Bankless - The Curve Wars | CurveMarketCap

Episode Date: January 27, 2022

The Curve Wars are the DeFi trenches. Deep in the realm of liquidity and incentives, a battle of tokenomics rages on. Many might not be clued into the mountains being moved in the Curve War, but Curve...MarketCap is here to settle it all. Will there be one automated market maker to rule them all? Does he who control the liquidity control the universe? Tune in and find out! ------ 📣 ALTO IRA | THE CRYPTO RETIREMENT ACCOUNT https://bankless.cc/AltoIRA  ------ 🚀 SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER:          https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/  🎙️ SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST:                 http://podcast.banklesshq.com/  ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS:  👀 POLYGON | LAYER 2 DEFI https://bankless.cc/Polygon  ❎ ACROSS | BRIDGE TO LAYER 2 https://bankless.cc/Across  🦊 METAMASK | THE CRYPTO WALLET https://bankless.cc/metamask  💳 LEDGER | THE CRYPTO LIFE CARD https://bankless.cc/Ledger  🧙‍♂️ ALCHEMIX | SELF REPAYING LOANS https://bankless.cc/Alchemix  🦄 UNISWAP | DECENTRALIZED FUNDING https://bankless.cc/UniGrants  ------ Topics Covered: 0:00 Intro 5:00 CurveMarketCap aka Gerrit Hall 9:56 What is Curve? 16:15 The Curve Wars 24:52 Governance & Rewards 32:54 Convex Finance 40:01 Bribing as a Good? 48:00 The Curve Community 53:16 Valuing Convex & veTokens 57:33 Uniswap vs Curve v2 1:06:08 PAC.xyz 1:11:13 Closing & Disclaimers ------ Resources: CurveMarketCap https://twitter.com/CurveCap?s=20  Conway's Game of Life https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/ether-is-equity  Llama Airforce https://llama.airforce/#/convex/flyer  PAC: https://www.pac.xyz/  PAC Discord:  https://discord.com/invite/Y95mnqewpb  ----- 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 I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/bankless-disclosures 

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Starting point is 00:00:06 Hey, Bankless Nation. Welcome to another State of the Nation episode, the episode where we go over a topic that's kind of been in the headlines. This is an exciting evening episode for us, David. Usually we record these during the daytime. And we're going to be talking about curve. The curve wars, more specifically. Curve wars. Curve. Like, there's a lot of subjects to unpack here. This has been something that's, you know, probably emerged over the last six months. I think it's important that we can. cover it because we want to understand it more fully. I feel like there hasn't been a podcast that has synthesized everything that's going on. And I think this mechanism will repeat in all
Starting point is 00:00:49 sorts of different D5 protocols. So we're not only going to see these wars play out on curve, we're going to see them all over DFI as well. So it's about time. We take the time to understand them. Who do we got on today? We have a community favorite. I actually did not ask if he goes by his name or not, but he goes under the newsletter of Curve Market Cap, which I believe is a playoff of Coin Market Cap. And apparently, Curve is deep enough to justify an entire newsletter. And so Curve Market Cap has gone with just producing enough content out of about Curve, just unpacking what's going on in the world of Curve Wars. And no other Defi Protocol has had this whole war thing going on. And so we kind of want to figure out why does, why does, why do
Starting point is 00:01:36 just curve go so deep? What is going on? What is the game that is being played? Because apparently there's a lot of things to unpack and things to discuss. And so, uh, curved market cap is going to, uh, unpack that for us. Yeah, what's everyone fighting over? Yeah, what are we fighting over? What's the war over? We're talking about all that. And of course, guys, you know, prices are down a little bit on the year. So got to tell you about crypto IRA, getting a crypto IRA that is from our friends, also, they wanted us to let you know, now is a fantastic time to open your IRA account, okay? Not only they want to let you know, I want to let you know. I love these things, David. I think crypto IRAs are the best way for retail to avoid paying taxes on crypto gains.
Starting point is 00:02:27 This is the truth. And that could be a lot, okay? And I did this a few years ago when the market was down probably the best most, like the most tax optimizer thing I've ever done was to open an IRA and also invert some of my old 401ks to the IRA structure and buy crypto. This used to be hard to do, but now there are companies like Alto IRA that are providing the easy button for this. So they're just like integrated with Coinbase. That means you can purchase 125 assets, a few clicks, you're up and going. You got all your paperwork filed, and you've got your own crypto IRA. So go check them out.
Starting point is 00:03:04 It's time to open a crypto IRA. Best time to do it is when you buy low in a bearish market, in a dip, whatever this thing is right now. And you can do that at alto IRA.com slash bankless. Check that out. Hey, David, I got to ask you the question, though, before we get in. What is the state of the nation today, sir? The state of the nation, Ryan, is cornering
Starting point is 00:03:25 because apparently that is what's going on in the curve wars. apparently the Curve Wars is all about the game of cornering the market. And it might have already been cornered by Convets finance. Someone won the war? The thing is, and I think this is what we need to check on. But I think the game just repeats because once somebody corners the market, then it's about cornering that market. And that's actually what I found out is actually quite interesting about this whole
Starting point is 00:03:51 curve wars thing. So, Ryan, on this state of the nation, we are cornering. All right, we're going to find out how the curve, market, the curve markets get cornered. And we've got the expert to do that coming up. We're going to introduce him right after we say hello to the fantastic sponsors that made this episode possible. Polygon is Ethereum's largest and most vibrant scaling solution to date. With millions of monthly users and all of the biggest defy apps, the Polygon ecosystem has turned into a blossoming metropolis of defy activity. Transactions on Polygon are quick and cheap,
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Starting point is 00:05:30 which I used to collect PO apps, NFTs, and do all my defy things while I'm away from home. If you haven't downloaded Metamask, you got to try it out. Web3 wouldn't be the same without it. Download Metamask for desktop and mobile at metamask.io and load up your Treasurer, ledger, lattice, or Keystone hardware wallets so that they too can get into the world of Web3. Bankless is proud to be sponsored by Uniswap. Uniswap is a new paradigm in asset exchange infrastructure. Instead of a cumbersome order book system where trades are matched with other humans,
Starting point is 00:05:58 Uniswap is an autonomous piece of software on Ethereum that lets you trade any token at the current market price. No human counterparties or centralized intermediaries, just autonomous code on Ethereum. Input the token you want to sell and receive the token you want to buy. The Uniswop Grants Program is accepting applications for grants. Do you have something of value that you think you want to contribute to the Uniswap ecosystem? No matter how big or small your idea is, you can apply it for a unique grant at uniswapgrant.org and help steer uniswap in the direction that you think it should go. Thank you, Uniswap, for sponsoring bankless. Hey, guys, we are back talking about the Curve Wars.
