Bankless - AMA with Evgeny Yurtaev, Co-Founder of Zerion

Episode Date: January 14, 2021

AMA with Evgeny Yurtaev, Co-Founder of Zerion 🚀 SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER: http://bankless.substack.com/ ✊ STARTING GUIDE BANKLESS: https://bit.ly/37Q17uI ❤️ JOIN PRIVATE DISCORD: https://bit.ly/2UVI10O 🎙️ SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST: http://podcast.banklesshq.com/ 👕 BUY BANKLESS TEE: https://merch.banklesshq.com/ ----- GO BANKLESS WITH THESE SPONSOR TOOLS: ⭐️ AAVE - BORROW OR LEND YOUR ASSETS https://bankless.cc/aave 🚀 GEMINI - MOST TRUSTED EXCHANGE AND ONRAMP https://bankless.cc/go-gemini 💳 MONOLITH - GET THE HOLY GRAIL OF BANKLESS VISA CARDS https://bankless.cc/monolith 📈 KWENTA | DEVIRATIVES TRADING WITH INFINITE LIQUIDITY https://bankless.cc/kwenta ------ AMA with Evgeny Yurtaev, Co-Founder of Zerion Zerion (https://app.zerion.io/) is a central portal to the DeFi universe. The goal of Zerion is to build an easy and accessible interface to engaging and interacting with all the various money legos in the DeFi ecosystem. While your Ethereum address is your bank account, Zerion can be your banking interface and middleware layer! You can download the mobile iOS and Google app on your phone, for mobile browsing, and use Zerion to manage your DeFi portfolio there, as well as desktop. Enjoy this AMA with CEO, Evgeny Yurtaev ------ Don't stop at the video! Subscribe to the Bankless newsletter program http://bankless.substack.com/ Visit the official Bankless website http://banklesshq.com/ Follow Bankless on Twitter https://twitter.com/BanklessHQ Follow Ryan on Twitter https://twitter.com/ryansadams Follow David on Twitter https://twitter.com/TrustlessState ----- Not financial or tax advice. This channel is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This video is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research. Disclosure. From time-to-time we may add links in this channel to products we use. We may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. We'll always disclose when this is the case

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All right, bankless nation. Welcome to another community. Ask me anything. This is your opportunity to ask questions of DFI founders and interesting projects. We have Yevgeny on from Xerion. Zerion is an interface to all sorts of DFI protocols. I probably use this tool on a daily basis. It's a great way to view assets across all of your various DFI wallets and to actually manage transactions.

I'd be kind of lost without this tool. This is your opportunity to ask questions of Yevgeny. So if you have a question, go ahead and comment in YouTube. David or I will get to it and we'll prioritize it. And if you're in the bankless Discord as well, you can ask a question that way. And that's mainly for the Periscope people. If you are watching this on Twitter, that's fantastic. But if you want to engage with the YouTube comments and get your comments to Yevgeny,

you've got to go to the YouTube. Yeah, Ghani, welcome to Bankless. It is great to have you. We are in a crypto bull market, I think, my friend, but you were building this during the bear market, weren't you? What was that like? It was actually way more calmer. And thanks so much for having me.

It's great to be on the show. And actually, this is my first live AMA. So I'm excited for this. Fantastic. Yeah, it was during the bear market. I kind of like it because, you know, people are not running around and like dreaming about the prices. So it's much easier to build. You just like you you forget about the price for a long time and you can actually focus on building stuff. And this is like the currency of

the bear market is like what you ship shipped versus like how much it's worse. But yeah, I don't mind the bull market either obviously. So it's good away here. You know, so since this is your first ask me anything, I think it would be great for the bankless community to kind of get to know So can you tell us a little bit about your crypto journey? How'd you end up here? Yeah, sure. So in short, I think crypto has been throughout my life, like the only big thing in my whole life. So apart from, of course, like engineering. And so I started as a software engineer myself, like I was studying and like I did a few internships here and there. But then like since I discovered crypto, that became my whole thing and like the biggest part of my life in the sense. And specifically, I think Ethereum was the most exciting thing among all of the crypto things.

Simply because when I discovered Bitcoin, it was just, you know, it was great as a concept, but I couldn't see how I can participate apart from just holding it. And that seemed like a very boring thing to do. So when Ethereum came around, I guess many software engineers felt that that you can actually start writing things on top of this machine. And that is, you know, groundbreaking concept. So this is how I got into it. My co-founders, they are also fascinated by the concept.

