Efficiency and Savings in Defi: Insights from Caddi.Fi

This is the PoolTogether Community Podcast. PoolTogether is the world's number one no-loss prize savings account. You can visit pooltogether.com to deposit. You're listening to the PoolTogether Community Podcast. I'm your host, Millie Yearley, AKA Tim, AKA I'm on— I've only had one, like 2 sips of a bubbly today. And so that's how my day is going, everyone, but I am here with, uh, Jaimin from Caddy. Welcome.

What's up? How's it going? How's it going? It's really nice to be here. Yeah. Love hanging out in people's Discords and it's great when I get the chance to have a chat with you guys. So awesome.

That's right. It's Discord plus podcast equals better podcast. IMHO. But, uh, listen, we got to get you out of here. Uh, you know, we'll do it. We'll do, you know, an hour, But you got boxing class, right? Is that with Mark Zuckerberg and Elon?

Yes. Yeah, I'm actually being the dummy, you know, um, you know, one of those things that just stands there, gets hit a bunch, um, looks very stern. That's, that's the vibe I'm going for.

I just, I assume that's what their training partners are like. There's no way that Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk is gonna have a training partner that is just like, you know, jacked and gonna destroy them, right? You gotta take it easy on these guys, right? I think,

I guess you have to because, you know, you could be affecting like the outcome of the world otherwise.

Stock prices, like with each move you can, you should, they should have the chart up in the training, in the dojo, have the chart up in the dojo.

Dude, I would love that if there's like a live stream that every time they get like a big whack or like they do something really sick. So like I saw the video of Mark Zuckerberg and Lex Fridman. Yeah. Basically, if Lex is like dominating in the stocks going down, if Mark Zuckerberg pulls a good move, then stock price goes up, you know?

That's right. That's right. It's funny, I was just doing a Twitter Spaces and I have CoinGecko alerts and the Pool token. I got, I got an alert for the Pool token and I was like, wait, is this like, how is this a reflection on how we're doing on this Twitter Spaces? That's pretty wild.

Hey, those, those CoinGecko alerts are good. Like, I don't know when they put them. like over the last 6 months, but it just tells me whenever I have like a portfolio page where it's like tokens I'm looking to buy, tokens I hold, and it just tells me when they're moving and I'm like, yo, that's, uh, that's pretty handy.

Yeah, no, it's real. I love the product. CoinGecko is really great. But my problem is like, I don't— I'm a bad crypto person. One, I don't like things that everyone else likes, which is bad and bad strategy for investment. Right? Like if everybody's going toward the Nike thing, I'm like, I'm, I'm so hipster. I don't even like that. And same thing with like investing. I buy synthesizer modules and I, when I should be buying crypto, but I, but I don't, I, I, I keep beefing up my synths. I'm a bad crypto person.

Wait, what do you mean by synthesizer modules? Like, tell me about that.

Yeah, I have a modular synth. I'm in my studio right now and I have these, I have like a bunch of wires coming out of a bunch of synthesizer modules and I don't even make like music that you would listen to. I make, yeah, just like what Darby just posted in the chat. That's exactly what I'm looking at. That's not really mine, but that's what it looks like. And I could name all these modules actually. That's funny. But I'm, I just make music that I like have never heard. I make sound. I like to make sounds that I've never heard before. And, uh, which is not going to make me any money. It's not going to, you know, but it's maybe I could call it art. I should do an installation, but anyway, but that's what I do.

Yeah. Yeah. I could see that totally in an exhibition. Just since I'm pretty into like some music, you know, I'd done a bit of DJing before, but yeah, never produced. my own sounds. That sounds pretty advanced.

Yeah, I've wanted to get into DJing just for the transition piece of it and just for like sculpting and like, you know, a whole set especially. Like, I don't, I don't know, like the whole like bringing out the, bringing out the bass and then bringing up the bass on a different track and then bringing down the mid, you know, that kind of thing. Like, I would love that. And also one of my favorite artists, Yeji, she started as a DJ and then she now is a producer and an artist and everything. So DJing gets you a lot of valuable electronic music skills.

Oh, for sure. Yeah. Yeah, that's awesome.

Yeah. And yeah, so maybe I should look into synth boxing. Like, you and I can team up. Like, you, you start getting punched in the face and I'll, and I'll accentuate it with some, some sine waves or something. But hey, that's not why we're here. We already see we started with a diversion so that the rest of the podcast we can focus in on Caddy. So, but, but first, Jamin, I want to hear your story. How did you get into crypto? How'd you get into this crazy space? And then how did Caddy come to fruition or come into existence?

