PoolTogether Community Podcast #9: Luigi D'Onorio DeMeo

This is the Pool Together Community Podcast. Pool Together is the world's number one no-loss prize savings account. You can visit pooltogether.com to deposit. You're listening to the Pool Together Community Podcast. I'm Tim, and I'm here with Luigi D'Onorio de Mayo from Ava Labs. And nothing that we talk about today is financial advice, but we're going to have some fun, aren't we, Luigi?

We're going to definitely try. Nice to, nice to be here. Thank you for the time and look forward to chatting with you guys.

Yeah, so, so thanks. Yeah, this is, this is really exciting. PoolTogether is on Avalanche. I am personally interested in some projects on Avalanche that I'm really excited about. And so would love to hear just about your journey To Avalanche, how did you arrive there? How did they snag you?

Well, it's been a long journey. So, I started my career out in traditional finance. I worked at Citigroup for about 7 years, holding multiple different hats, but mainly as a trader. So, I traded CDX, which is an index of credit default swaps, and also I sat on the equity desk. Um, so I was able to kind of have a lot of just markets and finance experience. And then, um, you know, at a certain point got really tired of working for one of the largest organizations in the world. And so decided and was able to kind of like really discover crypto a little bit more. This is around 2015-16 time period when Ethereum really started to just, just get going. Um, I started to attend a bunch of meetups and and go to all the conferences and really start to understand kind of what, what could potentially be possible with smart contracts. And I got really excited about it and eventually raised seed funding for a dApp that I was building, which was in 2017, which was to solve misinformation online. So crazy, crazy type of thing to solve, interesting time to try to solve it, but ultimately not a lot of infrastructure in blockchain at the time. So sort of difficult to get to market with something reasonable. And then when DeFi started to come along, personally got very involved. It's just kind of somebody, I think, just bouncing around that space a lot and was also doing some consulting at the time on M&A and strategic advisory stuff. So when the opportunity came up, I had been following Avalanche since the paper dropped on the consensus and was super intrigued. And, you know, reached out and ended up being a good fit. It's about 10 months since I've joined. And yeah, it's been a lot of fun.

That's awesome. I worked in Midtown Manhattan pre-COVID, and I just want to know how many Finance Bro vests do you own?

Good question. So I own— let's see, I have my Citi vest. that I used to wear on the desk every day. And then I have this Patagonia one that I'm embarrassed to wear, so I don't wear it. And I think there's only 3, and then there's like heavier ones that I wear.

So what is the crypto bro outfit? What's the crypto version of that?

Yeah, I wear like non-baggy sweatpants and a hoodie all the time.

That's— I'm out on Long Island right now. That sounds like the Long Island uniform. That's really nice.

Yeah, just like exercise clothes is kind of how I think of it.

Yeah, you got to be comfortable, right? Crypto is not comfortable. You got to be comfortable. So, so what you're— it's really cool to hear your origin story. Really. I mean, what a, what a massive thing to tackle, which is misinformation online in 2017. But you arrived at Avalanche. So, so how do you explain I like to, because I talk to my mom when I'm driving out to Long Island from Brooklyn and I have to talk about crypto things. And I always try to imagine how I'm going to explain something to my mom about, yeah, I just talked to Luigi from Avalanche and she's going to be like, what's Avalanche? And then I'm going to explain it to her. So how would you explain Avalanche to somebody who has no clue about crypto?

Yeah, great question. So Avalanche is effectively a scalable blockchain. You know, many people have heard of Ethereum or Bitcoin, you know, and Avalanche in a lot of respects is very similar to Ethereum, but from our perspective proposes some advancements as that relates to consensus and also various other architectural things. But in the spirit of trying to keep this simpler, effectively what Avalanche is, is a blockchain that allows people submit transactions, have those transactions verified in a decentralized way, in a trustless way, but without the limits of proof of work, meaning that they end up being much cheaper and faster than the existing solutions out there.

And then, and then go into Ava Labs and, you know, what's your team look like? What are you guys trying to do with Ava Labs?

Sure. So Ava Labs is pretty large at this point. It's about 120+ or so in terms of people. The functions, I mean, the functions span a variety of ways. I mean, Ava Labs is engineering the core platform of Avalanche, continuing to put out updates on it. As well as build tooling. So Avalabs built the Avalanche Bridge, which is a bridge from Avalanche— from Ethereum to Avalanche. So that's something that was completely developed in-house. There are many other things being developed in terms of tooling as well as core platform upgrades that they plan to bring to market. But Avalabs is also doing BD for the Avalanche ecosystem, marketing, you know, a variety of functions to effectively bootstrap and really build out the ecosystem. The longer-term vision is to really focus on how do we, you know, build out tooling that can be really useful for developers and community members in the ecosystem going forward.

