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Building DeFi & Financial Apps
Recorded: March 31, 2025 Duration: 0:30:52Space Recording
Short Summary
The discussion covers innovations in DeFi mechanisms, such as composable yields and interest rate trading, alongside trends like building in public and structured products. Growth is evident with Yay's success on Say, while new token launches are facilitated by platforms like Flaunch and Clanker. Say supports developers with free infrastructure, encouraging further ecosystem development.
Full Transcription
Hello, hello, party people. I'm Ellis, your host of the All-Star Hackathon. I'm the president
of Web3 and AI with Hacker Earth, and we're super stoked to have Owen with us today talking
about building DeFi and financial apps on say. Make it pretty quick in terms of handing
it over. So with that, Owen, I'll just hand it over
to you and kick this thing off. I appreciate it. All right, cool. We are live. It looks like
there's a little, I'm seeing double on the docs, but we'll avoid we'll avoid that on the other screen share
um but yeah no i'll kick it off with a quick intro and then just gonna dive right into it
with bill defy and say i am elgini as ellis i believe i also also have Alex joining as well.
I manage everything that is the DeFi you go here at say,
so work very closely with builders on say,
and then just in general,
kind of like where I want to go
with this whole entire presentation is kind of more, like how do you build in in defy and
just like financial applications on chain but also like you know like what they don't tell you when
you are going to build uh on chain and kind of like how you hit scale in a sense, so like take it from zero to one.
So I like wanna get you guys started,
but also just want to give you the tips
and maybe some tricks to understand like what is scale
because as myself, not a coder,
just know SQL really well as my past life was in data.
But yeah, with that,
we can kind of jump into the presentation here and, uh,
and start going through it. Um, so yeah, this is building defy.
I'm Owen. Alex will also be on as well. Um,
our agenda for today is going to be first,
just like kind of what's defy, we building it and then eco overview like I said
what they don't tell you what can you build say support that we provide and then dead resources
which Alex will take off so first it's like why do we defy why do we just not do this like off chain and it's kind of like obviously what
defy enables and that's just the fact that you can touch or provide an application to everyone
in the entire world um so like this permissionless exchange of value i'm sure whenever you pitch your
parents or tell them that you're looking at crypto or working in crypto, you probably allude to like either payments or financial applications.
And this is the reason why. Right.
This is exchange of value.
And then it's like this ability to create financial instruments by way of like composable yields.
financial instruments by way of like composable yields.
This starts from like everything from bringing T-bills on chain.
So if you work with a centralized exchange and you can bring in your
stables, which is USDC, USDT,
and you can earn 4% all the way to like what Pendle has recently been doing,
which is a little bit more
uh attuned to actually like trad fi in like interest rate trading uh which is very cool um
and then just like foundations of d5 that like you should always just kind of like keep in mind
whenever building of like does it kind of fit into this bucket if it doesn't like can i create another bucket um which is also room to do um and that's just like token generation so obviously
you guys probably play around with maybe pumped up fun um and that is like at its core the best
way of token generation but it's also like tokenizing things like t-bills and allowing you
to get yield off t-bills stable coins definitely needed amms which is like dexes this like exchange
of value i want to swap and then money markets right i want to put in some collateral and borrow against this. Again, very tried fi. With that, we'll go
into just kind of like an eco overview. And the main goal here is to show you what is currently
on say. And then we're going to follow this up with like opportunities, green space for people
to build new applications that like we either don't have or we could see better
applications. So we'll start with DEXs, right? Like for your Uniswap lovers, we have Sailor Swap,
Dragon Swap, and Carbon, all very similar. Carbon is like like i would say a little bit novel in the fact that you can do some
different strategies for balancer you have jellyverse and the reason why i'm going to go
through kind of like why you need three decks is here um but then for like aerodrome we then have
yaka but these all provide like their own novel use cases and are major primitives for a reason.
So Uniswap obviously, as you guys know, is more so for like volatile assets.
