PoolTogether Community Podcast #44 with Stani Kulechov from Aave

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, Hot Mike, aka Tim, aka It's Always Sunny in Brooklyn, and we are here with Leighton Cusack and Stani of Aave. And I am just over the moon excited about 2 OG DeFi founders sitting down and talking about the state that we are in, about what's happening in the future. So Leighton and Stani, please take it away.

Yes, thank you, Tim. And Stani, thank you so much for, for being on the, on the podcast. My name is Leighton. I am sort of guest hosting, co-hosting with Tim. So if you're a loyal podcast listener, that's who I am. And I am one of the co-founders of PoolTogether Inc. And Stani is someone who really needs no introduction, but he is one of the originators or the founder of the Aave companies, which originated the Aave protocol and also more recently the Lens protocol, which you've heard of before, I'm sure. Stani has been a builder in the crypto space for a long time, since before the word DeFi was even invented. The Aave protocol was first deployed in January of 2020. Even before that, the ETHLend protocol preceded that, which was also created by Stani. Stani, to get started, we've both been in the space for a long time, and I'm really excited to talk to you about what things have happened, where things are going, But I wanted to first kind of just focus on a couple personal questions and reflections. And I know you to be someone who is extremely supportive, very positive, very energetic. And I think those things are all crucial attributes for builders and for entrepreneurs. And I want to know, where does that come from? Where do you get all this energy? Where do you get all this positivity? And yeah, just get us a little bit in the mind of Stani.

Yeah, thanks. First of all, thanks for having me here. And it's an amazing audience and community that we have here in Pull Together. And I, yeah, what made— I think like what's really, really keeps me maybe going and excited about is that kind of like I, over more time, I see more and more people actually valuing what we have here, like in general, in the, like, not just in the DeFi community, but like widely in Web3 and kind of like what kind of impact it can create. And I think in the very beginning it was more harder because I, I grew up with technology. I started to program very early, created different web applications in my life and started to build fintech as well. And when I came into the Ethereum space and started to learn more what you can do with smart contracts and the concept of EVM, and I just saw a lot of opportunity there. Yeah. But during that period, it was just like, I felt very lonely with other lonely people within the community. So I think the growth and the recognition that what we're doing is really helpful And it has impact. That's been helpful for me to be more positive than normally I would be. Well,

I definitely see you as someone who leads the space broadly in terms of being positive-sum and thinking in a positive way. And that also sort of leads me to a second question here, which I'm curious, when you were more lonely and building earlier on, Is there anyone who stands out or a specific time or person that believed in you? Like someone who took a big risk on you early on or someone that you felt like early on really supported you when maybe you weren't as sure if DeFi was going to be a thing or if ETHLend was going to work out?

I think in general, what we have done very early is that we established a community, which has been very helpful because normal setup when you build a company. For example, you have people and you have a mission that you want to accomplish and you're basically building something and testing out between your users and whatever you're building. But a community is a sense of feeling where you actually have this aura around you which actually has voice. And this voice really helps you to navigate which direction to build and what to do. And a community is kind of like beyond the user group. It's people that care about your mission, vision, and cares about what you are trying to achieve. And also they have the underlying ethos. And I think when you look at many of these projects, like go deep down, like what people have been building decentralized finance, I think that community aspect has been one of the most valuable and having the grassroots effect. That's been, that's been like something that has been part of us since the beginning.

Yeah. Well, amen to that. And yeah, that's, that's something I think where the PoolTogether community also really shines, which is why we're so happy you're here on this podcast to talk to us. Because there is, you know, just the people in the audience, I could go through and say everyone who's listening to this podcast being recorded right now, something that they contributed or something they've done, which is to contribute to the protocol, which is an amazing thing. Okay, so on this topic of sort of reflection a little bit, one more question here. A lot of people, I think, look to you as a role model, but are there people who you look to even today as a role model in the crypto space, maybe from a builder perspective or more from sort of an ethical perspective? I want to know, are there people who you look up to and really admire?

