Yeah, sorry, like exits a bit buggy but but yeah, welcome for this amazing AMA with tenderize
we're super excited to be hosting this one.
Yeah, churro is going to be our guest host and arbitrary contributor that we that will
So let's get started and thank you for your patience here.
Yeah, I think we stopped with Alec giving an introduction on tenderize.
Alright, beautiful, beautiful.
Yeah, so I'll keep this short.
I'm Alec and the CEO of Tenderize Labs.
It's the development company that built and contributes to the tenderize open source protocol
and before working with the tenderize lads, I was running a protocol on Arbitrum called
So I've been building, you know, professionally since 2020.
Before that, I was running this entity called the Market Blockchain Lab, which is when I
started when I was a university student at Market University.
And then before that, just kind of like a kid hanging out in hacker forums, downloading
software from peer to peer torrent sites first came across Bitcoin in 2015 and one
of those forums and it's consumed my brain ever since.
So that's my quick background and I'll pass it off to team members.
Yeah, it's really cool to see a Bitcoin OG in the space still.
Yeah, like what I'd say more than eight years.
Yeah, I mean, when I first got exposed, for better or for worse, it was when a couple
of my lads and I wanted to go to a pub as we were heading to university.
And basically, they accepted payment in this strange thing called Bitcoin.
And I first encountered that in those like, you know, kind of like hacker style forums
where I was trying to do the torrenting and I was like, oh, shit, I've come across this
thing before. So, you know, this was still during the days where if you wanted to get
some Bitcoin, you'd have to go to localBitcoins.com and then deposit cash into a
random bank branch, basically take a photo of your deposit receipt and then just pray
that your Bitcoin would show up.
So that's when I, you know, that was my first interaction with Bitcoin and then came
across Ethereum in 2015 and I was studying finance at the time and it just really
clicked. So basically right then and there I was like, this is going to be my career
path. Yeah, that's awesome.
And I also remember back then I wasn't there for it, but I heard that there was
like a Bitcoin faucet where you get like a little bit amount of Bitcoin back in the
day. But now that faucet is empty.
I'm not sure where that is, but that's why I heard.
Yeah, I was I wasn't lucky enough to get the faucet.
But a couple of my cousins like way back when these are some surfers out of
California and they were like, yo, you got to use this thing Coinbase.
If you sign up and make an account, they'll send you 50 Bitcoin because
they're basically worthless.
But, you know, we think they're going to go up in the future.
And I was like, oh, man, these crazy dudes, you know, I'm not I'm not downloading
that shit. And it was probably one of the most costly mistakes I've ever made.
But, hey, it made me pay attention to the space and kind of keep a pulse on it over
the years. Keep track of it.
Yeah, I mean, I don't think that that is as bad as like when someone bought pizza
with Bitcoin. You heard that story, right?
I also heard someone use their Bitcoin to buy a computer mouse back in the day.
But, yeah, Diogo, do you want to give yourself an intro?
First of all, you know, thank you for having us here kind of a very special day for
I'm leading Martin at Tenderloin.
I've been through big pharma with Pfizer and AstraZeneca, then went to luxury
with with the Richmond Group, working with Omega Brightling and then ended up,
you know, on my dream industry, which is Webtree and DeFi, more specifically
liquid staking at Anchor, ended up developing Helio CDP until mid-shine,
till 200 million, then Davos CDP as well, went to went through Tagus Ventures
and, you know, now I tenderized pushing decentralized liquid staking and,
you know, much more, which we're going to we're going to be speaking through here.
But once again, you know, thanks for for having us here.
Cool. Yeah, welcome aboard.
And we also have Salim here with us today.
Yeah, thank you for having us.
My name is Salim, a little bit about my background.
Been an entrepreneur for 11 years at my digital agency company.
I sold that a few years ago, worked full time in crypto.
My role here at Tenderloin is the chief operating officer.
So I do the daily operations and also business development, expanding the launch cohort.
We currently have 40 partners, even more launching with us today.
And yeah, really excited for today, talking with you guys about our launch
and how we can benefit from liquid staking using Tenderloin's V2.
You guys launched yesterday.
So we deployed the contracts yesterday, but the front end was just pushed live about an hour ago.
So like we're still running high on emotions here, man.
Whoa, yeah, that's awesome lives.
Yeah, hopefully we can see some TVL kind of tick in there, flow in as we're live here.
And, you know, just to get started, how are you guys feeling about the launch?
I know you guys must be so excited with, I know obviously this took a long time to build.
So I'm curious to hear your thoughts on like, how do you guys feel right now?
Yeah, I mean, I'm feeling good.
