Epicenter - Learn about Crypto, Blockchain, Ethereum, Bitcoin and Distributed Technologies - Gearbox Protocol: 'DeFi Is Boring, Let's Reinvent Credit' - Ivan & Mikael Lazarev
Episode Date: March 23, 2024Credit is a widely used term, which could essentially be summarised as “more capital so you can do whatever you want”. In DeFi, there are numerous ways of getting exposure to an asset in a leverag...ed manner: from looping to perpetuals and margin trading, the possibilities are endless (especially when you also account for synthetic versions). Gearbox Protocol aims to create a universal, composable, on-chain ‘credit layer’, through credit account abstraction. This approach simultaneously addresses three concerns: liquidity, security and, ultimately, user experience (UX).Topics covered in this episode:Mikael’s and Ivan’s backgroundsComposable leverage explainedLeveraged stakingGearbox credit accountManaging smart contract riskQuotas and rate limitsLeveraged restakingGovernance and safety parametersScaling GearboxFee structureEpisode links:Mikael Lazarev on TwitterIvan on TwitterGearbox Protocol on TwitterSponsors:Gnosis: Gnosis builds decentralized infrastructure for the Ethereum ecosystem, since 2015. This year marks the launch of Gnosis Pay— the world's first Decentralized Payment Network. Get started today at - gnosis.ioChorus One: Chorus One is one of the largest node operators worldwide, supporting more than 100,000 delegators, across 45 networks. The recently launched OPUS allows staking up to 8,000 ETH in a single transaction. Enjoy the highest yields and institutional grade security at - chorus.oneThis episode is hosted by Meher Roy.
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There were a lot of hacks happening, so it wasn't a nice time to be in.
The hacker could immediately drain all funds.
Sri Ram and the team said, let's infuse points and infrastructure coins into the boring debt
defy.
And defy got a resurgence, right?
That's the...
Nobody cares of stable coin rates today, only as a derivative of it may be funding rates,
right?
Maybe that.
But people just basically said, okay, defy is boring, but now we can get points for a huge
potentially infrastructure coin.
Crypto is a market which is dominated by tail risk, right?
Like for five years, things will be fine.
And then one sudden day, there's going to be a black swan event and something major is going
to blow up.
We invented a very great concept, which is called quotas.
And in this case, all people, friends of pool, could check how much money could be used
as a quota for any particular amount.
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Hello everyone, welcome to Epicenter.
Today I'm chatting with Ivan and Mikhail from the gearbox protocol,
which is a protocol for composable leverage on Ethereum.
This is a really interesting protocol that extends the scope of how leverage can be used
with DFI protocols in the crypto ecosystem.
Ivan and Mikhail, welcome to the podcast.
Maybe we can start with your story about how you,
you got into the crypto space and you ended up with the gearbox protocol.
So maybe Ivan was first who joined the crypto space.
To me personally, I participated in different technical events.
I'm originally from St. Petersburg and we have a lot of different stuff related to machine learning and so on.
And one conference was related to crypto and I was totally inspired with energy.
and so interesting technical solution
I've never heard before
so pretty soon we have a really great
group of enthusiasts
it was called like San Petersburg
blockchain developers group
and around 400 developers
were there so we have like
each two or three week
meetups to discuss new technologies
new stuff and so on
and I really felt in love the tag
behind that we talked more
this time in 2017 related to Bitcoin, to AZeroom, to a lot of new things come to scene.
So I was actively deep into this stuff.
And after that, I participated as many projects and many hackathons in my memory.
Maybe it was around 30 or more.
And I won a lot of them.
But the biggest things won in January of 2021, I participated in MarketMay.
I was really close to fail and it looks like it was night when I should create something
and the ideal gearbox came to my mind.
So till 7 o'clock on the morning I was calling, coding, coding, coding, calling by line,
there's the POC and submit one minute before deadline.
And boom, the project became a finalist.
And after that, a lot of people start to call me and say,
hey, we want this project.
We want to use merchant rating on Uniswap when talking, when you deliver it.
And it was really cool.
So I have a prank, Ilgis, who knows, Ivan, and after that, we teamed up maybe in a month and started this story.
Yeah, so my story is not as romantic.
I unfortunately cannot code.
My mom gave me birth without any special skills.
So I was one of the people DM in, from 2017.
I was one of the people coming to DMs of developers and asking Servant Token.
So I just continued doing it as a thing.
So being in this space since 2018, early days,
was always on the community marketing side.
Kyla was like doing part-time jobs back at university.
And fast forward was like an angel investor and whatnot.
But basically at some point got tired of just like investing in things
because you also want to be involved to an extent.
So with Ilgis, as Mikhail mentioned,
the third co-founder.
We also spotted the project of Mikhail.
We spotted Mikhail at the hackathon.
And we're like, okay, let's call with this guy.
Maybe we can invest early.
And then fell in love with the idea
with what it was contributing to the space.
So since then, I think,
this week or so marks three years together, essentially.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's three years anniversary.
My longest time ever, I think, in a company.
Community Protocol, however you call it, yeah.
That's an interesting story. Hackathons do work in creating protocols and startups. That's interesting.
So guys, tell me about the idea, the idea about composable leverage. And yeah, what is it really?
It's a really cool question, thanks for it, because I started personally thinking, oh, I want to do something with leverage like a margin trade.
And then I thought, oh, it's pretty hard to attract liquidity if you want to.
launch something like an exchange. Can I reuse Uniswap protocol and just leverage it up?
So the first initial idea during the hackathon, what we mentioned before, was to make a leverage
for Uniswap. Next stuff, we started talking with Ilgis and Ivan and found that we can easily
use it for yearn to leverage your own tokens. And then we found, wow, it's cool, we can leverage
everything, not only farms and margin trading, we can use different tokens. And now we are going
step by step to make a leverage layer. So the idea here is to be a protocol which could power
up different protocols to provide liquidity and make it possible to leverage wherever you want.
Yeah. So to add to it, any complex idea, architecture or protocol, those building it always need to know
how to distill it down to something very simple, right, for the users and like as a catch of
race. So three years down the line, we are still on that path. I think we are somewhere in the
middle of figuring out a good way to pitch it, but let me try a few different concepts and
then see which one clicks the most, right? People sometimes have affiliation and more familiarity
with one side of products of another. So one way to see it is like account abstraction with leverage.
Gearbox essentially gives you that smart account or call it smart wallet or something else,
but with leverage inside it.
So you have more capital, like imagine if your metamask had 10x defunds,
but then you go and operate with other protocols through it.