Starting point is 00:06:36 We're here with Garrett Hall. He runs a newsletter called Curve Market Cap, fantastic newsletter that covers the curve ecosystem. And when we tweeted out, who is a person who can come on bankless and explain, the curve wars. The resounding answer was Curve Market Cap. Garrett Hall, the person that we have as a guest today. Garrett, it's great to having it on bankless. How are you doing? Thank you. Thank you. It's going good. I have to ask, is it still bankless or after the market crash are you down to a homeless? Yeah, yeah. We're getting there. Yeah, we're getting there. I aspire to be homeless one day. We tweeted out that meme before someone could use it against us,
Starting point is 00:07:16 right? That's the thing you have to do is, you know, scratching up bankless. Front, front-run the attacks. You know how Twitter can be. Speaking of Twitter, you were recommended to us on Twitter from Crypto Condom, I believe, who apparently is a brilliant voice on Curve and on Defi, and I have just blown away by how interesting this community is. And I wonder if you could start, Garrett, by telling us a little bit about yourself. Like, how did you get into Curve and kind of your background to give us some context? Because Crypto Condom didn't fill us in. They just, you need to speak to Garrett. Oh, these late night streams are weird. We're already entering the after dark territory, right? So it can be explicit. No, I got my start in crypto actually back in 2014.
Starting point is 00:08:02 And for various reasons, was out of the space until about 2019 when I popped back in. And at the time, I'd had some Bitcoin lying around. And I was just looking for places to earn yield on it. And at the time, I was actually looking at finance of all places. I'm an American citizen, so I can't use Binance, but I was saying, what on earth is going on? How come, like, they're actually able to get these incredible yields on things? So I asked a colleague of mine, and I was saying, hey, what do you know about this? And he was like, stop, don't look at Binance, look at Curve. And this was at the time that Curve was having its curve, swerve drama.
Starting point is 00:08:38 I don't know if you were around to remember that. It's like very old school. Swerve was a fuck of curve is what I remember, what I recall. Exactly, exactly. So I started to poke around and take a look at it. And the more that I read, the more that I learned about curve, just the more my mind was blown. So I just decided to just dive all in.
Starting point is 00:09:02 That's awesome. Yeah. And what about it blew your mind? I'm curious, Garrett. Like what's cool about it? So there's a number of things. If you look at where it is today, it's phenomenal. It's got nearly $20 billion in value locked, according to DeFi Lama.
Starting point is 00:09:20 By far, the largest source of liquidity in all of DeFi. This is now across eight chains. The mathematics behind the curve pools are bespoke. So when you read through the curve white papers, they get into incredible detail and very higher level math. And I'm a huge math geek, so that really definitely appealed to me. In a nutshell, it allows for incredibly high-volume transactions with extremely low slippage, which makes a huge difference for whales.
Starting point is 00:09:47 And you two are probably whales, but for peasants like me, the curve tokenomics is also incredibly generous at splashing these fees to curve holders. That's super cool. And just maybe for people who aren't as familiar with Curve at a high level, could you even go back and sort of explain that? So this is a decentralized exchange, I believe, of the automated market maker variety.
Starting point is 00:10:13 So sort of like a uniswap, where you are trading with a protocol and a pool on the other side. But it specializes in similar tokens, right? So like, you know, stable coins would be one, you know, where the tokens are like kind of a similar value and curve tries to sort of equalize them. You could probably explain this better. What is curve in a nutshell at the highest level?
Starting point is 00:10:39 I think that's a good explanation to what you provided. So it definitely got its start as a, stable coin AMM. And that was also something that I found really interesting about the protocol, is that they had kind of looked at the existing capabilities of trading between like type, like price tokens. And they figured out more efficient ways to adjust the formula. So Uniswap, which you mentioned is the constant product, X times Y equals a constant. And that works fairly well, but then it kind of runs into some issues in that it can produce more slippage. The Michael Egerov white paper on this essentially figured out a way to combine a linear constant invariant with the product constant invariant that allowed it to have the low slippage that you would like to see that you would see from a linear invariant and the capability of kind of shooting rapidly towards imbalance.
Starting point is 00:11:38 And as a result, the pools can stay maybe 70% imbalanced and not see too much in the way of issues. which was very useful for the curve v1, which focused extraordinarily on stable coins. For the visual learners out there, X times Y equals K is the classic uniswap curve, and that is just a normal parabola that is very uniform. And curves innovation, and what Garrett just explained using math, I'm going to try and explain using visuals where the center of the curve, the center of the parabola is flattened. And what that means is that when you have two of these, two of these things, as in two trading pairs,
Starting point is 00:12:17 because where the curves meet is flatter, these pools can be more and more imbalanced from each other, as in we could have like 70,000 USDC on one side and only 30,000 USDT on the other side, and these things are still trading at basically $1. And so while the pools are out of whack in how much supply there is, the trading prices on these things still trade really, really close to one-to-one. And that's a feature that Uniswap does not have.
Starting point is 00:12:48 Uniswap V2 does not have because a 70,000 supply of USTT on one side versus 30,000 on the other side for USC would represent something like 70 cents versus a dollar 30, something completely out of whack. And so Curve really came into the market via this flattened curve of the Uniswap of an AMM that really optimized for trading like kind assets. So Curve made this assumption that you can trade, that you can bend the curve a little bit and allow for much more optimized trading of like-kind assets. And this has done, I think, just a phenomenal job on just literally, Curve v1 is focused only on like-kind. So stable-coin to stable-coin. And of course, Uniswap is very good at transacting between different coins. And I think, Twarly towards a bit later, we might get into Curv V2 pools, which is this whole
Starting point is 00:13:42 kind of on top of it. But just even in terms of where we've come from, this is like a loud curve to attract a ton of liquidity to the tune
Starting point is 00:13:51 of about $20 billion. Yeah, that's exactly right. And we definitely want to unpack Curve V2 versus Uniswap V3 because there's been some rumblings about does uniswap
Starting point is 00:14:01 V3 eat into curve? And some people think yes, but then Curve fans really think no. But that conversation is coming at the end of the Curve Wars conversation. Well,
Starting point is 00:14:12 We want to talk about the curve war situation first. I know, Ron, I know you have a question. What's up? I was just going to ask, like, because when people are hearing about curve, and if they go to the curve website in, like, the app itself, this is what it looks like. And Garrett, I have to ask, this is going to throw a lot of people off. Like, it looks pretty basic. It looks pretty janky.
Starting point is 00:14:33 Looks pretty 90s. This is like 90s. But can you tell us? I mean, we talked about the liquidity in this thing. How much volume is this user interface? Is this protocol throwing off right now? Are we talking some large numbers? Yes, so you can scroll down to the bottom
Starting point is 00:14:52 and the volume is published right there. We're seeing about curve itself, about a daily volume, often north of a billion. And in fact, during bear markets, it even tends to spike a little bit because so many people need money fast, Maybe they've printed too much like of liquidity USD, which is a lending stable coin, and they need to cover their position quickly.
Starting point is 00:15:18 So they jump to curve because curve is one of the few things that does pretty well during bare market. Gas fees might be spiking, but they'll take out as much as they can to try and cover their positions. So in fact, during the market crash of the past few days, we actually saw a curve routinely exceeding a billion dollars in trading volume per day, in some cases, $2 billion. Are people using this interface or is it all happening money robots behind the scene, aggregators, that sort of thing? So personally, I do think that this super retro interface is gorgeous, but I'm like older than the average person.