And we were very eager to see some like positive feedback from partners even before we were live.
So we've been live on Testnet since about November.
And we've been basically talking with staking service providers and node operators to better understand their pain points and to curate a custom protocol that democratizes participation in liquid staking.
So much so that these node operators can actually play the liquid staking game as well.
And all of their stakers actually can participate in this ecosystem, which I'm sure we'll get into kind of like how we differ from existing protocols.
But yeah, we're just like super honored and humbled to have over 40 different staking service provider partners with us today.
And just couldn't be more excited to see the TVL begin rolling in and kind of prove out this new, totally new liquid staking architecture.
And we really kind of rethought liquid staking from the ground up, took a first principles approach, and built something really new.
And we're very excited about that.
Yeah, no, yeah, really excited about this.
And, you know, for the audience here, I'm curious, do you guys want to jump into like the story of Tenderize on like where it all began?
What inspired you guys to build this protocol?
And yeah, hopefully, I think this is like an interesting story.
So, yeah, I'm curious to learn more about what is Tenderize and where it all began.
Salim, I see your hand up.
Yeah, we got our first 600,000 GRT and I'm monitoring the smart contracts life, just wanted to let you guys know.
Hey, Nico, if you'd like to add anything about kind of the early days of Tenderize, you can hop in now or I can take it away.
I see Nico's just a listener.
So basically, we observed this interesting phenomenon in the liquid staking space.
And that is that it wasn't actually democratized.
Okay, so liquid staking was and is currently working just fine for the DeFi DGen, who's really just looking for some basic yields on their assets that are sitting idle.
And maybe they want to use that stage token as collateral to borrow against it.
But most users of liquid staking protocols today just really want this kind of simple, very, very basic yield product.
There's not much focus on risk mitigation.
It's really this like, okay, I have some ETH, how do I get yield on my ETH, and I don't really care where it's generated from as long as it keeps coming.
So if you kind of double tap on that, a lot of the risk associated with these products is obfuscated.
And this prohibits a lot of market participants from actually staking.
So if you look at like staked ETH versus liquid staked ETH, there's only about 20% of all staked ETH is liquid.
So it's not because these other stakers don't want a liquid product, but it's because the liquid products today don't satisfy the specific needs of these stakers.
So we kind of took this new approach completely to liquid staking, one that doesn't use an index style approach, but rather we give
the end user the opportunity to select which validator they would like to stake to, and then the Tenderize v2 protocol will accept the stake delegated to the
whichever validator the user selected, and then the protocol will return to you an extremely vanilla,
extremely bare bones, no governance liquid staking token, and the performance of that token is directly related to the performance of the node or the validator that you selected.
So this doesn't take an index style approach, but rather it whittles down the infrastructure to validator specific LSTs.
And then when the end user say wants to create an index, instead of in minting that index right off the bat, the user has the ability to curate their own custom index.
So what this really does is allows for those people staking to a specific node operator to begin playing the liquid staking game.
And if you want to create a custom curated index like, you know, SpakeD, you can absolutely still do that.
And we'll get into kind of how that all works here, but that was the primary motivation behind building Tenderize.
We needed more ability to silo risk and have just a more nuanced approach to the liquid staking instead of just holding these index style products that tend to have some
centralizing attributes and leave a lot of stakers on the sideline.
I'll jump in for a second here.
So so the OG story is that because I haven't introduced myself, sorry.
So my name is Nico, CTO at Tenderize.
But before Tenderize, I was actually an engineer at LifePeer and I worked on their staking contracts and much more, of course.
And if you don't know, LifePeer is the OG Deepin project that was the first to migrate to Orbitrum as well.
They've been on there for like over two years now.
So how this kind of all got started is I run a note on the LifePeer network and I wanted to expand the service and grow the operation.
But all of my money was locked in in stake that I couldn't immediately withdraw and I didn't really want to sell it either.
So we were we went looking for a way to sort of collateralize that stake and hence Tenderize was born and the idea of validator specific elasties.
Cool. Yeah, I'm really interesting.
How does that look today?
And what are you guys doing to improve it and grow the liquid staking ecosystem?
Yeah, if you if you look at it today, let's let's take let's like Polygon as an example, right?
Because it's the biggest of the tokens in terms of market cap that we support.
They also have a few other liquid staking protocols already live for GRT and LPT.
We're sort of the only ones.
So it's not really a nice comparison.
But for Polygon, if you if you look at it like at the amount of tokens that are staked, only 10 percent or roughly less than that is actually liquid staked.
And all of the other stake is just people that are happily selecting validators and natively delegating their tokens.
And we really want to include those people into liquid staking as well.
