Unchained - Andre Cronje of Yearn Finance on YFI and the Fair Launch: 'I'm Lazy' - Ep.190
Episode Date: September 15, 2020Andre Cronje, the developer of yearn.finance, talks about all things DeFi and the past, present, and future of yEarn. In this episode, he discusses: what Yearn Finance is, and what led him to de...velop it and eventually open it to the public his history and background, leading up to the development of Yearn the processes and mechanisms involved in yEarn v1 and yEarn v2 why he decided to do a "fair launch" of the YFI token, despite being in debt as a result of building Yearn why he felt that a Decrypt article about him in August was a "horrible hatchet job" why he disagrees with what he sees as the current anti-VC narrative his thoughts on the phenomenal rise in YFI's price and why the price of a YFI token still doesn't matter how and why he decided governance participation would be a requirement for earning tokens in the Balancer/yCurve/YFI pool the governance processes in Yearn and his thoughts on whether or not a Compound-style form of governance would be better how he might mitigate whales dominating the vote what he means by "I test in prod" and how people have misinterpreted his meaning why he briefly walked away from DeFi whether he agrees that YFI could be a new structure to replace existing traditional business structures his response to the allegations by XAR Network whether he would consider moving Yearn to another blockchain his vision for what Yearn can become and how much YFI he currently owns personally Thank you to our sponsors! Crypto.com: http://crypto.com Gods Unchained: https://playgu.co/unchainedpod Episode links: Andre Cronje: https://twitter.com/AndreCronjeTech Yearn Finance: https://yearn.finance https://docs.yearn.finance CoinDesk on Yearn: https://www.coindesk.com/what-is-yearn-finance-yfi-defi-ethereum The Block report on yEarn Finance: https://www.theblockcrypto.com/genesis/75189/defis-yield-aggregator-dao-yearn-finance Post introducing $YFI: https://medium.com/iearn/earning-yfi-y-curve-fi-53b5fd347f0f Delegated vaults: https://medium.com/iearn/delegated-vaults-explained-fa81f1c3fce2 V2: https://medium.com/iearn/yearn-finance-v2-af2c6a6a3613 Delphi Digital report on yETH yVault: https://www.delphidigital.io/reports/yeth-now-do-you-understand/ yETH collateralization ratio: https://defiexplore.com/cdp/13972 Tony Sheng newsletter: https://tonysheng.substack.com/p/yfi-ponzinomics Yearn Governance: https://medium.com/iearn/yearn-governance-forum-7b7c9d0300ac yInsure Finance: https://medium.com/iearn/yinsure-finance-a-new-insurance-primitive-77d5d4217896 Delegated funding DAO vaults: https://medium.com/iearn/delegated-funding-dao-vaults-7ab05a63d7ba Siege Rhino question about governance: https://twitter.com/SiegeRhino2/status/1303415750238101504?s=20 Andre’s “Building in DeFi Sucks” post: https://medium.com/@andre_54855/building-in-defi-sucks-b8fdfda0ef58?source=---------17------------------ Andre quits in February: https://decrypt.co/21068/founder-of-promising-defi-project-abandons-the-toxic-cryptosphere Andre close to quitting in August: https://decrypt.co/37995/exclusive-yfi-andre-cronje-broke-quitting-defi What Andre wishes he had known before building Ethereum dapps: https://medium.com/iearn/things-i-wish-i-knew-before-building-ethereum-defi-dapps-cd6bf0f07a16 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Hi everyone. Welcome to Unchained, your no-hype resource for all things crypto. I'm your host,
Laura Shin, a journalist with over two decades of experience. I started covering crypto five years ago,
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Today's guest is Andre Kronia, developer of urine finance.
Welcome, Andre.
Hi, Laura.
Thanks for having me.
And I think I need to start off by apologizing for all the effort you had to go through to actually get me on this call.
I do apologize for that.
I just try to hide in my corner and develop.
So I'm normally not very connected on social media or those kinds of things.
So I know it can be a pain.
That's interesting. I didn't even know you had gotten my earlier messages.
When I finally read your messages on Telegram, I went through the Twitter stuff and the email stuff and saw you try to get me on a bunch of different methods.
I normally pack my social media stuff into a day. So I'll ignore everything for a few days and just develop and then try and clear my backlog and then move on to the next cycle.
I see. Yeah.
there was a go between I also tried to use. I'm not going to name who that person was, but
afterward I was like, does this person even have a relationship with Andre? Because then later,
that person was like, oh, he stopped responding to me after this thing I said. But anyway, we're not
going to go into that. I also actually want to make another disclaimer before we continue, which is
that for the audience members who are watching via video, Andre preferred not to do video. And I have
to make another disclaimer, even for audio, if you're listening.
because there are lawnmowers going on outside.
So if you can hear that, I can't control it.
But anyway, for people watching on video,
that's why we're using his headshot for that side of the screen.
All right, Andre.
I promise I am human.
I just don't appear in person at all anymore.
But I'm definitely not an AI.
No one has to worry about that.
Good to know.
You're not GPT3 over there.
All right.
So let's start with a question that seems simple, but the more I researched it, the more I was like, I don't know how simple this is.
What is WIREN finance?
It's a yield optimizer.
So the goal with WIREN was always to simplify and to codify knowledge.
So what I mean by that is originally back in Jan Feb when I started it,
I was looking at where to earn the highest yield.
And the yield was by borrowing and lending assets.
So I would look at something like Dai.
I would see Ave has got it at 6%.
Compound has it at 4%.
So I should have my funds in Ave.
And I would move it around like this.
After doing this for a few days,
A, the gas fees made it prohibitive even at that time.
and B, it was tedious to need to do it and move it the whole time.
So instead, I codified the process,
which allowed it to switch between these different yield providers at that time,
D-Y-D-X, Fulcrum, AVE compound.
And the next iteration I realized is I can refine this by making it more granular.
So the more often it moves, the higher your aggregate API, annual heal.
To get it as granular as possible, I needed more people to interact with it.
So I opened it up so that more people can deposit funds and withdraw funds.
And the more people deposit and withdraw, the more accurately it moves between the different lending providers
and the higher aggregate yields it creates for you.
And that was V1 Yearn, very simplistic, very basic, just a give it funds and forget,
and it's going to move it around to maximize yield.
Then came in projects like Uniswap curve.
We had LPs.
This was an additional way to generate yield.
So we built the Y pool in partnership with Curve Finance,
which allowed you to earn trading fees on top of the yield aggregate lending that you got now.
And that was sort of the V2 year.
And again, that was fine up until the whole liquidity mining, yield farming,
governance token incentives, which is the current phase.
and that required something a little bit more intelligent.
So for that, we provided the vaults, which have more mutable strategies.