So we just got together and wanted to do something. We didn't know, like, yet what's going to happen, but we really wanted to be a part of this journey. So it's been since, like, 2015, I think. We've been on this. And, yeah, we never stopped since we started. And so what, what's the idea behind? and Zerian, like, you know, did you envision it would become what it is today or did it start

with a different premise? Why did you decide to build it? And like, what is it? Yeah. So first of all, of course, like any product is a series of iterations. But I think the core ideas and the core concepts that we had in mind when we were built this particular product were there and they're still here while we're making changes to. So essentially, when we started, we noticed this fragmentation. Like, we knew that it's not there yet in the sense, because like we only tried out what do you swap and maker and compound, I think, by the time.

But we just realized that it's going to be a way more things in this defy thing. So people will need tools to make sense of it. And looking at the number of tokens that are appearing on the blockchain, it's like in thousands every single day now, probably. Like it was in thousands months before. and given number of protocols, you know, just to compare that in 2019, we integrated about five protocols in the whole year. And then in 2020, we integrated over 50. Actually, I lost my God. So that is like just to show you the scale of how many new financial instruments are appearing.

So I think in the future, it's similar to how internet was evolving. So, you know, in the beginning, you only had a few websites out there and people knew them all by heart in the sense. But you have this explosion of new different things and you need to keep track of them, you need to find them. You need to evaluate them. And that's what Zerian helping you to do. So we help you to keep track of your DFI portfolio. We help you discover all new assets and we help you execute the trades at the lowest rates possible. So yeah, that's the core premise of Zerian. So Yvgeny, I want to hear from you how you would explain Zirion to somebody who, knows about Bitcoin, maybe they've heard of Ethereum, maybe not, but they are, and they understand

that there's this weird, crazy thing called crypto. How would you explain Xerion to somebody like this, with this sort of understanding? And so I think what I'm asking is, like, for people that are looking for, like, legacy mental models to map onto, how would they understand Zirion? And then maybe after you're done explaining that to them, how would you explain the features that Zirion that what Zirion has that they would never be able to find in the legacy world, yet they could probably still resonate with. Yeah, I think the closest in the traditional world is, I think many people use this analogy, something like Robin Hood.

So looking at Zirians, it's an asset management tool. It's an investing app. So you can find any asset. You can click to buy it. And we were actually, we're inspired in many, like, UI decisions and UX decisions by Robin Hood and other investment apps. So essentially, I think this is the closest as an analogy as it gets. In terms of what are the features that Zerrin has, I think the biggest one is this, you know,

it's the whole narrative of Web3, how you have an address that you plug in and you instantly get all the data. It comes with this address right away. So you don't have to start it over again. You don't have to deposit money again. So this gives you a whole lot of freedom. and the people who are complaining about the UX of crypto,

they just haven't tried it fully, so they haven't really used it much. So once you get to use MetaMask on a daily basis, you get to understand how frustrating it is to sign up every time and connect your credit card and fill out the details of your account and everything. So I think this is the biggest benefit. And just us as a company, we're taking a lot of advantage off of that because we can get a bunch of information just from the blockchain,

and users are getting this amazing user experience right away. And all the assets, they're all public on chain. All the transactions are still there. So you don't need to build out this. Your relationship with the user and your journey with the user is actually much, much shorter. So you can start quickly and start helping them quickly. And for the users as well, this is beneficial because they can, you know, if the UX really sucks, they can just.

switch. And I think this keeps us, even though it's like a lot of competition, and it's harder to make money off of that and be rent-seeking. But I think that's a good thing of role and crypto will win because of that. You know, another analogy I like, Yvgeny, is like the early internet type of analogy that you talked about in the early internet. There were just a few websites to keep track of now, like in crypto, there's defy, there's all of these different money protocols to keep track of. Zeran is almost like a Netscape navigator, I feel like, right? So you kind of, all you have to do is completely non-custodial, right? So all you have to do is bring your eth address, whether that's on a hardware wallet

or whatever wallet you have in MetaMask, whatever you have. And then you just plug it in. And then the world of defy kind of opens up to you. You get a bird's eye glance of all of the assets inside of your portfolio. You have the ability to interact with these various defy protocols. and Money Legos. What do you think of that analogy, right? So like Netscape really helped to mainstream the chaos

and the navigation of the early internet, right? And so a user interface like Xerion is kind of helping to mainstream this internet of money that is DFI. I really like that analogy. But I still, I would probably say that Maramask is this Netscape browser as a better analogy. at this moment. So for ourselves, of course, we're currently non-custodial,

but for the new users where, like, we think that at some point will roll out the support of the wallet itself, so people will be able to create a wallet on Zerun, and hence they can explore other interfaces outside of Zerun eventually. So I really hope that Zerun turns out to be, you know, Chrome browser rather than Netscape. But I think that's a great analogy.

