Gemgem, can you guys hear me well?
Yeah I can hear your spell.
Just gonna see... for it. I just made myself a speech man, shamelessly.
Hey Iggy, how's it going?
Thanks for taking the time out.
We're just good old Twitter space and non-vibes.
Excited for the Christmas holidays?
Well, I just got back from three weeks in the Caribbean,
so it was definitely an adjustment
Well, apparently I missed a real cold snap.
it sounds like you would have had a blast.
Never been to Caribbean or never been to New York?
it's a bit of a trek to get to there.
Well, you have your own beaches.
Are you in Australia now?
Yeah, yeah, Oh, yeah. Are you in Australia now? Yeah. Yeah, I am.
It's like blistering hot at the moment.
Everyone's just staying inside.
I think we'll just give it a couple more minutes just for everyone to come in.
Hope you're having a good day, night, afternoon, wherever you are. Thank you. I think we should get started since we've got a lot to get through.
I want to start off by just saying that, just a quick disclaimer, nothing discussed in this
space should be considered financial investment or legal advice.
All opinions expressed are our own educational and independent purposes only.
Please do your research and before making any investment decisions.
Alrighty, let's just jump in. This is a Twitter space where we'll be discussing
all things TRIP and also discussing any outcomes between our wonderful guests from Pendle,
between our wonderful guests from Pendle, USDAI and Theo. How about we just go
around the room and do introductions. Pruitt, let's start with you.
Yeah, of course. So yeah, my name's Pruitt. I was one of the first team members to join
at Interview Advisors. We're a service provider for Arbitrum DAO.
Our scope of work mostly includes incentives like the DRIP program, treasury management, and data analytics.
I mostly assist with the governance operations as well as jumping around from different projects and programs wherever help is needed.
So I help out with initiatives like the Watchdog and the status front as well as helping Matt with drip.
Hey everybody, I'm Sam. I'm grossly here at USDAI.
And yeah, so we're, we're building a GPU-backed stablecoin protocol. And yeah, it's nice to be here.
I'm in the Pendle's BD team and I lead the ecosystem integrations,
mainly working with a lot of money markets, earned programs, and virtual wallets to get our PT and
LP tokens integrated across the wider ecosystem. Thanks for having us.
No worries. Cool. And lastly, Igi.
GM, guys. I'm Igi. I'm Chief Investment Officer at Theos, so I get involved with a little bit
of everything and had a kind of a long career, Wall Street starting with Bay Capital and
private equity and build the SaaS company and manage Proc Trading and Credit Suisse and
many other things. Before Theos was actually a co-head of Polygon Ventures, so as a crypto
Awesome, awesome. We've got quite the stack lineup and we've got quite a lot to go through. was actually a co-head of Polygon Ventures, so as a crypto VC.
Awesome, awesome. We've got quite the stack line up and we've got quite a lot to go through. So let's just jump right into it.
I'm going to throw it over to you, Pruitt.
To kick things off, could you just give us a quick refresher of what DRIP is and Entropy's work within the program?
Yeah, for those that aren't familiar,
DRIP is an incentive program that was approved by the Arbor from Dell back in June of this year.
It's a large-scale incentive program that's managed and executed by Entropy.
It has a total budget of $80 million ARB that's going to be split across four different seasons, and we're in the midst of Season 1 now.
now. Each season is targeted for a specific DeFi vertical activity with season one targeting the
growth of looping of yield bearing assets like USCAI and Dio on specific lending markets and
protocols. So the season is epoch based. We're in epoch 8 now. Each epoch is two weeks long, but getting towards the end of
season one at this stage as we are in the last couple stages of the performance phase, basically
each epoch as we look back and see which lending markets saw the most asset growth and success over
the previous two weeks, and we then adjust incentives and rewards
for the following epochs.
almost the final month now of season one.
I'm gonna throw it over to you, Sam.
You guys are building something quite unique
by combining two hot narratives, stable coins and AI.
Could you just walk us through what USDA is?
Yeah. So we're a, um, I think the, the, the easiest way to describe it is like
So, um, what we're providing is a way for people to tokenize their GPUs that they
have installed, um, for me,, earning revenue.
