Epicenter - Learn about Crypto, Blockchain, Ethereum, Bitcoin and Distributed Technologies - Mona El Isa: Enzyme – The Future of Asset Management

Episode Date: July 14, 2022

Enzyme Finance, previously named Melon, is a decentralized protocol built on Ethereum (ETH) that allows users to create, manage and invest in custom crypto asset management vehicles onchain. Using Enzyme Smart Vaults, individuals and communities can build, scale and monetize investment strategies that employ the newest innovations in decentralized finance. Enzyme enables Depositors to interact with Vaults in a way that is non-custodial and requires minimal trust between parties. Vault Managers can be bound to performing certain actions or forbidden from others. We were joined by Mona El Isa, CEO & founder at Avantgarde Finance and Enzyme Finance, for the second time after her first appearance 5 years ago. We chat about the transition from Melon to Enzyme and the current state of the protocol, how vaults work on the platform, decentralized governance and how to survive a bear market.Topics covered in this episode:The transition from Melon to EnzymeHas the vision for Enzyme changed?How does the protocol work?Choosing your vault and redeemabilityWho are Enzyme users?Becoming a vault manager and sharing your vault24/7 reportingThe MLN tokenGovernance - Enzyme’s path to decentralizationEpisode links: Episode 158 - The Polkadot Protocol – One Blockchain to Connect Them AllEnzymeEnzyme on TwitterMona on TwitterSponsors: Tally Ho: Tally Ho is a new wallet for Web3 and DeFi that sees the wallet as a public good. Think of it like a community-owned alternative to MetaMask. - https://epicenter.rocks/tallycashSteakwallet: Steakwallet is your new favorite multi-chain, mobile wallet. Tired of having a different wallet for every chain? Get Steakwallet today and get the power of Web 3 across all chains right at your fingertips: https://steakwallet.fi/ -This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/452

This is Epicenter, Episode 452 with guest Mona Elisa. Welcome to Epicenter, the show which talks about technologies, projects and people driving decentralization and the blockchain revolution. I'm Friedricha Ernst and today I'm speaking with Mona Elisa, who is the founder of Enzyme Finance and the CEO of avant-garde finance. and enzyme is a protocol for on-chain asset management and delegating this trustlessly to other parties. And we will go into detail in just a bit. But before we do, let me tell you about our sponsors this week. Our first sponsor is Teddy Ho.

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head over to Teleho.cash to try the Teleho Community Edition and play around with its feature before its upcoming launch. SakeWallet is our other sponsor today. SakeWallet is a multi-chain mobile wallet that puts the power of Web 3 at your fingertips. In just three tabs, you can stake and manage your assets on over 22 built-in protocols, including all major EVMs, layer 2s and non-EVMs like Cosmos, Holana, Nia and more. Stake wallet abstracts away all complexity while being fully self-custodial,

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at stakewallet.fI, and stake wallet is spelled like the meat. Okay, Mona, it's a pleasure to have you on again. after all this time. Pleasure to be back. Thanks for having me, Frederica. I recently listened to the episode you recorded ages ago. It must have been late 2016

or early 2017. Back then you came on with your then co-founder, Ratu Trinkler, and most of the episode actually revolved around Polka Dot and the white paper that had been published in the weeks prior.

So obviously, Lots of things have changed. You're now built on Ethereum and Polygon, not Parker dot. Reto has disappeared. You've changed your name. So tell us about the last five and a half years. The protocol has changed its name. My name is the same.

Oh, yes, yes. Back then you guys were called melon. Yes, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, oh God, it does feel like ages ago since I was, I was, here and certainly it was very different times. I mean, you know, it was first, you know, very,

very kind of less experienced founder, I guess. We were, we got into a phase where we were, Gavin and Utah were advisors to our company, Melonport that built Melon v1. And we were, we were very close to them, still are close to them. And at a point, we were just talking about Pocod and melon, now enzyme. And we got excited about kind of future possibilities. And I think it was Gavin that suggested that we consider doing a joint token sale. And for a while, that idea persisted. But actually, a few months in, we decided that it would maybe make more sense to do.

our token generation events in a separate and more independent way. We never actually committed to building on Pocod back then because things were so early. I mean, it hadn't even really been built. We just had a white paper at the time. And our intention was there, you know, to see how things developed and to make sure that it was going to be a chain that we could build on and that had all the infrastructure that we would need. But to this day, we've actually been quite slow to roll out on other chains. We, even Polygon deployment that we recently did, I think it was in April May.

It started off actually as an experiment. We were at an offsite and we just had a free day of hacking and a few of the devs got together and said, let's just try to deploy enzyme on polygon. And unlike many other protocols, enzyme is a complex protocol. It's made of 25 contracts. It has a very complicated subgraph infrastructure that underpire. pins it. So we run seven subgraphs to collect all the data emitted. We have a dependency on chain link for price feed so that we can give our users real-time historical reporting.

And yeah, and this kind of experiment just kind of got some momentum. And before we knew it, we were inserting it quickly into our product roadmap and making it into a deployment. But yeah, actually, usually we're much more flow and cautious when we do. deploy on new chains and we're definitely looking still at the Pocodot ecosystem with special interest in what Akala is doing and what Moonbeam is doing, speaking to those teams very closely, but still I would say not quite at a point where we're, you know, we've decided on a time or a commitment to deploy anything. Yeah. Why did you end up changing your name from melon to enzyme? Don't get me wrong. I think enzyme is a much better name. I still miss

melon actually but yeah it wasn't um so so in the middle of the bear market the last bear market we were approached by b ny melon um which is a large fund administrator in the u.s for those who don't know and um even though the spelling even though their full name is b ny melon spelled with double l um they felt that um we were um uh infringing on their trademark um so we we tried to push back and every single legal letter that we responded to them with was costing us sort of, you know, five figures in terms of legal fees. And we felt that we had a strong case, but we felt that we would be outspent in the courts if we persisted it. And because of the bare market situation and because we were actually caught on a pretty bad treasury management,

I would say in the last bear market, we decided to preserve our capital and take the opportunity to rebrand actually in the market, take an opportunity to rebrand and freshen things up a little bit as well. Cool. So tell us about the vision for enzyme from the get-go. Has it changed over the years? Yeah, I think it hasn't really changed. I think it's mostly, it's actually stayed very consistent.