The thing is up until the vaults, everything could happen on-chain.
All of the data you needed was on-chain, all of the decision-making was on-chain, all of the logic was on-shane.
But now with yield farming, you needed to start to make decisions like what is the price value of comp versus what is the price value of a balancer token and which one is the more profitable one to farm.
you don't want to use price data on chain because that can be abused and move funds around.
So that required external mechanisms for people to provide input.
And that was the original design philosophy behind the WiFI or the Wi-Fi token as well,
which allowed people in this space that are also into yield optimization and that have been using
these systems and know how to identify these strategies to have a,
organizational tool
whereby they are incentivized and can provide
strategies into these
systems that allow to optimize
yield. But that's more on the
operational level. From the user perspective,
the goal is always very simplistic.
You provide the token that
it is that you wish to have.
And urine does not expose
itself to any impermanent loss
systems. So if you provide
it die,
there is a chance you're going to get
zero percent yield, but you're never going to at least not get the die back you put in.
So if I put in a hundred die, I'm going to get out a hundred die.
That's one of the core principles.
Fortunately, so far, we've been, you know, performing 10% up with the current yield phase.
It's closer to 100.
So that's great.
But it's simplistic in its deposit and forget.
So it's supposed to act like a savings fund or an investment, whatever you want to, you want
picture it as, but it's, I put funds in, my funds are always readily available and they are
earning the best healed they can within the defy ecosystem without me needing to have the time or
knowledge to go hunt for these opportunities or understand these opportunities or need to go through
the smart contracts and see what's going on. I can provide it and the system will do that for me.
With the current gas fees and things, the system has also evolved a little bit to make it a lot
cheaper to deposit and to withdraw, and it also subsidizes any interactions that need to happen,
like selling a token for another token. And that also, in the current market, is a definite
value add for the whole deposit and forget mentality. So even though there's a lot of intricacies,
the high level is really just an automated smart savings account. Yeah, the way I've been
describing it on the show is it reminds me of a robo advisor like betterment or wealth front.
And that is pretty fascinating because those, you know, are big fintech companies and
you're basically just you. But the other thing I actually wanted to dive into before we get
into even more detail, thank you actually for that really wonderful description on WIREN,
is that you also have been working in crypto for quite a while.
before. So can you just tell us a little bit about your background before you came to do Y Earn?
Yeah, sure. I mean, my background goes back a few decades. So, you know, I'm, I always feel so
incredibly old when I'm in crypto because everyone is a 20-year-old that just walked out of high school
and now thinks they're going to reinvent the world. But anyway, so.
I think, yeah, I think I might even be older than you, but let's not.
figuring out on this show.
That could be a side-like conversation.
Yes.
So before this, before I started working on Yearn, I was a consultant slash advisor
slash developer for a few blockchains that I liked to the research they were doing.
Phantom Foundation is one.
I was very excited about the asynchronous BFT consensus and how we could use that in a lot
of other industries I've been working in as well.
Fusion with their distributed key rights management that actually allows for cross-chain
key ownership, so did quite a bit of work there with them as well.
Before that, I was just teaching myself really, and I try and teach by studying what others do.
So I did code reviews via crypto briefing, which was basically looking at
the ICOs at the time, seeing what have they both trying to assess their competency.
But it was mostly for me to learn as well, because that was my training mechanism to
understand how everything worked and to see.
And the main reason for that is before crypto, I come from a very traditional fintech background,
the telecommunications, mesh networks from there, moved into AI, big data, from there,
into traditional insurance, traditional banking, traditional loans, heavily focused on the retail
consumer side. And it was during that time that I started looking at blockchain because
there were all of these fantastic claims happening in blockchain at the time of people that have,
and this was just during that early 2017 ICO boom, where everyone had a white paper that was
just more fantastic than the one that was released just before it. And it really captivated me
because there was this entire sector that I've never really been exposed to where they were
claiming they had solved problems that we've been struggling with for the last 20 years.
So I quickly got very excited and very disappointed when, you know, through this code review
process and reading through the stuff, I very quickly realized that it's mostly just on paper
lies. And most of these guys don't really have what they are presenting and offering.
So that was a little bit of a cold wake-up. And then from there, I realized I need to
help contribute and help build some of these solutions, if at all possible. And then it was
late last year where my passion for Defi really started, because that's the first time that
there was enough assets and there was enough protocols and there was enough toolings that a lot of
the traditional finance stuff I used to do are possible to do now. And in a much more autonomous,
in a much more transparent and a much lower OPEX environment, which was really awesome for me to be
able to interact with. And I mean, before that used to be a teacher, Compzai, before that,
studied computer science, before that studied law. So it's,
been it's been a long path. Yeah, yeah, when I saw that you were a lawyer, I was like,
oh, how did he become a coder? But I understand because I've had, you know, multiple stops on
my journey to this point in my career. So let's take a little bit further into the Y Earned Protocol.
Something that I just want to make sure all the listeners understand before we continue with our
conversation is all these tokens that start with Y. So like Y, CRV or Y die or Y USDT, what does that represent
when there is a token with a Y in front of it? And how do you think this type of token has been
useful for users and for the protocol? So any Y prefix means it's a yield bearing token. So the Y is
just for yield. So that means, so let's take USDC as an example. USDC, you know,
at its base is a
USDC stable coin. And if we
think of it in terms of purchasing power, it has
the purchasing power of $1
because it is a dollar denominated
stable coin. Something like
YUSDC is a
tokenized yield version. So
it still has the underlying properties
of the underlying token, which
in this case is purchasing power of $1
and being a dollar
paid stable coin. But now you
have its yield.
I don't want to say futures because
the yield you get is the actual realized yield, but it's basically it's yield futures as well that
you're putting on top of it. So it's the current earnings and future potential earnings that are now
combined into the token. So the nice thing about this multi-layer tokenization system is that
you can keep adding properties on top of that. So a good example is at the base layer, you have
USC, and that has the properties and qualities of USDC. Now you add Y, now you have the
yield bearing as well, which means this is an ever-incrementing object of the underlying assets.
Now you can add the insurance, the F-I-D on top of it.
So now you have F-I-D-Y-USDC.
Obviously, we need to fix the naming standards in terms of UX, but the nice thing is you're
always inheriting the properties of the underlying asset.
So all of the Y tokens in the system are just yield-bearing versions of their underlying assets,
which means they will forever be increasing in value as long as there is yield opportunities.
And if there isn't yield opportunities, they will still be equivalent to their underlying assets.
They can't diminish in terms of value.
Yeah.
And so I actually then, just with people having that knowledge, want to just walk through
why you're in version one, one more time, and then version two one more time as well.
and just walk it through
how it works if someone were to put their money in.
I think V1 is pretty easy to figure out
because you explained it from your perspective.