Once they are at that point,
so they're installed and earning revenue,
they can essentially take a mortgage
And this is actually a little bit difficult
and something that banks cannot fund
due to the risk profiles and that credit does fund.
But typically you have to be very large and it's very expensive to find that financing.
So, you know, we think that using DeFi and using on-chain rails is the best way to be
able to provide a service because you know we
can bring the cost of origination of these of these loans down to you know whatever the cost
of transaction is on arbitrage which is like less than a penny and when you can do that and when you
know the the greatest barrier to issuing loans is just the speed at which it takes to create the nfts you're you're vastly decreasing the
amount of time that you need to be able to like bring issues that this this debt so i think it's
i think it's something that only can be done on chain and it's something that really drew me to
the project because it's only with stable coins and the smart contract lending profile that you can do this type of business.
Thank you, Sam. Over to you, EY. I'm sure most of the listeners here know who you guys are,
but could you give us a brief intro to what Pendle is?
Yeah, for sure. We are a yield trading platform.
So what we do is we tokenize any yield bearing assets by splitting them into its yield token component and its principal token component.
So from a user perspective, if you like to leverage farm points or you want to leverage farm yield, then you would buy YTs, which is the yield token.
Or if you'd like to lock in fixed APY, then you can buy PTs.
So it's mainly these two kind of strategies, these two basic strategies that you can do on Pandal.
And yeah, we're happy to be part of this because I think we have a very good relationship
and have worked very well with everyone in this call here.
Pendle's been very instrumental
throughout the whole DeFi ecosystem
and very, very important through the DRIP program as well.
could you just tell us what you guys are building at Theo
and what sets you guys apart from the stable points today?
So Theo enables exchanges and DeFi protocols to trade and actually use RWAs.
So up until now, there is a lot of trillion dollar institutions that tokenize their things.
And that was like a massive leap forward for RWAs. But the problem is, you know, they put them on blockchain and then don't use blockchain right so
they don't not composable in defy there's no volume uh there is no trading book so so we built
you know sort of a brick by brick uh all the elements that i needed to actually make them
usable on chain uh and then plug into all the wonderful uh defy tech that's been created over the last five years
right like like panda like more more fun and many other like things that don't exist in stratfi and
we started with it bills basically the risk free rate that's a strictly better product than a
stable coin because you get all the same benefits you can you can use it as collateral uh just like a stable coin but it
gives you the risk raised which you're you're giving up in it in a stable coin and then we have
a pipeline of other rwas the next one is going to be gold and it's pretty uh pretty soon to uh to
launch and then there will be other commodity stocks. The ultimate vision is to enable people
to have a diversified portfolio of RWAs fully on-chain
and fully usable with all the DeFi protocols.
And I can see why you guys have grown so tremendously,
especially throughout Drip.
But we'll get into that later on.
But onto the whole Drip highlights and talking about Drip.
Pruitt, could you just tell us how Drip performed during this performance phase
What are the best performing assets and protocols throughout the campaign?
Yeah, I can, I guess, walk everyone through the performance phase.
It's certainly been an interesting time in crypto.
The, I guess, for context, like the performance phase. It's certainly been an interesting time in crypto. The extra context like the performance phase began at the beginning of October. I
think exactly October 1st actually and you know 10 days later we had the
largest liquidation event at least of this year maybe ever where I think like
19 billion was liquidated on October 10th. And, you know, while at the time that event specifically didn't have a major impact on
Drip, like we didn't notice any immediate massive decreases in market sizes or big changes
in DEX liquidity, it did, you know, eventually result, that event result in the, you know,
extreme finance insolvency crisis that we saw in early November.
And that event did impact several curators that operated on Arbitrum.
And while we saw limited bad debt on Arbitrum from XUSC specifically, it did impact lending markets like Morpho and Euler and, you know, Epochs 5 and 6 that occurred
in November, we did see, you know, market sizes decrease, the amount of USDC borrowed
decreased due to the unwinding of several loops due to stream finances and solvency.