It can be farming, it can be trading,
it can be doing some composable delta neutral positions,
so that's up to you.
So it's really leverage as a credit layer
or leverage as a liquidity layer to an extent
where trades, farms, everything else,
that they don't happen within gearbox protocol.
Gearbox protocol is just that middle layer in between.
that gives you more money, but everything happens without a protocol.
So essentially, that's why I personally fell in love with it at first,
because I was investing in many things, okay, not that many things, not like SBF,
but let's say many enough to see that everything was granularized.
And this was to be like, wow, you can actually focus on one protocol,
but be able to tap into different narratives, be able to be always relevant, right?
That's one of the hardest things in crypto to be relevant.
And when you're building a protocol that is isolated in itself,
as soon as the narrative switches,
you have the issue that you are kind of stuck in something
that people don't care about, right?
And I was like, okay, gearbox is something I can actually dedicate full-time to
because if there is something new, you can always see how to edit.
Before jumping ahead, of course, that's one of the things we've added recently
that we've seen success.
So the goal is to make an engine
and then adapt to different things that the market wants.
So the way kind of I see gearbox, I'm correct me if wrong now, is, I mean the traditional economy, like TadFi economy, I can get leverage.
And usually that leverage is kind of earmarked for a specific purpose.
So when I go to the bank for a housing loan, home loan, that's a form of leverage.
I might be putting down $200,000 and the bank $800,000.
So I'm levering a Forex to buy a home with the home as collateral.
itself. But those $800,000 that the bank gives can only be used to buy the home and do repairs
to the home. You cannot use it for anything else. And similar for like auto loans or, you know,
anything like basically other forms of leverage. Now, in the intradify, there is like another
part of the spectrum where I can take a fully collateralized loan. I go to the bank and give them gold.
and I get less than that value of gold as a loan.
And then I have like full independence.
So if I do full collateralization like that,
probably I can do whatever I want with that money
because the bank has the collateral itself.
And then finally in Tradfai,
you have like this kind of loan,
which is like the personal loan where,
which is usually very small amounts of capital only
and I can go and get a loan from the bank
and I'm free to do whatever I want.
and I may not even need to put a lot of collateral up,
and in reality it is being collateralized by people's earnings power
or their credit rating or something like that.
So that's kind of like the whole range in intradify.
So if you go full collateralized, of course you have freedom to do whatever you want,
but that's not interesting.
That's not leverage actually.
You're not really leveraging if it's full collateral.
So leverage occurs when you have less than the total amount of capital.
But if you have less than the total amount of capital,
it's usually going to be intradfied that you can only use it for certain small purposes,
because that's how the system is designed.
And now in crypto, when we move to crypto, the interesting thing is that
the role of the bank in a sense is replaced by a protocol
where there are so many different primitives that can be actually.
accessed inside Ethereum itself, like from Uniswop to eigenlayer to liquid staking, etc.
Unlike a bank which only might be dealing with home loans,
Ethereum might be dealing with like hundreds of different instruments.
And so what you're trying to do is have a protocol where I can put up some capital X,
can get leverage on it, like 4x or 5x or 10x the amount of capital.
and then I could deploy it not into just one, like one system,
but like a mix of various systems depending on my choice.
So it's about bringing the freedom to do a lot more on Ethereum
because fundamentally Ethereum is a composable machine in a way that stratify systems are not.
You're correct.
And just to explain, so basically maybe.
As I definitely believe in cryptic we should not copy narratives from the real world,
I've seen a lot of projects who try to copy existing products from Web 2 to Web 3,
and majority of them were unsuccessful.
So Gearbox, it's a novice approach to solve this problem.
And the idea here may be a little bit similar to credit cards,
so our credit accounts could be considered as a credit card.
You open in once and then you can go across different protocols and use this credit account as a smart contract wallet to many of them.
When you go to Uniswap, you immediately get margin trading because on your smart contract wallet, there are two source of funds.
The first part, your pound funds, you should provide around 10% or so to get leverage.
and then your credit account could immediately take money from the pool.
So when you really open a position, you provide, for example, 100 USDC, and 900 USDC comes from the pool.
Now you have 1,000, and of course this smart contract wallet has some limitations.
For example, you come to throw money all of them into your pocket because it's creating solvency
for the protocol, but you can consider Gearbox as a lot of different boxes.
And let's label each box with a token.
For example, we have a box called USDC, we have a box called E's, link, and so on and so on.
So when you do any operation between tokens, for example, you make a swap on uniswap,
you put some talks USBC and get some tokens to the box of E's,
or if you go to provide some liquidity to the farm,
you take some UDC tokens and get some URN tokens.
After each operation, we go across these boxes and compute your collateral.
And if we really compare this collateral with your debt and it's bigger than debt,
operation could be considered as safe and okay.
If not, it's reverted.
It's why we protect pools from.
and protocol from unsolvency.
So each time you participate and interact with third-party protocol,
you really provide some tokens out of the credit account and get some new tokens,
and then we compute collateral.
Pretty clear.
And furthermore, in V2, we have a really great experiment feature.
You can connect gearbox protocol through the wallet connect to external protocol.
for example, to Uniswap and have a really native experience.
So you should not learn how to use gearbox application.
You can simply connect to Uniswap, then do swaps as usual,
and gearbox automatically make all routing and so on to create native experience.
And probably in the future, I believe we also could implement such things.
Thanks for credit abstractions and create amazing product,
When people should not learn what gearbox is, we want to become a part of infrastructure.
So it's like a credit card, you never keep into your mind how it works when I paid for a milk in a show.
Gearbox could be the same.
You have a special gearbox wallet.
You have 10x money and then you go to uniswap or Curve or LIDA, wherever you want.
And just use them with X10 money.
Pretty cool, I think.
nothing I would add specifically.
I would just say you started with don't copy the narratives from Web 2 to Web 3.
I think what you probably so meant don't copy the implementation of the products people might want, right?
So you kind of just do them the same way.
And that get back to Meir's point where he said that, oh, like you can get a loan to do anything, right?
But it cannot be large size.
And it is guaranteed by your earnings.
So there is things like somebody come into your house to beat you up to get your money back, right?
like conceptually, that's how they work in real world, right, to an extent.
There is also the concept of digital identity that needs to be maintained.
While in crypto, you have a bunch of different addresses conceptually, right?
So you cannot copy this leverage, right?
This loans at a larger amount, a new initial, in crypto the same way.
As Mikhail said and fully agree with him there, if you try to copy that fully,
you just don't arrive anywhere because your rails are fully different.
So you need to adapt, maybe the narrative is similar.
to prime brokerage in real world,
but the implementation is absolutely different.
