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104: Unifying On-Chain Finance with SuperLend on Tezos · TezTalks Radio - Tezos Ecosystem Podcast

• 0:01
  Speaker 1: Welcome to Tez Talks Radio.
• 0:02
  Speaker 1: I am your host, marisa True, and today I am rejoined by Om Malviya, the co-founder and CTO of SuperLend, which is bringing lending, borrowing and money market infrastructure to not just Tezos but Web3 more broadly.
• 0:15
  Speaker 1: So, Om, welcome back to the show.
• 0:17
  Speaker 1: How are you today?
• 0:19
  Speaker 2: I'm good Good to be here.
• 0:20
  Speaker 1: It's always a pleasure to have you on and the last time we spoke was around October last year, where you had just launched SuperLens MoneyMarkets, but you painted a really strong roadmap that basically brought us to 2030.
• 0:34
  Speaker 1: So can you give us an update on how the platforms evolved over the last six or seven months and basically, how has the MoneyMarkets product evolved, as well as SuperLend more broadly?
• 0:45
  Speaker 2: Yeah, sure, I think since October there have been quite a few updates on SuperLend side.
• 0:52
  Speaker 2: So, first of all, as you said, we launched our money market on Etherlink, for which, instead of going how majority of the people go like you, just go and fork a good protocol without their permission, just deploy it.
• 1:07
  Speaker 2: The challenge, the idea we had, was we could build it from scratch, but it wouldn't be significantly different than what is out there.
• 1:17
  Speaker 2: And DeFi is a very tricky thing right Because of the history of hacks and a lot of different security issues.
• 1:25
  Speaker 2: If you want to gain user trust, you want to give them a nice, solid and secure ground.
• 1:30
  Speaker 2: So that's why we came to conclusion that we might as well ask the biggest DeFi protocol right now if we can do a friendly fork with, you know, permission of the AaveDAO itself and deploy it on Etherlink.
• 1:49
  Speaker 2: Now, the advantage of Etherlink is it's 100% EVM compatible.
• 1:53
  Speaker 2: So there are all sorts of things possible now which weren't possible, you know, on layer one.
• 1:58
  Speaker 2: So we thought it reduces our go-to-market with a very short span of time, and we essentially did that.
• 2:05
  Speaker 2: We went to our dao, put a proposal it's it's out in dao as well that how do we want to structure it and then we essentially forked the code base.
• 2:13
  Speaker 2: We did some of our own changes, not in the code but in terms of the assets, right, because majority of your structure is same, but the assets you have on etherlink are not exactly same as on RBB3, on Ethereum mainnet, right.
• 2:28
  Speaker 2: So we did some of the customization.
• 2:31
  Speaker 2: We used Oracle, they used Chainlink, we used PIT what you call it and essentially we deployed it.
• 2:37
  Speaker 2: We also onboarded risk partners.
• 2:40
  Speaker 2: We do ourselves a lot of risk management to risk management as well.
• 2:45
  Speaker 2: So now the situation is we have close to around 40 million in tv, around 22 million dollars borrowed, and apple farm is also live and this is one of the most tvl product on etherlink right now.
• 2:58
  Speaker 2: A lot of users are using it.
• 2:59
  Speaker 2: So the initial idea we had and all the choices we made was essentially, you know, has led us to this traction we are seeing on Ethereum right now, because that has built a kind of user trust, which is borrowing the same sort of Lindy effect from RWAV3, building on the same kind of and then also building on the Lindy effect of Tezos itself and having a product that works really well.
• 3:27
  Speaker 2: It gives users what they need.
• 3:29
  Speaker 2: If you need leverage, you can also do that.
• 3:31
  Speaker 2: If you want to just borrow USDT, usdc and do a bunch of things with it or buy a car, I am also able to do that.
• 3:39
  Speaker 2: So it's a very nice, sweet product.
• 3:41
  Speaker 2: On E-ELINK, we are very focused on growing it along with the journey of how ETHELINK grows, and we have some very exciting things coming up in markets as well.
• 3:50
  Speaker 2: Now, as far as the other things goes, we have two more products.
• 3:53
  Speaker 2: One is the aggregator.
• 3:56
  Speaker 2: Now the aggregator is universal.
• 3:58
  Speaker 2: It's multi-chain, where you can discover the yield on any chain, on any money market, and you can also discover, if you want to borrow, what are the borrow rates on different money markets across all chains.
• 4:10
  Speaker 2: So that has also started to get a little bit of traction.
• 4:15
  Speaker 2: Of course, majority of traction on that product is also a lot of Etherlink users, because I guess you know, even though we have two different UIs, they just like that thing as well.
• 4:24
  Speaker 2: Or a lot of users we attract, they naturally end up on Etherlink, because when you open the Superland aggregator and if you sort it down by yield, you know Superland markets are at the highest because of the Apple farms and the yields are at the highest as of now the incentive program coming.
• 4:41
  Speaker 2: So we are seeing a bit of nice traction there as well.
• 4:44
  Speaker 2: We are adding more protocol integrations.
• 4:46
  Speaker 2: We are refining our UI a bit more.
• 4:49
  Speaker 2: We have a lot of optimizations coming in terms of experience, ui, ux improving a bit more and we just want to make it really cool in terms of for users to navigate.