So maybe we can just review that quickly,
but then let's go to V2 just one more time
because these are a little bit complicated
or not complicated,
but just if somebody's ingesting this material
for the first time, it might have gotten
a little bit quickly for them.
Not a problem.
So everything in Yearn is just automation of something you can do yourself.
So let's say, let's stick with the USDC example and let's say you as a user of in Defi or someone that has interacted with Ethereum via Metamask, you have, let's say, 5,000 USDC.
Now, you don't just want to have that sitting in your wallet.
Instead, you want to be trying to make money with it.
So what you would do is you would go look at the current lending providers.
So you would go to something like Loan scan or Defy Prime.
You'll see what are the current percentage interest rates being offered by the different providers.
And you'll see AVE is at 6%, compound is at 5%, DYDX is at 7%.
So now you go, okay, D-YD-X is going to give me the most, so I'm going to put my funds at D-Y-D-X.
But now it's also the very volatile nature of crypto means that the borrowing and lending side also very quickly changes.
So tomorrow, when you look at the five prime again, you see, oh, but D-Y-D-X is now down to 2%, but compound is up to 10%.
So now you withdraw your funds from D-YD-X and you put it into compound.
Now, that's all it does.
The V1Y tokens just do that, but they do it autonomously for you.
So whenever someone deposits or withdraws from the protocol, it looks at the different providers
on chain.
It sees what their interest rates are.
And if it can move to one of these others, in other words, it's lump sum that it moves
would not impact the APR to such an extent that you would be earning less.
then it simply moves the funds over to the other system.
And it just keeps doing this automatically as people are interacting with the protocol,
which means you as an original depositor just has to deposit it once.
You don't have to monitor it and you can just let it accrue the highest interest rates for you that it can.
And your money is always available.
So if you want to withdraw at any given point in time, you can.
And it's really that simple.
It's just automation of things that you could do yourself if you had more time and information in terms of the Defy ecosystem.
And then for V2, that was the delegated vaults, which basically allows you to do that with any token.
Is that it?
Or it's that your and wire and has to create each of those?
So it needs a vault per token just to keep it clean.
technically you can't jump between tokens, but then you have to trade between tokens.
And if you have to trade between tokens, it means there's slippage.
And one of the core principles of the yearn ecosystem is that if you give it a hundred die,
you need to get a hundred die back.
You might get zero percent, but you won't get negative.
So for that reason, we have a vault per asset.
So you'll have a link vault.
You'll have a die vault.
you'll have a USDAC vault.
And this is where people often get a little bit confused because they'll see,
oh, but if they're on curve finance, they can earn 90% API.
But USC, which you can deposit into curve finance, but the native USDC vault is only earning 20% API.
I say only sarcastically because I don't understand how we're in an industry right now where that's considered low.
but anyway, that's a different discussion.
But that's because we don't convert to the USDC,
because now if I have to provide that as LP to curve,
it means I have to convert it into the four representative tokens.
And that means you're going to have LP losses or impermanent losses.
So instead, we'll have it in compound where it's farming com tokens,
which might be less API, but it doesn't have any downside exposure, which is important.
But anyway, sorry, I'm getting a little bit sidetracked.
So the delegated vaults, the process there is you can, let's take link, for example.
You can take your link tokens to AVE, you can deposit it.
And that gives you a credit line.
You can then against that credit line borrow USC.
And then with that USDC, you can do the process we previously described.
So all the delegated volts do is they simply add that one step.
So they'll take that credit line and they'll see, okay,
but what's the borrowing rate for USDC versus die versus TUSD?
And what's the interest provided on each one?
And whichever one has the biggest net difference between borrow rate versus interest rate
you can gain from using one of the subsequent bolts,
that's the one it borrows and then puts in.
The one reason why the delegated volts are nice is if you do that in your own capacity,
And apologies, when I say you, I mean general you.
I don't mean you specifically.
When you do that, then you need to check the collateral ratio of your vault.
And you need to check the health factor.
And every day you need to make sure you're not liquidated.
And these things make you a little bit more risk-averse.
So you'll do a much higher collateral ratio, maybe 400% instead of 200% because you want to be safer.
But the vaults do this for you.
So now it can be a lower collateralization ratio,
because whenever someone interacts with the protocol,
it rebalances.
Even if someone's not interacting with the protocol,
it has off-chain bots.
Even if those off-chain bots aren't being used,
systems like Gelato have built-in monitoring for R-Volts.
So it does the automation you can do yourself,
but on a much more granular and I almost want to say safer level,
I'm hesitant to use the word safer
because you're adding a lot of different compound risks and smart contract risk and other risks on top of that.
So I won't actually say it.
But in terms of monitoring your health factor or your clitorization ratio, etc., it does allow it to act on a much more granular level.
But it's again, it's just that automation that's well automated.
And for people who believe in one particular token, they don't have to sell that token.
in order to participate in these different yield farming schemes.
And at that moment, in current taxable event, they can just keep exposure to that token.
So, for instance, you know, you recently launched the YETH fall, and that's why people are so excited
about that.
But before we discuss the YETH fault, let's talk about the YFI token.
This was the catalyst for a lot of the interest in YERN.
And one of the features of it that was so captivating to the community was the fact that
that it was what we would now call a fair launch, because this was the first one. I mean,
I don't want to say literally the first one, because I'm sure Charlie Lee would give me a call
because he and I have had a long discussion about how he fair launched like coin. But this, I think,
in the most recent wave of new tokens was the first token that was fair launched. And by that,
what we mean is that it wasn't listed, it wasn't sold, it could only be earned in the protocol.
there were no tokens that were pre-mined and allocated to founders or VCs.
So why did you end up doing what we would now call a fair launch for Wi-Fi?
I mean, as I stated it in the medium article,
I just wanted other people to interact with the protocol and do stuff I was doing.
It's people like to glorify it, but it's really nothing glorified.
I'm lazy and I didn't want to do all of the work.
And I want to sit back and just let my money sit there.
the vaults and earn the max amount of yield.
And to do that, I needed more people that, that, that know what I do.
You know, more people that understand curve, that understand yearn, that understand being
an LP to uniswap and that they are incentivized to provide strategies and to provide
optimizations and to keep working on the system.
And for that reason, I wanted to hand over the system to them.
So it's really as simplistic as that.
It's a, it's a, I needed more people to do this stuff so that I don't have to do it the whole
time.
Wow.
And, but why not allocate some of that money to yourself?
Because for instance, DeCrypt reported that you spent $42,000 building Y Earn and then double that
amount on audits and hosting.