But in recent weeks, even as we've shifted some more focus to the ETH assets, you know,
we've seen these USDC markets pick back up and slightly rebound.
And I think that's largely due to assets like ESEAI and the DeFi ecosystem to, you know, retain some of the growth.
And so the unwinding from that event resulted in a much larger decrease.
And so I think in recent weeks, we've seen some good growth come back from that event.
But overall, like protocols like Aave and Fluid have performed really well.
Assets like UOCI and Theo have performed really well on the east side.
We've seen a lot of growth with Kelp. But yeah, I think that event in particular showcased largely an entry-piece
thesis on DRIP and how we approach incentives. We don't want to just be incentivizing the supply
of ETH or USCC on lending markets. It's how do we create structural changes in a DeFi ecosystem,
and that's leveraging assets like ESCI and DO and protocols like Pendle
to actually enable new and different activities
that keep people around once the incentives start off.
And so we'll see how everything retains over the next six months,
but even as we started the taper rewards, we've seen pretty solid retention so far,
I'd like to double tap into that.
USDAI, we've noticed that you guys are one of the largest markets on Pendle.
Talk us through some strategies that drip farmers may not be aware of
Sam Samson Yeah, so I think the, I mean, it's been really
interesting to see how our chain is keeping with the other networks that we have going,
I think 80% of all the capital has just been in Arbitrum,
which is really cool to see.
I mean, like, I've always been a huge fan of Arbitrum,
and you guys have a great product.
And I know that with DRIP, it's really been a lot
with the leverage looping, so for, like, the PTEs on oil. And I know that with with with drip it's really been
Hey, sir, you're just cutting out a bit there. I
Think my mic was done There you lot back and forth between that so
there you go we can hear you now yeah so i yeah i was just saying that it's um the drift's been
really great to see for some of like the leverage looping uh that happens with the the pts on oiler
i think that's the most interesting um like source to go track right now.
Anyway, I'll throw it over to you.
Although Pendle isn't exactly a landing protocol,
it's played a meaningful role during Drip.
many corolled during Drip. What are some of the trends or highlights you've seen spun
What are some of the trends or highlights
you've seen spun out from Drip?
Yeah, I think with Drip, it has been quite a successful campaign from our perspective.
We could see that, like you mentioned just now, when TBL attracted is rather sticky.
I think collectively between USDAi and Teo, collectively I think they contributed to close
to 400 million of TBL on Pendle.
So it's a very sizable marketplace.
And this is building on the success that we have had with Arbitrum in the past.
I think not many people remember, but Arbitrum ecosystem is actually where Pendle first got its breakthrough back two years ago. So we always try to make sure that we
place a lot of importance into the ecosystem. So for us, we didn't get any incentives directly,
but it's more of an indirect through money markets. And the most popular strategy is like what Sam mentioned, whereby users are able to loop PT tokens, whether it's PT-USDAI
or PT-SUSDAI or PT-TH bill on money markets, mainly of course more for an Euler. And by
having those incentives, you essentially make it more attractive for users to loop. And
that benefits all the different stakeholders. So users just get a higher fixed API and we'll be able to
capture trading volume and a higher TVL. So in fact we just reached the cap for the PT-USDAI pool
on panel yesterday. So I think that just shows how much attraction that he has gained in the past few months.
Absolutely. Over to you, Iggy. THBuild become one of the fastest-growing drip-eligible USD assets by market size.
First, actually hit 100 million back. What attributed to the success?
What attributed to the success?
So we think that primarily it was just having really, really good product and really good partners.
So the fact that it was Arbitrum and, you know, we're like consider ourselves a pretty blue chip protocol as well.
So the incentives are not that big.
It's just my personal opinion. And again,
you know, it's about 1% to land and like on the order of basis points to on the other side.
So I think the fact that the campaign existed, it created, you know, the design was really clever
and that gave a lot of attention. but the incentive portion itself is relatively small,
certainly by DeFi standards.
So I think it's the fact that the partners were reliable
and people trusted that they really will get what is being promised
as opposed to some like pie in the sky 10,000% APY.
