thanks for joining we'll be with you shortly we're waiting for the space to
fill up a little bit more and then we'll get kicked off
okay thanks for joining everyone today you'll join we're joined by Nico the
head of the DeFi here at Trillitec and I think I've probably introduced myself
because many of you in the community probably haven't heard from me yet but I
am blockchain Jeff Jeffrey Elliott I am one of the new community managers here
at Trillitec and you'll be hearing from me quite a lot just to give you a
little bit background I've been in web 3 for about seven years in various
community oriented roles and yeah now I'm here doing the same at Trillitec but
yeah let's get kicked off we're joined by Nico as I mentioned the head of DeFi
here at Trillitec and yeah Nico would you like to give us a bit of a
background about yourself your role and yeah sounds good hi everyone it's
actually interesting that you've been in the space for seven years I didn't know
that myself yeah it's been a while yeah on my side maybe I'll do a small intro
on my own because not everyone has seen one of my pieces of content which
has sparse and quite spread around so far so I joined Trillitec six months ago
roughly and Trillitec for those of you guys even in the wider community is
essentially like you know an equivalent of Tezos labs you know in other
ecosystems together with Nomadic Labs were co-developing helping to develop the
new parts of the blockchain and we're working on adoption and spreading the
word on what the Tezos blockchain should be used for and the upcoming
newer chain called Isalink which is a layer to rolling up to Tezos coming up
very shortly so I joined six months ago and the role here and there was a goal
really is to actually get some DeFi activity properly going on Tezos more
than we've we've had before and also in a more innovative and sort of you know
thinking out of the box way we do want to have some of the things that are
happening in other ecosystems and with the new introduction of Isalink and
therefore an EVM pass to builders that's made quite simple actually compared to
before but but we also have an ambition to actually do a lot more and contribute
to making the space more useful in general and more vibrant and what I mean
by that is doing things that are related to real-world components like
having DeFi and Block III components in new apps that only leverage blockchain
as opposed to being all about blockchain and having some users who use it without
really knowing what blockchain is about knowing every single element of the
stack having to you know install a metamask and trying to do as a seed
tracing on a piece of paper and all of this and that's essentially what we have
been hard at work doing with the team here so DeFi team and the way the teams
at Trillitec Nomadic Labs and the smaller entity we have in APAC called
TDA. Thanks for that introduction and yeah let's get kicked off with the
questions we have a few community questions to go into so I suppose first
question that we have is what are the unique advantages of building DeFi
applications on Tezos compared to other platforms? Yep so there's two parts to
that answer really one part is the historical one which is already live
already open for business available and all that which is a Tezos layer one
itself so Tezos chain that most people would be familiar with on the Tezos
chain one of the components of it is the whole idea that the co-founders had at
the beginning and is living to this day is the idea of security built-in from
the get-go in the smart contracts that get deployed on that Tezos layer one
and that's this idea of like you know you see this in various ways from the
way Mickelson which is a smart contract language on Tezos to any of the higher
level languages that essentially get transpiled into Mickelson
like like you know like MLEGO, JSLEGO, SmartPy and so on the idea was
really to have a very secure environment that would almost guarantee and nothing
is a guarantee really but almost guarantee that there is no clear bug in
the code with like you know formal verification and a bunch of things that
were like designed from the ground up for this that's an advantage of it it
does come with like you know having to learn potentially new tools for people
who haven't been building in in one of those languages in the past and some of
the tool stack around those like you know people would be familiar on this
code probably even more than I do like tekito and you know like interacting
with wallets that are a bit different in their structure like kukai and
temple and things like that and the advantage really on the Tezos
ecosystem that exists today and frankly has existed for a year and a half in the
current sort of form is security from the get-go and reusing some of the
elements that have been built in the ecosystem by other brave pioneers like
you know use and and codify and plenty and so on. On the EVM side because we're
trying to expand quite a bit the audience that we're catering to and on
the EVM side you know with this only currently being launched you know the
testnet is fairly stable and I saw a tweet earlier today or yesterday saying
that it was quite stable now and that the EVM compatibility had sort of been
done and later on in the roadmap you also have Justice which is a
JavaScript based roll-up but essentially with those the entire goal is to have
access to that community which is fairly large at this point of solidity builders
I would say VM but at the end of the day Viper is nowhere near where EVM is at
the moment solidity is at the moment and those solidity builders with all of
those tools that have been built by third parties like alchemy and third
web and and the search JSTM and web3 before them are really really strong
tools that are like heavily battle-tested at this point for some
specific types of apps that are already out there and taking a quick look at
defile armor right now we can think that those type of apps those types of apps
on our bedroom for example or on BSC or on this area itself tend to be like you
know broadly speaking like five types of apps at most which have been quite
