Gem gem and happy friday. We have a very exciting ama with shell purple
And churro is our guest house and arbitrant contributor that we'll be leading this ama
Yeah, happy to host this ama
We have shell protocol. I know you guys have been here within the arbitrary ecosystem
For a while now since the beginning of time before
Arbitrant when mainnet, so
Yeah, really excited to have an og project here to talk about what you guys have been up to I know you guys recently
So super excited to dive into that
But you know first I want to give you guys a chance to introduce yourself. So yeah gonna pass it over to you guys
Hey, what's up? I'm Kenny
The founder of shell protocol and I'm really excited to be here big fan of
The arbitrary tech stack and yeah, thanks for having us
Cairo I'm head of marketing for Calri Labs, which is building shell protocol
And I'm gonna let Kenny do most of the talking today since he's the mastermind when it comes to shell v3
But I will be here to chime in as needed and
Yeah, very big fans of Arbitrum
Been really happy working with you guys for quite a while now and very glad to be here
Cool yeah, I mean Kenny do you want to start with like the story of shell protocol how it came to be?
Sure, yeah, um, I think like
Think the fundamental like premise for me or like driver of
Creating shell protocol was well my my backgrounds in economics, right? And I felt like on
Traditional economists really
Didn't fully appreciate how powerful and important like a proper
Internet native financial system and monetary system really was going to be and how that really is like the future of our
Is being able to connect peer-to-peer online and?
Undergo any kind of like sort of financial
Arrangements or contracts and I think that's just gonna be like a huge impact on our species and I felt like
Mains from economists weren't really appreciating it because they were just seeing
What crypto was and not what it was gonna become?
but on the other hand, I felt like
People in the crypto space maybe weren't
Also didn't I think fully appreciate just what it what it's gonna take to build a proper like internet monetary system
Like I think the promise and potential of Bitcoin
Don't very captivating to me, but I felt that like just having like
An asset on its own wasn't enough for like proper like internet money and what we needed was like a whole holistic
financial system and kind of analogy I use is
Like the sink in our house and we turn on the we turn on the tap like water just sort of comes out
we don't really think about it, but like
Really that water only got there because of a complicated system of like pipes and pumps to take it from you know
like a cistern somewhere or reservoir and deliver it and treat it to your
Treat it and then deliver it to your house and I feel like that's kind of what the monetary system is like, you know
When we use money, we just sort of take it for granted. We don't realize that there's like a complicated
infrastructure behind the scenes like moving value from one like
part of the economy to another and I feel like
For me like the the guiding principle with shell protocol is is to try and create those pipes and pumps
But for internet money, so that way we can actually have a proper
You know global internet decentralized financial system and that's sort of I think
the origin of the idea we
Ship shell be one. Oh, man. That's a while ago in October knows focused on focusing on stable coins
as an AMM for stable coins, and that was something that we
Think learned a lot from that experience and so that sort of was
Based on my experience. We realized that what we really needed to build one of the real challenges in defy was
composability and internet interconnectivity between protocols and have a
system where instead of having these protocols be
siloed into different apps
Different smart contracts to have sort of an integrated
Interconnecting network and that was the that was sort of what we built for Shelby to but it had one
Drawback which is it wasn't
External protocols that already existed and so with Shelby 3 which we shipped earlier this week on Monday
Addresses those shortcomings and now we can connect to any protocol anywhere on the EVM. I think that's like really exciting
Yeah, I mean I I agree with you on the on the monetary system part
I'm also an economics major. So I also took all those classes like all those theory classes to learn about
How economies are built and stuff like that and as soon as I started to take those really senior courses in college
I was like, holy shit, like our monetary system is so updated
So, so, you know, that's why you know, we have defi now is because you know, it's open open source
it opens up a global economy where you know anybody could be a part of it and all you need to do is just download a
Wallet and obviously connect to use those protocols and such as yourselves as well
But yeah, that's such a really good analogy
About what you guys are doing
Within the defy ecosystem
And you know one thing I wanted to ask you guys about is the shell smart contracts
I know that's something new for
V3 that could benefit other protocols. So do you maybe want to dive into that aspect?
