Simplifying DeFi Feat. Portals.fi

This is the PoolTogether Community Podcast. PoolTogether is the world's number one no-loss prize savings account. You can visit pooltogether.com to deposit. You're listening to the PoolTogether Community Podcast. I'm your host, Millie Yearley, AKA Tim, AKA Hot Mike, AKA V5 is right around the corner. It's actually here already in private beta form, but public launch coming soon. And I'm so pumped to have Suhail here with portals.fi. Portals is, is basically magic. When I used it for the first time, I was like, it's one of those magic crypto moments that are so rare to have. And so I'm so pumped to talk to you, sir, and welcome to the podcast. Thanks for making time for the community.

Yeah, thanks for having me on, Tim. happy and excited to discuss all things Portals and, uh, PoolTogether. Super pumped for V5. I was playing around with it a little bit yesterday too. So yeah, let's get into it.

So as we start off always on the PoolTogether Community Podcast, I like to talk about origin stories. One, because you're a hero, and two, because it's helpful for people who are new to crypto to hear what each person's journey is, because they're all different. And they resonate, right, in, in their different ways, shapes, and forms. So how'd you get into crypto?

Yeah, so I've been in crypto for a while, you know, since the very beginning of DeFi, back when it was basically just, you know, ETHLend and MakerDAO and, you know, those kinds of protocols. And I created a dashboard for MakerDAO back in the day when it was still single collateral DAI. And basically it was for monitoring like positions. and like how much DAI there was in the system and stuff like that. It was used for some governance stuff, but mostly it was my intro into DeFi. And yeah, kind of just fell down the rabbit hole after that. And then while I was building that, I met my co-founder from Zapper. So we built Zapper up. It's an awesome product, love it very much, but ultimately decided to, you know, strike it out on my own once again and work on Portals. This was in 2022, I left Zapper. the end of 2022. And yeah, co-founded Portals with a good friend of mine, Nabi, who's not here at the moment, but yeah, it was a 2-man team for a little while. And now the team has grown, you know, quite a bit. We have 6 in total and yeah, looking forward to building the future of DeFi at Portals.

Can you go into that thought process for you of just like, you're at Zapper, you're— why? I mean, Zapper's great, right? Like things are going well. And then you have this thing like this Zap and, you know, you take that and that's what Portals is, right? It's the Zaps from there. So, so what was that thought process like? What was that for you? If you could walk us through.

Yeah. So it's, you know, the founding of Zapper is really interesting. It's actually, it was created from the merger of 2 companies. One was called DeFi Zap and the other one was called DeFi Snap. So Zaps were originally created back in 2019. at a hackathon for Kyber. It's a hackathon we ended up winning, and then we formed a company called DeFi Zap around that. But, you know, people would come use us. This was like long before DeFi Summer and stuff. And, you know, yield farming was basically just Synthetix pool with, with Seth. And this was with Uniswap V1 still. And anyways, people would come to DeFi Zap, they would zap into, you know, some LP and do some farming, but They couldn't monitor their position. So we'd always send them over to DeFi Snap, which was Seb's company. And yeah, there was a pretty good synergy there. Like you could zap in on DeFi Zap and then, you know, go to DeFi Snap and monitor your position. So we ended up merging, called the company Zapper, and that's how that began. And yeah, we were ticking along at Zapper for quite a while, but given that we merged from 2 different companies, we, Seb and I kind of had slightly different opinions on, you know, how we should build Zapper out, what it should be. Should it be a dashboard? Should it be primarily, you know, transactional based? So obviously the dashboard side won out. You know, Zapper's now very much, you know, a dashboard and they're, they're working on like on-chain data and, you know, messaging and stuff like that. Very much not the transactional stuff. So yeah, I opted to, you know, leave Zapper and work on Portals, which, you know, basically Zaps and, you know, doing all of these cool transactional features and, you know, account abstraction. And, you know, all of the cool patterns that are emerging, that's really where my passion is. That's why I opted to leave Zapper and focus on Portals exclusively. And yeah, so basically we just do zaps and there's some other stuff as well, like the data components of Portals. We offer, you know, data for, you know, 35,000 tokens, which is more than CoinGecko, DeFi Llama, and CoinMarketCap combined. Those are all priced in US dollars as well. So yeah, basically focused. Exclusively on Zaps now. And yeah, it's a little bit of the story.

Bear, one of my embarrassing crypto stories is, I know after I interviewed Seb, I know that Seb's like a sleuth, right? He loves to be on-chain and see where the action is. And that's why Zapper is what it is, is to help make it more readable, more detectable, how you can find out the alpha from the chain. Like the chain tells you the alpha itself. So I remember like I was wallet sniffing or whatever it's called. Taking a deep dive. And then I found, I was like, oh, what is this wallet that's getting all this ETH? This is super suspicious. And so on Zapper, contracts show as wallets, no matter if it's a contract or not. So I just was like, Seb, Seb, look, I found like a weirdo wallet. I'm like you, I'm a sleuth. And it turned out to be the wrapped ETH contract. I was like, delete, delete, delete. Oh geez. But

That's funny.