We've been thinking about that for a while. you know, the DAP browser idea did not materialize, which is a bit sad, I would say, but kind of expected. What do you mean by the DAP browser? What was that? So with the DAP browsers, you know how on mobile phones, all the wallets, they were trying to push this DAP browser thing inside their wallet, but the usage is really low, and it's much harder to trust the websites and everything. That's why actually we, with the Zerun app now, it acts like a DAP, like a native DAP

rather than a website inside of that browser, if that makes sense. It does, yeah. I don't know if people are familiar with the DAP browsers you're talking about, but like I get the picture of like, I remember in 2017, like the state of the art was something like the Coinbase wallet on mobile. And it was fashioned very much after like an App Store type model, right? Very skeuomorphic to like what came before, which. which was an app store, so it would have little tiles that you would, and it wasn't very

crypto-native, it wasn't very user-friendly. You could have do a lot with it. Right, exactly. And I think later on, Apple also went after these types of browsers, so they pretty much kicked everyone out if you were trying to replicate some sort of app store functionality within your app. So I think on iOS, it resulted in all of the wall was deleting their app browsers, which essentially means that your crypto is locked and you cannot do much with your crypto if you have a mobile

wallet. So yeah, I think that's like one of the reasons why we wanted to have this wallet connect connection to all the wallets and natively on mobile. So you can actually start doing more things with your money, even if they're on your mobile phone. So I want to get into some of these questions that we're getting in from the YouTube. And the first question I think is a good question to start with is we are curious as to how Zirion monetizes. How do you how do you guys actually fund the business? Do you take transaction fees on actions executed by Zirion? That's a good question. We get it quite quite a lot. So at the moment Zerian does not earn pretty much anything. I would say that. So for full transparency,

the only thing that we're currently making is the referral fees by one inch. So whenever we post the trade to one inch, they share some of the revenue. that they generate from the transaction and they share, I think, about 27% of the positive slippage that they take. So this is not something that we really like wanted and envisioned as a long-term business model, but this is just something that happens. And we didn't make too much out of that. The largest, I mean, the only way we're funded is by the VC money at this point. So we took money from placeholder as our lead investor about a year and a half ago. and yeah, we're still running off of that money.

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

starting spending remaining as soon as like you won of this year is actually taking the transaction fees but we want to be we don't want to be rent seeking as i said before it because it doesn't make sense the users would just you know leave us if we're trying to be uh you know squeeze the fees uh into everything so what we we will be doing the fees only on the things where it makes sense when we're actually helping the user so imagine you're trying to buy like a why earn strategy that is like takes you, you would need otherwise to make about three years to four transactions in order to compute that. Or you would get a lower rate, or you'd need to manually go to some other aggregators to find the best rate first, to exchange, and then only to deploy it into the

strategy. So stuff like that, where we are simplifying the experience and making you your life easier, then I think it's justifiable that we take the fee. So this is something that we have in mind for the short term. I think in the longer run, run. Yeah, we can talk about the token. So we're definitely not anti-tokens. We like the ideas of tokens and we think that pretty much any company in the crypto space is going to have a token at some point or like die in a sense. Because like, you know, because this is just a new way of doing equity, I would say. And I think it's inevitable that this is just a better. instrument to do equity and it makes perfect sense for us it's better to reward users using that

and it's much more flexible and you can be you know as crazy in terms of actual implementation and the model itself we first we will never do the token just for the sake of the token so this is like definitely not our plan and the airdrop like people are going crazy on twitter asking about the air drops we are considering that So I'll just say that. So keep using Ethereum if you want to be part of an ad drop. Wow. But I'm not making any promises here.

Of course, of course. Let's say that. So, Yevgeny, a token can do almost anything because that's the power of Ethereum, that's the power of tokens. Yet we've seen tokens be tools to achieve the decentralization of some aspects of a project, right? It's a way to turn governance over from a centralized team to the hand of the token holders, right?

What things about the Xerion? platform, do you think you could hand over control to a set of token holders? Have you guys thought about this? Yeah. So this is the biggest challenge, I would say. So we're not a typical defy protocol company. So if we're taking compound or like maker, this is pretty much all of their business is on chain. So it's much easier to, you know, just decentralize the governance over that stream of money and have it all worked out by the, and controlled by the token. So with our case, most of the value is actually not on chain. So we only have pretty much a small portion at this point on chain.

