Hello everyone and welcome to the club. I can see Blizzard is with us.
I just accepted the request to speak also.
but I don't see the speaker icon. Maybe Twitter's basis need a few sex.
Always with the technical issues between us bases. We will prevail. Don't worry guys. We'll be right back.
All right, I just accepted the request from Snowbound. I can see the speaker icon, but you're on mute right now, so should be working. Yeah, I think it's working. Can you hear me? Yes, loud and clear, beautiful. Perfect. Welcome to the club, man. Hey, thanks for having me.
Of course, of course. So where are you tuning in from today? I'm based in South Dakota. We have some good winters over here. Is that why you have the profile picture that you have? The, yeah, the bear.
I guess it's a little confusing that's fair. It's actually a steer covered in snow and the steer only has one eye. But it's a big NFT collection related. Well, it's like you're all in on the co-part.
Police are finance and it's all Dakota. That's all you man. Fair enough. Yeah, I mean, I've been all around, um, um, uh, lifting California at, uh, and Florida and, you know, a bunch of other places, but, uh, yeah, we decided to come back to the cold weather. We missed it.
Well, I'm here in Copenhagen, so I mean right now it's sunny and nice, but most, most months during a year it's, it will be rainy, snowy, cold in general. So I know the feeling. That's fair. That's fair.
But yeah, I can see people are starting to tune in and settle in. So let's just kick things off. So welcome everyone to the Cosmos Club, where we talk all things Cosmos, which we daily about what's going on. And then we invite interesting, fascinating, hardworking builders of the Cosmos ecosystem. And today we got Blizzard Finance with us. Welcome to the Club Guys.
Thanks again, man. So we'd like to start these spaces getting a little bit of a personal story or personal background if you will. How you ended up working on the Blizzard Finance. I mean, people in crypto and in cost was in particular.
feel they come from all walks of life. Some people obviously technical, some people are financial, investment banking, all that kind of jazz. Some people are very artsy from a design background and then some people are on the more marketing side of the
So yeah, people from all over. So what's your story? How did you end up working with the full place of finance? Yeah, so there is an interesting story here, kind of. So I got into crypto a little over a decade ago now in 20
2011 and my background is really on like the infrastructure system administration side of things. I have a little bit of coding experience and I guess I've gotten some more recently. But how we actually came into like the
Blizzard situation is we were working on some Dow tooling which we're still very interested in doing related to Blizzard. And there was an application on secret network that the
the developers decided to, you know, actually, I don't know that I want to speak to their intentions. I've never actually directly asked them, so, but they decided to do something other than work on the application.
And it was called Polymer actually, not to be confused with Polymer Dow. We've talked to them. We immediately rebranded this after we got what they had done thus far.
So we were offered taking over the project essentially more or less and our team discussed and we decided to take it over. We used to maintain a secret network first block explorer and it was called secret node.
So we had been toying around the idea of a token for a long time for something that we build. And Blizzard really came about branding wise because we kept having these short names for
for our company, secret nodes. So we'd call it like snodes. And then if you reduce it even further, it's kind of just snow. So when we got this, we decided to call it Blizzard Finance. So there's been a lot of contributors actually
on this. They're the original team. They actually, it's not a fork of balancer. It's definitely not a fork. That implies like solidity runs on secret and that's not the case at the moment.
they ported it over to Cosmism. So like it uses the vault approach and whatnot for an AMM. I'm pretty sure we're the only decks on secret that has a vault based decks normally. All the pairs are their
own contract. So, and they really put a lot of work into, they really put a lot of work into getting the logic moved over and making sure the math was right and things like that. And when we took over,
There was more work to do. There were some extra features we needed to finish and add and such. But that's kind of how we fell into it a little bit. And yeah, it's been an interesting journey so far.
Definitely, sorry, I was muted. My bad. Yeah, and I just got to ask straight up because you mentioned that you've been in crypto since 2011, are you one of those Bitcoin whales that we all marvel at and envy? Is your sounds like it?