refined over the last two years two years and a half and and are like
fairly mature at this point you have like you know five broad types one is
have a compound and what people call money markets in defile so those
actually money markets is a missed number of number for those but at the
end of the day what it means is that you can deposit a token so let's say wrap
Bitcoin and then based on that token being considered as a collateral you can
actually borrow another token which obviously like most likely is going to be
different from the one you've deposited and it could be a stable coin link to
the dollar like USDC or USDT it could be I don't know like you know
RAP test, RAP ether and so on you have like applications like Uniswap which
enable you to swap one token for another and those are in the lingo are called
spot taxes and those like you know again have like massively evolved over time so
the latest iteration with the v4 is slated to be online by the
beginning of April or something and and those again are super helpful for like
giving liquidity from one token to another to people like people would have
done in Tezos with plenty or I believe QuipuSwap was another
DEX and it's still online and still vibrant on the plenty side and
you have like each of those have a very strong code base that is like you know
well audited has been battle-tested with billions of dollars in TVL and trillions
of dollars in volume over the years and essentially being able to deploy it like
for like those solidity contracts whether you are exactly doing a fork of
one of those or you're doing something more ambitious and reusing building
blocks from those code repositories a very famous one is open zeppelin which
is a smart contract auditing firm making an open source library of smart
contracts available to everyone for everyone to use for free or you know
like newer ones like the third web one which unfortunately had an exploit
recently but otherwise it is really good quality and it's also linked to a
very very well-designed UI UX framework making it super easy for you for
example to to deploy embedded wallets and that's the last thing I'm gonna
mention in the details is those embedded wallets if you go to third web right now
you are able to deploy what is essentially a smart wallets with the
third web which is designed for you and that can be tailored and fine-tuned
however you like in literally five minutes only so much and that's
something that you know is quite secure again it's experimental take and you
know anything can happen but has been a little multiple times is being used as
we speak by multiple very well-funded apps in the US the UK and and the way
the world and it's something that you know is just simple to use and and get
you going essentially so if you're a web 2 developer and you're willing to
look at web 3 you have maybe some TypeScript JavaScript experience maybe
you don't you have C sharp which now has a syntax that is very very similar to
TypeScript and so on you can get going in frankly like one or two afternoons
looking at alchemy university content or anything like that in a way that is
is very mature at this point that sort of content is super helpful for devs you
know a lot of devs struggle with finding the right place to to get information
and having all that information is somewhere like alchemy or have third web
support on that is super super key you mentioned you touched on ether link and
we have a question actually relating to either either link you you kind of
covered it a little bit but perhaps you could go into a bit more detail so one
of the questions was what are the plans to grow the DeFi community of Tezos will
Tezos DeFi cross into ether link to okay so that's that's a good question but
it's not a short answer so let me just think about how to actually wrap this up
in a in an understandable and relatively short answer okay so there's a few
components of this obviously so we do have an existing DeFi ecosystem on
Tezos that ecosystem on Tezos currently and again let's just go back to our
friend DeFi Lama here I look at the various apps we have on the Tezos
ecosystem right now and I didn't I'm gonna exclude the Tezos liquidity
baking there might be some questions on this afterwards and that's not an app in
itself it's it's more complex but apart from that we have use we have codify we
have Colibri which is still around we have plenty and so on so things that I
would say is that those apps are pure DeFi apps and what I mean by that DeFi
that name comes from the DeFi summer we had in 2020 on the cerium and it stands
for decentralized finance now I don't really like that name anymore for what
we actually do in finance when it comes to blockchain and what me and various
people on this call are doing day to day because it's too limited compared to
what we can actually do and what people are working on at the moment in various
BC facilitated accelerators and various places around the world
decentralized finance refers to a fairly closed ecosystem where you're
essentially trading a value that is native to the blockchains that you're
doing it on okay so typically you go to Tezos right now and you go to use and
you're going to be able to trade their you token which is native to the Tezos
blockchain as it represents a link to the use application and the use protocol
or you're going to be able to trade this and you're going to be able to trade see
this potentially in some of the others and things like that those are things
that takes our value from the chain where they're on and you have that
exactly the same on the cerium and it's linked layer tools well like you know
the name of the game at this point is to trade the liquid staking tokens and now
the newer kids on the block new liquid risk-taking tokens all of which draws
our value from the cerium blockchain the Eigen layer protocol which is deployed
on the cerium blockchain and designed to at least for now there's only one AVS
and to design to to validate consensus and provide consensus services to other
blockchains and things like that right so currently that's what we have on