Yeah, I guess. Well, thanks. Thanks for, I guess, switching it up into, you know, Caddy and, you know, I guess my background as well. I came into crypto in 2017, and the story of forming Caddy is very much interlinked. with, you know, me getting in, I basically saw it as this really cool technology that can almost just cut out a lot of the unnecessary components of finance and, you know, intermediaries that we deal with day to day, which to be honest frustrates me very much. The fact that we have to go back and forth with, you know, a lot of things that could be automated. I'm very much an automation maxi. So I essentially set up a blockchain club at the university I was studying at. And I started to read some books, got very excited, and just saw like, okay, these ICOs that I'm looking at in 2017, 2018, it didn't seem like anything was truly built yet. It just looked like the fundamental premises were forming. Like we had Ethereum back then, obviously a lot of hype. ICOs, people kind of like launching tokens, and it did seem a bit cash grabby. I mean, some of those projects have done really well and come good, but a lot of them, you know, they were kind of just, you know, glorified Ponzi schemes, for want of a better word. And I didn't pay attention to crypto as much as I should have done over the next few years. So when I came back in late 2020 and early 2021, having studied a bit more, I did a master's in computer science. I was like, hey, maybe there's some, some, some really cool things that have been developed. So when I paid attention, I started using the DeFi apps. Like I was kind of using Aave, Compound, Uniswap, And realized that, oh wow, like with this MetaMask wallet, I can actually plug in to the smart contract platforms that I thought were going to take maybe 5, maybe like, you know, even more years, like, you know, 10 years to build. And I was like, hey, I actually think that this is the right time to be joining. And in the interim, I had joined a bank, you know, as a quant. So I was a quant trader and I was doing some, you know, I guess pretty boring forecasting stuff at a bank, which, I mean, it was, it was valuable stuff, but realized that I could actually just go and participate in the markets myself in crypto. So I spent about a year and a half. I basically quit my job as a quant once I realized that I could make a decent amount of money from trading in crypto using algorithms that I developed. So some of those algorithms were arbitrage trading across centralized and decentralized finance, and also executing with low latency on signals that I would find from social media. and other event-based signals like news sources and news releases. And, you know, it kind of set me up to build Caddy when I came across a ton of problems. I was pretty excited about the tech, but it just felt very early stage, you know, when there was minefields like rug pulls everywhere, scams, and the markets themselves are super inefficient. Like now we're seeing lots of layer 2s pop up. There's still like a lot of layer 1s, But the price discrepancies between centralized and decentralized finance, that was kind of what I was generating quite a bit of cash from. And I realized that as retail traders, right, you guys don't have access to actually benefiting from those price discrepancies, whereas these funds, these quite complicated, sophisticated traders, that's what they do. And they basically are predators towards people causing those market inefficiencies by executing a trade on one specific DEX. or one centralized exchange, which, you know, I wanted to build a tool which made all of that really accessible to every user and keeps them protected from scams. And, you know, that kind of culmination of tools that I spent a year and a half building ended up with something that, you know, looks a little bit different now. But that was the first version of the platform in Caddy. And I'm happy to kind of dive more into it in a bit. But yeah, I kind of pause there and that's my entry to crypto.

Yeah. So, I mean, this is really, I mean, I read about MEV, I read about arbitrage opportunities and I'm, I'm not technical. I love to say that, um, because it gets me out of a lot of things, but also, but also like I want to be. And I love things like, say, um, like when Alexa first came out, they had these templates that I could use and make my own Alexa skills. And I really didn't even have to have to code. So I made like a pet translator out of a science skill thing. So you would ask Alexa to translate what your pet just said, and then Alexa would come up with a funny phrase that I had pre-entered into it. You know, things like that, like basically no-code coding stuff. And the same thing is like, how do I do no-code MEV? How do I do no-code arbitrage? How do I do that sort of stuff? And I love that. I love that you're, you're democratizing it, but it can't be that easy, right? Like, it's not— it's— I feel like it's— I need— I don't know. Is it that easy?

Yeah, I mean, that's a really good point. Like, you know, how easy can you make it to get access to these opportunities? I think there's a couple takes on how you can make some of these market inefficiencies accessible to users. Definitely arbitrage is one of them. And there's a couple of tools out there. Like, one of them is Hummingbot, which is kind of giving quite powerful tools to someone who isn't necessarily a trader or like a pro trader, and they get access to being a market maker basically across CeFi and DeFi. But if you think about what Uniswap really did and the first AMMs, like automated market makers, they really took the model of market making, which, you know, if you think about these big hedge funds, Citadel, Jane Street, Jump, you know, all the ones that are in traditional finance, users or like normal people don't have access. They'll basically be very easily outcompeted. By people with better hardware and better software. And what we found with automated market makers, it's not necessarily the hardware specifically, but even the software, which is the advantage. It's more the high-level strategy. So in becoming a market maker, you can actually benefit from trading volumes through fees. And now we're seeing more complex models like Uniswap V3 and soon to be Uniswap V4, which I'm pretty excited about. So kind of anyone can have an entry to this. Except the strategies themselves for doing these trades, executing market-making strategies, they still can be quite complex. So I would say it's like, you know, not necessarily for absolutely everyone to just, you know, put some money in somewhere. There's lots of places you can get yield, and that's kind of a very simple way of doing it. But the real problem that we're tackling is whenever you execute a trade, you're actually causing a market inefficiency, and that's what slippage is, right? So you execute a trade on an AMM on Uniswap, You push the price one way, then all these bots come in. So the hedge funds, the kind of sophisticated traders, and they look at the price discrepancy you've just caused, and then they kind of extract value. They kind of normalize it. They make it go back to where it was by executing trades on different exchanges, on different ecosystems, on different centralized exchanges too, and taking the, the profits of that. What we do is before you execute a transaction, We make sure that the price that you're gonna get is 100% the best price. And we use things like aggregators. If you are familiar with 1inch, with Matcha, with Li Finance, OpenOcean, we've integrated those guys and also centralized exchanges so that we'll give you the best possible execution for any trade. And the best thing is that all you have to do is in 3 clicks, you download our Chrome extension, And it's ready to go out the box. So when you're on Uniswap, when you're on 1inch, when you're on a DeFi Llama meta aggregator, you can make sure that Caddy will pop up. If it finds you a better price, it will suggest, hey, you might not want to use this platform, and it will change either the contract call, and you can select which one you actually want to execute through, or the centralized exchange if you want to put your API keys in the extension, which by the way, we keep them non-custodially. It's always stored in the same way that MetaMask keeps your seed phrase. And, you know, it's not a case of we're giving all the arbitrage opportunities to retail traders, but it's making sure that you're not, I guess, a victim to a lot of the market inefficiencies that you're creating. You can actually save the money. In terms of MEV, we're going to be doing some stuff around MEV, protecting against front running most likely. And we're getting that set up as well, which, I mean, we could get into MEV. It's a whole crazy space over there. Um, but that's another way which value is extracted from a lot of users currently.