No, no, no, my background is tech and I definitely have been learning a lot about, you know, beyond just like the infrastructure stuff over the years, but now 2011 was too early for me to have
made the wise decision to just hold it forever. Ken win them all. Ken win them all. But eventually we all turned around and got into crypto rights. So yeah, I know how it is. I wasn't that early, but
I remember I think it was in 2012, if I'm a mistake and I was actually playing around mining Bitcoin. Obviously lost the computer a long time ago and didn't pay attention until after many years where I realized how much was left.
left on that computer. Hey, that's just my contribution, my donation to the entire Bitcoin ecosystem. Those big coins will never be found. I'm pretty sure. But yeah, anyways, back to Blizzard, Blizzard Finance, not too dwell on lost financial
opportunity here. So talk to us about what Blizzard finance is and how it fits into the secret ecosystem. Don't want to take too much away from you, but obviously the catchphrase that you see right away when checking you out on Twitter, checking out the website, is that you are an AMM, a balanced or like AMM.
build on secret network. So talk to us about that. What is Blizzard in a nutshell? Sure. So in a nutshell, Blizzard is, it is a balancer like AMM, but beyond just tying it to balancer, really what was ported over,
was the technical approach to building an AMM inside of a vault where the vault, like there's a secure vault and that's what stores deposits, right? We have other contracts and such but they're mostly like rewards contracts and stuff like that.
But it's an AMM that allows us to plug in things like balancer style pools, which it uses the same logic as balancer. And we actually focus a lot on multi-assets.
that pools with more than just two assets. But it also has the same math as curve has for our stable pools. So really what it is, it's like a foundational piece of tech that we can plug in these other pool types too. They tagline
has for so long been Balancer-like and it is very Balancer-like but honestly it's not limited to just that we can plug in other pool types like Metastable pools which Balancer and other decks also have.
For us, we view it as a foundation for perfecting the AMM over time and also building a wider ecosystem where when we get to the Dow tooling stuff to make it a
true Dow, we're going to generalize those tools to make it so other people can create similar types of things. They don't have to be AMMs, but when it, like, decentralized applications, we want other people to be able to create them and manage them the way
we intend to design the DAO stuff for Blizzard. So it's kind of a little more than just an AMM. Right now it is. It is just an AMM at the moment, but there is like a wider thing we're trying to work towards.
Beautiful and talked was a little unpack perhaps a bit on the balance or inspiration There's a funny story here. I actually used to work with balance or not on the balance protocol or anything but a project that is building on top of balance or using what they call
managed pools. I'm a big fan personally of Balancer. It's just marvelous what they've built. Obviously, they'll claim to fame is there are smart pools that they created originally. People probably remember there was just normal pools with
a unit swap and the first decks is out there on Ethereum which had 50/50 split or weights in their pool and then comes balancer onto the scene creating quote unquote smart pools where you could have different weights essentially not 50/50 but I don't know
80/20 or whatever you want. So that was a claim to fame and they sort of innovated a lot on that. You mentioned vaults, you mentioned metapools, there's a lot of things but yeah I'm curious to hear what is your inspiration for using something like Balancer. I mean you know first of all I want to give a lot of credit to the original team. They're the ones
that plugged in the balancer stuff, which was they did excellent work on that. So, you know, credit where it goes, we did add some safety features and various other features to it.
When it comes to smart pools, I'm also pretty fascinated by them. We did a lot of research when we're still experimenting with some of the pools of course, but we did a lot of research before we deployed our first pools. One of the things that
I'm happiest with is that the weighted pools actually got, let's say, validated to an extent by the market here, the ones that we chose. Like, for example, our most popular pool, like the most used
is a 40 bit coin, 40 E and 20 USDC. And if you look anywhere else on any other decks for those weights, for those assets, I have not been able to find a pool that is used with those weights and assets yet.
on secret network it's used. Over 50% of the value has been traded over the last 30 days and we don't know exactly how people are doing it because it's secret network but
It really does look like the focus on these triples that allow you to hold a basket of T1 assets, like tier 1 assets. It looks like people actually do want it at least on
secret. You know, especially as Bitcoin has been fluctuating, we've seen the volume go up there. And it is an interesting way to hedge with, like I said, with a basket of T1 assets. I'm not exactly sure why it's not super popular elsewhere.