tezos and that's what we have in fact on any of the other blockchains with rare
exceptions what we're trying to do both for tezos and for acerlink is to
actually bring apps that would correspond more to something that I
would call finance on-chain and it can be defined and it can be something that
derives our value or their interest or their use case from trading things that
takes our value on-chain, wrap bitcoin, wrap teaser, tez, things like that or those
can be things that actually are linked to your real activity in the real world
because the real world whether we like it or not is still much much bigger than
what's happening on-chain how to believe when you follow Twitter every single day
but that's actually true and so at the end of the day where we see really the
growth relay and things that we could do with acerlink in particular but
tezos as well going forward is first making a bridge and a possibility for
everything that has been done so far to be done on acerlink and that's in
particular true from the ago thanks to an L1 L2 bridge being designed by
LP Labs as we speak and they're almost done actually where like any FA 1.2
FA2 token from tezos will be able to be bridged to acerlink and actually
acerlink by itself being a layer 2 is actually a bridge in itself if you
actually understand what a layer 2 really is and a roll-up so that's very
very secure and that's convenient it's nearly free and it allows you to
bridge them over and use that value for viruses whether you want them as
collateral for a money market whether you want them as as you know things
that you can trade within the decks on acerlink for example which you can
already do to be fair with on tezos and things like that things that are going
to be easier to do in the short term on acerlink compared to tezos are things
related to user onboarding user experience and especially around the
account abstraction we can reuse a lot of the heavy work we're standing on the
shoulders of giants here on that front by by alchemy by software by those guys
that I mentioned before and and ethereum themselves and so on in how we can and
and some of that is being done on tezos as well just to be clear but with a one
one step one click deployment solution being able to create an app like what
friend don't take don't take was a an early pioneer of where you can like
login with your Google account or whatever an account gets created for you
in the background and that account is self custodial no one has access to your
keys and so on and then people are able to like start using the applications
that has spun up that smart account for you and they will even pay the gas for
you for short amount of time or maybe forever depending on the gas prices
and what the app actually is so there is this feature called paymaster where
essentially just with that one click solution that you're able to launch
right now on on third web as we speak on the salvage you're able to spin up an
account for your users based on their hosts from from Google or Facebook or
Twitter or Netflix and and then have them interact with some things on
chain without a single guest or camera in your wallet in their wallets and
that's just one example but there are a number of features like that that are
just made easier simply because we have access to the TVM tech stack now it
doesn't mean that the tezos blockchain won't evolve going forward and we're
working on two specifically large projects around this I guess I can
disclose one and the area around it which is a stable coin that will be
yelled bearing and that thing has been famously difficult to do in the past and
it won't escape anyone's attention that USDT the tether one and USDC the circle
one are not paying you and there is a clear reason for this it's because if
you're paying here you'll consider the security token and that security token
has a bunch of potential consequences that are not are not great if you're not
ready to to face the legal framework around us and we've been working with
two partners especially one that has actually cracked that thing done it in a
way that is fully compliant especially in Europe and the US which are like two
important markets and and that thing you know like welcome on tezos but will be
obviously usable only selling as well via that L1 L2 grips that I was
talking about and as soon as you get to reselling the and I'm gonna go slowly
here because it's fairly technical but it's important for people to sort of
realize and that might preempt and answer a bunch of the other questions
that people have later on let's say you have that stable current let's call it
EUSD for installing USD or whatever the E stands for electronic USD and
trying USD whatever you want that EUSD lives on tezos it's native to tezos
it's minted on tezos okay it's backed off-chain by some sovereign money
markets you know some ETFs you should buy BlackRock or Fidelity or some others
and essentially those guys who have minted that stablecoin can bridge the
stablecoin from tezos L1 to e-selling L2 right they use the bridge whatever
that's fine the stablecoin now lives on the selling what you have on the selling
it's called the lock and mint model where you have locked the stablecoin on
the tezos side in a tezos smart contract and you have minted a receipt a
representation of that stablecoin on the selling side now on the selling side
that contract you can put whatever you want in it in particular us the
operators of the bridge can put a lot of things in it and one of those things is
the OFT standard which stands for Omni-Chain Fungible Token Standard which
makes it compatible and usable within the layer zero framework and so in
particular what that allows you to do is you can send a cross-chain message
using the layer zero pipes and e-selling has an endpoint from layer zeros our
strong partner of ours I literally speak to those guys every single week and as
a result it means that not only is that stablecoin usable on the selling but
it's usable on every chain where we would have enabled it within the layer
zero ecosystem so every change that has an endpoint like this selling one will
be able to do that so we have to sum up on that particular topic we have a