Starting point is 00:15:53 I also happen to know that they're working on a new UI, which is a bit more of like a Windows 98 type feel. Oh, cool. Getting an upgrade. Going from like Windows 3-1 to 98. That's great. But I myself, like, I'm a super geek. So I just tend to do most of my stuff in Brownie, which is a Pythonic smart contract testing suite. Awesome.
Starting point is 00:16:15 Very cool. So let's go ahead and dive into the curve wars. So now that we understand what curve is, we kind of want to figure out why there is a war happening and who's fighting that war. And I think this conversation starts with the CRV token. Garrett, can you kind of take us through the unique properties of the CRV token and why it's instigated a war? Yeah, and unfortunately, the victims of the curve war seem to be everybody's portfolio this past week. So I'd say in a nutshell, the big value behind the curve token is two things. There's the revenue share component, and then there's the governance aspect of it. So diving into
Starting point is 00:16:59 each of these, with the revenue share, all the trading fees that occur when people are trading on curve. Usually it's about four basis points and that's split evenly and VECRV stakers earn 50% of that. So if you stake the curve token, the CRV token, it turns into VE, which I think stands for a vested curve token and those people get 50% of those four basis points for whoever's staking, right? That's correct. It's a vote escrow CRV. And the VECRV is very interesting in that it is non-transferable. You can't do anything with it other than that it's an ERC 20 token. The curve itself is transferable. You can do whatever you want with it, but curve by itself does nothing. So you have to lock it to get the benefits. And then curve implemented the system where if you lock
Starting point is 00:17:49 it, you have to do the maximum lock of four years to be able to get the boosted rewards that were on the screen shown earlier. So that's the curve now voted into existence. The, property of allowing users to vote with their VECRV on the emissions of curve that these different pools would receive. So you get some fees from the basic trading activity, but then you also can get a minimum of the number on the shown on the left. And if you have enough VECRV locked, you can earn the maximum boost, which is the 2.5 times that number on the right. So by locking your curve as VECRV, you can achieve this maximum boost. In some cases, is double digit and some in I've seen as high as triple digit AP wise in terms of the in terms of the
Starting point is 00:18:42 value you can get from from staking in these pools. So when you say boost that is yield farming, correct? And when you stake your your curve for the maximum amount of time, which is four years, it means you're not getting your curve back for four years. And that's a one way decision. It's not like you can go command Z on that. Like once you stake it, it's in there. But then you are also getting the maximum amount of emissions because that is because you've locked it up for the maximum amount of time, you're getting the maximum amount of emissions as a result of that staking. And those emissions are in CRV token? They are. Although it's not as good as that because the VECRV that you have also linearly decreases over time. So if you lock for four years today,
Starting point is 00:19:27 the VECRV will drop to zero by four years unless you extend your lock. Well, it's, drops to zero as in it is deleted? No, you still have your curve, but the VECRV you have drops to zero. Okay. Wait, but I thought VECRV is curve, just vested or voting. No, you lock the curve, you receive this VECRV token. It starts at the amount of curve that you have, but it decreases linearly over time until you have nothing left unless you extend your lock.
Starting point is 00:20:01 Okay. And you extend the lock of this. CRV token? Yes. Okay. Okay. So you take your bag of curve, you lock it, and then you have to keep locking it if you want to keep getting this maximum boost. So it really does incentivize tying up the curve, keeping a massive amount of the curve off the market.
Starting point is 00:20:19 Was that the intent of the design here, is to just like increase the value and price of curve? Or is the intent to, I guess, incent governance of the protocol? Why the lockup in the design of curve? And here's where Twitter did you wrong, because you really should have invited on Michael Eggarob or someone from the company who actually designed it, because I can just speculate. I would assume that it is for these reasons
Starting point is 00:20:48 to massively extend the amount of curve that is locked and therefore off the market. As you know, four years is a massive amount of time in DFI. Like four years in DFI time is what, like 80 years in real time? Oh, at least. We invented defy like three years ago. But still, until convex came around, people were doing this. People were taking their curve and they were locking it for four years, which is an amazing signal.
Starting point is 00:21:17 So I think it's something like 80% of the curve is just completely off the market, which is pretty wild if you think about it. And one of the, perhaps the reason why this dynamic exists at all is specifically because of the emission schedule of curve. and also the boost dynamics, but Curve has this very aggressive emission schedule where it's inflating at an insane amount. But the reason why that doesn't result in just a complete dump of the value of the token is because everyone's locking it up for four years and then also relocking it up for four years.
Starting point is 00:21:50 And then they're locking up their emissions that they get for four more years so that they can get more emissions so that they can lock those up for four more years. So what's really mind-blowing about the emission schedule is it's actually a third. 300 year emission schedule. So the final curve will be emitted and sometime in 2000. Real years.
Starting point is 00:22:10 Not deep. Not deep years. Not deep five years. Okay. Wow. So the curve wars is going on for 300 more years. It's a 300 year war. After that, who knows?
Starting point is 00:22:19 The war is done. Dig yourself in. It could get wild. No, the 300 years is like, it's crazy. Every August, though, the emissions rate decreases. And in fact, half the curve has already been emitted. So we're already 50% of the way through the emission schedule. It's been decreasing.
Starting point is 00:22:38 And every August when it decreases, it's a fairly substantial amount. So just to be clear, if I own curve, I lock it as V curve for some length of time for being the maximum. And then I'm eligible for this boost. That means I get more CRV rewards. And am I also getting a share of like 50%? of the fee on all transactions, on all trades on Curf. Am I also getting that? And if so, what is that paid in?
Starting point is 00:23:08 So that is paid in 3C. The Curve 3-Pool contains dye, tether, and USC. When you stake your curve, when you stake any of those coins into the three-pull, you receive a three-pool LP token. And that LP token can then be redeemed for die, tether, or USDC. So that's cool. That's like a nice little dividend. and plus on top of the dividend, the cash that I'm getting,
Starting point is 00:23:33 also getting more, if we translate this into the equities world, I'm getting more stock, right? I'm getting stock as a boost for locking it up, and then I'm also getting this dividend, which is basically a percentage of revenue generated by curve. That's correct. But if you really want to get the value, the maximum value out of curve,
Starting point is 00:23:54 you can never actually get the value of the CRV token back, because if the game is to corner the curve market by having as large of a CRV share as possible, you always need to be locking up CRV as long as possible. And the only value that you get is your share of the stable coin volume fees that get swapped. So the two basis points that go to the CRV holders, right? So if you keep on locking up curve forever and ever and ever and ever,
Starting point is 00:24:22 that's how you maximize your dividends that are being paid in stable coin fees. But you can never get the CRV. back because if you start to offload your CRV, you're also offloading your rights to the point to the two basis points. Is that right? Yeah, I'd say that's a fair characterization. So you do have a dilemma. Like the price of curve was before the crash, $6 is $3 now. Most people don't even seem to care about the price though, because if they've been locking their curve, can't sell it until the next presidential election. Okay. So that's, I think, phase one of the curve wars.
