Hello, hello, thank you for joining us everyone. We'll just give a few minutes for more listeners to join. Here's a few more minutes and we'll just get it started. Thank you for joining.
Hey, Andrew. Hey, everyone GM GM just making sure can everyone hear me all right? Yes, I can. But I can hear also my voice.
Yeah, there's a small icon on your side. I think always it just from my side, but I'll give everyone just a minute to check their audio check settings and just a few more minutes for members to join and yeah, let's get this started
All right, I think we can kick it off. Yeah, let me just test. No, I can't. Maybe you should use yourself from the top. There's a bit of feedback from from under. Yeah, try to mute. Oh,
Okay, now it's perfect. So if you guys just mute yourself from the main account when I talk, it will be awesome. Got it, got it. We'll do this. Okay, looks good. So I think we can get started about now. My mic also, all right you guys.
Everything. Well, as long as you guys don't talk at the same time, everything is fine. Awesome. Okay, let's get this started. So thank you everybody for joining good stuff. We're going to go ahead and kick this a may off. So a couple of points. What will be the main priority here? We're going to be talking about
The partnership obviously we're also going to take a segment to talk about the device space in general So it's just going to be a casual chat. We got a couple of questions prepared We also have a opening where community members can ask any custom questions. So if you have any you can prepare
those. We also already went into the community and picked some questions out. So we're going to get everything covered. Let's go ahead and start off with a round of introductions. So let's start off with our guest from DeForce. Andrea, perhaps you could do a quick introduction. Who are you? Would you represent everything you want to share?
Sure, thanks for having me first of all, thanks for all the listeners to have joined. And my name is Andrea. I am from Italy. I joined crypto in 2020. And it didn't take long for me to realize that this was the world that was the most interesting.
that I wanted to work in the field and understand, or was more and more and even after, you know, three years and more than three years. I mean, this field, I still know that there's still a lot to learn. Also, this field is developing so fast that it's really always something
to take care of. And yeah, I've had some experiences with my own community, with PancakeSwap community. I work for a number of projects and now I'm super proud to be part of the DeForest team as a marketing manager. So thanks for having me again.
Awesome. Great. Okay. Perhaps also a quick introduction from our side that would be Mike in this case. He's going to be talking to me. Hi everyone. First of all, great introduction, Andrea. Great to be on the speaker side with you today. Hey everyone.
My name is Mike. I'm working at Bullight as a community and partnership manager. So for everyone here in the audience, hearing about me for the first time, I'm pretty new in the team. So any community kind of related stuff, any partnership related stuff, you can always bring it up to me. You can find me on both Discord and you can also like
Check out my Twitter account. But to get started, my name is Mike. I'm based in Finland. I was actually born to a separate and finished to Finnish parents. So I'm mixed. I've lived most of my life in Cyprus and my first interaction with kind of like this urge that got me to kind of like stay.
step forward to the Web 3 space and the crypto space was in 2013, there's a banking crisis in Cyprus where just in one day the government decided to make a cut in big, deposited accounts. So that kind of started to make me think, how much in control are we really
of our funds and what kind of like alternatives exist out there. So like I didn't really hear much about Bitcoin until early 2016, mid 2016 and that's when I really started to get more into it and learning the ideas and then discovering Ethereum and really getting started into this, getting more involved in
community space of stuff because the first interaction I had in 2017 I flew to Malta and there was this Bitcoin conference and that's where I got to kind of like get my first hands-on experience discuss with other kind of like related and like-minded people in the industry and yeah and that was my kickstart.
And since then, I've been growing communities. I've been very involved in DeFi. And yeah, I'm very happy to be with the BOLI team now. And yeah, happy to be here speaking about BOLI today. Thank you. All right, good stuff. Yeah, I think we're all pretty aligned here. So that's amazing. Thank you.
for the introductions guys. Let's go ahead and dive into the juicy stuff. So the partnership, the recent partnership was announced over on Twitter between DeFours and Belaide. Right now in the audience we have a mixture of, you know, the people here from Belaide but also obviously people from
the overall de-force community and people beyond. Let's talk a little bit about what the partnership entails, what we can expect in the coming weeks or months. I think this question is mostly till that Andrea at first and perhaps Mike can chime in a little bit thereafter.