But he was sweet about it. He was like, well, that's good feedback that you think it's a wallet and you're our customer. Like, and we need to tell you that it's not a wallet. It's actually a, a contract or whatever.

So,

yeah. But you, you just go ahead. Go ahead.

Yeah, no, I'm saying true.

Yeah.

Oh, it's true. It's labeled as a contract. Yeah, for sure.

Yeah. But you said something interesting that I wasn't, my brain wasn't even going to that place in this conversation is that there's, An API product, there's like this data. Tell me more about that data that you're collecting, that you're curating.

Yeah. So what was this last month? We launched our V2 update called Milky Way. And as part of that update, in addition to changes to our smart contract infrastructure, we also added an indexer. And basically the indexer powers all of our data APIs. So we're listening to all of the contracts that we support, all of the protocols we support, every single, you know, token transfer on-chain. And we update data for all of these, these aspects with every block. So for example, uh, you know, someone zaps into PoolTogether or even just uses it, you know, natively without using portals, we are indexing that. So we'll know like, uh, when the deposit happened, you know, how many withdrawals there were, which day was most popular, which, which vaults were most popular, or currently with v4, which, which pool is most popular and on which network. And we provide, you know, token images and contract addresses and prices and APYs and all of that stuff. And we, we like to think of this as kind of our residual capability. Like, like SpaceX didn't seek to launch, you know, Starlink satellite satellites. Like their, their goal is to have a colony on, you know, Mars, but they figured, well, we have this capacity. They call it residual capability. We, we might as well use it and launch satellites for Starlink. That's kind of how I see our data API. It's not necessarily our core product, but we need all of that data in order to facilitate zaps, because obviously we have to know everything about the position people are zapping into or zapping out of. So we need to have all this data anyways, so we might as well offer it, you know, to the community to use, you know, to build their own products, you know, not even necessarily related to portals or to zaps or anything. And we also have, you know, super fast account endpoints. you know, returning, you know, balances of all 35,000 tokens across all 9 networks we currently support in around 200 milliseconds, which would take significantly longer using, you know, on-chain calls, using balanceOf, and so on and so forth. So yeah, the Data API is really just this nice, you know, builder thing that we have that anyone can use, and you can feel free to use it to build whatever you want. And you can also use our other endpoints to, to zap in and zap out of opportunities as well. So we, we kind of have zaps available both on the API, sorry, on the API as well as on our, our own front end, which you probably played around with a little bit. So yeah, we're kind of like Matcha on the front end and, you know, One Inch on the back end basically, but with the data component as well.

Can you give me an example of like the Starling customer would be like a rural Internet user, right. Who doesn't have access. So who would be an example? Like you said, devs, but could you give me an example of who would use that, that data component of the API?

Yeah. I mean, we have like protocols like Yearn and StakeDAO using us, you know, just to get data about their positions, like their vaults and stuff like that. But, uh, we also have, you know, wallets like xDeFi using us to get balances for all of these exotic tokens that we have tracked, like LP tokens, vaults, you know, interest-bearing tokens. Stuff like that. And then, you know, dashboards would be great, would be a great use case for this as well. You know, you hit one endpoint and then you have balances for basically everything. You know, trading apps who want to facilitate trading into or out of various tokens, they can, you know, pick a subset or just use all of them. But yeah, I mean, basically any builder that needs some on-chain data about, you know, DeFi protocols, Can use the portal's API.

I love that. Okay. My brain didn't go there. And so that's why I had to ask questions about it because my brain immediately goes to the account abstraction, the ease of use for people, the, you know, the fact that, you know, when I went to the PoolTogether private beta and I wanted to deposit into the wrapped ETH pool on Optimism or vault on Optimism, I still, I had ETH, but I needed wrapped ETH. And so there, there's, there's always just a bit of friction in crypto transactions where I don't have exactly what I need or whatnot. And so when Tjark, community manager extraordinaire, told me about portals, it blew my mind. Like, I was like, wait a second, wait a second, wait a second. So I have, my input could be whatever and my output could be whatever, including not just tokens, but also vaults. Like I can, I don't have to get a multi— to get to swap into a multi-token liquidity pool or some, one of these 5-token dealy-poos. I don't even have to think about it. I can just be like, listen, I've got USDC and I want to get in this. And I can, I can find that through portals and swap in. So how does that magic happen? Can you like explain it to somebody who's not technical about, about how, you know, how does it happen? How is this safe? That sort of thing, because it's so magical.