And then in addition, you had to take out a loan on your house and your, or, you're, or,
at least at the time of the DeCrypt article, you were $20,000 in debt. And kind of in the typical
startup model, which has been dominant for the past few decades, a founder would just, you know,
take some equity for him or herself. So why not do that? I mean, I had the same rights as everyone
else. So, you know, I could also farm the token. I could also use my own capital. And just for
qualification purpose, that decrypt article was a horrible hatchet job. They used so many things out
of context. It's not even funny. Well, wait, but are any of those facts wrong that I just stated?
So, so, so they, they put it in a light that made it seem like it was negative. I did spend that
money on the protocol, but I recouped it in protocol fees long time ago.
I did have debt.
I did not take out debt specifically to build the protocol.
And the reason I have debt in my local currency is because the interest rates I pay in the local currency are significantly lower than the rates I'm making with yearn.
And when I say that, I mean as an LP.
So, you know, it was cherry-picked bits of information to tell a story that was really not an accurate portrayal at the time.
So urn itself is a profit generating system.
It's been profitable since day one.
And it's been able to recoup any of the expenses I've needed.
And that's why I didn't feel a necessity to assign any token when I was happy to play with the same rules as everyone else.
I was happy to use my own funds to mine the token so that I could get a portion of voting power.
I was happy to participate in that same ecosystem.
So because if you want to do a proper exit to community, you have to be willing to exit.
If there's a founder portion aside, it doesn't matter how small, then people expect the founder or the team to be responsible for it.
They expect.
So what I've seen with a lot of tokens, and I didn't want this to happen,
is I've seen, let's say a traditional 30% goes to the team.
So now a lot of people that own the token don't think they need to do anything.
They can just sit and wait until the team does something,
because the team are supposed to maintain it and continue building it and improve it and et cetera,
et cetera, et cetera, versus if you have no team token, if you have no founder token,
it's only the people that have that token.
It's in their control.
They need to decide what they make with it.
They need to decide what they build with it.
So it's to avoid this mentality of, oh, don't worry, the founder and the team will
take care of it.
Because now, no, the founder and the team won't take care of it.
As long as the protocol is of value to work on, obviously I'm going to keep.
keep working on it. This is my baby and I do love it. But don't expect, you know, me to
somehow magically do things for you. It's, it's a hundred percent in the community's ownership.
So the community needs to, you know, get off of their asses and do something.
And when the community embraced this notion of the fair launch, was that a surprise to you?
Like, were you trying to make some kind of statement when you did that? Or is it literally what
you just said that you were like, this is too much work for me. And I really want the community to
handle it. And so I'll just give them a token and they can manage it. Or like, or were you trying
to make some kind of statement about, you know, VC coins as they're so, as they're called now?
I'm, I'm, I actually wanted to, to write an article. Okay. So to first answer the question,
no, it wasn't meant as any statement. I, I don't actually understand the current sort of anti-VC
narrative. Um, I mean, from, from the data I have,
it's more of a anti-unlocked tokens for team narrative,
because from everything I've seen,
teams dump their tokens a lot more than VCs dump their tokens.
So if you want an anti-narrative,
it should be anti-unlocked team tokens, not anti-VC,
but that's a different topic.
It was as simplistic as I needed other people engaged with the ecosystem.
I had tried a bunch of different models.
I try to do
like work with other communities.
I try to do community grants and see if that would get people interested.
It just nothing worked.
When I saw, you know, other people launching tokens in every second day of the week
and they get huge communities overnight.
So it was as simplistic as I knew a token was the best way to be a catalyst
for more people to be engaged, for more people to take over.
I was not in my wildest dreams expecting it to be as phenomenally successful as it has been.
I mean, right now there's almost 20 employees.
There's more happening on the forum and on Discord than I can keep up with.
So it's phenomenal to see.
But it was, I was expecting maybe four or five people that come to help me out,
not the 20 odd we have now, which is really awesome.
But no statement.
So in a moment, we're going to talk more about the YFI token, but first a quick word from the sponsors who make this show possible.
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Back to my conversation with Andre Cronia.
So as we were discussing, why a bi token just really took off and, you know, it had zero value, as you said in your original blog post, and at the time of recording, it's worth about $28,000.
So why do you think it took off as quickly as it has?
If we're talking about the financial value, I have no clue.
I even the reason I built urine and why it's so stable coin focused is because I very quickly learn.
I do not have an aptitude for
price prediction or knowing if something's going to go up or go down.
I think TA is flipping a coin and hoping for the best.
So I very quickly avoided all of that stuff
and decided I'm going to stick to stable, sustainable farming mechanisms.
So I do not have any informed opinion
as to why the token has done what it has done.
But the positive side of the value it's gained
and the traction it's gained is that it's provided access to a lot of the best minds in our industry.
I mean, the caliber of people working on it now, thanks to the high price, is phenomenal.
So as a net benefit, I'll say I'm very grateful it is as high as it is, but as to why, no clues.
And one thing is, you know, this could be a reason, is the fact that it only,
had 30,000 tokens to launch. But is that, I think that's a cap, right? So I saw that there were
proposals to increase that cap. I mean, that alone, like the scarcity of it is probably a big reason.
I mean, there's there's other tokens that have been scarcer. I mean, there's there's a token called
unobtainium, which I think there's one of, you know, so I mean, it's probably a mean, but still.
Yeah. So, so, so like, but again, you know, it wasn't it wasn't designed with that in mind.
Whenever I have a price conversation with people, I always tell them that, you know, it doesn't matter if a Wi-Fi token is worth one cent or if it's worth $100,000.
The system only cares that its value is one, because one Wi-Fi is equal to one Wi-Fi as far as governance and the system protocol is concerned.
So I don't, I'm tempted to say the price doesn't matter.
It doesn't actually influence anything.
It doesn't actually change anything.
And the protocol will keep working the way it is irrespectively.
of it. So I tend to not really think about it. I did not know the price is currently 28,
unless you mentioned that a little bit earlier. So, you know, it's, it's, I actually lost,
I thought it was somewhere around the 20, so I see it's doing its thing again.
Well, yeah, yesterday it was 22. So I don't know why it jumped so much, but.
Same. No two's. And it's good for the community. You know, they're happy about it. They like to
rally around those kinds of things. I'm sure some of the people that have it probably do
market making of these kinds of things. I don't even know.
There was another explanation that sounded interesting, which was Tony Scheng, wrote
that for your second pool, it was 98% dye and 2% YFI. And when people deposited in that
pool, they could earn YFI, but since early on it was hard to get, when they bought in, they would
be buying the 2% YFI with the dye that they put in.
So they were basically buying Wi-Fi to yield from Wi-Fi,
and then he was like, well, that would also push the token price up.
And I didn't know if you purposely did that,
or if you realized that that would be an effect.
No, it was definitely not a realization.
It was actually a, I wasn't expecting it to blow up as quickly as it did.
