Hey, Saki, welcome to the club. I believe you were able to speak also. Hey, how's it going?
It's early morning for you isn't it? Very early morning for me. How are you holding up man? These days are tough in our industry.
Yeah, yeah, it is definitely a challenging time.
Yeah, I feel like every morning, whenever you get your morning coffee and catch up on the news, there's some new institution, new exchange or whatever that is defaulting.
Scary times, but nevertheless a good argument for DeFi and decentralization if you ask me at least. I mean, I think it has been enormously validating about the need for DeFi.
Yeah, I agree. I mean, last time we were here, it feels almost like 2018, but in 2018, at least for me, I was legitimately scared that we wouldn't make it as an industry. But now, you know, back then it was like, okay, well, maybe there
there are other options out there. But now crypto and DeFi is the only option to solve this once and for all. To have these bad actors who are not able to play with other people's money in the behind the scenes with this opaque way of doing business. But anyway,
I'm sure we will talk about all this before we just dive in. Do you have any questions, Sacky, or should we just get started? Now we can get started. Yeah, perfect. So welcome everyone to the Cosmos Club where we tweet all things Cosmos. We summarize that in that we can do
and then we invite awesome people to spaces like these who are building the Cosmos ecosystem. And today we're honored to have you, Saki, from Somiya Finance, among other things, with us. Welcome, Saki. It's great to be here. So, I guess just to kick
it off and for anyone who is perhaps ignorant or just doesn't know what some of your finances. Perhaps you can just give a quick intro of the protocol and perhaps also yourself because you've been in Cosmos since the inception almost. So yeah, perhaps just a quick intro for anyone who doesn't know.
I mean, I've definitely been in cause most since the inception. Okay, so what is semilya? So, semilya is a protocol that enables actively managed DeFi strategies. So, you know, we have a bunch of different strategies.
the first strategy that we came out with is a simple strategy. Another cool thing about Smele A is it is essentially a hybrid protocol between Cosmos Tech and Ethereum. What we wanted
to do is, well, Sinalia is always intended as a multi-gain protocol. What we wanted to do was combine what we viewed as the best of what is possible with Cosmostic Mentalology and what is the best is what is possible with Ethereum's Dividing ecosystem.
So, the ability is right now designed to plug in two DeFi protocols on Ethereum and provide an extremely user-friendly and automated experience for accessing sort of value that's created in DeFi.
So one of the reasons, so an example of what we have right now is we have a live strategy called the Arve stable coin strategy and what it does is it provides access to yields based on, you know,
what is the demand for borrowing stablecoins on Ave? But what stablecoin is most of the demand is constantly changing and the strategy is constantly monitoring the constantly monitoring what the best yielding stablecoin is.
among a list of sort of stablecoins that seem to have similar levels of risk and will automatically change what stablecoin is ending based on what the system predicts is going to be the highest yielding stablecoin.
Hmm. Nice. Um, I guess it's all right. Go ahead. Another sort of strategies that are sort of dynamic trading strategies that are designed to maximize your exposure to, um, or sort of maximize the value of your exposure to eat and Bitcoin and
And so we have these ETC trend and ETC momentum strategies that are basically trading strategies for getting exposure. And one of the interesting things about civilian strategies is
that they are actually tokens themselves, so that you actually can hold exposure to them as a token. So basically, you have this token that gives you exposure to a strategy that underneath the token is trading even Bitcoin.
So, you know, that is again another core property of the system is that like you have this sort of actively created strategy where you're able to hold it as a token. And so, I've been working on Cosmos technology for, you know, since like 24 years ago.
14. And something like similarly A has long been the kind of thing that I want to do C in the Cosmos ecosystem. Because I think like one of the challenges of D5 is that, you know,
the like the possible like what is exciting about D5 is it it can be fundamentally safer than C5 and it can be like fundamentally better for users than the C5 ecosystem.
But, you know, most users who try to use DeFi today are, you know, they're like, okay, gas costs are high. You know, liquidity is reasonably low. I have to monitor all of this 24/7. I have all of these like wallets and apps that I use to try and manage
my position, it's very complicated and so what overwhelming and what C5 is always offered is okay, right? You know, here's the magic bunny machine, you put your coins in, you get healed. How can we do that in D5 without compromising values of D5? And this is what the problem similarly is here itself.