Yeah, I love that. I don't know why I called it Ava Labs, but I say Avalanche. I guess I would have to be— I would have to commit to say Avalanche and Ava Labs or Ava Labs. That's really fun to say.

I'm an Ava one. We go— we fight with people all the time on the— Yeah, for sure.

Yeah, for sure. Uh, uh, side question here. This isn't in the chat or anything. Together Avalanche song?

Say that again.

Have you heard there's a PoolTogether Avalanche song?

I have not heard that.

Oh, I'm so excited about PoolTogether on Avalanche, on Avalanche. And then it repeats on until infinity.

Wow, look at that. Who wrote that one?

I did.

Ah, nice.

Tim did. Hot Mike did. Yeah, that's right. So we did a meme contest when PoolTogether launched on Avalanche. And I made that song and I sang it and it won the meme contest. I'm pretty proud about that. I wish I had a Poe app to brag, to show that I was the meme master for that one. So.

Very cool. Very, very, very cool.

And now I got to sing it for you, Luigi, which just makes it even more special to me.

Yeah,

you made my day. Say that again?

I said you made my day.

Oh, I feel so warm and fuzzy. Okay, so what— You know, there's this like Avalanche Layer 2, there's this kind of like mainnet versus the world kind of mentality. There are people who are purists that are like very much mainnet only. And then there are people like, I don't want to pay the gas fees. What are you talking about? So how is Avalanche working with Ethereum or competing with?

Yeah, that's a good question. One we really get a lot, you know, I'm not, I'm not a big fan of this, uh, this competing narrative because, uh, I really don't think, you know, like, if, if the reason that we all came here, uh, in terms of this industry, in my opinion, uh, is the sole sum of what exists right now, then we really haven't— we really didn't accomplish much. And so I think the space is much larger. I think it's going to be much, much larger. And so there's no reason to limit, you know, the growth of any of these ecosystems. There are not— there is not enough block space on these blockchains for all the use cases that will potentially exist. And so there does not— there need not be, you know, one winner. Uh, there's going to be many winners. There may be niches, there may not be niches there. You know, this is a lot of things to, you know, to potentially exist. At the moment, Avalanche has lower fees than Ethereum. This is a fact. Um, you know, how that looks over time is— we'll see. I mean, obviously, you know, at Avalanche we think that that'll continuously remain that way, and we hope to see that be the way. But, um, I don't, I don't, I don't see the reason that why there needs to be one chain versus another. I, I think in general it's going to always be multiple chains, a multi-chain world, and one where we all, uh, grow and collaborate together. For example, you know, there are many Ethereum-based applications that have deployed on Avalanche. Aave, you know, pulled together a bunch of them. So it's good to collaborate and cross-pollinate ecosystems, you know, from my standpoint.

So I'm new to crypto, admittedly. I mean, I've 2019 and 2020, and then I really went all in in November of 2021. Um, and I, I can't remember where I saw this. It might have been on Vitalik's UpOnly interview, but, uh, Vitalik has, has talked about, uh, how the future is, is not cross-chain, it's multi-chain. And so I wonder, uh, what you would say to that, if you could help me understand that. I think I understand that there's like a problem with bridging, um, uh, and how Avalanche, uh, would respond to that and solves that?

Yeah, so, uh, first, I would not, uh, ever, you know, even attempt to, uh, kind of rebut Vitalik on anything technical. Um, but, you know, from my standpoint, uh, you know, in reading what was read, a lot of that was very, uh, with the presumption that the tools that exist today will be the tools that exist in the future. And I You know, just, you know, given the way this space moves and all technological spaces move, I don't see that as the case, right? Like bridging technology can completely change, right? A mint and burn bridge that exists today does not have to be the way assets are bridged in the future. And so I think there's a lot— like, I think of it this way. I think the first chain that was starting to get bridged to was not even a year ago. Um, and, you know, bridging adoption really, really started to accelerate in the fall, let's say like September. So to assume that the bridging tools we have after adoption occurred, you know, 4 or 5 months ago, I think is like kind of naive in some respects. Uh, I think there's going to be a lot of innovation in that, in that area in general. Um, but in general, I do also agree with his, his point that, you know, keeping native assets on the native chains is Optimal. It definitely is easier, that's for sure.

Yeah, I really, uh, I appreciate that, that answer. That's very helpful. Um, especially, you know, in a world where I'm just waiting to get rugged at any moment just with my meager investments or whatever, and to hear Vitalik say something and be like, ah, and then hear that, it's like, oh yeah, I need, I need like a, an app or a dApp that like reminds me, hey, that has only existed for 4 months. Okay, give it a second. You know, like, that's really—

that's kind of how I feel. Like, there's, there's, there's bad rugs and there's like low effort rugs, and then there's like things that are trying to innovate. And like, to assume that there's not going to be any like, you know, stops and starts when you innovate is like—

So what's, what's the future for Avalanche? Even if you just wanted to give us like '22, 2023 roadmap of like, what are you excited about? What are the highlights?