stablecoin which is yield bearing by default every single day at midnight or
something like that it will pay you the yield and that stablecoin is native to
tezos so the tezos L1 has a very strong new application if you want to call it
this way or piece of infrastructure or something and that piece of
infrastructure through that L1 L2 bridge that we get
quote-unquote for free by virtue of e-selling being a roll-up gets us not
only access to e-selling in our own ecosystem on e-selling but actually
access to arbitrary one to a payment to base to ban and smart chain and so on
and so forth so I guess I took a particular angle on that question but
let me know if that sort of answers the initial question or not really yeah you
want to do a lot of detail there and thanks for that I think it does answer
that question but let us know if it doesn't for you guys if you have any
more questions please feel free to drop them in the comments as well so I guess
we'll move on to the next one so this question asks in what ways can the
tezos community contribute to the growth and success of DeFi on the platform
that's a good question is that related to e-selling or both tezos and selling
just the tezos ecosystem as a whole I suppose so so like you know obviously we
have we have a community to start with the community is strong and has features
that are fairly unique to our ecosystem there are a number of things but I think
we tend to talk a lot more about technical fairly fairly highly technical
details than some of the other ecosystems out there which can be both
a strength and and and a weakness if we don't manage it properly we tend to have
people that are not as I mean if you look at the e-selling discord they are
quite digen at this point but are not as you know like purely focused on like
let me make a quick penny on this and then move on and are actually more
interested in where this thing all goes what how are we making that and by that
I mean the entire industry and the technology and that ecosystem actually
useful and and and you know not only on so on flipping tokens so if you want to
flip tokens yes you'll definitely have that both on tezos and selling going
forward and I'm doing a lot of hard work for you guys in the background at this
point where I fought by myself a unique history concentrated liquidity decks for
for you guys to enjoy it in the short term while we get a better team out there
with a with a solution that is a small bulletproof and more future proof and
that team in particular codify is working on a very innovative central
limit order book amm spot decks so it's a lot of words here but essentially what
that means is it's a spot decks that allows you to go from one token to the
other but a spot deck that uses all of the features that are now more and more
doable on chain with another book well literally you have some bids being
submitted you have some masks and some offers and those are actually matched
fully on chain which is something that is fairly new I see one comment from
Muzi in the chat right now which makes me laugh by the way five years late guys
really yeah five years late in some ways but not really first if I summer was
2020 so it was only four years technically I'd like to say but also
also at the end of the day a ton of things that have been updated in the
serum ecosystem and the serum is dating is a dating again because on the
searchance of March which coincidentally is the start date of the
installing beta they're also doing that then can upgrade which makes on chain
activity on their layer tools cheaper so what did we need and why are we not five
years late really if you look at release or use cases that will link to the real
world will be much more interesting to a normal user and not a really intense
user like myself actually chasing the backdrop on every single ecosystem for
like no no other reasons on their own bottom line and so on basically we now
have with this only and some others in the ecosystem let's be honest a very
cheap platform that is both cheap fast and secure and so security is relative
and there is some censorship at the very beginning because at the very beginning
we'll have only one node possible but later on progressively we'll have a
trusted execution environment with several nodes and MEV protection from
the get-go and things like that so it's relative and it will take about three
months or so to fully mature but at this point and we need within one month time
maybe we can we can just take a tiny bit of time and celebrate that we'll have
within the design ecosystem a native enshrined roll-up that will allow us to
have a block time with that is very short you click on the UI and for most
users it will it will look instant you'll get an answer you'll get a
visual cue you finally traded your digen token for test token and you've
clicked 500 milliseconds ago and here's the answer and here's what the
pre-confirmation that the sequencer is giving you looks like that's very usable
and that can lead us to a tone of new use cases that even like you know Solana
and SUI and the various layer tools of Ethereum uses using centralized or
single-node sequencers are having as well which are like just happening as we
speak I'm talking about that centrally me called order books at Dimitri and the
team at caught fire working on that centrally meet order book until literally
six months ago was not doable on any chain and why is that right so you're
doing your centrally meet order book essentially for the end user if Jeff
wants to send wants to trade out of some new tokens for some test account
he goes out there he puts his 1000 new tokens in the in the cell section and
he's gonna buy but in the background what's going on is that's going to be
what's called a market order and that market order needs to go into a huge
list of orders currently being being submitted to the blockchain and to that
smart contract on the blockchain for matching and then someone else
coincidentally or because our market maker and that's their job and that's
what they do for a living will be against against you and we'll have a