Yeah, first of all, I wanted to give an overview on the Force because it's always expanding protocols. So I really want to make sure that everyone who's listening really knows what we actually do every day. So the Force was born in a long time ago.
can say in 2019. We started off as a stablecoin protocol and we developed into a complete ecosystem of DeFi protocols. We broke down the seal of barriers which allowed us to capitalize on liquidity which we think is a much more efficient model
than having standalone protocols seeking from liquidity from the other market. So we are a decentralized stablecoin protocol powered by an integrated DeFi matrix composed by assets, lending, trading, bridge, and also there's the DEX AMM which is currently in test
that is going to be deployed in May that soon. We are currently available on nine different blockchains and we are also expanding. Hopefully we will get into that later on. These nine blockchains being Ethereum, Arbitrum, Optimism, Binance, actually now it's called B&B Chain, Polygon, Avalanche.
and recently we also added conflicts in space to the list and we have around 200 million dollars in total assets. So far the force has recorded an accumulating borrowing of more than 2 billion dollars with 11,000 unique addresses. Our state
stablecoin is called USX. It reached a market capital of more than $150 million. And the stablecoin itself is supported by a number of protocols which provide liquidity for it and all the chains were present such as Uniswap curve,
yellow drone, beefy, doldo, saddle, kaiber, platypus, equilibrary finance, equiptos and you know, I can't make any more. And USX is the pivot protocol within the first defy matrix. So it is a decentralized stable coin which is permissionless, non-custody and high
capital efficient and it's supported by our DeFi machines. Moreover, its begging mechanism is mainly maintained by the liquidity stability reserve, which enables anyone any time to do one-to-one swaps between USX and a number of
support a stablecoin such as USDC, USDT and DICE or any time anyone can swap these three stablecoins for USDX or Dubai's MS. Also we have a protocol directly liquidity provision which basically allows us to intervene
on the interest rates when the demand of the author of USX is unbalanced to maintain the peg. And we also allow users to mint USX by putting as a collateral a variety of assets with fixed interest rates through the bull.
So as you can see is a really complex mechanism, but in a nutshell, we are deforested the protocol behind usx, which is a decentralized stable core. And it's supported by its own pegging mechanism as well as well integrated with our defy matrix. So we have our landing
protocol on all the blockchains, trade, bridge and also the decks is coming soon. And we've really been in this world for almost four years now and we can't wait to see the next expansion starting.
with our partnership, our collaboration with Bolleite5. So I would like Mike to spend a couple of words on, I don't know, you, how you, why you chose to integrate defaults on polygon and how is it being going
Yeah, first of all, thank you, Anfa. A lot of the stuff you mentioned is big reasons why we're partnering up in basically powering our leverage lending strategy on polygon. So as you also gave a brief introduction on the first, I'll just speak a bit to the community, the listeners about Bolaid, just
the prefin introduction. So as many of you know or might not, the light is an access to high yield aggregator. So as a user, you would simply go to the platform. You would deposit assets such as ETH, BTC, stable coins and some other major altcoins. We're currently
being chain agnostic, so supporting multiple other chains as we're progressing through our roadmap. But yeah, I'll leave some of these points for later stage of the AMA. We can discuss about what we're working for the future. But at this current stage, a few stats as well. At the moment, we have
over 12 million in TVL and yeah always happy to answer any questions that come from the community also we had a few questions in the comments section or Twitter so we'll pick this up at the later stage so yeah if there's anything you'd like
to fill in this space. I think that's a brief introduction about polite. As we said, we're meeting today last week or a few weeks ago, we announced our partnership with D4s, so this was in the scope of powering and enabling our polygons strategies. So if
Not everyone is familiar with how deforestation is providing this infrastructure or this possibilities. You can always check out their website and their socials. You can always check the tour account that's in the space now and follow there. But yeah, those are a few points from my side. Anything else?
I want to say you I really like your UI and like how the website is built and also the doc. Appreciate it. Yeah, there's a lot that has
the inception of the idea of providing a clean UI, a very understandable UX, and apart from that section, that's been also a big bottleneck in the industry for many years. I mean, you'll find maybe a
other, for example, protocols that either are not transparent with their UI, either the UX is not the most friendly as we would say, but yeah, really appreciate your feedback.
Awesome. Right. Yeah, by the way, just chiming in here on the UX UI topic here. I think we can go. We can talk a lot about about the DeFi space and where it can be improved upon. So we're definitely going to circle back on that in a later stage here as well.