Uh, the highlights are subnets. Um, so Avalanche is much more than just the C-Chain, which is, uh, kind of where a lot of the activity lives right now. Avalanche has this unique architecture where, uh, you can spin up a bunch of application-specific blockchains. So this is probably really useful for things like gaming that require a lot of transactions and high throughput. Um, and, you know, an isolated environment works quite well for that. And these can all be EVM-based, right? Which means that you can also, uh, deploy all of your, uh, smart contracts pretty, pretty easily on a subnet. And most of the tooling works out of the box, as well as why, um, as well as a lot of the bridging solutions that exist right now can connect to these subnets. So if you're, if you're like a gaming application, um, Define subnet. I'm watching the chat here. So a subnet is effectively, uh, an additional blockchain that runs Avalanche consensus. It can, it can have a custom VM, virtual machine, or it can run the EVM, right, which is what the Avalanche C-Chain has. You can think of the Avalanche C-Chain as one subnet, and there can be millions of these, you know, they can be infinitely grown. The only requirement Uh, is that subnet validators must also validate, uh, the Avalanche primary network. So that is the only connection. Uh, subnets can also have their own gas tokens, meaning you don't need AVAX to run transactions on the subnet. So if you are a game and you want to bring additional utility to your token, you can, um, effectively, uh, use your token as a gas token, and then you could get quite creative, right? Validators have to stake a certain portion of it You could burn the gas token, or you could redistribute it within the game or within the application. There's just a lot to experiment here, and I think 2022 and 2023 will be the year where blockchains can get much more mainstream because we don't have these, you know, throughput issues. You know, like on the Avalanche C-Chain or Fantom or Polygon or any of these chains, whenever there's like a big NFT drop or an IDO or or something that requires a lot of, a lot of, uh, attention, it slows all the other applications down. Um, however, with these subnets, that's not really the case because they're more isolated environments. Um, and then also in general, right, like, um, the, the ability to have additional utility to these tokens via their own subnets solves a lot of the problems in terms of these governance tokens and tokens with not a ton of utility. So I think that, you know, and that's also from a regulatory standpoint. I, I know I'm giving a ton of information in a very, uh, short amount of time, and we're going to really spend a lot of time in terms of Ava Labs providing a ton of information to, to users about subnets. But, uh, this is the reason I came here, uh, to Ava Labs, was because when I read the paper, um, I started to think through subnets, and I— and to me, it was the only real way a blockchain can scale. It cannot scale just linearly, you know, one highway with just adding lanes. Instead, it just needs to be a highway with, you know, an off-ramp and on-ramp, go through the back roads. So I think that that's going to be really, really unique. And, you know, we're also— one other key feature of subnets is it allows for permissioned environments. So if you wanted to, you could have things that had full KYC and whatnot. No, it's not interesting to a lot of people in DeFi, but if you want to bring adoption to institutions, you can perfectly define those things. You can define what jurisdictions people are in. You can make sure they're not in any blacklisted jurisdictions if you want to. This is all customizable, you know, is kind of the way I'm putting it.

So does that mean the future— and I've been saying AVAX too. Geez, I'm learning so much about pronunciation. So it's not a naval land,

right?

Yeah. Does that mean that, you know, it wouldn't be required to make your own subnet, would you? Would it? I mean, that sounds like it should be required. It's like, no, if you're going to do something on this, you need to subnet out.

In what sense? What do you mean? What would be required?

I don't know. So, so for example, I play ice poker and, and there was a mint happening or something. I don't know, but it's on Polygon and Some Sunflower game was hogging all the— hogging all the— you know what I'm saying? So like, for like, at some point, if you're hogging everything, you would be required to create your own subnet.

Not nobody requiring you. Uh, you, you probably would want to, but if you're the Sunflower game and you were on your own subnet, uh, there wouldn't have been any issues, and you also wouldn't have ruined everybody else's day on the chain. So it's pretty interesting.

Yeah.

Yeah, it looks—

you don't subnet, no one will like you if you don't subnet. But that's, you know, you don't have to.

That's one way to sell it.

Yeah. So, so one thing is just about on-ramps. And you said like you could even do that with like a fiat on-ramp. So like if you had a service that wanted to do KYC. So, so are there, you know, any fiat on-ramp kind of on/off ramps in Through Avalanche that we're seeing, or that, that you might— we might see in the future?

Yeah, Wyre is integrated. Um, you can— I think they're live on Pangolin. You can buy up to $5,000 worth of AVAX directly there with the fiat on-ramp. And, uh, I think Ramp is being integrated at the same time, so that's also another option. So fiat on-ramps are coming, and then also we have integrations to centralized exchanges Like Coinbase, FTX, Binance, where you can withdraw ABOX directly to those exchanges.