dynamically adjusted older that will get matched with yours in a fraction of a
second that's something that like you know that is what the nice the NASDAQ
so nice see the London Stock Exchange the Hong Kong stock exchange do every day
on a daily basis with a very optimized centralized database that is now
something that we can do for relatively cheap and relatively fast on the
blockchain and that's not being five years five years late that's something
that is brand new including on the exchange on ecosystems like garbage room
and and in the suit suey and and Solana for some specific reasons have
happened like in the in the second part of last year so that's one example and I
can give you like quite a few of those examples of like why we have that zero
to one sort of phenomenon as Peter would call it we're like having such cheap
gas fees make it possible not only for the operator to potentially pay them for
you if it's one cent per transaction and we expect each user to do two three
transactions a week maybe we just want to put that in as part of our customer
acquisition and pay those fees for the users that's what a bunch of VC
funded startups are doing and working on at this point and I strongly believe
that this is the future at least for apps with lower value being transferred
NFT apps in some ways apps loyalty apps that some of the biggest brands in the
world are working on at the moment things like that you know so to be honest
with you I forgot what the question was but I hope it answers part of the
question yeah you definitely covered a lot I think you did answer the question
but yeah let's move on to the next one so you kind of touched on this a little
bit but I think perhaps you can go to a bit more detail so is enhancing user
experience and accessibility for DeFi products to reach a broader audience a
particular focus of yours if so what steps are you taking to achieve that
yeah that's a great question so I'll give some precise examples of what we're
doing and what my art thesis is on this going forward so maybe I'll start with a
broad point essentially if you look at every single cycle that we've had in
recent years and even 2013 to some extent Bitcoin was a real innovation
back then and was getting noticed by the market as digital gold but let's
move that aside you've had broadly speaking they follow the Fourier cycle
that everyone knows at this point and you've had 2017 the first real bull
cycle around smart contract blockchain we were born out of the cycle
Ethereum was largely born out of that cycle you could you could argue
Cardano and so on and and then you had 2021 and then we're in the middle of
2025 for some reason that one is a bit front-loaded a bit more so even than the
2017 one I hope that's not worrying and I hope it continues strong until 2026
but you know it does seem a bit front-loaded but anyways all of those
cycles have had something in common and that one will be no exception every one
of them coincided with a very strong innovation in the space 2017 unfortunately
at this point because we know it went sideways at some point and so on but
was the period of the ACOs right so I see us was new and shiny everyone was
doing an AC on the serum etc it became really really big and it finally died
with the ones that will go in the records as the biggest one I'm pretty
sure yes us in June or July 2018 raising you know 4 billion or some in some
amount of money so that was I see us and that was a real real innovation
enabling you to raise money on chain without those massive sort of like you
know rigidities and constraints that are like you know associated with raising
money in quote-unquote the real world okay and that was not the only innovation
but to be honest that was kind of the main one in 2021 you had to action
you had defy with defy summer in 2020 compound super super launched that that
trend with raising with launching that token as an incentive component and
making it to found okay you had that ability because of some innovation on
the serum at that point to do it in a way that was not too cumbersome and the
gas fees on the serum bags and were quite cheap and you know like what were
some very early examples of this with either Delta which was a very early
example of decks and Easterland which became a very afterwards became like
really real got product market feed with compound with my uniswap themselves
later on and with you know like pretty much any of the food tokens and the
food applications that we got that went a bit bonkers but were were interesting
for a lot of users and and that was like you know one example of this and
innovation and then the other ones that really supercharged it and that we
benefited massively as part of tezos from as part of tezos is NFTs NFTs
really had their time in the Sun really had product market feeds people thought
that they were super cool and people who are not pure crypto people actually got
into into crypto and into blockchain and stuff and into trading on chain because
of this so there was also I have to say because people might mention that later
on IDOs which are like you know they call it of ICOs initial coin offering
that were off-chain and done in a very amateurish way that morphed into slowly
but surely into initial exchange offerings on centralized exchanges and
initial decks offering decentralized offerings for the 20-21 bull run and
that was especially strong on the binance marching with spanking swap and
various launch pads there that was a clear driver of that that cycle and then
you but you had a bunch of other things built around it right but like the main
thing was those two things in my opinion now for 2025 if I'm honest right now you
don't really see what is like about to launch the next bull cycle we're in the
middle of it like you know a lot of people in technical analysis and stuff
identify those cycles with three legs you have the first leg of the ball the
second leg of the ball and the third leg of the ball I think right now in the
middle of the second leg of the ball which typically is a lot more jumpy
than some of the ones on the first leg and especially the third leg we haven't