And that's what we see with many successful products, right?
Like, from, I guess, okay, let's not go that far for now.
But yeah, as Mikhail said, you get, like, essentially,
we supercharge your wallet with X5, X10, the amount of money.
And then all of the trades, farms, positions,
whatever you do, like a credit card, they happen elsewhere.
And that's the compatibility part, right?
You can margin trade on unioswap, you can leverage farm on curve,
either convex balancer, right, wherever else it is.
Or you could leverage restake, which is the hottest narrative in town this week's, right, or this month.
So, yeah.
So, yeah, let's cover this hottest narrative.
Now, maybe, like, leverage restake is already quite complex.
Let's first think of, like, leverage stake.
So, I'm able to leverage stake with gearbox.
What is it?
And, like, what could I get?
What kind of returns could I get through, through, through,
these strategies. Let me start this one and then Mikhail can catch up and tell what I missed.
So leverage staking conceptually is pretty old strategy, right? Ava headed, Instadap had it on top of
Ava and so on. The point there was, well, you have a few different ways to get to leverage
staking position, right? One way is when you have delta neutral, so you don't have like a
long or short on ETH compared to USDC. You just have ETH, right, and you want more of ETH. You don't,
you don't want to care about the volatility of the eat price, right? Those are essentially the
strategies that have been popular on other and pretty much any other lensing protocol.
With that, what the position is really about is you arbitrage the rate between vanilla
eat borrow, right? So normal eat that you borrow and the staking yield that, let's say,
Lido or some other stake in provide like RocketPool gives you, right? And then you loop it.
So what you do is you essentially borrow it, right? You put it in a lot of, you put it
into STEth, swap and go back. That's just the looping, right? The usual strategy everybody is familiar
with. With gearbox, that strategy also worked and got very popular, I think, around $30 million
worth of ETH deposited into Lido directly module back in V2, which was last year. But it was done
differently. So in gearbox, you don't do the looping, like another, for example, right? You have
almost two pools, right? You just borrow between them and you loop. In gearbox, you take X5 the money
at the beginning, right, in your credit account, and then you do, for example,
death swap or lighter deposit with that amount of money fully altogether.
You can do it in trenches or you can do it all together.
So the difference here is your execution and your yield is exogenous.
It's not about just arbitrageing the rates within one protocol.
It's about doing all of that rate compatibility among different protocols and which ones those
are, that depends on you as a user and, of course, whatever integrations are enabled.
Today people might be earning 3.5% API on Lido, on average, right?
So if I had, for simplicity sake, 100th, well, there's a lot of money now.
So if I had 100th, I could open essentially like a wallet, credit account with gearbox protocol.
If I deposit the 100th in there, I might be able to get up to 1,000 eth from B.
the gearbox protocol itself.
I may even choose lesser.
I might choose to take lesser, 500, 400, whatever.
Let's say I take 400.
So 100 of my own and 400 from the protocol, 500.
I'm going to deposit the 500 into Lido.
It gets deposited as ETH,
and it starts to on interest.
So basically with 100, I would have made 3.5Eth per year,
assuming 3.5% stays for the year.
But with 500-Eath,
it is as if my position is making 3.5 multiplied by 5.
So that's something like 17.5% E by staking on Ethereum,
which is like a pretty safe operation.
And on the other side,
because I've borrowed this 400-Eth,
I need to pay some kind of interest to the protocol.
and if that is less than 17.5.5%,
then kind of like it's a worthwhile trade.
Is that right?
I think you're right, but I want to have some addition
what really made gearbox different
because we focused in your example
just to get yield from the state is.
And this critical strategy,
it's very common.
but Gearbox has unique feature, as I mentioned before, you have a lot of boxes.
Why you should keep your STEs on account?
AG rate? Not enough.
Elt.
Let's put it into Curve and get Curve token.
See, I forgot, I think it's like here VEs or so, and then put this Curve token into Colvex
position to get more yield.
It's doable and it's why gearbox have a big difference with our or on the protocols.
We are fully composable.
So basically, you start, let's go and follow your example.
You have 100 years.
You go to gearbox and say, hey, I have 100 years.
I want X for leverage.
Now you have 500 years.
For simplicity, let's consider that all rates are one to one.
so you swap 500 E's into 500 state E's.
Pretty cool.
You already get some interest rate.
But it's not enough for you.
You put your 500 STEs into Cure
to get, for simplicity, 500 CRVE,
and then you put it into convex position.
So you really make it boosted position.
You make yields from ESTEs,
you made some rewards from cure,
and it's quite unique for gearbox because your own your own credit account we should not really follow for complexity when people use like an old design of pools in other all money or an elder all money located into the pool which creates a honeypot for hackers and it's hard to compute your separate position in gearbox when we open credit account 500 is on a digital
And if convex want to pay rewards, these rewards will be transferred on your credit account.
We should not take all this complex math how to spread them for all pool owners, because it's a pretty complex task for computation.
Each protocol should have a different course, schedules and so on.
And as a result, if you use like a pool design, thinks it would be hard to really make all computation and at the end provide the real rewards.
In gearbox, your convex position behaves to your credit account.
So all extra rewards, which could be paid in different token, also yours, it's really good.
So you can make STEs in convex and then you can get elements.
your token if I remember correctly or something else as an additional reward which creates more
and more juicy rates for you. So, you know, that sounds really amazing, right? Because I could
stake and participate in a curve pool and maybe something else all together with gearbox,
earning more and more interest with every cycle, every additional thing in which I participate.
So one of my worries, and maybe like we can cover that later in the episode is when users start to use, let's say, three different smart contract systems with gearbox.
Let's say you're using curve, Lido, maybe like something else.
Then isn't it the case that even if like one of these protocols gets hacked and their ETH gets stolen?
So there's a smart contract with Lido, smart contractors with Lido, smart contractors with
curve and maybe there's the third thing is year there's a smart contractress with year
any of these systems blow up all of that bad credit then lands up on the table of gearbox
because though that each cannot be retrieved anymore not so so I think like this is this
is kind of like one of my conceptual questions maybe for now or either for the future that
how do you actually, can you even keep a protocol like gearbox safe
when smart contract hack risk is so major in our ecosystem?
I think it's a really great question
because I'm really crazy and focused on safety
and our death series.
A little bit hate me because I ask them right fast,
do audits and so on because we want to make
it as safe as possible. And gearbox in comparison with these many other protocols I know
has a totally different safety model. Just imagine and let's compare with oil or hour which
based on or morpho it's the same on this pool model. In these protocols you have a pool
when you have E's and STE's for example. And all three.
all users interact with this pool.