And so, yeah, so having good results obviously our bit from right is um
the leader in the space and then and then for us I think the fact that uh a yield bearing uh
product uh is is strictly better than the stable coin right stable coins are a massive product
market fit success so uh kind of a our view is that the yield bearing portion right where
there's some money market fund on chain or just the yield bearing tables they're going to continue
to grow as percent of the stable coin market cap which is already 300 billion right and then that
300 billion is going to 3 trillion so it's a growing uh percentage of the pie that is extent expanding by itself uh and then
the the other things that we're going to launch such as tokenized gold again that's the market
that there is a lot of interest it's actually not so easy to buy gold in most countries around the
world and i've visited quite a few of them myself so this is going to be a huge unlock not just for on-chain capital but
potentially bringing in a capital off-chain into on-chain for the opportunities that people
don't have uh in the in the tradfire world
that's super exciting i'm definitely i think everyone in the in the call uh believes that stable coins are
uh the product market fit um a product to come out of this cycle and i couldn't agree with you
more we're going to trillions uh that's for sure um on to the alpha section of the today's uh
twitter space uh i'm going to throw it over to you uh as we near the end of season one is there
anything you could leave the listeners with for the
Any outposts for future incentive campaigns?
Maybe not the answer to everyone wants to hear, but unfortunately I can't share too
much as we're still in the process of scoping out future seasons.
Some things that we've been looking at are like foreign currencies,
so like non-US dollar assets.
But yeah, hopefully we'll have some more to share
I know season one is wrapping up near the end of January,
so gearing up to have something ready
Yeah, love to see more diversified stablecoins and products for everyone to get access to.
USDAI, I think we've seen your loans being growing, especially as we near the token launch.
Is this related to the upcoming protocol upgrade?
Can we get any insight or alphas into the token launch?
Yeah, so we actually have a bunch of stuff coming up.
And I know everybody's been watching our loans.
It's the real world, so it takes a bit more time sometimes to get these things spun out.
I see the pipeline of everything that is coming.
I think I've got a bad cold at the moment um yeah so the the things that we're looking at is
really to um fill out the the loan book before we get to launch i mean that's the most important
thing is to show that we can do these things um i think that that people just really believe in the model
Yeah, I mean, you look at like how the structure
and the availability for us to be able to like service
And I think it's really unparalleled, right?
I've got this piece that I'm putting out here
and I was supposed to put it out yesterday
when I got sick, but just about like, there's a really clear opportunity
for us to move into these markets
and to out-compete both the banks and private credit.
And that's like really the most interesting thing
that I see about this part of the cycle,
is that we have have a we've been
building all these products for like said but five years now since really the beginning of
DeFi summer and we're just finally getting to the point where the the on-chain infrastructure and
the the product base is strong enough to be able to go out and compete against existing players
and and out-compete them because like what we've done is essentially like speed run all the
financial history in the last you know like 15 years um and and we kind of like know what works
and what doesn't work on chain now how to design incentive structures, like all the, all the kind of questions about like,
you know, what can we do on chain and the little games that we can play to incentivize people.
We have really good, we have really good insight and data into that now.
But now it becomes a question of like, how can we, how can we use that information that
we have to then grow the pie substantially, essentially outside of the
current markets that we have now. And there was that really great article about like crypto is
dead that was published this week. And I think that it's, you know, he's spot on a lot of things
in that like, the next wave is just professionalization and growth and being able to service
markets and say, like, you know, like for
us to be able to do like a 100 million or $200 million, like GPU deal, or even 500 million,
right? Like that's, that's really the goal is that we've made it this far that people trust in the
architecture enough that they trust in using something like Arbitrum enough that those type
of deals can get seeded. And then we can out-compete the biggest players,
the biggest private credit, the biggest banks in the world
and show that we have a better system and better structure.
So that's what I'm really excited about.
Do you have any insight into how you guys will execute that
and grow that loan to that size
that you guys are aiming to get to?
Well, remember, at the end of the day,
it's all cost of capital, right?
That's like 90%, probably 99% of what people care about
is like, what rate can I get my interest rates at?