Yeah. I mean, I guess basically what we've been shilling to date at Portals is the whole ease of use, you know, account abstraction, you know, gasless transaction thing. And we kind of encapsulate this into one-click DeFi, but, you know, in the grand scheme of things, we want to make everything in DeFi easy, regardless of whether you're a developer or, you know, a trader or a retail user or whatever. So we want devs to be able to access that API. and be able to create these apps as easily as anyone can on our front end. So the overarching goal is to make DeFi, you know, easy and accessible regardless of who you are or what you're doing. And basically, you know, the way it works with our, you know, our Zaps or our gasless transactions is we have a routing algorithm we call Warp Drive, and it kind of hearkens back to the data API where I said we have this residual capability. We're constantly, you know, every block updating information about for example, PoolTogether, and let's say like, I don't know, Uniswap. So every single block we're updating like reserves, we're updating the volume that happened in the pool, we're updating the price, so on and so forth. So we have all this data. You send a request that says, hey, I've got ETH and I want to get into, you know, the Optimism PoolTogether vault. Our Warp Drive algo will look at all of the data we have and, you know, find a route from whatever input token you have to whatever desired output token you want. And because we have all this data, it's just a matter of us, you know, internally creating basically a directed graph, which, you know, describes the routes. And ultimately we get a couple of routes and then we pick the best one from that. And the best one for us is the highest USD output with the least gas usage. So yeah, it's basically a fancy routing algorithm and it uses all of the data that we already have on the API to figure out these routes. And it doesn't matter what the tokens are. So like you could, You know, with PoolTogether v5, anyone can deploy vaults. And so you'll be able to move directly between vaults. So you don't need to like get out of a vault and then swap to another underlying token and then get into the new vault you want, because maybe it has, I don't know, a higher chance of winning or something. You can just move directly between them in one click. And that's, you know, relatively easy for us because, like I said, we have all the data and it's just, you know, we're using the USD prices to figure out, you know, price impact and slippage as well as the reserves. And then, yeah, we just use the algo and it spits out basically a route. And then with the V2 upgrade we just did, we basically have a smart contract that batches all of these calls together. So, once we have the route, we assemble all of the calls that we need. Like for example, you know, approve the WETH contract, or I guess you won't need to do that if you're wrapping ETH. Deposit ETH into the WETH contract, take the WETH, you know, approve the WETH for deposit into a pooled together vault. deposit into the pooled together vault, and then, you know, send the vault token back to the sender. So that's generally the types of calls that we do. Our smart contract batches that stuff. It uses a cascading balances mechanism. So this means that it uses the output from the previous step as input for the next step. Because, you know, when we're dealing with DeFi, oft we don't know exactly how many tokens we're going to be spending at every step. Like, we know you're going to start out with like 500 USDC, but if you're swapping to USDT on-chain, like, who knows how much you're going to get? You can get, you know, 499 USDT or like 501. And this kind of breaks a lot of DEX aggregators like 0x and 1inch because they expect to know the amount you're swapping. Whereas with our mechanism, we just take that input— that output, we feed it into the next step, and then yeah, we go along the way ultimately until you deposit into the vault and we send it back to the user. Yeah, that's, that's kind of how it works. Hopefully I didn't get too technical and— No,

it's great. How do you curate this list of vaults? There are so many things out there, right? And not only are you curating this list or I don't know how it's being populated, but then there's also TVL information and on certain vaults or certain pools, as it's called here, there's APY information. So is this like I'm looking at a Vesper USDC with 12% APY right now, $2.2 million. TVL on Optimism. So how are you getting that? How is, what's the mix of manual versus robot overlords?

Yeah. So it's basically all automated at this point. I mean, it's, it's pretty protocol specific. So like, for example, to get the pool together, V5 vaults, we're hitting the factory contract on-chain. We're getting all the vaults. And then once we have those addresses, then each block will update those vaults depending on how many deposits and withdrawals they've had. So it's like, I don't want to say the word curate because we don't really curate it. We kind of just want to have everything available to you. Like, it shouldn't be up to portals to kind of gatekeep and say you shouldn't be getting into this or you should be. That's kind of on you to decide. We just want to provide, you know, the mechanism for you to get in there. But yeah, like I said, it's pretty protocol specific. Some protocols are really hard to work with, like PancakeSwap on Binance Smart Chain, because they have like 11 million pools and like every single block there's new garbage pools being deployed for like shitcoins and stuff like that. And like, yeah, we can get that data, but like, is it useful to anyone? So that's kind of how we look at it. Like, is it going to be useful for anyone? Is anyone actually going to use this? Like this new PancakeSwap pool was deployed 146 days ago and it has 2 transactions. Is it likely anyone's going to use that? Probably not. So we'll filter it out. But that's the extent to it that we'll go to, I guess, quote unquote curate. But yeah, for the most part it's automated. Every block we'll check through every single pool depending on if there's been an event in that pool or that vault or that lending opportunity. And we'll update, you know, the TVL if there's been a deposit or withdrawal. We'll update the volume, we'll update the APY, 'cause those are often based on volume as well. But yeah, that's generally how it works. It's fairly automated. And there's a lot of forks, which is nice because like, We can treat Aave v3 forks basically the same way as we can Aave v3. So, for us to add a new Aave v3 fork, it's like we add like their, their lens contract and that's basically it. And then boom, we get every single lending opportunity available just like that. So.