I personally admire a lot of folks that are actually building on the application layer. So I feel like that there's a lot of interesting innovation and kind of like a vision and leadership on a network layer. You see a lot of interesting thought leadership coming out from, for example, from Vitalik and a lot of people in the kind of like a more broader Network level, but I think like the most like hardest problems to solve is is in the application level because like you have to find something that has a product market fit and and you have to create a product that really really works in in an audience which is very niche. So my kind of like the biggest praise goes to everyone who is building application level protocols and apps on top of the. blockchain infrastructure. And I think most of the, like, the biggest DeFi protocols, they have done very well actually on achieving this. And I love what's even happened with PoolTogether in terms of like experimenting different kinds of reward systems and using the DeFi as a backend infrastructure as well. That's very fascinating, but also like the smaller experimentation. So there's a lot of builders out there, they just like want to experiment and build something and doesn't necessarily want to scale to billions of TVL, but actually wants to have something that the community enjoys and they can keep building further. So I would say definitely it's the application protocol, application-level builders that I have the most— I look most for.

That's exciting. And that's encouraging, hopefully, for people in the audience to hear, because I do think that's the next Now that some of these foundational protocols have been built, the L1s, the L2s are scaling, gas fees and on-ramps are getting reasonable. It's all coming to the applications. That does lead into our next question, which is for people who are in the audiences, maybe some young Stanis that might be in the audience right now. If you were getting started today, if you were who you are and you didn't have the experience though that you've had, You sort of already answered this, that you probably, I guess, based on what you just said, you would probably be working on the application layer. But maybe think about, yeah, what would you say to people who are wanting to get started today? What do you think they should be working on? What do you think you would be working on if you were trying to get into the space today?

Yeah, I think like kind of like a lot of like more like a bigger application and use cases have been quite well built at the moment in decentralized finance. And I think like there's still a lot of things you can build in DeFi. So you have this like a big, you know, kind of like an area of improving the experiences and focusing on the experience layer. But also I think there's a lot of value to in building in non-financial applications that can be, for example, regarding to social gaming or more community-driven use cases. And I think it's very valuable because I think like, as we all use decentralized finance, like one way or another, I think the kind of like a bigger onboarding channel will be more of a non-financial applications and building that utility into utility path into using blockchain technology. And I think I think making that experience as smooth as possible and bare minimum, like a non-financial Web3 application needs to feel the same as whatever we're using today, like let's say Twitter or even like Discord. So you don't need to sign transactions, pay for gas, and building just better experience that brings more people into the space. I think there's a lot of opportunity there.

Yeah. And that's more than just talk that you're giving us because you actually are actualizing that. And I think that leads very naturally to talk a little bit about Lens, because Lens is obviously capturing this non-financial Web3 opportunity. For those of us, or for people in the audience who maybe haven't heard of Lens or have heard of it but maybe don't really know what it is, do you want to just describe in your own words real quick how you would talk about Lens?

Definitely. So Lens is a decentralized social media protocol. So you can create your profile. And once you have your profile, it's secured by the blockchain and you can follow other profiles. And each profile can actually publish content. And every content you basically publish on Lens, you can also set different kinds of tokenization. So for example, the followers of your content, they can actually— for your social graph, they can actually collect the content that you create either for free or as basically paid collects. So it gives the users the ability to own your own social presence and also your social graph, meaning that if you If you see a new application, or you want to leave an application, you grew your social graph, you can actually make a digital exit, and you don't lose your followers and leave your social capital behind. For example, what will happen today if you want to leave Twitter for another application? And the power of Lens is that it really changes the dynamics because when you're owning your profile and your social graph, it also means that the applications and algorithms really need to work for you because you are in the place to actually choose which algorithms and experiences you want to subscribe into. And anyone can build a new application. So effectively, it means that it lowers the barrier for developers to building new social experiences, which is very important for innovation.

Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. And I think I would assume the audience here, I have a Lens profile. I know Sir Hot Mike has a Lens profile, our co-host here. And I think you're in a very Lens profile-friendly or Lens-friendly audience. But yeah, one other question on sort of the inception of Lens. Was this always part of the plan or were you inspired by something? If an outsider stands back and looks at it, I don't think they would have thought someone who starts the Aave protocol will next start a Web3 social media protocol. I think that was an unexpected pivot for a lot of people. I would love to know, was this part of the master plan from the beginning, or where did it come from? Where did the inspiration come from?

Yeah, generally, what we have been— if you look back in time and what the Aave team has been doing is that we effectively have been, uh, you know, building access. So we've been building access to, uh, global, uh, transparent, um, financial markets where you don't need to give custody of your funds to anyone, but you can actually interact directly with the financial protocols in a transparent, uh, way. And at the same time, um, we're building with Lens, uh, effectively access to your own social media presence and your own ownership into your social graph. So you don't have to rely on the platforms where you're actually generating all the data, creating the social capital there, and then having that locking effect. So there's sort of kind of like a mindset of envisioning around building accessibility as a theme behind of what we're doing. But for us, like the biggest, I would say, catalyst for Lens Protocol was definitely the NFT summer. So we saw obviously the DeFi summer from very close by because everything just went— everything was on eBay. Exactly. And those days, basically the DeFi infrastructure was there. So you had these different protocols, you had basically stablecoins on Ethereum and like the catalyst, for example, with liquidity mining as well. It was just right because the infrastructure existed there. And with NFTs, what we saw actually was that creators were going directly to their audiences and being able to distribute content and create a community. Yeah. So our kind of like a step was like how we can actually take this step further in that you can actually create a profile, create those relationships, and distribute your content, whatever it is, music, audio, anything else directly to your peers and have discovery as well. So if you want to follow creators alike or other type of use cases. So I think like the NFT summer and the idea of owning digital goods, as an NFT, as a concept, was the biggest thing. And we're just kind of like expanding the idea to making user-generated content as an asset class.

Okay, so to recap for the audience listening, the thing that ties them together, that ties Aave and Lens together, is sort of this open, accessible protocols. Like, Lens and Aave are both open and accessible protocols that, as of today, the Aave companies and yourself no longer control. Lens is doing that for information, for NFTs, and Aave is doing that for money. I am curious, one more question on this, though, because the classic— this is maybe for entrepreneurs in the audience, but the classic entrepreneurial advice is stay focused. Don't do too much, only do one thing. How have you managed to do 2 things? Maybe what's the breakdown of your time between these 2 projects today? And how have you found that process of pursuing 2 things that have high-level commonality but have a lot of differences in terms of the strategy and implementation around them?

Yeah, I definitely agree on the idea that focus is very important and it really helps you to think of new ideas and improve maybe your product. And I think you can do more than one thing if you are crazy. Like, like me personally. So like, it's just like, um,

you are crazy.

Yeah. Well,

I want to let you finish, but I always want to say one thing about you because I think that all of the best entrepreneurs, they have this thing where when you talk to them, you come away from a conversation feeling like you can conquer the world. You know, and I feel, and I feel that way whenever I, whenever I've had conversations with you, I always come away from the conversation thinking I can do more. and really inspired. And I think that's a really amazing attribute. And I think that's an attribute I see in all of the best entrepreneurs. So I just wanted to call that out. And Sunny, I'm glad that you're living it because I'm going on a little bit of a diatribe here, but there's a lot of people who would have just said, look, I helped create Aave, a huge protocol, and I'm ready to go hang out on a beach, right? Or I'm ready to go relax. Um, but, but you haven't done— I don't, I don't think you've done that. And in fact, I think if anything, it's almost been the opposite. You've, you've sort of put your foot on the gas and said, actually, I want to take on more. I want to do more. I want to start hosting global raves all over the world. And that is a really awesome thing that I, I will say for myself as a builder, I, I definitely, um, uh, I definitely look up to because I, I, I really look up to people who, who don't sort of, um, rest on their laurels and say, hey, I did one thing cool, but actually, actually takes the next level. So anyways, I, I wanted to call that out as you answer this question about why you felt able to pursue 2 sort of, you know, strategically very different things at the same time.