Starting point is 00:24:58 and things get even more complicated and even more crazy after this, because I think why there's so much excitement about convex finance is it seems to be that convex finances started to really get into cornering the curve market. Would you say that that's a fair classification of convex? Have we actually talked about before we get there? Have we actually talked about David and Garrett? Like, what else you can do? Because there's some voting aspect of that.
Starting point is 00:25:28 this, right? It's like maybe we should talk about that because you're not only locking up curve to transform it to V curve to get the boost and the staking. There's also like a governance right as I understand it so that you actually get to decide which of the pools receive a share of future curve rewards. Is that an aspect we should talk about first before we get to your question, David, and set that up? Yeah. Yeah, that's worth getting into. So a lot of protocols have governance rights, and sometimes it's not clear what those governance rights do. With Curve, it has a very strong degree of decentralization, and nearly every aspect of
Starting point is 00:26:11 curve is managed by VECRV holders. So most commonly, this is to periodically vote on which pools get the most rewards. and we'll get into a bit more of the mechanics, especially how convex disrupted all of that. But basically, if you see those boosts and the emissions on the front page that you looked at earlier, that's all voted on by the community.
Starting point is 00:26:39 The community decides which pools is going to reward. And there we go. If you click on Home, actually the Dow is also a good place to do it too. All those rewards, TAPRs are what the community decided. We vote that this pool will get 10% max boost. The next one, three pool gets 1% max boost.
Starting point is 00:27:03 That's just a straight up vote of VECRV holders. And so what this is doing is this is directing what stable coin pools get more rewards in emissions. And so what that's doing is that's incentivizing liquidity to come into curve for specific stable coins. And so for stakeholders, for somebody like SUSD, if somebody was incentivized to really bootstrap SUSD liquidity, they might want to vote with their curve tokens to incentivize SUSD to come in. And so they would vote in the Dow, using their CRV tokens, to put more rewards in the SUSD pool.
Starting point is 00:27:45 And so how has this played out? what stable coin pools has the Dow elected to incentivize the most? And how often does that change? Or is it relatively stable over time? Changes roughly weekly. And you can actually have full transparency into how the Dow is voting on it. And you can therefore try and move your coins around to the pools that are going to be, going to next week be like getting more rewards.
Starting point is 00:28:15 Or if your pool is losing rewards, you can move out of it. Some protocols also choose to, like the SUSD that you were pointing out, also choose to issue directly rewards in their own token. Yes, the next token. So you can see some examples of that. And so the, yeah, go ahead. Yeah, so is it fairly balanced or are like if from the, from the perspective of stable coin operators, like how badly does like circle, for example,
Starting point is 00:28:48 really want USDC liquidity or are these types who's really playing and why are they playing in this game? What are their interests in bootstrapping
Starting point is 00:28:57 certain liquidity pools over others? That's a good question. So I think one really good example would be Steph and F are you familiar with Lido Finance and their staked Ethereum? Totally.
Starting point is 00:29:11 So if you have 32 Ethereum, you can run a validator node yourself. If you have maybe one Ethereum and you want to get the 5% interest rates. You can't do that directly, but what you can do is you can go to Steff, LITO finance. You can stake your Ethereum there. And they will give you a Steff token, which is, relies very heavily on people believing that the Steff Ethereum Pake is always one-to-one. So it's very useful for them to have a lot of liquidity in this pool because they want
Starting point is 00:29:44 to be able to people to move between ETH and Steff fluidly. If there's not a lot of liquidity in the pool, then you might end up seeing a run on the Ethereum, and it'll just be overbalanced with Steph. That's cool. So what's interesting here is it feels like there's some value, some additional value to V-Curve. So, like, I guess there's value because V-Curve pays out a dividend and the boost rewards of CRV. But there's also value in the governance vote itself, because that governance vote, you know, as allocated as a percentage of a V-curve,
Starting point is 00:30:24 actually dishes out a lot of capital, it seems like, a lot of liquidity rewards here. And how much are we talking, Garrett? Like, how much money are we, you know, talking that goes through this reward system? We're talking about like millions of dollars, you know, more than this? Yeah. When we get into the further down the flywheel towards Vodium, you'll see that to be able to influence this, protocols are putting in roughly on the order of like a million dollars cash equivalent
Starting point is 00:30:58 per week. Wow. Okay. So if I'm Lido then and I want to create liquidity for staked ETH and the ETH pair, or maybe I'm Rocket Pool in Areth and the ETH pair or something, then how much am I willing to pay for, is this where bribing comes in? Like, how much am I willing to pay to get liquidity on my, on my pair? Or do I have to buy a whole bunch of curve and stake it as V-curve in order to do that?
Starting point is 00:31:32 Or it seems like the curve wars are about the secondary market that's popped up and created kind of a way to pay V-curve holders somehow in order to sway their votes? Is that what's going on here? Yeah. And when we look at the raw value of curve, you know, there's the trading fees, which are of interest to everybody. And then these votes are probably not of interest to you unless you're operating a protocol. But if you are operating a protocol, it can be massively important to you. And it's fairly, fairly interesting because this VECRV mechanic, as we get further and further down the flywheel,
Starting point is 00:32:10 we can see where it really has advantages in being able to somewhat separate out the, these different needs because protocols all have their issues to deal with. So they often have conflicts of interest between like whales, LP holders, and figuring out what they're going to do with their own emission. So if you look at this voting system, it does a really good job of being able to split out some of this value. And convex was able to basically just swoop right in, figure out exactly how things worked well within this ecosystem and use it to architect their protocol to really intermediate themselves
Starting point is 00:32:51 in a non-peracetic way into this market. Is this where we should get into the conversation of convex finance? I think it's time. Garrett, what is convex finance and why is it such a big deal? So my colleague told me that convex is so perfect and he asks me, it has to have been designed by someone at Curve, right? Right, right? And I have my doubts on this, but I do agree that Convex fits in perfectly. As the aforementioned CryptoCondom sites, that Convex solve the emissions problem that Curve has in the short term, but it's not parasitic. So it fits in nicely and only serves to
Starting point is 00:33:33 amplify all the benefits of Curve. So essentially, Convex streamlined the process of allowing protocol owners to bribe different curve pools. And it did this by, when they launched, they solved a problem for the liquidity providers on curve, which was this need to stake your curve for VECRV, lock it up for four years, keep extending your boost. It's really difficult to do. And it required a lot of gas. It required a lot of constant management. Convex automated it. So they said, you take your curve LP token you get for staking, and instead of staking in the curve rewards gauge, you stake it into convex. Convex is going to manage the VECRV for you. Every curve that convex gets is going to lock it up for four years and it's going to pull that all together.