So if a hacker, potentially hacker,
could be able to do something with this pool,
the hacker could immediately drain all funds
what happens with Euler and it was up to 200 million.
Another part that this pool design really likes to have unused money
because it increased a TIVL if you go and check some pool
in Ava you can find that
some of them has a very
low utilization. It's around maybe
5% so a lot
of money just
lay some money
somewhere and do not
generate additional things.
Gienbox has a
totally different security
model. At the first
time, as you already mentioned,
all money come to the pools.
So when passive
lenders comes to
gearbox they provide with their liquidity to the pool.
However, you as a leverage user on Nidias could not access to these funds directly.
Instead of then, when you open credit account, we transfer this money from the pool into
dedicated smart contract.
And then only you as a user could manage them through the Avo security system.
What implications for security of such model?
It's very easy.
When we have a high utilization, it means that initial pool of 100 million will be really
spreaded across maybe 100 smart contracts.
And each small contracts, which held around 1 million in different assets, correct?
At this case, if you're a hacker who want to really steal much,
from the pool, your honey pot is limited because if we go through the high utilization
around 90% it means that you can't borrow so much because for more security we have a special
buffer on a top of utilization which allow users who are on the B-side to vis-rown-money.
So basically we have like a free 5 million of available money.
to borrow and if you're a hacker you can own and you can find there some security
hole I hope we have known them but you never could be confident here you can
really borrow up to 5 million to this thread and steal them because all other
money are spread across different wallets it's a totally different
security model and we want to be to make a gearbox is a very capital efficient
We are not willing to keep like a stale money on the pools because they create this honeypot.
For E's now in this risk-taking company, it looks like our utilization 90%.
So if you come today as potential hacker and want to borrow, there is nothing to borrow for you.
We really go through the limits and it's create a very good stuff.
However, as you mentioned previously, if, of course, some protocol when we provide money could be hacked, of course, it's great bad death.
But the same problem in Awe, if you use STEs or cure token as collateral and the protocol would be had, the same risk.
Agreed?
If you look at gearbox itself, right?
So you have a bunch of sort of passive lenders putting in capital.
And then you have a bunch of people on different side of the market,
which is like taking leverage and then putting them into a set of protocols
and maybe there are like 15 or 20 different integrations.
Maybe in the future there are 100 integrations that your protocol has.
And yes, the system can be financially designed.
the system is financially designed in a way that
if those counterparty protocols
with which you are integrated
if they are safe, your entire system will run
safely and it will be pretty hard to hack into.
But in crypto, like, you know,
crypto is a market which is dominated by tail risk, right?
Like, for five years, things will be fine
and then one sudden day, there's going to be a black swan event
and something major is going to blow up,
like TerraUSD is going to blow up.
I think like these, when I look at these D5 protocols in Ethereum, they have a similar
nature.
If you make 15 integrations, every five years you are going to have an event where two
or three of these integrations that you have are going to blow up in the same week.
And they are all going to like go to zero for some reason, right?
Like either the money gets stolen because of some smart contract vulnerability.
that two systems share or something like that.
And it feels to me that like
that is something that is
very hard to defend against. For gearbox
for anything that is offering leverage
in a smart contract environment.
Yes.
And we do
step by step things
to protect users.
So basically
if we consider
gearbox from the business perspective. You can find the gearbox and maybe I think it's a very good
model comes from web 2 in terms of narrative. Here we have a passive lender and it looks like a deposit
in a bank. So you won't just to get money and not focusing on details. For example, I am really
the worst trader ever if I buy any token or any asset, it's immediately going to.
down and so basically end as opposite so you can really do it in different way and make a lot of money.
So I prefer to be on a passive side. And of course there are some people who have some great
skills and experience who can trade and so on and so on on the leverage side. And at this case
it's a quite simple way to find the equilibrium between this.
two parts. We invented a very great concept which is called quotas. And in this case, all people
range of pool could check how much money could be used as collateral for any particular
other asset. For example, just imagine we have this e-th pool and we have a quarter how much money
could be invested in to rent the protocol for restaken.
Now the quota is around 15k E's.
So basically the system accounts that not more than 15K of E's could be used as collateral in any way.
So all potential losses are fixed.
And in the way how other companies or farms build their portfolio,
they could have like a blue chip with high.
Fire limits. For example, it's a pretty safe today as we know to invest money into Bitcoin
related to a smart contract or technical problem. Yeah, we trust the system. Or E's. It's also
great example of a very stable system. At this case, for example, if you open a loan position
from USDC, that water limit for E's could be very, very high. However, for all risky assets,
which could generate a lot of it, we can set a lower limit, and at this case it's
created a good combination.
Me as a passive lender could check, wow, this 60% of the full could be used only for
safe tokens when the risk of the smart contract program is quite low, and this 40% could
be spreaded across different small protocols, which could generate high yields, but for
For each protocol, the limit is set, for example, up to a few million.
And the logic here is how maybe venture phones works.
They try to invest in many, many, many startups.
Some of them could fail, but as a result, another one could generate so many, so much money
that they really cover bad debt and so on.
Of course, we have a lot of risk models, consideration, and when analysts our
Qans compute how to set up this limits and so they do their job to really eliminate all potential risks.
However, as you can see, of course, smart contracts exist, but it's limited.
It also exists across different protocols, and we try to add additional things to really detect it before and do some steps.
it's really in our backlog to protect more and more.
So, of course, our main goal to make Gearbox the safest one for these investments.
Let me just add one thing.
I think the comparison with Venture Capital isn't exactly the right one there.
Even though the logic makes sense, the comparison is that venture capital has downside, right?
They can just go to zero, many of them do.
With Gearbox, the point is it's more comparison with the bank,
where they say you're allowed to do a loan, for example, 5% for the real estate market in New York, right,
but only 0.5% for Detroit, for example. So that way you cap them. And let's say if liquidations occur,
there are things like LTV being lower, right? There are things like monitoring systems. So
if an asset has a shortfall, if that's the right word, it is conceptually that gearbox would
liquidate it before lenders have any downside exposure. So the idea is, of course, that lenders
never lose their money unless a huge hack occurs.
And then you have things like reserve funds stepping in,
whether it's enough to cover or not as one question, right?
Before the reserve fund even steps in,
there are things like liquidated premium and other things
where MEDs sophisticated bots because it's a fully open system, right?
They can liquidate the position before, let's say,
some idle holders from another protocol are able to do so, right?
So there are a few different steps.