And most of the things are happening either on the front end or on like, or the data that is streamed on the back from the backend. So this is the biggest challenge that we see. And for I think there are not many examples at this point when companies like ours were able to introduce a token that was like representing the core portion of the business. And I think we're going to continue to work in that. So I think the easiest way for us is to decentralize governance over the DFI SDK. So DFI SDK is becoming a more and more important piece of the Zerian stack.

So essentially, pretty much any balance that you see on the protocol is fetched through the DFI SDK. So this is what we call read adapters. And just for the ones who don't know about the DFI SDK, let me just take a step back here. So the DFI SDK is this smart contract layer that we've built that allows you to first fetch all the balances across different DFI protocols, as well as execute multiple different actions across different protocols. And the only thing that is needed for the DFI SDK to work with a new protocol is this adapter. And it can be built by either us, and we will build most of the adapters, I would say, by this point. But we're starting to get more and more protocols building the adapters themselves. And thank you guys for doing that, if anyone is listening from the protocol side.

So this is really helping us because we just, you know, we look at the pool request and we click to push it. And now we have this new support for the new protocol that we haven't really even researched. So essentially this allows us to mix and match all the different transactions through the same smart contract layer. And we are already routing the 1-inch trades through the DFI-SDK, and we'll add un-swap trades and sushi trades through that layer too. So that means that pretty much any transaction that is involving the trade on Zeran will go through this layer, and it will be as cheap as going through the native smart contracts. So that is like the big benefit, and we'll continue to do to kind of unify the interaction layer through the DFI SDK on Zer, which will allow. allow us to essentially see all the transactions that are generated by the ZioNUI, and hence understand how we can distribute the governance over the adapters within the D5DK and the fees that if we

potentially take them on the D5DK level. So that is like the simplest path to token that we see at the moment. But we're actually, I think we're just lacking the tools at the moment in terms of the decentralizing control over GitHub, for instance. So that would be, of course, ideal, but it's not, we're definitely not there yet. So imagine having a token holder is controlling what kind of code is running on the backend. And this would be amazing. So if we, if we can't have like the team that is rewarded by the token holders in the sense and like just shares the part of the profit goals

to the team that maintains the backend system that allows you to find the best trade. So, yeah, all of that is just the distant future that is a bit hard to envision right now, I think. But it's going to be there at some point. So you were talking about the defy SDK, and this might be my naivness about technical level details, but we have a question from the YouTube about whether or not Xerion uses the graph in the protocol. Does what you were talking about about querying data using the defy SDK, again, this might be naive, but does that have to do with something similar to the graph and do you guys use the graph in your back end? We, so we, that's a good question, first of all. And we currently do not use the graph. And we have we have built the system, which is pretty much similar to what the graph has, but it's more tailored towards the defy use case. So the graph. So the graph, the graph, graph is kind of like the one backend trying to fit at all.

So they allow you to essentially extract logs from different smart contracts. And you can build the backend based on the graph and query the data using the graph. But stuff like cross-associating between protocols and building your own things on top of the graph is becoming harder. So it's essentially a lot of customization needed in order to create an interface like Zerian. So we have, so we actually started the Zirian back on the Nipfax. structure long before the graph was published, so that means that we have built pretty much the same or sometimes even more than the

graph has, allowing us to do a lot of stuff that other interfaces can not do. This middleware piece is absolutely necessary for the kind of stuff that you're doing. Are there other, so you've got the graph, you've got your Defi SDKs, are there other kind of middleware layers out there? that are, I don't know if competing is the right word, but like, yeah, what's the, what's the, what's the middleware layer look like for somebody who's trying to build something on DFI right now? There are actually not many. So DFI-DK is the smart contract solution to that, but DFI-SDK is not, does not fully solve the problem because it only allows you to fetch, let's say, balances on,

you know, stake balances or deposits in multiple protocols. There are a lot of things like, you know, asset prices or historical portfolio performance. So stuff like that and matching that with pricing is more complicated. I think in a way, June analytics is similar. So they allow you to query a bunch of data and like use SQL to extract whatever data you want. But it's definitely not real time, as you probably know. So I think at the moment there are not many alternatives to what we have as an API. Probably, I think, the closest one, alchemy has some form of an API for, like, querying balances,

but it's definitely not as DFI-focused as what we have. I want some people who maybe are less technical, maybe zoned out a little bit when we're talking about APIs and SDKs, that sort of thing. I want you guys to realize how important what, like, SDKs and these APIs actually are, because this is the type of stuff that got built out during the last two years of the bull market. that essentially needed to be built out, bear market, excuse me, that needed to be built out in order to enable something like Xerion today. And now it's built. And other apps can essentially use that same scaffolding. Like we have some of the highways in place that we didn't have back