And what we've actually heard from our lounge partners and several staking service providers,
but also customers of staking service providers, is that they really want us to maintain their relationship with the people they stake to,
but also be able to participate in liquid staking.
So what we're trying to do is not really fight for crumbs with existing liquid staking protocols over the existing liquid staking market.
We're trying to activate the capital and the stakers that are currently like kind of barred from from participating in liquid staking
because of various reasons that we can go into afterwards.
So yeah, we hope that bringing those people into that ecosystem as well is a catalyst for growth towards decentralization.
And that's sort of the angle that we're playing.
Anything you want to add there, Alec?
Yeah, that's very interesting.
And you guys recently, well, before, in the past, you guys dropped the V1, right?
So I'm really curious, what is the difference between V1 and V2?
So V1, you can look at it as sort of a MVP or proof of concept.
We started doing hackathons very early on with tenderize, like early in COVID.
And this was even before Lido was a thing.
They were still building.
Rocket pool was still building.
Liquid staking was not a thing yet, but we knew that like some people were building eat liquid staking and kind of coming from a deepened background.
We wanted to bridge those networks, like the graph life here, et cetera, more with DeFi because flash back to 2020.
DeFi summer was like raging and like the deepened protocols sort of were under look despite something like the graph being the backbone for a lot of gaps and the data that they serve.
So our initial vision was to kind of sort of shed more light on these protocols through liquid staking and bridging them to DeFi.
And our model was very similar to something like Lido.
We just allocated stake to one or more nodes on the network and that was managed in-house by the team.
And like we could have like put that under a dow.
But we made the decision very early on after launching that and sort of anticipating what would happen to stake deep, not only in terms of the deep back happening, but also in terms of like the centralization debates.
We sort of anticipated that and we said like, yeah, we can move the one to a Dow and improve that and add more nodes or we can just like rebuild the entire thing from the bottom up during the bear markets and we kind of chose the latter.
Hey, on the topic of building this thing from the ground up, I want to just introduce kind of this like mental model that we use to kind of like think about liquid staking broadly.
So liquid staking has three core components and conveniently enough, it's like right there in the name.
So first you have the liquidity and the liquid part of the liquid staking token.
And really what that means is like, OK, where what liquidity venue are we going to pick?
Which AMM is this going to be traded on?
Number two, you have the staking component and that's the philosophy around, you know, where and who, where's the stake going to go and who's allowed to custody stake for the users delegating through this protocol.
And then the third component, which is the T in LST, it's the token, it's a very simple process of wrapping the stake into a transferable ERC 20 token.
And all liquid staking protocols today, including even tenderized V1, they lump the S and the T into one category.
So practically that means that they use this kind of index style approach.
So if you're picking, say, state ETH, they use, you know, 31 of the largest validators supporting Ethereum and it's if you go to a different protocol like liquid collective or luvial, you know, you meant OS ETH and they have a different philosophy around which node operators are allowed to participate.
And they wrap the token into this index, which is really convenient when it comes to like incentivizing liquidity on curve.
But what I'm driving toward is it doesn't really give much optionality for the end user.
They don't individualize the three components, but rather they lump the token and the validator selection into one.
And tenderize is a new protocol that separates those three components as we believe they should be.
So let me just kind of hit the tenderize approach real fast.
So when it comes to the token component, so that's the T in the LST, we don't use an index, but rather we have this.
Credibly neutral base layer that will accept the delegations and return the user the validator specific LST.
So at this layer, there's no governance, there's no risk of your stake being co mingled with other node operators.
You can hold this LST and know that your stake is only going to live on your on the validator that you delegated to.
Okay, so that's the T component. Now, let's look at the S. This is the philosophy around which validators are allowed to participate.
And instead of picking some subset of validators from day one, we allow the end user to select which validators they want to stake to.
So the user can still create indexes, but what they do is they create indexes through our protocol called Tenderpools.
And it's actually comprised of validator specific LSTs.
Okay, and then when it comes to the L, the liquidity, we have our own new liquidity venue. This is called TenderSwap.
And it's a public shared liquidity pool that can either provide liquidity to the validator specific LSTs, or it can provide liquidity to an index.
So instead of trying to fight other protocols to get the most liquid index on curve, rather, we completely rethought the infrastructure.
And what this does is allows those stakers who prefer staking to one validator, they can play the game with using these individualized LSTs.
Or if you want to create your preferred index, you can absolutely still do that.
And you can do it in a more trust minimized way, in a more transparent way, with less fees by curating your own custom index of LSTs.
So we compartmentalize those three core components, and then the user gets to interact with those components up to their comfort level.