I think getting back to the question with here on once every,
here, something blows up, right? If that's something that blows up is a Lido, for example,
I don't think any amount of security modules are going to do anything, right? Mikhail, you can beat me up
here, but I don't think we're able to do anything with that. So if it's one of the most safe pieces
failing, that's one thing, right? If it's the tail risk, which are new stuff, for tail risk,
we have this quotas and limits of the protocol. And coming back to Mikhail's point of gearbox
being secure due to being this like, you know, having many different pieces. I buy into this story,
but of course we don't anyhow hate Ave, Euler, right, Ajna, Morphe, and others. They're all great
teams, but we of course are biased thinking that the design we have is better. End of the day,
though, I think all of these protocols are moving towards a model where there is more granularization,
right, so different pieces, risk is isolated, risk is priced differently. It's just the question of
whether you have one system with a lot of modules in it, right?
Or you have fully separate modules and one system uniting them all together then.
And that's where lending protocols or lending mechanics disagree.
Because one thing is maybe safer from one perspective, but then it's unusable, right?
Another one is more usable, but then it packs a bit more inside.
So we can have that debate forever.
Yeah, but on a high level, on a high level, the idea is that,
Yes, like when you do a lot of integrations as a composable leverage protocol, you are exposed to the risks,
the smart contract risks in like the counterparty systems that you are integrating.
But you have this system of quotas where you're probably assigning higher quotas to safer systems
or systems that have lasted in the wild for a longer run like Ethereum staking itself or Lido.
and then smaller quotas for the very new D5 protocol that might be offering 40% yields.
And the hope is or the engineering design problem now is to adjust these quotas well
so that the protocol survives and does well in the long run without harming the passive lenders of the protocol.
That makes sense, right?
Like that's probably the limit of what engineering can achieve in a market.
like that. And it seems that people argue that you have like an AVE-like model, right, where you
essentially, it is bootstrap, and then they can integrate new things, and then you can use
different stuff, right? Gearbox probably is a bit more, Mikhail, would it be fair to say it's a bit
more similar to Aver than to other Lansing Protocol? So you would say not a fair comparison.
I think we are in the middle between Lansing Protocol.
Midler.
Lending protocols like Awe, because the initial pool design.
I was inspired by our in 2021 I really learned concepts from them and we're similar in the pool design.
However, these quotas and the way how we spread money after credit accounts are quite unique and at this case,
I think maybe we are a little bit similar how sexes works.
So for example, when you use Cracken, you have a special smart contract when you deposit your money,
deposit your money for this exchange or withdrawal. And basically, the same logic in gearbox. So we have
a separated credit account for each person. It's quite unique. I think maybe some teams try to
copy, but it's a pretty complex concept to be implemented. But it's safer. So it's like risks in any
system, right? Sorry, one's like like in society, in technology, right? I don't know why I am saying
this. I have the least experience out of all the people now in the podcast. But the thing there is,
you either have like some level of aggregation, right, which makes it easier for users and
anybody interacting. Of course, that introduces a bit of bottleneck and a bit of not centralization
risk, but more like some level of something occurring there. Or you have full on permission
with this, but then you have to bootstrap every single time from zero. And the middle ground,
right, is what we are trying to make in the best way possible.
Another part, sorry, a few words, so gearbox, just to imagine it's a very, very modular system.
And now we talk a little bit that there are some pools when lenders could deposit their money as a passive site,
and they are connected to an entity which is called Credit Manager,
which really holds on policies related what you can do and not,
and then a lot of credit accounts connected to credit managers.
So it's like one too many, one to many.
So one pool could have connected different credit managers
and each credit manager has a lot of credit account.
It's like a tree.
And from the passive side, it's quite easy.
We have a clear list which protocols or tokens
could be used in these credit managers.
And in quotas, you can check,
wow, these pools has such limits for these assets.
But without any line of code, we can create,
because it's modular, more complex stuff.
For example, we can create a few pools for USDC.
Why not?
One of them could be called like a conservative one,
and we can allow to use money from this pool only for blue chips.
It would have better safety measurements,
because the lift of the protocols are very, very safe, like EAS, BTC and so on.
And another pool is opposite, we can call a risky one or juicy one or digging one.
And these funds from this pool could be used across Nudify protocols.
And at this case, you as a passive side could choose between these two pools.
If you want to focus on safety, you can use more common.
conservative one. If you can take into account that risk is possible or one of these
tokens could have some problems in the future, but the Eels look so lucrative, you can provide
your passive liquidity to this pool, so it's great modularity and at this key gearbox without
any additional line of code could, we can build a lot of different projects. So margin
trading, leverage farming, leverage risk taking. We can simply
build a lensing market just from different modules to make them properly configured.
Cool.
Okay.
So, yeah, quota limits for the protocol and then for the pools are like two ways by which
like you can sort of like adjust risk and like there are different pools that offer can
offer different riskiness.
And they different pools can have different integrations and that is how, you know, like
different kind of flavors of risk, I guess, can be created in the protocol.
Now, actually, coming back to the leverage restaking, so recently, like, a lot of attention
in Twitter has gone to your new leveraged restaking products. And, yeah, could you explain
what leverage restaking is and, like, why people are kind of interested in this strategy?
DFI has been somewhat dead for about two years, right? Yields have happened.
been not that good. There were a lot of hacks happening, so it wasn't a nice time to be in.
I guess for builders like Mikhail who sit in the dungeon and code is good. No, like, nobody
calling you asking Servant token. For me, it gets less good because I have to see everybody being
upset, right? Like, Sir, when is Defy reviving? Anyway, at some point, eigenlayer, uh,
let's put aside all of the DEA availability, right? The data availability and other stuff.
Let's talk about what's relevant for us, the eigen layer part of restaking.
Sri Rahman, the team said, let's infuse points and infrastructure coins into the boring debt
defy. And defy got a resurgence, right? That's the, nobody cares of stable coin rates today
only as a derivative of it may be funding rates, right? Maybe that. But people just basically said,
okay, defy is boring, but now we can get points for a huge potentially infrastructure coin. And that
made the borrow yields insane. Because people, that's one thing to farm
That's one thing to pre-farm when you don't know what you pre-farm, right?
That's another thing to pre-farm points that you don't even know at what ratio are going to be there
for what you were going to get, at what valuation, at what supply, right?
Full on absolutely gamble from the people who want it.
But people made valuation sheets and said, this is going to cost dozens of billions.
So I'm going to pay a huge amount of borrow to get more ease today to leverage restake.