in 2017, 2018. So it's got to make building a lot faster this cycle. And I think like, well, I'd actually like your thoughts on that. So Andre from YFI recently put out a post saying like some, I forget the title is like building defy sucks, right? Part two or something. What's your experience building in defy? Does it suck? I would say no. I think I think the biggest reason is that we don't have a token. Yeah. Okay. And he in his post, he is complaining quite a lot about. the token specifically of how token came into his life and pretty much made a big mess there. And this is like a one worry that we have about the token, of course, is that this does slow down

the process. So when you are the sole decision maker in the whole thing, it's allowing you to move much faster. And that's why like, you know, building does not suck because you're only making whatever you like in the sense. But over a long time, of course, it's better to have multiple people who are responsible for the decision and involved in decision making. So I think it's kind of natural that he's saying that. Yeah, our experience, I think fundraising in my experience sucks, but everything about building is great. You have, Jenny, I was curious how Zirion measures its growth and its success, right?

So you might look at a DFI protocol like Uniswap and measure it by trading, volume, right? That's something Aidan Adams puts out quite frequently. You might look at something like maker and compound and measure total locked value, assets under management, that sort of thing. For Zurion, is it number of users? Is it number of wallets, like a wallet being like almost like a D5 bank account? Is it assets inside of the platform? How do you measure growth and success? And how, what has the trajectory been like? Yeah. So we actually use multiple different metrics and KPIs that we find. important. I think the one that is the easiest to track is the number of users. And that will

measure by how many people connected their bullets. So we identify the user as someone who connected at least one bullet to the zero and UI. And that the trajectory of that metric is almost parabolic, I would say. Obviously, like over the summer, we had a bunch of new people coming into the defy with the yield farming race and they needed tools to watch their portfolios. Now, It is another bull market and it's more the crypto side, less of on the defy side. But at the same time, people are now discovering all these new different assets. So they are, you know, sharing zero links to different assets just like they would use, you know, coin gecko or coin market cap.

But this time, they can start buying them right away from the same experience. So you see the price performance and you can buy it right away. So I think this is helping us quite a bit in terms of following the traffic into the product. And yeah, in like in December, we had over 53,000 people using us across three platforms. So we find that and this is probably like a very underestimation in terms of the number because a lot of people use ad blockers and stuff. So we don't know the actual number. And it's by looking at comparing the on chain volume with actual analytics that we have, we see that the discrepancies up to 50%. So it might be that the number is much, much bigger than that.

But overall, yeah, we're pretty happy with this growth in terms of the users, and we're hopeful that in the next year it's going to continue to be the case. But other metrics that are more interesting in our view is the market chair that we started to measure recently. And we do that by looking at the on-chain data. So with each protocol, all the day is public, which is great. So you can start looking at how many users interacted with a particular protocol and how many of these users were using zero in a given months. So say we identify users and by users I mean wallets in this case. So wallets that interacted, say, with four different protocols in a given months.

And among these users, we have over 40%. So we call them, you know, Power Defi users. And these are like among PowerDefi users about 40% use zero. in every month. So that is like one metric that we look at. We also look at, we call them active defy users who use at least two protocols. And among these we have over 20 something. I don't remember the exact number.

Yeah, percent. So that is what we look at. And of course, the transaction volume is kind of the recent thing we started looking at since the release of the trading, the full trading experience in the late September. But yeah, that's the three things that we're keeping our eyes on. So, Yevgeny, we have crypto banks like Coinbase where like that's kind of where people get started when they are trying to like get into the world of crypto and they want to keep that familiarity. It's like, oh yeah, I know how to operate Coinbase. It kind of works like my Wells Fargo.

And I think that's using crypto in like the 2D sense, right, like the relatively unimaginative sense. And I think, like, Zirion is like a new sort of like crypto bank account, crypto bank in the 3D sense, in the sense that like you actually have the ability to load up your bank account into like the Zirion portal, right, into the Zirion interface. But in that same model, like, you know, crypto banks and actual, you know, normal bank banks and also like legacy brokers, they have leverage when they have more people using their product, right? If they have more capital flowing through Wells Fargo,

flowing through trading view, flowing through like whatever Charles Schwab, they have more leverage. They can get better like market prices. Does that model exist as well with Xerion when more people use Zirion? Are you guys able to like advocate for your users for better rates? Or like what are you able to do in a more advantageous fashion when more people use Zirion? Yeah, I think this model is pretty much the same.