seen those jumps just yet but I do single in the second leg what this means
in general the second leg of the ball in the 2020-2021 bull run was right
before avalanche when bonkers and did a 30 or 40x in one month and that's
typically what we're supposed to be right now in that cycle except that to
be honest with you I just don't see what this innovation on chain is currently
that could lead to a token a major token during the 30x 40x I'm not the only one
saying that if you look at bank less if you look at con bureau and so on there's
also like quite puzzled and they're not sure what that innovation is for that
cycle what I think that could end up being but you know like I have no idea
right is that accessibility to get back to your original question making what we
already have with what what is quite mature in Jesus in Solana in EVM and
much more accessible right now we have 1 million on chain active users if you
look at who does those quests on layers free on on galaxy and so on it's about
1 million active users it's absolutely nothing those users are super expensive
to acquire I'm one of those I'm sure a bunch of people on the call are one of
some one of those essentially like one thing and one thing on me interests me
in that it's making money and I go out there and I try to pump my bags by going
into bar after fire cell drops and stuff like it's interesting but I mean it has
its limits and it's extremely circular without real value added in my opinion
at least for now so that's something that like you know can lead to something
and obviously like those American VCs spending enormous amounts of money
incentivizing users and user acquisition on that on those protocols have
something in mind and that something is mine is how do we bring the normies or
normal people on chain right and a lot of people are hard at work on this and
in fact the people that were pioneers of like doing things of chain for crypto
are helping us here and trying to move in that direction if you look at what
Binance have been working on in the last year and a half early they've been
working on like you know right now they have that Binance web3 wallets which is
directly accessible from the Binance.com UI front-end and that thing like you
know he's not doing super well and you know it's going to take some time and so
on but essentially everyone is trying to become a gateway to DeFi gateway to
on-chain activity and that thing will eventually work whether it's through an
NPC facilitated you know setup and and product that is being pushed heavily by
fire blocks and their competitors fire blocks calls it wallet as a service or
whether it's through a pure account abstraction and it remains to be seen
which standard will win is it ERC 437 EIP 6900 I have no idea but one of those
will solidify the community will coalesce around one clear standard and
will be able to go forward with this in a way that is super usable for someone
who frankly doesn't care about wallets about what's behind it even what
blockchains are using to be completely honest you've seen that very example of
this very early example of this with friend dot-tech various dot-techs you
know post dot-tech and so on on base you've seen that with blackboard dot x
yz which is a really cool app available only in New York for now but I think
they're launching in Los Angeles and not too long where essentially you go and
you eat at the restaurants and buy like house essentially doing some
advertisement for the restaurant and and creating a community around it and
so on the restaurant were like in a very roundabout way subsidize you eating as
that restaurant and you can actually do that without even knowing what the wallet
is and that is super cool and that's account obstruction right so so those
things I think could be the innovation for that cycle which is not like you
know on paper as exciting as what NFTs and Defy Summer brought but actually a
lot more useful if you think about it because if we go like in the last cycle
at the top we have we had about five five or six million people on chain and
let's be honest most of those users were on Binance Marching so you know
interesting but very limited there was there to participate in some launch
pads they wanted to you know I can do some some NFTs and stuff like that that's
fine but that's kind of limited a lot of people lost money and got burnt in
the process and actually out of the five six millions that were on chain in the
last cycle apart from the one million remaining I'm just not sure that they're
gonna be back on chain in time soon however so guys that could be on chain
without truly going to Metamask making their seat raise making sure they keep
it in three different places that people who know what they are in case they pass
away or whatever like you know all of those things that we associate with
being on channel if you don't have to do that and you have a very clear and
very clean social recovery feature and maybe you can log in with a
authentication with Google and Apple so that if you if you're locked out of your
Google account you go with your Apple account and all of those things that are
being refined as we speak maybe that's actually the innovation for this cycle
and we make your tone of transfers of value and in various contexts very very
usable and very you know like no no-brainers and and easy to use going
forward with the tools that have been developed in the last release the last
year and a half or so on the account abstraction front and on the on the
middleware front for you know third web alchemy more or less a bunch of the
others who have been working on this so so that's essentially like art thesis I
would say in a nutshell but I've been speaking for like what looks like like
two hours and I've like like put that in the in the goals on for example the
accelerator I'm running from the 15th of April in Singapore two weeks in person
in Singapore the rest four weeks remotes with that whole idea of having like very
usable defy applications and in fact you know what I'm going to add in the
chat for the audience here the link to that incubator in case anyone is