I would say that there is a slight subtle difference between the vision behind enzyme and avant-garde, which is the company building on enzyme today. In terms of enzymes' vision, I think the idea has always been to be giving simplicity, transparency to investors by enabling them to have three key things. One is transparency. We've seen with recent market events, you know, what happens when they're, there's opacity in the financial markets and the contagion impact that can happen when you don't understand the risks or the leverage or the, or you can't see through the lies that certain

counterparties are telling you. Another aspect that we felt very strongly about was that people having control of their own assets through non-custodial solutions. So we don't actually advocate that non-custodial is good for everybody. I think that's a personal user choice. But I think having the option to have custody of your own assets and control of your own assets should always be a possibility. And that has always been part of the vision. And then last but not least, we were quite excited and still are about decentralized systems, decentralized governance systems versus centralized single points of failure. And again, just this week, we've seen an interesting story in the Financial Times where the London Metal Exchange just on its own decided to cancel,

I think, six or seven hours worth of trades just because they were afraid people couldn't make margin requirements. And this was just like, and it was actually, they think it's an illegal decision that was made by a centralized single point, you know, single kind of party. They rolled back transactions and they caused, I think, they're being sued for $456 million dollars in losses that they caused. And who decided that that was okay? That decision was out of their remit. You know, what conflicts of interest did they have in making that decision?

You know, obviously they would have been the worst off party if the margin payments couldn't have been made. And so, you know, we have always believed that that's just one recent example, but we've always believed that decentralized governance, if done right, and we've obviously seen, you know, some growing pains with that. But if done right, we believe that it can bring some balance and some objectivity to the way decisions are made. And you guys, you're very much at the full front of decentralized governance.

So I think you were one of the first projects to have fully decentralized. And I want to talk about this a little bit later in the episode. But before that, let's maybe talk about what the protocol offers to users. So say, I am a retail investor and I hold crypto assets in, I self-custody them. In a way, enzyme finance enables me to delegate the active management of those assets to someone else, right? So the power of enzyme is that you can, so we didn't actually talk about the trustless aspect. That's another actually very key principle around the enzyme vision is keeping this trustless relationship between investment manager and investor. And this is something that over time we've actually has slowed us down and actually created a lot more work for us.

But we've been very passionate about that value or that vision that we want to be able to automate that, you know, in traditional financial, you need financial intermediaries to give trust between the different counterparties in a traditional fund or any financial product. You would typically have a custodian, a fund administrator, an auditor, etc. Those people play the role of making sure that the investor is, or the manager is managing the funds in a way that was promised to the investor. And we believe that you can do away with all of those financial intermediaries through just using smart contracts. And that's how we've always built enzyme with this in mind. And it becomes very challenging. The more complex defy becomes, the more types of assets and the more types of standards that we see becomes more difficult to adhere to those promises.

But we have always avoided taking the shortcuts to not compromise on those promises. Today and hopefully, you know, for years to come, it will always be possible for an investor to invest in an enzyme vault in any kind of. financial product built on enzyme with the full knowledge that the manager can only behave in certain ways. For example, only interact with certain protocols or only interact with certain assets or not act with certain or not trade against certain assets, not trade with certain protocols. You can also have prohibitions or stop losses embedded in the smart contracts. if, for example, somebody loses 5 or 10% in trading slippage over a very short trading period. You know, you can actually pause their restrictions, trading restrictions, until the sort of board or the, I say board, but typically in this space we refer to, we think it's, you know, there's a manager, but there's also like a group of people who own the vault or own the product and govern that product.

and usually that's done through a higher layer. The most common one we see is with the Gnosis safe. And these people can review, okay, well, why did he breach the trading slippage or why did she breach trading slippage? Was it a valid reason? Or were they trying to do something inappropriate, malicious, and then kind of reassess whether they want to give back the permissions? Or trading still possible at the safe level, but temporarily gets halted?

And so before you invest, you can see upfront, you know, what you're getting into, what the risks are, what you are and are allowed to do. You know, it sometimes could be comforting to know that if you're investing in a yield vault, which is not allowed to take any leverage, for example, because you're not comfortable with leverage or has a maximum leverage ratio, this is something that, you know, suits your particular risk profile. And you might want to protect against, you know, for example, assets below a certain liquidity being touched or being traded in a vault so that you know that if you redeem, because you can always have the right to redeem, you will always be able to find liquidity in the underlying assets. So there's a bunch of different protections. We talked just now about the asset management policies in particular, but there's even protections thought about and built in at a governance layer. So with traditional financial systems, if an update or an upgrade is pushed, it's usually forced on you. With enzyme, if we decide to upgrade from V4 to V5, all we do is signal an upgrade, but it's up to the Vult managers to actually opt into the upgrade.

And in order to protect investors, maybe they don't want to do this upgrade. Maybe the upgrade is going to include changes that they don't like increased fees or a change of risk management policies, there's always a seven-day cool-down period, but they're notified about any changes up front and that they have a possibility to opt out within a seven-day period before they're forced into this new paradigm. So you see everywhere we worked,

we've tried to think about how to preserve that trustless relationship. There's a lot to unpack here. Obviously, lots of thought has gone into the system. Maybe let's stay with the, retail customer, the user for a bit. So, I mean, obviously, your background is in trading. You were a Goldman Sachs star trader for in your previous life. So obviously to you, all these investment vehicles, they're not scary because you understand

them. What about, so basically, as someone who's not deeply knowledgeable about, about, how financial instruments work. How do I decide which vault to buy into? Yeah, I mean, I think traditionally this is something enzyme hasn't been able to display very well. And what's interesting is like enzyme is really all about the core infrastructure. You know, we think about it sometimes as an operating system for asset management,

something that enables you to build any asset management products on top of it in a trustless decentralized way. But we, they've never really, enzyme, the council around enzyme have never been particularly concerned or focused on the user experience or making investment, or even the products that are built on enzyme. These are all built by third parties. After we decentralized enzyme, melon enzyme, we, a few months later, we, a few months later, we formed avant-garde finance. And avant-garde finance's vision has been much more about enabling. So basically, you know, sure, we have the infrastructure now to build products easily,

but what do you need to think of outside of the code? And then education and discovery. So, like, if you're a retail investor coming into the platform, right now, it's very overwhelming. There's hundreds and thousands of volts. And, yeah, sure, we have filters and we have data and we have, we're about to roll out APIs so you can filter that data. But, you know, it's really not an experience for a retail person coming in. And so avant-garde is much more focused now on how to filter the different vaults or how to display the different vaults,

how to categorize, how to educate around the risks of the different vaults, and how to make accessing them confidently much easier. Do you expect that parties to kind of build retail user-centric frontends to this? Maybe even with like a rating system or recommendations or approved by this, by a committee or something that basically that kind of gives the user more to go on? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we have been in. some discussions, people who want to build that. And also we have been beta testing a white

label for enzyme, which should make it much easier for people to display the vaults they want to display on their interface and give their own recommendations through their own branded company or through their own branded. It could be either their own products or the products of others. And this, I think, will be a really interesting stepping stone towards making, bringing more transparency and awareness around suitable investments for different people. Okay, cool. Yeah, that makes lots of sense. So let's stick with the investor for one more second.

