosystem. So alpha Homora is one of the products that we're going to build. And at the end of the day, the whole ecosystem would achieve the goal of maximizing returns and minimizing some good downside risks. So similar to the YFI ecosystem, do you intend for the alpha to essentially unify like that.

0:00 Welcome

2:27 About Tyler

5:11 What Problem does BarnBridge solve?

17:39 Traction numbers

22:48 What's the advantage

32:59 Sources of Inspiration

35:57 Credit to Vitalik, Lubin, others

42:06 Kain Warwick's brothers

What is Axie?

Axie is a movement disguised as a digital pet game. So the game itself centers and revolves around battling collecting these kinds of adorable monsters called axies, I think the secret sauce is that we carefully structure the economy, and basically using blockchain, which allows our players to earn crypto by playing. And so this kind of, you know, this because this been this phenomenon around the concept of play to earn, where people are feeding their families during the pandemic, and playing Axie infinity, I think that's, you know, kind of what, what's made us kind of what's helped us make a name for ourselves so far. And we've also seen Axies, you know, become a very highly coveted collector's item. And with some axes selling for hundreds or 1000s of dollars.

So the idea behind Axie is that it's not just one game, it's going to be an entire universe of games. What we currently have out is a battle card battling game. It's kind of similar (to Pokemon). It's not actually similar to anything but yeah, you can kind of play different cards. Each Axie has six different body parts and those body parts actually correspond to different cards. And and yeah, so the battles are 3v3, you can battle against other players, which in real-time, there's a leaderboard with actually with you know, rewards, we've given out things like AAVE tokens, Khyber network tokens, real gold, in the form of gold-backed tokens from DIGITS, and also our governance token, which basically is kind of a slice or part of our universe. And yeah, so we also have we also have a land system under development, which will basically allow you to build a kingdom for these Axies.

Axie Land Buying

People have been buying and selling land for a while now. And kind of in anticipation, and to get ready for the launch of land. We actually did a seven-day demo in December, which I think, you know, people are really excited about. And so yeah, that's, that's another really important aspect to the game. There's also the kind of biological aspect to the game where we try and, you know, Axies are, they have their own genetic code, and you're able to actually breed Axies. That's part of actually what balances the economy is that we have this breeding system, but in order to actually breed in Axie, you need to use these potions (SLP or Simple Love Potions) and those potions can actually own be earned by playing the game, we don't actually sell them right like a convention or mainstream game studio might sell them themselves and try to monetize that way. And but we don't, we don't sell them. And if so if anyone wants them, they have to get them from uni swap, or now Binance. And this one, it was one of the things that are kind of fueled this idea of played around where basically, we don't step into certain markets, and we leave them totally up to the players. And I think when you give players autonomy, and the right to control, you know, one of the markets around the game and you know, you don't force them to kind of have to do black market deals or use trusted third-party sites. And we're, you know, we build the marketplace, ourselves, and when So basically, when you let them have that a lot of really interesting behaviors begin to emerge.

What is ParaSwap?

How are people trading in DeFi today? It's a bit hard. The liquidity is very fragmented. So as a user who wants to sell or buy a crypto-based on Ethereum right now? Well, they have the choice between almost 50 exchanges. So which one should they choose? Which one should they avoid in order not to get wrecked (rekt). This is where a DEX aggregator makes sense, like ParaSwap. But that's solving the problems of today of improving liquidity and improving the user experience on trading on-chain. That's the long-term view on ParaSwap and why we're doing this is we think that trading will happen on blockchains in the future, and will happen in multiple blockchains. And we think that real-world assets will be also traded on blockchains. And we think this is where an aggregator will make more sense. People will not be seeking like this small exchange that's going to help them swap Tesla shares (TSLA) or for a Bitcoin or whatever else, they will be trading on aggregators, and they will be trading on the platform that will give them the best prices and the best execution. And this is what we see ParaSwap solving in the future. This will happen within a few years, obviously. And we are focused on the problems of today. But yeah, this is our long-term vision. And this is how we see a product like ParaSwap and aggregator performing in the crypto ecosystem, or in the trading at a more high level in the next coming years.