Right, so yeah, I mean, the process seems very efficient. Right, you start off by selecting a validator.
So and you could choose any validator within the ecosystem, like, for example, Ethereum, and then stake and then collect.
And then from there, you can either swap or un-stake.
Yes, exactly. So it's permissionless from the both the user perspective, as well as the validator perspective.
So you can select any validator in the network, the Tenderize V2 protocol will return to you a liquid representation of your stake.
And then you have two options. You can either swap instantly through TenderSwap, or you can un-stake one-to-one by simply wading through the unbonding period.
So, you know, for Matic, that's 48 hours. For a live peer, that's seven days. For a GRT, it's around 28 days.
So you're never left holding a bag or left in a situation where there isn't on-chain liquidity.
You can always guarantee that you can withdraw one-to-one.
Right. And like, how does the validator specific LST approach benefit the end user and network?
Yeah, I think it does benefit. It provides two like really clear benefits. So it does it two ways. First, it democratizes participation.
So as we kind of discussed earlier, the majority of stakers today are staking through staking service providers.
They're not interacting with LST protocols directly. So they're either delegating through the native interface or they're staking through staking service providers.
And with Tenderize and our validator specific LST approach, it allows for these staking service providers to offer a white label LST where their current stakers can mint a liquid version of the stake.
And the staking service provider gets to retain all of their assets under management and the user gets to continue to stake to their preferred node
without having to commingle assets or mint this strange index style product. So that's number one. We allow for all stakers to play the game.
And then number two, you can still build these index style LSTs which exist today, but in a more decentralized way.
So if you want to replicate staked ETH, fine. Pick the exact same 31 validators supported by LIDO, but remove the 10% fee that they take on rewards.
Or you want to create a OFAC compliant index because you're a US based delegator. Fine.
Pick the same validators that support the OS ETH index, but do it in a way that has less fees and doesn't drive all of the stake toward this centralizing kind of honeypot style approach.
So that's really, we want to democratize the space while also ensuring that we're building indexes in such a way that's more transparent, more permissionless and doesn't have the centralizing attributes.
Yeah, and in terms of like, what works does tenderize V2 support currently?
Yeah, so we're going live. Well, we just went live with the graph. So that's GRT, the asset, and then the asset LPT, which is the live peer token, and both of those tokens live on Arbitrum.
So you can go today to app.tenderize.me, and you can liquid stake GRT to whichever indexer you prefer, or you can liquid stake LPT to whichever orchestrator you prefer.
And then we also have Matic liquid staking, which is live on ETH layer one. Eventually, Matic will live over in the polygon ecosystem once they do their POL migration.
But for now, it does live where the Matic staking contracts live, which is on ETH layer one. And then after the Dancun upgrade, you can expect our liquid staked ETH product.
And then later this quarter, you can also expect a liquid staked SOL product over in Solana. So yeah, starting with GRT, LPT, and Matic with ETH and SOL coming soon.
Cool. Yeah, going multi-chain. That's awesome. It's cool to see. And, you know, on the roadmap, I see that you guys have a really cool...
As prepped in November, you guys marinated it. And you guys also dropped the testnet, which made the stake rare.
And now we're at medium rare. So after that, what's next?
Yeah, so good question. Right now, you know, so we just did our mainnet launch today. And in combination with launch, we're running this kind of TVL bootstrapping campaign.
So we call this the tenderized cookout. So we want everyone to go get their stake, you know, start the grilling process, which is, you know, delegate to your favorite staking service provider or note operator.
So after you delegate, of course, you're going to earn the native staking rewards that come along with that asset. But also, you're going to begin earning what we call hats.
Hats are comparable to point systems popularized by, you know, Eigenlayer or Swell. But what you can do is you begin the delegation process.
You collect your native rewards, you collect hats, and then those hats are going to be convertible to our governance token in May with our TGE.
And you can even earn more hats by completing some quests that we have. So check out our Twitter or various announcements, you can find how to earn more hats by completing quests.
And you can also earn hats by inviting your friends. So you go to tenderize.me slash cookout, you'll be able to mint your referral code.
And then if you share this code with friends, and they use that code to deposit, you will actually earn a 15% kickback on all of their accrued hats.
So invite your friends, start earning more hats, and all of those hats are going to be convertible to our governance token in May.
So this is a 90 day campaign that we're running. Before the end of the campaign, you can expect Ethan Solana to be on the testnet.
And then right after the campaign, it's all about utility of these liquid staking tokens. So two primary use cases will be first collateralizing these tokens on Arbitrum and Ethereum based borrowing and lending protocols.