There may be many reasons for it. It may just be like legacy pools where some of the Dexas started off with XYZ, so those routes are better or something. But we started from the get go with that pool. And yeah, and when it comes to some of the tooling stuff,
I'm a big fan of the smart pools and like the like forgot the term like the the pools that can be owned by people we don't have those yet but
But the link into Dow tooling really is, if you want to use tooling like this, you're building an application, it doesn't need to be an AMM, but you may want your Dow or your application to hold a treasury that is actually
a smart pool that you can tweak. With various things like let's say you can be the only liquidity providers or something like that for example. The Dow would be the only liquidity providers but it would also be the only recipient of the fee
traded from their own pool or something. One of the, I love balance or one of the things that I feel like they don't focus on because they're so focused on the AMM, which is very important for them to focus on. But it's making it so dows can really like
control those and Empowering people to lean into that and it's yeah I mean it's one of the most interesting aspects I think of you know when I look at Balancer and when I use it in such Beautiful
awesome man. I mean, as I said, big fans of Balancer just curious to hear what's your take on why you decided to take inspiration from that. But it makes a ton of sense and it's great to see a Balancer AMM like
protocol and a platform being built on secret network and cosmos as a whole. So great job on that. This is great. So you obviously are building with a top of secret network, something that is
very recent is the privacy as a service launched with the secret network and that puts you in a funny position right now I think which I would like to ask you about and that is obviously taking inspiration from Balancer which is running on a
Ethereum, I believe, Albatro and Polygon at this point, with Secret Network rolling out privacy as a service, basically means for anyone who hasn't been following, it basically means that other blockchains can adopt privacy onto their chain.
starting with IBC enables and customers change in general. But eventually with something like EFMOS or similar sort of EVM compatible, customers change, I'm sure this can go beyond, customers change the whole privacy as a service
set up that the Secret Service has. So imagine a world where a balancer decides, you know what, we're going to create some pools on our balancer decks which has complete privacy. That puts Blizzard in a funny situation, right, because you are sort of taking a heavy inspiration from balancer and then perhaps Balancer might
move into privacy as well. Do you think that would ever happen just getting your take on both that maybe is a bit far-fetched but I guess the bigger question is where do you see something like Secret Network and privacy as a service expand will it be a benefit or not a benefit for Blizzard?
Sure, it's a good question. So I think it would be great if Balancer focused on privacy. You know, we're not as big as Balancer, Curve.
or any of the other well-established large AMMs. But I think it would be great if they focused on it. It's possible they might.
If they did, I would hope they would leverage something like secret in some way really because none of the privacy stuff that I see on ETH is really very private. The ZK stuff isn't that's not privacy.
I don't know how likely it is, but I do think it would be great. I still think that our focus is pretty different. We're not positioned to say we're going to take on Uniswap or Balancer.
to build something useful on secret network that people want to use. And I'm sure they'll use other DEXs as well. And I just don't think many will focus on the tooling side like we intend to do.
But in the short to medium term, we are really focused on making sure the AMM is solid. Makes sense. And I know it was a bit of a non-fair question. I just thought it was quite a good, like the timing was impeccable. It seemed with the privacy as a
service being rolled out. I think it would be absolutely great if Balancer adopted a secret network stuff that I mean or yeah I think it would be excellent. Awesome. And just like Balancer has the bell token, you guys, Blizzard Finance has the snow token. Talk to us about the token.
and why people perhaps should pay attention here. Yeah, so the tokenomics, or at least the features, let's say, of the token were built by the Polymer team, and they designed it in a way where
There are swap fees and LPs can get those and people who stake snow can get another portion of it, like a percentage of the
of those swap fees. That's how the Polymer team essentially designed it. We are going to make some small tweaks, not anything I just said really, but we're working through a dual token approach that
It's fluctuated a little bit, but we are in our current iteration, let's say, in our current thought process. We haven't really seen it before. So there would be
My little has just a big disclaimer, the tokenomics, beyond the portion of fees. That part is staying, but beyond that the dual tokenomics are not finalized.
