Arbitrum | Polytrade

Recorded: Feb. 26, 2024 Duration: 0:37:35

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I think we have everyone here right
Hey GM, GM. How are we doing?
Fantastic. I have my team members here.
Scott is there, Melinda is there, Sooj is there.
Guys, you can request to join.
Yeah, I've invited Sooj up on stage, but yeah, no, I think we're ready to begin.
So yeah, I mean, my name is Chiro.
I'm the community manager here at OptinLabs, also an Arbitrum contributor.
So really excited to have you guys on here to talk about pie trade.
I know you guys recently announced that you are now integrated on Arbitrum.
So congratulations on that.
Very big news for the Arbitrum ecosystem, especially the real world asset ecosystem.
Very big for that on that front.
So we'll love to start off with some introductions.
So PG will love to get a short introduction from you guys, as well as from the rest of the team.
So I'm going to pass it over to you guys.
Thank you, Chiro. Thank you so much.
We are also equally excited to join Arbitrum Foundation.
And I guess it will be a big move for all of us because, you know, for the path we chose to unify the liquidity and to bring everything together in RWA,
it's a very crucial step for us.
So, yeah, thank you again.
Just to give you a very quick kind of introduction about polytrade.
We are creating a marketplace for RWAs.
Our basic thesis is that it should be one place where everybody can come and, you know, be privileged to buy or take part in RWAs across chains.
It should not be any protocol should not work in silos.
And that is the reason we are creating marketplace.
There are more than 90 protocols globally whose assets are being traded, and they all face the same challenge of liquidity.
They all face the same challenges of secondary trading.
So, yes, our marketplace is promised to solve that.
And yes, Arbitrum is definitely a big, big step in that.
Yeah, but I would I would request my team members and all members to come and join me here and give a brief intro about them.
So, GM, GM, thank you for having us, guys.
I've always been a fan.
It's a pleasure to finally be on Arbitrum.
I think Piyush is rightly talked about polytrade.
It's we've been building this marketplace for some time now.
Really excited to get this marketplace in front of the Arbitrum community.
Really excited to get all these protocols from Arbitrum in one place.
Maybe, Milan, you can talk a little bit more about the protocols.
Just again, thank you so much for having us.
It's a pleasure.
Hey, guys, he absolutely is super exciting time for us to come to Arbitrum.
As she said, we are big fans, even some of the, you know, we're partnering with seven protocols on Arbitrum,
getting to them, getting them on the marketplace.
And each of them is so unique that I think the ecosystem in Arbitrum is just trying to really go to new heights.
And maybe I'll give a couple of honorable mentions to Wiganan.
One called Opulous, that is tokenizing music IP.
And they have some really mind-blowing assets, you know, Phil Collins, Mariah Carey.
And, you know, it's just such a pleasure to have them on board.
And there's another one called Uranium, which is something that I had never imagined would come, tokenize and come on the blockchain.
But I think it's an asset that is definitely, you know, as we see the transition to safer energy, maybe it might be the solar.
But, you know, we all know that nuclear energy is also going to be part of this mix going forward.
So that's another really exciting one.
But there are five more and it just shows that Arbitrum is really gearing up.
Apart from that, obviously, you know, the basic scalability about Arbitrum, the composability and usability, of course, is super important as well.
But we're really glad to be part of this ecosystem and help build it out and help just drive our WAs to the next frontier.
Cool. Yeah, no, I think Polytrade has a really great place for all other rolled asset protocols.
I think there's definitely a huge, huge use case for that, given that, you know, what you guys mentioned before,
like how there's concerns where there's projects that are separate.
And it's good that there is one place, a marketplace where any user can interact with all of these different real world asset protocols in one place and can use the funds to, you know, it could be finance, it could be real estate,
it could be Uranium, what Uranium 808 is working on on Arbitrum.
So it's really cool to see that there's finally a marketplace on Arbitrum where you can do all those things.
So, yeah, that's really cool to see from you guys.
And we'd love to learn about, like, what inspired you guys to build this marketplace and what are some challenges you guys faced along the way?
I think that would be really interesting to hear or learn more about from you guys.
Yeah, I think I'll touch base on one point, which I believe is one of the biggest problems of Web3 today, is that there is no, you know, homogeneous systems here.
Everybody works in silos and they're building their own tokenization standards.
What we did to fight this or to solve this problem?
We authored ERC 6960 and our aim of doing that was to kind of create a standard tokenization where we can wrap all the assets, whoever is using ERC 721, ERC 1155, ERC 20, it doesn't matter.