So the capital I was using was not sufficient to get enough Wi-Fi
so that I can actually be a strong participant in the ecosystem.
So the second pool I actually set up so that it would be attractive for people to sell the Wi-Fi token too because there's a lot of die.
So they're incentivized.
They can add a little bit of Wi-Fi and get a lot of die.
So the thought pattern was that it was a good mechanism to incentivize people to sell into the pool so that I could actually get more and that horribly backfired.
But while I will say that that could definitely attribute towards the price,
for the first week, which was the distribution system,
you know, it's definitely not contributed anything after that.
Because after the first week finished, you know, it seemingly hasn't stopped.
And for the third pool, this was actually really interesting.
So this is a balancer y-curve, YFI pool.
One of their requirements for people to receive the tokens that they earn in this pool
is that they have to participate in governance.
and actually vote.
And I found this to be a pretty ingenious way
to solve one of the main issues
that other systems have had,
which is that often they don't get enough votes
to reach quorum.
So I wondered, how did you come up with this idea?
I thought it was super smart.
Thank you, but nothing I design is ever
from a thoughtful perspective.
It was as simplistic as that point.
I wanted to distribute the Wi-Fi token
to people that knew how to play this game.
So when I say that, I want people that knew how to use Curve.
I want people that knew how to use Yearn, that knew how to use Balancer, that knew how to be an LP.
And at this point, I had taken them through all of these steps, you know, because the first pool, you needed to know how to use Yearn and Curve to participate.
The second one, you needed to know how to use Balancer.
And then on the third one, you needed to know how to use an LP.
and then I wanted to teach people how to use governance,
because that's why the token exists is for governance.
So it was really just a tutorial, if you will,
in terms of the steps I wanted people to go through
to show that this is a valid candidate to participate in the system,
because that's the skill set I wanted for the decision makers.
And after everything, meaning after your fair,
launch and now the crazy value of the coin. I was curious to know how much Yafi you own at this moment.
I currently have 10, which I'm very proud of. I actually only managed to farm two, and then gas
fees, etc. was subsidized by the treasury. And they sent me the other eight. And this was when it was,
I think, around $4,000 or so. So all of that's locked up in governance. I'm just happy to have
any kind of vote. But I have 10 to my name, which I am very pretty.
proud of. Yeah, I think I listened to another show that you did where you said you only had one and a
half and I was like, hmm. So it's very low for a second. I managed to farm two and then I sold
point four of that to cover gas fees for deployments. And then the rest was gas subsidies that
the Treasury voted towards me. All right. So let's talk a little bit more about governance.
Why don't you describe the governance process in Yearn?
So originally there was just the on-chain part.
You know, that's simplistic.
You lock in your tokens.
You can create a proposal.
People vote on-chain on the proposal and executor is set on the proposal.
And when it reaches quorum, someone can trigger the execute.
And that execute is normally a smart contract that then does some kind of function.
But that's the, let's call it, very rigid governance and only the on-chain governance.
I mean, since then, Yearn has evolved into be a lot more than just the smart contracts.
You know, there's content happening outside.
There's the forums.
There's new strategy discussions.
There's strategists.
There's over 20 employees that are being paid out of the system.
So it evolved a lot away from the very rigid on-chain component, which is really just about the smart contracts,
into a lot more social governance system,
which originally was just like forum polls on thegov.
org.org.
Finance, but that very quickly we saw was not civil resistance
and people would create a bunch of accounts and register
and then mess with the polls.
So we ended up working with the balancer snapshot off-chain solution,
which we're implementing now in a bunch of different mechanisms.
But even then, you know, right now there's voting in terms
of how should time-based vote locking work or what tokens should be used in terms of voting?
Because you know, you've got Wi-Fi in governance, you've got Wi-Fi in vaults, you've got Wi-Fi and AVE,
which ones should be included. So there's, it's, it's very much an evolving system currently.
And at this point, I'm just a spectator. So I'm actually, I often just see the new proposals being
voted in and then participate in governance myself to, you know, try and try and add my say,
but it's really evolving on its own at this point, and I have no idea where it's going to end up
in a month from now. Do you think it would be better if Yerun went to a compound-style form
of governance where there was code attached to each of the proposals at the time of voting,
rather than the system now where there's kind of this, I guess,
like momentum builds for something and then it's coded up?
I do not think.
So what the problem that I have with that system is you spend a lot of time and energy
into building this code and this code might not be voted in.
So that is a lot of resource time wasted because the difficult part isn't the discussions
or the agreement on a vote.
difficult part is codifying the smart contracts and making sure it's audited and secure and stable
and is going to execute as you expected to execute. So as someone that helps build these contracts,
I would much rather know that it will be voted in and then I'll build it rather than I build it
and then I hope it's voted in. So I'm much more preferential to the current mechanism in year than I
to the mechanism and compound.
Yeah, I think I'm with you on that one.
And I meant to say earlier that that question was when I got from,
I don't know if it's one of my Twitter fault, it's somebody on Twitter named Siege Rhino.
All right.
And I also actually wanted to ask about something else, which is in a podcast conversation on Uncommon Core,
you said that you were unhappy because whales have been dominating the vote.
Do you see any way to mitigate that?
So one of the things we're looking at is, is time-weighted participation currently, where your vote is only so strong as the time slope that you voted in for.
But even then, you know, a whale will just take a long end of the position.
The thing is, if you have something that has financial value, and this is why I wanted it to avoid financial value originally.
But if you have something that is connected with financial value, then it is game of.
It's as simplistic as that.
And the game is simply your capital.
So we're fortunate right now that the whales that are participating are people like Framework Ventures and these guys and they're awesome.
And they know how the space works and they're intimately familiar with Defa and they're actually adding significantly more value than they are, you know, in quotes, subtracting by being a whale.
So it's not something I really care to fix right now.
It's something that it would have been nice to see an even bigger distribution.
But I mean, most of these guys didn't get their tokens during the initial week distribution.
They kept accumulating after the fact.
So if they have that much voting say now, it's because they put their own resources into it.
So I'm a lot more grateful now than I was when I had that conversation for sure,
because I've seen the value they can add.
You're famous for saying, I test in prod,
which means that you test in production and that the code may be unaudited or is unaudited.
And yet we've seen a ton of hacks and bugs and exploits in defy this year.
So why is that your motto?
So the original reason for that was back in Jan, when I started this, I went the proper route.
I got audits, a bunch of different audits.
I published the audits.
And because I published the audits, people put money into the protocol.
And there were mistakes in the protocol even after the audits.
And to me, that was a much bigger warning sign.
saw that people use these audits as safety nets. The second they see an audit, they don't,
they don't caution anymore. They don't do their own research. They just throw their money in.