Nice. And these strategies just to make sure everybody is on the same page. These strategies are basically conducted or back tested by professional headphones like investment firms. It's not you guys who are creating these strategies. Is that correct? Well, we have what we have been re-done is onboarding.
people who have been monitoring, who have been managing money in the real world to bring them onboard the platform and give users of Sanoania access to these strategies. Previously, you would have had to put money into a hedge fund to have access to
Yeah, makes sense. And there is a distinction here between vaults and strategies. Well, every time people say vaults, I think they immediately think about the sort of yield optimizers like urine finance and there's many now, but this is a different thing. This is strategies actively traded strategies.
So I think what we've seen so far in crypto is like passive strategies from bulls. And the challenge with those strategies is they don't respond to market conditions. Whereas so you know the obvious strategy
to make a decision that says, "Hey, you know, one is like what's stablecoin-rolling, but also in community decision," he says, "Hey, we think the risk associated with tether right now are too high, and we don't want to get exposed here to tether and swap people out of it." So, you know, during
the tether d-pag a few weeks ago or a week ago, the system was able to respond and decrease our user's exposure to the risks of tether. The strategies are able to say, "Hey, we are in a bear market."
and move everything into stable coins while the strategist anticipates the market for continue to be moving in a downward trend, then move back and regain exposure to the eat and Bitcoin when things improve.
Nice. Yeah, so for anyone who hasn't tried it yet, I encourage you to go out and try some year finance. I've always been playing around with it quite for quite some time actually. I thought it was brilliant what you guys were doing and been looking for something like this for quite some time.
It's quite a nice niche right now, but it could be huge, of course, especially in these days. Let's talk a little bit about the recent events in our industry, particularly the insolvency of exchanges and institutions, centralized exchanges.
So perhaps how is some of you perfectly placed in the market right now? You could say to sort of fill the void that is being left by all these guys, do you think? Exactly.
The thing that Sanitia is doing is, for instance, if you are using these strategies on Ethereum, your assets are never bridged. There's no bridging of assets. The bridge is used for this automated
So the system actually can never halt withdrawal. So this idea of you not being able to redeem your funds is just not possible within the semelage system.
The classic problem of C-Fi is, "Okay, yes, you waggen your exchange account. You see that you have USDC, Bitcoin,
or whatever on your exchange, but you don't really have those assets until you exit them from the exchange, and the exchange, as we can see, could be playing games and how that's accounted in all withdrawals of it. A similar A strategy can never do that.
Yeah, that's the first warning sign that people should be aware of whenever someone or someplace is pausing withdrawals. Yeah, it's usually game over unfortunately. We've seen that with Celsius with FTX and perhaps Gemini next it seems
like, unfortunately. So this is completely centralized. The underlying strategies, I mean, there's no withdrawal button, basically, that you can all of a sudden activate into these tokens. And that's one of the guarantee that people have
for using some of you. So what do you think is going to happen then? Are people going to like once we have leaked our wounds, do we start moving into something like some of you? What do you think this is pure speculation of course, but what do you think will happen after all this?
I think the thing is that the other reality of the situation is without disasters like this, people are never going to, you know, we as an industry users are never going to have, are never going to make the leap to use decentralized systems, right?
You know the problem with FTX is you know on one hand. It's like okay, you know Sam is a really bad band You know they stole user funds, but the problem you know is not jet is not just that the problem is the centralization and that we you know
What we have in our system is the technology to fix that. You know, and it's not just, you know, the possibility, you know, the transparency that is possible through D5 is the cure to the problem of that we see with that.
of FTX. And the collapse of FTX is, I think, going to remain in everyone's minds about how wise and important to use D5A systems. And the point of civilian A is to take, is to bake D5s
accessible to the user who doesn't want to make managing their positions in their full-time shop. Yeah, and I think the majority of people don't want to manage their phones all the time and look at prices all day long. So why not have it's a million?