Starting point is 00:34:22 So everyone gets just about the max boost. And then they slice off 10% or so for themselves. Okay. And is it fair to say that convex has successfully cornered curve? Yes, convex is about 50% of the voting interest in curve at this point. And by the definition of what convex is in how it operates, it's never going to lose that market share. No, no. So there was probably a time when someone could have outcompeted convex. That time, who knows, maybe something will happen in the future and it could happen where someone else finds an entry to compete. But convex doesn't use this voting share for itself. It then turns that back over to convex owners to be able to bribe the curve pools that they want through the Vodium protocol.
Starting point is 00:35:15 Okay. So is it now, instead of the curve wars, is it now the convex wars? Like, did we just pass the wars down the line to the winner? I still think they're all kind of part of the larger global conflict. Uh-huh. So it's a new front in the curve wars, perhaps. So Convex hasn't just won the war and the war's over. There's going to be, like, it's just won the battle, I suppose, and the war...
Starting point is 00:35:45 Convex is now the battleground. Convex is now the battleground. Okay. All right. So Convex basically just automated the bribing process that was already going on on Curve. right they just automated all of that and now they they dominate it what what's in it for convex what does convex gain out of it and um i guess it's not parasitic right is this a symbiotic relationship of some sort like why does why does curve benefit from this or is uh convicts the you know the organism that's that's chiefly benefiting from this relationship so they do appear to be in
Starting point is 00:36:29 symbiosis in which both seem to benefit. And this is where this concept of this flywheel came in in that these are sort of intricate machines moving together. And they just tend to both throw off a ton of cash to whoever happens to be standing nearby them. And so I'm actually really fascinated by this because at one point in time, I wrote this article, I can't remember what it's called, but it used Conway's Game of Life to describe some defy apps about, Garrett, are you familiar with Conway's Game of Life? I am, yeah. Yeah, listeners should look it up.
Starting point is 00:37:04 It's kind of hard to explain. But basically, it's just these very programmatic rules that if you design them correctly, they take on these life forms that perpetuate often to infinity. And so, like, there's been a lot of, like, defy innovations these days that kind of just feel like obfuscated Ponzi games.
Starting point is 00:37:20 But that's not what this feels like. This actually feels, like, oddly sustainable. Yeah, here's Conway's Game of Life. this uh and so like you make these different shapes they they react to each other yeah like there's a fantastic animation there's these self-perpetuating little organisms that with you know some inputs create infinite outputs and just exist uh and it seems to be that uh convex and curve are the right constructions combined with the right issuance to just be kind of filling the original ethos of what DeFi was supposed to be, which is these long-term, self-perpetuating, fully decentralized applications
Starting point is 00:38:03 that really return value towards the LPs and the governors. Like, this seems like an elegant model. Like, would you agree with that description? Yeah, and this is why Convex really made a splash when it first hit, because the curve community is full of a lot of very smart people. Because, of course, you have to be smart if you're going to understand all these complexities of curve in the first place. And when you look at the way each element of convex is architected, it's sort of filled in some of these gaps from the user interface perspective. So like the hassle
Starting point is 00:38:37 of having to lock your curve is kind of gone. If you want a liquidity provide, it's just so easy to dump it in convex. You don't have to wait four years. You can get your money back. Convex introduced a wrapped form of curve called convex curve. You can always take your curve, give it to convex and get a conced token back. The convex curve token can be staked into convex to earn convex curve and three curve. So you get the dollars in trading fees that you would get from staking curve. You also get curve back from that and you also get convex back from that. And convex takes that, of course. They then use that to increase their overall stash of the ECRV, thus increasing their voting rights. And this is actually able to maintain its peg in the same
Starting point is 00:39:27 way that Steph does by having a curve factory pool between curve and convex curve launched. So if you ever want to take your convex curve and trade it back to curve, you can do that any time as long as the convex curve curve, factory pool maintains this peg. It's kind of funny. We started part of this looking at the curve interface and how rudimentary it is. But it strikes me, that's almost like the like the firmware level of this protocol, right? It's like you don't really have to, I mean, that can be abstracted through things like convex. And that's maybe more of the user interface that people are actually using practically.
Starting point is 00:40:03 But one thing I'm hung up on here still, Garrett, is like this idea of bribing. Like, bribing doesn't have a positive connotation, does it? Right? So like, okay, like, you're brought, let's say this was a corporation and there was some, know, voting shares in the corporation. And you are actually bribing shareholders to say, you know, say it's Apple, to give you a contract. Like we are part of that supply chain that wants to make iPhones. And so rather than, you know, compete and win fairly at that game, I'm going to just call up a whole bunch of Apple shareholders. I'm going to bribe them in order to vote,
Starting point is 00:40:50 to assign my supply chain company the Apple contract. That doesn't seem ethical, right? I mean, like, bribes are bad, aren't they? Or talk about this a little bit. Are bribes bad in this system, or is this some sort of transparent bribe that is like actually okay? Yeah, it's part of the game.
Starting point is 00:41:15 Is bribe even the correct word here with all of the negative connotation? So if I said that a protocol was using its own native token to incentivize liquidity, would that sound bad? No. No, I would also call it a bribe. It doesn't have the same ring to it as bribery. And, you know, bribery is effective. It works.
Starting point is 00:41:33 We all know what it means. I think it's used a bit tongue in cheek. But like, what's the ethical issue that you would see with the way that this is happening? I'm not sure. It's actually just the term bribe that I'm not comfortable with. Let me ask you, are there ethical issues? there corruption issues? Are there issues of some nefarious token trying to get liquidity that doesn't deserve it and like buying its way into that liquidity? Or like is that a bad thing?
Starting point is 00:42:02 Are there any, you know, hazards, moral hazards that they come about as a result of this? That's a good question. I am struggling to think of it, but I am not among my many accomplishments by no means an ethicist. So there's this website that has been a spun up. Vodium that I think has formally instantiated bribery in the curve ecosystem. And so I kind of want to, Ryan, if you could, there we go. So this is kind of the end game, I think, of the Curve Wars. This is kind of where things have landed. What are people doing here?
Starting point is 00:42:41 Just take us through what are people doing when they are bribing here and why are they doing that? We might have already covered this. No, you're absolutely right. where the activity all flows on to. So if you take your convex tokens and you lock your convex tokens, it's only a 16 week lock, so it's not quite as severe as that four-year curve lock. And then on this site Vodium, you could use that vote locked convex to vote for which pools are going to receive rewards. And then also if you're a protocol, you can directly issue a bribe here on this site so that people can go in and
Starting point is 00:43:17 people can go in and vote for the protocol that they think is best. Now, all the bribes are shared by everyone who votes for it. So if someone goes in and places in $1 million bribe and you're the only person that votes for it, then you would get that entire million dollars for yourself. So as a result, it tends to equalize out a little bit between the pools.
Starting point is 00:43:36 And if you'd like to see some stats on this, I would suggest going to the Lama Air Force site, that's llama. That's llama. Lama, like the little animal. Of course. Lama Air Force.
Starting point is 00:43:50 Two L. Two else. Two else. A llama, Ryan. Not the Dali Lama. I should have been more explicit. Thank you.
