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🎉 2 Years Of Meta Pool w/ Dragonfly & Lyrik Ventures
Recorded: Aug. 22, 2023 Duration: 1:05:01Space Recording
Full Transcription
Hello, everybody.
Apologies.
Just having some issues with my microphone.
So anyhow, thank you very much, GM.
Good evening.
Good night.
We have a very special Twitter spaces today.
So we have a very important member of the medical family, medical community, long-time supporter, and also a fan of his work, thoughtful work that he's done throughout these years.
So, Tom, thank you very much for coming into this Twitter spaces to celebrate our two-year anniversary.
How are things over there?
Thanks, Claudio.
And, yeah, congratulations.
Things are going well.
Things are going well.
I think it's kind of business-free as usual for us over at Dragonfly, but I'm excited to be part of the fam and excited to talk on the spaces today.
Perfect.
Perfect.
Perfect.
Last but not least, we also got Rune Bentian from Lyric Ventures.
We met Rune when we first got started building on top of the Nier ecosystem, Nier Protocol.
Long-time supporter, even before coming in as a backer for Metapool.
Hey, Rune, how are you doing?
How's the weather and how's summer over there in Denmark?
Hola, Claudio and Metapool.
And, Tom, good to say hi to you as well and everybody else on the call.
Thank you for the invite and congrats on the two-year.
Who would have thought that in Cryptoland it's, I think, it's dog years, right?
The weather is nice, surprisingly enough, here in Copenhagen, but, you know, never complain.
And, yeah, really good to be here and, yeah, looking forward to questions and maybe ask a few as well.
So, yeah.
Yes, let's get this up and running.
So, anybody, so whoever's new coming into the space, my name is Claudio.
I'm one of the co-founders of Metapool.
We're the first liquid staking solution on Nier Protocol and Aurora.
Aurora is an EVM-compatible blockchain that runs the consensus and security mechanism on top of Nier.
And we just recently launched Ethereum staking three weeks ago.
So, really excited about being part of the Ethereum ecosystem as well.
We believe in a multi-chain world.
And so, we're definitely embracing that.
Where I'm here doing these spaces from Buenos Aires, Argentina.
We just had an incredible event the last week.
We were here for Ethereum Argentina supporting the land of builders, Tierra de Builders, as they call it here in Argentina.
And definitely, yeah, they're owning that name for sure.
It's a bold statement.
But then again, you cannot complain, right, Tom?
It's just the land of the current World Cup champions.
So, definitely really excited to be part of Ethereum Argentina.
So, let's get this started.
I believe there's been a couple of things happening the last couple of weeks, right?
A lot has been happening on the DeFi space.
Definitely, liquid staking tokens are going to be a key part, key component in this.
And this is the question that I want to start with.
And basically, state of liquid staking on Ethereum in alternative L1s or a multi-chain.
Your perspective on it, Tom, I know that you've been very vocal a couple of times regarding liquid staking.
I know Dragonfly has participated in a couple of liquid staking protocols, including Metapool.
So, it would be interesting for everybody here in the audience to understand your perspective moving forward and the role that LST tokens will play in allowing more capital efficiency for protocols.
And more importantly, will help us try to onboard the next 1 billion users into the crypto space.
So, you're two cents on it, Tom.
Yeah, I mean, I think, like you said, we've been on LSD bulls for a while, also on investors in Lido, on the largest one on Ethereum.
I think if you look at other chains, LSDs are sort of the natural state of the world.
And it's sort of this weird quirk in some ways that, you know, maybe Ethereum, you know, bake in some sort of tokenization interface into its staking.
And so, naturally, a market is sort of formed around it.
But if you kind of zoom out and think about, like, okay, what are sort of the market pressures that might be pushing us in this direction, there's a few fold.
One, obviously, is the benefits of using an LST over just having sort of a standard centralized validator or staking product is the fact that you can use these assets in DeFi.
And it's kind of what we see with something like Lido's Staked ETH is it's not just sitting on exchanges.
It's not just sitting in custodians.
It's sitting in AMMs.
It's sitting in lending pools.
And in some respects, it kind of becomes this way to bake in sort of the risk-free weight, quote unquote, of Ethereum via, you know, block rewards, via transaction fees into other aspects of the DeFi ecosystem.
So if I'm offering, you know, a new lending product or I want to, you know, maybe offer you a bid on your NFTs or something like that, I'm no longer competing with the, you know, 4% that I would be owning.
Otherwise, I can sort of be holding on to that 4% while I'm engaging in the other type of business that I might want to, you know, do in DeFi.
And so sort of the composability component is really kind of key, in addition to just sort of the other benefits you get from having liquidity, right?
You can easily swap in and out of the position.
There's no sort of staking delay.
Obviously, that's, you know, somewhat, there's a cap to that.
But having sort of instant liquidity for your assets is really valuable.
And in addition to just sort of this aggregation effect, right, as we sort of saw with the crack in settlement a couple months ago, you know, there is regulatory pressure being applied.
On sort of centralized staking services, at least in the U.S.
And so being able to, you know, effectively diversify and index your staking exposure across many different providers via LST is also just sort of one added benefit.
So looking at metrics, you know, an increasingly large percentage of ETH is being staked.
And that percentage of stake is increasingly going to LSTs.
And so it just kind of feels like the natural way of the world.
Yeah, thank you very much.
Rune, your two cents on it?
Yeah, thanks.
And thanks, Tom.
It's always interesting to hear.