So like your BTC is your ETH and pooling through concentrated liquidity or XYK mechanisms,
which again we can dive into and then balancer here
balancer is more so for stable swaps so like i want to swap usdc for usdt it is optimized for
these stable swaps and then aerodrome is optimized more so for yield farming so popping up yields on pools by way of trading and bribes.
And then you wrapped us all into an aggregator,
which is like the main thing any DeFi ecosystem needs if they have multiple
DEXs because as a user,
I just want to go and find the best rates all over the place.
And this is where you find this by way of an aggregator.
Most of you probably use 1inch, CowSwap.
And for us, or Jupiter if you're on Solana,
and for us, this is Symfony.
Just a great team and great for onboarding as well.
You then have money markets, right?
You have Compound, and that is Takara. And then you have compound and that is to cara and then you have
ave which is yay and yay is our largest application on say right now with great yields on usdc
uh also strong team and these primitives right here um first you probably need a Dex second you need a Marni Market whenever starting
a DeFi Eco so love these teams then you have derivatives these are actually net new applications
for say so filament is very cool kind of a little bit more attuned to hyperliquid and then Citrix
is something similar but you also have let me back, like this off-chain order book side of things.
So we'll just keep flicking through these and get to some good parts.
Staking, we have silo and kryptonite.
So this is just taking say and depositing it in, earning a yield by staking, right?
It's probably all done.
He's staking here.
If you haven't,
it's the same thing. And you get out then a LST. So like you stake say, you get I say,
and now you still have this like liquid token to play around within say DeFi.
Structured products. This is actually probably like one of my favorite categories and where I think like a lot of defy will build and it started kind of like with yearn in a sense and we have pit finance and these are
just like vaults where i can take usdc put them in and then these vaults like go and generate yield
for me and i think this is so great because for the basic user i don't want to try and push 30 different transactions
i just want to put my money into a vault and earn the yield and have someone manage it for me
um okay now like kind of more so towards like maybe what they don't tell you or like
um some taboo things um and it's like, whenever you're
creating an application
and you probably look before
for GitHub, you don't really
think about needing an audit
or like, okay, the last guy
kind of did the audit for me. Security isn't
needed, but this isn't
the way that you want to go about it
because you're going to end up in a similar
situation to this of
your CTO was like, we should have gotten audit and the ceo is like i didn't have the money for
it um so let's say we provide um some good tools to help people with security audits and we can go
through those as well but always need an audit. The second one is like a common thing with builders.
Like if I just build this thing, like really cool application,
like people are just going to come.
The thing is like, that's like 20% of all of it.
And I know that's like kind of obvious,
but like this is what most people think of.
Like there's okay, I'm going to build an application
and a bunch of people are just going to come uh use my protocol it's so cool but like this is what it turns out to be um right like
you're just kind of like i have this cool application and no one's using it right you're
middle of nowhere and that's like the last means there actually one more like you think it's that
time square and you've got uh yeah your lovely
depth that everyone's looking at the last thing i'll say here is whenever you are creating an
application uh your users are going to be your time square for you so with that we'll move on but
for you so with that we'll move on but again we'll highlight more of this a few more bullet points
here um net new ideas and products like normally win um i think what the analogy i like to make is
right if you have uber in the united states like you may have gojack in Indonesia or something, right?
Like that is like a net new idea for a net new audience.
But anyone who then tries to create the second Uber or Lyft,
like you can have some competition,
but then at some point the market share like dwindles.
So net new ideas and products will almost always win.
And that can be through marketing.
It can be through innovation on your protocol layer and tech layer.
It can be moving to a new chain, which is, again, a new region.
So, yeah, cheers to you if you're building new products.
Building in stealth.
So like this is kind of one of those things that, yeah,
if you do have this like really new novel primitive,
you're like, I should probably build in stealth so no one can see what I'm building.
I actually think this is a little bit of the wrong way to think about it.