• 5:01
  Speaker 2: That you know, suddenly if let's say a normal person, let's say a normal person, let's say like my father, suddenly hears there aren't some nice savings rate in DeFi and if he ends up on SuperLend he should be able to navigate through it and being able to put that deposit right.
• 5:19
  Speaker 2: So that's the aim we have.
• 5:23
  Speaker 2: And then we figured out that even the discovery and navigation could a little bit a bit, could be a little bit um uh, time taking.
• 5:32
  Speaker 2: So some of our users we talked to, they also expressed their interest that if you had a set and forget thing where you know I just deposit and I don't have to know about how d5 works and what the money market is and how the rates work, that would be cool.
• 5:46
  Speaker 2: So for that we are experimenting with a new product called Superfund.
• 5:50
  Speaker 2: It's right now live on base.
• 5:52
  Speaker 2: It's because we are running a bit of, you could say, the early testing.
• 5:56
  Speaker 2: There's a lot of normal retail users on base as well and we are trying to see how they react with it, how they engage with it, if it fulfills their purpose, if there is a product market fit or not.
• 6:07
  Speaker 2: And once we find that ground then we plan to scale the same kind of product to E-Telling and beyond as well, where we think a lot of users are.
• 6:19
  Speaker 2: So this is broadly what we are doing, but for next few months and for next few weeks.
• 6:28
  Speaker 2: Right now we are very much focused on actually the E-Telling markets, to increase the blend of collateral, to increase the more borrowing options.
• 6:36
  Speaker 2: So we are talking with a lot of different teams on E-Telling itself.
• 6:41
  Speaker 2: How can we cross we cross, collaborate and make Superlend more composable with other protocols.
• 6:47
  Speaker 1: So very, very busy is the crux of what you're saying.
• 6:51
  Speaker 1: Product market fit has been, or PMF has been the acronym that's popped up more in the last six, seven months than I've seen within the crypto space over the last I'm going to say three to five years.
• 7:04
  Speaker 1: It's suddenly become this mega priority because people have realized that no matter how sophisticated the products they build are, if they don't satisfy a genuine user need, then it's a little bit fruitless.
• 7:15
  Speaker 1: So you have, or you are, experimenting with product market fit across multiple domains.
• 7:20
  Speaker 1: On one side it seems a bit more institutional grade where you're dealing with a slightly more complex financial solution, but bit more institutional grade where you're dealing with, you know, a slightly more complex financial solution, but at the same time you're trying to simplify DeFi for a retail user.
• 7:33
  Speaker 1: So how do you weigh out those priorities and you know, given you are testing on Etherlink but you're also testing on base how do you sort of prioritize where the product market fit makes the most sense or where the results of your efforts mean the most?
• 7:51
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 7:51
  Speaker 2: So on Ecelink, we have a very, I would say, fundamental and base product, which is the money markets itself, and for Ecelink, of course we are doing a lot of our own efforts to bring more users Etherlink team themselves, apple Farm also, and there are users coming also.
• 8:12
  Speaker 2: But what we would like to be is, you know, in terms of Superland, our vision is to just be a one single platform where naturally all the users go to if they want to do anything with DeFi, where naturally all the users go to if they want to do anything with DeFi, and then we make Etherlink as one of the most priority discovery on that platform.
• 8:31
  Speaker 2: That naturally is happening right now as well.
• 8:34
  Speaker 2: So that's how we think about it.
• 8:35
  Speaker 2: Etherlink is, of course, our number one priority, and then the other deployments we do or other experiments we are running.
• 8:44
  Speaker 2: It's just to essentially go where some of more.
• 8:47
  Speaker 2: How do we get more users right?
• 8:49
  Speaker 2: So of course there are a lot of users coming to Etherlink, but there might be some more on some different island which is, let's call it, base.
• 8:55
  Speaker 2: So we go on base on that island, open our shop there as well, but our franchise is Superland, right, and the Superland main store is in Etherlink itself.
• 9:05
  Speaker 2: So that's how I look at it.
• 9:08
  Speaker 2: Now, in terms of retail and other complex users, I think we are focusing on retail on, let's say, base or the aggregator itself.
• 9:17
  Speaker 2: On institution side, I think it would be more cool.
• 9:23
  Speaker 2: I mean, I think it makes more sense to focus on Etherlink itself, because there is a nice appetite for institutions.
• 9:30
  Speaker 2: Now what we just have to do is we just have to be ourselves.
• 9:34
  Speaker 2: A lot of people in all the protocols on Etherlink, including the team.
• 9:38
  Speaker 2: We all have to constantly talk to these institutions and give them our offering.
• 9:43
  Speaker 2: Like you should be holding your assets on Etherlink, because you have a diversity of assets, you can really diversify your portfolio.
• 9:52
  Speaker 2: For example, there is uranium, right.
• 9:54
  Speaker 2: It is a very nice set to have in portfolio for an institution which you can have on Etherlink.
• 10:00
  Speaker 2: Then you have T-bill, mt-bill, m-basis.
• 10:03
  Speaker 2: If you want to have exposure to treasury bills, that you can also do on ETH link, right.
• 10:08
  Speaker 2: If you want to have exposure to the basis trade that happens in the crypto market, that you can also do on the ETH link, which is similar to Athena's S-USD.
• 10:18
  Speaker 2: And if you want to have make markets, you could also do it on Hanji, and then you can use all of your positions be it on uranium, be it your position in Hanji, be it in TBL, be it in basis state, as collateral on its super land sort of like prime brokerage and you can borrow more stable coins out of it, right?