So I have decided on a vault and I've invested in it in some sort of asset. How do you make sure that I can always redeem? Because obviously the vault manager is allowed to kind of undertake certain actions on So do I need to give a heads-up that I want to redeem or how is liquidity handled? We try to flag up front on the interface, which volts are 24-7 redeemable and which volts might not be 24-7 redeemable. In the past, they've all been 24-7 redeemable, but as the complexity of Defi has increased over the last year or two, we've seen new types of non-fungible or illiquid position.

come into play like NFTs or like, you know, when you borrow or when you when you borrow on AVE or compound or when you create a CDP, you're not always getting back a divisible ERC20 token, which can be redeemable at all times. So this has added, this added complexity and we saw a lot of demand for this product, so we couldn't completely ignore them. But ultimately, the use of these products does negate a little bit on the 24-7 redeemability because, of course, if everybody wants to redeem at once and the vault is tied up 100% in the borrowing, there's no way to force the unwind of that position in order to be able to redeem it. So we try to flag on the front end which ones are 24-7 redeemable.

And the way that you can guarantee to the investors that that 24-7 redeemable, is there is a policy that says that this vault is not allowed to interact with any external positions. External positions being these more complicated, less liquid types of positions. Then there is another type of vault which is allowed to interact with external positions, but we flag in our documentation and we're trying to make it clearer on our interface as well, that these kind of vaults require different level of trust assumptions. So typically you might require maybe illegal terms and conditions. You might want to know who your manager is,

whereas in the other case, you might not care because you have 24-7 redeemability full control. So we have actually now started to think about enzyme. It's highly customizable, highly configurable, and we provide templates for people to create different types of vaults with different trust models associated with them. That makes a lot of sense. So if I invested, say, ether, I might not get, you know, ether back.

I might get like some collection of ERC 20 tokens when I redeem, right? So there's no way to kind of just cash out in whatever. Actually, there is a way. So when manager is a manager can give his or her investors the option to redeem in a single asset or several single assets. They just have to go to the settings page and say, okay, I want to make ETH a redeemable asset.

And they can also configure that they can put a cap, you know, because you don't want all the ETH to be drained without rebalancing the portfolio. So you can say, I'll allow up to 10% of the AUM to be redeemed in ETH if that's something that the investor

wants. But then there's a period of time which allows them to rebalance the portfolio. then they can go to their settings again and put a new rule that says a single asset redemption is possible. So again, we leave that up to the manager. But the default, and as long as you're invested in one of these faults, which is 24-7 redeemable,

the default is that you get a slice of your assets back, the underlying assets back. Do you have any idea what kind of market segment the user of this is? So basically what kind of people? So, I mean, because you kind of, you have to know your way around defy, at least a reasonable amount to kind of say, to specify what kind of protocols you're comfortable with and what kind of policies you would like to have your vault manager adhere to. So who are your users? Yeah, I mean, I think that the type of users that we tend to attract are typically, it's quite broad-based, to be honest, because there are so many different things you can build on enzyme.

One use case, what we originally set out to build was for the hedge fund use case. And we saw a lot of interest in that, but also a lot of fear and this kind of hindered growth for a while. And the fear came from, you know, hedge fund law is very complicated. am I doing something wrong if I raise money, if I market the fund? And there was just too much complication and lack of clarity around the regulation. So we saw that growth somewhat stunted. And that's something that we as avant-garde finance, not as enzyme, have been researching in a lot of detail to be able to provide, you know,

more like more advice and more solutions around that to prevent, you know, this technology which offers huge amount of automation and lowers barriers to entry. And really, you know, everybody, including the regulator, should be celebrating this really because it gives transparency, it gives control. If the regulator's job and mission is to protect the investor, that's exactly what enzyme was built to do. So, you know, if the barrier to entry is now just the legal side of things, we have to solve that.

And so that's something that we have been working on solving. The other interesting use case we've seen is, interestingly, something that we never set out to target, but Dow Treasuries. And the reason is that the same protections that investors look for for investment managers are the same things that stakeholders in a decentralized governance system should be looking for the people that manage the, the funds. So I think it's no secret that most DAO's struggle to manage their treasuries unless they fully outsource and fully trust a third party. We have seen some DAO's even, you know, giving full control and blind trust to a single wallet, for example, to manage things more efficiently. And really, that compromises on the values of DEFI, really. Like, you know, the whole ideas, it should be transparent, it should be fully accountable, it should be, it should be

trustless to the extent it can be. And so we have seen a lot of interest in people using Gnosis with enzyme so that, A, they can give full transparency and reporting to their community at periodic intervals and even in real time, B, so that they can delegate trading efficiently, they can agree as a DAO on the investment policy, like this is what we want to achieve, but they can delegate the execution of that strategy to an individual or a team, knowing that that team have to stick within those certain parameters. And three, they can monitor and evaluate the team and kick them out at any time if they are breaching any of the parameters that they were given. So the Dow Treasuries is another use case that we've seen a lot of interest in. And those are

really the two main ones. So basically your goal is to kind of achieve a user experience that is good enough that people are no longer willing to sacrifice on security just to kind of make it workable. Yeah. And I'd say that the customer, the user experience work is largely coming from avant-garde finance through building various services or researching the legal stuff or, you know, building out the interface, developing further the interface. Super interesting. So let's talk about the vault managers. So let's say I know something about Defi and I think I can, I have some alpha and can

out trade other people. So what do I do to become a Vault manager? So it's really, really quite easy. So you just go to create Vault on our app. And then you get taken through basically eight pages of questions of configuration. You know, for example, what do you want your vault to be called? What do you want the token symbol of your vault to be? Do you want the shares to be transferable? Do you want to have a management fee, a performance fee, entrance fee, exit fee? Do you want to have risk management policies built in?

Do you want to have rules around investments? Do you want to have rules around redemptions? If so, what are they, specify them? and it's all just easy drop-down menus which are easy to interact with. And the last step is check your configurations and deploy to the blockchain. It's one transaction to deploy your vault on chain. Once you've deployed it, you then have an interface where you can manage all your defy assets simply from one single unified interface.