We will wrap all of them in 6960 and make them homogeneous tradable on our marketplace.
So I think this is one of the biggest challenges we faced because we reached out to almost 50 plus protocols across different chains and everybody was just kind of doing their own thing.
So yes, to aggregate, to bring them together, to make them, you know, trade in an interoperable manner, I think it was one of the biggest problems we are solving.
But yeah, I'll leave podium to, you know, my friend, Scott, you know, who is already a big RWA evangelist and maybe he can share some of the thoughts from the ecosystem.
Yeah, PG, glad to be here. Thank you, Arbuter, for having the stage. Yeah, I think you guys touched on some great points.
My two favorite things to always bring up what you guys covered is access and liquidity.
And the reason why what PG and the team is doing really stuck out to me is what you said, Churro.
Somebody could literally, you know, be interested in Pokemon cards, collectibles, and then, you know, they'd go on Polytrade and all of a sudden now something like commodities or something in the financial sector is now, you know, interesting, easier.
Now you have access to this. So that's what gets me excited.
Also, it gets me excited is every sector is involved, right? You don't have to be a masterful trader. You don't have to be, you know, go be a founder of a NFT PFP project.
You can really, you know, take what you know from your sector and Web 2 and apply that here.
So really excited to be doing this with Polytrade to give so much liquidity and access to everyone who hasn't had it before.
Thank you, Scott. Yeah, so I think Ashish is getting some problem in hearing some members.
Ashish, is it better for you when I speak?
Yeah, I think only Scott's voice is no. No, no way. So, yeah, Ashish, maybe you can touch base on the product side, you know, exactly what could what were the challenges and, you know, how do we see this as an opportunity? I mean.
Yeah, absolutely. I think you started off at a very right step. I think people are building in silos and that was one of the biggest problem statements, right?
So I think today, if I ask somebody that you want to buy a real estate, everybody's saying yes, but are they truly buying?
I think there is a lot of tokenization happening, but a lot of people are not buying these tokens.
I think it starts with a very basic concept of discovery and how confusing it is for the user to actually absorb that data, right?
And and that's what the problem with your assets was, right? So every time you wanted to buy something, there was a lot of discovery process.
There was a lot of there was a lot of hinges that had that was in the part of the user to actually buy that asset.
And that's what actually pointed was to solve. We want to make it into a one ecosystem where it is not dependent on any individual where a user can come to the key.
I see get access to 100 acts, 100 protocols. Not only that, we're also building a full secondary market onto the system.
Just slightly touched on six nine six zero, a great feature of six nine six zero. It allows user driven fractionalization.
So what how it differs is that a user can decide that I want 50 percent of this asset or I want 10 percent of this asset and at a different valuation with different parameters.
So in whole, the marketplace is built in a way where it's a Lego block.
It can adopt to any new ERC, adopt to any new token standard.
It cannot also adopt to any new criteria that is being laid out by the real world for an ERC to adopt.
So we made it in a beautiful way. We just hope the users like it and that's it.
Yeah, I think I think the really cool part about this is that I think Scott mentioned,
but not only you can trade real estate, equity, metals, stocks, but also, you know, other collectibles as well like Pokemon cards.
I mean, people love Pokemon. I mean, I'm a huge fan of Pokemon.
So I mean, it's really cool to see that that you guys have on there.
So, yeah, I'm super excited to see this. And, you know, one question I have is what made you guys come over to Arbitrum?
What are some things that stood out to you? You know, is it the community?
Is it the technology, the product that's being built on Arbitrum to help us scale Ethereum?
So, yeah, I'll take initial part. Like, you know, you already answered actually the first two points.
What really excites me about Arbitrum is the speed and the community.
These two points, like, you know, I always use other protocols where I, you know, personally, I do a lot of, you know, staking or various other things in Web3.
And every time I use Arbitrum, I get so happy and so impressed with the speed.
And the, you know, of course, it's very cheap to use Arbitrum because gas fees is not there.
And then, you know, the lovely community, I guess that is something which we have been, you know,
we have been very focused on one chain for the last three years.
And now this is the first time we are moving out. And, you know, there is nothing, no better home than Arbitrum for that.
But, yeah, happy to. I mean, Milan, you can you can share your thoughts here.
Yeah, just just one second before Milan goes, I just have one story.
It's a funny one. But something Pewsh was testing the product and he's like, why is this transaction every time going faster?
And whenever I'm doing here, it's going slower.
And we realized the only difference was that he was doing it on Arbitrum when it's faster.