And also, you know, like what benefits are there that are provided to me
that I can't get other places? So specifically for these GPU deals, the banks don't touch these
things because of the risk controls and limitations on capital reserves versus the equipment that you
use themselves. So the banks are providing these like
revolving credit lines to the companies themselves.
But typically with these GBU deals, like they all get structured into these SPVs
that sit off balance sheet.
And so like they're unrated, they have like no history and the credit risk is quite high.
So the only people that can that can source the loans for them is the private markets.
And that's why you've seen like Blackstone andar uh really take down and and and run with this
uh but at the end of the day like let's just let's just look at the two token model right so
a two token model allows us to split the uh you know some people who just want to hold a stable
coin which has no yield versus the people who want to stake and earn the yield.
And structurally what this does is it allows us to lower the cost of capital because now we can say to the borrower that, okay, like we can give you a half a percent or a percent better on the interest rates because there's people who want to like hold the stable coin like you know one of the things that we're working with is trying to get like these these gpu operators to like pay for things
in in the usdi like non-yield bearing stable coin and so if you can increase the moneyness of that
token and and have people hold it even though they're not getting the yield um it benefits
everybody else and it reduces the cost of capital across the board. And, you know, it's just small things like that that, you know, allow us to come in and be extremely competitive.
Right. Because, like I said, you know, all that we do is we issue the token, this NFT, which represents the servers.
That costs next to nothing.
And there's very little legal fees that go into that.
that go into that. It's not like for a private credit firm to do due diligence on the company
is going to take, it might cost a couple of million dollars for them to do that. But if the
size of the deal is in the billions, they'll make their money back, right? So we can be cheaper
because we can issue these NFTs at very low cost. And then the loan that's taken by the borrower
from the protocol, again, it's through Arbitrum. they're paying like less than a penny on it and so you know if you're if you're if your
speed market and providing these loans is faster and the cost of capital is cheaper because you
can offer you know more competitive interest rates you know you're going to be able to compete or
even out compete the best so that that's that's the kind of like realization that i've had
yeah i completely agree and not to mention the defi legos that you can play around with like So that's the kind of realization that I've had.
Yeah, I completely agree.
And not to mention the DeFi Legos that you can play around with, like Pendle and all that good stuff to juice up the yield.
But that's very similar to how the CMBS market works, right? Where like, you know, even though you have like you have your core product, but then you have all these other like, other services that get tacked on either for like derivatives or for borrowing or for everything else, that just that just makes the the debt
product that you have more useful and more financialized at the end of the day. So like,
having having things like Pendle or Euler or anything else really just maximizes the use of the yield stream that you're getting.
And it's pretty incredible to see.
Just conscious of time, I just want to just ask one last question.
Do you have any insights or are there any metrics that you guys are looking at before the token launch any kind of milestone could you leave us
with any insights or alfas leading up to the token launch I mean our number one
priority right now is to source my loans and so like you know the TVL is a gift
that we have to be able to go out and make the business model work you know
our number one priority at the end of the day is to be able to issue these loans
and show the market that we can, again, out-compete and that we're competitive
and that we can make this business model work,
where the benefits of the protocol are seen and people want to get that
and there's demand for it. And that's our number one priority at the end of the protocol are just are seen and people want to get that and there's demand for it and that's our number one priority at the end of the day.
Cool. Thank you very much, Sam. On to you, EY. What are you guys cooking at next for Pendle
or is the most of your attention now on BOROS and perhaps integrating that with Pendle?
and perhaps integrating that with Pendle?
Yeah, at the moment, a lot of our focus is on Boros.
Boros is a new standalone product
which allows users to trade yield on margin.
Right now, the first use case that we have for Boros
is to trade funding rates.
So essentially, what you can do on Pendle,
is that you can long or short your funding rates on perv exchanges.
So we have listed a couple of funding rates from a couple of exchanges,
Binance, Hyperliquid, OKEx for example, and mainly on the blue-trip assets, BTC, ETH, Hype for example.
So at the moment, the way that we vision it is that Boros will remain as a standalone
It will run in parallel to our current Pendle V2.
At the moment, there are no plans to integrate them together.