• 10:37
  Speaker 2: So I think the blend of services we have in traditional sense on each link makes the most sense for institution, like it should be a no-brainer for them to.
• 10:49
  Speaker 2: What we need to do is just to increase the outreach more and more.
• 10:53
  Speaker 2: You know, be ourselves like this sales people knocking on the door and selling the opportunity, because I think that's where.
• 11:00
  Speaker 2: That's where a lot of alpha, in a sense, and that's also in terms of institution-wise, is going to be our focus for at least until we are able to make it auto-discoverable.
• 11:16
  Speaker 2: At one point of time, institutions will automatically come in and do a bunch of things, and from our side we are also very focused on making sure the tooling is there for institutions coming and doing a bunch of things, and from our side we'll be.
• 11:25
  Speaker 2: You know, we are also very focused on making sure the tooling is there for institutions, the risk management is there, the trust is there and anything that required.
• 11:33
  Speaker 2: You know, if anybody's listening to this, could always reach out to us and essentially ask us.
• 11:37
  Speaker 2: You know how any sort of questions to essentially reduce the entry to barrier.
• 11:43
  Speaker 1: So, with all that being said, what are the success metrics that you look at when evaluating how SuperLend is growing over time, you know, is it something as simplified as TVL, which I guess is probably the more traditional metric at this stage?
• 11:56
  Speaker 1: Is it about capital inflows and outflows?
• 11:58
  Speaker 1: How are you assessing not only institutional engagement, but also you know retail engagement as well?
• 12:02
  Speaker 1: Not only institutional engagement, but also you know retail engagement as well.
• 12:05
  Speaker 2: So for us, we look out.
• 12:07
  Speaker 2: We have two essentially broad categories we are looking at.
• 12:10
  Speaker 2: One is on, of course, our core product is on, it's a Link.
• 12:14
  Speaker 2: So on, it's a Link.
• 12:15
  Speaker 2: The focus is the number of the amount of utilization, the percentage of utilization.
• 12:21
  Speaker 2: So essentially, we don't only want that.
• 12:23
  Speaker 2: You know, suddenly there is $ million dollars and nobody is borrowing it.
• 12:27
  Speaker 2: That doesn't work.
• 12:30
  Speaker 2: So you can think of as a productive tvl I don't know if there's a term for it or something but what we're looking for is nice, um, high value of utilization, which are into the, which are within the risk threshold.
• 12:41
  Speaker 2: So you can think of as as like we are looking at, we would ideally like to target around 60 to 70% of utilization, that 70% of all our assets should always be borrowed out.
• 12:52
  Speaker 2: At least in terms of stable coins, they should always be borrowed out.
• 12:56
  Speaker 2: That utilization is one of our metric in terms of how we look at it.
• 12:59
  Speaker 2: Then, for our retail products like aggregator and super fund, we look for more.
• 13:07
  Speaker 2: You could think of as a weekly active users.
• 13:10
  Speaker 2: We are still trying to figure out.
• 13:11
  Speaker 2: You know, how do we, how do we define this metrics more ideally, what would, but what would be best for these products is not only your defy native users coming in, but also you, a more generic type of user, which only hold, let's say, bitcoin and which only hold Ethereum in their Coinbase app.
• 13:30
  Speaker 2: They don't know what the wallet is, what kind of stuff, but now, with the you know, now, with the wallets abstraction being there, like you can create a wallet with your passkey, with your you know biometrics, and you don't need to have the seed phrase and all that kind of stuff, I think we are, are we'll be looking to unlock that kind of growth as well.
• 13:51
  Speaker 2: So, yeah, there's a lot of things that goes on.
• 13:52
  Speaker 2: On interlink, of course, we are more focused, like making more focused as growing it as a proper business.
• 13:56
  Speaker 2: You could think of it as a prime brokerage, you can think of it as a money market kind of thing make, give more loans out.
• 14:02
  Speaker 2: Essentially, and for the other things we want, we are still trying to produce a lot of inputs in regards to you know, what should our next feature be or not?
• 14:11
  Speaker 2: What should our next optimization should be, so that we essentially are able to resonate with the nice niche of, or nice base of, users, and from there we want to, you know, multiply and keep building on top of.
• 14:24
  Speaker 1: In the last half year alone, we've seen a lot of volatility within the crypto market.
• 14:29
  Speaker 1: I mean, we always see volatility, but perhaps a more observable kind, whether it's to do with you know the us, like the us political situation, whether it's to do with just crypto skepticism, overall institutional limitations.
• 14:42
  Speaker 1: So how have you navigated super lens roadmap amidst that volatility, not only in terms of responding to changes within the environment, but also being able to stick to the core principles?
• 14:56
  Speaker 1: How did you find that balance?
• 14:59
  Speaker 2: Yeah, so I think the volatility has helped us in some way because, fortunately, when the markets were volatile, of course January and February were a bit of a bumpy ride, but by March Apple Farm went live and E-Selling was also ready.
• 15:17
  Speaker 2: So when the you know, the open optimism was down, there were no yields.
• 15:21
  Speaker 2: Oh, you know, the open optimism was down, there were no yields.
• 15:23
  Speaker 2: Fortunately, apple Farm came and Superland was also completely ready and we were able to, you know, get a lot of liquidity onto Superland itself because that was the only place where you could make such a nice.