Shelby three what is shell? I think it's important to take a step back and look at
the problem and I think it's easiest to look at the problem from the standpoint of an end user and
What I find really cool and exciting about defy and I think like probably everyone
Probably everyone in defy feels the same way is it's just the the rates of innovation and the
Opportunities available is just really impressive and it's sort of like one of the things that
Gets me up every morning excited to like work on this is just thinking about all the cool stuff
That's being built all the time and just sort of be a part of that
You kind of a part of this like it's moment in history really at least in financial history. It's just really like special
but the the thing is that it's actually like it's so hard to
For a practical standpoint to take advantage of all this innovation
It's and I think like one of the reasons why it's so hard to like use defy and take advantage of it
Is that like every defy protocol basically is like its own?
Application and so if there's like a new if a team of builders has come up with like a new thing a new design a new
What you have to do is you have to like open their app learn a new like front-end
Figure it out and then once you figure it out you got to go
Well, where am I gonna get like tokens to put into this you put into this protocol?
And you got to go like a one other one other protocols that I'm using you got to go to like you got to withdraw
Them you maybe you got a swap them and you got to deposit them
That's just like a really
Inconvenient experience like just imagine, you know, you're you're a liquidity provider on uni swap and
You want to migrate your tokens to curve like that's gonna take you
Quite a number of transactions. It's gonna take you like quite a number of steps just to accomplish that
And there's really no reason why that should be the case. So if there's no reason why
Can just be done through one standardized interface. There's no reason why you can't
do all these things and just one simple transaction and so
That's kind of where I think Shelby 3 comes in which is
Unifying defy into like one interface and so that like being an LP in a pool being able to like lend or borrow tokens
or trade NFTs is just as simple as doing like a regular old token swap and
Not only is that really good for
Because it reduces the barriers to take advantage of all the opportunities and innovation and defy
it's also great for builders because like
You can get people to try out your protocol and be exposed to your protocol without having to like open another
tab in their browser without having them to like
Manually withdraw from like a competitor's protocol. It's just as simple as like a one-click
Transaction and so trying to like reduce the barrier between users and builders is I think a really important objective for this
now you mentioned the the shell smart contracts, so
We have the shell app. If you go there you can we're still adding integrations, but
right now you can migrate from
Shell pools to curve pools. We're gonna add balancer pretty soon. Hopefully
Hopefully for the next couple of days. We'll have balancer pools so you can migrate from curve pools to balancer pools, but like
Powers the the shell app interface is the shell app smart contracts
And I think the way the best way to describe what the smart contracts do well high level
DeFi protocol that's integrated into our smart contracts
becomes part of this like super network of DeFi protocols and users and pretty much any
DeFi protocol can connect with any other DeFi protocol in this network. And so if you're
Want to compose DeFi protocols, this is probably the best way to do it
and one of the coolest things about this system is that it's like
permissionless so anyone can build like an adapter between shell and their protocol and
Connect with it and hook it up. And then it just like works and
interface on the app is standardized
It's it's you you don't have to build like a new front-end to access your protocol
You can just access it through the shell front-end or even, you know
Fork the shell front-end and use it yourself
Yeah, that's basically it. I don't know how much detail you want to go into the smart contracts. I have a tendency to like
Ramble once I get going so I'm gonna take sort of
To sort of let things kind of percolate
Yeah, something I wanted to mention as well. Like I remember back in
Was happening and I remember like hunter and I we were just like hanging out at the park at the waterfront in our town
and we were trying to like
Gather our thoughts together and wonder like, you know, what is uniswap?
and like what are the other
DeFi protocols out there because it was so hard to keep track of everything because during that time you seemed like an explosion of
Leverage protocols options as well. So
Yeah, I think you know jumping into that space back in
2020 it was such a it was it was crazy
It was so easy to get lost because we were just trying to like figure out everything like oh like what is what is uniswap?