And then second, we're actually going to be shipping our own CDP product. So this will be a LST-backed stablecoin where the end user has the ability to do things like
create an auto repaying loan, repaid by the yield generated by their collateral, or it could be an auto yielding stablecoin where you can hold the stablecoin.
And then all of the collateral yield is given to you in the form of either more stablecoins or in the native yield generated by your collateral.
So we're very excited to push these integrations and products over the next couple of months.
And it's all leading up to May's token generation event where people can begin claiming their Wagyu. So yeah, super excited.
Cool. And yeah, wait, are these hats like NFTs or not NFTs? No, I'm really curious.
No, the best way to think of them is very similar to like the various points,
like the point campaigns that are offered by Eigenlayer or Swell or even Blast, I guess you could say.
Yeah, they're not on-chain NFTs. They are just points which will be convertible
over to the governance token come May. So it's effectively your credits for the airdrop.
Cool. Yeah, I've seen a lot of projects starting to do their own point system. And yeah, I think it's been like a really interesting experiment.
So yeah, I'm excited to see how this all turns out for you guys. Yeah, I know we're towards the end of the AMA.
So I want to ask as well, you know, in case there are community members that are interested to learn more,
where can they go to learn more about Tenderize and the launch?
Yeah, the best way to get involved is to participate in the Cookout. So the Cookout
is a really simple campaign, and you can learn more about it at tenderize.me slash Cookout.
It's going to be a very simple three step plan. You can go there, you can complete a quest right
away, just follow us on socials, you can earn your first couple of hats, you can meet your referral code.
So this way, you can be, you know, share the news with friends, as they join the Cookout and deposit,
you will earn additional hats by inviting the friends. And it'll have all your relevant links.
You can go there, you can learn all about the protocol, you can make your initial deposit,
and you can join the Cookout, begin collecting hats, and ensure that you have a nice healthy
airdrop waiting for you come May. And then tenderize.me is the May website. And as always,
you know, you can follow us on Twitter at twitter.com slash tenderize underscore me.
Give us a follow, the account is right here in this AMA. And that's kind of our, you know,
official announcement venue. You can also find links for our Discord on the Cookout page as well.
So, you know, come join the Discord. Come talk to us. We're extremely active and passionate about
the crypto space where we're in there every single day. So don't hesitate to join the community
and any questions you may have about the Cookout, or hats, or anything liquid staking.
We're your guys. We're here to help. And we look forward to seeing you in our communities.
Yeah, no, I think what you guys are building here is really cool and interesting. And especially
the approach sounds really unique compared to other LSTs. So I'm really excited for you guys
for this year. But yeah, thank you, Alec, Diogo, Salim, for coming on and joining us today.
And yeah, wish you guys the best.
Yeah, thank you so much, Churro. We had fun today. And yeah,
look forward to staying active in the Arbitrum community.
Yeah, thank you. Thank you so much for, you know, like I said, thank you so much for
your invitation. It was a pleasure being here. And you're really looking forward towards,
you know, what's next as we just went with life, especially with the Cookout as well.
So, you know, thanks. Thank you so much for, once again, you know,
allowing us to be here speaking about, you know, what kind of drives we do.
The real question is, have we hit one mil TBL already?
When? That happened already? We're at what?
So we are approaching 200k, which came in 30 minutes ago. So we are hitting the ground
running. Really happy about the launch, guys. The movie is going today and tomorrow.
Yeah, hopefully we hit that one mil TBL in the next hour or so. So yeah,
stay tuned. We'll be obviously tweeting about those big milestones and
start getting involved early because you don't want to miss out on the airdrop.
Yeah, really excited for everything on Twitter.
You cut out a little bit, but it seems like vibes are high. It seems like all good. Yeah.
Hey, yeah, I think the Internet is not working well. But yeah,
super excited for what's coming for Tenderlois. And yeah, looking forward to see you more,
to be honest. And congratulations for everything you've done.
Hey, thank you so much. Yeah, it wouldn't be possible without the support of the Arbitrum
community. And just my last kind of thought here, everyone, is you have a unique opportunity now to
actually contribute to the decentralization of these networks. And let's not kind of settle
for the status quo, which is this index style approach today. But we actually have the opportunity
to use more permissionless, more transparent and more credibly neutral liquid staking protocols
that don't put our underlying networks at risk of centralization. So if you care about permission
lessness, really consider using liquid staking protocols like Tenderize V2.
And that's all I got. Thank you so much, everyone.
Fantastic. That was a nice last thought. Thank you, Alec and Salim and Diogo.
It was fantastic. And yeah, I hope to see you in a new AMA very soon.
Thanks so much. Have a great day, everyone.
You too, have a great day. Take care.