So, you know, I'm incredibly excited about native staking and also in particular, like, this sort of, yeah, liquid token, right?
Or the flexibility that gives you as a whole, you can apply your assets in other use cases for whatever reasons that might be.
But, like, I think it's incredibly exciting.
One of the questions I sort of keep asking myself is, like, I mean, is it a winner takes it all?
I mean, Lido is doing an amazing job on the ETH side.
It's still so early, right?
Like, and, you know, is there how much space is there for other liquid derivatives on ETH and other networks, right?
And, you know, I initially thought this was going to be, like, a winner takes it all.
But I still think, like, it's such an early market and early days that I think, like, we're going to see a lot of innovation in this space and new applications and so forth, the composability that, you know, Tom referred to as well.
So I think it's still super early days.
And seeing stuff like, you know, Metapool working, obviously, on, you know, exposing yourself to Ethereum and is super exciting from, you know, from an investor point of view.
But also, I just think, like, in general, seeing how this space evolves and in that as well is obviously the work that you guys are doing on the DAO side as well that, you know, trying to really get these assets and these sort of tools in the hands of more users.
I think, you know, staking is being recognized as a core primitive within the more traditional financial world, and it definitely will be.
So I think it's, you know, with that in mind, I think it's still so early, right, that, you know, we have a very exciting sort of number of years ahead of us when it comes to liquid staking tokens and protocols and derivatives, right?
So, yeah, that was my long two cents.
All good.
Yes, I think we're, it came into, like, for us, when we launched on Nier, right, and making sure that we leveraged everything that the Nier protocol had to offer, we launched our liquid staking platform on top of a DAO, right?
And so, and that's been from Genesis, from day one.
And so this is something we've been always trying to push in every way we can, right?
And so, for example, right now, Metapool is the only liquid staking token on Nier protocol that is, yes, it's running on top of a DAO, but we're also launched governance on top of it, right?
I know it's been, and governance has been kind of like a tricky, there's, the tooling around it is still being built, right?
I think we're under sometimes the wrong impression that, yes, we're over on the Web 2.0 side, a lot of things have been developed, right?
There's a lot of technology from the likes of Dropbox, right, Box, Salesforce, Atlassian, whatever, right?
And so we're kind of used to having all this right tooling for building software, right?
But when it comes to DAOs, there's still a very important gap there, right?
Even when we were trying to build our governance, we were collaborating very close with Ask Your DAO.
That project eventually got, well, it kind of got stagnant, and we were left quite alone, right, in the sense that no tooling was being made.
And so here I need to give a shout out to my co-founder, Lucio, and the development team, right, who did an amazing job of keeping the vision and our mission on track, right, which is building governance around it.
And so we built the first, yeah, the first DAB called Metaboat in order to allocate 15% of the total delegation of Nier being put into the protocol in the hands of the validator nodes that are helping to, of course, maintain the Nier protocol network and, more importantly, run their consensus and security mechanism, right, and keep producing blocks, of course.
And so this has been, has been from day zero a challenge, right?
How do you structure not only on the software side, on the smart contract side, but also the governance around it, right?
And so in here I would like to get to understand your perspective.
I know Dragonfly has been very close to, has been collaborating one way or another with MakerDAO, right, with Rune being the other Rune, not Rune from Lyric.
Like being, joining Dragonfly now, joining back to Maker, or one way or another shifting roles, right?
And I think governance is still something pending on the table.
I believe it's something critical in order for us to bring in a lot of value to new users coming into crypto.
And so, Tom, I would like to get your perspective on it, right?
What do you see yourself, what do you see as the next step of things that we need to address in order to make governance more accessible, and more importantly, for DAOs to provide value back into the community?
Yeah, good question.
And as you mentioned, Rune, not Maker Rune, is a venture partner with us, and we've known him for a while.
I think, you know, we're in many ways still kind of in their sort of early stages of proto-governance.
A lot of DAOs are, you know, DAOs in name only, and there really is not an on-chain, you know, treasury or governance component, as we sort of saw with the Aragon DAO news a couple months ago.
I think there's also still kind of a legal and regulatory question around where DAOs fit in.
Most DAOs have a legal wrapper today, which I think is probably a safe move.
But as we also saw with the Uki DAO lawsuit, you know, there's an argument to be made that some DAOs might be viewed as an unincorporated partnership.
I think overall, though, like the problem most DAOs face, you know, is a fewfold.
One, really not much, there's not enough import to what they're actually governing.
And so I think that now just sort of breeds some apathy, but I think there's also, you know, sort of a lack of corporate hierarchy, for lack of a better term.
Most corporate decisions do not go through an all-shareholder vote, right?
If you are trying to approve new branding for your company, it's not subject to every single shareholder being able to weigh in.
You have layers of governance that apply to different, you know, levels of importance of decisions.
And so I actually think Maker has been pretty forward-thinking in this regard, in the sense, in the way of basically, you know, breaking out working groups by function, giving them a budget, and then letting them operate autonomously for set periods of time.
And so it looks more like a corporate board where you can approve individual, you know, executive functions and a budget and let them operate versus having to send every single decision through an executive vote.
So I suspect that will probably be the way to make this stuff sort of scale up and, frankly, maybe even get people involved.
It's difficult to even know what's going on a lot of times with respect to an individual vote or get involved in the process.
But if it starts to sort of break down into subcomponents that are maybe more grokkable for most people, I think that will sort of combat some of the apathy as well and just make the whole thing a little bit more approachable and a little bit more scalable as things grow.
Thank you very much, Tom.