What problem does Kava Solve?

The big problem in DeFi is currently DeFi is limited to the Ethereum ecosystem. About assets. And what comes along with that is the types of collateral that can be used in DeFi is very limited. And then what we've seen recently is things like transaction bandwidth and the resources of the Ethereum network are starting to get really constrained, because of the success of defining it. crypto kitties were the first kind of bellwether that said, you know, things could be clogging up here, but DeFi taking off, and then I actually USDT transactions, and just regular payments of ERC. 20s has really filled up the whole blockchain. And that's what's causing, you know, $80 transaction fees and huge spikes that make what's supposed to be an open financial network and composable financial services, no longer open to the world, but only open to what I would call like the ultra-rich or people who can afford to pay $80 per transaction that's way higher than what people currently pay to, you know, trade a stock or do anything in the US much less If a person's in, you know, Vietnam, Malaysia somewhere where you know, the current, the average person doesn't earn all that much money. So, you know, the overall promise of DeFi is to make these financial services, not just for the ultra-wealthy, but accessible anywhere in the world to anyone, regardless of what asset they hold. And we really focus on addressing that particular problem.

What is Terra?

Terra is what you would call an algorithmic stable coin. So what a stable coin is, is different from different types of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin or Ethereum, where the value of the coin or the price of the coin fluctuates in response to demand, a stable coin retains its value to $1, or to whatever other fiat currency lead might be pegged to, There's a couple of differences that para has versus other stable coins, such as tether USDC, DAI and some of the components are is the number one it's algorithmic. So for stable coins like tether, you generally keep $1, or you promise to keep $1 in the bank account for every stable coin that's issued. So the presumption is that you should be able to redeem this against the dollar or to mint an additional unit of the stable coin against the dollar, by using Fiat reserve operations. Or for makerDAO, for instance, like you keep up, you know, $1.50 worth of Ethereum in a smart contract to guarantee the value of, you know, the standard plan.

What is Mirror Protocol?

A recent protocol that we launched is called Mirror. So the mirror is a protocol whereby you can make synthetic tokens that track the price of any asset class in the world. So for example, you can mint a token that follows the price of, let's say, a bar of gold, or it could be some sort of ETF. But initially, we specifically focused on issuing synthetics for 13 different US equities. And the reason for that is because in most places across the world, outside of Western Europe and North America, it's actually very difficult, or in some cases, prohibitively expensive to be able to get price exposure to US equities as an asset class. So, you know, today, I think the response to the Mirror protocol has been pretty explosive. So throughout December, there was about $110 million in equity locked in various DEXes like uniswap. And, and paraswap in about $90 million locked up to create cdp's to mint various types of synthetics. So combined, we're looking at about around $200 million, locked up in TVL, within the space of, let's say, six weeks.

What is Akash?

Akash is a peer-to-peer marketplace for cloud computing resources and a deployment platform for modern distributed workloads. The big difference of the big value it provides compared to the incumbent (Amazon Web Services or AWS), it's designed for a very modern developer. So what takes normally 10s of hours on a cloud takes minutes, right? So developers can do more with less. And it is private and permissionless. So there's no signup and incredible user experience that you get permissionless networks. And it's, of course, unstoppable, since that's becoming more and more important, considering what's happening today. And, and in a big value is cost. I mean, costs anywhere from two to three X on a normal lower than the Amazons and Googles to Microsoft's, in some cases, even 10 times slower. So that's an incredible value proposition.

Episode Index:

0:00 Welcome

0:53 What is Akash Network?

2:15 Current state of the Network

5:21 Akash Token is Liquid and Network is Alive

6:29 Linux Containers and Developer Tools

10:44 Who runs the containers?

13:32 How can it be 2-3x cheaper than AWS?