But just to stay on topic here, the partnership and what would that in particular look like between the two? I think it's good to start with a view from Andrea and then we can once again bring it back to mind.
Yes, so you've aggregated our lending platform in particular if aggregated the possibility to I mean use your users can deposit you SDT on polygon on your vault and you will be leveraging our
lending protocol and I see that the API is 6% but it can be boosted up to 24% and you know we always look forward to increase the markets that make
people notice our landing platform because it may be not the most generous one regarding how much we give away also because we are really careful now we spend our DF tokens but on the other hand it
It's really battle tested and it's been there since years now and I think it's absolutely one if not the most reliable landing protocol out there and there's a lot of things that you can do with landing. I think it's really one of maybe the other
the things happening in D5, it really enables to become your own bank through D5 and also if you have boosted APRs or aggregated pools that's even very welcome to have them for the space.
Great, yeah. So the way it works from our site or the way that the user can actually understand, like in view and see the mechanics or actually see this in work, you can visit app.polite.fi and if you scroll down you'll see the
on volt and by clicking on the information button next to the deposit you'll see that the volt port to folio it's by default and that's where we aggregate everything and so the information that was provided 6% APY you can see the boosted APY as well
to 24%. We were going to mention at the later stage of the Twitter space how you can achieve that. It's basically by sticking your blood tokens, but I will touch in more detail to that later stage. So yeah, you can visit
app.plated feed. Check out our polygon vault. Yeah, it seems to me that you deposit the users USDT in the vault and then you borrow the the our USDT.
All right then. So it sounds actually like there's a lot of technical stuff already done. What would you say is the next steps in regards to the partnership and what can the end users mostly expect?
Everybody listening right now, what are the opportunities, what can they do right now as a result of the recent partnership, but also what is on the medium term planned from both ends to be done in the future.
So as of now there is only this vault open by you guys aggregating USDT, landing USDT on polygon. But you know we listed on nine blockchains, we have our landing platform on nine blockchains.
I think there's a lot of room to become closer partners, tie-tie. And yeah, like, and as we keep expanding, two of your opportunities will be even more.
I think you guys are doing a great job with the with Bolay. You just started but also the market is a bit choppy but I think you know there's no hurry if you're in this market you know how it works cycles we go up and down it doesn't matter the important thing is to have a nice product
have it bottle tested, make it sure that it works properly without any security leak and then keep riding with it until defy approaches with the next billions of people. Yeah, that's exactly right. Along with the security aspect you said,
And also like the medium to long term plans that we have at the moment just to touch upon those. So we have one audit already complete by hacking and we're currently working on a second one by a different auditing firm. But yeah, how we envision this partnership and how we can also envision polite in the
future or in the short to medium term long time is we envision the light as an ecosystem. So as we have several other networks, so we mentioned arbitrum, optimism, so these aren't networks that we currently have strategies on, but we are currently looking to expand to.
So yeah, I mean as we go from one blockchain to a different one and we discuss strategies, there's always ways to collaborate there. But yeah, we're planning to launch an arbitrum and optimism in the coming months. That's going to be a big expansion on seeing how arbitrum and optimism
I think optimism just a couple of days ago they completed their bedrock update that was a pretty huge update that was Expected by the community. So yeah, just technically looking at the space in a holistic way. So where are we at the moment? We're looking at the
We're looking at the roll-ups. We're just following that kind of path. As I said, we envision the ecosystem. It will be more than your simple
interface to access these vals. So we'll have more usability such as a wallet in the future. We might even work on a usability like for ADDX if it makes sense to have a swap capability in the platform. So it will holistically
become an all-in-one platform where any retail user institution can have an easy accessible friendly platform and also secure. So yeah, if I would touch upon what we're looking towards the future, it would be expanding on other networks, working rigorously
rigorously on our security. As we mentioned, the great UI, keep iterating, looking what's best. And yeah. If I may spend a couple of words also on, you know, expansions and what the future holds.