Especially in crypto, maybe in a traditional sense,
like it makes sense. But in crypto, like if you're actually building in crypto, maybe in a traditional sense, it makes sense. But in crypto, if you're
actually building in public, you increase mindshare. It goes back to this point of if you
build it, they will come. If I'm building in public, more people are likely to come and check
out what I'm building. People love to see faces. If you're just a protocol that is tweeting from a logo no one
really is going to trust you until you probably throw your face out there or like you build some
credibility um you can be smoky the bearer you can put on a bear hat and go on a panel uh it's
still showing that like you're living breathing and you are um a smart human pretty much um so
yeah like no don't try and build and still and then i must launch with 20 000 users um this is
also like i guess a little bit conflicting to like if you build it they will come but like
if you're building a defy application like you really just need two power users at first um one that really gets like the
ux side of it um you can kind of keep like the ecosystem healthy and then one that can provide
liquidity like those are two things like you just need if you can get those then everything else
will follow um so yeah this is a rough list for this.
I think there's a lot more that goes into this
that is sector specific.
But yeah, I just wanted to highlight this.
So that's another no.
This is the overview.
If you want to take a screenshot of the list.
Okay, what can I build?
And probably kept you waiting long enough, but like in terms of DEXs, like we have a lot of DEXs, I think maybe we could use another balancer style DEX or
aerodrome style DEX, but like Curve is an open code base that no one has yet explored or built
on say, and I think just seeing how successful
curve has been in the past this is definitely an application that is easy to immediately get your
feet wet with start coding and explore kind of like a very basic front end if you saw curves
initial front end like it was very retro um i guess it kind of went into their marketing a little bit, but like you can kind of like take curve and yeah,
make it live on say pretty quickly.
So I think it's again, an easy one to get your feet wet with.
These are probably two that are like extremely hot in terms of what builders
have been exploring. just obviously again with the
fun meta like what is quote unquote cool or interesting for users and these two applications
are flaunch and clanker so i actually went ahead and like i think last friday created tokens for this hackathon and on flaunch and we'll
see clanker and the way that flaunch works is that you simply put in a ticker you put in a name
you put in a description i think you pay something like 12 the application, which most likely will go back to you, the builder,
and then you can distribute as needed.
And then we'll launch this fair launch.
I think it needs to get to like 10K.
Doubt that this has got there.
I have not looked at it since.
But again, like this took me 15 seconds maybe,
plus another 15 to go and get this picture right then we go here and we go to clanker so clanker actually is probably my favorite way to launch a
token that i've seen and i think yep again i'm fun is great you can kind of get initial liquidity in but for clanker
it's really cool like you're simply adding like if we move left to right here you're adding clanker
you're saying hey crack devs uh wants to launch a token for testing you give it a name a ticker an
image and it replies like immediately it's kind of like an AI bot, and I can share the docs on kind of how this works.
And as I say, it gives you kind of some witty thing.
It says, yeah, I deployed it.
And then also, it's already deployed.
I can go on to Uniswap on base.
I can search this token address or AllStar, the ticker and i will find this ticker again probably
zero trading volume on it because again what do we learn um if you build it they will not come
like i probably need to spin up a twitter for this i need to get traction maybe you guys are
the traction for it um you guys can own it from now on um yeah these these two if i were to highlight two applications are probably like
the most needed um on say in respect to like how easy it is to launch a token um the last two we'll
go over the first money markets uh morfo has been one of the best money markets that we've seen to come out of DeFi since I guess DeFi summer and it kind of
offers more composable I'm gonna call them vaults but like composable markets to where you can have
really intelligent folks come in and spin up net new markets it doesn't just have to be a USDC market it can be a USDC market that lends on
other applications and earns an equivalent of their yield plus the other
application to make your I'm gonna call it a vault more attractive so Morpho is
really cool also open source And it's actually surprising,
I didn't know this, is one of the easiest code bases or I guess like least lines of code if I'm
talking to the devs. And like very simplistic. So I was surprised to hear that and I think it'd be
cool for you guys to check out. Next one is just stable coins um i think no one
has built maker dow or sky which is now named as which is probably the leading decentralized stable
coin right now uh and again has been battle tested still need to hunt it for it but um is one of those ones that is kind of
like it has found product market fit um and then like if you just want the i just want to get
started i don't really care what primitives are needed and i just kind of want to build what i
want to build um i've kind of like built out this list of all open source DeFi projects that are prominent.