I know it's been – it's something that, yes, we've been – that's still a challenge, right?
And even for Maker, right, they've been long on DAOs, right?
And Rune coming back to MakerDAO, like, signals that it's not an easy thing, right?
It's not something that you can just let the DAO run, right, and then forget about it, right?
And so sometimes the founders are – or the founding team needs to come back and clean up the house a little bit, right?
So, Rune, from Lyric, what's your perspective on DAOs, right?
I know you've been pretty active on the NIR ecosystem regarding DAO tooling, and so definitely your perspective is much, much appreciated.
Yeah, it's a good question.
So, I think the – there's been a lot of hype around DAOs, right?
And what does it even mean?
And I guess maybe let's start there.
So, for me, it's like there's this – we're trying to create this community, global community, where everybody can participate,
everybody can have a stake in the game, and everybody can have a vote and, you know, create upside or create value,
whether that being financial or, you know, in sort of the engagement that they do,
whether it's, like, intrinsic to them and so forth, right?
But I think the – you know, one interesting aspect is, like, everything is on chain, right?
So, but people talk about blockchains like, you know, everything is, you know, private, right?
Like, the fact is that all this data that's being generated on chain is, like, is worth a lot to, you know, a lot of, you know,
the existing data companies that are out there, right?
I mean, imagine all the behavior you create on chain, right?
You know, all your behavior is being recorded on chain, right, at some point in the future, right?
And that's providing some unique opportunities, right?
Like, so I think, like, there is definitely a consideration there that I think is not solved for, right?
But obviously, and, you know, I think Dragonfly, you guys are very much exposed to the world of CKs and so forth.
So there's a lot of interesting things going on in the privacy side, right?
But then there is the whole thing about, like, how much do people actually want to, you know, contribute, right,
in these communities, right?
And I think, like, also trying to think, not, like, trying to apply this technology for the sake of the technology,
but actually find, like, use cases or communities where there is, like, some value being created by the members, right?
And then, like, try to see how can you enable them better with these tools and not the other way around.
I think that's extremely important, right?
And, yeah, I would see that there is obviously also the, because you see the, you know, Astrodial as an example, right?
Like, one of the guys behind it always used to say that it's more like a way to keep records, right?
A lot of decisions are actually being made off-chain, right?
But it's a way for us to actually record these decisions that are being made by the members in this specific DAO and on, right?
And, you know, I think that's very true.
There is obviously questions around, like, sort of this, these ecosystems that we create, you know, are they,
I think Maker has done an incredible job over the years, right?
I mean, there's a reason why they're still here.
You know, the foundation was very firm on dissolving itself, right?
And spun out these business units that are today, like, very much still involved, right?
In building out and maintaining and keeping, you know, I would say Maker as, you know,
one of the leading projects of all in DeFi, right?
And, yeah, like, you know, I think we have to see how this space evolves, I think,
for just trying to tie this back into, you know, the likes of Metapool and you have, you know, Lido and others as well, right?
Like, for me, it's like, what sort of the users are you trying to address as well, right?
Like, where, you know, it's still very early days overall and you have a lot of focus on builders that participate in this to make sure that, you know,
these solutions are built out strongly.
But also what I like with Metapool, it actually is trying to engage with the end users, like the real end users of products, right?
And then all of the Liquid token through things such as the Metaboat, but there is also this whole sort of platform for projects that can get funding.
And I think, actually, that's a generally really exciting use case that you're trying to address with, you know, your technology and your platform, right?
And I think, yeah, I'll pause there for your two cents.
So definitely for us is we wanted, when we decided to go to Ethereum, we wanted to get an angle on how to approach the community, right?
We understood that there's definitely big players out there.
We need to recognize the hard work that Konstantin and Vlad had done over at Lido.
So the folks at RocketPool as well, right?
So just to address the elephants in the room, right?
But one of the, how can we leverage coming in a little bit as a late bloomer, right, on the ETH ecosystem?
For us, we understood something, right, from the get-go, which is how can liquid-staking platforms be a source of growth for emerging economies,
for the ones that we truly built everything for, right?
It was really funny when I was at stage in ETH, and I asked the audience, right?
And being here in Argentina, this makes the whole sense, right?
It's just, I asked, hey, who from the audience has faced 15% inflation?
A few folks raised their hands, right?
Most of them being Mexican, right?
And so, and I was very blunt about it, right?
It's like, we're building tools and the next generation of building value online, not for you.
Sorry, but that's, how are we going to, how do we think we're going to onboard the next 1 billion users?
They're not going to be in emerging markets.
It's not in Western countries.
That's not going to happen, right?
The next 1 billion users are going to come from emerging markets, right?
Where we're going to build value-added protocols, right?
That have this new value creation process that has some underlying financial value.
And that they can definitely use them as a means to, and I'm not going to say we're going to pull people out of poverty, right?
But we're going to give them the tools necessary for them to save, for example.
Savings is something that might be trivial for many countries, but definitely for in Argentina right now that I came in on last Friday, right?
Or two Fridays ago.
And then Sunday, yeah, elections.
And then the Monday, a drop of 15%.
And then on Tuesday, another drop of 15%.
And so is this, like, people complain about crypto markets, but definitely they should come here to Argentina and really face the true colors of how broken a financial system from state-run governments really feels like, right?
And so when we launched on Ethereum, we said, hey, how can we make an impact, right?
And what we said is, let's replicate what we're doing right now on NIR, which is we're putting all protocol fees generated from the staking rewards back into the community.