• 15:33
  Speaker 2: So that has helped.
• 15:36
  Speaker 2: But other than that, I think the volatility side what happens is when there's too much volatility or there's sort of like pessimism in the market, the leverage goes down.
• 15:46
  Speaker 2: Right now, even in crypto, majority of the defi is essentially all the revenues you are making, all the tvs you are seeing.
• 15:53
  Speaker 2: It's all driven by leverage.
• 15:55
  Speaker 2: Right?
• 15:55
  Speaker 2: People have bunch of bitcoin, they borrow usdc against it and do bunch of things.
• 15:59
  Speaker 2: They buy meme coin, they buy more tokens, eth, ethereum, or they buy more Bitcoin, whatever.
• 16:03
  Speaker 2: And when market go down, naturally you know people need to close their leverage positions.
• 16:08
  Speaker 2: So they, whatever they bought, they are going to go and sell it.
• 16:11
  Speaker 2: That causes more market wind down and you know being able to pay back the loans that doesn't help, but I think there should be.
• 16:33
  Speaker 2: Now we are actually getting to a place, defi overall, where it is affecting less and less, at least in terms of money markets, as and when more volatility is coming.
• 16:37
  Speaker 2: For example, in the recent volatility period, if you look at the TVL of Aave, it wasn't affected that much.
• 16:40
  Speaker 2: It wasn't affected that much.
• 16:46
  Speaker 2: There was more tbl coming in and people were uh, people were having their deposits in our way for a far less rate than treasury bills.
• 16:50
  Speaker 2: I think there's something there's.
• 16:51
  Speaker 2: There's something there.
• 16:52
  Speaker 2: Because of the composability that d5 provides, ideally, it would be great to have net new inflows.
• 16:57
  Speaker 2: Essentially, if you can get net new users not the same bunch of people who knows how to use five, six different protocols the chances of retentions are much higher because you know, on defy, even if you take the base yields, those are usually way higher than what people get in their banks or something.
• 17:13
  Speaker 2: So, yes, volatility is there, yields go down, um, and.
• 17:19
  Speaker 2: But if you build your product in a way and that's what we want to focus on also, yields are there, nice, nice, but at the same time we want to position these products as like just some, not a bank, but really nice banks.
• 17:33
  Speaker 2: Right, where you have your UI, ux really nice, you are actually earning more than what you would earn in your savings on your bank and if we are able to attract that kind of audience, then these volatility would not be a big problem for us.
• 17:47
  Speaker 2: But right now it is because everybody is chasing yields.
• 17:50
  Speaker 1: Do you think crypto broadly still has a problem with attracting that retail user, that non-DeFi native user?
• 17:58
  Speaker 1: Because, in the same way that I think many L1s or many protocols are chasing the Web3 native developer, DeFi protocols are sort of confined to a narrow group of DeFi native users.
• 18:11
  Speaker 1: So is that a problem you still feel is very prominent and how do you think we can actually break the back of that and attract that retail crowd back in?
• 18:20
  Speaker 1: Because you know, if we were to cast our minds all the way back to 2021, our efforts towards attracting retail into the world of crypto were through NFTs, through collectibles, through art and culture.
• 18:31
  Speaker 1: But if we're looking at more of the financial dimension of blockchain technology, we've never managed to attract an active retail crowd that aren't just buyers and holders.
• 18:46
  Speaker 2: That's a good question.
• 18:47
  Speaker 2: I think about it a lot.
• 18:48
  Speaker 2: We also discuss it with a lot of people.
• 18:50
  Speaker 2: My opinion is we need to disassociate the DeFi overall.
• 18:54
  Speaker 2: First of all.
• 18:55
  Speaker 2: We probably need to drop DeFi and call it on-chain finance or new finance and then disassociate ourselves with the crypto new finance and then disassociate ourselves with the crypto.
• 19:06
  Speaker 2: It's a it's, you know, bold statement, but the reason is, the moment you say that this new finance is a bit of a crypto thing, then the expectations of users are way too high right now.
• 19:16
  Speaker 2: Even if you look at normal user, why would they deposit into usdc when they'll just buy Bitcoin?
• 19:22
  Speaker 2: Now, bitcoin itself gives users this psychology of you know, asymmetric.
• 19:27
  Speaker 2: Upside they're like, wow, ok, all right, you know I have my savings in my bank for I'm earning 2%, but why should I bother with 5% for crypto?
• 19:37
  Speaker 2: If I'm going in crypto, I should just buy a bunch of Bitcoins at the base scenario.
• 19:42
  Speaker 2: Right, and then you have other things as well.
• 19:43
  Speaker 2: But if we essentially just position ourselves as this alternating finance, the new finance, you know it's, it's essentially more tradition, uh, more um, efficient, more composable, and this associate a bit with this bitcoin and volatility, you could say this is a nice to have that you can now tokenize Bitcoin and borrow against it, but this similarly, you can also tokenize gold, uranium equities stocks and you can borrow against it.
• 20:11
  Speaker 2: Maybe this is coming out.
• 20:12
  Speaker 2: I'm seeing some early signs of you know this thesis being played out, but once that is there, then we should be able to build a separate narrative in terms of, you know, retail, but then retail won't look at it as a crypto thing.
• 20:25
  Speaker 2: They will look at it as a more efficient finance kind of thing, right, and they will look at it.
