PoolTogether Community Podcast #25 with Techno from Alchemix

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, and today I'm interviewing Techno from Alchemix. We just hopped right into it. We just hopped right into it. We just started talking like old bros. So here it is. Hope you enjoy it.

Anything you wanted to say or talk about before we started?

Not really. Thanks for having me. Yeah, we met back in February. Denver.

Denver. That's right. That's right. My, my very first crypto conference. And, and yeah, I got to, I got to meet the leader of Alchemix, which is Basically, I think Alchemix and PoolTogether are 2 Infinity Stones in the Thanos Gauntlet of DeFi that Chris K has, uh, that told me about. Like, I took Chris K's class and Alchemix and PoolTogether were the 2 dApps that melted my face. So then I got to meet you and you're like, oh yeah, Alchemix. I'm like, what? I'm talking to a rock star. At ETH Denver.

Nice. That, that's awesome to hear. I don't know about rockstar, but yeah, I'll take it. Why not?

Yeah. And then I asked you to be on the podcast and you said yes. I'm like, it's that easy? I can just ask people to be on a podcast? That's awesome.

Especially live in person. It's like such a different vibe in person, especially at a conference like that. I felt like it was just 10 days nonstop, cool conversations about DeFi with cool people.

Yeah. Yeah. It's very, very fun. I loved it. I just got back from Permissionless and that was a different vibe. Totally different vibe than ETH Denver. It was more like VC focused rather than builder focused. IMHO. So yeah, interesting vibe there.

Yeah, I was there for one day. I just kind of like, You know, popped around the expo hall a little bit and it was very much like VC, fintech, institutional. I, I mean, I can't even count the number of companies in the expo hall that were pitching, you know, integrate your institutional whatever with DeFi. It, it was just, there's so many of them and they won't all survive, but you know, some of them will, which is just, Awesome for the growth of the space.

Yeah, like Visa was there. I was like, what is Visa? There's a Visa booth? What?

It was great.

What, next one we're going to see Bank of America or something? Is that where we're going?

Yep, at a Bankless-sponsored event.

Exactly, exactly. Well, I mean, a lot has happened in the space since we had first talked. I mean, we were actually at a at a political fundraiser, right? That was pretty cool. I like didn't even realize, like, I mean, it was really cool to raise funds for politicians who are pro-crypto. This specific guy was Matthew— Matt West.

Yeah,

Matt West, who was a Yield dev or a Yearn dev. And then boom, you know, got into politics and made stuff happen. So it was really cool to, to be there and, and chat, chat with you and chat with the, the group and feel a part of, not only do you feel a part of something with crypto and Web3, and then suddenly you're like talking politics now. And I was like in line at ETH Denver with like lobbyists and stuff. So it was really, it was, there's so many different facets of this, of this biz. So it's cool to explore that.

Yeah. Yeah, big time. Matt Weiss is a cool guy. I got to chat with him a little bit. The primary unfortunately didn't work out for him, but I think he's got a bright future in whatever he does.

For sure. Yeah, no, he was great. And even like, you know, he dressed the part. He got like the suit on or like the blazer on, you know, which was weird at a crypto conference. But then Andrew Yang also had one. So I feel like, yeah, it was, it was a good vibe. But dude, I mean, so much has happened with Alchemix too. I feel like since we've talked, I mean, one of the things I asked you is when Polygon and, and you've, you're on Arbitrum now and you're on, you know, you got other layers that you're going through and stuff. So let's, before I get into all that, I would love to hear the origin story of Techno. Can you tell me that?

Yeah. The origin story of Techno. So let's see, I think I initially had cooked up this name. I was like producing music and I put a track on Audius. So any sleuths want to go find that. And then a buddy of mine invited me to a Discord and I was on Discord as Technocratic in some music Discords. And he had been like pitching me on DeFi for a while and got me into MakerDAO back in like 2018 and stuff. So yeah, he invited me to just this private Discord of like other DeFi enthusiasts, and that was it. Just kind of stuck. It was just it wasn't like an intentional thing. It was just like all right, like I'm signed on as this non-name, and that kind of makes sense. Fast forward, you know, like six months or so, and some of the guys in the Discord Scooby and some of the other guys in the Alchemist team were talking to us about this protocol they had developed. So they're talking about yeah, we've built this protocol. It's called CheeseFi pitching us on it, sharing you know a little bit of al. And letting us play around with the beta website version. And then they were like, you know, we were— does anybody know Solidity here? We're trying to push this thing across the line. We're having a little trouble for whatever reason. And I raised my hand. I was like, yeah, I'm, you know, I was working this fintech job at the time doing like kind of blockchain fintech stuff for banks. And I said, yeah, let me take a look. And then, you know, 3 months later, we, we were able to get polished and launched and I quit my job and went full-time Alchemix. Here we are.

And what, when was that like, when did you, could you gimme like the years?

Yeah, so that was all 2020. I mean, I, I think I linked up with them on Alchemix around like November. We initially started chatting back in like June, July, just chopping it up about DeFi and then Around November, December, we started talking about Alchemix and I started helping them. And then, um, by February, end, end of February, we launched.

That's incredible. I talked to you at like, you're 1.2 years into crypto, basically.