And so we're committing our first 1,000 to 2,000 on MPEs to do exactly that, right?
But then I said, you know what, let's put our tokens where our mouth is, right?
And so we partnered with Gitcoin and we said, okay, we're going to support a round, right?
Focus on emergent markets.
And so with this, we partnered with Gitcoin and we launched the LATAM round.
And so we're putting 25,000 DAI there for projects that are helping us spread the word on why staking is important, how staking can be a source of value creation for emergent markets.
And so in this, I think it's something that it needs to be done, right?
And it's something that even if Konstantin and Vlad, the LIDO team, or maybe even Rocketpool, if they want to do it, right now they have all this internal processes that will make them, that the processes are slow, right?
Even if they have good intentions in doing that, I believe that right now coming into the, as a new player into the ETH ecosystem, we can come with this fresh perspective and really have an impact on emergent markets, right?
And because we believe that's going to be the source of growth for crypto in the next two years, right?
I'm not going to go say five, right?
If we do, if we play our cards right, partner with the right protocols, I believe we can do so in the next two years, right?
And so that's something we're betting heavily on.
And definitely regarding this, Tom, so I know Dragonfly has been expanding over to the Apex zone.
So tell us a little bit about that, your perspective on it.
I don't know if you've been there lately, but what is the word on the street, right?
How do you feel that emergent markets will make an impact in crypto?
Yeah, I mean, I think having a global footprint and global DNA has been kind of part of Dragonfly since day one.
We are really split kind of 50-50 between Asia and kind of the West, the U.S. and Europe more broadly.
And yeah, it's very much a different ecosystem out there.
I was just out there in February and going back out for Token 2049 in September.
I think, you know, in some ways, if you're not looking at Asia, you're kind of missing a large part of the market, not just in the sense of, oh, talking about exchange volumes or something like that, but in terms of the technology and applications that people are using.
And culturally, what, you know, crypto sort of indicates, and I think you sort of see that this is maybe slightly tangential.
We had a great research piece on our blog about a year ago about Ibox.
I think a lot of people in the West, they think of NFTs, they think of OpenSea, they think of Blur, and they think of, you know, hey, on-chain art or on-chain PFPs.
Ibox was this sort of centralized NFT, quote-unquote, marketplace in China that was extremely popular, but there was really no on-chain component to it.
It was really sort of almost like a centralized database that allowed people to swap, you know, JPEGs back and forth.
And yet, that was sort of the technology and platform that people ended up choosing over, you know, something like Blur or OpenSea and sort of the NFTs that we think of, which are, you know, sort of on-chain smart contracts and collectibles.
And so, I think, you know, there's a few sort of tailwinds kind of, I think, promoting Asia right now in the sense of, hey, from a regulatory perspective, it's a lot more attractive than the U.S. for entrepreneurs.
And yet, there's still a lot of teams that are a population that's increasingly becoming online, already very tech-savvy and digital and, you know, culturally accepting towards digital collectibles.
But sort of the technology and the applications that people use are just different than, I think, what maybe we're used to or what we see.
And so, for teams that are thinking about expanding their go-to-market, I would probably recommend them spend some time in Asia and see what's going on on the ground there.
Because it's not something that's really captured if you just spend time on Twitter or you spend time on, you know, Discord.
It's sort of isolated in some ways, but still very important in large.
Rune, your perspective on it and maybe get some gritty details on it, right?
In the sense of how we started collaborating, even before we launched, right?
You talked to a guy from Mexico and Argentina, right?
In full-on pre-pandemic mode.
So, if I may, can I just ask you, Tom, like a question?
And so, it's really interesting to hear this.
And, you know, we've done, we're obviously a very young fund and small fund compared to you guys, right?
But we've obviously exposed to, you know, the Asian region and we have done a couple of investments there as well.
But, like, somebody said to me, like, two months ago, right?
Like, never bet against America, right?
And I'm just, there's also a lot of reports around, like, there's still, like, a lot of activity also, like, you know, in the Bay Area, et cetera, right?
Like, what are the, if you can point to any, like, what are any observations or differences that you see between the two regions, right?
So, if you take U.S. and Asia, right?
Because, you know, U.S. is not going anywhere, right?
Despite all the friction that is in the industries, but in particular in the U.S.
that I think you alluded to yourself earlier, right?
But I'd just love to hear if you have any sort of observations.
Yeah, I think the different regions tend to have entrepreneurs that have different types of strengths.
I think, you know, just empirically, Asia runs laps around the U.S. when it comes to CeFi, and that's why all the largest exchanges are coming out of Asia.
I think, you know, to your point, there is still a strong, you know, tech culture, deep tech culture coming out of kind of the West.
And I think that's also why we see a lot of the sort of core infrastructure improvements, you know, a lot of the ZK research still coming out of kind of the West.
But I think it's more of a regulatory issue that it's just extremely difficult right now for teams to build a great product in a regulatory compliant way if they want to do something in DeFi, for example, out of the U.S.
And, you know, this is more crypto-specific, not talking about AI or something.
We're a crypto-only fund, it's a crypto space.
So, you know, I can't really comment on what's happening in maybe the Bay more broadly, for example.
And I am optimistic that in the long run, I think we get to a better spot that allows teams to have clarity and operate comfortably in the U.S.
But for right now, I think kind of what we're seeing is some teams even, you know, moving out of the U.S.
or, you know, having a nexus outside the U.S. partially as a way to hedge, but also as partially as a way to get access to, you know, users and capital that are coming out of Asia.