• 20:30
  Speaker 2: Of course it's new, it's more efficient finance, it's a new finance, and so risks are also higher, so are yields, but it's not crypto, right.
• 20:38
  Speaker 2: So if I want to do crypto thing, I would do it separately by a bunch of tokens, meme coins, bitcoin, whatever.
• 20:49
  Speaker 2: But if I'm still a little bit serious on the spectrum of, you know, having bank deposits to the buying bitcoin somewhere in the middle, then I would go and try this on chain finance and I think if we are able to, you know, circulate that narrative that this is across the across the world, it should be very easier to onboard users and also retain them.
• 21:03
  Speaker 1: Okay.
• 21:03
  Speaker 1: So there's quite a few dimensions in there.
• 21:05
  Speaker 1: On the one hand, it's a bit of a marketing and a narrative issue, in that we've painted this image of you can come and make so much money out of the crypto space.
• 21:16
  Speaker 1: So therefore, you know, there's a little bit of the gambling component, there's a little bit of the risk taking component, there's the inherent volatility, but if we're trying to encourage users to come in and use these tools and use DeFi platforms as part of their everyday finance, it has to not feel so separate from the way they treat the rest of their money effectively.
• 21:38
  Speaker 1: And so that education curve is still largely untapped.
• 21:43
  Speaker 1: I would say it's not something that we've ever really dug into, because I think the assumption for many retail users is that you know you leave finance to the experts, you know the bankers, the traders and so on.
• 21:55
  Speaker 1: So for a retail crowd, that will still be an uphill battle.
• 21:58
  Speaker 1: But then, when it comes to institutions, how do you think the narrative needs to change, because institutional readiness has been increasing year on year, but there's still that sort of separation that you were just discussing?
• 22:24
  Speaker 2: now just, you know, running some pilot programs or stuff like that.
• 22:26
  Speaker 2: From what we are seeing across the industry is everybody wants to try in some ways.
• 22:28
  Speaker 2: Either they want to launch a stable coin, either they want to, you know, tokenize their fund and do something.
• 22:33
  Speaker 2: So I think there is a lot of learning by experimenting that is happening on the institution side.
• 22:39
  Speaker 2: Now, for institution, the biggest problem is privacy, as far as I know, to the people I've talked with, because all of your transactions are public.
• 22:47
  Speaker 2: Now, if we look at the full scale institution onboarding, an institution let's say, jp Morgan doesn't want everybody to know the bonds that they are buying, and you know bonds that they're selling.
• 22:58
  Speaker 2: There's still T plus one or some some time period in Wall Street as well, that you get to know, which gives them some sort of privacy as well.
• 23:06
  Speaker 2: So that's something that a lot of institutions are looking for if they really want to bring their entire balance sheets on chain right.
• 23:12
  Speaker 2: So privacy is one thing and I'm glad you know a lot of efforts have been done on the zero knowledge side and you know private rollups or public rollups, and there's a bunch of things happening on this scenario private roll-ups or public roll-ups, and there's a bunch of things happening on this scenario.
• 23:23
  Speaker 2: And then the second thing is institutions really like what Tether has done with its business, which is a huge, profitable machine, but at the same time, they are understanding the challenges of it as well.
• 23:36
  Speaker 2: It's not that easy to scale.
• 23:38
  Speaker 2: Tether is already 80% of market share and the majority of the stablecoin business is based on distribution as of now, and if you are, you know, integrated into all these wallets on these exchanges, on these decentralized exchanges.
• 23:51
  Speaker 2: So I think that's one part where a lot of brainstorming is happening for institution, like how do we essentially create a framework for stablecoins to get adopted, because they know it's a good business?
• 24:03
  Speaker 2: And then, on the other side, there's also a lot of things going on on tokenizing, equities, stocks, regulations.
• 24:10
  Speaker 2: It's something that in the US, a lot of people are pushing for.
• 24:15
  Speaker 2: So on the institution side, I think the barrier is just getting the right framework.
• 24:19
  Speaker 2: So it's like all the institutions are at least you know about to at the threshold where you see, okay, something is there, but it's not quite there yet.
• 24:29
  Speaker 2: So now that just that last 1% of thing is remaining before they can really start doing these, doing on-chain finance at scale.
• 24:40
  Speaker 2: So we are quite there, but just something is missing.
• 24:44
  Speaker 2: It's regulations.
• 24:44
  Speaker 2: The tech needs to be a bit more mature and then we might see the huge amount of unfolding in the space itself.
• 24:56
  Speaker 2: There are some very nice experiments running, but when I talk about experiment and we talk about, oh, this platform or this something has a billion dollar TVL like that's nothing for institutions.
• 25:06
  Speaker 2: So a billion dollar TVL is nothing.
• 25:07
  Speaker 2: So that's why I'm still calling them experiments.
• 25:09
  Speaker 2: But they are doing it in a lot, but a lot of people are doing it.
• 25:13
  Speaker 2: So I'm hopeful that within next one year, we are going to see a complete framework for bringing institutions on-chain with tokenizing equities, stocks, all their assets, bringing the traditional finance in complete sense on the blockchain rails.
• 25:30
  Speaker 1: So, basically, there are multiple use cases that have been maturing over the last few years, but none have really broken that surface tension.
• 25:37
  Speaker 1: And, to use your example, perhaps Tether or perhaps stablecoins have been the closest, but what's it going to take for something to actually break that surface tension and become far more institutionally integrated than it has been already?