How can we benefit from this or like how could we utilize the other protocols?
and so it was just like a rush of innovation just like
Pouring like onto like our phones and all that sucks our laptops too because we're trying to you know
Learn how to use it and there was a new protocol. I was out we were trying to like catch up
It's like what was going on. But yeah, it was such a crazy time
So I'm really happy that you guys have built a protocol that
Has everything in one place like swapping
Barring lending and so forth. So yeah, it's such an awesome job on that front
Yeah, I don't really have any questions on the shell smart contracts
Yeah, I was just curious on how it benefits like other protocols, but you already mentioned that
Well, hold on you said something that I really liked, you know, you gave a shout out to the 2020 DeFi summer and
I think you know in a perfect world selfish
Uh, I I really hope that we can get back to that excitement in DeFi again
And I hope I know in a perfect world
Shell will be like a catalyst for that because it'll unlock all these other DeFi protocols and make them accessible to people
in a way that they currently aren't and
Like I feel like when I use
services like say DeFi llama
It's on the one hand DeFi llama is this like incredible platform that lets you
Look into different DeFi protocols and track them and understand them and it's a great tool for exploration
But then if you actually want to use any of them
you know, what do you do next and I think like
like kind of like a bit of a
A bit of a crazy like way that we describe it is sort of like, you know, what I think the ecosystem needs is like
something like DeFi llama and one inch to sort of have like a baby where on one inch like you can swap between every token you
Want because it just sort of routes between all the DEX's and DeFi llama lets you like browse and look at all the different protocols
I think what we really need to like get back to like, you know, DeFi summer 2.0 is
This is a platform where you can like browse different DeFi protocols like DeFi llama
And then you can like use any DeFi protocol you want sort of like how one inch lets you swap for any token you want and
that's kind of the goal with with with shell is to create that kind of user experience and and
Make DeFi like fun again, you know
I feel like we haven't had a lot of fun in DeFi since DeFi summer and there's no reason why we shouldn't we should have
More fun cuz like they have the protocols are better the UI UX is better
There's more liquidity more TVL. I feel like I feel like DeFi is ready to go on a run again, at least
As as sort of a DeFi enthusiast. I want DeFi to go on a run again
Yeah, I miss those good times
Yeah, I yeah, I'm like really curious to
account abstraction because I think
During the bull market, I mean, sorry not bull. Sorry bear market a lot of a lot of protocols on arbitrum
They've been heavily focused on
improving the user interface or
abstracting things that could you know, make it easier for users to use their protocol
So I'm wondering like in terms of account abstraction
Are you guys also focused on that aspect as well for this year?
now first I feel like every time I talk about something that's
Economics but related to like other product design or software engineering
I got to give the obligatory like disclaimer of like never fully trust an economist when they're talking about like
Technical stuff and in fact never trust definitely don't trust an economist when they're talking about economics
The way I look at account abstraction is I think I'm more in the like intense camp
Do you think our listeners are like familiar with like I assume they're familiar with intense
But, you know, basically it's a basic idea is
Right now when you want to do something on a blockchain like say arbitrum or aetherian mainnet
You basically have to figure out exactly what you want to do
And then you have to like build that transaction yourself and then submit that transaction to the block and have that transaction
We're validated or whatever whatever terms are using these days and
You know with intense it's a little different right instead of saying exactly we want it do step by step
You say hey, here's the outcome that I want and you sign a message basically saying look, I'll accept any transaction
Executed on my behalf that accomplishes this outcome and then there's a whole networking ecosystem of solvers that says
Do this transaction for you for Kenny and in doing so I could maybe make some
tokens for myself so like I think
Like cow swap or you swap X or kind of like the most
examples of intense that are in production where instead of you know one inch
You go to the one inch API and you say hey like I want to swap E3 USCC
One inch has this whole back end that goes and looks at all the different pools and all the different possible ways to
Make that trade through DEX's and then it finds the most optimal one
Gives you that transaction path and it's up to you to like get that mind
Whereas like you need swap X or cow swap it's a little different where basically you say hey like I
Want to make a swap for ETH USCC. Here's how much ETH I want to give here so much USCC
I want back and then the solvers which will probably have infrastructure similar to what one inch has
figure out the like the cheapest route through all the DEX's to
I think that swap into your behalf and then if there's a difference between what you asked for and what you got
You know, they'll take a little pocket to spread and make some money and
All this is to say that I think personally that
account abstraction is probably I
Think like the goal of account abstraction is the right goal
But I think that intents are a better way of accomplishing that goal than account abstraction
Because there's a couple of things that you get with intents. So one thing you get is
Transactions now the user is just signing a message and they don't need to spend gas. So if you want to