So LIDA rates today, 3.5,000.
as you said yourself, right? And then they said, okay, this is going to be whatever. It's going to
be multiples of that. Fully based on people's expectations. But because of the expectations that
gave researches to defy, because now people are prepared to borrow vanilla eth or even Lido-E,
at a huge rates, because they expect this airdrop to be worth a lot. So all the previous
talk we just had for the past half an hour about composability, rates, granularization, right,
that, that is all an engine to enable integrations which the market wants. And we saw that one
is the one that market really wants. As soon as the LR, as soon as the possibility to leverage
eigenlayer points, sorry, not yields them in their points, right, came to life, we integrated it.
There were a couple of things why we couldn't do it earlier is because eigenlayer has a seven-day
withdrawal window. And for lens and protocols, unless you modified the logic, you need to be
able to withdraw immediately, right? To be able to bidrow immediately, you need liquidations to
work immediately. And there was no secondary market to have the seven-day withdrawal window be
capped, right, to let's say a minute, okay, a second really. So then came LRT protocols, liquid restaken
tokens. I think that's Etherfi, Renzo, Kelp, and a few other, Puffer, right, and a few others,
essentially. They said, okay, we're making derivatives. So basically, they made their own ST ethers,
but for risk-taking, right? Conceptually pretty much the same for the user. Behind it, of course,
it's some AVSSS, figuring out what operator you are, which AVS use service, where the yields come from,
all of that people don't care. They see a new STEs, but they think that's going to yield 30%. And because of
that, they pay 25% today. That's pretty much it. So the protocols that capitalize on giving leverage
to it were Pendle and gearbox essentially. I'm not sure there is anything.
and else. I know there is a Wales market which is like an OTC platform to literally buy and sell
points with some collateral, but that's basically like a centralize exchange, right? You pay for points
at a certain price. That's like no like mechanics there per se. With Pendle, you split your yield
between the principal and the yield token, right? And then you just loop it. With gearbox, you get more
vanilla if, and then you shag it all into ether, fire, anzo, and other integrations available.
So there's the resurgence of defy
The borrower rate they're prepared to pay
Depends on how much they expect the airdrop to be, right?
The air drop depends on how much
percentage of airdrop eigenlier is going to give an air drop
Which they have never even promised a token yet, right?
There are so many dependencies of people expecting stuff in this case
It's crazy, but hey, we are protocol, we service what the market needs
As long as it's safe
Is it safe?
Well, those are just LRTs, right?
They have hundreds of millions of dollars of liquid
on balancer, uniswap, right curve and whatever else.
So who are we to judge?
We service the user if it's within safety
and so far it seems to be pretty vanilla safe.
I'll shut up at this point, I think.
That's probably enough.
I'll let Mikhail add whatever I missed on that front.
Yeah, and as of part, what I really like
in all these things, because it's amazing stuff
in terms of safety.
These poems exist only as all of us in Web 3 likes on Postgres or somewhere centralized database.
And at this point, because this poem is something ephemical, we do not take into account when you compute coattoral.
So basically, we know that each egging layer is could be swapped somehow to real ease.
So it has a great cootrao.
We should be taking into account all future or expected profits when you really measure the value.
So it's quite safe because I can see we can grow very, very high
until we know this all money comes from gearbox will be steak to real ease in EGELA.
And it's safe because there is no promises, there is nothing like this token could cost like
1.2 is no additional stuff. And of course these points could be beneficial, but it's quite cool.
And is Ivan said, Gearbox now is one of good information providers how people measure and expect
how much money they could get. If they are willing to pay so high rates to borrow this yields,
it means they have a really high expectation. And you can really use Gearbox stats to understand
the real pricing for these points and so on.
So pretty cool.
Pretty cool.
I really like it.
It's absolutely crazy.
A friend of mine who was like bearished the entire time.
She's like pretty whale, but he was like, no, this is all risky.
He is now looking at gearbox interface every second day,
just shagging hundreds of Ethereum into leverage because he's saying this is the future.
Like we went from buying companies with companies with cash flow, right?
To ICOs in 2017, which made promises, to then ICOs,
without any promises, to then absolutely vaporware stories without any tech, to now, to then
farming tokens, right, and future airdroves without knowing what they are, to now farming points
for future airdroves, not knowing what they are. And now people are making liquid tokens of
the points which give you tokens then. So I don't know how much more this can go. And it doesn't
actually, so none of this is bad for security, right? Because these are people's expectations for
profits. They don't, as Mikhail said, they don't care for collateral value. The only thing they care
for is that people are prepared to pay more higher today in real genuine assets compared to what's
going to be tomorrow. So it's not like, you know, it's not that, it's not like Luna where you have
tail risk of that stuff, right? None of these points are ever calculated anywhere. You only have one new
thing, which is the derivative, the LRT itself, right? And those are pretty straightforward. Like,
that's basically the business you run, right, just with a bit more stuff that you need to do on top.
As the smart contracts go, there is nothing conceptually new.
So when people compare risk-staking to Luna collapse, like, at some point, no,
this is just like a couple of staking contracts, right?
And that's pretty much it.
All of the craziness is just expectations and smart contracts don't care of what you expect.
Like, they are not anyhow valued into, you know, future value or collateral or anything else.
It's just, people are just prepared, again, to pay more today, then they're going to
get tomorrow because they think tomorrow is going to be brighter. And that's fine. That's what we
are here for as a market service essentially. Right. So this is actually like a signal of a bull market
to come that I totally agree with you, Ivan, right? So if you look at the system itself,
you are dealing with eigen layer and like this resticking, we could resale systems, which per se are
not very complex smart contract systems, right? Like their complexity is off of Ethereum. The complexity is
not on Ethereum itself, the part you're dealing with.
But it's really the case that eigen layer is promising or like some,
like,
like,
Igelair is giving some kind of points if you restake with eigenlayer today.
When you restake with eigenlayer,
there is actually nothing that is done with that capital in the here and now.
Nobody knows exactly what these points are worth,
whether they will convert to a token,
one token or two tokens or zero tokens.
or not, but still the market is kind of expecting it to get converted into a token and for that
token to be extremely valuable. So what's so valuable that it's fine to borrow Heath at 20%
from gearbox protocol. And this is like the clearest sign of a bull market that probably
probably we can see around, right? Like I've actually come across. That's really cool.
And yeah, I think like gearbox protocol will do well in that particular, that particular market.