Yeah. Well, I mean, I've been in crypto since like 2017. I, you know, got caught up in all the ICO hype and left my ad tech job to go to, you know, learn Web3, Ethereum, uh, all that good stuff. Uh, been a software engineer for, you know, better part of a decade now. So yeah, it was around 2017 I kind of got into it, but it wasn't until, yeah, 2020 timeframe that I really just like started diving full on into the public space and trying to go full time into Ethereum.

I love that. And can you give me like, so the origin story of, well, you just told me the origin story of Alchemix, but what has been like, We're on version 2 now. What is version 1 like? What were the learnings and how did you get to version 2?

Yeah, so version 1 was kind of a proof of concept for self-serve bank loans. We, you know, kind of knew that it, it wasn't necessarily going to scale the way we wanted it to, but needed to, you know, at some point when you're building something, you just say, all right, cut the release and let's see how this does. So we launched with, you know, our DAI product, alUSD. We launched an ETH, aleth product. And then with version 2, the idea was to revamp not only kind of the inner workings of some of the economic pieces and the way that the system worked, but also just like the overall UX for how you could interact with the system, you know, V1, it was like, all right, you have to have collateral, deposit it, take your loan. V2, you can just have a yield-bearing asset lying around and just deposit that into the system and take your loan. And then on the backend too, there was, you know, we had this V1 transmuter, which is our peg stability module. And we, you know, did a deep dive on the economics of that and the incentive structure of that. And we always kind of knew it, wasn't optimal. So we worked for months going back and forth and iterating on the design of it and on the Alchemist design with our auditors Runtime Verification. I don't know if you guys know Runtime Verification, pretty heavy-hitting audit firm. They did work for like the Beacon Chain and the ETH2 deposit contracts, and they've got, you know, other history in the space and outside of crypto too. So they helped us a lot, uh, just kind of drill into the specifics of what we were trying to do, really get back to basics of what are the invariants of the system, how do we need this to function. Um, and, uh, yeah, we, we, we went to final audit with V2, um, at the end of last year. Um, and I think we came up with something that was materially Better than V1. It definitely functions better. It's definitely much more scalable. I mean, if you notice, like even in the time, like launched V2 in March and we've already been able to add, um, you know, I think it was 3 new vaults to the product and we've got another 5 in the pipeline that we're, we're kind of in the finishing stages of going through more audits with runtime verification just to make sure things are fully secure, especially in light of recent Rari and Compound various exploits that have happened across the space. So yeah, we can expect to see just a lot more scaling of the system, new chains like you mentioned. We've been scaling to Arbitrum. We launched our synthetics on there. We've done a whole rollout on Fantom with, with the whole ALU-USD system on there. Just recently pushed to Optimism. Arbitrum and Optimism don't have full loan systems. They just have the synthetics and I believe GALCX. It's more for integrations with who's on. Can't remember who the one on Optimism was, but I know Dobex was on Arbitrum. They were trying to get there. Polygon, I, I can't give you a target date on that. It's definitely something that's on our radar. Yeah. You know, we'll just, we'll follow the yields wherever they go.

Okay. So then, yeah, that was my question is like, are you going to like, is it all the chains? But I guess it's like where the yield goes, you go.

It's where it goes. Yeah, exactly. You know, we, we're kind of this like, not layer 3, but This, this Lego block above the other Lego blocks, right? We're, we're not a base layer protocol. We are building this, you know, application on top of these base layer yield generating protocols. So you plug into, you know, Yearn is our main source of yield and we have Lido and Rocket Pool. We'll be in Compound Aave. We need these base layer yields to be able to basically roll out our product, which is providing loans against those yields.

So when I explain Alchemix to friends, family, doubters, haters, normies, I, I explain Alchemix. It's, it's a very easy hook for crypto. And Chris K in his video uses the boat example, which is Some dude's parents lost their boat and that guy put $50K into Alchemix, took out a $25K loan against that, bought his parents a boat, 18 months later got his $50K back. Boom, free boat. And I tell this to people and immediately they're like, yeah, okay, whatever. What's the catch? You know? And, uh, and, and, and so I say, well, the time, the repayment time is the thing that varies. You know, sometimes it's, It's longer, sometimes it's shorter, but that, that's generally, you know, yeah, that's, am I doing it right, Techno? Like, is it, am I selling? Yeah. Did it, how's my pitch?

No, I think that's perfect. I actually spoke at this conference last week, just kind of gave a little pitch and an overview of Alchemix and how it works to a group of brand new Web3 entrants. They spent the whole day Learning how to use MetaMask and learning how to send transactions and how to interact with DeFi protocols. And then I stepped them through what Alchemix is and how it works and why it works and what the value prop is. The thing that they really hung on to, the thing that kind of made it click for all of them, was that real-world example of the boat. And I also brought up the one I think a guy tweeted to, not to Long ago, um, he got engaged. He like bought an engagement ring with an Appomattox loan. And those are the perfect examples of, you know, what the system can and should be used for. Like, one of the things the system can and should be used for, um, and it kind of boils down to, you know, capital efficiency. It's like deposit the $50,000. You, you, you have 2 options. You can take your $50,000, split it into 2 buckets, $25,000 for the boat, And $25,000 to throw into a yield-generating protocol like Yearn, and you earn, you know, 3%, 5%, whatever it is on that $25K. The other option is you go to Alchemix, you put in the whole $50K, you take out your loan, buy the boat, and then you have $50K earning at 3 to 5%. So you're essentially paying off that boat at twice the rate that you would normally. So like that, that capital efficiency piece, that is the thing that I find really helps it click for normies or, you know, people with a traditional finance background. They go, oh, okay. Yeah. Yeah. That, that makes a lot more sense. So I think you're, you're spot on with that.