Take advantage of blockchains and you'd like well, maybe I don't want to hold each
Have ETH exposure and I don't want to use my own ETH to pay for gas
As long as they have like USCC or any token really with some value they can use that token
through intents to do whatever they want and
Ecosystem again becomes more and more complicated and complex
it's going to become harder and harder for
You know to figure out what's the optimal
path through the network to like make a swap or to like LP into this pool or to like lend this specific token and
If you want something that's somewhat
Decentralized, you know, typically they they run this logic in like the users like
On the user's computer itself
But as it gets more complicated that becomes less and less feasible and you want to have like a cloud
Server somewhere doing this is some like more heavy-duty
Hardware and it's hard to have a decentralized application if like the most important parts of it are happening
You know on an AWS server somewhere. And so what intents do for you is it lets
Specialists specialized solvers running whatever
hardware, they got to run whether it's a cloud server or like something else to go and
Calculate all these routes on your behalf. And so you end up with a more dis
Aggregated network a more decentralized network where different
Techstack are controlled and executed by different parties. I think overall so you get like that high level of performance without like
And hopefully mitigating some of the centralization that would come with it. And so in that sense a
much more bullish on intents than account abstraction and
That might be also somewhat of a self-serving
conviction because the the way the shell
it makes it fairly easy to build an intense framework on top of it because
underlying all these smart contracts is
basically like this fairly
flexible and efficient ledger system that tracks balance changes for users and
Using this system. It becomes fairly easy to run an intense framework
That works for any protocol connected to the shell network. So that means
You know, once we develop this intense framework and we recruit like a network of solvers
well, we'll end up with is sort of a generalized intense framework for all of the five kind of as like a
And so yeah, that's why I think I'm more interested in intense than account abstraction that and I think it
Works really really well with the fine works really really well with the technology that we've built
Yeah, that's super that's really interesting
And you know talking about like five years from now
What do you guys see a shell protocol at?
This is a good question. Well, it's hard to predict what's gonna happen specifically to shell protocol
but I think the DeFi industry in general, I think like I
Think we're no longer gonna have I guess these standalone like apps for DeFi protocols
And instead we're gonna have like a couple of platforms
That connect DeFi protocols together and sort of create like a unified
Interface for end users and so I think in five years like builders aren't gonna be like building like dApps for their protocols
They're just gonna be connecting their protocols to these
Like super deep super super DeFi apps, and I think it's gonna be a much
There's been much more opportunity for users and builders and there's gonna be just a much easier way of
Taking advantage of the innovation that DeFi is providing and so yeah, I think hopefully in five years
No one no one no one builds their front and they connect to shell
But even if even if they're not connecting to shell there, they're gonna connect to something very similar to shell. I feel like the
the approach that we're taking and the the the technology tech stack that we're building is kind of inevitable for this ecosystem and
whether whether the protocol is deployed on on
Arbitrum or on its mainnet, you know, the end user probably won't necessarily need to know and
They'll just be using DeFi and they'll be using all the different DeFi protocols of different
Opportunities on it'll just feel very intuitive and as a builder you don't won't have to worry about
You know building your own app and recruiting users and recruiting eyeballs
You'll you'll be sort of like an Amazon marketplace where it's just you know
If your protocol is good people will learn about it and they'll use it
Yeah, that's super cool. Yeah, well, I definitely
Am like super excited to see that like a DeFi version of Amazon
That'll be so cool. It's like look up shell protocol and you guys will pop up and I could do whatever I want on there
Yeah, that should be pretty cool to see
Yeah, but another thing too
Is there a need for those
Absolutely, and I have been embarrassed to admit this in front of everyone, but I actually never used
DeFi and mobile until this week
For for whatever reason I
Access when when we when we launched lv3 and shipped the shell protocol token
Needed to I wanted to access the app and using myself and I and I spun up
My mobile my mobile wallet and browser for the first time and it was actually using it and I was like well
This is cuz I just I just assuming they're like, you know, if defies is like kind of mediocre on desktop
You know God help me if it's on mobile, but it's actually it was actually really like much better than I was expecting and
And I really realized like whoa, this is like so cool like it's one thing to have like
the world's like financial system of world's most advanced financial system just on on my
On my desk just sitting there or my lap
But it's even cooler and even it kind of blew my mind just having like the world's most advanced financial system just in my pocket
And I was like, wow, how could people like it's shocking that nobody's knows yet that
What this is that that like this is gonna be like a thing that like everyone's gonna have like the tools that people on
Wall Street have right now and other financial hubs across the world
That's gonna be like trivial compared to what's this gonna be in your pocket?