Starting point is 00:43:57 The Lama Air Force is alphabetically Alunara, Benny, and Fidi, who are incredibly active in geniuses in terms of programming. If you click on the Vodium tab up there, they have all sorts of stats for curve convex. And you can see all the results.
Starting point is 00:44:13 of all the bribery rounds, if you want to call it that. We're currently on round number 10. And as you can see, Frax has deposited nearly $6 million worth of bribes. And this is going to get distributed amongst everyone who votes for Frax. If you go and click on that drop down, you can see the results of some of the previous weeks. This one, oh, actually, this one has concluded already, too. you can see the dollars per vote locked CVX means the amount of dollars you take home at the end of the day if you voted for that. And you can see that they tend to equalize out between all the different pools.
Starting point is 00:44:56 So because fracks bribed the most, they got the most votes. And this is the mechanism by which it evened out. Before the bear market crash, this is approaching nearly a dollar per vote locked convex. That's incredible. Okay. So maybe we could talk about that for a minute. But it's like, again, using the term bribe, but really what these protocols are doing, like what Frax is doing is, it's just paying for liquidity, isn't it? Just the way it would buy liquidity from, you know, token back or, you know, some other service. That's correct. And if you don't want to bribe people, you could buy a large stake in convex yourself and you could use that convex or you could buy a large share of curve. So there's a lot of ways you can go ahead and vote or sorry, there's a lot of
Starting point is 00:45:37 ways that you can influence the curve emissions. The Vodium angle is just one of many. So this is the end state of the Curve Wars. I don't think it goes any further than this, unless there's some sort of bribes for bribes, but that seems like one factual too far. It might be. I mean, maybe someone's going to come up with some sort of lending protocol based on something within this. The ingenuity in this space is what keeps me glued to my screen 24-7. Very, very cool. Gary, there's a number of questions. that I have for you. There's, like, I want to know who's playing the game
Starting point is 00:46:12 because there's a lot of whales that are playing the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, world world's, kind of want to know who's kind of, who's won, who's won the most? And I also want to get into the topics of, uh, curve versus uniswap, because there's always the conversation of, like, oh, well, will uniswap v3 just like, end this? So, we're going to get to all of those questions just after we talk to some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible.
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Starting point is 00:49:12 And we are back with Garrett Hall talking all about the Curve Wars, which seems to have evolved into its logical conclusion. And so, Garrett, I want to ask about the Curve community, because this is such a vibrant ecosystem of just like data and, you know, tokens and shenanigans that is, of course, is attracted just a bunch of people around it. So how would you characterize the curve community? Like who are the types of people that are really interested in the curve wars? Yeah. So there's a number of ways to answer this because there's the protocols. Obviously, we talked about their role in the curve wars. They want to get their pools big. They want to maximize emissions, get a ton of liquidity. On the other side of this is just all the people who are kind of downstream of this in receiving some of the cash that get thrown off from this protocol.
Starting point is 00:50:04 Like, let's be honest, there's one thing that unites pretty much everybody in cryptocurrency, and that's greed. We're all extremely greedy. Curve has been making people, not only making people wealthy, but they don't rug them in the process. So anytime you see a site that's saying, you know, 5 million percent APY, of course, users throw money in, they lose all their money, and then they complain. Curve has been consistently delivering. Curve has been around for two years, an incredible security.
Starting point is 00:50:32 track record. So people feel really safe and comfortable putting their money into Curve and by extension, convex, Vodium. The people in the community, because you have to really be able to understand this, you get a lot of really smart people. So I tend to hang out mostly like the dev channels. So I end up talking a lot with developers that are building really cool stuff on top of this. And I think that the kind of composability of all these various assets that Curve is creating is just really bringing out some of the best ingenuity and innovation within all of Defy. I think one of the biggest things I've taken away from this conversation is that Curve has
Starting point is 00:51:10 really won the game of decentralization. It seems like this game that's being played has created a long-term stable equilibrium of decentralization because we're talking about like the winner of the Curve War is another protocol and that protocol is only giving out its spoils to bribes than those are being bribes by other protocols. So when you peel back the layers
Starting point is 00:51:38 are on this thing, like is there tetranode under the hood just like winning at this game or like are there humans like winning at the Curve Wars or is it actually a successful case of decentralization? So I think it's a I happen to know the Curve Court team puts a lot of emphasis into decentralizing. So amongst other things like the site is hosted on Fleek,
Starting point is 00:52:00 that can't be, or not through the IPFS, so it can't be taken down. There was an issue a few weeks ago that got a lot of attention where there was a protocol that was trying, called Mochi, that was trying to basically backdoor its way into cornering convex. And it was shut down by something called the Curve Emergency Dow. And what a lot of people don't realize is that the Curve Emergency Dow is none of the core team. It's nine other completely different protocol, some are protocols and some are just very active community members that have like the sort of master key ability to shut down,
Starting point is 00:52:37 shut down things in case of issue. So Curve is no capability of doing that. They completely decentralized that. If an asteroid wiped out all of the, very tragically wiped out all of the Curve Corps devs, the protocol will live on. Amazing. I feel like that's just like sadly extremely unique in Defi.
Starting point is 00:52:59 I can't name another protocol that has this property. Nor can I, but I'm just an expert on curve. Okay, fair, fair enough. What's cool about this too is like all of this stuff happens on chain. Like it's so transparent, even from the emission schedule, being able to forecast, you know, 300 years in the future of what the curve token supply is going to be. the fact that all of these like the bribes are on change like everything is completely open and transparent and on chain. I do feel like that is very much the ethos of defy. I'm curious one thing when we were talking before the sponsor break, Garrett, about like the value of a curve vote.
Starting point is 00:53:44 And it's like 87 cents or something according to the Lama, the Air Force Lama here. 87 cents per vote. And I've read some things like the little I've read about. about this lately about convex itself and the value of convex. And there seems to be some idea within the community. And of course, bankless never provides financial advice. None of this is financial advice. But I've read a lot about the valuation of convex.
Starting point is 00:54:13 You can value it very much like a stock, a stock that is throwing off dividends. And when you look at the value of a curve vote, it looks like the convex token itself is tremendously undervalued. Do you have any insights on that? Or like, what is the community saying about convex and its relative valuation? I think the thing that, like when I mentioned the kind of the core ingredients of the curve token is there's the governance and then there's the cash flow.