Okay. When we hear the buzzword, the buzz phrase, account abstraction, many things come to mind. If you want to win a hackathon right now, you probably have to say account abstraction in your pitch. Okay. But account abstraction is also like a beast. It's all over the place. There's so many things to abstract away that are difficulties for the user. And so how do you stay focused? How do— 'cause there's so much I'm looking at. You have like request a feature, uh, you know, you're building this product. There's all these things that people are asking you to do. I have my own request list for portals of like what I would love to see. How do you prioritize? How do you, how do you, you know, not get impatient that we're not there yet, you know, with this whole perfectly account abstracted crypto universe? How do you decide where to go next with feature building for your product?

Yeah, I mean, we, we kind of have to be forward-looking when we're deciding what features we want to build. So obviously, like you said, account abstraction is, is kind of the buzzword. And I, I guess it's more than a buzzword because it's, it's, it's real, right? Like it's, it's going to have a huge impact on you know, Web3 UX. We, we think that's where the industry's moving to. So that's kind of, you know, what we're building towards. And so it's, it's, it's not really that difficult to stay focused on it because we have like this, this finish line, so to speak, which is, you know, abstract all the things. And, you know, the, the phrase account abstraction, I think is kind of difficult to understand, like, what does it mean? And, and to me it basically means, you know, programmable wallets, you know, seed phrase abstraction, Being able to bundle and batch transactions together, being able to do cross-chain actions in the same transaction as you're doing other complex transactions, and being, you know, having a kind of ownership over this wallet that's transferable, that protects you from, you know, your seed phrase being exposed and stuff like that. You know, easy onboarding and signing up using, you know, social logins or other mechanisms, you know, like passkeys or Face ID. I think all of these things, you know, constitute account abstraction. There is an EIP called EIP-4337, which is called Account Abstraction Using Alt-Mempool. And I think there's been some conflation there between like this EIP versus what a lot of people mean when they say account abstraction. And yeah, like I said to Portals, it means basically making everything easy, accessible. Like, so you shouldn't have to worry about gas or even know what gas is. or gas prices. You know, you shouldn't have to worry about, you know, this, these 12 words or these 24 words unless you want to. I mean, we shouldn't stop anyone from managing their own, their own key, but, you know, for the most part, I think the, the vast majority of people that use like Robinhood or, you know, banking apps, they're fine with, you know, there being some level of control over this and some recoverability as well. And I think all of these things kind of tie into account abstraction. Ultimately to, you know, make DeFi what we all hope it'll be in the future, which is like this, this financial powerhouse where you can basically do anything from, you know, take out mortgages to, you know, buy, buy tokenized real estate to, you know, buying in-game skins. And ultimately, I think all of those will be living in some type of programmable wallet that'll be controlled by, you know, users. So yeah, that's kind of, you know, our vision for the future of what we're wanting to build. And obviously there's a lot of requests that come along the way, like, you know, can you add protocol X or can you add protocol Y? And for the most part, we will do that because that's what users are using right now today. But, you know, the long overarching goal is to build out this account abstraction kind of future that we're all dreaming of.

And one of the things I missed, but you mentioned the gas abstraction or, you know, hey, this is gasless. It's all wrapped into one transaction, which is beautiful. But I really, for me, I can't see past cross-chain. Like, I just don't want to pick a chain. I don't want to pick Optimism. I'm sorry, Optimism-based Arbitrum. I love you so much. I love you so much. But like, there's a thing I want to do. Let me do it. And like the chains and everything, can we figure this out? Now I understand because I already have a wallet, because I have a Ledger, because I have a hot wallet, I'm there. And I understand like, that's really difficult to get users to. I had to have coaching from Our very own community member, Torgan, on, on that kind of thing. When I first started out in crypto, but, but cross-chain to me seems like that's the holy grail. I wonder if I'm wrong. I wonder if I'm just like obsessing over it and it's actually not. What are your thoughts on cross-chain, especially because of like security, right? With the, with bridge hacks, bridges aren't, aren't ideal. What are we going to do about that? So how does Portals, how are you going to approach the cross-chain? Yeah.