So, yeah, it is it is faster. And then we love the community too. Sorry, Milan, please go ahead.
Yeah, I think Pewsh and Ashish touched upon most of the points.
I think another really important piece for us was just, you know, there is there is a lot of action, volume, TV,
you know, what you call it on Arbitrum that we think could be could be maybe funneled into our do is right.
It's it's one of the biggest communities, one of the largest sectors in blockchain.
And, you know, RWA is we think are going to be the next thing that carries Web 3 to the next level.
Right. And for them to participate in RWA is super important.
And we want to make sure we are on Arbitrum where a lot of it we think will go down.
Yeah, yeah.
And I feel like the really big thing here is the amount like so I think what we've seen so far this year in 2024 is that there's been a lot of users bridging over to Arbitrum.
So like right now, if you check Etherscan, Arbitrum is like one of the top four contracts where people are bridging their eaves to.
So Arbitrum, there's a lot of inflows coming over to Arbitrum in terms of but also USDC, which is really cool to see because, yeah, so if you go to USDC.cool website, you can see that like Arbitrum is like the top third bridged USDC as well.
So, I mean, for real world assets, what does this mean to you guys in terms of native USDC inflows coming over to Arbitrum?
I mean, you know, just one thing on this particular point, you know, because we have a lot of stable coins which are being used in the ecosystem to access these RWAs, gaming assets, NFTs, right?
The common thread which binds all of this is stable coins.
And I guess that's the right measure to see that which chain has the highest amount of USDC being natively trading and more getting accumulated.
So you're right on that part.
And probably that is also one of the reasons that we believe that Arbitrum could be a very good home for a lot of RWAs projects in the coming months, because I think I think most of the products, new products, new protocols,
always wants this, that they get support from the chain, they get good ecosystem, they get good community, and of course, they get a lot of liquidity.
And when you measure this liquidity, it is mostly in terms of how much stablecoin liquidity exists on a chain.
So I think, you know, these are a few four characteristics which will make sure that Arbitrum will always remain as a leading chain when it comes to RWAs.
And we are at a very early stage, right?
We don't even know how fast we are growing at this stage, but soon enough, I think we will realize that mostly, you know, something which we use in our daily lives, we will see a lot of assets start coming on Arbitrum.
So, yeah, it will be fun to watch this space, and next few months will be very, very exciting.
Just to add to what PG was saying, you know, there are basically two demand drivers in RWAs, right?
What we've seen till now has been on chain capital looking diversified or looking to get into stuff that, you know, is a different investment option for them.
And that's driven RWAs to, you know, five to ten billion dollars that we are right now.
So I think that's why obviously having these stablecoins and that wealth on Arbitrum is an important consideration from a demand perspective.
That said, I think the next phase is going to be about having assets that maybe bring a lot more of Web2 users into Web3, right?
Pokemon cards is a great example.
If we can get more of the Web2 community into investing in NFTs that represent these cards, that's going to be the next step.
And then all the features about being fast, being easy to create wallets, all of that is going to be centered over the next couple of years.
Yeah, that's super amazing to see.
And, you know, another thing I also wanted to point out of like the initiative that Arbitrum is taking, I'm not sure you guys have seen this, but like last year in December, they announced an Arbitrum stable treasury endowment program.
So they're looking to invest other assets from the treasury Arbitrum DAO, right, the Arbitrum DAO treasury, into real world assets.
So that's something really exciting to see.
So they're looking to diversify the Arbitrum DAO treasury into other assets as well.
So I think it's a really big positive move for the real world asset ecosystem on Arbitrum.
So, yeah, really excited for the Arbitrum DAO to go in this direction and see how that supports the real world asset ecosystem on Arbitrum.
So, yeah, that's a big initiative that the Arbitrum DAO is working on.
You're right, Shuro, actually, you know, that's also a big step towards adoption because retail participant is definitely required, but the more and more treasuries and institutions keep coming in, I think it will bring a much faster adoption to the whole RWA space.
Great to hear that. That's really good news, Shuro.
Yeah, yeah. And if you guys want to read it more, it's on the Arbitrum forum.
So you guys can go on there and find it there.
I can also share it in the chat that we have.
So, yeah, super excited for that initiative.
And I'm wondering, too, from you guys, what are you guys most excited about now that you guys are on Arbitrum?
What are some things you guys are excited about?
Is it collaborating with other projects on Arbitrum?
Is it you guys have an initiative that you guys want to lead to be the leading real world asset place on Arbitrum?
So, yeah, really curious to hear your thoughts on the direction going forward now that you guys are on Arbitrum.