I love that. Okay. So, um, I, I'm gonna, I was gonna wait, but I really feel like now is the time to pitch you my product idea.

Oh, great.

Alchemix feature. Ready?

Please.

When buy with Alchemix button.

Okay, so you're saying user goes on, they just, they're, you know, maybe product hunting on Amazon. They click buy with Alchemix, you go in

and they pay, and they pay 2 to 3 times the price of the thing that they're trying to buy.

Right.

And, and then they get their money back, you know, at some point.

Right. So they just abstract essentially Taking out the loan and using that to pay for the property. Yeah. You know, that's the exact type of thing that we want to start focusing on. Like we've been talking a lot about that internally. It's like, all right, we're kind of in a wider bear market, sideways market, whatever you want to call it. You know, we're not in this screaming bull market anymore where everybody's getting distracted by yields, new shiny new thing. And we actually had time to like focus and build. And one of those things is like, let's integrate, let's integrate with marketplaces, let's integrate with, you know, if you're just shopping for NFTs, let's integrate with things like DeFi Saver. Could be a really cool one where, you know, you can save your CDP with, with your yield-bearing assets that are just laying around. So, you know, when, can't give you a timeframe, but that is definitely one of the biggest things that we're looking at right now is to get those integrations that are kind of abstracted from the user where they get that capital efficiency with just a single click.

Yeah, I think that'd be, I just was like, oh man. I mean, also because it allows me not to tell my, it allows me to, Not say no to myself when I'm doing that binge purchase or whatever. But, but it, you know, I mean, those credit, like pay, pay later buttons are everywhere. You know, if you're doing online business, if you're selling online, you have to have a finance option. It's just, you know, so it'd be, it'd be sweet to battle those finance options. Yeah. With an Alchemix, like with Alchemix button in Shopify, you know, when, when suddenly when everybody's able to be in crypto and all that, all the difficulty has been abstracted away. Uh, it'd be so, it'd be so powerful. Super cool.

Yeah, absolutely. Self-financing, self, self-repaying Amazon purchases. I love it.

Sponsored by Bank of America. So, so maybe that's the hook, Techno, like maybe that's how you explain it to people, but what is the, what were you hoping to achieve with Alchemix? Like what was the grand vision? And has that changed? Are you still heading in that same direction? Are you more convinced than ever? Are you doubtful? I would love to— are you accomplishing what you've— what you set out to accomplish?

Yeah, I think we definitely are. I don't know. I don't think any DeFi protocol that's going to be around for the next few decades is going to accomplish that overnight. That's why you see everybody, you know, Aave's on V3 now and they've been around for a few years. It's like, You're always iterating on the design. So grand vision, you know, we'd love, I think, to get to a point where, you know, governance and control of the protocol is fully decentralized and there's no like quote unquote core team. It's just more, you know, run by the DAO, run by the community. Obviously there'll always be core contributors, but decentralizing operations and governance fully is kind of the big push for this year right now. It's one of the big pushes. We just released an article, like a little thought piece. I mean, don't take it to, to, to take all the ideas in there as kind of like high-level ideas, but I think we put out an article last week or the week before, just kind of outlining that vision. So you guys can go check that out. And then I think, you know, long-term grand vision, the other piece to that is decentralizing at the protocol level. So if anybody's following EIP-4626, which is like a kind of like ERC-20 is to tokens, ERC-4626 would be to yield-bearing assets. So Just a generic predefined way, predefined standard of interacting with yield-bearing assets, which Yearn is looking to integrate with their next upgrade. And the hope is that it gets adopted across the wider ecosystem, which would make it really easy for more contributors and a more decentralized scaling of Alchemix where some new yield-bearing something comes up and it is relying on the 4626 standard. That's a Really, really quick integration for Alchemix to take off. You could even like spin up new AL assets in a permissionless way and, you know, make a proposal to the DAO to integrate it and hook up everything. Yeah, I think that would be really cool long-term. I think we're on our way there. I think V2 has been a massive upgrade for us just in terms of scalability. Yeah. Long-term, just decentralizing and scaling even further is what's in front of us.

So yeah, doing this stuff, I mean, in crypto, it's not always a walk in the park. The line doesn't always go up. So what have been some challenges for Alchemix? What have been kind of like the major roadblocks, obstacles? Can't say problems in business, you have to say challenges that are meant to be overcome. But what have, What have those been for you?