Yeah, yeah, you know, like, I think you definitely can do more than one thing, you know, if you set your time and your organization in the right way and your mindset. And it might mean that you might have to sacrifice some time out of elsewhere. You might have to adapt your lifestyle a bit differently. And definitely it's the case for me. But at the same time, I think everyone has their— should have their own way of working. And I think something I love a lot is processes, but I also like I like the idea of having different ways of operating and different ways of like contributing. So, for example, like for many, it might be, you know, you want to contribute to multiple projects, like multiple DAOs. For some, it might be, you know, I just want to, you know, make this one thing right. And I just like put all my energy into this one thing. And you can do multiple things, I would say. But there's also the What we all need to remember is like, your kind of like time is limited. So whatever, how much you're putting effort into your work life, you know, it might take, unbalance your work and life. And that is where you like, that is the kind of like a barrier where you have to kind of like adjust. So you should, you can work a couple of years like crazy, but then you have to like— balance out things in a way that, you know, you can live a normal life because that's what everything's all about. And life is what inspires your work. So you have to have that in, um, in, in your, um, uh, kind of like a program.

Yeah, that's good. I like that. Life is what inspires, inspires your work. And, and obviously, I know you have a great team of people who are also working alongside you, and that makes a huge difference. Um, okay, so to pivot just a little bit, um, we're obviously on the PoolTogether podcast. So I would love to know just if you have any, any input or advice for the, for the PoolTogether community. It's a community that, you know, you've been adjacent to for a long time. I think you've seen it develop. The primary audience for this podcast is the PoolTogether community. And, uh, yeah, I would love to just, if you have any, any thoughts or input or advice, either on the community side or the protocol side, things you'd like to see PoolTogether do or be.

Yeah, I mean, first of all, I have to say that this community is— it's incredible to see how strong it is. And I would say it's probably one of the strongest or the strongest communities I've seen in the Web3 ecosystem. And also, I think like you basically measure like strength or excitement of a community not based on the number of people, but actually like what kind of impact and movement it is. And I think there's like a lot of different exciting things happening in the PoolTogether community. And I personally, I want to see kind of like maybe more ideas and community input on what could be created on the experience layer. And maybe also kind of like how to think about incentives and also the social aspect and how to tie them together. And just thinking what we can do to onboard more people, how we get more people into the Web3 ecosystem and getting excited about open source, open networks, and the benefits that we get from the blockchain.

Yeah, that's good. And for those listening, the PoolTogether community is also on Lens, so there's an overlap here. So definitely follow PoolTogether community on Lens. And there's probably a lot more to explore there, Stani. I mean, we could, we could probably jam on that for a while in terms of how could the, the PoolTogether protocol and the Lens protocol sort of interact in really, in really fun ways. And yeah, I'm getting excited just, just, just thinking about that right now. And also what you called out too, in terms of, um, in terms of being, uh, an onboarding ramp, you know, I think we definitely see PoolTogether as a very friendly place to get started, a very safe and secure place to get started. where people, the front door to DeFi. And so want to continue to, to, uh, to, to build on that. Um, well, thank you for that input. Um, we maybe the one protocol we have alluded to a lot, but we haven't talked about as much is, is Aave in terms of what's going on with Aave right now. We talked about Lens, talked about PoolTogether. Um, is there anything from the, from the Aave side that you want to share in terms of alpha to leak to us or things that are being done in that community right now you're excited about?