So yeah, I would love to get into that, but can you walk us through like setting it up? So you install the Chrome extension and then there's like, you need to create a password and then it's, you, you would need to add, add your Binance key, API key, your Kraken API key and your KuCoin, right?

Yeah. So, I mean, you can just operate with no CeFi, like no centralized exchanges. You just download it, then everything in DeFi works out the box. I mean, it's one of the good things about DeFi. It's like your assets are self-custodied. So if you use a MetaMask wallet, or we're currently live with browser wallets, so it's, you know, alongside the extension, it should just pick up the trade when you execute it on-chain on any DeFi front end, and then make sure that you're getting the best price. With centralized finance, we do enforce you to have a password, which is actually part of the encryption. It's actually the same way that MetaMask works. Over the Christmas period, I, you know, took some time to understand exactly how MetaMask keeps seed phrases. They use this thing called the keyring controller, which allows you to encrypt, I guess, your seed phrase, but in our case, it's API keys, and then you can decrypt it for signing. And, you know, sometimes when you haven't used MetaMask in a while, it requires you to put in your password again. That's actually decrypting it. So it kind of stays decrypted. But if anyone hacks your browser, they're going to have to brute force this password. And actually, you know, that might take several years if you have, you know, a pretty long password around 12 characters. And using that API key, we then have connections to your exchanges. If you give them trading permissions, then you can trade if you have funds on the centralized exchange. A lot of our users, you know, store some on, let's say, Binance or Kraken, and then they use a lot of DeFi as well. But quite often the rates for trading are much better on centralized finance because they don't have gas fees. And sometimes the liquidity is often better when you have centralized exchange order books as well. So yeah, that's kind of how it works. But yeah, happy to dive into further. You know, we will have the opportunity to do bridging through centralized exchanges and depositing and withdrawing to centralized as well.

Yeah, this is great. I mean, I'm using it right now as, as we're As you're talking, I'm like looking, I went to Uniswap, I'm swapping some ETH for USDC. And then it gives me a list of, of new, like other ways I can swap other than Uniswap. It's like, here's your original route. You're going to pay $4.87 in gas because of, and then on Kraken, I can save that gas and some more, like a couple cents more. So how would you, but this is for swapping, right? It's just like giving you a better rate, but how do you know when you're like, Ooh, I'm exploiting the system. I'm being able to make some cash here. Any tips on that?

Yeah. So usually it's when you go to a DEX like Uniswap and you're trading a, like a pair of token which has low liquidity on that exchange and, you know, the markets are really dynamic, so it kind of moves all the time. Yesterday I was swapping this token called Temple. You know, these are— I kind of, you know, I know some guys at Temple and I'm pretty excited about their project. I was, by the way, not financial advice. I was just buying it for like, you know, myself. And I saw on Uniswap the slippage cost was going to be 70% or something like that. And this was on Ethereum mainnet. So swapping ETH to Temple, basically Caddy picked up the transaction and said I could save several hundred dollars from this one transaction. So it really depends on the liquidity in that particular exchange. There's probably another exchange, maybe it's SushiSwap, maybe it's something else. I think the trade was routed through Matcha. But it's very dependent on what the markets are doing and where the best liquidity is. And by the way, yeah, feel free to use it. I don't know if like screen sharing is a thing, but I could potentially show you how a swap works. I'm happy to walk through it.

Yeah, I don't think you can screen— oh yeah, you can, you can actually screen. Yeah. So if you would go ahead, that'd be great. And then we'll decide what to— this is the first time we've done this on the podcast, but maybe, I don't know, I'll record if you, If you're okay with it, I'll record you screen sharing and then, uh, we maybe could add it to like some video element.

Uh, yeah, sure. Why not? Like, um, for the guys in here as well, I think it just would be cool to—

Okay, go ahead, go ahead, go ahead and screen share though. Let's do

it. I mean, I'm happy to record or, you know, or whatever you like is, but yeah, like, um, I'll show you how a swap works with Caddy. Cool. I'm assuming you can see the right screen. It should show Uniswap.

Yep.

Yeah. So when you go to Uniswap itself, you can see like Caddy's on the page here. It says optimize.

Oh, that's great.

You know, here's just the extension and my most recent trades. This is on Arbitrum. But yeah, I mean, maybe I'll show you that trade that I was making yesterday, which was with Temple on Ethereum mainnet, because I saw some, you know, it was a pretty cool price discrepancy. I wonder if it will exist today, but we can just walk through the whole trade process. So Temple, oh, you guys are seeing my degen plays. So yeah, like if you end up executing a swap here, it might have quite high slippage. And we, you know, here it says 74%. So that's a massive price impact. If we choose to swap anyway, then confirm swap. Now Caddy pops up instead of MetaMask. And here you can see that Matcha again is gonna offer you a great price improvement because instead of getting 111, Temple tokens that you would get on Uniswap, you're gonna get 362 basically. And the gas, yes, the gas is going to be double, but you know, you've saved $245. That also does include the, the gas.

That is baller.

I'm not, not so

good

execute this trade, but yeah, like, you know, here you can see. Yeah, it would just go through and it will tell you, you know, what we are trying transaction's doing. We are live on Ethereum, Polygon, Arbitrum. Yeah, I kind of closed that down, but I can show you the full flow on, you know, Arbitrum. I don't mind spending a little bit of gas on that. So if I was to like execute a trade, let's say we're trading Chainlink token, and this is, you know, on Arbitrum, I guess. Yeah, it tells you that the centralized exchanges, you do have to, you know, I haven't added my API keys to this particular extension. I think I was doing some testing, And here, 1inch is going to save you $0.12. And you can see like the pricing gas is a little bit different. So when we trade on 1inch, now MetaMask pops up and you click confirm on MetaMask and we've just saved $0.12 with Caddy. You can view that on the Explorer to verify it went through. And yeah, that's basically how it works.