Your positions are aggregated in the interface is updated in real time, and you can build on top of that like various strategies without having to log in, log out of different protocols. You can, because, you know, we're connected with other protocols at a smart contract level, you can actually just stay logged in once with your Metamask wallet and do all your trading with the different protocols from one place.

You can also do this programmatically through our SDK or through writing a bot. You can delegate trading to someone on your team. if you are a bigger company, for example, or more people. Let's say you have assigned, you give three people on your team trading permissions. You can assign different permissions and risk policies to each person, depending on what they are and aren't allowed to do. So the level of configuration gets quite granular. And the advantage there is really that you don't have to build an infrastructure from scratch

yourself. You can focus on building on something that has been on main net for three and a half. half years and somewhat battle tested. It's received, God knows how many audits in three and a half years. So through some of the largest auditors in the space, chain security, open Zeppelin and others. And then also you save a lot of money and time and energy by not having to build and maintain infrastructure. Something that we've learned in a long time in this space is building is almost the easy part. Maintenance is really where it gets painful and difficult. Yeah, amen to that. So that sounds incredibly powerful, but also incredibly expensive to deploy.

So basically, if you have granular permissions management on a smart contract level, how does that play out in terms of gas? On Ethereum, I don't have any stats for you right now. I would say that obviously the more granular, the permissions are, the more expensive it becomes. But I suppose that we, now that we have other deployments, we have an alternative deployment other than Ethereum, we're sort of less concerned by that because the idea is that hopefully in future years will be deployed on much cheaper and more efficient chains as well, like maybe Gnosis chain or Aurora chain or one of the parrachines on Pocod. And so increasingly we think we're, you know, we'll move towards an interoperable world somehow.

And we will, this will become less and less of a problem. But yeah, of course it does add to the complexity today. Of course, it's much less of a problem. I was shocked yesterday doing transactions at how cheap gas has become. It's become super cheap. So it made me want to stock up. on like ENS names and stuff. I actually thought there was a mistake in the estimator for a second because I don't remember

the last time I saw gas prices that low and I almost couldn't believe it. But yeah, I mean, comparing from where we were a few months ago, it's not a huge issue today, but we all know that it's not sustainable, you know, if gas prices spike on Ethereum again. And that was something that was quite prohibiting actually during, during the months where gas spiked, it really did become very expensive to use enzyme, and it did paralyze trading activity to a large degree. Yeah, that I think lots of people on Mainnet have felt that. So if you look at the vaults themselves,

so you just said that the integrations are on a smart contract level, that sounds great limiting in terms of, of integrating other protocols. Has this been an issue for you? Yeah, to a degree. I would say it's limiting in a sense that we cannot always meet the needs of everyone in terms of, you know, when we're talking to a prospect that wants to use enzyme and they say, well, we need to interact with these 10 protocols.

We might have eight of them, but we're missing too. And although we can usually turn around the integrations pretty fast, you know, some people prefer to have the full, full available options at all times. And this was especially the case during, you know, the yield parties that we saw a few months ago when, you know, a new protocol would launch and there was a yield farm that was 400% for a day or two. And you had to be really quick to get in,

to get that 400% for the first few days. And then it would fold quite drastically. And obviously we cannot move that fast. But on the plus side, I think it's, those protocol, it's those integrations in that system and that pricing mechanism that also enables us to keep the trustless promise, to be able to give the 24-7 reporting and to be able to build a purpose-built asset management tool that really considers the needs of, I mean, if you look at, for example, the platforms like Gemini or other asset management platform, what Gemini

has done with Bitria, for example, they have 17. assets, crypto assets in their universe that hedge funds can interact with, which is, you know, I think a quarter of what we have. So it's not that we are, it's not that we cannot provide a variety of assets, but yes, we cannot provide everything because every time we add something, we have to think about the risks that this would introduce to the pricing of the vault, to the attack vectors, to the risk management policies in particular. The 24-7 reporting, I assume this, I mean, this can't happen on chain, right? So basically you have to have like a back-end service somewhere that kind of, you know,

runs the subgraphs that you have for people. Yeah. Who runs these? So, yeah, I mean, basically like the sub- what the subgraphs do is collect emitted data from the contracts. and we have all of that emitted data collected on seven different subgraphs. And then AVanguard will run a service that basically we have two types of pricing. We have the on-chain pricing, which we get from the chain link historical prices. And we have something that gives much more granular tick data, which is centralized.

And I think we use crypto-compair for that. So Sebastian on our team is one of our CTOs. He has, yeah, I think, I'm not sure if this is still the case, but at one point we were the largest consumer of the graph in terms of data. And he's actually now also on the graph council. And he's been a very big influencer in terms of how the graph has actually developed some graphs to be more scalable, to be able to handle larger amounts of data for us. in terms of the actual specifics of how it works on our end, I wouldn't be able to go into

details, but that's kind of at a high level. I mean, even at a glance, I mean, kind of having 24-7 reporting on any on Shane Vault, I mean, this is, it's, this is basically unheard of. I actually, I know, I know funds that kind of take screenshots of like the D-Bank or Zapper portfolios at certain points to use this as a basis for reporting. So kind of just having this as a continuous service, have you thought about kind of just selling this on its own? Because I think people would eat it up.

Yeah, I mean, we think the full package is really what's attractive. But yeah, increasingly we're starting to think about where these kind of things could get interesting. Where else, you know, like we can use this infrastructure that we've built to improve the experience of other asset managers in Defi and beyond. So let's go back to the vault operator. So I'm putting on my vault operator hat again. So now I've created this vault and I've deployed strategies.

How do I make this known to people? So how do they find me? So I mentioned this white label product that we're in beta testing right now. And the cool thing about that is like one of the pushbacks we've had from managers is I don't like, I don't like sending the enzyme link to my vault, to my investors, because then they get to see my competition, which is kind of funny because we're trying to advocate for transparency as well. But I kind of also see the, I can see both arguments, right? I mean, the data is there for any investor who wants to see this is like a big, you know, the enzyme map is like the big. master database of all the funds that exist on all the vaults that exist on enzyme. But so there's two different ways.

There's a, you know, hosting your own, having your own website and being able to send that to your own network of investors. And B, you can just get the visibility from the enzyme app, from the enzyme community. And something that we want to do in future is actually help accelerate managers. So we're working on a project which is still in stealth mode, which will hope. fully announced in Q4 this year, which will be really pivotal to helping managers beyond just the tech, but also in a much more holistic way, whether that be on the legal side, on the fundraising side, on the marketing side, everything. And really the vision, going back to the vision,

is that we want to promote transparency and simplicity for asset managers and investors. So, you know, that goes beyond. on just having tech. You know, tech solves a lot of problems. But we really, you know, the problem in traditional finance, the problem in even centralized finance, even in crypto, is, you know, setting up a crypto fund today. You still need a custodian.