Yeah. I mean, in general, like Aave protocol is very simple in the sense that you supply cryptographic assets protocol and, and you earn yield and you can use those assets as collateral and draw and borrow liquidity to finance some sort of use case. And many of you who've been using PoolTogether, you know, Aave is one of those that works in the background as well. Which is quite nice because it shows, you know, the composability and what you can actually build when you have an open ecosystem. I think like for us, like we've been, and the protocol itself is run by the community. So people come together and they decide like how they improve the protocol. They vote on-chain and, you know, give grants from the treasury for developers or non-developers. I

am an AAVE voter. I am one of those people who votes, votes in those proposals. So I'm also part of the same community.

Amazing. And I think it's like very important to actually be active governance participant because, you know, if you don't actively govern these protocols or actively delegate the governance power, you know, it kind of like loses the kind of like importance of decentralization. And that's where the problems happen. So what, like, one of the things I like about PoolTogether itself is that the community creates awareness, which is very important. And in AAVE, I think AAVE governance has been at the moment in a very exciting place because, you know, there's decentralized governance, but there's also decentralized amount of contributors, whether it's from development, risk management, treasury management. And now, for example, one of the things we're doing In our team, we're focusing on the launch of the GO stablecoin. So effectively, it's an overcollateralized decentralized stablecoin with the big difference that when you supply your assets into the protocol, you can earn on your collateral while you're actually minting this stablecoin, which kind of like introduces a bit more capital efficiency. And then another thing we're doing is we're upgrading now within the community, the, the last main market, which is the Aave V2 to V3 market, which is quite fascinating because then all of the networks where Aave Protocol is will be under the V3, which is more risk mitigated and capital efficient version of the Aave Protocol.

Yeah, those are exciting things. And specifically the GO, the decentralized stablecoin. Uh, that, that likely, uh, could have a big impact on PoolTogether just in terms of people being able to use that as an asset to deposit into, into PoolTogether. Um, I do also though want to hit on one thing you mentioned and just sort of rehash it a little bit, uh, you know, cause this is a builder-to-builder conversation in terms of an exhortation you were giving for people to, to participate in governance. And I think, um, you know, that, that is one area that I would say I've been surprised that there hasn't been more uptick in. more uptick in people, people proposing things, people voting. And although I think both AAVE and PoolTogether have very active governance communities comparatively, in terms of where I think we could go, um, there's a lot more, a lot more that could be done. So definitely, if you are in the audience and if you hold AAVE tokens or if you hold Pool tokens, don't just hold them, use them. Vote, vote, vote on things and propose things. And, uh, you can you'll be really surprised to see how much of an impact you can actually have. I don't know if you have anything to add on that, Stani, but I did want to call that out.

No, definitely. Like, I see a lot of value in the kind of like community contributions into voting or even in like upkeeping these protocols. And it's, it's quite fascinating because, you know, there's like, it goes beyond the technical aspect, like traditional open source communities, they've been much about the technology itself. If you look back into something like the Linux ecosystem, ecosystem. But in Web3, like, you know, there is beyond that, you know, there is, there is research that needs to be done, non-technical parts as well, these communities, events. So there's plenty of things where you can contribute.

Yeah. Well, you know, I have one last question for you here, and then I'm going to see if, if Tim, our co-host, has any questions he wants to bring up. But from my side, one last question. We talked about communities being super important, and I need to say we have a community manager, Tiarq, who is listening to this call, who happens also to be an amazing DJ. So I don't know who is in charge of the bookings for Rave, but I do want to say— I do want to ask that question and see if we can get our community manager DJing at Rave. Sometime soon.

That will be super cool. So, uh, I mean, like, Jarvis, you know, the— it's a very curated event, right? So, so basically I need a, uh, I, I need a DJ set, and if it's good, um, maybe we'll put a snapshot vote with Aave and see how the community, uh, will vote about it. And that could be a, a way, but that will be super cool.