So now one of my curiosities is, you know, like when I look at something like gearbox protocol
where like first of all, when I am kind of, let's say I'm a passive lender, I lend passively
to a pool and I must get an interest rate. On the other side, if I am taking leverage, I must pay an
interest rate. So something has to set the interest rate. But it's not just the interest rate like
earlier in the conversation we talked about how
you need different kinds of
quotas to determine how
how much risk to allocate to each integration
that gearbox protocol does
so there are like all of these parameters to be set
into the protocol for it to run well
and so
how does that work how does the governance of this system
work
I can start to make the complex
picture of this
quota system and how
we really
develop them
step by step in our
minds and then Ivan can talk more
about Dow and how the working works.
So the initial idea was
okay, we are really worrying about
if someone could invest
or some medias
could invest during like
a hype cycle, invest a huge part of the pool,
in some risky asset and then it could be a black swan event, the asset becomes zero and we can
get bad debt. Okay, the next point was, wow, we want to limit the possibility.
We think, guys, you could not use more than the quota limit into some particular asset.
Looks good. After that, we keep up to mind. Okay, if we have a limited possibility to use some
pool funds into some particular asset which could generate very high yields, it's create a shortage,
it's create a higher demand, because you as the needs is, at this case, should really
be the first to use this opportunity, correct?
So it's a way that we should really increase the price of using these pool funds to this
particular asset, otherwise it would be like first come, first state, and in terms of small
quarters, it would be unfair things, and we create a quarter interest rate and gauges.
The concept is very, very simple. We are not willing to be people who really provide the idea,
this asset should be priced or this should be additional interest for five person or ten percent
and so on, because it's a crazyness, it's a lot of work and it doesn't fit the market
needs.
You can't predict it.
Instead of that, we create a very clear system called gauges.
So each asset has a quota limit, and at the same time, it has a mean rate which is computed
based on security model.
So, for example, we can understand that probably the additional value that needs is should
paid in original quarter of values. So we do not keep into account how much the price of
end asset we really talk all time for the underlying asset. So if you want to use EASC from
the pool for this restating, you should additionally pay 15 or 20 person more. And this amount
adds to the base interest rate from the pool. And then there is some minimum rate and maximum rate
and maximum rate is the maximum possible profits we expect for such an asset.
And then people could stake their dear tokens and what for minimum side or maximum side?
So basically it's create a great market equilibrium.
If you're LP, it's all nature that you go to gauges, take your gear and what to maximize your profits.
correct? Because when the interest rate going up it means you earn more. If you are
there it's so good to go to the gauges and what to reduce the interest rate because
when the interest rate for any particular token you have position is lower you make more
money so you stay on both sides and it's what we call gear worse and there are some
interesting cases, for example, if you compete for the liquidity, you can really want to lower interest
rates for your protocol and increase rates for a competitive one. It's also pretty cool for us. And in this
case, because we have a very, very flexible system, as a result, different parts could agree
what is the market equilibrium. If the additional quarter rate
will be very, very high. Nobody wants to borrow and keep this assets. It's unprofitable.
And in this case, all people who stay here do it for nonsense here. At the opposite side,
it's quite low. There is no big demand to liquidity to the pool. So it's a way how we can
really found the real market price. A lot of people could vote for different stuff, different
different two parts to reduce or increase this rate and as a result the gauges is the way how they
could make the final decision what is the market equilibrium and i think it's a very good model
because all stakeholders could agree using gauges what is the real additional price for this
risk for this particular asset for this community just to summarize
So if I'm borrowing some asset from a pool and I want to put it into some integration like
eigenlayer or uniswap, if I'm borrowing eth for maybe uniswap nping, I have one interest rate
and if I'm borrowing it for the eigen layer, I have a different interest rate.
Now this interest rate, there is some minimum amount that is like set by the protocol, but then
there's a variable amount for these different applications.
And how is the variable amount set?
the variable amount is set by the holders of the gear token, which is the token of the gearbox protocol.
They can stake their gear and they can essentially participate in this decision making of the interest rate setting.
And your underlying assumption in this system is that because the gear holders have a stake in the system,
that collectively they will set the interest rates intelligently enough,
that they don't set it too low
that there's too much market demand
and too little supply
or too high
such that there's very little demand
and too much supply.
So you're banking
on the token holders
to collectively make this kind of
assessment and do it.
Yeah, you are correct.
And just consider an example
because we talked a lot today
about leverage risk and it was fun.
because these gauges we believe, of course, more people will be involved when TvL will be more than even now.
But when the people found, wow, it's cool to really use gearbox for restaking.
We add all the E's and VEEEs.
And then we found that people immediately understand the concept and they start voting to lower the price.
So it works by epochs.
So the interest rate theft for a whole week.
And it changed each Monday.
So basically during the week, you can vote to increase or decrease it.
And the latest value before epoch change happens on 12 GMT on Monday will be used for the whole next week.
So each week we have update like a cure.
And we recognized, wow, we do not really.
talk more about the system, but people immediately recognized and lower the interest rate for
the quotas close to zero or so, because they understand that. And then another part, wow,
I wrote it with and some of them recognize that zero interest rate is too low and was to
really make it higher. So basically, it's going back and forth. And now I believe it's around
fifth or 20 percent. I mean, maybe you have a latest number.
Yeah, yeah, around there.
Does this system work in practice?
How long has it been live?
And do you actually believe this will scale to millions of dollars?
So there is an interesting discussion on this.
Some people believe free market should be free without absolutely any, like anybody tweaking the rates and whatever, right?
Real world economics have a bunch of people trying to tweak rates, whether that works or not is a question, right?
like with those interest rates of the power, right,
and all the memes of the last three years and the steamy checks, right, all of that.
Let's put that a bit aside and see that gauges thing as a boot trap and incentive layer.
So it's not even about to make the system perfect and because we think gear stakers are amazing
at a much better at finding rates than the free market is, right?
Usually free markets humble everybody.
It's more so a layer that helps bootstrap new integrations and a layer that helps funnel
liquidity in different ways. So see it as an extra engine that helps the system work rather than
something that tries to replace the free market. Conceptually, the system should to an extent
try to relate to the free market if there are any other opportunities and protocols offering similar,
right? So it's not like we are trying to change free market. It's more so that, let's say,
three liquid restaking protocols are added. They all battle for liquidity and let's say gearbox has that
liquidity. They're going to be incentivized to either give points,
or they even own tokens liquid, right, bribes essentially,
for the rates for their own protocol to be lower.
Lenders on the other side,
who we envision to be not just, let's say, smaller passive investors,
but rather protocols themselves even, right?
Let's say like these 3M module of MakerDAO,
would want to vote the rates to be a bit higher.
Now, whether they participate in that themselves or not,
that's a separate question, right?
We don't expect core maker governance to vote,
and it probably one of the sub-dows
or like core units, as they call them now, right?