Starting point is 00:54:46 There's sort of an implicit third, which sort of every protocol or every kind of has, which is this sort of multiplier effect, which is factoring in, hypothetically things that might come in the future. And like by way of example on this convex, if you want to just value it based on this Vodium, the flywheel, the cache is currently throwing off, you would have missed, for example, that convex recently is not just going to be doing this convex magic, sprinkling this magic pixie dust on curve. They're also expanding to frax. So frax has a VEFXS vote escrowed frax chair that they, They announced, they're basically moving their entire tokenomics to the VE CRV model, and
Starting point is 00:55:30 convex announced that they're going to pull them in their fold. So this is all of a sudden a second major, massive protocol in DFI that's going to be getting convex. How many protocols have you seen lately adopting this VE tokenomics model? What percent of those might end up under the convex, under this convex umbrella? What is the VE token model itself? Because that does seem to be something that a lot of protocols are. you know, switching to, are considering or taking a look at, is that just basically locking
Starting point is 00:56:01 up, locking up your tokens in the way that that curve has in sort of this, yeah, this staking type arrangement where you are able to receive token rewards and potentially dividends? So I don't think that this is just a copycat or a hype thing. And it's actually funny because at the beginning, this VE tokenomics was mocked mercilessly, but now it's kind of getting the last laugh here. Why were people mocking it? The four-year lock is too much. It's too complicated. It's too confusing.
Starting point is 00:56:35 No one's going to use it. But nowadays, we're seeing protocols not just really copying it, but tailoring it to their own needs. Because protocols all have their own issues to deal with, and they might need a slightly different implementation of it. So if you look at the way that some of these different protocols are moving to adopt the VE tokenomics, they are kind of moving in this way that would be compatible because once you have a VE token that controls governance rights, you can get it in the convex ecosystem. But it's not almost the case that it's good for everyone to adopt VE tokenomics. Like I think that if you have a cash flow, for example, where you're able to return fees to users in a substantial amount, I think it might work.
Starting point is 00:57:20 If you don't have that, I'm not sure if the VE tokenomics is something that your protocols should necessarily adopt. I want to open up the kind of worms, which is uniswap v3 versus Curve. Because Curve really, this whole entire game and the whole entire valuation of the CRV token and also the convex token is all. dependent on stable coin volume. And if stable coin volume decided for some reason to migrate away from Curve, then that would be bad for a cascade of all the relevant tokens that extract value from the trading fees going through Curve. And so in a world where Uniswap V3 actually becomes more efficient for stable coins,
Starting point is 00:58:03 that would be really bad news for Curve. Do you think there's a future version of the world where Uniswap V3 eats Curves lunch? Well, I don't necessarily think that because I really think that the past few years curve got to this level of dominance through the stable coin swaps. But it's the curve V2 pools that are, I think, going to be upending things. We haven't gotten a chance to talk much about the curve V2, but it really is a seismic innovation. So essentially the curve V2 pools allow for our pools that contain voluntarily priced assets. The first such pool that was released was essentially a pool that had U.S. Tether, WBT, and W.ETH. The pool is able to rebalance itself without the aid of an external Oracle.
Starting point is 00:58:57 So just by understanding internally the trading volume that's happening within the pool, it's able to determine what it believes the current price of Bitcoin and Ethereum actually is, and it's able to rebalance itself towards that taking profit along the way. And what we've seen, this pool was launched in the summer of last year. This past few weeks was obviously some major bare activity. A lot of AMMs were unable to really accommodate the kind of massively fluctuating change in price. TricyCrypto2 was rebalancing itself in real time and was one of the only sources of available liquidity if you needed to move in the absolute swing of, things between Bitcoin and Ethereum, for example.
Starting point is 00:59:44 Wow, wow. Okay, so one of the big drawbacks about Uniswap v3 was that you can provide liquidity in a concentrated form, which is one of the perks. But then if the Uniswap markets for that particular trading pair moved outside of that concentration, so here's a concentration and then it moves outside of it, then all of a sudden all the liquidity is gone. And people would have to withdraw their liquidity and then re-deposit it based on new parameters. And you're telling me that Curve V2 does this same sort of phenomenon, but in an
Starting point is 01:00:14 automated auto rebalancing fashion. Yes. Wow. And you can also, the other thing about Uniswap V3 is it's, it's very much rewards more active liquidity providers, right? Like, you always have to be playing the game. Play in the game. You have to monitor it. You also have to have opinions as to the future of the price as well. Totally. It's opinionated liquidity. Yeah. But with these V2 pools for something like this tri-cry crypto too, which is, you know, Tether, Bitcoin, and Eith. That's pretty passive, I would, I would suppose. Like, you don't have to play the active liquidity provider sort of role as you do in Uniswap. Right. So I'm a poor person and I can't afford to kind of constantly be rebalancing my position. But I can put some money into
Starting point is 01:01:03 tri-cry crypto. And the only slight drawback to it is that there is impurember. impermanent loss because, of course, if the price has changed, the balance has changed, and you might be withdrawing a different amount. But then the upside is that you, well, first of all, a lot of these pools are getting the curve rewards on top of it. You can somewhat time your trades on that. So, for example, now would be a really good time to put dollars into the tri-cry-cry-cry-cry-cropos pool because then if the price of Ethereum and Bitcoin go up, then you'll be able to pull
Starting point is 01:01:35 out, in theory, more Ethereum and more Bitcoin. And it's not like Uniswap V3 would have protected you against impermanent loss either, right? No, no, that's something that if someone solves that, you know, I'd like to see how. Right. So is Curve V2 going to eat Uniswap V3's lunch? I would, you know, I can't comment on Uniswap necessarily. I don't know a lot of people are trying to push this battle between Curve and Uniswap, and I think it's a little bit forced because, for example, like, it's been this battle.
Starting point is 01:02:06 that this battle has been kind of pushed there for a long time. But the more AMMs that we have out there, isn't that the best for B-Fi? Absolutely. I think people just like watching the money robots beat each other up a little bit. It's like battlebox. It's kind of entertaining. Yeah, a little battlebot session here and there. It's kind of fun.
Starting point is 01:02:25 Curve V2 have an internal, accurate price Oracle on chain. Is Curve going to eat chain link? No, probably not. Right. And we would never say that, by the way, frogs. any frogs that are listening. Don't come cancel us. I'm tired of you guys.
Starting point is 01:02:41 I guess that is the main difference between Uniswap V3 and CurvV2 is that Curve V2 depends on an Oracle and Uniswap V3 doesn't. Is that correct? Yeah. Yeah, okay. Tradeoffs.
Starting point is 01:02:51 I'm sorry. Curve V2 does not depend on an Oracle, David. There's no Oracle. No Oracle. That's what's cool. Well, I was curious about these V2 pools. What other sorts of things could you put in them?
Starting point is 01:03:04 Like we're putting tether Bitcoin and ETH in one, but it probably doesn't work with, like, is it still kind of like kind sort of assets? Or can you throw anything in these pools? You can put anything in it. So just last week, Curve launched the V2 factory. And anybody can go on that and launch their own pool between any two tokens that they like. So far about a half dozen of these pools have been launched. So we've seen a lot of pools with ETH and some other Dief. asset, Badger, which as you saw as a big player in the Convex Wars, is created a Badger Bitcoin
Starting point is 01:03:41 pool. And then there's been a few dollar pools created, like dollar plus some other asset. That's cool. It's going to open up a lot of routing options because this means that the more pools of these that get launched, the more that you can move high volume, low slippage between any assets than Defi. Garrett, let me guess. If I open up the Curve V2 white paper, it's just an insane amount of crazy math.