Challenges. Challenges. I mean, yeah, there's definitely no shortage of them. Um, I think maybe one of the biggest challenges has been, uh, just scaling the team. And, and we don't wanna scale too far. We're not looking for like a, uh, you know, 50, 100 person, uh, core team that we get a little unwieldy. But, you know, finding good Solidity devs in the space that, you know, A, are easy to work with, B, know what they're doing, C, haven't already like started their own protocol and are like super rich and aren't interested in working with you. You know, it gets tricky because like the talent pool isn't that big. I'd say that that's one of the biggest things, but we have done a great job. Just scaling in terms of solid developers that we have on the team. I don't know how many people are in Discord and follow us, but you see me and Nomad around and Fubar. We got a new guy on the team, Toivo, been crushing it. Scrub. So yeah, we got a really, really solid team now. What else?

I would think like one main challenge, and this comes up in the, as a defeater to Alchemix, or when I, when I give the pitch, which I love what you said about you get to pay off a loan twice as fast. I think that's a, that's a super hooky hook that I will now use when I talk about it. But that twice as fast, that length, right? Depending on the yield that you're getting, as the yield goes down, it's going to be longer, right? That, that people, so, so ideally you're getting the time shorter and shorter, but also you want to be stable, like you want to be a safe place for people to put their money and not get rugged, liquidated, or whatnot. So has that been a challenge, like just trying to make it enticing for people to deposit their money in, you know, and get that decent timeframe of return?

You know what, I think it's whenever you have a new primitive like Alchemix, it can be a challenge to sort of message what the value proposition is. And even when people think they get it, they might not totally understand it, right? Like, like the value proposition of Alchemix is secure access to your stable collateral if you use it in, you know, the expected way. And yeah, the, you know, repaying your loan twice as fast as if you were to do it some other way and you can't get liquidated. So like those 3 things together, if you really understand how the system works, makes it an extremely enticing product. It's just like messaging all that can get kind of clunky. Um, um, where was I going with this? Uh, so yeah, I mean, messaging that has been tough. I mean, people understand it, um, and have been picking it up.

Well, you said, you said hiring was a challenge for you in the dev department, but also it sounds like marketing too, right? People, people forget about the marketers.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we've, we've got a great team pushing like in-house content, which has been awesome, memes and whatnot. And we've also got an awesome community that's— I don't know if you guys subscribe to the Alchemix newsletter. But I think that's been really awesome for marketing and just getting the word out there about what's going on with the protocol, what's going on with the community. I think DeFi in general has a marketing problem that I'm hoping we start to see get solved over the next few years. You know, not, not just marketing to like users, but like marketing to the broader population and skeptics and regulators and We just haven't done a great job of like branding this as, you know, the future of France that it is. It still seems like some esoteric, too good to be true kind of asset. Like you said, when you explain Alchemist to somebody, they go, ah, that's bullshit. That's too good to be true. That only repays itself. That doesn't even make sense. So yeah. Marketing, it's been a challenge, but like anything, it's like, it's going to be better long-term as you kind of like slowly build confidence in the system and onboard users that are there for the long haul rather than relying on like, you know, quick hype and high yields to pull people in. It's like they actually understand the value proposition, which can take a little longer. I think that's more valuable.

Yeah, we're having a little chat in the Discord. Taliskai quoted you DeFi in general has a marketing problem. And then N Cookie says the marketing problem is scammy projects having better, better marketing than legit projects. LOL. Yep. And then my input to that was like, marketing and product tend to need to go hand in hand. Like, you, yeah, you can slap, you can have a bull take a crap in a box and slap, I don't know, whatever the Tommy Boy quote is. Yeah. I can't remember. But you know what I'm saying? Like, like it could be a box of, that's a box of poop and people will buy it. But, but generally you got to have input on what's in the box too. You know, it's like the chicken or the egg.

Yeah. Yeah, big time. And, and Cookie is like very, very correct that the projects have phenomenal marketing. I didn't touch Terra for a second because it was just You, you dig just one layer deep into what's going on there and you're like, all right, it's clearly just another algo stable that's going to collapse. Like, this has collapsed like iron. Like, you've seen it 100 times, but their marketing was phenomenal. Their marketing of this, like, oh no, 20% APY, and they've got all these influencers pushing it and big VCs pushing it. Oh, this is the future. Like, that's really unfortunate because, you know, $50 billion just disappeared in the span of 3 days. So yeah, that, that's definitely the other half of the marketing problem that hopefully we can solve.

Yeah, for sure. So, and this brings, I think that on-ramps are so key in this whole situation. And I don't know if you have a favorite, I'm not talking about your personal on-ramp and off-ramp, Techno, but I'm talking about for normies. Like if I'm trying to, because the space is so ripe, there's so many beautiful products out there, so many great things like pulled together in Alchemax that like you can use and get it. They're very powerful, but how do you get people to the thing? You know, like how do we get outside of the crypto audience, the CT audience, the, you know, the people that are already in the space and how do we grow the space with people who are financially responsible, who aren't like aping into stuff like degenning or even like, I mean, right now I feel like we're just marketing to recovering degens, like degens who got burned and who like want a place to heal.

Yeah.

But how do we, you know what I'm saying? Like, well, what it, so my question is, how do we get the normies involved? And like, do you have any like favorite on-ramps, off-ramps that you would suggest to people for normies to go there?