That's an interesting question because there'll be a lot of answers attached to it.
But my version is that since our marketplace is planning to go live very soon, I guess we believe that more and more users start participating from Arbitrum on Polytrade or start looking to buy their first RWA's ever.
Because, again, as Scott and Soothe has mentioned that everybody keeps tokenizing, but really nobody is buying.
And we would love to see Arbitrum community to come and start, get their first RWA's in their hand.
Our marketplace also allows people to buy and sell these assets.
So if you are already a holder of RWA, you don't need to hold it forever.
You can always come and sell it.
You can fractionalize it using our technology of ERC6960 and you can actually sell even a fraction of it.
So I'm most excited about seeing because supply funnel is easy to create, right?
It's more about how do we bring demand and it will be lovely to see community and, as you mentioned, even treasuries and dows start participating in this.
I think that will be really fantastic.
One more use case which we saw recently was we were approached by a fund manager who wants to pool in liquidity and create a kind of mixed bag for RWA's.
Now, to go to different protocols and buy these assets was a really difficult challenge for them.
They proposed that if we come to your marketplace, create an index of various RWA's in it and start trading it here.
So, you know, these are the kind of innovations we need and these are the kind of things which will probably bring more RWA's and more users onto the chain.
So that's from my end.
I mean, I'm happy to hear thoughts from my team members as well.
Scott, anything you want to add?
Soot, Miran.
Yeah, yeah, sure.
I love what you said about the USDC, the liquidity, right?
Oh, my God, I was in the room.
So I think a lot of people forget USDC was the first RWA.
So that really excites me that so much liquidity is coming from, you know, USDC to Arbitrum.
That really opens things up, in my opinion.
The other thing that got me excited is something that you just said, Churro, is the endowment.
Like, wow, I had no idea about that.
So now, you know, just my brain going off is this is going to open the door.
But like PG said, now maybe Harvard's endowment, you know, the most popular endowment that
is around.
Maybe they see what Churro and Arbitrum is doing and go, yo, we should, you know, put
some of our funds into something like that.
So yeah, these are all those organic baby steps that I'm really excited that Polytrade is
going to do to open everything up and obviously super excited for Arbitrum teaming up with
us for the opportunity.
Yeah, yeah, super excited for what you guys are building here in Arbitrum.
And I know you guys have a community event going on.
Do you guys want to talk a bit about that?
Yeah, Melinda, do you want to touch base on that, please?
Yeah, sure. So thanks.
Thanks for bringing that up, Churro.
So it's it's a simple kind of celebration quest for our community to even get to know
the Arbitrum ecosystem.
I think we're just going to post it as a comment here on the space itself.
For anyone who's interested, you can win trade tokens that are now on Arbitrum as well.
And just go and click on the link.
It'll be a small quest and you can win up to 500 trade tokens.
Also, you know, happy to tell everyone here that trade tokens have been on Ethereum and
Polygon and we've we've also launched trade on Arbitrum now.
Yeah, that's awesome.
Yes, super excited to see the community get involved with that initiative.
So yeah, super hyped for that.
And I think we've covered everything.
Oh, yeah, I think one last topic is the strategy for real world asset expansion.
So, PG, I wanted to get your thoughts on that.
What is Polytrade's strategy for expanding, you know, not only just let's say stocks or
collectibles, real estate, is there more that can be put on chain?
I think I've probably said this many times to my colleagues and, you know, to Indian public,
but I'll repeat here, we need to bring more and more Web2 users.
We need to bring more and more Web2 assets on chain.
We want to become eBay or Amazon for Web3 eventually, right?
That's our long term aim.
So to do that, yes, you are right.
You know, we need to bring our daily lives on chain.
We need to bring our daily used assets on chain.
We need to bring big brands who are very popular in Web2 on chain.
And that's one point.
And, you know, the second strategy, which which is, again, very close to our heart today,
there are, you know, places like Africa, Latin America, countries like Turkey, where local
currency is, you know, probably getting constantly devalued and people do not get opportunities
to participate in dollar based products.
While that's the beauty of Web3, that you can get access to these beautiful assets, own
them in as small fraction as you want.
With minimum hundred dollars, you can participate in treasury bills and, you know, stocks and
all that, which in real life are never available to people.
So that is one thing which we really want to penetrate very fast.
We need to go to these countries.
We need to take partner with, you know, agents and distributors there to start penetrating
in these areas.
So these are two key strategies which we are working on to bring both assets and users and
liquidity on chain.