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

And yeah, I think this is like the most straightforward path to getting like more value out of more usage. But at the same time, I think as we as we enter the air of L2s, we're going to have even more trading volume. and L2s are in a sense more separated than the shared liquidity in the L2 of Ethereum. So then I think that will be even more of a thing. So being able to actually having all these users on your platform and trading will have a direct impact on what kind of quotes and trades they are getting on the specific layer two solutions. So that is a bit unfortunate that we cannot really share all of the liquidity. But I think overall we'll figure something out and something probably more interesting than just commissions and fees will arise as the business model.

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on platform and what it can do. So just before our sponsor break, you were talking a little bit about layer two. And I think that's top of mind for bankless users right now and defy users in general, because gas fees are too damn high right now. It's very hard to get our transactions out, and it's expensive to do so. But Ethereum is developing this whole layer two world that you alluded to. can you paint a picture of what that world might look like and how Xerion might be involved as sort of an aggregator

across these layer two chains? Yeah, for sure. And speaking of the gas prices, by the way, I think that really helps the Ethereum price go up because when are people trying to sell, it's too much gas needs to pay. Yeah, exactly. Not selling.

Exactly. So we've got to keep that for a while. So with L2s, yeah, being serious here. So with L2s, I think this is, the first I want to describe the experience and how that might, I think the good analogy is I message. I don't know if you've tried that, but essentially whenever you make, you send SMS, you get this green bubble and it takes a pretty long time to deliver while with I message, you instantly click and it sends right away.

So I think that is going to be, that's how it's going to feel with L2 and all the transactions. Because all of the people in the crypto space, they kind of got used to the fact that your transaction is, you know, taking, you know, 15 seconds or so to mine sometimes a bit more. And yeah, this is fine, but sometimes gets frustrated when you're trying to actually execute on the really important trade. So over a long time, I think most of the trading volume, pretty much all of it, will be concentrated. on the L2 solutions. And at the moment, there are probably over six different L2 different approaches that exist in the Ethereum space. And yeah, so that's the part we're worried about, right?

So I think we see the promised land of an L2 where transactions are fast and cheap, but we're worried about it breaking composability, breaking all the money legos that we developed on the main chain. Yeah, so as I was saying, So essentially we've been just speaking with quite a few teams. And I think the general consensus among them that over a long time, it's going to be possible that all these L2 solutions will be interoperable,

or at least some of the most important ones will be interoperable, and we'll have the same right future for the defy space. So you don't have to. And in a way, they're all going to be interruptible by the fact that you can withdraw from the layer two and deposit into some other layer two. So this is like one step, but it will probably be, you know, slow and not so efficient. And I think over time, with potentially the help of aggregators like Zerian, you'll be able to instantly move from one layer two to the other without actually the need to move back to the layer one. So I think this is the place where aggregators will play a big role.

And same goes to existing trading experience on layer one, just like one inch is better than just going on a single deck. So you imagine a world where just as Xerion has aggregated all of these different DFI protocols on Ethereum, you're also aggregating all of these layer twos. Yeah, so we're only starting on this journey. So you probably have heard that layer two are only spinning up and like there are few announcements planned for this year. And we're going to see, I think that this year is going to be the year of L2s. And we're the first thing that we're going to start with is just supporting the balances across these different way or two solutions. and among the most popular ones. And then as this ecosystem develops,

we'll start adding actual trading functionality to allow Zeeing users to exploit, like I said, take advantage of the lower fees on the L2 solutions. Well, I was told that this is going to be the year of lightning, so that's going to be an interesting take to see what happens. So, you have a number of quick questions I want to burn through out of the YouTube channel.

First is, I would like to ask you to ask you a question is I would like to ask about the graphing system that you have on the site. Are there plans to integrate charting tools like Trading View? Oh. We actually, I don't think we have considered that really. We did think about it for a bit, but we really didn't take this series. I think the best way to proceed with that is to publish that on Roadmap.0.io and try to get the supporters to upvote that.

So if you do, we're happy to integrate that as well. So we just so far haven't seen too much of a demand for this, but I don't think it is something unfeasible. Okay. And then we have two questions about integrations. When will pool together be integrated into the Xerion UI? And then also somebody is asking about Celsius network staked assets also viewable through the Zirion dashboard. So on the pool together, we do track balances as far as I understand. We don't support the actual like the lottery functionality.

But honestly, like I think the answer is the same. So if you want to get something integrated, it's either if you are a solidity developer yourself, you can build an adapter for that. And that is the easiest pass for us to integrate. Otherwise, we just didn't see too much of a demand and pull together UI is great for their use case. And it's less of a, you know, financial one, I would say. Okay, so that kind of leads into this question. How do you guys decide which protocols to integrate and with so many new ones being built?

