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, 2024

Credit 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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Starting point is 00:00:00 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?
Starting point is 00:00:22 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.
Starting point is 00:00:47 And in this case, all people, friends of pool, could check how much money could be used as a quota for any particular amount. awesome. This episode is brought to you by Gnosis. Nosis builds decentralized infrastructure for the Ethereum ecosystem. With a rich history dating back to 2015 and products like Safe, cowswop, or Nosis chain, NOSIS combines needs-driven development with deep technical expertise. This year marks the launch of NOSIS pay, the world's first decentralized payment network. With a Gnosis card, you can spend self-custody crypto. at any visa-accepting merchant around the world.
Starting point is 00:01:47 If you're an individual looking to live more on-chain or a business looking to white-label the stack, visit nosuspay.com. There are lots of ways you can join the NOSIS journey. Drop in the NOSIS Dow governance form, become a NOSIS validator with a single GNO token and low-cost hardware, or deploy your product on the EVM-compatible
Starting point is 00:02:09 and highly decentralized Nosis chain. Get started to take. today at nosis.io. Chars 1 is one of the biggest node operators globally and help you stake your tokens on 45 plus networks like Ethereum, Cosmos, Celestia and DYDX. More than 100,000 delegates stake with Chorus 1, including institutions like BitGo and Ledger. Staking with Chorus 1 not only gets you the highest years, but also the most robust security practices and infrastructure that are usually extremely.
Starting point is 00:02:43 exclusive for institutions. You can stake directly to Quaros I's public note from your wallet, set up a white table node, or use the recently launched product, Opus, to stake up to 8,000 eath in a single transaction. You can even offer high-year-staking to your own customers using their API. Your assets always remain in your custody, so you can have complete peace of mind. Startsaking today at corus.1. 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.
Starting point is 00:03:24 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.
Starting point is 00:04:02 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
Starting point is 00:04:25 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.
Starting point is 00:04:48 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.
Starting point is 00:05:26 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.
Starting point is 00:05:56 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.
Starting point is 00:06:22 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.
Starting point is 00:06:41 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.
Starting point is 00:07:01 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
Starting point is 00:07:59 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
Starting point is 00:08:47 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.
Starting point is 00:09:12 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,
Starting point is 00:09:38 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?
Starting point is 00:10:02 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.
Starting point is 00:10:37 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.
Starting point is 00:11:25 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
Starting point is 00:11:44 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.
Starting point is 00:12:09 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
Starting point is 00:12:44 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.
Starting point is 00:13:28 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.
Starting point is 00:14:06 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.
Starting point is 00:15:06 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.
Starting point is 00:15:50 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,
Starting point is 00:16:24 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.
Starting point is 00:16:59 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.
Starting point is 00:17:33 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.
Starting point is 00:17:59 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.
Starting point is 00:18:31 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,
Starting point is 00:18:55 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.
Starting point is 00:19:22 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
Starting point is 00:19:51 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
Starting point is 00:20:33 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.
Starting point is 00:21:10 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.
Starting point is 00:22:00 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.
Starting point is 00:22:24 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,
Starting point is 00:22:54 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.
Starting point is 00:23:23 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
Starting point is 00:23:54 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.
Starting point is 00:24:20 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.
Starting point is 00:24:45 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.
Starting point is 00:25:59 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.
Starting point is 00:27:00 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
Starting point is 00:27:47 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
Starting point is 00:28:32 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
Starting point is 00:29:10 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
Starting point is 00:29:28 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
Starting point is 00:29:44 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
Starting point is 00:30:26 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
Starting point is 00:31:19 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.
Starting point is 00:32:11 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.
Starting point is 00:32:59 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,
Starting point is 00:33:26 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
Starting point is 00:33:53 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
Starting point is 00:34:20 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
Starting point is 00:34:45 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
Starting point is 00:35:45 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.
Starting point is 00:36:33 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
Starting point is 00:37:26 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.
Starting point is 00:38:12 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.
Starting point is 00:38:52 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,
Starting point is 00:39:31 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,
Starting point is 00:39:55 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,
Starting point is 00:40:39 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.
Starting point is 00:41:15 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.
Starting point is 00:42:11 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.
Starting point is 00:42:43 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
Starting point is 00:43:40 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.
Starting point is 00:44:22 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.
Starting point is 00:44:56 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.
Starting point is 00:45:26 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.
Starting point is 00:46:06 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.
Starting point is 00:46:50 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
Starting point is 00:47:30 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.
Starting point is 00:48:13 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?
Starting point is 00:48:55 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
Starting point is 00:49:38 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
Starting point is 00:50:19 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.
Starting point is 00:51:09 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?
Starting point is 00:51:45 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?
Starting point is 00:52:05 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.
Starting point is 00:52:25 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.
Starting point is 00:53:14 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.
Starting point is 00:54:11 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.
Starting point is 00:54:28 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
Starting point is 00:55:12 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?
Starting point is 00:55:48 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
Starting point is 00:56:26 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.
Starting point is 00:56:55 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.
Starting point is 00:57:33 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
Starting point is 00:58:13 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
Starting point is 00:58:33 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
Starting point is 00:58:51 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
Starting point is 00:59:30 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
Starting point is 01:00:26 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
Starting point is 01:01:04 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
Starting point is 01:02:01 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.
Starting point is 01:02:59 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
Starting point is 01:03:55 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,
Starting point is 01:04:44 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
Starting point is 01:05:01 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.
Starting point is 01:05:27 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.
Starting point is 01:06:09 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.
Starting point is 01:06:50 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.
Starting point is 01:07:22 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,
Starting point is 01:08:02 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?
Starting point is 01:08:29 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.
Starting point is 01:08:51 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.
Starting point is 01:09:29 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.
Starting point is 01:10:06 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,
Starting point is 01:10:37 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,
Starting point is 01:10:55 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,
Starting point is 01:11:16 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
Starting point is 01:11:53 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
Starting point is 01:12:44 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,
Starting point is 01:13:18 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.
Starting point is 01:13:56 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,
Starting point is 01:14:32 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
Starting point is 01:15:24 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,
Starting point is 01:15:46 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.
Starting point is 01:16:08 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.
Starting point is 01:16:54 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.
Starting point is 01:17:15 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.
Starting point is 01:17:47 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.
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