So after, I would be more than happy to try and share this
with all you guys.
But yeah, again, good place to get started.
I think next we'll go to say support.
So like I mentioned,
you have all these different applications
that you can build,
but it's like how,
oh, and how do I make it
so when I build this application,
people will come to this application
or how do I know how to fork a code base how do i know how to plug into say
um and that's where like we provide you with this like what i call like the bible for all devs so
it walks you from everything as much as like you know what does the ecosystem look like right now to like how do i deploy a contract and then even like discounts for other infrastructure
or like just free services from other infrastructure that will benefit any builder
and some of my favorites here that i want to dive into and again can share these links
is this like essential guides i think this highlights that if you build it they will come
moment of like we give you i'm going to crown the twitter growth guide first to like these are just
very simple things to walk through look at them and kind of have like aha moments through all of it.
Like, oh, yeah, that's right.
Like I should be doing that.
That's kind of why maybe some of the other Twitter accounts are popping off, why Mindshare is so prevalent right now.
And it's honestly like if you're loud enough like you generate signal
and this is again a great way to find out how to do this the community growth guide
everything starts with community if people trust you if people believe in the vision that you're
building and they want to get behind you and they want to also preach this vision they are going to be your best advocates um so again it starts with those power users right
and then lastly this guy abatej who has built out filament that really cool
first protocol that i alluded to earlier he is probably the best case study for founder-led marketing which I think is
starting to become like the main way you need to market your brand these days
just because again you're showing that you're you're a human like you've built
this you're intelligent and you know what you're doing next one is just to say
ecosystem directories right like where you can go find all
like the defy applications uh but more so like what i want to highlight here is like the data
and infrastructure right there's like a ton of free infrastructure that say can provide to you
guys that will make one your application better but also to like keep money in your pockets next we'll go to marketing sports so this kind of goes into like
the Twitter growth guide and community guide and this is built out by our
entire marketing team to say like how do we give any net new builder like an
immediate chance to hit scale and this is the outcome of
the marketing support guide so again another one that i would crown um with that i can hand it over
to alex if he's on the call if he's not i can um quickly walk through this
yeah here you go yeah suddenly came into the picture thanks owen um
yeah that introduction from him and especially the resources when it comes to like the notion
page that we have is extremely rich in basically everything that you need to kind of kickstart your
app um what we also have is additionally in the docs is a bit more technical and this is especially
something that we wanted to give
to get everyone basically into their hands.
It's just a bunch of pretty useful solidity resources.
So, you know, you're going to have to do a lot of work
on your smart contracts, obviously.
And for that, you essentially just need two things, right?
Which is a lot of just good tooling, which is Remix, which is your VS Code, which is your lot of just good tooling,
which is Remix, which is your VS Code,
which is your Foundry, your hard hat,
so your classical tooling.
And what you also need, can we move slides?
I think, Orin, you can.
Yeah.
So we will have, and what we also have is just like a bunch of resources
for you to just kind of see
what has already been done, right? Because you don't have to really start from scratch um it will save you a lot of time
and you will definitely learn also a lot when you just interact with and just you know kind of get
to know just the top of the um top of the range smart contracts that are in ethereum so for example
you know starting off like just like simple, official documentation from Solidity,
then from Solidity language documentation
to just some cookbook,
where you just can find like existing smart contracts
that are like pretty curated,
or even go into just pretty much the de facto reference
from OpenZeppelin,
which provides like a lot of reference contracts
for ESC20s, ESC721s, ESC 1, 1, 5, 5, proxy contracts,
essentially everything that you might need
or just general utils, everything that you might need
for your, you know, for writing your smart contracts
and for writing adapt.