Yeah, exactly. So there is a lot of debate going on within the Ethereum community just to look at another ecosystem that is obviously massive and we take inspiration from particularly the ERC 4,600
26 or 26 26 to 6 exactly tokenized vaults as they are dubbed So how does so many and then your strategy tokens how do they compare to that perhaps So similarly I mean
This is one of the reasons that we chose to build on the thearium first because there are these ideas that exist within the thearium. So the idea of an ERC4626 token is basically
representing this idea in a standardized way that you have a token that sort of contains or provides access to other tokens. And so having something like ERC 466 as a standard means that you know there's this evolving world that exists on the theory
For instance, you could use a civilian strategy token in this collateral. Because a ERC for six juicic aware, a winning protocol could not just see that you have these ERC for six juicic tokens, but it could actually see that, oh, these two
represent the Bitcoin and the USEC sort of underneath them inside them. And so when you're deciding on the value of your collateral position, it could be evaluating the tokens that are contained within rather than just the price of the USE force. It makes sense.
Yeah, so that so the big benefit is that you can look at the value of the underlying assets in a token vaults. Let's call it that tokenized vault. And thereby you can use it on RV or other kind of lending boring platforms to to use as collateral basically.
Yep. Is that something that you think will be possible with the the strategy tokens that is being issued by somebody? Yeah, there are protocols that in the year, it's 262 ecosystem, like Midas that we are in discussions with about who could be
a mess collateral whenever needed. If needed. Yeah, that's the vision. I would like to see, you know, I think there's an enormous opportunity for to build similar things in the sort of Cosmos native
system. But a lot of people have asked why we didn't prioritize cost-most strategies. First, there is a richness that is available right now in Ethereum D5.
have in plasma's D.V.I. is DEXIS. And sort of, you know, there are-- there's a lot of work to be done to get to the next stage of what's possible at Cosmos beyond, you know, just a DEX-centric D.V.I.E.P.S.S.
And that brings me to a question from the community about the roadmap of Somalyeh or what's coming up. I mean, you got the strategies running right now, the stable, the RV stablecoin strategy, the BGCEE strategy. So what's next for Somalyeh? What's on the roadmap?
So we have strategies from new teams coming out. So we have these single asset strategies like a single asset, like steady eat and steady VPC.
coming from past digital. Those are launching very shortly. And, you know, we have a new strategy teams being onboarded all the time. We have
a new version of our strategy contracts that are in audits right now, which are designed to enable accessing sort of
So right now, you know, we have the obvious strategy, which is just a single protocol. We have these sort of actively traded for folio management strategies from clear date. We have the
We have a more portfolio management strategy coming down the pipeline, but these next strategies can also access sort of other DeFi protocols. So, you know, we are, so, you know, that's a key piece from this of what we're trying to build with this.
Next generation of a for with what's enabled by these new versions of sellers, you know, stablecoin yield that's outside of just what's possible in our day, you know, we're getting across all all the options in the theory of
Nice. And you touched briefly upon cosmos moving into cosmos. Is there any, obviously, people listening to, to this channel, they are heavily invested and interested in cosmos? So any, any alpha you can spill here, not to put you on the spot, but I'll do it anyways, moving into the cosmos ecosystem.
I mean, I've been very excited about, you know, the, you know, I think the launch of IST and build, which is another protocol that I'm excited about is really important for the Cosmos ecosystem. I think that the
increasing sophistication of Dex's, you know, order book Dex's, AMM style Dex's, you know, enables new things. I mean, it's been a huge way to the process of listing IST, the process of listing IST, the process
So, you know, we are planning on listing similarly a strategy taken from Injective soon. So, you know, users will be able to access similarly as strategies without having to leave
I don't leave the Cosmos ecosystem. I think that's another big thing that we're excited about. Nice. So still some rails to be built within the Cosmos ecosystem before you can fully dive in. Yeah. And yeah, that makes sense. And I mean, Ethereum is a leader. Let's be honest, a lot of excitement.
and stuff going on in Cosmos for sure and you've been a big part of building that so you know better than any but yeah there's still some way to go to reach the level of Ethereum. Besides that Ethereum has more liquidity than any other protocol so that's obviously important when you have these strategies running.