That's awesome. So how does it work with decentralized exchanges? Like, you don't have to show us on the video, but But just, if you just want to talk us through how that would go, does it go to your centralized exchange, your, your DEX account, or sorry, your, your centralized exchange account?

Yeah. So what you can do with the Caddy extension is you can onboard and manage your API keys. So here, you know, you onboard, you kind of, this will just take you to your API key management page and you just upload your API keys. Then when you're doing it, when you're swapping here. So here, I think we saw some centralized exchange routes. I haven't actually added it. Basically, the APIs will ping Binance and tell you, okay, you've traded this much and there's a bit of a price improvement here as well. So, uh, yeah, I mean, it works really smoothly. Like there's no signing with wallets or anything. It just uses the API to execute directly.

That's great. But what I'm saying is, is then that exchange, the transaction, those tokens that you just swapped for would live in your Binance account, correct? Or does it also send it back to your wallet? That you're interacting with right now?

Yeah, that's a really good question. Right now, our method is the tokens exist on the exchange. We don't allow people to like withdraw and deposit just yet until we're going to get a security audit. So, you know, audit is in the pipeline and we're making sure that the things are 100% secure. We're going to have some penetration testing to make sure that, you know, like things are going to be 100% airtight. And then the goal is once we have that, then you can deposit to Binance. withdraw from Binance if you want. And we can create really cool experiences around this. So, I mean, a platform I was using pretty recently is called NFT Pub. Don't know if you've ever heard of it, but, you know, let's take PoolTogether as an example. Like, we can build custom experiences around any dApp. So let's say if PoolTogether is running a specific pool, I don't know, maybe you have to own a token on a chain like Celo, and you have to own like USDC, but the Celo version, right? A lot of users, they might not have that particular token on that chain. And what we can do is we can potentially find the best route for that user to get funds there in order to use the app like PoolTogether. It's by injecting this Caddy, you know, Caddy optimized dApp into PoolTogether. It's like, oh, if you wanna on-ramp, then we'll have a fiat on-ramp. You can do that at the best price, but maybe you already have USDC on Binance or on Kraken, then you can withdraw directly into your wallet and then go ahead and use PoolTogether and start, you know, entering some of these, you know, potential prizes. And, you know, in the future you can do swapping and bridging. So if you need to swap from something on Celo, or if you need to bridge from Arbitrum or Polygon or wherever your USDC is, you might need to swap and bridge at the best rate or potentially at the best time as well. Something that can optimize for speed. Then we can do really cool things. I'm very excited about that.

That's great. I'm currently trying to swap. So I do Decentral Games, ICE Poker, and I have some ICE in my wallet, but it's too, it's too rare, like not widely distributed or something to be detected. But that's really interesting. I just wanted to try it out to like, you use Temple. And so I use my ICE to see, and I'm using QuickSwap, which I didn't even know it would go through, but it did. Like Caddy picked it up. And then was like, we don't know what this is. So, um, we're putting you back into your normal flow, your regularly scheduled program. So, so many ways to go. I, before I forget this question, I want to ask this and then, and then I'm going to ask you a question based on what you just talked about. But what, what's the fees? There's got, anytime there's abstraction or there's convenience, I feel, I feel like I'm going to get ripped off. And sometimes I don't even care because it's like so good. It's so convenient. Like Crossmint allowed me to buy a Solana NFT with my Ethereum wallet. And I was just so pumped about it that I could just like, not even think about bridging that I accepted it knowing that I'd probably get screwed out of it. But, uh, so, so what, what is Caddy's fees?

Yeah. Yeah. That's, it's pretty accurate. Like anytime which there's convenience, like a convenience factor, um, there's always going to be fees. I will say that, like, you know, right now on the version that we have, we have zero fees, but There are going to be very small fees.

What? That's alpha, alpha, alpha. Okay, keep going.

Yeah, yeah, it will change. So, you know, I'm not promising that this is going to last for a long time. But, you know, the typical fee that we charge is 0.05%, which is half of the fee of Binance. It's really, really small. It's like something that is forecasted directly into the quote that you get. So when Canny quotes you a number, it will include the fee. And it's only if we save you money. So if you're just executing swaps and we can't save you any money, then we're not going to apply any fee. Your fee is, you know, zero, and it's whatever the exchange that you're using. On the centralized side, it's a little bit different. We do take a pretty similar fee. It's between 0.03% to 0.06%. But that's at no extra cost to you guys, the users, because we take it out of the exchange's revenue. It's quite similar to how affiliate models work. You know, people shill Reflinks all the time. It's quite similar to that, except you don't necessarily have to sign up to the platform with Caddy. We get, we get this. I think, you know, in the future there are going to be different fees for bridging. We'll have to explore that. And when we do fiat on-ramping as well, there's also going to be separate fees. But for swapping, we're trying to keep that fee as low as physically possible.