What we also have is like with an emphasis on DeFi,
we also just give you like some more links for Uniswap.
Plus we're going to basically whatever we find in our day-to-day work, we will also add to that
knowledge base. So the later time goes on, you will probably even find more and more resources
there. Just, you know, existing contracts from great dApps that allow you to just, you know,
kind of take their code if license permits it, obviously.
Or even just look at core ideas of these contracts
that you might want to implement in your dApp as well.
Great, yeah.
With that, we can jump to Q&A
and I think I might have some builder questions here and want to just again like
re-highlight that
I think there's
like so many YouTube videos out there
that like I don't want to pretty much
bore everyone with the 30 minutes that we do
have on like
how do you go about
like spinning up
a uni v2 fork
I think there's plenty of 10 hour videos on this or
claude open eye etc that you can go after uh so yeah again want to preface this and
hope that everything that we kind of discussed here was
tangible to you all um but yeah with that i definitely want to open up to to q a
and elis let me know if we have a either a chat that i should be looking out for
or um they can kind of bring up people on stage or i mean yeah we have obviously we have our discord
chats so if there's any questions essentially you can just ask there um and that said i mean
we also have like just a vast amount of like pretty much we have like a lot of just example
contracts basically everything that you have resort wise so you can already um get a lot of
help by just getting these contracts or getting to know
these contracts I'd say plus since EVM is around for so long you can obviously also really consult
and it's actually extremely helpful to actually leverage AI as well so I mean like chat GPT like
model is also really helpful Claude is extremely helpful with this.
Even though it's not perfect,
so you should be really careful, actually, when trying to take a contract from there, you might
get some really nasty bugs
in it.
You definitely need an audit.
Yeah.
It looks like, Alex, are you talking
about official SayDiscord or any other server?
Yes.
So guys, there's the official say discord server where you'll always can whether it's on questions or smart contracts or any other technical assistance you might need.
As of right now, questions generally just coming out of the chat.
Doesn't look like there's really any in there right now.
Good stuff. Yeah. I think like, uh, for anything else that needs to be, uh,
asked like definitely in telegram,
I'm going to pop myself into a telegram and drop some links in there anyway.
Um, and like, we'd probably just, uh,
I can open up my services and probably I'll speak for Alex. I'm just like,
yeah, anything you do need, you can ping us there.
And honestly, it's better.
I have a bunch of people on this call.
It's better just to work one-on-one with folks and just kind of like get an understanding of maybe some of their strengths, like where we can maybe partner you with another builder, either within our eco, either someone more technical, someone more marketable,
and get you kind of running.
So any blockers that you do have,
like we are here to unblock those,
and I can also drop in guides for everyone.
Sweet. Awesome.
So last question looks like in the chat on is,
are we going to be able to get a copy of the PowerPoint?
Yeah, yeah, of course.
I'll drop in the PowerPoint and then all the links as well.
Maybe we should ask the user probably where,
if they're in the Telegram chat.
Yeah, if you want to drop the PowerPoint, I can upload them onto the Hackathon site and the Telegram and make it easy.
Okay, yeah, that works.
That works.
Well, great presentation, great workshop, guys.
Oh, and that was awesome.
We have another session coming up tomorrow, I believe.
Let me just double check.
Yep, wallet integrations and dynamic authentication.
So with that, guys, again, big thank you to Alex and Owen.
And for all of you watching, if you have questions, again,
feel free to reach out directly in the Telegram to any of the admins.
We'll set you up with the Say team.
And then if you want to take it even further, it sounds like one-on-ones with the team or something that's always on the table, too.
100%.
Awesome.
Well, again, thanks, guys, for the time.
Everybody have an awesome start to the week.
And we'll see you guys tomorrow for the next one.
You bet.
Thanks, everyone.