But speaking of customers, you've been, as you mentioned, all the books, I guess, injective, you mentioned Kujira also has this fin, all the book. Is that something that is almost like a deal breaker if it's not in the customer's ecosystem or why is that?
One of the things that I think is really important is, you know, without order book style decks is listing of things like strategy tokens becomes almost impossible. And, you know, so for instance, on, you know, in white, you know, stable coins again, order books can enable
stable, enormous market depth. So we have, you know, we've been working with the Crescent team to set up what are the largest stable, you know, stablecoin, stablecoin pools in the Cosmos ecosystem for IST.
with a strategy token, right? A strategy token is a price that can always be computed based on the underlying value of the assets inside of it. And you don't want to offer liquidity, you pretty much want to offer liquidity just around that price.
And so without an order book it becomes almost unaffordable to really make robust pull depth for some of these assets possible. But could we, it costs
plus millions of dollars to offer meaningful liquidity on strategy tokens on let's say osmosis but on an order book decks you can offer meaningful liquidity for tens of thousands of dollars.
Nice. Yeah, I guess it smells like what you're about to say is that you're setting up a similar kind of stable-choreian strategy like you have with Abbey, but in Cosmos using IST. Not to put you on a spot again.
But that's what it sounds like and it makes a lot of sense. I mean, there's so many different stablecoins coming up in Cosmos, some of them are risking another of course. And actually, I believe you tweeted a little bit about this not too long ago. I think you mentioned you as I see of course that you are proud of
but also usk from Kajira and perhaps some other stablecoins as well. All these people taking into a strategy, is that what's being planned or, yeah, we were framed from those other stablecoins.
I think it's important that a stablecoin protocol be open source. There's this raging debate that's going on in the Cosmos ecosystem about Kuzura and their close-order smart contracts.
We talked about the benefits of D5 to user safety and security. But the reality of the situation is that many of those benefits only manifest in an environment where the code itself is.
And so I think that is a is all you know users in the Cosmos ecosystem. It's not fun. Talk about the fact that that we lose some of the advantages of B5 using
by using QuoSource software, you have different teams who have different attitudes about that as well. There's, you know, injective, for instance, if you've talked about, is also QuoSource at the moment. They do have a plan to open
But they've also been very open to sharing their source code with, you know, validators and other community members inside of Cosmos. They don't really view it as an anti-competitive thing. They have just been, you know, using it as a sort of, as a way of
of managing what they view as their security risk surface area, but you know many people who they trust, like that access to that source code, and so you know there's a wide variety of people in Cosmos, you can be like, hey we know what's going on, you know, Kuzherra on the other side has been
because you're on the other side has never been very, you know, precious with, you know, the source code of their sport car tracks. So I do think these things matter, but, you know, there is a continuum between fully open and fully closed and, you know, there are many trust models that
as a fair point and we are predominantly an open source industry and I think everybody believes in that at least for the security reasons. We've seen so many stablecoins being issued and collapsing and I don't think anyone wants to see
another one, hurting our industry. We got enough problems as it is right now. So I got some questions from the community on the summer, yet token, the sum token. Perhaps you can speak a little bit more to that just to shift gears a little bit. Yeah.
Like some of the questions why is there a default token? What is the token useful for? So on a high level. So yeah, absolutely. Okay, so semely A is a very different asset than what we see commonly in Cosmos. One of the things that's interesting about it is that is
is a fixed supply, staking as it. And so where will, where does staking returns come from? And like what the, sobiliate model is is that staking returns will come from the
the fees that are paid to the platform from sellers and strategists. So there is this deep and underlying alignment in the token between the value of strategies and the sort of
of rewards generated by strategies and the value of returns from Stakey. So, unlike other cause of scorns where the only model out there is publishing non-stakers, it's sort of the transfer between people who are
using the token of DeFi and there is this. And so the revenues for taking the responsibilities of some token holders are also come from this incentive line because some token holders only get staking returns if so
make profits, they have a lot of incentive towards choosing validators who are going to be effective in the management who are going to be effectively able to execute strategies or the strategies updates, etc. They have a incentive to drive
They have an incentive to vote in governance for sellers that they believe will have broad user adoption that are not going to be rugs that are not going to
that are not going to be rugs that are not going to be strategies that are going to be able to generate future state-in-requests. So we really think that this core and incentive alignment between the
in order to be in the user base is sort of novel for Cosmos. And too many people in Cosmos have been sort of trained by these inflationary, sticky APIs that are not based on any sort of core value creation. And that's not what we're doing with Sonoma.