I love that. I love that. Okay. So then back to my question that I wanted, that I'm pumped about, is that with this new version of PoolTogether, currently PoolTogether V4, you can deposit USDC into AAVE basically. And it's a very safe OG yield source, and which means that it's low yield, but, uh, that you can win prizes daily. So we have up to $5,000 prizes, which is pretty cool. It's really fun. And it's an opportunity to encourage saving. And then you get a chance at outsized gains. You get a chance to, uh, get a really awesome prize APR. Um, by saving in PoolTogether. You could also not get any prizes. So that's just the way that PoolTogether works. And so, well, with this new hyperstructure is how I pronounce it. Yes. The hyperstructure, uh, is that you can do any token and any yield source permissionlessly. So anybody can create a PoolTogether vault. The thing is with the smart contract is that all of the, all of the yield from all of the vaults on Optimism or Arbitrum on mainnet, um, all of that yield is converted into the pool token and then distributed as prizes. So the, the way that's really interesting is that some of these ERC-460, some of these vaults, like Beefy vaults, are actually integrated within 1inch that you could swap directly into the vault. You don't need liquidity pool to swap into it. And so I'm wondering if there is, so that's like that abstraction, which is really great. So that, that means that at some point you can actually just swap into a pool together prize vault. Like you can, you can take ETH and you can swap it out for prize ETH. And it should always be 1 for 1, cuz PoolTogether is no loss. You always get back what you deposited in. Now, the price of the asset that you're depositing could go up and down, but you're always gonna get back the, the, if you put in 1 ETH, you're gonna get back 1 ETH back minus gas fees. Right. So I'm wondering how this could be like how Caddy could take advantage of this, right. With these, with these potential routers. So again, just another way to abstract and be able to swap into the PoolTogether. Prize vaults.

Yeah, this is super interesting. Well, firstly, I love that it's kind of like one-to-one, that there's, there's no fees. I mean, this is pretty insane. And you guys are just like kind of distributing out the prize money to, you know, if people have assets lying around, like it just makes total sense to put it in to pull together. And yeah, I mean, given like Caddy will have a lot of users, you know, hopefully like, you know, we're expanding Got a few hundred users on board. I definitely think that there's like some kind of partnership that we could, we could have where for assets which are maybe lying around in people's wallets, we could have like a little suggestion saying like, hey, by the way, you have these assets which aren't really doing anything. Do you want to potentially collect some, some yield? And it could be huge, right? And yeah, I mean, there could be some sort of swapping mechanism. It seems like the smart contracts themselves are going to be pretty simple, like LP pools, like 1 to 1. But if you can swap directly into Prize USDC or, you know, that token, then there is an integration that we could do and we could suggest it to users. I think it would be a pretty cool partnership to have.

Yeah, I love that. And in this, I just did a Twitter Spaces with Earnify and Dawson from Bankless, the CTO of Bankless. And Dawson, I was talking about PoolTogether's new— the hyperstructure on the UI is going to have this in-your-wallet button. So you can actually just click that and then it, and it shows the vaults for which you have assets that you could deposit into. And Dawson loved that because it was like, oh, that's so good to have. I, you know, there's not many dynamics like that, UX dynamics in crypto where you could just like, it looks through your wallet and here's what you can do with that. So that's awesome. The other thing, the other dynamic that I think is like the holy grail is a user wants to take an action. But then the backend figures it out based on their wallet or wallets, what they can do. Like, hey, I need ETH, get me some ETH. And then it looks through and it's like, well, you have this, this, this, this, this, and then you pick a route that you want to get the thing. So anyway, those two, those two kind of dynamics, UX dynamics are really interesting to me. And so, and then also with PoolTogether, we're looking at ways to get rid of the frontend, right? We want to be the prize layer in every protocol in crypto. I want every wallet deposited into PoolTogether in some way, shape, or form. And I want every protocol to integrate PoolTogether. These are, these are very lofty goals, but I think it, I think it's like, there's some really cool things. Every time I talk, every time we do this podcast and I talk to a protocol, there's always a cool way that PoolTogether could be integrated. So yeah, I really love what Caddy's doing. This is really awesome. Totally using it. I've already used it, but, but also just to see like, oh, okay, with this hyperstructure, Hi, Boston Rockstar. Well, I could see some really cool, hey, why don't you save that kind of things that pop up?

Yo, I'm going to start using this word hyperstructure because it's a good one. Yeah. And I completely agree with you that, you know, in terms of pull together, there's literally like no downside if you're— well, I guess gas fees is the only thing, but, you know, with layer 2s and I see you guys are like live on Optimism, you know, there's basically this prize layer, which, you know, can be integrated to almost any dApp that has assets lying around, which is so powerful, right? And, you know, people like who, I actually think that, you know, what if Caddy, you know, was able to say, okay, if the user wants, we can like have, you know, users' funds deposited into, maybe Caddy could control that, or like, and we could distribute out the prizes, like if we won the prize to all of our users or something. But yeah, I mean, there's just like a lot of cool things that we can do. And creating this very frictionless environment for like interacting with crypto is what we're all about. Like, we want to improve the UX of crypto. I think right now it's a very unstreamlined process when you have to worry about, oh, I have all these different wallets and I need to move my funds. I need to use bridges, which, to be honest, they're pretty nascent and they suck. The UX is bad. They get hacked all the time. You know, it's kind of sometimes I've got funds stuck on bridges before because like gas prices changes and not having one clear platform where you can just manage everything. Like you want to, you know, own ETH on a certain platform, you want to move funds around, you want to swap at the best rates. We're trying to create something that is just so intuitive, so easy to use. You just navigate crypto and we know that, you know, Caddy's got your back. It can Like route your funds everywhere. You might be getting yield from other protocols and really creating this kind of frictionless environment is what we're all about.