So, yeah, I didn't mean to make this sound like a totally anti-U.S. team or U.S. entrepreneur sentiment.
We obviously were still doing investments in the U.S.
more speaking to the fact that, you know, you're missing some of the bigger pie if you're not looking at Asia.
You know, for example, we're also investors in Bitkeep, mobile wallet.
I believe they're at like two or three million monthlies.
I don't know how many people in this podcast know of Bitkeep or have used Bitkeep, but extremely popular mobile wallet in Asia.
And it's like if you aren't there, if you aren't talking to people, if you're not looking at what people are using, you're missing components of this because you would normally be using Metamask Mobile or Rainbow or Coinbase Wall or something like that.
And so it's just making sure that you're not sort of getting dialed into one sort of world perspective.
Yeah, thanks, Tom.
That's really interesting.
I know I didn't know about Bitkeep, but I'm looking at it now.
So thanks for sharing.
Yeah.
And so I actually think like, Claudia, just to answer your question there, I like, but, you know, you seem like two grown up guys thinking both of children at the time as well.
You have some obligations, you know, I'm going to run away.
No, I'm just I'm just kidding.
But like the the to me, at least, partly there was obviously trusting meeting people online and you haven't met them in person and you have to take their word for what they want to build is actually being built.
And they don't run away with the money, but like, you know, obviously you make a bet.
Right.
And I think for me, at least it's also ties back to this conversation.
Right.
I knew that you were coming from a part of the world where I assume that you would see a bigger need for a new financial system and new money.
And I think like this sort of probably, at least from my point of view, speaks to that you're still here.
Right. That you're very committed to the to to building out Metapool as a really powerful play, not only in your region, but obviously like globally, but providing access to, you know, new, you know, ways for people to make, you know, reliable and stable incomes.
Right. In regions where that's never been the case.
Right. And, you know, maybe this is sort of oversimplifying a bit.
Right. But like, you know, if you have parts of the world that skip the whole, you know, broadband sort of infrastructure that we've have deeply embedded in in in the Western world.
Right. Like literally in the ground and just jumped right onto the mobile Internet.
Right. Like maybe there is some sort of parallels to that as well.
Right. Where you can actually like, you know, everybody is, you know, big parts of the world.
So they are on mobile. Right. That's extremely powerful.
Right. And through that, you would have connect connection and connectivity to all sorts of applications.
Right. And I think like, you know, there is a play there for for Metapool with sort of at least what I've seen about to now.
So, yeah, I think like, you know, tying that back to some of the reasons why, you know, asking support.
And also, I think I've shared this with you before.
Right. Like we.
This was in 21. Right.
Bull market near was extremely young, like had had less than a year and in on main net.
Right.
And no liquid token like LIDL was new, very new at that time.
When I looked at that, I was just like, somebody is going to build that on on there.
Right. And it's going to be like such a big.
I mean, it is the arguably the biggest sort of.
Derivative play that we have here.
Right. And it will be in the years and decades to come.
It's going to be the biggest one.
Right. If you ask me and obviously variations of that.
Right. So it's just like, OK, so we were actually trying to Australian put this together with another guy from London.
And like the first liquid staking protocol and we're one week from announcing it.
And, you know, we didn't have we hadn't built anything out yet.
And then, you know, I came across you guys and I was like.
Screw it. We're not going to build on.
We'd rather support these two crazy guys, Claudio and Lucio and their team.
Right. And, you know, super impressed with what you've built so far.
So. Yeah.
Perfect. Perfect. Yeah. Yeah.
It's been it's been a crazy two years. Right.
We've been we've been building for the last, yeah, two, two years, two years, two years closest to two years and a half.
So really happy about what we built.
I understand that right now market conditions are quite challenging. Right.
I do want to be mindful of our time.
I do want to give maybe a little bit of an opportunity for folks to raise their hand if you want to ask some questions as well in this two year anniversary.
You got two great people here that know a lot of have a lot of perspective in this space.
I do want to give everybody here a chance to to maybe come up, ask, ask a question either about medical or about liquid staking for sure.
So we're going to open this up. So, Francisco, be where be be ready for that.
If anybody wants to come on stage and talk, I'll give you a chance.
Please do be mindful. Right.
The following things, just housekeeping and everything we said here should not be considered financial advice.
Please do your own research. Right.
We're trying to keep a healthy, healthy vibe here in the spaces and also be respectful for for the hosts and the speakers today.
But, yeah, if anybody has has any questions, you can they can raise their hands and we'll pull them up.
But I do want to be mindful. I know Tom is running on a tight schedule.
So anyhow, last question here. Right.
So we understand that. And I think you raised this question really good or this this theme here, Tom, mobile will play a big role.
Right. We understand right now that tooling as it is for for for staking is going through wallets.
Right. Native staking is will be a challenge because at the end of the day, you have to rely on either a mobile wallet and then discovery of of how can I say a good actor regarding validator notes.
And in the network is important. So your perspective on on staking or liquid staking and mobile experience, where do you think is the next bounce of the ball?
Right. Making it easier and more importantly, making it safe for people to under to make a decision on how to stake or where to stake.
Tom, you want to take it?
Yeah, I mean, I think you kind of nailed it. Two big trends that are increasingly growing.
I mean, I do think like, you know, one of the also sort of bigger unsolved questions here is around, you know, private key management.
I think kind of the trend that we're increasingly seeing is people moving towards either, you know, wall as a service type of products using using MPC or HSM.