You need a fund administrator. You need a lawyer. You need several lawyers. You need to research a ton of different service providers. You need to understand the fee structures. You need to do months and months of really boring, really painful paperwork. You need to, even when you're halfway through, usually you think, oh, shoot, there's a better way to do this. And you start again from scratch.

And it's just like there's no one-stop shop that can help you from start to finish. It's something the Angel List has done very well for venture funds, for example. It just does not exist for hedge funds today. So I think that our vision really eventually is to be able to be that one-stop shop at the avant-garde finance level for investment managers. you know, to be able to just have everything they need in a very easy, simple, quick way. So you're in close contact with several of the vault managers to kind of hear their pain points? Yes. Yeah. Cool. So the C is I kind of, I understand how the vault manager operates.

How, I mean, you already kind of alluded to this. So there's a management fee or the management fee can be set in a a performance fee can be set and so on. Do you have any idea of how much money the vault managers typically make on a vault? I don't have like aggregate data, but there's like, I know that there was a vault manager we were looking at last year who really has been a very kind of exceptional example and really, you know, one of the really has done really well, has done really well through bar markets and bull markets. And so we've got a lot of our attention. as a team. And, you know, we're almost like, you know, some of us have even invested in, in that vault ourselves. But I think, you know, the interesting thing about him is that at one point,

I think, you know, last year's fees for him were looking kind of north of $400,000, which I think, you know, on a, I think it was a $2 million, one and a half to $2 million asset under management. you know that was a function of him a performing really well like having picked up the right assets in the bear market and b you know his fees were actually very reasonable but just performance has been really consistent and really solid and even now you know every now and then I always when there's a big move in the market I always like to go and look into that vault to see what's or I have two or three volts which I really I like their styles and I love to go into those faults and just look at, did they, you know, did they get out, like before the last sell-off,

you know, did they go into stable coins or did they, did they, you know, reduce their risk or did they, or before, if there's a big spike, I like to see if they bought volatile assets and if they, you know, and it's really interesting actually to have all that data at your fingertips. And that's why, you know, as we start to discover more and more of these talented people and we build bigger and bigger data sets on them, I think the next step is really trying to help them succeed. Our vision has always been about related to lowering buyers to entry,

democratizing access to finance. But that also, it doesn't just come with investors. It also comes with investment managers. If you look at the largest hedge funds in traditional finance today, they are all the biggest hedge funds, really. The biggest hedge funds are the only ones who are allowed to succeed. they don't have particularly good performance. If you look at the new players coming into the market, there's hardly any.

Even if they're performing much better, they often have to shut down because they're not able to scale in order to cover the costs. And so it's actually very hard for new incumbents to break through. And I think our hope is that by lowering barriers to entry and providing this one-stop shop, simplicity, transparency to all, we can help enable innovation at the investment management side and success. So we really hope that that feeds through to investors too because that means that they don't have to, you know, they have better alternatives than whatever the, you know, the three or four options are available today, thread needle, fidelity, etc., which are just, you know, not particularly bad, but we don't know that they're the best because they don't,

they don't really have any real competition. I see that on the flip side, the transparency that you enable is said also dangerous to the vault managers because basically everything is inherently on chain and basically all trades can be seen in real time. So what would prevent me from creating a bot that kind of has,

just replicates a popular vault, but takes half the fee. Yeah. No, I think that's a fair point. I think privacy is probably an area that we want to research at some point. We don't see it as a huge problem today. But, you know, exploring how we can use obfuscation layers to make certain parts of a portfolio only visible to certain permission people

is important. Like, you don't want your competitors being able to see what you do. We are also able to funds are, faults and funds are also able to negotiate prices off-chain with people from a vault and then settle on-chain. So, you know, through something like a zero-x adapter, you can actually settle trustlessly through that vault. It's true through that adapter, but nobody really needs to know about the trade until after the fact. But yeah, there are definitely some challenges. I think they come more when you, they're likely to become a bigger problem as

track records become longer and people are more convinced that someone is a really good performer and also as some of these products really start to scale. You guys have a token. It's still called MLN, as in MLN. What does the token do? So the protocol has a fee embedded in it. It's a 25 basis point fee. MLN is used to pay the fee. the initial fee that is collected is as a share of the vault, but the enzyme Dow doesn't want to end up with lots of,

we actually would like to end up with lots of different shares of all the vaults, but the problem would then be redeeming all of those shares and doing something meaningful would just be too gas-intensive and labor-intensive. So the system that we devised instead was that you can buy back your vault shares at a 50% discount by paying your fees. MLN. And so the token is used for paying fees on the network and enables you to a discount. On the flip side, the protocol mints up to 300,000 new MLN tokens every year, and those tokens are used to incentivize developers around the enzyme ecosystem to build cool things and useful things

more than cool and useful things that will help improve and grow enzyme. And this is also how avant-garde finance is financed. Yeah, I mean, avant-garde finance is actually contracted some of the council work, and that is partly paid in MLN. But we also, because we're building sort of other services on top of enzyme at some point, some of those might be monetizable. There's also some equity VC funding at the Navigarche finance level. So we consider Enzyme as one of our clients,

but we hope in future that we will have many more clients. You just said council. And enzyme, basically if you look towards this path of decentralization, in that a lot of original defy a project are on. And Ziam is at the very sparehead of that movement. So tell us about your path to decentralization and what the council does and how the governance looks. I think we were the first defy protocol in history

to decentralize our governments. It was in February 2019. So it had never really been done before and we, I think, wrote one of the first, you know, proposals for how decentralized governance should look like in practice and actually implemented it. So the way we did it is Melimport, selected, Melamport, the company that built V1 of Enzyme, selected an initial starting council. I think it was composed of 11 people at the time, but the requirements were that all of those people had to be technically skilled or user representative. We couldn't actually,

actually have user representatives at that time because we didn't have users. So we just kept it technically representative, technically skilled, sorry. And we included people like people who had audited enzyme in the past or had interacted with enzyme quite extensively at a contract level. And so we had 11 people who had some kind of technical expertise to contribute to the council. and then from then on they were going to decide on how the council grew from there on. We did eventually add the user representatives and we have had some changes on the council. I think we're 14, 15 people today. But in general, I'd say that the really key area, I think, of differentiation that we have compared to other governance models that I see is that it's not a token holder governance.