The other opportunity that I'm seeing here with Caddy, so PoolTogether, the new version, it's permissionless, right? So anybody can create a vault and there are going to be these vault lists that need to be curated. So the ones that you'll see on pooltogether.com will be audited vaults. Um, but again, you can have just like Uniswap, you can have like custom tokens, you can have lists of these vaults. But so, so there's that. But the thing that I'm thinking about is, is we need bots to interact with the Hyperstructure smart contract. And there's really 3 things that need to be done by bots. The first thing is that the POOL token needs to be— the bot, the smart contract's thirsty for the POOL token. It needs to buy POOL token. And so there's an arbitrage opportunity where it's going to buy POOL for the prize pool. It's got to convert yield. It's got to sell the yield that it's got. for the Pool token. And so that's, that's one bot that I'm thinking, oh, Caddy could totally be that. Like if I have Pool token, I could immediately, like Caddy could let me sell it back to PoolTogether, to the prize pool for whatever asset I wanted to. So that's really, that's, that's one thing. The other bots are unrelated to Caddy, but prizes now, you don't need to go claim them and see if you won on PoolTogether. You can actually, it's auto-claim for you. So when you win, you just get the pool token sent to your wallet. And so when you get the pool token, you can then swap it for whatever asset you want. You can redeposit it into the pool vault if you wanted to, or you can, you can swap it for prize, whatever token you want to hold in that PoolTogether vault. So anyways, those are some cool opportunities, but, but I was thinking, oh yeah, Caddy could be like that, that pool arbitrage bot.

Anyway, yeah, yeah, 100%. We could do that. That would be dope. Yeah. If you guys need bots, like, you know, that's kind of my bread and butter. I build bots and that's kind of how Caddy came about. So I'd be down to collaborate on something like that. I think it'd be pretty cool. Maybe we could do it as like a hackathon project or something.

Yeah, definitely. I mean, yeah, if you wanted to build your own art bot, that'd be great. But tell me about MEV. You said there were some MEV secrets that you had or some ideas that you had on how Caddy could integrate MEV, which is maximum extracted value.

Yes.

Um, nailed it.

MEV, maximum— I kind of recently changed name from mining extractable value to maximum extractable value. So yes, Caddy right now, like, it doesn't help with MEV just yet, but we're forming some partnerships with people who can prevent normal traders when they're, you know, just trying to execute a swap. From these MEV bots, which will basically just take your cash. Essentially, it's like they will reorder transactions and make sure that you do not get the best prices on any of the assets that you're trading by front-running you, by doing things like called back-running. Basically, front-running is putting in trades before your trade. Back-running is executing arbitrage opportunities after your trade has kind of like move the price of the token. As we mentioned before, like whenever you trade, you're causing the market or the price to change, which is technically a market inefficiency. And then the, the bots will make the markets efficient by extracting value on the other side of that trade. So what we're planning on integrating is with private RPC providers, and RPCs are basically the thing that connects you to the blockchain or your transactions to the blockchain. And they can have private RPCs which prevent against front running. And you can make sure that people like Jared from Subway.eth, who are, you know, very big MEV bots, they can't take any of your front running money. And then there'll be some back running opportunities, which I think they kind of share the revenue with, with whoever, you know, kind of needs that revenue as well. So, yeah, I mean, we are planning on integrating with some of these private RPCs. And there's kind of a very hot topic called intent-based trading right now, which it's quite kind of similar to CowSwap where you post the trade upfront and they can match trades peer-to-peer. If, you know, someone is selling you ETH for USDC and you're trying to buy some, you know, there's a perfect match. So you could just sell them directly without needing to go through automated market makers. And that is something that we are planning on Either integrating with or even building our own, you know, kind of in the longer-term future.

Yeah. And I feel like, doesn't 1inch do that with their fusion swaps where, or there's a lot of like peer-to-peer happening on 1inch where the seller actually pays the gas so that you can make a swap and have a gasless swap, but it's really not gasless because the seller pays it or something like that. But yeah, the CowSwap folks, awesome. And they also have the routers as well that you could route into, you could actually swap into. These vaults, these yield sources, which is pretty cool as well. They also have, when I was talking to CowSwap, they were talking about like the ability to say like auto-routing, I guess, contracts where like, if you got pooled, you can actually have your wallet automatically convert the pool to something else, to something else that you wanted to hold. Now, again, I'm not technical, but that's, I'm dangerous. So I can say things like that and it's probably not at all accurate. And then, and then I watched my CoinGecko prices go down.

I mean, that sounds very cool. Like, to be honest, 1inch are really innovating at the forefront, right, with their new fusion mode. It's quite similar to CowSwap. You know, they have different solvers and a different mechanism for it. But yeah, I mean, it's quite interesting to see, like, how the P2P matching models are turning out. And in terms of routing to, I think you mentioned, like, you can kind of route to multiple tokens at once. Is that right? Yeah. Like, you can basically start owning an asset for, um, or like kind of, you know, have like a multiple route swap. Is that correct?

Well, I, I, the way I understood it with CowSwap was that like in the instance of PoolTogether, when you received a pool token prize, you could, you could automatically, you could have it like set up so that it would swap, like it would run, it would change it into whatever, whether it's redepositing into your vault or, uh, swapping for ETH or whatever you would want to hold. I could have been mishearing that though.

Yeah. Yeah. So I think there's, there's a couple of almost like automation platforms like Gelato, Autonomy Network. And I know 1inch limit orders are quite similar to this where it will basically wait for a certain action, like a price reaching a level, or I guess in this case, um, some prize tokens being distributed or maybe like, you know, the prize period ending. And then it could execute an action like a swap to a token, which is kind of predefined. I think it must be that, which sounds like very valuable because then you could start staking in a vault. You could start, you know, owning a token after you're done with, I guess, staking it for a while.