Like, like you said, when you first get into crypto, it's, it's very overwhelming. Like there's Base and Optimism and Ethereum, and some of them are more expensive than other ones, and, and some of them take longer to, you know, confirm your transaction. It's all very confusing, honestly. And, you know, I, I do see a world where there's a bunch of appchains existing, like maybe Uniswap Chain and like, you know, we have dYdX already. And now we have like, you know, Gelato is basically making chains as a service where anybody can deploy basically an Optimism type chain for their own purposes. So chains are going to expand, there's going to be way, way more of them. So obviously we have to be able to move between them seamlessly. So yeah, like you said, I think cross-chain is really, you know, one of the holy grails here in DeFi because ultimately when you see an opportunity you're interested in getting into, It shouldn't matter where your assets are. It shouldn't matter what assets you're holding. It should be a lot like Amazon. You go to the Amazon page, you see something you like, you click the Buy It Now button, and then if you're on mobile, you slide that little slider across and then boom, you're done. It doesn't matter if that package is coming from— for me, I'm Canadian, so it doesn't matter if it's coming from the United States or if it's coming from the warehouse that's just by my house. That doesn't matter to me. It's not important. only thing that's important is that I'm getting the thing I ordered. And that's how, you know, DeFi and Web3 should be. So it's something that we're very seriously considering, and we're actually building some architecture that'll handle this very seamlessly. And it's basically a programmable wallet. And yeah, we'll be able to batch all of these complex DeFi actions as well as do cross-chain actions all in the same transaction here. So we've actually, previous to our V2 launch, we had like this tweet that went out that said basically what we're hoping to build. And one of 'em was network abstraction, gas abstraction, and the Portal smart wallet. And I think, you know, combining all 3 of those together, we can really create a very, very seamless experience, kind of like this one-stop shop DeFi place where, you know, you, you'll come and look at your, you know, your, your pool together balances, check if you've won a prize and be able to manage your assets regardless of whether they're on Optimism or they're on mainnet. So you'll be able to do things like, you know, repay loans on Ethereum using your pooled together winnings on Optimism. So those are some of the types of actions that we're looking to build out here, probably early next year.

So you just said wallet, right? Say that again. What's the thing that you're building?

Yeah, so it's the Portal Smart Wallet, which is basically a programmable wallet, because I'm sure, as you guys know, EOAs, or externally owned accounts, like the ones that we have with our seed phrases, they're pretty limited. We can't do basically any programmability with them. So the Portal smart wallet enables us to do things like, you know, manage lending positions, you know, looping strategies, you know, leverage positions, stuff like that. That all needs to be, you know, programmed in before the action is taking place. Whereas with an EOA, you might go onto like GMX and then you'll first deposit some tokens And then maybe you'll take out some leverage on a position, but you should be able to do that from a different chain using assets on a different chain, all in one click. So that's kind of what the smart wallet enables. The thing with Zaps at the moment is that it only works with tokenized positions. So like the pooled together V5 vaults are tokenized, so that's fine. But if you want to open a lending position for somebody, that's not something we can do at the moment. And that's where the smart wallet comes in.

Okay. So then help me understand here. So a portal smart wallet, this is like you're, you're having automated actions. I would think like buttons that you could press or things that you want to, maybe a transaction that you've done and you want to then be like, hey, I want to do this again at a frequency, or I want to, yeah. Like, like shortcuts, as Darby said in the, in the chat. Is that what you're talking about? I mean, it also sounds more like, I mean, it sounds pretty high-powered, right? If you want to create a lending position. Or if you wanted to, like, we were even talking about ERC-20 tokens, but like NFTs and NFT lending positions and that sort of thing. So I love how I talk about scope creep and then you drop the ultimate scope creepy thing. Cause I was like, hey, how do you keep the product tight and whatever? And now you're like, we're doing a portal smart wallet where, you know, so that sounds like the, that sounds like almost a new direction, but it sounds awesome. Am I right in saying that this is like a whole new product?

It is a new product, but it heavily leverages everything we've built already. So our portals router that we released in V2, which I talked about previously, which does the cascading balances stuff, that's going to be used extensively in the wallet itself. But what it does allow us to do is to manage stuff that isn't tokenized, which is a big win for us because, you know, we like, we can get you into Aave and you can like lend collateral to earn some interest, but maybe you want to use that collateral to, you know, borrow some USDC. That's something we can do currently. So basically it's, it's very similar to like a safe wallet, except that it also supports ownership by other smart contract wallets as well. So basically it's, the idea is just like you said, shortcuts and programmability. The idea is that we can, you know, DCA into a position, like buy tokens every 2 weeks, for example, for you. Or we can repay back, you know, we can repay a loan if your collateralization ratio is getting too low, for example. And that's all stuff that we can't do currently. So yes, it is kind of a new product, but also kind of no, because it still leverages everything we've already built. And the smart contract architecture is actually quite similar to our router. And so it's very similar. So it's not a ton of scope creep, but it is something that we've always been planning since the very beginning. So yeah.