And, you know, as we just saw with like the front tech growth, it's all using this MPC wall as a service on the on the back end.
But that's enabled it to grow so quickly or people pushing more account abstraction, smart contract wall type of functionality and maybe abstracting out what it means to have a key and sort of making it less risky to have something like a raw private key on your device.
I think that all kind of feeds into just making it easier to onboard people and then that sort of feeding downstream into allowing people to more easily, you know, stake their assets, manage their assets.
Yeah, you can imagine even, hey, I can have a key that is only allowed to, you know, move my assets from one validator to another or to, you know, limit the amount of assets that can be sent in a given day, sort of like a hot wallet or that's maybe limited to $200 a day.
And all those kinds of things that we've come to expect from, you know, top of the line, you know, fintech apps and neobanks, you know, those should be present in crypto as well if we actually want to reach mass adoption.
Perfect.
Rune, your two cents on it.
I'll try to give you my two near, two tokens.
So, I mean, there's a lot of interesting stuff going on, right?
Like there is, I heard this podcast by Castle Island Ventures and a guy from IBIX, which is a South American.
And firm in this space as well, very focused on Lightning.
And, you know, he was sort of throwing out the indication of signal.
He thought that it would be like a stable coin on Bitcoin slash Lightning coming in like next one and a half years, right?
And so why do I mention that?
Because what you said, Tom, around keys and so forth, like there is actually a really, like a lot of interesting stuff going on in that space as well.
I don't know if you guys are familiar with Fetiment, but that's a new way to do sort of like management of funds and keys as well.
Well, super exciting stuff there.
Well, that will stay separate or sort of overlap and interfere with the stuff that we do here in Ethereum and NIR and crypto in general.
Well, the future will tell.
But I think in general, there is a big push towards that.
And I think that's going to enable more of these use cases that we're talking about.
And, yeah, I'll post there.
Perfect.
I know, Tom, you got to run.
Any last comments before you head out?
I do want to be mindful of your time.
I appreciate all the effort, all the support Dragonfly has given us and the team.
I know we've met a couple of times.
He's also with Hasif, who couldn't join us today because he's doing a proper summer vacation with family, which is always great to touch ground and, more importantly, touch family and spend time with them.
So, Tom, any last comments before you head out?
Yeah, I mean, it's been a great part of it with you as well.
I think super excited to see the direction MediPool has been going in.
And congrats on all the success and traction so far.
And it's like you said, I think it's sitting at this great intersection of the rise of mobile and crypto, the rise of liquid staking and crypto.
And I'm really excited to be working with you guys and sort of be a force for positive change in the industry.
Thank you very much, Tom.
OK, we can let you go now.
Send regards to the whole Dragonfly team.
Hope the Stanford Blockchain Conference goes good.
For folks that are going to be over there, please do reach out to Tom and the team.
They're going to be there.
So anyhow, so it's just you and me, Rune.
We're going to close this up.
We're going to be here for another 10 more minutes.
So if anybody has any questions, any comments, please do raise your hand.
Come up on stage.
Ask the tough questions.
We're here to try to answer them as much as we can.
But definitely, Rune, regarding multi-chain staking, right?
I think that's something that is on top of mind right now for most of liquid staking protocols, right?
It's like how much is too much and how little is just too little, right?
I think that's one key question, right?
I think Lido has been facing some of the challenges, right?
They, for example, were coming into the Nier ecosystem, then decided not to join as a liquid staking provider.
So how do you feel like fragmentation of liquidity is, it's either, and there's two sides of the coin, right?
People think that sometimes having diversity is good, but then fragmentation reels in their own head and that has an impact on the underlying protocol.
So I want to understand your two cents on it, and let's take it from there.
Yeah, thanks, Claudio.
So I want to make sure I understand your question, but I'll try to just answer right away.
So I think, like, you know, if you look at ETH, right, ETH is the mode, right?
And, you know, there's only 20% or so of ETH staked today.
So it's still so early.
There's clearly, like, room to grow for everybody and be involved.
I would say, as with anything, you need to be in the money in order to have anything to do in a space, right?
So I think that's the, how do you then capture that liquidity?
And we've seen that, like, in Nier, specifically around, like, getting liquidity to projects, right?
And then people talk about the chicken and the egg situation.
Well, just if I have liquidity, I get users.
Oh, if I have users, like, liquidity will come, right?
So I think, like, for anybody who is trying to, including Metapool, right, like, it's, you know, to expand into the leagues, super important to enable that through, you know, partnerships, et cetera, et cetera.
But I clearly think there is space, right?
And I'm like, I mean, LIDAR is a great, you know, in my opinion, like, example of innovation in this space where, you know, just trying to sort of stay focused on some of the core functions that, in this case, that POS network has, right, around staking.
But also enabling sort of that liquidity and flexibility, which in turn will enable new use cases, right, and business models, right?
So I think that's pretty cool.
And you can obviously talk about restaking.
There is, I've been looking at, like, everybody talks about, like, Lair, and I've been looking at it for a long time and haven't looked too deep into it.
I would say I've followed it, right?
Like, and I think it's obviously an interesting application.
I'm still trying to get my head around it because obviously it speaks to the security of the network and so forth.
But I'm looking forward to see how that evolves.
And then the other thing I think is extremely interesting is, like, which ties into this narrative that Tom alluded to before as well, which is around, like, you know, there's push on regulations from regulators, right?
Like, if you take DBT, distributed validated technology, I think that's sort of really having spoken to a bunch of players in this industry myself over the past few months.