I think we'll just keep them separate for now.
As for Pendle V2, we are, of course, we're still keeping a close eye in the RWS space.
I think both the USDAI team and the TO team has proven that the RWS segment has just heated
I think next year we'll likely see a great attraction and we want to make sure that Pendle
will be able to list the assets early and help these protocols to grow bigger.
I'm super excited about Pendle, especially Bars as well.
You know, with Pendle, it's so cool that what Pendle is building.
Like I have like non-crypto, non-DeFi friends that I've introduced.
And the first thing that I do is tell them to go to Pendle.
And it just makes sense for them, like they they love the product and like i think i've turned probably like four or five people on to it in the past couple of months and they they love buying
pts and they love everything that pendle has to offer it's so awesome wonderful thanks sam
i gotta say you also have real smart friends Sam because everyone that I try to onboard
Pender 1 so they just struggle understanding PTs and YTs.
I mean you're buying a dollar for 90 something cents.
I mean it's, just tell them that.
True, I'll use that next time. Last but not least, Iggy, THBuild is Theo's first product, tokenized money market fund.
What is the endgame for Theo or what's next?
What other assets are you guys planning to organize?
I know you mentioned the gold, but yeah.
Yeah, so we're planning to expand along kind of two vectors. One is adding more assets, more WAs, and then the other one is adding distribution pathways.
So on the asset side, definitely gold.
And our gold is going to have, for the first time of any gold in Shadfy or Nofchain at scale, is actually going to have an embedded yield which is like insanely cool
and most of the time you have to pay um to buy gold you pay for storage and then you also have
hidden costs um when people are buying futures you have this this cost every time you have to
transition to the next month you're losing and then there's slippage in trading so you know oftentimes if you look at your actual
uh gold performance is going to lag the the london exchange price so so that's gold uh
the next on the road map is going to be other commodities potentially again not going to
pronounce anything but potentially things like silver and selectively mega cap stocks.
We're going to be very, very methodical in launching them because we want to make sure that all the building blocks are in place so that there are like DeFi integrations in multiple places.
When we launched THPL, for example, within the first week, we were on 13 different DeFi protocols and four chains.
So we launched things very, I would say slowly, back up to standards, but then very rapidly
make sure that they are available everywhere where liquidity lives, where there is hyperliquid
ecosystem, Arbitrum, the Tether ecosystem ecosystem or anywhere else so that's on the product side and then on the
distribution side we're going to have our own sort of exchange you know for lack of a better word
where people can have a selection of rwa but also partnering with probe dexes so part of the way we
actually get rwas to trade on chain and to be liquid on chain is by having this
you know fully backed spot markets as well as the perp markets and then running the car between
them because liquidity begets liquidity so the more liquidity you have in the perp the more you
have in the spot and vice versa so having you you know connectivity with major projects some of them have
launched sort of rwa markets and and it's been pretty successful for them some of them don't
have it so part of the vision is to enable these uh you know projects that are doing really well
right now and to see you guys know that there's been a a spike uh i wouldn't even say spike like a secular growth in volumes
in recent months in perplexes so adding rwas there is sort of a natural fit because you know
every country that i go to people would love to to have perps on rwas it's sort of just a natural
easy way to uh to get access to to, much better than options, much better than futures.
So partnering, again, the general idea is partnering with venues where liquidity lives.
I've got to say those are the two main vectors of expansion. Again, the ultimate goal is to be a full
wealth management platform on chain where you can log in from any of
who already in over 60 countries by the way just with THBL so somebody from
Thailand can just log in with ten dollars and have a proper portfolio just
like you would have from a private banker sitting in Manhattan
super super cool there was lots to unpack from this Twitter space and I'm sure all the listeners could
I'll give a moment to pass the mic to the floor.
If anyone's got any questions, feel free to put your hand up and I'll pass the mic over
to you before we wrap up.
All right, looks like there's no questions. Thank you all for tuning into this Twitter space.
Feel free to check us out at Entropy or at USTAI, THBO or Pendle if you've got any other
questions and enjoy the rest of your day and the best of season.