18:23 Inflationary Rewards Mechanism

20:17 Equinix is an exclusive data center provider

20:53 Mainnet Launch Upcoming!

23:59 COSMOS, Solana and other Ecosystems

25:03 INFURA and Bison Trails

25:42 Managed Node Hosting

27:01 Parler, Censorship Resistance and Deplatforming

34:55 Big upcoming features

40:01 High Performance Computing

40:58 Amazon Web Services and Open Source

46:50 Solomon Hykes, Brian Fox and Alex Ellis

On Pankaj Balani: Pankaj is a seasoned business leader and a derivatives trader. He is a UBS alum and has deep experiences in derivatives, quantitative finance, and Asian equity markets. He also helped build and grow an e-commerce business in India which went on to raise a Series C round of financing. Pankaj is a graduate of IIT Delhi and has an MBA from the Indian School of Business.

Where Yield Comes from: there was a day in crypto Twitter when everybody was talking about free yield and free. There's no free lunch. Somebody is paying for it. Yeah. So if nobody's paying for it, then whatever tokens you are getting is not worth it.

Competition: Whatever is your strength can also become your weakness in that regard, and how we tend to ignore, ignore that part. And, you know, XLM (Stellar Lumens) and XRP (Ripple) is again, great examples.

On Stellar (XLM): People had literally forgotten stellar, like, it was number six, you know, market cap coin, in 2017. And it kept falling without any activity for so long. Yes. You know, and the way table's turned and in a matter of a month, so it's up like 90% today. Next up is don't, what 60% in less than a month.

Black Swan Events: So in markets, you know, whatever scenarios you think can happen more likely happens.

What is Delta Exchange: We provide futures and perpetual swaps on many of the popular coins and support as many as 70 alt coins, in many cases the only place where users can get options on many of these.

Announcing the Delta Token: The token is inspired by DeFi projects. So how DeFi projects have bootstrapped liquidity on the platform, we have taken that inspiration and similarly created liquidity pools on Delta.

When will the token launch: So we're looking to do a token generation event (TGE) very soon, probably by the end of January (2021).

Retail vs Institutional: there are both the kind of participants, so, you have institutional and retail reality is that if you try to bring all institutions upfront, then you know, you end up becoming more like an over the counter (OTC) desk, yes, you bring only retail, then you don't have that much size. So, it has to go hand in hand.

India is the World's Largest Derivatives Market: in India, we have about $200 billion of options trading on a daily basis, and India is has done a very good job on the single stock options and futures market. So, now, when you if you see the breakdown of numbers there you have 45% trading coming from retail 40% coming from proprietary which is basically a trading desk or you know, 1% opening up a trading shop or two percent, people running a trading shop and 12% contribution is from institutions.

0:00 Welcome

0:51 What is YGG?

2:17 yEarn is king

3:17 Compound Finance

4:00 Compound Blockchain

5:11 Origins of YGG: Axie Infinity

8:11 Games waste your time

9:28 UBI and Andrew Yang

10:46 Play to Earn Gaming

13:03 Pokemon, Magic and eSports

14:50 Scaling to Millions of blockchainers

17:11 $100k USD Axies

19:29 Building the Metaverse Economy

22:38 YGG Guild Leveling System

26:04 No Blockchain Experience Needed

28:34 From Subsistence Farming to Land Owner

30:27 Selamat "Thank You" Axie

33:15 eSports

33:48 Cryptographic Custody

36:43 YGG small company, big community

38:11 yEarn SUSHI Curve and AMM

40:06 YGG: Largest Credit Union on Earth?

41:18 DeFi not just for whales.

0:00 Welcome

0:51Digital Fashion

2:46 ERC Standards

5:50 Auction Successes

7:26 @robnessofficial

8:35 How to Experience it?

13:01 New Years Eve Event

15:12 Bitcoin NFT and Fashion

21:17 NFT, Scarcity

24:27 Corporate Influences

25:00 Dapper Labs

27:47 Defining "cosmetic NFTs"

28:26 Where utility comes from