And we got some pushback at the time for that, like saying this. isn't really decentralized because it's not token holder governance. But we actually felt that it was because the parties on the council have to be known. Anyone who meets the criteria is eligible to join and become a member of the council. You just have to prove that you're either technically skilled or that you're able, you meet the criteria of being a user represented and are nominated by other users. So I think the tokenomics like really, the tokenomics really looks after the token holders and the security and future development of the protocol. But no one in our governance, because nothing or nobody in our ecosystem,

was really covering the most important stakeholder, which was the users themselves. And when we thought about what do the users need in terms of their representation, we decided that that would be people who know what they're voting on in terms of contract upgrades and technical decisions in general, which is what the governance really looks after. And that they have to have some representation to prevent the council from doing things they want to do rather than things that the users want to do. And we think that that has been a good balance, but it hasn't been without its pain points. I mean, governance, decentralized governance is definitely much more challenging than when you run a centralized company.

I think that you guys will be finding that out soon. But I think we've learned a lot from that. we've tried to iterate our governance along the way. For example, you know, getting people to vote or participate can be, in a timely manner, can be quite challenging. Everybody's really busy and has other obligations in voting. Frankly, it's a time-consuming thing. You know, you have to go and get your ledger, I'll get in, look up, check the votes.

The tooling around checking the votes is not, you know, the most easy. It's getting much better now, but it's not the most easy to, to, you know, decode function data and actually decide to be able to see what you're voting on. I think PONOSIS just released some tools that make it much easier. But in the past, we're talking three, you know, we're talking more than three years ago now, three and a half years ago. It's been very challenging. And some of the things that we found or we learned were that it's very easy to add people

to a DAO. It's harder to remove people from ADOW, especially when they know each other. So we decided that we should introduce minimum participation levels and measure KPIs of various participants. And rather than make it a kind of emotional decision, make it much more quantitative, and say, well, if this person hasn't attended more than X meetings or hasn't participated in more expotes and hasn't contributed certain number of expected hours, then the decision to remove them should be almost automatic. And so that's kind of one of the iterations or an example of one of the iterations that we made. Again, collecting that data is still a challenge and still quite manual. But I think Dow Tooling is getting better by the day. And if someone gets removed from the council, because they haven't participated enough or similar,

so the council gets to nominate someone to stand in in their place? So what we found is actually that when we introduced these minimum participation, suddenly the participation shut up. People don't like to underperform when, you know, they're being watched. So again, it's another strength for transparency, right? And I mean, where I would like to get to is that we automate the measurement of these KPIs and publish them monthly and we're working on that. but I think because that's like almost like a you know name and shame that that's like the ultimate

you know at least then is you don't even have to let go of somebody usually what you what you see and what we have seen is if people are not able to meet the KPIs before we even have to tell them they come and put their hands up and say I've been really busy and I just can't I don't think I can manage this with my other time commitments and and two or three people had to step down because they had to acknowledge that they just didn't have the time and the brain space, headspace for being on a Dow. And that's what we want. You know, we need people who are able to commit time. We need people who are able to contribute and add value to our stakeholders. And so this was a really good step. So how do you make sure that the council members are

incentive aligned with success of the enzyme protocol? Because that's kind of the, where the token governance kind of comes from. Right. So basically, I mean, the idea. that people who stand to see the most upside or the most damage to their positions, they should be incentivized to make rational decisions? No, I mean, the council members are all incentivized because they get paid in MLN for their time. And actually, that's been another challenge. In the bar markets, those payments are worth very little, and in the bull market, they're worth too much.

So how to strike, you know, how to strike, like, say, the dollar, value of a council's participation with the volatility we've seen over the last three, four years has been really challenging. I think the interesting thing that we've learned from the last bear market is that people did, you know, people did stand by us even when our low point, our market cap got to $2 million. I remember it very clearly in July 2019. And I think that, you know, I think they were, I don't remember the exact number, but they were probably receiving one or $2,000 of compensation a year for pretty substantial amount of work, you know, and not saying it's a full-time job, but, you know, the, the asks we had from the

council were, you know, we're part-time, part-time work, part-time, part-time jobs. And the following year, I think, you know, the MLN price went from $2 to at some point $180. So you can imagine those same packages were worth, you know, over a million dollars. And I think, I think, you know, at some point we had to actually self-regulate ourselves and say, you know, this could be seen as very bad. And so we actually need something a little bit more measured. And all the, all the melon that's paid out to the council is vested over two years so that aligns a bit for the longer term. But we need something that actually reflects the amount of work we put in. So we're now pricing it for it based off a VWAP. And we revisit, whereas before it was a fixed amount

that was dedicated to each council member, we, sorry, a fixed pool of assets, which is divided by the total number of council members. We now actually price it off a VWAP and we strike it every year. And what kind of decisions does the DAO make? So what parameters are updatable in in the protocol. So this is really interesting. So we very naively, when we launched the DAO, there's only three responsibilities the council has. It's upgrading, overseeing the upgrade of any contracts.

So when we signal a new upgrade, they have to verify things like that the contracts that we deployed are the contracts that were actually audited or that if we're adding an asset to the universe, asset universe, they have to check that the price feed that's linked to the asset is the right price feed and being calculated against the right, the correct rate asset. So if it's Gnosis, you know, we need to make sure that we're reflecting correctly if it's priced against ETH or UST so that there's no miscalculations in the NAVs, etc. So these are just a couple of examples, but that's quite a lot of work to check when you're, you know, there's a

standard operating procedure for every type of decision, adding a new adapter, adding a new curve pool, adding a new, but, but, you know, these, these are quite thorough checks that need to happen. And then the second kind of thing that the council has power over is fees. So, we mentioned that the fees on the protocol are 25 basis points per annum. Any kind of toeconomics change or fee increases, decreases come from a council level. It can be proposed by anyone, but the council ultimately has the final vote, final decision. And then the third thing is that they can vote on is the distribution of grants. And these are the three main decisions.

I think something else that we have learned from governance is that not all technically skilled people, like especially auditors, want to be voting on things like grants or fees. They just don't care. They're very happy to vote on contract upgrade. And in a similar fashion, if someone is like a tokenomics expert, they don't really want to be taking the responsibility of voting on a contract upgrade. So another change that we're implementing, we're halfway through implementing this, but we're strong believers now after three and a half years of operating like this, that we need to kind of divide and specialize into subgroups. and delegate certain powers to certain specialists.