So we are also blockchain agnostic as I said we present on nine blockchains so far that I'm not going to list again, but we planning to launch us also on Zekisync, ZKVM by Polygon, Scrawl and linear
by consensus. So we're also looking forward to expand our product and reach more users on all the ZK brolla chains that are gaining attention lately. And we also, as I mentioned, developing the DEX AMM.
our own native texture M as the last maybe the last piece of our defymetric puzzle, which is currently in testing it that we also have about bounty program opener and we also looking at other fields that are not strictly let's say yield related. So for example we're expecting
Integrations with community Dows, we are exploring decentralized identity as a way to unlock new possibilities for DeFi and we are working to introduce real-world assets such as Treasury bills to bring real yields to DeFi and also to bring old institutional
may find it easier to access these products in the traditional world. We also, you know, regarding UI UX, we have an upgrade of our defaults lending. We will be including more
features to increase the capital efficiency and flexibility, more security as we will of course as you said consult with some major audit firms there and we will bring some changes for the UI as well.
Awesome. Talking about the improvements that you guys were mentioning. We talked about UX UI improvements and we talked about the mid to short term plans of both of the projects. We got actually some community questions that tie into this. One of them is specifically about the marketing efforts and
and how they've changed and what you guys are planning on to approach this market, especially with everything being so turbulent nowadays, or well, all every day to be fair. As we could start from the home front, from Bolide,
Thank you for the question. To start off at Boulite, as I said, I fairly recently joined the team. So that goes to say that we're looking to expand the team, scouting all the kind of talent we can find in defying
space and defy native. So how we're tackling or handling marketing at the moment, we are all kind of aware of these questing platforms we have Zili, we have like role gated platform like Guild and another such. So we kind of always try to gamify or
like kind of make a game-fired experience for any kind of like announcement that we would like to push or any kind of like new feedback loop that we would like to have a community in Brazil. So we really do believe in like the community really gives so much back to the protocol itself in regarding the development
and just getting the word out, so we're growing as being one with our community, so that goes for rewarding them, that goes for acknowledging them, for providing educational content. Another great method of approaching marketing community is we have both
two sides. We have the offline and the online. So we're talking just now about Twitter, Discord, these kind of platforms for interacting. Another approach is we often go to conferences or either we have team members attending hackathons. I myself was in East Tokyo and East Taipei in April. So that
That's also a very nice ground to speak with up and coming developers, with current developers, network with other teams, and get the real feel of the persons behind these protocols. So yeah, it's a lot of experimenting, as we say, we try to make out of these joint AMA sessions,
Now with other spaces, so we try to introduce our partners, we try to do some fun activities without partners in our community. We have also like a sticker competition, we have a community, a channel for communities to share their content, and we have various ways of the community members to be able to contribute to this, to the product
itself and in the protocol of course we contribute back to the users. So yeah in a nutshell this is a very big like summary of how we look at things and of course like this space is like every day like new things come up new trends are set and yeah I mean looking at the space in a six month
span, everything can be totally different in the scope of the marketing angle and what works and what doesn't. So it's always been on top of things, researching, testing new things out, getting the feedback from the community. I think those would be some of my points.
Yeah, like you mentioned, it's a turbulent time, but on the other hand, when you are blockchain, agnostic, DeFi, protocol, right, you're not as important as centralized exchange in the US is, right? So that's also one advantage.
for people to enjoy the fine. I think there has been a huge shift in the past couple of years where people started understanding what the blockchain really is about. Talking some just not there to be bought and held on a centralized
exchange, hoping for a return, but that's actually a lot to do with this decentralized public blockchain technology. A lot of opportunity, that's really your opportunity to bank yourself, you know, to access opportunities now also with the real world assets coming in to really to
things that were unimaginable just a couple of years ago. And that also talks about the velocity of how this space moves forward. And you know, about the marketing, we always look for expanding on new blockchains, of course, where we think it makes sense and that
makes us approach new user bases. As I said, linear is one of the names of this coming. I'm really excited to be working with them, but many more will come. You know, it's you always need to adapt to the market. And if the market is into the ZK EVA,
and blockchains that you've got to be there if you want to do marketing. Let's in the sense that you actually listen to people's feedback and change new user base. And yeah, also this market has followed the cycles and as it should be and you've got to do marketing
even in bearish times because to be ready for when really the market starts kicking in to be ready to be there to be recognized as a valid protocol where it's worth looking into because then everyone's life is easier once the next two market hits but you've got to be there also in the bear market.