Yeah. Degens Anonymous. I'd love to join a group like that. I actually just downloaded Abra today. I haven't interacted with it, but from what I can tell, it seems like a pretty solid app. I think you can on-ramp and off-ramp on an—

What was it? Sorry,

Abra. Not Abracadabra, not Mim. It's just Abra. It's just like a wallet app that It hooks into exchanges and stuff and they have like promised yields on certain assets if you stake. Like literally just a few hours ago, kind of downloaded and started playing with it. So we started to get into that. You know, as, as far as on-ramps and off-ramps go though, I, I think, you know, your larger exchanges like Coinbase, that, that's always kind of been my way to go about it. That's the most trustable. You know, least hackable and just easy to use, at least for burgers like myself. I think, you know, getting people to on-ramp and getting more users in the system, that's just like a time thing. It's not going to happen overnight. It's going to be over the course of the next decade that we work out On-ramping the actual long tail of users. So yeah, it's not going to be like, oh, by the end of 2023, like on-ramps are going to be perfect and everybody's going to have a crypto wallet. Like the internet took 20, the internet took 30 years just to get into like most homes, took another 20 to get into like everybody's pockets. So, you know, Web3, I'd say, has been around for maybe 5 years if you count it as like start of Ethereum. So yeah, it's going to be a little while to really permeate the masses with crypto on-ramping and off-ramping them.

When I was at Permissionless, and you are such a rockstar, you just go to a conference for a day like that. That was impressive. But I got a ticket. I was the noob that got the ticket and I was in the expo center and I was walking around talking to people, handing out POAPs and such wrapped in my PoolTogether beach towel. And I talked to Shannon from ETH Denver. She runs ETH Denver events, but I guess all of the ETH kind of conferences.

Cool.

And she was like, listen, PoolTogether is prime for emerging economies. And I would say the same is for Alchemix. Yet, I, I don't know about you, but PoolTogether, we're not, we don't have like a, yet we don't have like an emerging economies wing or department or direction right now. But that could be the source of all the onboarding, like all of the normies. But for sure, that can't be on mainnet. It has to be on something with, with cheaper gas. Any thoughts on that, Techno?

Yeah, I, you're definitely not wrong about that. I mean, I haven't thought about it in that direction, but if you look at crypto adoption, you do see big spikes in emerging economies and, and in, you know, economies that have kind of emerged but are having trouble. Like if you look at like what happened in Turkey the other year, crypto purchases skyrocketed once the lira started shitting the bed. Look at what's been happening in like Venezuela, you know, that they can't find price stability in their own dollar. So people are flooding into crypto. So they do seem like a really good avenue, just a really good pool of first adopters by necessity, which is too bad. But that's also, you know, one of the great things that crypto is there for is to Bank the unbanked or the underbanked. I mean, as far as working Alchemix into that, I would love to see, you know, the un- and underbanked getting self-repaying loans. Again, I think that that's just like those kind of integrations take time. I'm hopefully going to meet with these Abra guys and start chatting about integrations with their wallet and like every little one counts, right? So you integrate with Fireblocks first, it's a little more institutional, then we can get into like Abra and Coinbase Wallet and kind of start spreading this message of like, get your loan, you know, loan yourself money with your future yield, repay your loan yourself, which could be huge for the underbanked and the unbanked.

Yeah, I mean, I love the examples of a boat or an engagement ring, but I really love the like examples of like started a business.

Mm-hmm.

Or like, you know, that, that high yield stuff, that, that'd be like super cool. I know that Celo is really working in the mobile-first environment, but as far as I'm not really sure about the yield sources on Celo for to be able to, you know, pull together Alchemix on there. Like that, but I definitely see so much potential and would love to see that blow up. So it'd be fun to work together on that. But hey, I want to pitch you something.

Sell

on another pitch.

Yeah, please.

Sell. Oh, you know him?

Oh yeah. See, see, see. Yeah, I've been quiet.

See, I said it wrong.

I know. Honestly, I mispronounce everything in this space.

Yeah, me too. Yeah. So they're a mobile-first DeFi platform. There's such a wholesome community. They're so great and I love. We just want to work with them more and more. But

anyway. Yeah, please pitch me. Let's hear

it. Yeah. Okay. This is not regarding Celo, but I want to pitch you. Have you heard of our multi-delegator thing?

Tool? I have not.

No. It's okay. Yeah, this is brand new, so it's nothing. I was— it's not like a gotcha question.

So.

Okay. I love this. Fresh meat. I love this. All right, here we go. So listen, so, you know, PoolTogether. You deposit in PoolTogether and, you know, and then, and then there's prize yield, right? So it's a prize savings account. It's fun. You're saving and then boom, you get prizes. It's like bonus saving, no loss stables. It's beautiful. Well, multi-delegator is how, is how we are going after communities and protocols and DAOs and NFT projects. So all these projects have all these stables and they're not yield-bearing, right? They're just being safe. As safe as possible, as safe as they can be, be in stables. Well, what if those protocols, NFTs, communities, anybody with a treasury puts those stables into PoolTogether? And then here it is, Techno, delegates it to their users, delegates the prizes to their users.

Ah.