But there's the thing, is that extra bootstrap module, extra incentive module, to funnel liquidity differently.
The system has been live since mid-December, and as Mikhail said, the TBL up until a week ago, was kind of tiny to care about it, right?
As actually interesting integrations pop up, as Mikhail said also, people now actually start to notice it.
The TBL probably needs to be a bit higher for that to make sense, but it's already pretty interesting.
And we see with curve gauges, right, how interesting they are.
Curve gauges, all of these bribing markets, right, CRV incentives.
They created dozens of protocols around this model.
There, the gauges are focused on incentives as emissions.
In Deerbox case, it's not about emissions, it's about fees.
So the logic of every week you vote, whether you change your vote or not, that depends, right?
That logic is somewhat similar.
But the outcome is different that you don't emit and inflate.
bill less or you bill more. Because of integrations are interesting by themselves, where
yield comes from outside, you don't need to give more, right? That's the thing with gearbox.
It's not about leverage here. Sorry, I'm mixing a few things up. They make sense in my head,
maybe they don't in yours, so it stop me at any point. Leverage can be achieved from multiple ways.
You have perpetuals, you have synthetics, right? You have some other derivatives.
You have looping on lending protocols, or you have margin. Gearbox is margin.
put safety aside, they are all different ways to get to similar exposure at the end.
Let's say you want to have exposure to real estate market in Spain.
You can buy a house or a flat.
You can buy a management company that services those that if the real estate market grows,
it grows in value as well, right, and profits grow.
You can buy some real estate index on their stock exchange.
So different ways, different risk exposure as you go there,
similar exposure in terms of an asset at the end.
A bit less, a bit more, right?
Like ETFs have the same thing.
In gearbox case, you get to it,
we think, in a safer way,
and in a more composable way.
If you want to have leverage risk taken,
if, let's say, an LRT is added to ABLE later,
you could loop as well, right?
You can just loop in.
With gearbox, you do it differently.
So different mechanism, similar exposure,
different risk, for some less,
in their perspective, for some more.
market rates converge to some extent in a way as well.
But that Gages model is very interesting because it allows other protocols,
not just people, to come into this market and incentivize it.
So we allow for influx of exogenous yields into that system as well,
not just into integrations, but into gear economics too.
So in a sense, because the product you want to offer is like composable leverage,
and composable leverage means many,
different integrations. Many different integration means many different interest rates,
which creates like a complex decision-making problem. Now, now, now, who is setting these
interest rates? And because of your challenge starts to be that you are operating in a decentralized
environment, and how could you do it? Like, either you could have some kind of fixed mathematical
model that will work always. It's too early to have like a fixed mathematical model.
you could have something centralized where like there's a bunch of community members known that are setting it.
That could work if the community members are good, that could fail in various circumstances, the problem of centralization.
And so the only actual alternative you are left with is kind of the gear token holders.
It's like a decentralized set.
in the beginning probably it's like a smaller set of gear holder.
So it's kind of like behaves like a centralized mechanism because the number of holders
is small.
As time goes on, it becomes more and more decentralized.
Maybe like that is the only alternative that is practically available for a decentralized
credit leverage protocol.
And we'll see, I guess, like how well that mechanism works.
Yes.
and just to talk a little bit more about this game in terms from the mass point here,
it's quite interesting here why we as gear holders to set up this fees,
we definitely try to solve the optimization mass problem.
Just imagine you are gear folder.
And of course, it means that you want to maximize protocol fees.
It's quite simple.
How you can maximize protocol fees?
We take a cut from the interest rate.
So if we can really set up the interest rate multiplied to the size when people borrow,
we can maximize protocol fees.
So it's all nature for all year holders to maximize the metric,
which is fees based on this interest rate,
multiply the depth from the whole protocol.
If gear callers would be dumb,
they may be set up this interest rate too high,
but the debt will be lower and multiplied each other,
they will be a little bit lower than it would be.
So it's a simple optimization problem,
and gauge is solved.
basically you are really involved as a gear token to set up this really interest rate in a range
which allowed in gauges to maximize fees which is good for the protocol because you are a gear holder
so it's a really good feedback from the fees and so on and i definitely believe it's a good mechanic
it's a good game and of course people should learn it they should
understand and we should it should take some time of course it's quite novice nobody use it so we have
no expectation how past it could be adopted but i think it's a very good connection between
your action and protocol feast i think meher as you said uh it's similar to let's say you want
to do a fundraise right you can just open a free iCO contract let's say legally if you were
able to right open iCO contract say supply is fully circulated everything is out there
go have it, right?
Fully free market, nothing absolutely hidden,
full-on locks at the start for everybody.
I'd say like a full-on free market,
I don't believe in any levers and pulls, right, and whatever.
Or you could try to do funding routes with C,
deliver more, right, and try to make the valuations higher.
End of the day, you end up on a free market,
end of the day you end up with full circulation.
It's just that it's the path to that, right?
Anything relevant enough and large enough
will end up with the free market,
but at the beginning, having some not controlled,
rather, but having some mechanism in place that help bootstrap might be a good thing.
But as you said yourself, it will result probably once it's big enough in something a bit more
model-like. Maybe, maybe not.
Cool. So we are at the end of the hour. I had a bunch more other questions because it's such an
interesting new protocol, new D5 primitive, but I'm short. So maybe would you like to tell our
listeners about, if they're more curious about gearbox, what are the best sources that they
can go to to understand the protocol, understand how they could participate, understand
how they could buy tokens, etc.
I think the best way to understand gearbox, go to github.com slash gearbox protocol.
It's the best way to understand.
Or either scan and go to the contract sources, but for all other,
sort of information Ivan can add.
Yeah, sure.
So for developers, there are dev docs.
There is GitHub, of course, with all the code open.
And we also have a risk framework.
So essentially, it shows protocol, updates, time lock.
Anything related to transactions and security,
we have, like, a dashboard where you can see many of this thing.
So for developers, that might be quite interesting.
For community and the DAO, I think a few interesting things that we do is
we do monthly reports on how much has been spent on non-waters.
So for pretty much almost three years at this point, there are reports on how much the DAO spent on what where the money goes.
So the usual worry of DAOs is not persistent here because it's not a huge one, right?
So there are not many managers trying to skew a piece to take it off.
So you can see it all openly.
And yeah, Discord, Telegram, Twitter, we are 24-7 terminated online.
Cool.
It was nice to chat with you, Mikhail and Ivan, and best of luck for the next year.
in the next crazy year.
Thank you, Meher.
Cheers.
Thank you, Meher, great in Korea.
Thank you, sir.
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