And the original reason I updated my bio to I test and prod, and it's the same reason why I stopped
releasing the audits. Even though we do the audits, I don't release them to the public,
because I want people to have caution.
So one of the beautiful things about defy versus traditional finance is you're in control of your money.
When you put it into a protocol, it is your choice to put it into that protocol.
It's not a money manager where you give your money and you have no idea what the hell they're doing with it.
You at any given point of time can see where it is.
But now that privilege comes with responsibility.
So whenever people interact with my systems, I wanted them to pause and to think about that so that they go and analyze.
Now, I know not everyone has smart contract skills or capabilities, but at least at a high level, you should be able to go look at these systems and see where the money is going.
You should at least be able to trace the money.
We have fantastic tooling for that.
terms of things like ether scan and eFTCs and a bunch of other tools that you can see what it's doing
and how it's doing it. So it's a pet peeve in terms of how it's evolved because, you know,
all of all of the projects that sort of followed yearn and adopted the I test and prod motto,
they took that to mean that I just YOLO launched stuff in prod and, you know, I, it, you,
there's no consequences.
And the reason I put that there is actually to make people more cautious, not less cautious.
So I want people to have more responsibility in terms of what they do with these systems.
And the key word that a lot of people seem to miss is test.
I still test thoroughly.
I'm not going to stop testing.
And I'm still going to make sure that the systems are as secure and as good as they can be.
because it's the testing part that's important.
But I know that's turned into a meme at this point where it's, I yolo, deploy stuff and then, you know, hope for the best.
But the motto and the purpose behind it is to tell people, hey, have a little bit of caution, take a little bit of responsibility and do a little bit of due diligence.
It sounds like you were talking about EM when you were talking about other projects, but I won't ask you.
No, I mean, it's a very long list of projects that I've followed that I've adopted the whatever.
I mean, yam did it, sushi did it, so many different flavors of food that I don't even remember did it.
Like everyone did it.
And it ended up being almost a joke, which really annoyed me.
Like, I'm honestly surprised more money hasn't been lost.
I think we have been so lucky that so far it's only been,
what, the 750,000 from Yam and I think the 13,000 from sushi and 13 million from sushi and
that's it. I mean, both of those numbers, I think, are ridiculous, but given the sheer volume
of money that was flowing into these protocols within 24 hours, it's fairly small in comparison,
even though I still think the fact that we as a community are glossing over it is beyond insane.
And I just wanted to call out.
So you said that now you are getting audits on what you release.
I've always been getting audits.
I just don't release them to the publics because I don't want to give people that safety net.
Oh, but.
But on the Defiant podcast, which was published just a month ago,
you were saying that you weren't doing security audits because they were so expensive.
You said it was $20,000 for the cheapest, $60,000 for the most expensive.
Yeah.
So just a month ago, you weren't?
We've always been doing audits.
We haven't been, so there's a difference in what they do with the full formal audits is they assign X amount of people for X amount of weeks.
And they do manpower per man week audits.
Those are very, very expensive to do.
And I simply can't afford them.
But you can do spot audits.
So spot audits are normally like $5,000 or so.
And it's a much, it's a much faster review.
But I do those whenever we do a new system release just to make sure that there's a view on it.
I just don't want those audits to give people comfort.
And does that kind of audit account for the composability?
Because there could be new attack factors that could open up when you're combining operations with, you know,
Maker and Ave and Curve and do you know what I mean?
So is that doing that as well?
Oh, okay.
No, no, no.
Oh, sorry.
Wait, you're saying that.
Those audits definitely, they do not cover for that.
No, no, no, no, no.
This is pure spot checks on the code.
Does the code make sense?
Does this in isolation work?
When you add the full scope, you need the full audit and that you just have to have the money available for, which is not viable right now.
But now with the treasury, we can actually start setting out for that.
Talking a little bit more about the community and, um,
maybe your position in it and the views of other people. In March, you quit Defi, at least temporarily
calling the community hostile and the user's entitled. But then later, you came back. And then in early
August, you said you were close to quitting. This is the decrypt article that you took issue with
earlier. So, you know, you can feel free to correct any facts there. But, you know, at that time,
why did you say the community was toxic and why did you ultimately not leave? And in general,
what's your opinion about having a position like yours in the DFI space?
First and first, the Crip article garbage.
So I'll just skip over that one.
I was not planning on quitting in August.
That was quotes they used from Fibb.
Feb March, I rage quit.
I was sick of the current narrative back then.
So to give that a little bit more context, back in Feb, March,
everything was the developer's fault.
Like if anything went wrong with users' funds, it was the developer's fault.
And everyone was screaming at the top of their lungs.
It was the developer.
And that broke my back because it was just me.
There was no funding.
There's no support staff.
There's nothing like that.
I put disclaimers on everything.
I put warnings on everything.
And until date, no one has lost money using my systems.
But there was the slippage thing with the zap where the user was trying to exploit the new curve pool we had launched, which we hadn't announced, and he was trying to use the imbalance to give himself a benefit.
There's the whole post-mortem on that.
There's a lot more data back in Fab that you can go through if you want.
I remember waking up in the middle of the night trying to release reports, trying to make all of these people screaming at the top of their lungs happy.
that they are justified.
And it was such a miserable time for me
because as a developer, seemingly everything was my fault.
If there was a user problem, it was my fault.
And this is a free system.
No one was paying a cent to use any of these things.
But users were constantly attacking me.
The communities were constantly attacking me.
the back then so-called defy police were alienating me in every single group.
So I left because I decided, you know, I have no reason to keep trying to do a free public good service if this is how people are acting.
And the only reason I even bothered to come back was because I saw that all of these so-called defy police people back then had alienated themselves.
They had kept pushing this narrative that devs are evil, and all that caused was devs to stop working.
So after a few months later, it had changed quite a bit, and people had started to accept that, look, not all of the responsibilities is on the dev.
The dev is partially responsible, and I'm more than happy to accept that, but the LP where they decide to put their funds also take liability.
And because of that narrative changed a lot, it was a lot more comfortable.
for me to develop again. And that is why I'm enjoying development again, because there's a lot more
quid pro quo in terms of every person, every participant's responsibilities, which I think is a lot
healthier narrative than what it was back in March. And to go back also to discuss the security
issue, you recently launched Why Ensure Finance. And why don't you tell us a little bit about
what that does and how it works? I mean, we're just a front.
end really for Nexus Mutual. They're the reinsurer and the underwriter. So if there is a claim,
they're as underwriter, they're the ones that decide if it's going to get paid out. If funds have
to get paid out, they're the reinsurer. So it's coming out of their pocket. Why insurer just
allows it to be proxied in front. So no KYC, no AML, and you can still take insurance. And then we just
added a few nice to have like NFT on top so that it's actually tradable. So that
you know, if you buy six months worth of cover and then three months from now,
a protocol looks like it's becoming a little bit more risky.