interested applications are open until the 31st of March so let me put that in
the chat because that's something very concrete that we are doing to boost not
only defy but finance on chain both on Tezos L1 and Easterling L2 so I've I've
posted the link in the chat for that AMA and whoever listens to the replay and
is a current listener can can have a look and you guys are like happy to to
answer any DMs if you have questions and and happy to give you more details on
this we're really keen we've got some strong applicants already and out of
those fighting that we want to take part in this what we're going to have some
some some good apps resulting from this that sounds super exciting and I
completely agree with you on the abstraction side of things being not
only potentially the next step but something the whole space has been
waiting for for a long time has been one of the biggest complaints about the
space just everything being too difficult to to grasp from a wider
audience perspective and yeah I think it won't only be a game-changer for this
next leg if there is a next leg but for the space long term really but we do have
a question in the comments from Dylan Kowalek I apologize if I've pronounced
that incorrectly is the Tesla's EVM implement implementation still plan to
launch this year I think you're referring to ether link and I believe so
but yeah Nico perhaps you could go into more detail there yep so so there's
implementation so actually that's the right way to phrase that that question
but but let me let me precise it a bit so it's our own implementation within
the context of tezos so it's we didn't do the VM implementation ourselves we
you we used an implementation that had been done in Rust previously called
Sputnik VM I believe and we baked it into our own solution with like you know
and we did every single part of the stack so what we call the ether link
kernel so the various bits that are needed for a sequencer and and really
like several nodes on the sequencer to run a privileged party for that EVM
implementation as you call it within the context of tezos and prolapse and all of
this is launching as part of a prolapse so not only is it an implementation that
is open source and that everyone can check on the cell income organization on
github but in fact it's also a product that launching as a community roll-up
called ether link so that's a bit of jargon and all but hopefully you guys
get it essentially ether link is a blockchain in itself it does happen to
inherit its security from the tezos layer one and the strong set of bakers
that we have long-running bakers and the bakers can vote and can choose to
the various upgrades to the ether link kernel which is part of the tezos
code base okay tezos blockchain code base okay so now enough for the
technical issues and what is happening later this year and where should we be
excited and what is your opportunity for anyone with a builder on that call and I
see that Kevin is on the call and that and that some other people I recognize
who might be looking to build essentially the whole idea here is for
ether link to be launched as a beta launch mid-march okay so that's very
soon now that's about a month time essentially is then very happening next
week and then soon after we'll have the launch of ether link so that launch of
ether link you can think of that beta launch as a quote unquote low key launch
okay why why would I see this way myself and full disclosure I used to run the
selling project so like this is also like you know choice that we made all
all of us combined at nomadic labs at at really take and so on and why is that
the right way to go according to us because we have a launch that is low key
well I people start getting familiar with the VM tools toolchain and and
stack if they're coming from the TESOS ecosystem and they are mainly makers and
builders we have people getting familiar with the TESOS way of doing things on
the VM side if they're coming from the solidity and EVM world they've been on
I don't know arbitrary one before and things like that and essentially that's
sort of an onboarding phase more more for like people who are behind the
scenes you know like so builders so partners who would like use the chain
with it within their stack for various apps or very various use cases and
things like that obviously at that time users will also get access to the chain
and we'll be able through I'm hoping Robbie will at fairly soon but from the
get-go from metamask and so on to get access to the chain they can actually
right now if they're interested have access to the testnet and use my own
index that I've deployed to Granadex on there there's going to be also other
testnet versions of protocols one of which is being worked on at this point
by the plenty team which is a money market and some others that are like now
that the graph is finally going to be online going to be launched because we
needed the graph for sub graphs for us to be fully doable in the normal way and
subsequent is also another sub graph provider but essentially all of the
tools are in place infrastructure wise so that on mid-march when the beta
launch is happening only selling for people who are builders to be able to
build and then for users to actually have a blast no pun intended with blast
and so on have a good time using the various projects and the early versions
of those projects so in particular you know the infrastructure side for the
builders who might be listening to us will have oracle so both redstone
classic redstone core redstone classic is very similar to what you would have
had if you've used chain link oracles in the past redstone core is very similar
to peace network oracles which are also called pull oracles we will we will have
peace network itself which is also pull oracles they pay on the technology very
strong tech we will have so you know those would be necessary for any money
market like Avi or compound for any perpetual platforms derivative platforms
that are Oracle based like GMX or gains network or things like that we will have
sub graphs as I spoke about sub graphs for anyone who wouldn't be familiar with