Yeah, so we are looking quite a lot on the, as I said, the roadmap that's doing the, people are super helpful. The own community is very active and our users are constantly just telling us what protocols we should be focusing and paying attention to. So this is, I think, the most straightforward way we do that. Otherwise, we, of course, do our own research. So whenever we see something cool happening and whenever we feel like this is something we should worth supporting within the UI as fast as possible, we try to get it done quickly.

Yeah. And so far, there is no, I think we're trying to get as many things as possible. So it's not that we're being discriminative in any form. It's, yeah, but at some point, I hope that most of the things will go through the DFI SDK route. to show people and protocols, they will integrate things themselves. And we wouldn't even need to worry about that. Yeah. So one question I have that, and this seems to be a pretty big problem in the space as a whole,

is because there seems to be a difficulty finding a single source of truth, especially with regards to crypto prices, right? So if I load up my wallet into Xerion, and then if I load up my wallet into Zapper, and then if I also look at my wallet on EtherScan or any other platform, it'll give me some sort of like, you know, one to two percent discrepancy on the price of these things. And so I would imagine that like accounting and getting prices accurate is a really difficult task.

Can you talk about like the difficulty behind that achieving that goal and what you guys are working on to refine that? Yeah, for sure. And this is actually the biggest problem that we're trying to solve. And being presenting the accurate portfolio is it seems like an easy task because all the data is on the blockchain, right? But in fact, it's not. I think the biggest challenge is the pricing, as you said. So you can fetch pricing for multiple sources.

There is, I think, one reliable source that we think is great is Coin Gecko. We use it for many different assets. But even Coingekko sometimes does not track the prices of weird things. and that live on the blockchain. So for that, you have to use unioswap sometimes, or sometimes these assets are not on uniswap, so you have to use some other source. So essentially, this is the biggest issue

and building something that would be able to keep track of all different price sources and aggregate across them and probably take volume into account. So that is a challenge. And there's not many companies are, or have successfully built something in this area. And second is just understanding what kind of assets the wallet has. So because of the nature of blockchain,

you cannot tell that a specific token belongs to a certain address. You need to first find this asset on the blockchain somewhere. And on the blockchain, there are so many different assets and they appear every day. And we as an infrastructure, we use Uniswap as our source of finding new different tokens. So as soon as someone puts a Unuswap pool, we decide that this asset isn't like a particular token that is worth tracking. So that's how we solve this issue. And I think this is the biggest issue, the biggest discrepancy, where the biggest discrepancy comes from between us and Zapper,

because Zapper manually whitelists all the different tokens. and we try to find them automatically on the blockchain as soon as they appear in JuniSwap. But this system is, of course, not complete, and we will need to track more sources and more contracts. And ideally, we need to look into every smart contract that is deployed, understand that this is a token and then start fetching the price. So that is the two biggest issues, I think, in finding the balance. I will tell you guys have done a very good job. A hidden use case I discovered for Zerion this year was,

is figuring out how to, figuring out what I actually did in my defy transactions, right? In order to like calculate taxes, right? Like, try to figure that out on EtherScan. Very difficult to understand what you actually did in a year if you're an active defy user. But Deeran has this great sort of history where it kind of categorizes all of your transactions. You can look through and actually figure out what you did. and even like click a button and export that to your tax software.

So it's stuff like that that just makes defy, using defy, much more user-friendly. It's like indispensable. I don't know if you envisioned that as a use case, but it's something that I kind of just discovered this year through using Xerion. We actually, when we were designing the history page, we didn't think that it's going to have this much success as it has now. This is like I think the feature that most of the people mentioned when talking. Yeah.

So speaking of the history page, calculating taxes was one thing that, you know, the token tax suggested we do. And we did it in a very, you know, but it turned out to be a big and useful feature. Can you hear me? By the way, I think my connection is on. Yeah. Yeah, we can hear you. It's not perfect. Your video's paused, but so far the audio is good enough.

So I'll have a follow-up question to that, Zerion. Excuse me. Are we still assembling? Oh, I think we're coming back slowly but surely. I'm going to take a pause here. I can hear you. There we go. Okay, cool.

So what other than getting accurate pricing data, what are the other hard problems that you guys are trying to solve? Like what else is like the, you know, the big obstacle that you guys are trying to overcome? There are some, I would say, like, challenges that are similar to the, I think, the early internet that are only starting to kind of present themselves at the moment. And this is like, we only had, let's say, 300 wallets and addresses using DFI stuff by this moment, probably a bit more, maybe like 500,000. But this is a very small number. And the number of assets that we currently have, it's still kind of small.