Maybe you want to sell that at a premium and create a bit of a secondary distribution market.
But that's really all it is.
It's a very straightforward solution.
And then one thing I wanted to be sure I understood was, so let's say I put 10,000 tether in there.
Is that also the amount that I'm insured for?
Like, is it a one-to-one ratio?
So there's two iterations of insurance.
The second version, which I think you're referring to, isn't out yet.
The one right now is smart contract failure insurance.
So you don't actually have to put any money at risk.
You just cover a sum.
So I'll take out insurance for 10,000 USDT,
but I don't actually need to have 10,000 USDT into the system.
The second iteration that we're releasing, which is the FID token, that is insured one-to-one.
So if I put in one U-S-D-T, I get out one F-I-F-I-D-U-S-D-T, which is insured for that value.
But that's a little bit of a different system that one hasn't been publicly launched yet.
Okay, yeah, I think that's one I read about.
And I also wanted to go back to the fair launch topic and discuss the delegated funding Dow vaults.
And I'm just going to very quickly describe this because instead of asking you to do it, because I want to ask a question about it.
But basically, funders will put WiFI into this fair launch vault and then they get an LP share.
And then if teams want to apply for a grant, they can do so by sending up a Gitcoin grant page.
then they apply via the urine finance forum, which is gov.urne.dorfinance.
And then there's a vote there. And then if they are approved, then the applicant will get a
credit limit that's set by YBorrow.finance. And that's based on credit delegation, which is
basically an unsecured loan that's based on personal trust slash enforced by law.
So one thing is, when you were creating this, I wondered, it basically seems to me to be like the Dow from 2016, but an updated 2020 version.
Were you aware that that is what you were doing? Was that like inspiration or did it just end up that way?
So the inspiration was from the 2017 Vitalik article on the Dow ICO, which the premise that,
there was that you have a Dow that manages it, but it's also an ICO in terms of funding and
it can set milestones that are based on payments. But yes, it's it's a hundred percent inspired by
that. Wow. Okay. But all right, but you're saying it's from Vatollic's article, but I can't remember.
Like, I don't think you were, were you working in crypto in 2016?
His came out
late early 2018
actually he wrote it in 2017
so it's not it's not the original
the Dow that was 2016
it was an iteration on top of that
okay and so I recently
published another podcast with
Olaf Carlson we of Holly Chang Capital
and we were talking about YFI
and he was saying that
in his you know mind like this is
what you're creating is something that is a new structure that replaces traditional business
structures. What do you think of that statement?
I don't know if I'd say replaces versus a decentralized implementation thereof.
But now I'm being very specific on terminology because, you know, business structures exist
because they function well.
So we saw it with yearn governance as well where originally everyone was just participants and it was quite chaotic.
And eventually sort of leaders started popping up in their respective areas.
You know, marketing had their own figurehead and finance had their own figurehead.
And eventually these people were elevated to the positions where they're sort of the delegated decision makers.
and that's very traditional business structure.
But instead of where in a traditional business structure, it's very top down, this all occurred organically bottom up.
So that's why I'd say you're still going to end up with the same sort of business structures if you draw it on a piece of paper.
I just think the way that you arrive at who those people are and how they are.
are empowered to do so, it's very different.
Because now if one of those actors are no longer functioning appropriately,
you know, it's not a CEO that's firing them,
but it's the people in the forum that are delegating their power to them
that end up replacing them.
So it's this mix of business.
And I mean, if you look at traditional business structures
and you look at traditional democracy politics structures,
I think they overlap a lot in how they accomplish this.
and doing that all in a decentralized semi-anon way, I think is very, very cool.
But I don't think it replaces it.
I think it's just a different implementation there are.
But you agree that it is kind of like a new type of business structure that we're seeing,
except just completely different from what's been around for the last couple hundred years.
I mean, yeah, yeah, yeah.
So I was just thinking.
It's weird it being put that way, but I guess, which is pretty cool.
Yeah, I told, well, OLAF and I were saying that we think this is going to be so incredibly disruptive to pretty much every industry.
But people can check back and check in with me in a few decades and see if Olaf and I were right.
But anyway, so we're not going to be able to get to all of these, but here are some of the additional products that you have written about launching.
why trade finance, why swap exchange, why liquidate finance, why borrow finance, why insurance,
well, we discussed why insurance finance, but in general, what's your vision for what WIREN
could become? I mean, WIREN's goal is very simplistic. It's to optimize yield for people
that don't necessarily have the time and knowledge to do it themselves or capital for that
reason. And everything that I pulled around it is to facilitate that single goal. As an example,
Y trade, which is the 1000x leverage stable coin trades, that increases trading volume on curve,
which increases trading fees for LPs, which increases yield.
Why liquidate keeps the system safe in terms of delegated vaults, but when it does liquidate,
a percentage of that goes into the treasury, which again increases yield.
Why swap is single-sided AMM, which allows you to provide that single asset,
and still have LP exposure without having the impermanent loss side,
so that again increases yield.
Everything has a singular purpose, and that is to increase yield,
because I want yearn to be the one-stop deposit and forget automated healed money manager.
All right, yeah, and fascinatingly this will all happen in a decentralized manner or could.
But let's actually just now discuss the world of traditional corporate structures. Prior to working on urn, you were and maybe still are a technical advisor to the Phantom Foundation. In early January, one of its South African partners XAR network said that it was repairing, or sorry, this was in July. It was preparing civil and criminal action against you because allegedly work you had done for it later launched on Phantom, not on XAR. And when they confronted you, you said, if you guys wish to take legal action, good.
go for it. Additionally, they said that you, quote, unlawfully and without authorization, open-sourced,
intellectual property intended for private use to the public. And they also say that you are running
a number of wire and iron domains in their private infrastructure, including urine.
Dot finance, urine. Dot exchange, urine.Fi, etc. What do you have to say about their
allegations? Look, it's a lot easier if I actually provide the documentation they sent and show that to
people versus me saying that it's all garbage because, you know, it's he says, she said,
which never really gets you anywhere. Then the long and the short is all of this only happened
after year and success. All of this happened and I have letters of them claiming if I pay them
$85,000 US dollars that they will remove these notices and hand over the domain.
All of this stems out of there is no contractual agreements between me and them.
So there is no legal action they can take.
And the civil action they were trying to take is based on the fact that I had unlawful access
to our AWS account, which was registered under my credit card that I have proof and evidence
for as well.
So nothing has come off this.
There have been a few news desks that have tried to.
write stories about this. I even got legal counsel that reached out to each and every single
South African police station to try and find this case they supposedly launched against me,
which Greg himself later came out and said there is no case against me. So it's, it's,
I mean, I don't want a bad mouth to guys, but, no, no, no, from czar. No, not,
Oh, okay.