And then here's the thing about account abstraction and features, right? Because there is so, there's so much that you can do in crypto, so many cool things. So like what you're talking about, we can automate, we can have a smart contract, we can delegate this and that and this and that. But then, but then you also have to abstract that the more that you come up with for the user, it just has to be in the backend. And that's what's That's why it feels so great to be on the bleeding edge of technology, because it's literally being built right now, the ones and zeros, like the languages, the tools that in 10 years, we won't even think about, because it's already, it's just in the background happening. But for example, one thing about when I hear about a smart contract wallet, I'm like, oh no, does that mean I'm going to have to pay gas and deploy on mainnet every time there's an upgrade? You know, oh no, that means that for every time I want to do a transaction on a new chain or layer, I have to deploy the smart contract wallet there as well, if I'm using something that aggregates those smart contract wallets. So could you give me insight to how that would work or how you see abstracting that away?

Yeah. So it's true that you will have to deploy smart contract wallets on other chains, but only when you actually need to do a transaction there. Because our smart contract wallet will support what we call counterfactual addresses, meaning that you'll have the same address on all networks. So you can send, you know, funds to say your address on Base without there actually being a smart contract wallet deployed there yet. And then only when you actually need to transact with that, with those funds on Base, at that point, we create the wallet for you. And another aspect is we, we have something we call wallets as a service, which basically allows anyone to create a wallet for anyone else. So we could do things like subsidize creation of wallets. You know, if Coinbase goes big in on us or something like that, they could create wallets for people. You know, your friends can create wallets for you if you want to onboard them, for example. So there's a variety of mechanisms to create the wallets, some of which don't involve you actually paying for them. And then in the cases where you do actually have to, we don't actually create the wallet until absolutely necessary. So even though you send funds to an address on Base, where the smart contract, your smart contract wallet isn't deployed yet, those funds are still yours. They will be controlled by you. And the second you create that wallet, you'll be able to transfer those funds out and spend them or, you know, zap in and out of positions and do whatever you want with them.

Okay. You dropped the C word, Coinbase. So what is, what does partnerships look like for you? Like, who are you wanting to see? Like, who, who's, who are the ideal partners? What is, how do you see Portals moving forward? Is it, is it directing more and more traffic to portals.fi to use the swap mechanism, the Zap mechanism? Is it like, what does that look like as far as growth partnerships for Portals? How do we see Portals win the day?

Yeah. So, I mean, it's, I guess, multifaceted here. So our current front end is basically an MVP or a minimal, minimum viable product. In that it's basically a swap modal and you kind of have to know what you want to do when you get there. Like, for example, if you go to portals, you know, you want to get into, you know, a PoolTogether V5 vault. So you're going to go and search for PoolTogether V5. But we actually have in the pipeline a completely revamped front end. It's going to be full of exploration features. You're going to be able to, you know, get a lot more info about opportunities, see which ones are trending, see which ones are popular, see which ones you know, people are leaving from. You'll be able to watch like stablecoins depeg on a Curve pool if you want. Basically all the information you could possibly need presented in a very user-friendly manner. So that's kind of what we're working on simultaneously. So obviously we do want to get as many people using our front end as possible, and not necessarily just for, you know, zapping in and out, but also for exploring the DeFi ecosystem, learning about new protocols when they launch, or, you know, looking at how the pool is performing when there's, you know, perhaps a perceived vulnerability or like there's a depeg or something. And then ultimately you'll be able to take action on that if you want to, because we'll obviously still have the swapping and the zapping and all that. And then, you know, on the builder side, we'd like to attract as many builders as possible, obviously. I think our product is pretty general, so, you know, you can build a variety of things with it. But, you know, our ideal integrations would be things like wallets, you know, dashboards, protocols, you know, like PoolTogether, implementing it into, you know, your own front ends. And basically anyone who needs data about DeFi to do analytics or to explore the system or to derive insights. Yeah. So we try to keep it very general and very accessible and easy to use so that we can have a much larger audience using it.

It sounds like the, the going back to the API conversation and when you're talking about data and, and just the amount, the compute that you're using to grab all of the things that you need and then making it available to API people tapping into the API, not even for swaps, right? Like xDeFi Wallet, uh, using it not, maybe not for swaps, but for the data. Yeah. It sounds like a Trojan horse. Like it sounds like, hey, look at all this great stuff that we have. Oh, and by the way, we have Zaps too. And you don't need liquidity to swap into pools. You can just do it and it's going to make it easier for users and you're already using our data. So wham, bam, add the code.

Exactly.

That's awesome.

Yeah. Yeah. That's, that's kind of, kind of what we've seen as well. You know, I'd do a bunch of these BD calls and I'd hop on calls with protocols and be like, you can get your users into this, you know, into your pools very easily in one click. And they're like, oh, cool. And I'm like, oh, we have data too, if you want, by the way. And they're like, oh, you have data? No way. We need that. I'm like, okay, sure. Yeah, use it. So yeah, we've seen a lot of, a lot of growth on the data product. So we had like 1 million calls in January and then like in June we were up to 7 million and now we're, you know, in the neighborhood of 11 or so million calls per month. So yeah, there's been a good amount of growth on the data side. But I feel like a lot of protocols, you know, products, companies, are kind of selling, you know, shovels to each other. Like, it's very dev to dev right now because, you know, retail trading and trading in general is not really what it used to be. So, I mean, there's like a lot of meme coins, a lot of sniping happening. So yeah, it makes sense that a lot, a lot more users are using the data compared to the Zaps at the moment.