Okay. So we've covered a lot so far and I wanted to round out our conversation by talking about the future. Where are we headed? What's going on? What's with the market? You know? So, so yeah, what's the future? And I will say that I've heard a lot about account ops. I hear a lot about public good. I hear a lot about AI. So the more times you mention those things, the more points you get in your predictions for the future. But I would also love to know the future of Caddy as well.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, crypto itself finds itself in quite an interesting place, to be honest. We kind of have the echoes of the bull run and whatever the hell happened in 2021. It was a really crazy year. And not for good reasons. I mean, we saw— I'm going to call them experiments fail, right? There's, you know, FTX, Luna, Celsius, Voyager, all these things which kind of tarnished the reputation of crypto. I hate to be someone who mentions regulation, but it seems like in the US particularly, they're coming on pretty heavy-handed. But there are other jurisdictions which are being a little bit more favorable. So, I mean, pretty excited that Hong Kong opened up crypto again to retail traders. That's you know pretty forward thinking, and Dubai and you know kind of some of the Middle Eastern states they are also being very welcoming to crypto. Here in the UK where I'm based, there seems to be a bit of a buzz. You know A16Z or A16Z as we now have to call them, their crypto arm is moving headquarters to the the UK. So I think it's quite exciting in terms of like you know I think actions definitely speak louder than words right now. So you can see you know people are quite excited by the prospect of crypto. crypto being, you know, an asset class which is around to stay more so than what happened after the 2018 bull run. It just has a bit more oomph to it right now. In terms of DeFi and CeFi, I kind of like the fact that people have this narrative where self-custody is very valuable because it really is. Yeah, it's a bit of a pain right now to manage seed phrases. I am going to mention account abstraction as a way to get around that. But these kind of integrated wallet experiences to end applications is really where crypto to get to. Right now, we're, we're technology enthusiasts, we're crypto enthusiasts, and we don't mind putting up with the kind of hassles of experimenting with new tech when things don't fully make sense. It's not like super easy to onboard. If you think about MetaMask, the first time you onboarded with it, it's like, what is this seed phrase and why do I have to keep it safe? Why do I have to write anything on paper? I, I literally don't these days. And what happens if I lose it? What happens if I keep it on a cloud platform and it just ends up getting hacked. This happens all the time. There's tons of, there's tons of hacks everywhere. I think we need to solve a lot of the problems in our own backyard before we even think about like true mass adoption. And that is the user experience needs to improve in matters all the time. So account abstraction can, you know, have more, more native wallet experiences into applications. You can have things like gas abstraction where the gas is funded by a company or even just, you know, with scaling and L2s, the gas will be cheaper. Pretty excited about that. And beyond that, you know, security needs to be solved. And I do think we're at a place where security is still a massive risk. If we can't figure out a lot of these hacks that are going on, if we can't insure your portfolio— like, this is something that we really want to do— if we can't insure your portfolio, then, you know, like, if you lose your money, that's it. It's irreversible transactions we're dealing with. And that really sucks. Like, bank accounts, you know, if some— something fraudulent happens, there's You know, they can block your account. They can, you know, reverse some transactions. Those things, you have those guarantees and you have ultimately some insurance as well. At the end of the day, with respect to Caddy, we kind of see on-chain being very much the future. People are going to be transacting, you know, whether they know it or not, on-chain. And we want to be this financial layer which makes sure that you're getting the absolute best price for things, make sure that you're steering clear of all these hacks, scams, everything else, and that you have the most frictionless experience in navigating the whole of your portfolio, whether you want to use multiple wallets, centralized exchanges, integrate with your bank account, you know, bridge across, you know, tons of different chains. Caddy will be there to make sure you're saving money on every trade and keeping you protected from scams. So yeah, that's kind of like a high-level overview of, you know, where I see the space going and Caddy itself. I do think privacy is quite important and also zero-knowledge cryptography can enable that. So you don't have to dox your wallet. Like, I don't want right now everyone to know my entire transaction history and, you know, everything I'm doing in the real world because, you know, I think having that privacy is important. And we think about the space being, you know, there's a lot of anons right now. Everyone has their PFP and their kind of online identity, but a lot of people just don't want to dox any information. And that's, that's absolutely fine. We should be respecting people's privacy, but we haven't really seen solutions be adopted, at least yet. which facilitate that. So that's kind of where we're at. Yeah. I'll pause there. I'm kind of thinking about this quite a lot.

And to the listener who's listening to the podcast, this won't— this will be a week old, but Vitalik tweeted today, like doing an AMA and there's some bangers in here. So I don't know if you have any, like any favorite questions or anything that you like got you thinking. For me, it was the MPC EOA wallets versus smart contract wallets. And just like, one, I had to look up like what all those letters mean, but then also just thinking about like, what, what, what if the smart contract itself of the wallet is, is hacked or like there's vulnerabilities. So anyway, I, any thoughts on Vitalik's AMA today?

Yeah. Yeah. I actually have not looked at the questions.

So I gotcha. That's what we're about here at the Pull Together. Community podcast is those gotcha questions.

I found one, I found one, right? So crypto and longevity, what field interests you most? And his answer was, was nomading. And this is something I think about, you know, myself, I'm kind of based in London, but I've been thinking about potentially moving myself, you know, obviously, like things with Caddy have to be stable, we have to be making sure that we're pretty much doing, you know, we can, we can operate with me Like nomading quite a bit, but now we can live pretty much anywhere and we can work for companies all around the world. We're an entirely distributed team in Caddy. Admittedly, it's like, you know, still a pretty small team, but I'm very excited about nomading and, you know, just experiencing completely different cultures, different areas in the world. Yeah, I am going to be traveling for some conferences this year. So going to ECC, which is pretty close to home, but then spending some time in Asia. Going to Token2049 and Korea Blockchain Week. And I do think that, you know, definitely in the future I would love to do some nomading. And I heard great things about Zuzu Lu as well. So, you know, there's a lot of conferences and crypto people, they do like to party, I guess. So it's pretty fun to like just hang out with like-minded people all around the world and not necessarily have somewhere where you just have to be forced to live because your job requires it. So I'm pretty excited about that.