• 25:54
  Speaker 2: Yeah, so I think for stablecoins.
• 25:57
  Speaker 2: Now, if you look at Circle right, circle recently filed their IPO papers and they are paying a huge amount of money for keeping distributions.
• 26:08
  Speaker 2: They are paying to Binance that you know we should be top trading pair to also Coinbase and etc.
• 26:11
  Speaker 2: So what?
• 26:13
  Speaker 2: As an industry, we hope that how, once the Circle data is live, it's going to be massive and stable.
• 26:18
  Speaker 2: Coins are such a big industry At least for me, it was not what I had hoped.
• 26:23
  Speaker 2: The reputation and the brand that USDC carries, the numbers should have been much better and the distribution should have been there already and probably we shouldn't be paying that much amount of money.
• 26:33
  Speaker 2: But that shows you that just solving the infrastructure is not going to be enough.
• 26:37
  Speaker 2: You also have to solve for distribution and I am also lately thinking that eventually it's going to converge with the larger player itself.
• 26:47
  Speaker 2: So let's say Visa and MasterCard.
• 26:50
  Speaker 2: They have distribution.
• 26:52
  Speaker 2: They have is such a massive, massive thing that once Visa really thinks, look, we are going to launch VUSC and all the settlements are going to happen in VUSC, I think that can immediately take a lot of USDC businesses or it can become a bigger business than what USDC is.
• 27:09
  Speaker 2: I'm not talking about USDT, because USDT is actually have a lot.
• 27:13
  Speaker 2: Usdt have found a huge amount of moat, I would say, at least in emerging economies, everywhere I see in South Asia, southeast Asia, in Latin America as well.
• 27:26
  Speaker 2: In a lot of places it's just a normal thing to send USDT to each other, right, and then paying for it.
• 27:31
  Speaker 2: So there's a huge amount of moat there.
• 27:33
  Speaker 2: Usdc is largely still is, you know, it's not, doesn't have that amount of uh distribution or that amount of mindshare and vote in terms of um, and the only way to beat for these is, you know, if this large distribution business, they just, you know, create a framework for launching their own uh stablecoin.
• 27:53
  Speaker 2: For example, paypal is done and I'm just I'm thinking all the all the businesses that own distribution are eventually going to launch their own stablecoins.
• 28:00
  Speaker 2: So it's going to be a fascinating thing to see how they essentially execute on the plan.
• 28:05
  Speaker 2: I know Visa can do it, I know MasterCard can do it, I know these people can do it.
• 28:09
  Speaker 2: I'm just curious to see how they are going to execute.
• 28:14
  Speaker 2: If they do a nice execution, then they can own a lot of market, but if they don't, then there is a you know, somebody is going to come across and take that chunk.
• 28:23
  Speaker 1: It's also interesting because we are talking about a traditional finance institution adopting a new age financial technology, the principles of crypto and the principles of blockchain.
• 28:35
  Speaker 1: To begin with, there's also a bit of a friction between you know a giant effectively monopolizing this technology or monopolizing the market share for something that we're ultimately trying to keep distributed.
• 28:47
  Speaker 1: Do you think that sort of ethos is coming at odds with institutional adoption, or do we just not factor that in as much anymore?
• 28:57
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that, of course, that seems to be the trend, but that's why I think I would also like to disassociate, you know this on-chain finance new age finance from crypto itself, so that crypto can have its ethos and this is somewhere in the middle, right, so you can also do your work.
• 29:12
  Speaker 2: Well, but crypto can also preserve its identity and its censorship-resistant techniques, and you know its core principle, um, and that's that's the main thing, right, because for crypto, all the principles that it's built upon, those needs to be there.
• 29:29
  Speaker 2: Right, bitcoin is a new age of money.
• 29:32
  Speaker 2: That needs to.
• 29:32
  Speaker 2: That needs to be there.
• 29:34
  Speaker 2: Um, and in best case scenario best case scenario, maybe this traditional rails or on-chain rails can become the best distribution engine for Bitcoin itself.
• 29:44
  Speaker 2: Right, suddenly, everybody is buying Bitcoin with their Visa, mastercard, and once they bought it, they paid that 1% fees and then they are never going to buy it, maybe.
• 29:57
  Speaker 2: Anyways, I think you know this is the coolest thing, uh, because for crypto, the main thing is, um, the store of value, the decentralized money.
• 30:05
  Speaker 2: Those aspects needs to be there.
• 30:07
  Speaker 2: In case you want to have a decentralized, stable coin, you should be able to.
• 30:11
  Speaker 2: In case you want to have a decentralized store of value you should be able to, but it's uh, but essentially it should be converging around.
• 30:18
  Speaker 2: The point, how I think about is that you should have the option.
• 30:23
  Speaker 2: Right, that's how I think about it.
• 30:24
  Speaker 2: Like earlier, we did not have an option, and I would like to always have an option, even though if we have to do something to defend it, for example.
• 30:34
  Speaker 2: So, of course, majority of my money would be in stocks, equities, all tokenized in stable coins, but I would like to have the option that if, let's say, my government is not doing something right or there's a lot of pessimism in the economy or something, I should be able to move everything to Bitcoin or at least keep a few things in Bitcoin itself.
• 30:54
  Speaker 2: So I think that's how I think.