So that's something that we've already started implementing. And then the responsibilities that no one talks about, because these are the three theoretical responsibilities that the Dow talks about, but the responsibilities that everyone who runs a Dow or is involved in a Dow knows about are the things that never get talked about. As a COO, I'm sure you're familiar with this,

but all the operational stuff that goes on, accounting, reporting, you know, payments, invoices. You know, this is something we actually didn't even think of or account for in terms of people's time and who was going to do that. And ultimately it falls, it tends to fall on one or two people who just want to get it done. And, you know, they have like OCD personalities and just want to get it done. But there's, there's, this is something that, you know, again, tooling could help with because it's at the moment very manual to go back and reconcile.

all your accounts from the last year, mainly so that you can report to stakeholders transparently over what happened and how you spent the funds. But then, you know, there's things that come up. Like when you give a grant, you know, should you have a contract with that party? What are the, you know, giving grants without any kind of strings attached can be very problematic. We learned and we've seen also other examples in the space. So you need to have milestones built in and, you know, and trigger points. and this is all extra work that we hadn't really anticipated.

And I guess I bundle that all up in operational stuff. But I think it's something that people don't really think about. Or maybe they think about it more today, but three and a half years ago we weren't thinking about that. Yeah. So basically your take on a DAO is in a way more permissioned, but basically excels at transparency, Is that a fair way of putting it?

It's more permissioned in the sense that, I mean, anyone who meets the criteria can apply. I would say that in order to protect decentralization, we feel that known parties and qualified parties have to be, there has to be an eligibility in a criteria to let people into the Dow. And the reason is, you know, we've seen since our Dow launch, we've seen a lot of token holder governance models. And, you know, we've always felt that that's dangerous because you don't know the parties. You cannot disclose or identify the conflicts that they have when making decisions. You have no idea around their level of expertise.

They could just be voting because they, you know, blindly, and that's a very dangerous thing. But the other thing is, and bare markets are a great time to talk about. this. Like in bare market, in bull markets, it's hard to attack any kind of token holder governance, but in a bear market, a lot of protocols get very cheap to attack if they are token governance led. So you can, you know, if my competitor has a market cap of $5 million today, for example, I can probably quite easily raise, you know, the amounts of token, let's say, whatever the threshold is to pass a vote, let's say $2 million, to buy up a bunch of money. To buy up a bunch of of tokens and basically maliciously destroy them and do it all anonymously. And so we felt that

those risks were too high to, you know, as much as an open system, we tried to keep it as open as we can, but I think the number one thing is having a robust governance system that is less susceptible to attacks. And so the way we made it, you can call it permission, but I guess like the way, I guess we think about it is still very decentralized. But, I think the way we think about it is a good governance system has to be one that cannot be attacked and that can withstand difficult situations. And some of those situations I just listed out, we are immune to because, A, all the parties are known. They have to adhere to certain, you know, they have to adhere to kind of disclosing interests, conflicts of interest up front. the parties are known if those conflicts are discovered without them having disclosed it,

again, automatically being removed from the council. So, you know, these kind of sound like boring alt-fai, trot-fi things, but they actually work. They do work. So, you know, we don't need to reinvent the wheel for everything. You know, some things we can actually learn from the past. Absolutely. And I think there's also a lot to be said for having, like, different approaches to the same problem just to see kind of what what because as kind of an arena for experimentation almost.

I mean, what we kind of see in the tokenholder governance projects is the rise of like the protocol politician, right? And there's also there's also the question of this is something that we want. Well, exactly. Yeah. Well, exactly. And also, you know, without naming any protocols, you know, a lot of token holder governance, if you go and look at the distribution of the tokens. They typically are owned by four or five of the largest VCs. It's very, very, very concentrated. And I would argue that having 14 people on the council today is more decentralized than having five hedge funds owning 90% of your token supply or 80% of your token supply. Especially if their reputations are attached to it. And it's, you can, it's not,

it's known generally who voted on what. So. Yeah, yeah. Okay, so maybe let's talk about the current market situation. So you were affected by like a little bit. Celsius was one of your clients, right? They were a user of enzyme, yeah. They were actually our largest user until recently. They ironically came to use, I say ironically,

because of everything that happened recently. But ironically, they were, trying to move towards a much more transparent on-chain process just before everything unraveled a few weeks ago. And they decided to do this via enzyme, or a subset of their team at least, decided to do this via enzyme by launching a cross-chain liquidity product on enzyme. And again, this shows how flexible enzyme is, because that was a use case. We never really saw coming. But essentially what they did was they created vaults for different assets,

which they then used as proof of reserve on Ethereum. For example, they would create an eth vaults on enzyme on Ethereum. They would deposit their users, theirs and their users' eth into that vault. And then they would mint eth on, let's say, polygon chain. I think they called it CX, Celsius X. ETH on Polygon and give back to their users CXEath. But working with us and with chain links proof of reserve, they were always able to prove to their end users that the CXEath was backed one for one

on chain through a mixture of chain links, proof of reserve and enzymes transparency. And they did this for a number of faults. And the second phase was going to be very interesting too, which was they were going to start managing the assets within the enzyme vault to earn yield and I think split that between their users, the CXEath holders and themselves to kind of have a win-win situation where you could be owning CXEth on Polygon which owns a yield from Ethereum and potentially also a yield from polygon which is kind of cool. So yeah the irony is this was like as transparent as you can get and as non-custodial.

Obviously, there was a C-Fi element in it. But it was an interesting use case nonetheless that we have seen withdrawn because of recent events. But it was really fascinating for us to watch that launch. Yeah, it looks like Celsius was moving in the right direction there. Yeah. So what, as someone who's been in this space for a long time, What are the breakthroughs you anticipate to happen in this space in the coming years?

Because, I mean, it's changed so much since 2015 or so, right? Yeah, I mean, I don't know about you. You've probably been in the space as long as, if not longer, than me. But I personally am sort of a little bit relieved by the spare market in the sense that it's kind of just bringing everybody's bringing some sanity back again because I feel like the last year or two has been a little bit insane.

You know, I feel like the definitions of Defy have been abused a little bit and warped. And that, you know, really the last year or two has been, everywhere I look has been like claims around innovation around DFI, etc. And actually, actually all we've really seen is increased risk and less transparency from newer projects

coming to market that have, I obviously don't like to generalize, but a lot of what we've seen has been compromising the original values that DeFi were built on. So in a way, I feel that this, you know, as soon as yield vanished, so did all of those projects. And I feel that that's actually a good thing for us to keep building on the original vision of Defi. And I feel that the recent events, whether it's three hours capital or Celsius or the counterparties that suffered as a result, have, if anything, strengthened the argument for Defi. You know, they've all occurred because of too much opacity.