It's— I'm just thinking about this and applying it to my own conversations about PoolTogether. And, you know, it's so interesting that the magic for me with portals is the Zap. And maybe even for you, Suhail, when you're talking to these businesses, when you're having B2B conversations, biz dev conversations, like in your mind, of course, maybe the power is the Zap. That's the magic. But then the data is the thing that they care about. And so I'm like, ooh, I'm thinking about Pull Together and how that also applies, because I think With PoolTogether, the magic is in the saving and the winning, right? And so it's just interesting. What's, what's the thing that maybe a protocol or, or some business is seeing that I'm not seeing that could be the Trojan horse? And I think, I mean, now, now it's for PoolTogether V5, it's swap, save, and win, right? So it's such a big boulder to move to try to get PoolTogether into an interface. And everybody wants to get into wallet interfaces, right? Add us to, as part of the UX, we don't want the dApp browser anymore. And so like the ability to get into a swap, which is like a natural feature of the wallet, is like super, is super beautiful. It's so elegant, of course, swapping. And, you know, as a user, I actually don't use wallet swaps a lot unless it just makes it really easy for me. I want to go to the place where I'm getting the best deal, but I think as more and more complexity is added, swapping is it. And then it's a race to the bottom as far as like fees and on. on top of that, what people are pulling out. So I would love to know for you, how are you? Because right now it's like, it seems like there's an 0x, there's like a 1inch API. There's this, uh, the wallets are building, right. But they've got their swap figured out kind of. And so I would love to know, is it the data play? Like, what's your play to kind of like disrupt the sacred swap area of a wallet? And, uh, and maybe we've already discussed it with the data, but I would love to hear that. And then I will totally apply it to how I think about PoolTogether.

Yeah, so for the Zaps, we always really consider them just basic swaps, right? Like, even though you may be doing a complex action like removing liquidity from a Curve pool and adding it to a Balancer pool, we still consider that just basically a swap. You're swapping a Curve LP token for a Balancer LP token. Here's the USD prices, that's it. So this makes it very easy for, you know, wallets, for example, to add them into their wallet swap, which is honestly where a lot of users do swap. Like, if you look at the MetaMask router, that thing is busy all the time. There's constantly pending transactions. But one of the benefits with portals and using this type of, I guess, this swap pattern instead of, you know, complex— making it more complex with calling it Zaps and, you know, single-sided liquidity addition and stuff like that, treating it just as a swap means that it can be easily plugged into existing swap UIs, just like they would any other, you know, swap protocol like Kyber or 0x or 1inch. And the benefit of this is that once we're added to some of these wallets, that means that you guys are added to those wallets as well, because through Portals they can get into PoolTogether or they can get into whatever protocol they would like to. So that's, that's the cool thing about, you know, the Portals API is that once we're added to some protocol somewhere, that means that everyone else that we've integrated is automatically also added. that dashboard or that wallet. So it kind of is like you said, a Trojan horse. Once we're in, then suddenly the door is like, you know, going to swing wide open and we're just all going to pour out and shill everything about portals. Like, hey, you're using our swap, so you might as well, you know, take advantage of using our data as well. It's probably cheaper for you than using, you know, on-chain node infrastructure, and it's significantly faster. So your users are going to have a better experience. The page is going to load faster. Um, when they do swaps, their balances are going to be updated more quickly. So yeah, very, very Trojan horsey, like you said.

Wait just a dang minute here. Wait, so you can— wait, wait, wait. So, because in my mind I'm thinking, oh, you have to just like get them to swap out whoever, 0x or whoever they're using for their swapping. But you're saying no, you don't even need to do that. So can portals be appear in the aggregators, like in the DEX aggregators? Can you just do that? Like, is that happening? When is that happening?

We can do that. I mean, we're still pretty small at the moment, so I don't think we're on, you know, 0x or 1inch radar at the moment. But if they wanted to, they could very easily, you know, enable these types of zaps via their API if they wanted to. Very, very plug and play. Like, it would take a dev like, you know, 15, 20 minutes. TOPS to implement this. So yeah, that's really more on my side. I got to do more BD of the product and try to get into those mind spaces. But yeah, definitely those protocols like 0x1inch, Kyber, Hashflow, whatever, could use this. In fact, we already have some solvers using our API already. So like solvers for CowSwap and other various RFQ liquidity protocols are using us. So yeah.