I think that's going to get a big push forward from, you know, the likes of SSV, Oval, and others, right?
So, but really that sort of tries to speak to compliance and sort of having a more, like, professional way of managing or, like, doing staking and also, I think, for some, at least, on top of the staking, liquid derivatives as well, right?
So, yeah, so definitely it's still a challenge, right?
It's, like, deciding where to go.
Definitely Ethereum is by far the largest market right now.
And as you said, that there's still a lot of room to grow.
This doesn't mean it's going to be easy, right?
And we do not expect this, right?
So, we understand that we need to build trust, right?
And here, a shout out to Tunacion Bankless, who's here, the Near Digital Collective as well, ETH Daily as well, that's here.
And I believe that a lot of people are going into this a little bit mindful on, okay, so it's this new liquid staking token, right, MPE.
But if you scratch a little bit, you know that you should know and learn that we've been here for quite a bit of time.
We launched the liquid staking token fully on, audited by Hallburn, by Blocksec, right?
And so, we are mindful in always putting our customers or token holders front and center everything we do, right?
I reckon one of the big things or the biggest challenges that we have in communicating what we stand for is,
well, we stand for making communities grow, right, through a liquid staking token, through the protocol fees and the staking rewards being distributed back into the community, right?
And so, it's important for us to understand that as more protocols are supported to the medical DAO, this will in itself create more protocol fees,
which in itself will create more protocol fees from the staking rewards, which will be going back to the community, right?
Now, the tokenomics around it, right, around the governance token and how right now, for example, on NIR,
all protocol fees from the staking rewards are going back to governance token holders that are participating actively in the DAO, right,
and also that are pushing forward proposals to increase the value for the protocol, right?
And increasing the value for the protocol is a very zero-sum game.
It's just increasing TVL, right, total value lock, which means more delegation of NIR.
And if you're making a proposal that will allow Metapol to have more delegation of NIR, we're totally fine by supporting you every step of the way.
And so, this is something we want to bring to Ethereum as well.
We're figuring it out.
We understand governance right now is only on the NIR protocol blockchain.
We are looking to understanding how can we leverage blockchain operating system to allow the Ethereum ecosystem to interact with the governance over in NIR protocol.
We're still figuring it out.
That's why we're being very open and proactive in listening to the community and understanding how can we bring this governance on a multi-chain level.
Not easy, right?
Yes, we've been talking to a couple of the bridges, wormhole and whatnot, Acceler, but then again, placing, it's not a trivial task, right?
Putting governance on a bridge or depending on a bridge is, at least from our perspective, way too risky, right?
And it's not something that should be taken out lightly.
But anyhow, so regarding bridging, Rune, I know it's always a very delicate topic, right?
And so, we've seen hacks.
We've seen the value that they can bring, but also it comes with a caveat, right?
So, I want to understand your perspective.
And with this, well, nobody is raising their hand.
Nobody wants to ask some questions, so I think we can wrap this up.
But anyhow, this is one last question regarding bridging on a multi-chain level.
Rune, you're there?
Yes, sorry.
I was just wondering, was that a question for me?
Yes, so regarding bridges and enabling maybe governance through a multi-chain initiative, right, that has this dependency on bridges, what's your perspective on it, right?
Is that something, what would you advise up-and-coming protocols or protocols that are thinking of bringing their governance on a multi-chain level, right?
Yeah, I mean, there is obviously inherent risk in bridges, but I think also, like, it's matured a lot.
And I mean, I think, look at our nearest only, well, not only, but, like, initial bridge Aurora with Rainbow has done an amazing job on that part, right?
I think that technology will continue to evolve.
I mean, I saw one of our other portfolio companies, Request.Finance, has enabled crypto to fiat payments now through a bridge as well.
So I think, like, these things just have to evolve, right?
I mean, and I don't think the bridges are going to go away.
So I think just make sure that, you know, that the ones who want to apply this sort of multi-chain setup will have to be really thorough on those bridges and making sure that, you know, obviously, I mean, audits needs to be done and needs to be done on an ongoing basis, right?
But I think also staying up to date with that sort of technology.
And maybe there are other solutions in the future or near future instead of using bridges as well.
But I will, yeah, think it's a viable solution for at least partially enabling these sort of multi-chain communities, right?
Yes, it's still, and like I said before, right, we're still at a very early stage.
And I think maybe many of you have gone weary of, yes, we're still early, we're still early ethos, right?
The reality is that, right?
And we need, if we sound like a broken record, please be mindful that we do need to let that sink in, right?
It's just the technology is just being built.
We were recently, my co-founder and myself were talking to like some early people that saw, for example, Coinbase initial fundraise and even PayPal's initial proposal to some gateway payments over in London, right?
And so it's, and for many of you, PayPal, it's been, yeah, maybe a dinosaur.
For many of us that are in our early 40s, it's still, there's still a company we grew up with, right?
Buying on eBay and whatnot.
And so many of, many of you that are hearing this in the spaces will, will have a reminiscence of this, this same time, right?
Where bridges were a discussion, right?
Where DAOs were still a discussion, right?
And hopefully in the next two years, we will have enough tooling to solve some of the most pressing issues.
For now, we're still discussing, right?
I do have a call to action to everybody.
Just join our Discord, join our Telegram, please.
If you have any questions, if you have any comments, if you have any proposals as well, right?
I've been getting a couple of DMs for, for, for people that want to, to, to join us and, and, and have proposals to, to get the word out there.
Please do be mindful, do it, do it through Discord.