• 30:57
  Speaker 1: So basically both solutions can be possible and compatible with one another without necessarily having to compete in the way that I think we're currently seeing them compete, because originally the narrative was very much that crypto was a total substitution to traditional financial systems.
• 31:13
  Speaker 1: Then it evolved to kind of working hand in hand with them and trying to get them as institutionalized as possible.
• 31:18
  Speaker 1: And now I think we're sort of tempering down and finding this middle ground where it's like what do we leave to be crypto native and what are we trying to implement as just better financial infrastructure?
• 31:29
  Speaker 2: However, I just want to point one thing out.
• 31:32
  Speaker 2: Sorry for interrupting.
• 31:34
  Speaker 2: Go for it.
• 31:35
  Speaker 2: There are a few concerns, though.
• 31:37
  Speaker 2: I'm remembering the whole dialogue on USTC buyout, where there was a bid that Ripple made that we probably can buy a file of the US circle itself for $5-6 billion and suddenly Ripple is essentially you know, holding the corporation that is majorly issued on Ethereum and suddenly there is a fork coming and Ripple said, oh, we are not going to support this fork.
• 32:08
  Speaker 2: You know we could see a scenario like DAO hack or something like this happen.
• 32:12
  Speaker 2: So there's an actor.
• 32:13
  Speaker 2: It's good to see.
• 32:13
  Speaker 2: There's a lot of discourse, there's a lot of dialogue on these kinds of scenarios and some people are really vocal about it.
• 32:19
  Speaker 2: But these are some real scenarios.
• 32:21
  Speaker 2: It seems far-fetched, but I think there should be frameworks to handle these kind of scenarios when we are talking about tokenizing especially.
• 32:35
  Speaker 2: No, I think that's a very, very important point to bring up, because anything can happen in this space.
• 32:37
  Speaker 1: But to bring this back's a very, very important point to bring up, because anything can happen in this space.
• 32:41
  Speaker 1: But to bring this back to SuperLend, how do you want to position SuperLend across each of these future scenarios?
• 32:49
  Speaker 2: Yeah, well, there are a few taglines we have thought about.
• 32:52
  Speaker 2: For example, they're still, you know, finalizing which one.
• 32:55
  Speaker 2: So you can think of SuperLend as a home for on-chain finance or an operating system for on-chain capital or finance.
• 33:02
  Speaker 2: So that's where we want to go essentially with these taglines.
• 33:06
  Speaker 2: The thing is, be it your tokenized stocks, be it your Bitcoin, crypto, everything we do want to address all of these things in a broader on-chain finance sense, that you should be able to put your capital at work and then you should be able to borrow against your capital.
• 33:27
  Speaker 2: That's the primary aim we are looking for.
• 33:31
  Speaker 2: Right now.
• 33:32
  Speaker 2: The scenario is the market is very fragmented.
• 33:35
  Speaker 2: There are 15 different chains, 15 different protocols.
• 33:38
  Speaker 2: I mean on aggregator itself, we right now are indexing almost 350 plus different markets for different assets.
• 33:48
  Speaker 2: So we would like to build more intelligent solutions, more technology to unify it all.
• 33:54
  Speaker 2: There are a few things.
• 33:55
  Speaker 2: We are looking at it from core engineering perspective that how can we essentially do a seamless sort of chain abstraction so that the user only see the rates and user only see the asset, but they don't necessarily have to see, you know, bridge out and do the swap thing and all that kind of stuff.
• 34:12
  Speaker 2: So that's something we would like to do on Superland itself.
• 34:16
  Speaker 2: Then for Superfund, what we have is we would love to introduce more strategies because right now a lot of users see that to bring some of the hedge fund strategies to retail as well.
• 34:26
  Speaker 2: Like some funds really make 15 to 20% of their USDC, they run looping and they run different kinds of arbitrage, so that is something also we want to make it accessible for users.
• 34:37
  Speaker 2: For Etherlink, then for Etherlink, we are right now focused most on, you know, bringing uranium as collateral, bringing your Hanji walls as collateral, bringing your what else?
• 34:47
  Speaker 2: There are some new assets coming on Etherlink.
• 34:48
  Speaker 2: We are trying to bring them as collateral as well.
• 34:50
  Speaker 2: Then I think, naturally naturally Etherlink should be the best place if you want to be in DeFi with a diverse portfolio, with a very active approach to risk management, and then you want to have a leverage against it.
• 35:04
  Speaker 2: I still think that's the goal for us as MoneyMarket on Interlink, that we actually end up making the best money market, where we are competing with Aave as well, for example, and it should be able to give users, in a sense, some really nice leverage strategies, some really nice portfolio strategies, some really nice, you know, a mix of blend of collateral strategies.
• 35:26
  Speaker 2: So that's on the Etherlink.
• 35:27
  Speaker 2: But overall, if we think in terms of layer, then there are actually three layers.
• 35:32
  Speaker 2: You can think of it.
• 35:33
  Speaker 2: One fundamental thing is money markets, which we have on Etherlink thing is money markets, which we have on italian.
• 35:43
  Speaker 2: On top of money market you would have, um, uh, you would have strategies, which we right now have on base, because there are a lot of money markets there already.
• 35:49
  Speaker 2: But we essentially automate the process so that you earn a very nice yield by actively allocating different protocols.
• 35:55
  Speaker 2: So so you can think of a strategy layer.