current thinking is essentially there would be a perma swap between these two assets. One we call 32F and one is snow. And when you go into 32F it would give governance
powers over secret dow like some of the tooling we're working on and it would give governance powers over Blizzard. But when you hold snow, snow's features don't change. Snow's features are static, but you can't leverage those features while you're
in the other token. And we're fleshing this non-finalized plan out. But in the current iteration there would be a max supply on both. So initially we were going to have the second one
inflationary and not have a swap or at least not a fixed swap. But there are some interesting dynamics that come out of this. One of the high level things is anybody that wants to participate in governance essentially lowers the supply of
snow. And then anybody who wants to move out of the governance side back into, you know, let's say staking or LPing snow or, you know, whatever else you might want to do with snow, buying and selling it, trading it, whatever
right? The feature sets there, then it would move back over and it would increase the supply. There's still a max supply on snow, but depending on what somebody wanted to do, it would either lower or increase the
circulating supply, which is interesting. Yeah, but that's that's kind of the direction we're going in. And yeah, we're it'll it'll be interesting to see
you know, working through the staking of each of these tokens to see like how that plays out, I suppose. Definitely, definitely. Talk to us about how you guys see yourselves or position yourselves, perhaps, compared
to others in the space. So obviously, shade protocol comes to mind, she and uswap, secret swap. So there's multiple dexes on secret network and in customers and beyond, right? So yeah, talk to us about how you guys position yourself in that market.
Yeah, so I mean the first thing that comes to mind really is kind of how I started off we have a really strong focus on T1 assets like well established big
respected assets like Bitcoin, ETH, USTC, USTT. And I think that's one of our biggest differentiators. Also the weighted pools, none of the people that you mentioned have multi-asset weighted pools.
I believe that's true, but someone can hurt me if I'm wrong. And we just thought it was really important to focus on that. I know it's not necessarily, you know, normally people launch
decks, they get as many tokens as possible on it and not going to knock that strategy at all. But we wanted to focus on T1 assets. Again, the tri pool that we have for ETHBTC and USDC.
see very popular for automatically hedging on the market to a point. There still has assets that are classified as volatile assets. But if you're holding crypto anyways,
It's kind of convenient, I think, to be able to hold BTC, ETH, and USDC in a pool, and it pretty much just re-bounces it for you at the weights.
Definitely, definitely. And that's the beauty of that's also why I guess balancer is so is so successful right? This is sort of the beauty of the tech working working is magic if you will. Talk to us about the roadmap of it. What's
What's on the horizon? So we talked about the initial setup and how you position yourself in the market with different smart pools with different weights and you have attracted definitely some respectable volumes and liquidity on your decks.
Well done on that. In general, Secret Network is a Wednesday struggling, but I mean we're not seeing you know huge numbers flowing into Secret Network these days, unfortunately. I think that's a little sad to see also why we want to shine light on it.
I think secret surpassed an injective protocol recently on TVO, but yeah, I mean I understand where you're coming from. I just think the narrative is so much bigger than that. I think that's a great milestone. I'm not going to take anything away from that.
But it's just the narrative. I remember the first time I heard of a secret network. It was Ethereum, but private like privacy. A chain that is a private natively. That just resonated so well with myself. And I think
is just so much potential in that narrative. There's the DAPS to support it now, which is mentioned all the different Dexas that is built on secret network. But it's not, yeah, there's just room to row. Let's say that. So yeah, back to positive finance.
What's on the roadmap for you guys? What can people afford to basically? Well, I don't like to give timelines. So I'm not going to do that. But outside of the tooling which is further off, we really have to keep professionally
the base first and we've spent a lot of time fixing bugs to make it much better. The pricing and such on the Dex is pretty good now for doing swaps. And we've been trying to rapidly learn from pools and
know it can be a little frustrating for users, but you know our first month we weren't very flexible. We weren't able to be very flexible with the pools and we're trying to correct that a bit. We've made it so we can be a bit more flexible.
And we're really just trying to see what works and then after we find like the the the right mix of pools and we get some You know more liquidity established for the native asset and things like that then
You know, it really, I think we're just going to be perfecting, we're going to be perfecting like the user experience and such for a little bit here. Outside of that, we have airdrops coming, I don't have a
specific ETA on it just because you know the air drops aren't useful if we have bugs so it's like a compounding problem. I mean some of the air drops will come sooner than others is what I should say.
Definitely a compounding problem if we do all of them at once and it's a multifaceted problem, let's say. So that's on the roadmap. Outside of that, we also have the NFT collection for my PFP.
coming up, which we think will be very helpful actually for community building. Maybe that sounds surprising. I know Dex is normally, at least typically don't do that, but we do have another NFC.