five or ten years from now, you know, just think about like
when when NASA sent astronauts to the moon like they the computers they are using to do all that are like
Tiny and minuscule amounts of processing power just compared to what's on my my smartphone
And I feel like we're going through a similar transition
but instead of processing power just with like financial complexity and
Think that mobile is really important because a like it's just so convenient to have something in your pocket that you can use
And be like large swaths of the world. That's mobile as a primary way that they they use
the internet, you know the time where that they use like computers and I think that
in order for DeFi and this
Crypto and blockchain in general to reach its potential is you know
It's it's it's about connecting people around the world sort of without any
Borders that any barriers just peer-to-peer. And so if you want to reach the potential of what we're building
We need to connect to people
And we need to connect to people everywhere and everyone is you know, using these using using mobile devices and I think like
It was really important to us
When we were designed the shell app to have like have it work
Really well on mobile. And so that's why like we were thinking about. Okay, so we want to create an interface that
DeFi protocols in an intuitive way because what we don't want is like, oh you want to use like
Curve well, here's the curve interface. Oh you want to use Ave. Well, here's the Ave interface. Oh, you want to use open C
Here's the open C interface and just like tab and sort of have them talk between different interfaces
You're basically just like taking the same problem. We currently have which is you got to open, you know
Different tab on your browser or go to a different area
Go to different like app to use something
It's just that that app just happens to be like a micro app and you're like bigger app
and so we wanted to have like a unify interface that every protocol could work with and we felt that like
They see on protocols like apps like uni swap curve
I mean really any decks is gonna have a swap interface and we're like this swap interface
I think is more powerful than people realize because
Ultimately, you know, what is DeFi? What's happening DeFi?
Well, I the user and giving like my tokens to the smart contracts
and then this smart contract is giving me some derivative token back and
That's basically what a swap is, you know, I'm giving I'm giving away one token X and I'm receiving token Y
And so pretty much every DeFi interaction
Looks so basically like a swap when you look at it from like just you know
Numbers in a ledger like maps your balance changing
And so we took that swap interface and we we we modified it a little bit and added
Yeah, well you can go I think it's easier to just see an experience for yourself than me it's describing words
we basically adapt that swap interface so it could work for
Lp'ing lending NFTs working on a borrowing interface as well and
Yeah, I think that one thing that I'm really
proud of and happy with about this swap interface is is how well it works on mobile and
You know because the swapping works on mobile and if this in and if the swap interface works on mobile
Then this interface works on mobile. And so yeah, I think mobile to kind of
Answer your question or summarize my answer. I think mobile is super important. It's it's the future of DeFi
I've taken really seriously when thinking about the the interface for the shell shell app
Yeah, yeah, I totally agree with like how
You know in terms of like, you know swap and the other decks is I think they've been doing a great job in terms of like
Not so perfect. Yeah, I'm sure there's tons of improvements that that needs to be done
But yeah, they've killed it in terms of like the UI
And yeah, especially with the wallets to like the units walk wallet. That's pretty cool
You could do anything on there. You connect to other apps as well
So, you know, yeah, they've done a great job on that front
Oh also rainbow wallet too. They've done a cool job as well
but yeah, it's good to hear that you guys are also focused on the mobile aspect of the shell interface because
Mobile has a role to play in terms of bringing in more users outside of web 3
Into the world of DeFi. So yeah, it's awesome that you guys are are focused on that as well
but I'm curious to hear about I
Guess for 2024. What are some things that are coming up for?
Do you guys have anything on the roadmap for this year?