I love that idea. We should maybe, Stani, just because it is really cool, maybe let's just talk for 1 minute about Rave and where that idea came from. Because I'll have to say from my own personal experience, I've only been to one. It was the one in Lisbon.

That one is good.

It was by far the best crypto event I've ever been to. It was amazing. A huge party with DJs. It was held at this botanical garden with this huge indoor-outdoor space. But the Rave, I think it's an ambitious and also very non-traditional thing. So maybe just talk a little bit about where— was this like a Swedish-inspired thing or where did this come from?

So I also remember the Lisbon Rave and I think by far it's one of my most favorite ones. They all share the same spirit that it's not a networking event and people come there to listen, music and pretty much dance until up to the late hours. And I think it's just basically a place where, you know, we can share our culture stack. And it's been super amazing, kind of like balancing of all the kind of like more technical and more contributory part of the events usually that happen in the Ethereum space. But I— so this was funny, actually. I think it was like in Miami, like one after the COVID when, you know, that was the first event, BTC Miami. And there was a lot of Ethereum-based side events there. And I dropped into— I tweeted back then that I'm going to drop some coordinates for a rave, like for a party, for a rave party.

I think I remember this. I follow you on Twitter.

Yeah. A few people started to actually message me and retweeted it. And suddenly there was, I would say, maybe a couple of hundred people asking about it. So I was like, okay, I'm here by myself from the team in Miami, so probably it's not going to work here. And we decided to do our first drop and then later in Paris. So that was That was one of the— where we were still kind of like practicing, but Lisbon was the one where we actually went full-blown. So we had a lights artist actually generating a program where we had lights art going and the lasers, and it was just like insane. It's amazing. Yeah, it was just super, super, super insane. And that was the time when actually Paris from Ideal Collabs, who's been working some of the projects with us together, has been organizing basically the lights, the creation of the DJs, and it's been like— and also like the whole venues and setting up. And Aave Grindstyle has been in a super amazing position to actually, together with the community, to actually sponsor these events. And it's so hard to actually do that. If you look at some of the communities, it's very, very hard to actually add cultural or like culture stack, uh, into communities and get, get those grants, uh, paid. So we've been super blessed by the, the, the other community to be able to, to host these rather parties.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, and also shout out to Paris for, for organizing that one in Lisbon. And I should say for the audience, if they're looking for alpha, I'm just going to make an assumption, Stani. You can tell me if it's true or not. The best way to get a ticket, the best way to get entrance is most likely to build something really cool on Lens. Is that a good way to potentially get entrance into the Rave parties?

That's definitely something that is helpful and could get you closer to Rave. And there's occasional drops on Lenser, so basically, and sometimes even Twitter. So when you see the Rave accounts posting something like you should definitely be looking at what's happening there, especially if it's like a meme contest. You know, just like those are probably the most, I would say like most popular ways to get in. And I think it's like usually like you don't have to really be very in the Web3 space. You might be a newcomer, you know, so that might even help you as well to get in and just saying like, hey, I'm very new here. But I want to join and see how it goes.

I love that. Keep, keep the door open for newcomers. Don't make it an insider's group. That's, that's, that's super important. Um, well, uh, uh, Tim, I don't know if you have any questions you want to ask, uh, if you've been looking at anything from the community, but that— yeah, go ahead.

Yeah, so, uh, Taliskai asked about this. They had a question a little bit ago in the chat, and one of the And it sparked something in me, Stani, because I know that governance is important to you, and I've heard you speak on it before. And I've just had like a little bit of a, uh, you know, somebody delegated me a noun just to like explore governance and like think about proposing something. And I've been in the space for a while, and I was so intimidated. I just get so intimidated by governance, and it's so needed. And I've, you know, there's this talk of the Web3 politician. And, and I— the question from Tal Sky is like, how do you see Lens kind of come alongside governance and DAOs and support them and actually make them richer? Um, so that's one question is like, is how do we, how do we spark more governance participation and make it less intimidating, but also get the best ideas? And the second thing is, can Lens replace Substack, please? Is that possible?