Okay. I need to get that list of who's— that is so, that's so awesome. And I'm also, when I have these conversations, it's never just a you and me kind of conversation. It's a you plus me plus our mutual friends, like the, these other protocols that we're already working with. It's kind of the more, the higher What is it called? Like the less noise, the higher frequency, the noise to signal, the higher the signal, you know, like as you get these mutual friends. So I love that. I love that. But you said CowSwap, of course, CowSwap is on the bleeding edge of everything. They're so great. Based squad over there. But I would love to, yeah, whoever, as these things come up, I would love to, we'll be in touch. We're in the DMs and stuff. There's a question from Shark. What about like swap.defilama? Would it show up there specifically?

It would show up there if they integrated us. Actually, DeFi Llama is pretty open source. So, that's something we should probably look into and see if we can just, you know, open up a pull request or something and get us integrated there. But yeah, it would show up just like any other token. That's, that's kind of how we designed it so that each token is associated with a USD price. So, regardless of how composed it is, regardless of, you know, how many underlying tokens it has, Ultimately, it's just treated the same as, you know, DAI or USDC with a price. And that's, that's kind of what we wanted to do.

I love it. So clarification, Tariq was not asking specifically about Swap DeFi Llama, but I was. So I used, I put those words in Tariq's mouth, but that's not, but that's, that's really great. So, Suhail, now we've come to the end of our time together and I would love to know, what have we not covered that you were like really hoping to cover in a pull together of PortalsFi? PoolTogether Portals podcast?

Uh, well, how about all of the PoolTogether stuff specifically for, you know, V5?

Oh, you want me to shill? Oh, of course. Oh, I'd be happy to do that.

Do some shilling. Yeah.

Yeah. So, so when Tarek showed me this, I was— showed me Portals, I was just so blown away. And of course I knew about Snap or Zaps and, um, you know, members of the community have been really excited about this. And so even in private beta, we're, we're in talks to just You know, as we're, as we're coming to the close of private beta, see what it looks like to zap into a PoolTogether USDC vault and swap into those, zap into those prize assets. And what's cool about V5 is we have so many new things happening, right? There's a Cabana front end from Generation Software. There's a PoolTime front end from the PoolTogether community. There's these cool different things happening, and I'm excited to see portals being very integral into this innovation as PoolTogether launches the public launch of V5 on Optimism, as we go to Base, as we go to these other chains and layers. And just like I said, specifically the idea that whatever you have in your wallet, you can then save, you can swap, you can save, and you can win with portals and PoolTogether is really great. So I'm excited to see As the smart wallet comes up, as the cross-chain comes up, as we launch on Optimism initially, what's going to be available. So definitely excited to see the pulled-together vaults on Optimism in Portals rip-roaring, ready to go. That's the October 4th alert.

Oh, there you go. You guys are getting those today, aren't you?

Yeah, we are. Sorry. But I'm excited to see that happen. What about you? What's your side of things? How has it been? What do you, what are you thinking?

Yeah, no, looking forward to, you know, being among the supporters of PoolTogether. So, we've basically done the V5 integration. I did it last night. Very easy to do. You know, I had a, you know, I wouldn't say a deep dive into the contracts, but I had a pretty good look at them and they're, you know, very well-written, well-documented, good tests, very easy for developers to integrate. It honestly took me about 15 minutes to do the integration. And that's the level of simplicity, which is always super nice. And, you know, one of the cool things about PoolTogether V5 is that anyone can deploy, you know, these vaults as long as they're, you know, EIP, whatever the vault EIP is. I totally forgot. There's too many.

ERC-4626 vaults.

Yeah. Yes. Thank you. Thank you. Yes. As long as they're ERC-4626 vaults, you can deploy a yield source and create your own vault, basically, which is super cool. So, you know, we're anticipating there being a bunch of vaults popping up as people play around with the, with the V5, and we'll support all of them as long as we, you know, have the underlying token. So yeah, I really had a good time, you know, integrating it and working with the contracts. It was very easy for us, like I said, to add to the API, and soon, as soon as we release it, it's going to be available to anyone to use, which is great. One other thing is we will support a migration as well for from V4 to V5, just because we already do, already do any-to-any swaps. It's, it's really nothing special for us, but yeah, we'll make it super easy for everyone to move over to the latest vaults.

I love that. I love that. So being able to go from, you know, if you're on Optimism V4, you'll be able to just go from your deposit on Optimism V4 for PoolTogether into whichever PoolTogether vault on V5 that you want to go to, whatever prize asset you want to hold. That's super perfect. Super exciting. So, well, thank you so much for being with the PoolTogether community. Look forward to the beautiful partnership that we will have. We will continue to have and seeing these apps being on more and more aggregators in more and more places. And then even, you know, a smart wallet someday soon. I'm so pumped.

Yeah, coming soon. And yeah, thank you very much for having us on. Much appreciated. And yeah, thank you all for listening in.

All right, later. 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.