Yeah, I think I think I think we're also looking out for a lot of assets that are closing
I think a very important aspect of people getting into the ecosystem is getting a taste
of what it truly is.
So right now, currently average ticket size of entering into a protocol is pretty high.
Like, let's say a lot of protocols have a minimum ticket size.
I think with Polytrade, what will happen is like a lot of people will get a taste of real
world assets without actually spending a lot of money.
What it does is it allows you to actually build trust on the ecosystem.
We need to establish that trust that, hey man, if you're buying a house, it can get
You can get your money back.
I think once we see that leverage loop happening, once we see all these people getting their
first results out, we will see a lot of money flowing.
I think in the coming time, we really want to make people get buy fraction, close their
loop, get their money returned.
Even if it's a small return, we want to build that trust with the user first.
Yeah, I think another piece of building out in the future is creating an ecosystem, right?
So we spoke about 6960 and how that standardizes, you know, tokenization frameworks across different
kinds of asset classes and RWAs.
An important reason for doing that is making it really interoperable, right?
So for example, if someone has to buy a Rolex watch or a Pokemon card, why does he want
to do that in Web3?
One reason could be he doesn't want to store it himself.
He can trade it at any time, but taking it to the next level means he can get a loan
on it, right?
How easy is it in Web2 to actually get a collateralized loan on an asset that you own or that's kept
in your house, right?
Use cases and they're going to be embedded into Polytrade.
So that includes collateralized lending, that includes drenching, indexing, like Leos mentioned,
I think that's going to be a big part of us getting Web2 users in here because that's
truly something that only Web3 can do.
We can have that interoperability with so many partners.
Ashish, you want to come in?
Yeah, I just wanted to say the most degenerate thing, like that is there'll be leverage.
Like we build leverage for all the deejans out there.
Yeah, that'll be pretty crazy to see.
And our trip is the home of deejans.
So you'll definitely get tons of excitement from that.
But yeah, it'll be pretty sick if like someone could, let's say, tokenize their toy or collectible.
Because especially like on the NFT side of things, right, a lot of NFT projects now are
focused on IP.
And when we're talking about IP, they're focused on like, how do you bring value back
to their holders?
And a lot of projects have been like launching toys, like physical toys, collectibles, like
one-on-one collectibles for their communities, also across like Web2, traditional toy industry.
So yeah, it'd be pretty funny to see like someone tokenizing their collectible, like
their one-on-one collectible or something like that on Polytrade, and then people just
like, you know, bidding for that.
But yeah, that's just an idea I just thought in my mind.
Yeah, really interesting, actually, you know, talking to a few NFT communities to bring
them on, you know, doing their merch or bringing their toys on our marketplace.
So that discussion is definitely on.
And yeah, we would look forward to have arbitrary NFT communities to, you know, partner with
us and bring us more, you know, such kind of stuff.
But yeah, great idea.
Thanks, Shuro.
Yeah, I think like the whole point of that is to just like figure out like, how do you
bring fun to something that could be like really hard to understand, right?
Because I think DeFi overall is just a very hard topic to understand, even for a non-Web3
user, right?
So yeah, it's just about bringing fun and, you know, making the experience so good that
they'll want to stay there and keep using it, right?
So yeah, that's how I came up with the idea.
But yeah, I'm really, really excited for what you guys are working on here on Arbitrum.
I think it brings like tons of collaboration, you know, not only having Polytrade being
the place for people to trade different rolled assets, but also could open the doors for
more collaboration across the Arbitrum ecosystem within the real world assets.
So yeah, really excited for you guys to go out there, collaborate with many Arbitrum
projects and see where that goes.
Thanks, Shuro.
That's really motivating.
And again, you know, thanks for this phase.
I think this is just the beginning and we have our whole week filled up with, you know,
bringing onboard all the Arbitrum projects with us.
So yeah, it is a very exciting week for us.
And let's look forward to it.
Yeah, yeah, super bullish on rolled assets.
Super bullish.
But yeah, thank you all for joining us today.
And if people have any questions, where can they go?
They can definitely hit us on our, you know, social handles.
Polytrade underscore F-I-N-F-N is here.
My team members are here.
Please follow us, DM us for anything.
You can go to Telegram.
That's always available, Polytrade.
You can just do t-dot-v.
I mean, it's just Polytrade.
Find us on Telegram.
And then last, you know, our website is live.
You can go to our website and find us our connections there.
Yeah, well, yeah, appreciate you all for coming on, joining us today and hope everybody here
has a great week.
Thank you, Churo.
Have a lovely week, too.
Thank you, Churo.