I mean, if there's builders here that actually want to build it, because like it's something that I really, really want to see, and I have also like ideas how to make that experience even better, feel free to reach me over DMs or something, because like I think there's sort of a lot of things you can actually do better and empower it a bit with Web3 experience. And I think like To get more people excited about Web3 social, non-financial applications, we actually need to build just better than the Web2 ecosystem. And for example, like there's this one build that we have this experimentation— experimentational port in Aave called Newt, and it's led by Jim, who's focusing on actual, like, kind of like building interesting, cool things on top of the whole Web3 stack. And he recently built with his team Rememe. So if you go to rememe.lol, you can actually create— you can take an existing meme and remix that meme. And basically it appears as a comment in the Lens protocol and you can actually collect it as well if you like the meme. It basically creates this kind of like a remix culture, which is quite a novel thing where you can actually look into like who created the original meme, who remixed it, and also you can split fees with the previous creators if someone collects those remixes and empowering that remix culture and monetization. And there's plenty of ideas how to actually even make that better. So you always need to create something that necessarily doesn't exist already, even like in Web2 space. And I think like Substack and like creating better ways to distribute content long form, there's a lot of interesting things you can actually do. So if there's someone there, I would love to talk to. And regarding the governance, I think what's valuable there is that we have to make governance more fun, more easy. And governance needs to be also tiered. So there can be governance that is on-chain that you go and actually vote snapshots, but also there should be like signaling discussions, you know, yes or no. Like it just has to be multi-layered and, you know, different ways to contribute into governance besides going and reading an on-chain proposal and voting on that. And I think that's a space where we have a lot of, a lot of innovation we can actually do.

And then I think like this whole competition is very healthy, right? We want to see it because we spur each other on as one builder builds something cool, another builder wants to build something cooler. But there's also this need to partner and to develop each other and help each other develop, you know. So there's this like healthy, you know, this platform versus this platform. But how do you do that? How do you do that, Sunny? How do you suggest us as we build, also partner, but we still want to keep that competitive edge, but then also like root for each other.

Yeah, I think like, I see like competition more as composability. So users in the DeFi space, they use the DeFi protocols like across the whole space, the most popular ones. So like, and PoolTogether is an example that is using multiple protocols. That's part of the idea of composability. And it's usually more of like how to deal with it is that, you know, another team might focus on a different kind of path compared to what we are doing. And I think it's just more of like thinking of like what could be interesting to innovate in and if it has actual potential utility and building that. So I think competition is actually good because When we started with Eatland back in the days, like there, there really wasn't a DeFi ecosystem. There was one decentralized exchange. But like as the ecosystem started to grow, people started to talk about, you know, the space and started to think about what we could name it. And then the term DeFi was coined. So like we need the ecosystem. And to be honest, there's so much things to build. Like you just want to like kind of like leave as much space as possible for others as well.

Great.

Tim, is there any other questions from the audience that you correlated while we've been here? I don't know. I think we're maybe running out of time.

That's good. So I really want to know, as, you know, sitting in front of 2 OGs, can you— and this is hard, right? Because you're building and you're focused on your own products, you're focused on Lens, you're focused on Aave, you're focused on PoolTogether. But I want to know what the future is. And as visionaries, you're both builders, but you're also— you're looking ahead, you're seeing where it's going. And so what are you excited about? I just want to know the future. So can you look into your crystal balls, your DeFi crystal ball, and tell me what's going to happen in the next year and then in the next 10 years, please?

Stani, you want to go first? You want

me to? I think we'd love to hear yours.