Nice. And I think that narrative is actually gaining a lot of traction these days. We talked about Brithik Kujira, which is a close source, but what I think some of the stuff that they get right is that they take anyone who steaks kuchi, for example, will get a piece of the feast being collected.
from different depths that is built on Kajira. So in a sense, it's a-- - Yeah, I mean, we really believe in the value of real yield. - Exactly. So if I understand correctly, the strategy is deployed right now, running the PGCE and the IV stablecoin strategy.
are deployed on Ethereum, but the customer strategies will be deployed on Somalia Network or how are they deployed? Basically, how does the Somalia chain come to life? I mean, to represent an interesting question for us, but we haven't resolved fully within Similia, so when we deploy on EVM chains, the strategies
the tokens that are issued, the assets all live on that EVM. We have Ethereum made it today, but we are planning into playing early next year on Github, Ethereum L2s and other EVM chains like Out-Abulent. Those are like the next edge of trust. We haven't yet designed
what our Cosmos architecture should look like, because whether or not we want to follow the model of having the Cosmos architecture also be deploying the strategies on other chains and controlling them from sommelier or having the asset actually lived in
disability. I see. Then I understand why I couldn't find that information. It's simply because it's the first time we have it. We haven't decided that yet. And there are trade offs between those things.
between those approaches and we're trying to figure out what the best way to make a decision about the straight-off. It makes sense. Just perhaps left-field question here, but is there any room for integrations with all these other
Ethereum compatible chains like FMOS, I mean there's a lot of other projects that are working to get the Ethereum ecosystem and the ConsumSecu system to work more closely together. Yeah, I mean there's a lot of possibility of deploying Zimelli-HRID use on either mid-based chains.
like Ebbmos and Kanto. We are, you know, we still haven't seen. I'd say, you know, the thing that our strategy community, our strategy community wants most is the protocol called GMX, which is driven
protocol on EVM chains like Arbitram and Abel Edge. It's probably our most asked for integration among this one strategy community. And that is a
That's one of our most asked for integrations from the strategy community. We are looking forward to more sort of unique things coming to the Cosmos DeFi ecosystem and the Ethereum DeFi ecosystem.
But we are, you know, and so this is one of the reasons why we've sort of focused on other EVN chains for that. Makes sense. Well, I have to ask, right, how to get you back into the Cosmos ecosystem, being one of the founders.
So we're still in the Cosmos ecosystem and you know we think that there's a lot of opportunity as this as we as we see all of these pieces come together in the I think the DeFi ecosystem to really
start pioneering what's right but like you know essentially I think a lot of what we need to do is build it ourselves. Yeah. Yeah and there's benefits of that also I mean you guys have a stack that you have build up over time and
Taking that and sort of integrating with others can come with complications. I've seen in the past at least so that makes sense. Sackie, you're a busy man and it's early for you. You have been great. Is there anything else you would like to leave the community with today?
Um, no, but you know, just encourage people to, uh, take this opportunity to try out, uh, assimilating strategies. Definitely. I think, uh, I will certainly do it. I've done it in the past and I've tried, I will try it again. I haven't tried the PTC.
strategy actually, but now is perhaps a better time than ever given all the uncertainty. I mean, strategy should be a way of rather than, you know, sitting on an exchange, centralised exchange waiting for the market to recover by the dip.
You know, you can have a strategy just do that for you. Amen to that. All right, Saki. Thank you so much for joining the club today and all the best. Keep going. You guys are doing great work. Thanks. Take care, man.