So it's like probably in tens of thousands of assets. But as we as we grow, we have this problem of, you know, in DFI, they're going to be way more assets than in the traditional finance. So on whatever you can find on NASDAQ is very limited. It's like maybe in thousands of different real stocks that you find and trade on NASDAQ. But with DFI, you're going to have, you know, millions and millions of them. And you'll have, you know, millions and millions of users, obviously. and probably billions at some point.

So just being able to match and like map these things together and finding, as I said before, finding this new assets, understanding what their prices are. So this is a big, hard challenge, pretty algorithmical, I would say.

And yeah, we would probably need a lot of servers to do that. And have you even scratched the surface on the NFT assets? Or is this all just tokens you're talking about? I'm only talking about ERC20s. And this is like one of the standards, right? We're going to see more of different types of tokens. And NFT is another one, another big class that we haven't touched on yet.

I mean, within the Zerian experience. But this is something that we'll get to it. Because this is part of your portfolio. And many things are worth quite a lot of money, as we've seen recently. So speaking of being worth a lot of money, this is a question that's been asked on YouTube. couple times now, so we've got to get to it before the end. I love Zirion. Can Zirion add Bitcoin values? Are you going to have this asset that is going up Bitcoin on Zirion soon? Do you mean like attracting Bitcoin wallets? Yeah, I think Bitcoin, native Bitcoin wallets, yeah.

I think native Bitcoin wallets rather than WBTC or an ERC 20 version of Bitcoin. That's the question. Yeah, this is something that Zepard did not so long ago. So we don't have plans yet. But at this moment, we don't have clear path to implementing Bitcoin right away. But I think that is going to be the part of the Zerian experience once we have the wallet integrated into, like the Zerian wallet integrated in our apps. So as soon as you create a wallet on Zerian, and this is something that we're working on, you'll be able to create a Bitcoin wallet as well and track the balance of it in the same UI. So that is something that we have in mind. So, Yivgeny, when you're not focused on Zirion and you're tinkering around in D5, what are you some of your favorite things to do? Like, what other projects are you interested in and what other things do you pay attention to?

That's a good one. I thought you're going to ask me about my hobbies outside of crypto. No, we don't. You have hobbies outside of crypto? Yeah, we didn't want to make that assumption. Yeah, sure. Let's talk about DFI. Keep it simple.

So with DFI, I think the stuff I like, I think lately is the rebasing tokens. I think this is amazing. This is one of the concepts that was not possible with legacy finance, just like flesh loans was like the first one. So now I kind of excited about the rebasing ones, especially the ones that are not just ample force, like the ones that track a particular price like $1 and have a fixed a target price, but the ones like, what is the base protocol, I think it's called, where it tracks the cryptocurrency market capitalization over time using rebasing mechanisms. I think this is something,

there's something about it and something cool about it. And probably we're only like, very early in this process, but we'll probably see some more cool applications of that in the future. So I would imagine that that would be an extremely difficult thing to get tracked inside of was that a challenge to get that done? Oh, yeah. Quite a few bugs related to that because, you know, these rebalancing tokens, they're not, like, they're not tracked in the same way.

So we were giving users crazy, like, gazillion dollar values at some point. And all the Twitter went crazy about it. But, yeah, it's only been there for an hour. Sorry, guys. It made you feel super rich for only an hour. Evgeny, it's been fantastic, having you on the bankless AMA.

For all the listeners out there, I want to remind you to like and subscribe if you like this video. Yevgeny's face will get posted all over YouTube more, so do that. And also subscribe to the channel for future AMAs. Ryan, do you have any last questions for Yevgeny here? No, I think we're all set.

Yevgeny, thank you for building Zerion. It's an app that I use on the daily, and you've made the lives of many bankless listeners is easier because we have that tool. So thank you. Appreciate your work. Thank you guys. And thanks for building this amazing community.

I think that that cannot go, like we can't build anything without the people who are using it. Absolutely. And if you guys have not yet tried out Xerion, you can go to zirion. dot I.O and plug in your wallet. It also has a mobile app as well,

which is really useful. Not going to show it, but it's on my phone. And it's also about a nice little widget. So you can put the widget into your home base. So you don't have to actually open up the app. It's just right there in front of you. And you can tell you'll tell you how much money you made or lost in the last day.

It's a really addictive thing to look at your phone for. Absolutely. All right, guys. Next lot. Next lot. Absolutely. It's more fun to look at this during a bull market. So download zero out during the full market.

Yeah, delete it in the bear market. Don't delete it. Don't delete it. All right, guys. Thanks a lot. Bye.