Well, I mean, I do think the whole— Stani has mentioned this a few times, right? He's talked about non-financial Web3 applications. And I think the whole GameFi space, games on the blockchain or games that have some element of the blockchain or NFTs that are in games, I know that's sort of a hyped category right now, but I do believe that is going to onboard a lot more people than are already onboarded. So I think that's going to be a really, really big thing. I don't think most people are going to, you know, first buy an NFT just to buy an NFT. I think most people are going to get an NFT by, by doing something. And, and Lensster is a great example of that. It's not exactly a game, but you are getting NFTs, um, from your social media content. So That's obviously outside of DeFi. I do think for DeFi, the initial Cambrian explosion of tons of protocols is over. I think that the DeFi space is in more of a solidifying space. It's more now, again, back to some of the things Stani was talking about, it's more now about building really smooth applications on top of the DeFi protocols. And so for the DeFi space, I see it on a maturing trajectory. I don't think we'll see a ton of new things. I think we're going to see a maturing of the primitives that have been built in terms of sort of the brand new stuff. I expect that more to come from non-financial stuff and specifically sort of this gaming spot. But, Sonny, that's my answer.

Yeah, I also am very keen to kind of explore the non-financial use cases, because end of the day, like, if we can onboard those different use cases, they become DeFi users, some of that audience. And I think like gaming, social are 2 of the components that have a lot of ability to attract a lot of newcomers into the space. As long as we as developers and the community itself, we endorse like creating better applications and smoother user experiences and I think that's where things are going further. And I think now the infrastructure is also there. So with the L2s rollups, it's way more easier to actually onboard more people and having that additional block space and still using Ethereum security. So that's very helpful. And I think there's, no matter how much we build that decentralized technology, I think there's going to be also even more you know, service providers and centralized service providers like exchanges that offer different kinds of accessibility. So like we will see not just like the decentralized part of this stack grow, but also like the service provider business that grow, which is quite, quite good for the whole ecosystem as well.

So we have a community member, Richard, and I want to, I want to get Richard up here. Let's see if he's actually here, but I want to Richard's usually on four calls at the same time. There we go. So, Richard, do you have anything else to ask Sir Stani, Sir Layton, before we wrap up our time here?

Hold on a second. Hey, Stani. Hey, everyone. Um, hold on. I can't get this to go on on speaker, so I don't. I don't know if you could hear me. All right, here we go.

I hear you. Yeah.

All right, awesome. Yeah, no, thanks, man. This is, this is great. You really, um, kind of made this moment very special for myself. Um, I've definitely been a fan, you know, from afar. Uh, I see founders kind of like artists and celebrities, so you're definitely, you know, on the list, you know, of people who I admire. Um, yeah, no, I mean, I'd love to see obviously, you know, more synergies within PoolTogether and Aave. you know, also lens. And I, as a humble community member, you know, be a part of that, you know, in any way. Basically be like a towel guy. That's what I'm trying to say.

Well, Richard, I gotta say, I mean, Stani, I think you know Richard, just at least from, from Twitter. And Richard was actually the instigator of this conversation. So, um, in terms of reaching out to you, Stani, and getting you to commit to coming on the podcast, so I want to thank you, Richard, for doing that, and Stani, obviously, for being open to that. And I think it's a good example of how anyone can do anything. And Richard, you just reached out cold. Stani, you were obviously receptive to that. And that was really awesome.

Totally. I've been in many same kind of calls with Richard too. And it's amazing to see the grassroots movement here. I was super excited to come here and see how strong the community is and hopefully can do it again at some point and super excited what's happening here. And obviously, like some of you already have Lens profile and, you know, just engage you to be active user in Web3 space, whether it's social or something else and pull together and also kind of like, you know, evangelizing what we have here because that's how we We can actually like spread more of the vision if we get more people to understand why it's so important what we're doing.

Snaps, everybody. Snaps.

Thank you so much.

Yep. Nope, I think that's good. That will— we'll end it right there. So thank you everybody for being here. This was awesome.

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.