So yeah, you know, the conditions, the security laws, all the, what's happening don't have the space but in reality there are bearish periods and that's completely fine. In reality, BFI protocols are not affected.
at all by these things. So, you know, just keep building, keep marketing, keep talking to your community. We also have a very active DAO where we run many proposals and decisions. We take them jointly with BF oldest. So, you know, just I think that's the way to go in the long term.
And while on the top of marketing, obviously you're going to see this one coming from miles away. But for anybody listening right now, and they're interested in discovering more about the force, could you share a little bit about where to find you? And also, we mentioned conferences, perhaps
Perhaps if there's any relevant conferences that you guys did attend recently, perhaps it would be also nice to share those with the community. Sure. So we recently attended a conference in Hong Kong as a default team is mostly Chinese.
And we also very likely to collaborate with many Chinese or Hong Kong, let's say, located DeFi protocols, but that's not a secret. I think it's obvious if you see what we've done in the past.
And so we've been there, I'm not sure about the next events we're attending. I'm not aware of any in the next future, but we are always often at conferences or we often presenting or even remotely to this.
I think it's the best way to collaborate with other coaches, to create something together.
Yeah, exactly. I was just going to mention that even if you were going to mention a conference this upcoming would be pretty cool to meet also in person. I might be going to token 24/9 in Singapore September, but that's always up to talks. Just wanted to mention it up here. Another thing that I'm personally at least looking
These ETH Global hackathons. As I mentioned there, the ETH Tokyo also have ETH Istanbul happening in November. There's always a great place to see builders doing their own thing basically. So where you can find us, you can always drop a question or a discourse over. That's where
everyone's active at. We also have a telegram channel, you can also join. And yeah, I think that's a few final points. If we have anyone from the audience that wants to drop final question, I think we got a lot of points covered. So yeah,
Okay, perfect. Yeah, if anyone from the audience later down the line has any questions, I'll keep an eye out and we can give a platform to that as well. For now, however, let's quickly move this conversation to the DeFi space in general before we run out of time today. So obviously a couple of big
news articles came out earlier this week. I'm very curious to hear you guys' opinions on a bunch of stuff. Let's actually get started with the Binance and the Coinbase matter in regards to them being sued. Is this relevant for either of you and what are your thoughts in general?
If I may, I would like to go first. Yes, sir. Yes. Yeah, so as I said, we both were blockchain, agnostic, defy protocols, which is, you know, really convenient to say when these things happen in the centralizing
regulated work. So of course, none of this has any impact on the force, but it does indeed have an impact on the market. But I think what's happening is good. Let me elaborate on that. So the market
doesn't like uncertainty, the market doesn't like unclarity situation and it's clear that now Binance and Coinbase are getting that SEC they're going to have a talk, they're going to be judges involved and trials involved and hopefully
Hopefully we're going to come out of this scenario stronger as an industry. We're going to be recognized by the US. We're going to be regulated and I need like they're going to find a spot so that crypto will actually also become something accessible to the US citizens. I'm sorry for
I don't know if you could hear that. And so yeah, I think one of the reasons why this bear market has kicked in is also because there was not enough legal clarity and because the SEC was showing centralized
projects here and there because some catastrophe happens and bankrupt see cases and I think that it's good that we have this conversation with SC now where the Bitcoin is under 30k rather than at the top because that could you know define the top at least we have this conversation now
in 2023, then we're ready for the next World Waves to kick in in a more serious approach with more confident investors, more instructed investors about the risk and everything that joining crypto brings. And I don't talk about
only the retailer, the retailer, as is life easy in DFI. I mean, everyone, I don't think there is a school or an institution that should tell you whether you can join DFI or not. But, you know, I'm talking also about institutional who don't have enough legal clarity to put real money into the market.
Yeah, I think I agree with all the points you mentioned. I mean, going to the US side of things, as you mentioned, we don't have any clarity. There's no clarity being given. Even Coinbase themselves and Binance have been kind of requesting kind of like a meeting or a formal kind of like, let's say,
a better explanation of things. But yeah, it hasn't been working out in any favor. Again, very good that we're having this conversation now. In some aspects, looking at the centralized players again, it might actually intrigue some users to try out DeFi, try out the self-custed, actually.