T-collection we did before also and you know we worked with an artist to do this. So that's on the roadmap and we have a V2 for
for Blizzard, the specification is in, it's very in flux, let's say. It's not, you know, sometimes with the front end stuff, you can move a little quicker. It can be a little frustrating for users when, if you move
It is something that's on the horizon coming up. Probably, I don't know, it could be the end of the year, it could be early next year. I'm not exactly sure, but I am excited for it because
Yeah, we would love some more flexibility and we're learning a ton about like, you know, once you get a dex into production, you can pick up pretty quickly where the pain points are and we're excited to fix them.
definitely. And I don't like timelines either. I mean, every time it seems like I put a pin in the calendar saying this is going to be a sense of launch, I just never hit it. Like not once. I hit 100% failure rate basically on that. Sometimes
Sometimes delivering before, I should say, before the deadline, but yeah, deadlines are not always good. And some things just take time, right? I mean, there's this people's money. You don't want to mess up on the pool structure. You don't want to mess up on these things. I mean, you'll be dead the next day.
if that happens right, so better be safe. We do have some protection features. What you're saying is 100% true. We do have some protection features that we added before launch that have been very helpful. So we can, in various scenarios,
I don't mean like we can't like move funds, let's say we can't move any fun from the vault but like we can lock up pool and we can do things like minimum liquidity which is useful because I mean it
Yeah, without something like minimum liquidity, like technically, you can probably solve for this, but we chose to solve for it with minimum liquidity. So there's probably other ways, but without minimum liquidity, if one of the assets ever goes to zero in the pool, the pool is ruined forever.
of math. There's probably another way to do a safety check, but in our research we found that their minimum liquidity is actually something not talked about a lot by many Dex's, but it is actually technically
a feature in various taxes. You can find it if you dig into the documentation for various things, including Balancer. And our implementation is slightly different, but yeah, we don't, we still have to be careful with these things, but we do have some flexibility to protect our
around that. That's probably our highest amount of flexibility actually. We don't have things like admin keys that can do crazy stuff. We can't change the weights. I know there are times where people, there are probably
times where people wish they could or whatever, but you know certain abilities you don't build in. It is something that I would want Dows to be able to do with pools that they own, but you shouldn't do it to a pool that has LPs. You shouldn't be able to do it to a
pool that has LPs that you're not getting their consent from. Makes sense. Talk to us about the NFTs that you guys have minted. What's the utility? You just sort of humbly went over that. Talk to us about the NFTs.
and we can find them and the utility. Sure, sure. One of the NFTs, at least the profile picture is right in here, Cosmos kid has it. It's called the Cataclops collection. We minted it with an artist I've known for a very long time.
time he's been in secret for a number of years since 2018 or so and he has one of the rarest NFT collections so we collaborated with him. I think it was last time flies, I think it was early last year.
And they're getting an airdrop that's definitely going to be the first one the first airdrop that goes out and We're working through how to give more utility to these NFTs and to our new collection which is the steer
collection. We're working through how to give more utility to these related to the dual token approach and related to staking and governance, right? Governance powers is definitely like that we're going to do it. We need to figure out the right way. Let's
And we've gone through so many different plans on it. But yeah, we have to continuously cut what doesn't make sense and stuff. But yeah, the end goal is pretty much to give them governance powers and some really cool abilities in
house let's say when it comes to like identity and things like that awesome and great to use NFTs I think it's almost like an unexplored marketing tool or utility or whatever you want to call it for Dexas as you
say, not many Dexas are doing anything with NFTs and it's a bit of a shame. It's a missed opportunity if you ask me. I think it's because they're not artists. One of the things that really stands out to me, I know we're a smaller dex in general, but one of the things that makes us stand out to me
is that we are like Blizzard really is not just in name it really is like something that a bunch of people have collaborated on to get it to this point like even before we had it there was another team building it and even when we got it
that there were other teams that came in and have helped build it. There was an entire other group in Germany that built our bridge page and they're not our employees. They work for the protocol.
So, yeah, and we get a lot of user feedback. It's also why I've grown much more shy about Enveig about the roadmap stuff because, you know, we'll put all this time into a plan and then a user will interact with it or they'll... they'll...
Here the plan and they'll say oh change that's change this change this and You know we are like core devs, but uh You know we're trying to be very respectful of the fact that You know we didn't get here alone and um
We're not going to go, you know, we're not going to go where we want to go alone. Let's say. So user feedback is like a big portion of this.