So this is, anybody can do this. You can take whatever's in PoolTogether, and this is how I onboard my normie friends. I just delegate my PoolTogether savings. They, my friends who are, I'm trying to onboard get my prizes. So they'll get $5, $10, $100. If they get $100, I'm gonna be so mad, but it's fine. It's fine. It's onboarding them into crypto. It's giving people who didn't have crypto, they now have crypto because I'm delegating them my prizes. But what if protocols did that? What if NFTs added utility to their holders where they would get prizes or even better, What if they took those stables and directed them at nonprofits, at causes, at artists that they're trying to support, that sort of thing? Like, there's so many different things that you could do with this multi-delegator tool. What do you think? How's my pitch?

Yeah. Yeah, I like that. So, so I guess the idea would be if, say, Alchemix treasury wanted to do this, we just get in the pool together and, and LCX holders would then stake on this delegator and, and the prizes would be distributed pro rata, or we would do another sort of pull-together type lottery and whatever prize the Alchemix DAO won, it would then be distributed via that one.

So Techno, you did this to yourself. I didn't even mention Alchemix. I wasn't even like trying to, you know, but you just did it.

I'm just trying to, you know, get an example.

No, I love it. I love it. So you could do it. So basically Alchemex would put stables onto PoolTogether, part of the treasury into PoolTogether, and you could do, you can give it to anybody who has, you know, a loan out right now, or you can do it to your governance holders, like any, anybody on governance, or you can, you could tie it to activities on the chain, anything on the chain. You can get those wallets, get a snapshot and boom, delegation to them. And then they get prizes. And the cool thing is we can show you like those prizes rolling in daily. You can like actually see the cha-ching that the prize is winning. And it's fun. Like it's a fun thing. And that's, that's one way that PoolTogether— this is, this is my favorite part about it. PoolTogether has friends around the community and it's fun to do stuff together. And so that's a way that Alchemix and PoolTogether could work together.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we're always looking for new partners just to like spread the message and try cool new stuff in the space. We've got a whole subDAO that works on this kind of stuff. So if you want to make a pitch, I mean, I'm definitely for it. Yeah, DAO might be down for that.

Yeah, I'm— I've already got a deck halfway completed. Great. So we'll get on that.

Yeah.

Well, yeah. Now what's another way? How do you have a pitch for PoolTogether? How can PoolTogether help Alchemix? I always love to have guests on and see, like, I mean, a lot of times it's hiring, a lot of it's like, hey, can you just please get us Solidity devs? Do you know any Solidity devs? And, you know, PoolTogether has connections in that area. You know, how could, how can we at PoolTogether help Alchemix become bigger and better?

Yeah. I mean, I have kind of pondered the idea of a PoolTogether vault. I think the sticking piece is like, all right, the yields are so variable that it becomes, you know, tough to like expect repayment time. But that's definitely something that we could look at. The Solidity devs. Yeah, always looking to meet new Solidity devs. So Got anybody I can poach from your team? You let me know.

I mean, at this point, Solidity devs have to be working 2 full-time jobs, right? And they sleep a couple hours. That's got to be the case, right?

Yeah. At least the demand out there. Yeah. And working on a side project that they're going to spin up eventually. Yeah. He's got a new next hit coming out. Yeah.

Everybody's got, got the hot drop, but I, uh, I mean, me as a marketer and me as a podcast host, I need to learn that Solidity, you know, I know a little HTML, CSS, how long would it take me? And then I'll just break a couple things, you know, kind of create some projects and then boom, Solidity dev. I guess everybody needs to have Solidity dev in their back pocket, right? At least, at least part-time.

Dude, 100%. Yeah, man. Just add it to the other ones everybody has. Entrepreneur, philanthropist, DJ, Solidity dev. Start on the list.

Recovering degen in the Degens Anonymous DAO that we just started. Dude, what about fireside chats? I'm hearing that these are blazing. So can you tell me about the Alchemix fireside chats?

They absolutely are blazing every Friday at 8 p.m.— 8 a.m., sorry, EST, which is like 1 p.m. UTC right now. in the Alchemix Discord. Everybody just hops in usually the first hour or so, 30 minutes to an hour. You'll have me, maybe Scooby, maybe some of the other devs jump in and just kind of chat about what's been going on, what we're looking at. Cool. In there talking about governance stuff. Corby is always a staple. I know how much you guys are in the Alchemix community, but he's kind of our community admin manager and he's kind of the master of ceremonies, more or less, fireside chats. So yeah, it's, you know, a quick discussion on what we got going on, maybe a little bit of alpha and then just having fun shooting the shit about DeFi, memes, gaming, music, whatever. I think we'll get 50, 60, 100 people sometimes, and it'll go for, honestly, I'll, I'll jump on in the morning and then I'll go off and like do some work for a little while and I'll come back in the afternoon, 5 hours later, and there's still like 30 people just hanging out, listening to music. I think some of them, you know, keep it on in the background as like a, you know, daytime talk show. They can just listen to me and a few other people chat while they're at work and they're like, I'll just, But yeah, it's a great time. Definitely, definitely come out Wednesday. So 2 days from now, 8 a.m. I'll see you all there.

Yeah, because the Solidity devs don't sleep, so they're obviously up at that time. You know, we love that.

Straight, straight vampires. We get a couple hours during the day, but that's

it. Yeah. Come home from the rave. Boom. Alchemix fireside chats. Love that. Hey, so also you had an E for Christmas, 2021.