Our team is there, our communications team is there.
Do your requests through there.
I'm not too good at answering or sending DMs over Telegram, just FYI on that one.
But other than that, we're keen, we also have an ambassador program as well.
Do reach out to Alan and the team over there on the Discord or Francisco as well.
We're keen on onboarding emergent market leaders, emergent market community leaders that are, that want to push the envelope on how staking can be a source of growth for a, a, a, adoption and growth for emergent markets.
So really excited about that.
And this is a little bit of alpha for those that maybe have not, uh, hear it before.
Uh, we're going to be committing to get coin grounds, 19, again.
Um, we're thinking of, of launching also the Latam round, maybe split it up into APAC.
We're still undecided on that.
So do voice your opinion.
And if you want, want us to support emergent market, sorry, emergent region of APAC, maybe we'll do a, a round for Latam and a round for APAC.
We're keen in supporting, um, up and coming leaders, up and coming projects and how staking can be a part of that, of that strategy for growth.
So for that, I think we're going to wrap this up right on time.
Rune, any last comments you want to make?
Also, I see here, uh, the big brain team, one of our backers as well.
If you want to raise, uh, uh, come up on stage, uh, near big brain, please do raise your hand, come up on stage and say hello to the folks.
We can maybe push this a little bit more, five, five, six more minutes.
But Rune, I do want to be mindful of your time.
Uh, any last comments, any chills that you want to say?
Go right.
I think, um, if, if the big brain peeps want to jump on, just do so and I'll shut up right away.
Uh, what, what, what I think is encouraging to see, um, for example, within the NERIC system, I like, I encourage these, the protocols here, right?
Like, so if we assume that the future is business model is protocols, like, um, you know, try to build your own ecosystems, right?
Of users and developers and partners and so forth.
And I think that's going to be extremely powerful.
So you end up with this sort of network of networks, right?
And then clearly the way that Metapool is structured and what you're doing, you know, you fit into that.
Um, but the, the, the example I was thinking of is also the, um, uh, mid-base project, right?
Uh, which are like running the grants, uh, program themselves, right?
For their own projects that are actually being built.
And I think these are just, you're going to see this more and more, right?
Um, and, um, it's just one first step in the right direction to create these sort of your own ecosystems and networks and networks of networks of users and developers and, you know, so forth.
So, yeah, maybe have a think about that as well, like to everybody on the call, like how can you sort of enable that yourselves as your founder?
Also, how can you integrate towards, you know, what Metapool is doing or is there anything else that could be brought to Metapool?
So, um, yeah, and thanks for the invite and congrats again.
Thank you very much.
Thank you very much.
I think, uh, near big brain is a little bit busy, but hearing us there, please shout out, uh, some, a round of applause for, for, um, for Rune.
Uh, Tom has already left, but anyhow, just a round of applause if you can, yes, please, uh, it's, it's, it's through the support of our backers that we're managed to, to build what we built, what we have built.
And I think one of the big things here is just a, an example that projects from LATAM can grow on a global scale.
I think that's my, my last message to everybody listening here, right?
Um, uh, and, and, and, and if you're building from, from a emergent market region, it can be done, right?
Sometimes, yes, market conditions right now are quite challenging, but, but this should not deter you from building, right?
Um, from creating, for creating a solution for your region or for a protocol itself, there's still a lot of white space as, as Tom said, right?
And Rune has also mentioned, right?
There's still a lot of white space on the mobile experience, a lot of white space on DAO tooling.
Maybe, yes, and, and, and also very, very mindful, right?
If you're looking to build in, on a decentralized protocol on blockchain technology, thinking you're going to, you're going to be the next millionaire or billionaire, uh, just be mindful that those, those realities are, are not, are not the day-to-day realities.
Reality is you're going to struggle.
You're going to sweat.
You're going to sometimes bleed.
Sometimes you're going to cry, right?
But is it, but it is through a community effort that we can build something that has sustainable value, right?
And I think that's the key question.
Can you build something that is sustainably valuable for your region?
And if you do so, you will leave this place a much better, uh, environment for your, for your, your, your, your, um, compatriots, your colleagues, your family, your siblings, your significant other, your, your children, right?
Um, which is, I think a much better, uh, a goal than just becoming, uh, uh, crypto rich, right?
Uh, um, and so that's our two cents on it.
Uh, my two cents as a builder, as a co-founder, as a father, as a family man, but more importantly, as a member of the near the Aurora and the, and now the Ethereum ecosystem, right?
We're here, we're here to build, we're here to support.
Please, uh, reach out to us if you, if you, if you have any, any questions, any, any projects where we can help do go to the get coin, uh, grants round 18 support projects there.
There's definitely some interesting ones regarding regenerative finance or refi, uh, of course, education and learning is key.
And so with that, I leave you, um, and, and wishing you everybody here, um, and also just one last thing.
I'm very grateful for all your support.
It's been more than two years since we started building here on web three.
I think we got another, another two more years and five, and hopefully more, 10 more years to go building solutions for emergent markets.
And more importantly, building value for each and every one of you token holders on the different blockchains that we support.
Thank you very much, everybody.
Uh, stay safe.
Uh, thank you for being part of our two year celebration next year.
Hopefully we'll bring more and more different, um, uh, values to the different blockchains we support.
And Rune, thank you very much for everything.
Nick near big brain, shout out to you as well.
Thank you very much for everything.
And we'll see you the next basis.
Stay safe, everybody.
Until next time.
Bye.
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Meta Pool
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