So, so I, I don't want a bad mouth, but like this, this whole experience has just been a very underhanded way for them to try and get money.
Hi, folks. After recording this show, I and the Unchamed team did not reach out to Zahar or Greg Vanderspay, who's mentioned on the show before publication.
We are now amending this episode to provide additional context. Whether or not Andre's statements in this episode are inaccurate is up to interpretation, but the additional
context can help you all decide. During the episode, I asked Andre about a dispute he had with Phantom and
X-A-R, which involves Greg Vanderspay of Z-A-R Network. And Andre said, quote, there is no contractual agreements
between me and them. The additional context I would like to provide here is that Greg, Andre, and two
other parties had a memorandum of understanding dating back to May 2019 to establish a blockchain
platform called Tsar Z-A-R network. Later, a contract between an entity named Kirk Newtown,
of which Andre had 25% and the Phantom Network was signed in August 2019.
Andre also said, quote, the long and the short is all of this only happened after Yerne's
success. Andre dates Yern's success to May 2020 when Yerne reached a total value locked of more
than $10 million. Greg's first legal letter to Andre was June 16.
20,
However, text messages show discord between Andre and Greg in April.
I also asked Andre about their allegations that he was running Uren.
dot finance, yearn.
dot exchange, and urine.fI on their infrastructure.
Andre said that the civil action against him was, quote, based on the fact that I had
unlawful access to our Amazon Web Services account, which was registered
under my credit card that I have proof and evidence for.
Greg says it is true that Andre registered.
those on Andre's personal AWS and with his personal credit card.
However, on the who is lookup for urn.finance and urn.com.
The registrant organization, which is another word for owner, is ZAR network, spelled ZAR.
And that's the blockchain platform described in the memorandum of understanding.
Also, Greg says that Andre originally tried to register 12 domains using Greg's personal credit card
and Greg's AWS account, but that when the payment for the domains for yearn.
finance, urn.fI, and urn.com exchange was declined on Greg's card.
Andre registered those on his personal credit card.
Andre claims that it was a shared AWS for the company.
Greg says it is his account.
In a text exchange, Andre informed Greg.
He had accidentally registered those domains on what Greg calls our account.
And Andre responds he thought he was logged in on his account and so would reimburse Greg.
Greg responds, no need at all, dude.
Additionally, it looks like Andre had stored the logo that is now used as the urine logo on the
ZARXAR Google Drive. And the I-Leverage.comitate. Finance and I-trade.finance domains were also
stored on Greg's AWS. And those domains now show notices that they are, quote, the subject of an
active criminal investigation. Case number CAS 176 slash 7-2020.
of fraud, theft, and crime and injuria with the South African Police Services.
The notice says this also applies to a list of other domains, including UreN.
dot finance.
Lastly, Andre said in the show, quote,
Greg himself later came out and said there is no case against me.
However, Greg says there is an active criminal investigation into Andre opened in C-point, Cape Town.
Andre says his attorneys have looked for the case but have not found anything.
I reached out to the South African police in multiple ways and was not able to determine the validity of the claims on either side.
However, the police did say that the notice on the websites was not placed by them since the contact address is a Gmail address and not a South African police services or SAPS email.
I and the team at Unchained regret not reaching out to XAR or Phantom for comment before publishing this show.
Now back to my conversation with Andre.
The fees on the Ethereum blockchain have been incredibly high in recent weeks, although at least at the time of recording, at least gas fees have come down somewhat.
But somebody did tell me that the other day they lost $600 in failed transactions alone.
So I wondered, have you ever considered or would you consider moving WIRE into another blockchain?
I would definitely consider it.
Practically, it just doesn't make any sense right now.
For WIRE to work, you need USDT, you need dye, you need link.
On top of that, you need compound, you need AVE, you need uniswap,
with aggregators like 1 inch and paroomasp and matcha.
On top of that, you need Metamask, EtherScan, remix.
So while I would gladly move to another chain that supported everything,
if not a subset of what I just mentioned,
I don't foresee that happening within the next six months or even year.
And do you have any preference for any particular layer two solution?
I mean, I definitely have my bias in terms of the projects I've worked with in the past.
But none of them have really been tested.
So everyone always likes to use this, oh, but their fees are so much cheaper or their transactions are so much faster.
But, you know, it's the highway analogy.
It's if you have a auto bond that has no cars on it, you can drive very, very fast.
But if it's filled with cars, you're going to sit in traffic like everyone else.
Now, Ethereum is the traffic.
If you move all of that traffic to a different blockchain, it doesn't mean it's all of a sudden going to be better.
It might be just as congested as Ethereum, unless you're willing to, you know, sacrifice security or some other metrics.
So, I mean, it's a long-winded way to try and avoid answering the question directly because I don't want to mention any projects because then I'm shilling some random coin again.
And this was a question inspired by Phil Manley on Twitter.
If you were to start some sort of cross-chain version of wire and what blockchain or blockchains would you add?
I actually don't think I'm qualified enough at this point to answer this question.
I've been so bogged down in ETH since Jan.
that I'm actually not that up to date with the layer one landscape at this point in time.
I mean, I've heard a lot about something like dots, but I haven't actually looked at polka dot.
I've done a cursory look at something like Solana.
I've stayed up to date with Fusion and Phantom, but I'd actually have to revisit the landscape to make that decision
because it's going to be a lot more around the tooling that's available more so than the actual capacity of the blockchain.
That makes sense. That's interesting.
All right.
Well, there's about 5 million other things I could have asked you because there's a ton of activity going on in yearn,
but maybe we'll just have to have you back some other time.
But in the meantime, where can people learn more about you and WIREN?
the best place for WIREN is to head over to docks.earn.finance.
The guy's currently working out of done a phenomenal job.
If it's more about like the grassroots slash day-to-day stuff, definitely the governance forum,
gov.earn.com.com.com.com. To learn more about me, don't, you know, like I'm just,
I'm just a wheel in the cog. Don't waste your time and energy on it.
Rather spend it on yearn because that's the thing that's going to be there if I die tomorrow.
So like, don't spend your time on permanent stuff, not impermanent stuff.
All right, great.
Well, thank you so much for coming on Unchang.
This has been so fun.
Thank you very much, Laura.
Thanks so much for joining us to Lay.
Today, to learn more about Andre and Wairn, check out the show notes for this episode.
Don't forget, you can now watch video recordings of the shows on the Unchained YouTube channel.
Go to YouTube.com slash C slash Unchained podcast and subscribe today.
Unchained is produced by me, Laura Shin,
without from Anthony Yun, Daniel Nuss,
and the team at CLK transcription.
Thanks for listening.