Oh yeah, yeah, the 25 days of Alchemicsmas. That was just a fun—

saying it wrong. I'm saying Alchemics and you're saying Alchemics. I've been saying it wrong this whole time. Oh my gosh.

Alchemicsmas. Alchemicsmas. I don't even know how you would pronounce The Christmas PoAP thing. I usually say,

okay,

Alchemixmas. Alchemixmas. However you want to pronounce it. We did. Yeah, the marketing team just kind of came up with a fun, you know, usually 25 days of Alchemixmas or 12 days of PoAP hunting, basically. You know, there were just some snapshots based on holders, governance voters, users, Discord. Just a fun way to kind of like give back, get some engagement. Some people, I think, hunted down all of them or, you know, dropped all of them. Some people picked up a couple here and there. Yeah, it was just a fun little thing.

That's great. We love our NFT Christmas celebration slash We had one called a Pool Party where it took you all the way around the PoolTogether ecosystem. Like, have you delegated to somebody and you win an NFT? And have you voted? And have you, you know, checked for a prize? Have you deposited? And basically I got all of the NFTs except for one and it really bothers me and I'm gonna go on secondary and buy one because I have to have the complete set for some reason.

You gotta have the full set. Yeah.

You got to. So that's great. I need to know your hot take on this tech. No, the hot take today is the Optimism. We're going to release this next week, so this will be old news by then, but the Optimism governance token drop. Yeah. Should people who sell the tokens be qualified for the next airdrop or should they be instantly disqualified? Your thoughts?

Should people who sell their first airdrop qualify for the next airdrop?

This is a, this is a legit proposal in governance right now for Optimism.

Interesting. Well, I will say I didn't even know that there was an expected second airdrop. I literally just floated back down to Earth last night from a long weekend away, so I kind of missed all the The crazy prayer drop for Optimism. And I was probably planning on going to find and sell mine. So I would say hopefully I can get the second airdrop. I guess if it were my community and I were running Optimism, I would say no, I want the people who are interested in holding and delegating and governing to be the ones. that reap the benefits of, you know, more community empowerment, more, more governance decentralization. So if I were in control of it, yeah, I'd say holders only.

So Kobe, Kobe added to the current governance proposal and said that, no, I think this is too soft. You should actually ban anyone from the second airdrop who has sold any token in the past 6 months, like any governance token.

Just across all, all communities. If you sold a single token, you are banned. That is

in 6

months. That's aggressive. That sounds like Kobi though.

Yeah, it's, it's good. It's, it, they hit his post and he is like, he's like, WTF, this is governance. I, I'm a holder. I should be able to propose something.

Freedom speech.

So Techno, what are you seeing? Can you predict the future for us? Can you look across the landscape that is DeFi, that is NFTs, that is all the layers? And predict for us, what are you excited about? What are you looking at? What are you pumped about? What's the alpha that we should be— it's not financial advice, of course, of course, not financial advice, but what are you pumped about? What do you think is the future? What are you wanting to share with us today?

Yeah, and I do definitely wish I had a crystal ball. That would That would be very useful in times like these. I really like that there's some new platforms on renting NFTs essentially, or borrowing and loaning NFTs. I think that kind of area hasn't gotten enough attention. So I think Mintable was one I saw the other day. Another one called like Bact or Black, I, I can't remember the name of it.

Bact. Yeah.

Yeah. There's some really cool ones that it seems like it's expanding, which is awesome because I feel like NFTs have just kind of had their day and there haven't been a lot, too many derivatives in that space to kind of really like Further expand use cases and financialization of NFTs themselves. And hopefully as we get beyond just art and silly monkey pictures, it'll become more valuable to have these new derivatives and platforms and use cases. Yeah, that, that with that, that's the one. And then, you know, beyond that, there's plenty of projects pop up day to day that I would just love to start shorting. As we kind of continue in this bear market. So yeah, that, that's a really cool area that I'm looking at. And I also love that as, you know, we kind of expand further into this metaverse space, whatever you think that's going to look like, you know, NFTs are going to be part and parcel of that. So I think that'll be super valuable. And then I think the thing I'm honestly most excited about is, I don't know if anybody read Vitalik's recent thing and Vitalik and Glen Weyl, forget the last person on the paper. They did like a thought piece, research piece on soulbound tokens. I think those are going to be one of the biggest things that we see adoption for and use cases for. value from in the ecosystem over the next 2, 3, 5, 20 years. Just this idea of like personalizing your account and, you know, it extends to things like credentials and, and, you know, POAPs are one, but it's really more about like, you can, you can take POAPs and sell them. And with SBTs, it's like you're building an actual history of you in the real world. Like it's, it's much more bridging the gap between the real world and the digital world, which I think is just gonna open up so many cool new use cases.

So with Cellbound, what I understand is they're tied to wallets, correct?