And so the Coinbase one exists now?

Yes.

Oh, shoot. Wow, man. Making— I'm learning so much right now. So you mentioned, Luigi, you mentioned gaming, and I'm a gamer. Let's be real. You can hear it in my voice. And I'm really excited about this wrestling metaverse thing that's happening because I love pro wrestling. And so I don't know if you have any thoughts on wrestling metaverse, any Any thoughts on other games that are happening on Avalanche? Are you a gamer too?

I am a gamer. I'm a big Warcraft and Counter-Strike type guy and Halo. I don't know much about the wrestling metaverse, but I will say that in general, I'm a big fan of a lot of the Avalanche games. Karrabata is a fun game to play. It's also quite lucrative. DeFi Kingdoms is a game that's coming to Avalanche. That's an exciting game to play on Harmony right now. There's also Chicken Farm is a fun game, NFT-based idle game. So these are all cool games. I think there's going to be a ton, ton more to come. You know, I know that there's going to be a ton more to come. So pretty, pretty excited about that.

And how can we as a PoolTogether community support Avalanche? We've, we've been really excited to be on Avalanche with having the Avalanche pool. But how can we show and be welcoming to Avalanche as a community as well as contribute to the growth of the protocol?

Yeah, no, great question. I mean, I think in general, like, building a community involves a few things. Number one, like, not having me and Ava Labs necessarily have to facilitate everything. That's where the community really starts to blossom and grow. You know, I think collaborations between the applications, we see this a lot. Like Banky and Trader Joe are collaborating today. We've seen Banky announce that they'll be collaborating with like Anchor from Terra. Seeing these natural collaborations between applications on the ecosystem is what really, really, really excites us. I know, I know you guys also, I believe, have been talking. I know you guys are integrated with Aave. Right, on Avalanche, given the way the mechanism works. So that's, that's really cool to see. But, you know, I would also love to see kind of more integrations with other native dApps and ways that there's ways that we can funnel more money in the lossless lottery. I feel like there's a ton of, ton of unextracted value there that I haven't given enough thought to. But, you know, a lot of that money is effectively just returning a yield and is a free option for users. So, you know, some of the dApps that I would maybe talk to are like a Yield Yak or a Snowball, who develop strategies in terms of auto-compounding and, and also just ways to loop money. I think that those could be interesting if there's a way to build strategies there. Um, also maybe, uh, there could be some interest to work with Platypus in some way, who's a, who's a native, um, um, I guess similar kind of application as Curve on Avalanche. And given the fact that you guys use USDC in a lot of ways, maybe there's some, maybe there's some potential to generate actually even higher yields there because there's interesting mechanism there to learn about. So I just think that there's, there's just a ton of conversations to happen. And obviously, you know, if anybody in the community needs introductions, they can always contact me and happy to facilitate those.

That's great. Okay, so I've got 2 more questions for you. The first of— I'll give them both to you and then however you want to address them. The first one is, how do we onboard more people to crypto, including like normies, like just people who, like my mom, or, you know, because this is what PoolTogether— we want to be an on-ramp for people into crypto, into a safe and fun environment for people to start experimenting with crypto. So that's one. And the second thing is, I would love to know other things that you're excited about for 2022 in the whole space, across the space from where you sit. I know you're going to say, I mean, Avalanche is great, but anything that you're thinking about that you're excited about?

Yeah, so in terms of onboarding new users, We have a lot of work to do on the UX in crypto. I think that that's getting better. We need to speed up. We need to accelerate that improvement a lot. So I think that we'll see— we'll continue to see some improvements there. And then, you know, that should onboard users, but also just like having some mainstream use cases. And this ties into my second answer in terms of what I'm excited about. I'm excited for real-world assets integrating with crypto. You know, it's fun to have a lot of Ponzis and like these various really cool DeFi apps. But it'd be really, really, really neat to kind of start to see more and more uses of real-world assets. I know Aave started to spearhead this in terms of like a lot of the, you know, collaborations with the centrifuge and other real-world assets that you can lend and borrow against. But, you know, the more and more we can do that, I think the better it is.

Well, Luigi, thanks so much for coming to this PoolTogether Community Podcast. If you have any— do you have anything else you want to leave us with? Uh, feel free to do that.

Yeah, no, thank you for the time. Uh, like I said, you know, happy to be helpful and supportive of PoolTogether on, you know, on Avalanche and in general. Uh, we're having our Barcelona, uh, Avalanche Summit, uh, in the 3rd week of March. I encourage you guys to come. Should be a really fun DevCon and community conference for everybody to get together. So, uh, yeah, that's it for me.

Barcelona sounds fun in March. That's great. Okay. Well, uh, yep. Thanks, Louie, or thanks, Luigi, for being here. And, uh, thanks for listening to the PoolTogether Community Podcast. Cox out.

Sure. Thanks, guys.

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.