Starting point is 01:04:08 It's math. This one is like above university level math. It's really complicated. Wow. I'll be looking at that right after this podcast. Yeah, yeah. Some light night reading. The easiest part to understand is that uses an exponential moving average to keep track of the Oracle price.
Starting point is 01:04:26 Okay. Okay. I'm also curious. I don't know if you have a perspective on this. Garrett, but while we have you and you're thinking about Curve a lot, what is it like migrating from Ethereum mean chain? I've noticed Curve being deployed on like Polygon. I'm not sure if it's on some layer twos right now, like Arbitrum. I believe that maybe happened recently. I can't keep up with it. But does that break the liquidity of Curve or how do you see it evolving
Starting point is 01:04:55 beyond just Ethereum main net onto some of these layer twos to other chains? So Curb is currently on eight different chains. And this is just as a quick aside, that's so good for like the people who aren't whales because the ability to kind of get access to this flywheel tokenomics outside of Ethereum is really helpful for a lot of people. And there's actually a few other ways that people who aren't whales can even on Ethereum main chain still participate. But on the subject of the side chains, Kerb has done a really good job of trying to keep
Starting point is 01:05:29 its architecture easily launchable on any EVM compatible chain, and that's allowed it to kind of move very quickly between it. A lot of the bribes can be done towards pools on other chains. And some of the mechanics are not yet fully built out, but are being built out as we speak to kind of allow for kind of more and more cross-chain compatibility. Here, this has been, I think, one of the most interesting and educational state of the nations that we have ever done. So, Thank you for coming on and explaining the curvewurst us in such a digestible way. There's two last things I think we need to get through on this episode, and both of them have to deal with you. And one is your PAC, your PAC.X, Y, Z.
Starting point is 01:06:11 Can you, for our listeners, explain what PAC.x, Y, Z is. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, it's more on the subject of UNISwap that I think is actually like a kind of real timely thing to talk about. Because could you imagine if UNISwap wasn't headquartered in the United States, if it was headquartered in another country? they'd be throwing the founder a parade. And instead, the United States, they're unbanking him or making him bankless. Like, it's just insane what's been going on. Bankless not in a good way.
Starting point is 01:06:38 Yeah. This is literally for people who aren't following, this is literally, I think this happened a week ago. Like, they canceled, Hayden Adams, the founder of UNiswap. They booted him from his, from his JP Morgan Chase. Say the names. Yeah, JP Morgan Chase. Canceled Hayden Adams.
Starting point is 01:06:55 Jamie Diamond, canceled Hayden Adams bank account. Are their names? I'm cutting up my chase card right now. Just this whole thing is madness. One of the things that got me into stable coins in the first place is I said, oh, this is probably a fairly safe place to be. Because stable coins, I've heard it described as like an IQ test for the national government. A rational government would be embracing this.
Starting point is 01:07:19 We have a huge lead. Every defy asset is denominated in dollars. And instead we're attacking it. Is that make any sense to you? No, it makes no sense to me whatsoever. So tell us about PAC. How do you solve it? So I've been so frustrated with what's going on at Washington, D.C.,
Starting point is 01:07:38 that I just sort of floated this idea of could we get some on-chain cryptocurrency advocacy going because the crypto community is wealthy. And you can buy house races for less than people are buying JPEGs for. Wait, bribes? Is that we're going back to bribes again? Well, thankfully, thankfully the PAC community has a ton of lawyers and figure, out how to make my wild ambitions like pass the legal test. Okay.
Starting point is 01:08:03 And they've come across a number of mechanisms that we can use to be able to affect change within Congress. And one of the most important things that we've launched already is this on-chain congressional scorecard. So we are allowing anybody with the wallet to come in and vote for whoever they think is the best or the worst. And yeah, no surprise, Elizabeth Warren is negative 4.91 out of five. Oh, wow.
Starting point is 01:08:27 She's ahead of Brad Sherman at this point. It's pretty bad. It's a very close race. But the flip side of it is if you sort the other way, you can see that there actually is a lot of people that are doing a lot to help out cryptocurrency. Tom Emmer at the top. He's coming on the podcast, by the way.
Starting point is 01:08:44 Show the podcast. When's he coming on, David? In February? Sometime in February, yeah. Yeah. Okay. Sorry. It continues.
Starting point is 01:08:51 No, this is great because I think that as a community, we can actually affect some change in Washington because there's only two things that move politicians. One is votes and the other is money. And cryptocurrency is getting there in terms of votes, but we certainly have the money. So if we are not getting our message out to Congress, then that's our fault. But we're starting to get the, starting to get the raw mechanics there. So this is one of the many initiatives that we're working on with PACT Dow. We're working on wherever we can apply on-chain crypto activism and use this to best influence Congress.
Starting point is 01:09:31 Well said. So Gary, how can people get involved in this? If I'm a regular kind of crypto user, can I just connect my wallet and vote for some of these representatives? Is that one way to get involved? What are the other? Yes, you can. Join our Discord. Our Discord's very active. We have community calls every Friday. We talk about the initiatives that we're currently working on. So I can't quite and all the initiatives just because it's already getting close to our close time here. Another podcast. I'd be happy to come back or we can get someone else from the community to talk about it because there's just a lot of work that needs to be done.
Starting point is 01:10:05 We need to, need to recruit primary challengers for all the people who are the most hostile towards cryptocurrency. We'll take a look at them again. This is the wall of shame right here. One more. So Elizabeth Warren leaves up. for vote this year. But Brad Sherman actually has an incredible competitor in Erica Rhodes. I think she's going to pull it off. So we had her on the podcast, big fan. Yeah, I listened to it. It was a really,
Starting point is 01:10:32 really good. Sherrod Brown, of course, was chairing the Stable Coin committee. He's not up for a little bit, but Stephen Lynch is a representative. Reps are up every two years. So we could get, we could get pro-cryptocurrency challenges for all these people. The primary race is what matters. Once they get through the primary, they don't feel the heat. And the primaries are coming up now. So glad you did this. Join the Discord. Go ahead and connect on the site and vote and follow it.
Starting point is 01:11:02 Packed down on Twitter. And we will get all of those links into the show notes for the listeners if they're not already there. Garrett, thank you so much for coming and just giving us so much education again with Curve. And also for fighting the fight in Washington because it's such an important fight. I'm in the wrong Washington for the fight. True. Fair, fair enough. Garrett, if people want to learn more about you, would follow your substack and just see what you're up to, where can they go?
Starting point is 01:11:27 It's curve.substack.com or follow on Twitter, CurveCap. Lovely. There you go. Thanks, Garrett. This has been fantastic. Bankless listeners, hope you enjoyed. The 300-year curve war may already be over. Convex may have already won.
Starting point is 01:11:43 We're not so sure, but it's really cool to see how this plays out. And I bet it will be full of surprises. the months and years to come. Of course, risks and disclaimers, none of this has been financial advice, not at all, ETH is risky, curve is risky, defy is super risky, you could lose what you put in, but we are headed west. This is the frontier, it's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.

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