• 35:57
  Speaker 2: So money market layer, a strategy layer, and then on market layer, a strategy layer, and then on top we have an aggregator and abstraction layer which is your end user product that user can face with right.
• 36:06
  Speaker 2: So we are thinking in terms of and, as I said, right, you have a OS and you have different parts of it.
• 36:13
  Speaker 2: Like, you have a money market being one part, you have strategy manager or strategies being another part, and then you have this UI, graphical user interfaces, being another part, and so this is how we're looking at looking at these things, and then, of course, the hardest part is to bring it all together, but each of our you can think of service or primitive has its own unique advantages of now.
• 36:36
  Speaker 2: So money markets on Etherlink, of course, has the biggest advantage, because number one, they are on Etherlink.
• 36:42
  Speaker 2: They're really fast, secure.
• 36:43
  Speaker 2: There's a really nice collateral blend that you can use to leverage for.
• 36:47
  Speaker 2: Then you have Apple Farms running as well.
• 36:49
  Speaker 2: So this is the most high priority focus for us as well and it's the most advantageous product for users.
• 36:56
  Speaker 2: Then there you have, of course, aggregator, which you can discover.
• 37:01
  Speaker 2: Now that you know money markets, you can also discover a lot of money markets across the industry as well, and you can discover rates, you can see those reward programs and you can, you know, participate in that.
• 37:09
  Speaker 2: You can lend, borrow and do this kind of.
• 37:10
  Speaker 2: And then we have superfund as well, which is a strategy layer where we don't have to stress you out at all.
• 37:15
  Speaker 2: You just deposit usdc and you know, you just chill.
• 37:17
  Speaker 2: So these are the ways we are uh thinking about now, as I said, right for ethan link, we have a very clear roadmap for for next 6 to 12 months, as I mentioned.
• 37:31
  Speaker 2: But, and for aggregator also, that we want to make it as user friendly, integrate as many protocols bring, bring chain abstraction as well For SuperFund and the strategy layer.
• 37:41
  Speaker 2: This is again, we are running as a.
• 37:44
  Speaker 2: We are running as a experiment to make the product perfect, produce more input from the market itself, see how they resonate with the other chains so that we are able to, you know, figure out a recipe that, okay, this is how we should be going about the other chains, where you know there are more users and then bringing bring them back to the Superland and there's a lot of focus where we want to put onto our brand itself that when users think about Superland it's just like you know.
• 38:09
  Speaker 2: Okay, this, if I want to do anything with on-chain finance, this is where I go.
• 38:14
  Speaker 2: Like, for example, you have Uniswap right now.
• 38:16
  Speaker 2: Uniswap has a nice front-end for Swap.
• 38:19
  Speaker 2: It's also Swap protocol itself, also has intent-based solver filler sort of thing, also has a wallet, also has a wallet extension on Chrome.
• 38:28
  Speaker 2: Bunch of different things, right.
• 38:30
  Speaker 2: But now the thing has become that you know it's so cross-connected and as well as well-integrated in the DeFi scene that the trust they have built over the years itself is enough for users to only have one single thing to use.
• 38:50
  Speaker 2: Like, I just use Uniswap, that's all.
• 38:53
  Speaker 2: A wallet also.
• 38:54
  Speaker 2: I use Uniswap, a Chrome extension, also.
• 38:56
  Speaker 2: I use Uniswap For swap.
• 38:57
  Speaker 2: I also use Uniswap.
• 38:58
  Speaker 2: So that's the kind of how we think about Superlend and we want to operate.
• 39:04
  Speaker 1: So it's not just about unifying a currently very fragmented landscape, but it's about providing effectively a toolbox for every level of expertise that will come to and engage with on-chain finance, as we would like to rebrand it.
• 39:20
  Speaker 1: So, by that token, superlend has a massive mission on its hands, but it sounds like you are taking a bit of an act and see approach, where you will adapt depending on how the market matures over time.
• 39:33
  Speaker 1: So it sounds like Superlend is just very much going to be one to watch.
• 39:36
  Speaker 1: Thank you so much for sharing all of your updates and all of your insights, and really loved your opinions on how you see basically the DeFi and financial landscape evolving over the next few years.
• 39:45
  Speaker 1: Is there anything else you'd like to add or what you feel our audience should know about Superlend in the very near future?
• 39:54
  Speaker 2: I think the best thing we can hope that comes from our users is a lot of feedback.
• 39:59
  Speaker 2: So I would encourage everyone to try out our products, join our Discord we'll soon launch Telegram as well and give us as much feedback as you can and go, as I mean we are willing to.
• 40:12
  Speaker 2: You know, get on a call, do the product overviews.
• 40:15
  Speaker 2: Really get down to the last detail until it becomes satisfactory for you.
• 40:20
  Speaker 2: Tell us what kind of product you want to see, tell us what are some of the shortcomings, what are some of the pros and cons, and that's the best thing you know as product guys we could have.
• 40:32
  Speaker 1: Amazing.
• 40:33
  Speaker 1: So everyone needs to sample the product, test it out, find where the improvement areas are, find where the strengths are and then just help support its development and maturation over time.
• 40:44
  Speaker 2: Yeah, that would be great.
• 40:46
  Speaker 1: Amazing.
• 40:46
  Speaker 1: Well, thank you so much again.
• 40:48
  Speaker 1: Always appreciate our conversations.
• 40:50
  Speaker 2: Thanks for having me.