We've been you know, I think focus has been primarily on shipping v3 and and and the token generation events
Work on like what's what's the future roadmap? And I think like the details are still
Getting thought through but I would say like high level what I see
Making sense for the roadmap is you think of it in three phases
Build integrations to all the major DeFi protocols
So uni swap we have curve. We're about to add balancer
Avi would be another big one and then open see
And then once once we get there then I think you know looking at major DeFi protocols on arbitrum
Would also make a lot of sense. So I think like Camelot would be one thing to look into
Really just create like a great
User experience with these sort of main
DeFi protocols that's phase one and I think like
certainly integrating, you know
Curve uni swap balancer Avi open see I think that that I think is on track to be completed by the end of q1 and
Then phase two would be like, okay now that we have like the core functionality
I think it's it'd be very useful for people to have
this type of integration for their DeFi ecosystem on other chains and
Then that'd be phase two is the deploying to multi chain. So like certainly main nets
That would be like the most that'd be the most obvious one
And then the third phase would be like integrating with cross-chain bridges. And so I think like
I think squid is a good example of like cross-chain swaps
And I think the way I see like cross-chain cross-chain bridges fitting in is it's kind of like squid but like with
DeFi protocols in that swap interface and so therefore you can go from any DeFi protocol on any chain to any other DeFi protocol
on any chain and I think that's
the multi chain would be like q2 and
Then the cross-chain would be q3 q4 and that's I think the high-level road map
That I'm pretty excited about
As well, it's hard to kind of fit into this road map, but I'd say is like certainly on the horizon and one is
borrowing is a bit different than all the other ones because you have to like lock up tokens and you have to like make sure that you
Are able to get those tokens unlocked by paying off the the debt and then the the other thing is
Like I mentioned that intense framework. I think the intense framework is kind of like a
Is it's not like it wouldn't be so hard to build
From a technical standpoint. I think it's more like being able to recruit solvers is the real
And you know if you have volume and users and recruiting solvers is easy
If you don't have sufficient volume and users and recruiting solvers is hard
And so I think that's why it's not really part of this roadmap because it would need to be
Predicated on unlike growth and adoption. But yeah, that's basically a high level is step phase one
Go to major DeFi protocols phase to go to go to major chain space to reconnect them all together and
Kind of in parallel to that's integrate borrowing and intense
Because I know there's a lot of protocols, especially like the cross bridge ones
that are looking to improve
not only the speed of like
transferring assets across different chains, but also
you know ensuring their security as well
from the products I've spoken to
The past few weeks they've been heavily focused on that part
In terms of like the infrastructure improving speed, but also, you know considering
having that security in place
Because you know, obviously bridging assets is
You know protecting user funds in general. It's like really important. So
You know, I'm super excited about cross bridging as well. I think that's
Gonna be something exciting to look forward to this year
But yeah, no, I yeah super bullish and so I guess the final question here is
Users go and learn more about shell protocol. Do you guys have a discord or?
Telegram where they can jump in and ask questions
Yeah, so we have a discord
Believe I don't know Cairo can probably answer this specific question, but then I do but we do have a discord and there's also
newly launched shell newly launched shell Dow the forum is already live or using Commonwealth and
Post a post a proposal or I guess a request for comments. Those are open. You can do that right now
will be I'll be like making a couple myself and like in the next couple of days and then
Voting will be for the Dow will be open starting next week. I don't care. I didn't miss anything
Yeah, well, I mean there's our Twitter which is on here
So if you're in the spaces, you can follow us on our Twitter or X shell protocol
there's the discord which you mentioned and the Commonwealth and
Those are the places where we're most active. We also have a YouTube channel if you want to go watch our
old podcast episodes see our faces and
Hear from some of our brilliant guests on various topics
You can also find those on Spotify Apple music wherever you listen to podcasts. Just search for
mind meld live with shell protocol
Cool yeah, no, it was a pleasure
Have you guys on here to talk about v3 and everything shell protocol and it sounds like you guys are
Building something really exciting here. So, you know, I'm hyped as well and bullish on shell
So yeah, thank you guys for coming through and joining us today and have a great weekend
Thank you so much for having us
Anytime yeah, see you guys later