I'm pretty sure that nobody would have lent money to three hours capital if they had any idea of the leverage. I did a quick back of the calculation estimate and, you know, from the data I could find and, you know, I think they they would have had at least 40 times, you know, somewhere between 16 to 40 times leverage, which is crazy. I mean, do, you know, I can't imagine any of the lenders to three arrows being okay with making a loan knowing that information or even anywhere in that range, even if it was the low end. So I think that transparency is something that's becoming more and more important. I think on the hedge fund side, on the investment side, I think people will continue to resist transparency

because frankly, but also the ones who resist it are also the ones you should be the most wary of because if you have something to hide, then you don't want it to be transparent. But I think all of this actually bodes well. these events are actually a great reminder to how important what we're building, and not just for the transparency also because of the self-custody possibility. And again, I want to emphasize, I don't believe everyone should hold full custody of their own assets. It might not suit everybody. But I believe that everyone should have a choice. And I also believe that true diversification these days, because everything is so highly correlated, is really between custodial.

and non-custodial solutions. Because if you have another Lehman Brothers, it doesn't matter which hedge fund in Trad-Fi, C-Fi you're invested in, most likely you're going to feel the ripple effect. And if you're invested in D-Fi and there's, if you're invested self-custodally in a D-Fi protocol and there's a smart contract risk,

you will suffer, but the other system won't suffer. And so this is really, you know, a diversification. The different risks, you're looking at single points of failure and custodial risk on one system, system as being the risks and on the other system, you're looking at smart contract risks primarily. And so, or losing your keys. And so, like, it's different risk profiles and you have to decide what's for you. But I think that's really today's modern form of diversification. And last but not least, I think increasingly we need to be concerned about governance. I mean,

we're seeing increasingly more and more abuses of single points of failure. When Robin Hood, pause trading when what were they called that group that with Game Stock, do you remember the group? I forgot their name. They caused a short squeeze in Game Stock and

Yeah, the Reddit people, but I don't remember what they called themselves. I'm having a blank, but anyway, Robin Hood just single-handedly decided to pause trading probably because it was pressured by its largest hedge fund clients. But this was really sad. I mean, for one, once the retail guy was winning against the hedge fund and suddenly they were, at some single

point of failure just decided that that wasn't, they couldn't do that because their big hedge fund clients would be pissed off. More recently, we saw the LME cancel the trades. And you've just seen countless examples of, you know, centralized players favoring their own interests in order to hurt other players or at the expense of other players. So I think going forward, you know, really thinking about decentralization is not perfect. It's far from perfect on the governance level and we have a lot to learn. But I think it definitely has a lot of promises and potential for balancing out the risks of a single person's interest if designed well and if governance processes continue to iterate in the right direction.

I feel your comments on the bear market. I also quite like bear markets, but obviously this comes from a point of privilege that, you know, we have certain economic certainties that kind of, that, you know, we'll hopefully be okay. There were times in the last bear market where enzyme was in dire straits, as you exiled earlier. Any advice for people, you know, in your shoes or in your shoes back then? Yeah, yeah, certainly it wasn't as easy as last time around, although last time was a huge opportunity for us because we did manage to keep building despite despite our really, really tough financial situation. The way we handled it at the time is we asked everybody, you know, we had a burn rate, which was basically at some point giving us four or five months runway. and just when we thought that the bare market, we were coming out of the bear market, COVID hit.

And, you know, and suddenly everything kind of collapsed again. We had very little certainty in four months' runway. So I think, you know, the decision we had to make quite quickly was, you know, either we, what's the point of continuing, during the bear markets, you know, a few people put in a few stakeholders put in, some of their own private capital in order to keep the project going. But even that was running out. And when COVID hit the four-month runway was, you know, private, the private contributors

were basically, we're not talking about VCs, by the way, we're talking about individuals on the team. The private individuals were at the limit. So the only way forward was to say, okay, we either need to cut our burn rate drastically in order to get ourselves, like, say, 12 months of runway, or we need to, or what's the point continuing to fund for four months if we're going to be dead in four months anyway. And so when you presented it like that to the team, the team actually there was quite a lot of buy-in and most people voluntarily reduced their salaries as much as they could. And some of them pushed back and are no longer with us.

But I think the solid team of, I think it was six of us that stuck around were extremely I would say, resilient and motivated and continue to push through those times in a way that I've never seen before, you know, more motivation than ever. And they were compensated in equity and tokens at the time instead of to compensate for their cash. So I really recommend, you know, not to be put off by a low token price, but actually if you need to restructure your burn, you know, you should be selling your token to your team as a way that, hey, if we pull this off, this token will, in our case it went from low, low to high was $2 to $180. So, you know, so I think that the risk reward can actually be huge on a very short time period,

one or two years. If you can get the buy-in from your team to really believe that they can create the value needed to bring this project back in a bull market. And our team managed to do that. So we got our runway to 12 months. And within that 12 months, we were able to close a seed round with placeholder and collaborative fund, which gave us some more time. And then later, our series eight, by then the bear market was over. But, you know, it was, it was a, it was a stressful time. And a lot of sacrifices were made by the team, you know, to get to get us to where we are today. So I guess, I guess that, so number one, my advice would be cut your costs immediately and probably cut them more than you have to try to incentivize your team with tokens or equity instead of cash.

so that you can buy yourself as much time as possible, and also they will benefit more longer term. The other thing is, as stressful as it is, also don't forget to think about the opportunities around you. There's going to be huge opportunities. You know, something that I like to bang on, for example, as an example, is if you're building something, an asset management product in this space

and you're funding the product development and the infrastructure development in asset management, to look around and see what solutions you could plug into that are plug-in-play, like enzyme. That's one example, but there must be so many other examples outside of asset management where you can leverage existing infrastructure to reduce your costs. And, you know, MNA can be interesting partnerships or receiving, yeah, partnering with competitors, peers, you know, strategic partners can be very interesting as well. Thank you. Yeah, that's very insightful.

Mona, where can people go to find out more about enzyme or participate? So our Twitter channel is very active. It's enzyme finance. We have a telegram channel, a Discord channel. But, yeah, Twitter is like kind of the central place where I think most activity happens in terms of announcements. And there's always a vibrant discussion happening in Discord and Telegram as well. Perfect. Thank you so much for coming on, Mona. It's been a pleasure. Thanks for having me back. Really great to be here.

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