Yeah. I mean, you can think of it as an NFT that can't be traded and can be revoked. So yeah, yeah. I mean, it's basically the same thing as an NFT. It's a non-fungible something that somebody mints to you. Maybe it's your college degree gets minted to your address. You've verified that you own this address and you tell them, yeah, send it here. And then it's yours. It's, you can't sell it to anybody so they can like pretend that they graduated with your degree. It's linked, it's forever bound to that account. And it, that obviously presents some difficulties with, you know, security of private keys and key sharing and key recovery and all that. And that's kind of one of the benefits of NFTs. But I think we're starting to get to the point where key, social key recovery and And, um, security of PKs, uh, is, is getting better every year. I, I think it'll be a while until it's quote unquote solved. Um, but it'll kind of need to be solved for these things to really take off. And yeah, it's linked to your account and, um, can't transfer it, but it can be revoked if, you know, they find out a couple years down the line that maybe you cheated when you were getting a degree. Um, they're gonna take that back. And it, these seem—

or, or like, I mean, and this, this actually is a defeater for me, but like, I, I was like, well, what happens if I, you know, need to ditch that wallet? You know, because I clicked, you know, I clicked on wrong, I signed something I shouldn't have signed and now it's compromised or something. 'Cause I love Argent. I love what Argent's doing without seed phrases and they're doing social recovery and then you can actually like ha— so I love that wallet technology, but still doesn't protect me from doing something boneheaded. And like, don't, I need to get a new. And so, so with that, it sounds like centralization still needs to happen, right? I still need to go to the college and get them to revoke my diploma from the burnt, the wallet that's dead now, and then transfer it to the current wallet that's alive again. But how does that look decentralized? My mind is spinning, but it is very interesting. It is, it is a cool topic. I don't know if you have thoughts like on, on what I just said.

Yeah, I know. It's definitely one of the things that's been sticking in my mind is About how you do these recoveries, how you do these inevitable cases where you might transfer something. I mean, social recovery is getting better, so I think that'll kind of solve itself. But you know what happens if your computer gets infected with malware and now that address is completely compromised and you do have to move everything to a totally new seed phrase? You have similar problems in the real world already. Like I'm carrying around my wallet. Oops, my bag got stolen or my wallet fell outta my pocket and now I have to go to all these institutions like the DMV, my credit card company, whatever else I had in my wallet and get these things replaced. I just think in this new case, as we go into soulbound tokens, Web3, yada, yada, yada, it becomes easier and more efficient. There's obviously like a proving process and you'll reach out to them and say, Hey, I need this, you know, revoked and transferred to this new account. But I think it'll be, you know, a quick 1-hour thing rather than like, you know, back and forth and back and forth with them proving who you are and proving your degree and waiting 5 weeks for them to, you know, send a new one to you or waiting 2 weeks for a new license to arrive or having you go to the DMV. Like, this will still be more efficient. in this new realm than it is today. So I still think it's an upgrade.

I love that. You mentioned with-backed or backed, and they, the thing that scares me about backed is like, there's a Zorb on there right now that wants a half an ETH loan, and they're gonna pay me 15 interest. They're not gonna pay that back to me. They're gonna take my half ETH and like, have fun with the Zorb, noob. And then I'm, and then I got rugged. So, but what if, what if Alchemax did this? What if, what if you had peer-to-peer lending and borrowing within, like Alchemix offers the safe and cushy stuff, you know, this, the, this, this, the nice, like, you know, I can sleep well at night, but what if those degens got outta Degen Anonymous and wanted to start doing their own? Okay, well, I'll pay it back quicker, faster. Any thoughts? Any, is that, is that, is that doable? You thinking about it? Does that tempt you?

It is so tempting. I can't even describe it to you. It's, it's honestly been something that's been in our eyesight ever since we kind of like were conceptualizing, you know, Legos that could be built on top of V2. That's another thing with the V2 rollout is like V1, we just nixed contract interactions altogether. And with V2, we want to build this Lego ecosystem on top of Alchemix. So an awesome, awesome use case would be peer-to-peer lending, Maybe it's through something like Backed or Rentable where you're putting up collateral for this loan as a lender through Alchemix. So if you do do something dumb, like give somebody money, way too much money for their XOR, uh, you know, you're still safe, quote unquote, because your loan's going to repay itself even if they don't pay it back. Um, but I, I do love an integration. like this. And it's— I can't give a when, but definitely at least on my mind.

That's awesome. Richard, OG PoolTogether contributor and, you know, maven, crypto maven Richard had that, was asking about that. And so it's— he's going to be really pleased to hear that, that at least you, Techno, are excited about that. I'm so, I'm so pumped about it. If you can have the P2P lending like that, But then also integrate like the rug prevention or something like backstop it a little bit, even for a little less return, but still more attractive. I love that idea. So, well, Techno, thanks for your— you gave us an hour on a Wednesday. We got an hour of your time. So thank you so much for that. Is there anything else that you wanted to say? Anything else that we haven't covered that you wanted to plug, to pitch?

Oh, my pleasure, man. It's been a blast. It's a blast meeting you at ETH Denver and I'm I honestly, like, completely forgot about this until I got a notification on my phone the other day. I was like, yeah, awesome. I had to do this. Anything else I want to pitch? I mean, come to the Discord, come check out our fireside chats. I posted a link in the podcast spam channel, so join us, come see what we're about. We have honestly one of the coolest communities across DeFi. Everybody is Crazy helpful in the Discord, crazy supportive in onboarding new users and getting you up to speed with Alchemix. So come through and join us on this journey.

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 PoolTogether Discord and let us know.