It's really interesting with the nomading because I'm very much being a Westerner and highly individualistic culture that I'm soaking in, right? In New York City, it's like, it's all about the individual. It's interesting to see something like nomading, which I would say is very individualistic, being rooted in this crypto community still. So even though you're nomading, you actually see the same people a lot of the time and you're building those relationships. Which, so you are getting that community aspect of it, which I think is, you know, there are pros and cons to an individualistic society, just like there are pros and cons to a collectivist society. Um, and so anyway, that's the nomading for me. I mean, listen, I live in New York City and I think it's the greatest city in the world. I love it so much. And, uh, I'm cool with quarterly travel if I could do that.

For sure.

But yeah, the nomading life seems like, I, like, seriously, it was my first experience when I went to ETH Tokyo, the hackathon. I was like, where do you live? And everybody's nomads. I'm like, what? Like no one has like a home. Everyone I talked to was a nomad. So anyway, there's gotta be something to it.

That's really cool. Yeah. Um, I, I would say that I was in New York not too long ago. It was only in March after ETH Denver actually. And, you know, I, I was meant to work in New York as well, but I spent some time in the States and I was like, oh man, this city is like really cool. So, you know, and the crypto scene's great over there as well.

That's right.

Um, I do think I will be spending some time in New York and the US in general, but there's so many other places as well I do want to visit. I'm currently staying, interestingly enough, in a hacker house. We have a couple of hacker houses, it's called Origin, based in London, and we are intending to expand, you know, I mean, we're kind of like letting it grow organically. We've got 9 members at the moment in 2 hacker houses, and we've got a 3rd on the horizon as well. But yeah, imagine having like a global network of like you said, community that you're, you're a part of. But even though you're kind of moving around the world with similar people, we do hope to have many houses across the world eventually. And, you know, that's kind of a community that you can go and join and you can, you know, potentially kind of swap rooms or sublet or kind of just, you know, have a base of people that you can connect with. So it's really exciting. We're actually having an event tomorrow. So I put— I invited like a few friends just to chat about DeFi. And we're hosting the people on the Partiful link. It's like 60 people have said yes, RSVP, and then there's like 15 maybes. So it ended up like being quite a big thing. And it's just like from people who are in DeFi and based in London right now. So I'm pretty excited about that meetup just happening tomorrow. And, you know, I do hope to continue with like hosting some meetups. If anyone's ever in London, then hit me up if you want to learn more about Origin, live with crypto people. Yeah. Happy, happy to, to, to share that with you.

Would you, would you mind dropping that link? Could you get that link and drop it in the Pull Together stage chat? And I will tag our London Pull Together community crew, cuz I think that'd be really cool. Yeah. Awesome. Okay. And

so we got Adam as well. Yeah. I'm, I'm sorry if it triggers people.

No, say that again. What? I, I, I couldn't hear you.

Oh yeah. So, um, the event photo is a meme. that I created for a talk I was giving about DeFi people. And it basically, for the people listening, it says a few things. There's like a picture of a lady and there's, I've been meaning to set up my Ledger. 1,000 APY seems legit. Rubbed again this week. Portfolio value minus 90%. There's basically just like a whole load of like crypto memes. So yeah, if anyone is around in London and free tomorrow, then be great to hang out.

Shout out to Adam and Smart Investor at the PoolTogether community. Yes. Farms Citrus asks about a New York City PoolTogether event. I actually started hosting these crypto climbing events. And so I'll post about it in the PoolTogether Discord, post about it on Twitter, but generally it's like a Thursday evening at Vital in Brooklyn. And me and my buddy Charlie, who's at Amex, we host these. And it's funny when you do these events, like the first one I did, I think like everybody canceled. And I had like 20 Partiful RSVPs and like no one showed. And then the second one I did, I had like 2 people show, but then it's like some people saw the PoolTogether towel I had and they're like, oh, hey, PoolTogether. And then the third one I had, it was like 10. So it's really cool. You just gotta stick with it with these community events. And then people eventually start showing up, uh, because people like to hang out. There's based crew in this, uh, in this thing. So Farms, I will totally tag you when we do the next crypto climbing event in Brooklyn. And that's what I'm saying, Jaimin, like when you come to New York, you gotta, you gotta do Brooklyn. Like a lot of the, there's no like tourist attractions in Brooklyn really, but you gotta go. It's like, it's, it's its own thing.

Yeah, I was saying that. I was staying over in Boerum Hill actually.

You're doing it right.

You're doing it right. Williamsburg for like, there's the coworking space. I think it's run by Jump, the Settler Space, which is pretty cool. And I saw the NFT wall just randomly, which was pretty cool. Um, but yeah, great to see the crypto scene's buzzing over there.

Yeah, it's funny how there's the Manhattan crypto scene, which is like, you know, all the like Uniswap and Aave and that sort of thing. And then you come over to Brooklyn, you got Rainbow and you got Rarible and you got, you know, PleaserDAO and stuff. So it's really cool. It's a good vibe. I'm glad you're in the Brooklyn spot. But hey, listen, everybody try Caddy. This is exciting. I love this stuff. I love making crypto more accessible, making swapping less scary, making it, you know, giving the power back to the users, uh, and not necessarily the bot creators, kind of democratizing that. And so, Jaimin, thank you for being here. It's been awesome.

Well, thank you, Millie. Um, appreciate the, the chance to, to chat about BotTogether and Caddy, and it's been great. Yeah, guys, do feel free to check out Caddy. It'll save you money on every trade and protect you from scams. Yeah, like, uh, and feel free to just DM me as well. Um, more than happy to chat about anything. So thanks for having me.

Cool. All right. So this will be out next week and, uh, we'll tag you on the Twitters, on the tweets, if it still exists by then. And, uh, yeah, that was great. That was awesome.

Awesome. Yeah. Take it easy. Take it easy. Have a good one, guys.

Take care. Thanks for listening to the PoolTogether Community Podcast. You can visit pooltogether.com to deposit, and we'd love to hear what you thought about today's episode. So visit the Pool Together Discord and let us know.