But yeah, I mean, there's always ups and downs. This is a tough battle. Again, it's always hard and almost impossible for regulation to catch up and follow, read and regulate innovation. It's been an open discussion in many, many, many, many topics years. But yeah, I think I'll just
ended by agreeing with Andres's points. In a way, it's good that it's happening now. Again, better not than having 50k, 60k Bitcoin and then having all of this coming down. But yeah, solid, solid kind of breakthrough and things
Again, looking at the European Union and the recent Micron, everything and all those kind of legislations, I don't know if the US is going to look at that and follow, but I'm just keeping an eye for things. I think that's all for that.
Right good stuff. Yeah, I think it's actually interesting what you brought up there about how it might actually end up being a good thing potentially right centralized under attack might push more people into defy would you
This is an interesting point you brought up. I actually only have one more community question in regards to the DeFi space in general. Keep in mind you guys in the audience if you do have anything for free to raise your hand or leave
a comment. A quick remark perhaps from either of the speakers on the optimism who completed its bad rock upgrade with a number of improvements, anything that we would like to say about that.
Yeah, I think one of the major kind of things with that upgrade was kind of like kind of like looking at fees and lowering fees. I mean looking at the last month, last two months, so we had this arbitrar, we had arbitrarity to merge up and then we saw that kind of like zero
or farming, move to other roll-ups and inflate in a way the activity is there. And then we kind of seen high gas fees across all these roll-ups where it was in a way said that fees would be a very low amount of sense and then a few times
few dollars of of gas fee. So yeah, I think there's a few technical upgrade of course, updated that came with Bedrock. But yeah, keeping a very close eye to optimism as well as other roll-ups, EK, Polycon ZK EVM. But yeah, I think
I think it's a good step forward and yeah, interesting to see what more there is. As we said, very hot topic, layer 2, roll ups, EK. So yeah, thanks for the question. Yeah, and you know, optimism as it's all brought up, they're professionals.
they have proven that. But I've also found that all this expansion of new ZK alternatives is also creating some competition for blockchains such as Arbitroman optimism or where almost that
the only layer to this, with polypone, of course, of a theorem. I think now the scene is really, the competition is really opening up and it's only good for the market. Like in the five-week advance as a whole sector, because
of competition because we need to innovate because we need to do more than our neighbor, right? And this always leads us to improve our protocol and that's how you reach mass adoption. You really have to do to improve on many point of views. As we said, UX, UI,
but also on the protocols on what you offer to the user base. And this improvement of optimism, I'm not for sure that they had it planned since long time ago, but I think that the competition brought by the ZK layer 2 and because they are so
many of those is actually making the whole sector work harder to compete for the user base. So I think as always, we welcome to see any expansion of the DFC in any improvement because eventually it's going to benefit us all.
100% agree. Okay, so thank you guys for all of the input and the in the well thought out answers here. I'm all out of community questions actually, so that's a good thing. How about you guys have a closing word, anything you would
like to say and I'll let you know if any additional community questions come in but I don't think so I think we pretty much covered everything that we wanted to do today. Yeah I just want to say I appreciate what you guys have built you know welcome to the space and zero
relatively new you still have a lot of room to grow. I'm glad to see you appreciated our landing protocol. It's really one of the best out there, one of the oldest and most audited and most tested and I think that's important for landing protocol to have a solid base to
start from and you know I wish you guys the best of luck and we will keep charting about our future opportunities to work together. Yeah amazing thank you so much thanks for the feedback thanks for thanks for joining us today I just want to direct all
the audience to check the defores out, follow their twitter account, join their community chats and show your support. Together we grow, as we said, collaboration in this space brings it forward. So thank you again and wish a beautiful
day for everyone and yeah thank you very much. Yes if I could mention we also running an initiative a campaign of incentives a lot to me so you can have both the yield there you can check out the
We also run the test net bug bounty for our AMM deck. So if you want to look it out, just check out the Twitter, Medium and you can be awarded for that. So we also need, you know, together we grow, yes, but we also need our user base to be there supporting us.
testing our protocol and also beer water because that's how DeFi works. You need to incentivize, you need to give and receive and it's a win-win. I think that that's what's good about DeFi. Everyone is incentivized to participate and more people are welcome to join. But closing the
the space I didn't need to go off topic thanks again for having me and you're forward to see you guys again soon. Yeah, of course appreciate your time. Thank you so much. Thank you everyone. Bye bye. I appreciate you. Have a good one. Bye guys.