It's the beauty of decentralization at work. And it can make you or break you. If done right, it definitely can make you.
Yeah, you can definitely do both. It can definitely do both. It's in like, I mean, we have a responsibility to like, you know, let's say a responsibility to to to
I don't even know how to phrase it.
do good work, let's say. But beyond that responsibility, some of this is out of our hands. A lot of people like to typically say, "We
We don't have the control we could even say we did. We could just, you know, some teams kind of just assert control by, you know, deciding everything without feedback or whatever, right? But we don't, I don't even think we could really, like, we got here with a community
and we got to keep working with them. Definitely. So let's allow ourselves to dream a bit. If you sort of, we tend to, when we talk about roadmap and all these things, we tend to think about crypto and
what we're building in sort of weeks and months and you know very short term. Krutto moves fast I guess. But if we allow ourselves to dream and look like 10 years from now or 15 years from now I mean pick your year, pick your poison. How
How would you look back at a placer finance and think wow this was exactly what we set out to build and this is what I'm super proud of having built and being part of maybe not for 10 or 15 years straight but you know at least some part of that journey basically what will make you proud
What would make it the roadmap of Blizzard, you know, be a success and the dreams come true that you and the team has set out to build? Great question. First I want to give a shout out to Mr. Mindet here because he is
He is the artist that has done all the collections that I've discussed here and he has some collections on other chains as well and he is a Blizzard collaborator. But in regards to your question, I don't think I don't think in ten years
I'll be able to look back and say this is exactly what I set out to build and it goes back to what I've already said about how we got here and we didn't get here by just beat like
putting together a plan, ignoring everything that is said to us, and then sticking to that plan while ignoring everything said to us. Like, it is really an iterative process. We have to continuously cut what doesn't work and find
something that does. So I don't know what the end state is. I know that like this is what we want to do, right? We want to keep moving down this path in general, but we don't know where it leads. So I think I'll pretty much just be happy if you know
In 10 years, we've continued down this path and we've continued to learn and improve along the way. There are some core elements that we don't want to stray from. Of course, we have an AMM, so that exists.
We're very set on the Dow tooling, but like I've been saying, you know, specs change, users give feedback, specs change. So I don't know what it'll look like, but I'll be happy if we've learned along the way and if we've kept
moving forward and been been enabled to do so. Well said. Well said. All right. I think this is coming to an end. Is there anything you want to leave the community with today or anything you want the community to do? Of course, go ahead and
and check out Blizzard Finance for anyone who hasn't tried that yet, listening right now to the space or listening on the podcast, et cetera. Is there anything that they should do or connect with you to you with on Twitter, et cetera? Yeah, so what do you want to leave the community with today? What shall we do?
Sure, sure. I would just say, I don't give anything like financial advice, but if you're interested in AMMs, I would definitely
say check out Blizzard Finance. We have some really interesting tri-pools.
Yeah, I mean, I would say check out the the BTC, ETH, USDC, Tri-Pool and kind of decide if you want to LP or try it out.
It's a, I'm kind of at a loss of words for it and not because it doesn't exist elsewhere. But like I said, I haven't seen it really used elsewhere. So it's the thing that I always like to talk about pretty much when pointing people to the decks.
Stay tuned for Steers also. It's pretty much been a year in the works right at this point by Mr. MINDED and us and I'm really excited about those. I think it's going to
I think it's going to be like a super charger for our community because we're not just like we're not like a dex that that like we're approached by somebody that says you know we'll do XYZ service for you or you know this or that like it's a pretty or
mechanic thing that came about that we started doing the NFTs like this with Mr. MINDED and there are contributors that are that are been here from the start working with us and that are actual artists.
not necessarily just doing it as a gig and moving on. So we really do care about the NFTs that we've done and I think it will be an interesting community if you're interested in NFTs. I'd say keep an eye out for news about
about the new collection. Awesome, man. This has been an absolute joy. Thank you so much for coming on today, talking about Blizzard Finance. I am sure, or we hope, that this will not be the last time that we hear from you guys. So yeah, all the best to you until we speak next.
Alright, yeah, thanks for having us again. It was great. We'll keep in touch. Definitely man. Alright, stay safe over there in the cold South Dakota.
And yeah, stay safe from the blizzards. I guess. - Wonderful. - All right. - Take care, man. - Chop.