a terminology were pioneered by a decentralized network called the graph
the graph is really outstanding tech I've been a long time users of that
technology they are coming and they will be like on the test that they're very
soon and on the mainnet hopefully by mid March were like essentially because the
blockchain is quite hard to interact with that is true for those that is true
for his theorem and as a result that's true for Easter link which implements a
very classic ethereum specifications for an API with an RPC endpoint etc
that RPC endpoint is quite clunky it's not made to be super usable for UI or
anything like that and as a result typically 99% of apps out there use a
middle layer for to be consumed by their UI and that middle layer is a sub graph
that uses quite fancy take a type of API called graph QL APIs that were
created by Facebook well meta a few years ago and the graph QL API is much
more usable allows you to do a lot of things easily at the UI level and to
have very cool very snappy UIs that you wouldn't have otherwise if you were
querying the RPC endpoint straight away and would also be very expensive to
query those RPC endpoints repeatedly like that so as a result those sub
graphs are super key and they will be there from the get go both from the
graph and another provider and partner of ours called sub screen and then you'll
have other infrastructure partners like you know block scout which has been
super helpful has enabled us to very quickly spin up an explorer that works
remarkably remarkably well for Easter link right now it's life for the test
net and the URL is testnet dash explorer dot easeling.com a bit of a
mouthful but it's referenced on the easeling.com portal you also and
essentially like you have a bunch of partners that are coming up and those
partners including like node providers and so on will be live and will be
operational from the mid marsh beta launch and then for users out there who
would want like really collapse with liquidity deposited by the foundation
by other partners of ours and by you guys eventually because it will be
worth it and because the yields will be high enough for it to be worth it
hopefully that gets going really really hard by I would say if I had to guess
beginning of May or something like that but I would I wouldn't be surprised if
it happens even before that whether it's on my own like small decks that they
will release Iguanadex or on so many markets that plenty is working on
provisionally called plan but I don't know what they will call it or like
others that were like actually making deals with to bring them to the easeling
ecosystem to bring their communities with them and potentially some of their
know-how around EVM setups and account abstraction to have from the get-go or
brilliant um I've realized I need to come and bug you in the office a bit
more and a lot a bit more about the wider DeFi landscape there's been a lot
of useful insight on this call so thank you for that just to just the end I know
we'll come to the last minute and for those of you who've just joined you'll
be able to listen back to this one once we're done but Niko what are you
personally most excited about within the Tesla's ecosystem about the progress we're
making in DeFi what what excites you the most when you when you walk to the
office and you're gonna start your day yeah I guess that's a good way to finish
the call basically I'm a builder I mean my real background historically I'm a
mathematician and I was a trader and in traditional markets for 12 years at
banks and investment banks and hatch funds and stuff but that's never really
excited what really excites me is the building and the building right now with
what we've put in place on installing there's still some missing bits and and
on Tesla's I'm working quite hard on making some some small improvements that
make a meaningful difference for people who are building on Tesla's itself and
some actually like quite major improvements but that's to be deep and
to be to be announced later because it's less ready and I want to properly work
on it before I talk about this but for installing itself which is like the big
thing for March because the launch is in March essentially it's this ability to
build and to just like see those applications that I know inside out
because I have built so many of those on the theorem ecosystem before and and
to see what what you guys actually build there's a community whoever is
listening to that call come to us come to my team come to me and we'll help you
go whether it's in the context of the accelerator whether it's giving you tips
just of the of the record in any context come to us that is Denver set meetings
with us we're just open for business essentially and and that thing you're
like it's super easy to do it's much easier to get started building than it
was even a year ago I mean the amount of work that third web has done to make
building a very trivial thing on the VM is just a game-changer like even two
years ago I remember I was still using truffle remix all of those stuff that no
one uses anymore because there's so much better and that's really what's exciting
about it I think like you know my own imagination is like quite limited I'm a
technical guy and stuff but with the amount of tools and infrastructure
pieces that we're making available for you guys to do your thing I mean for
sure we've got to get to a point where we have one real app that people want to
use not because they want to do to get an air drop but because it's actually
interesting it gets it somewhere it's useful or it's fun or both so that's
what I'm excited about what is a killer up when the when does it come and who's
gonna mention nice I'm excited for that too thanks for joining everyone we're
coming to the end of this this space I want to give a big thank you to you
Niko for answering all the questions and giving us all of your insight I'm sure
community have loved it and yeah we'll be speaking again very soon we should
have a space again with yourself Niko and perhaps maybe one of our partners so
yeah thank you all and thank you Niko have a good line guys thanks for