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DeFi Power Hour
Recorded: Oct. 2, 2025 Duration: 0:55:48Space Recording
Short Summary
The DeFi Power Hour returns with a focus on the launch of new projects like Revolve and Meridian on Telos, emphasizing growth opportunities, innovative privacy solutions, and sustainable yield models in the evolving DeFi landscape.
Full Transcription
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Hey, do we have Tim here?
Hey, Will. How's it going?
Good, good, good. We'll get started in a few waiting on Justin, and hopefully we get a few more to show up.
Yeah, sounds good. I'll get started in a few waiting on Justin and hopefully we get a few more to show up. Yeah, sounds good.
I've just quote tweeted it.
All right, cool.
Talk to you in a few. Thank you. Hey, hey, let's give it just another minute and we'll get it kicked off.
Sounds good.
Just testing my mic here.
Let me know if you can hear me okay.
Yeah, sounds good over here.
Excellent. Thank you. Okay, recording live.
Let's go ahead and get started.
Hello and welcome everybody back to the DeFi Power Hour after a long hiatus.
We're back to talk Telos.
We're going to talk a little bit about Telos, where we've been, where we're at, where we're going.
We're going to talk about DeFi.
We're going to talk about Revolve, the newest protocol on Telos and dear to my heart as it is a project I've played a large role in.
We're also going to talk a little bit with Tim Judge from over at Meridian,
a little bit about where Meridian's at,
and we're going to see if we can't map this future of DeFi on Telos,
the future of privacy on Telos,
and where things are headed.
So without further ado, I'm going to get us kicked off, and we have Justin from the Telos
Foundation here with us today.
You want to introduce yourself, Justin, although I'm sure everybody knows you at this point.
You've been around for a long time.
Yeah, probably people know me, but yeah, I'll give a little bit of a quick introduction.
I'm one of the co-founders of Telos.
I mean, we've been around, I think, like eight years now.
Before Telos, I was working in tech, building products, essentially, sort of a product manager type person.
But yeah, been with Telos for eight years now. It's been a
wild ride. I've, you know, done all different roles at the foundation from marketing to being
the CEO, all sorts of different leadership roles. And yeah, it's been an exciting and a fun and challenging journey. But I'm glad to be here and really excited to talk with you guys today about privacy and DeFi.
Yeah, let's dig in to tell us a little bit because you've seen it all from the very beginning until where we're at today.
And including our sort of, you know, the recent challenges that I think we've been through,
you know, I think everybody in the Telos world knows what happened. Certainly we rehashed it
over and over again on all of the socials. But it seems like we're kind of turning the corner a
little bit. And I see a new narrative around Telos and what's the
experience been like and let me kind of ask first like how do you think that you
all have kind of held it together through the turmoil to kind of get to
this point where you're really kind of ready to turn that corner yes that's a
great question it's actually kind of funny because Telos was born into Challenge.
We kind of were founded in 2018, I think it was late December 2018.
And so we were founded in a bear market and we did no ICO.
So we had no funding, no nothing. And so we faced like challenges from day one in terms of like getting on exchanges and like finding out like no one will list your project at the time, you know, just because you were getting lots of adoption or whatever.
You had to have a lot of money.
And then just like, yeah, liquidity challenges early on.
And then we obviously went through the bull market and that was great.
We got some funding where I would have built the EVM that we have, which is like world
class.
And yeah, so when we had like these recent challenges, um, you know, with leadership
and, and other things, we kind of were ready to, to tackle those challenges.
Um, I mean mean just being in crypto
generally i think you can probably relate to this will and and also tim like it's it's very very
challenging because it's like a very new well relatively new industry there's just like lots
of discovery lots of craziness and just as a a community, as a crypto community, we've been all facing lots of different challenges in terms of like the direction of crypto, what brings in users, what brings in adoption, the ups and downs of the markets.
were kind of like for a while they're left with like you know no funding and we had to kind of
scrap our way back uh was a huge challenge but also at the same time something that we were ready to
face and you know just being like a decentralized community having you guys the guardians to help
you know guide us and also kind of ensure that we're doing the right thing, which is like,
you know, what should have happened all along. You know, we have like the support of the community.
We've been through tough challenges before and kind of, I think we're on our way to better
things now. You know, we've announced the privacy roadmap just the other day. And we're heading towards a direction of going deflationary.
These are all exciting things.
And without the last eight years of challenges, we probably wouldn't know the direction.
So all the challenges, all the failures are all key to actually finding success.
So I think that puts us in a really great position right now.
Yeah, I think watching the team operate as,
you know, as a guardian, as a builder on chain,
you know, we kind of had this narrative early
when I first got into TELUS and we launched. This is only three years
ago in 2022. We launched on Telos. And the narrative then was, of course, like you said,
the world-class EVM and building out a DeFi ecosystem. And I think we had a lot of really
early success. And then it kind of felt like the narrative changed a little bit. And I think we had a lot of really early success. And then, you know, it kind of
felt like the narrative changed a little bit. And I know that there was a lot of excitement around
it. But, you know, it kind of got us a little bit distracted from that sort of goalpost of having
high activity, having high quality dApps, having, you know, just a place for people to transact efficiently, quickly, cheaply.
And we kind of got away from that narrative a little bit.
And it seems like we're kind of turning back to focus on things that are really meant to
bring in users, really meant to bring in adoption.
And included is what you just referenced, privacy.
So let's talk a little bit about that.
Why is that?
You know, and Telos isn't the only place we're seeing it.
It's really kind of blowing up across blockchain right now.
And I think it demonstrates a need.
So why do you think it's such an important narrative in the industry right now?
Yeah, you touched on some really good points there about,
I think we did get a little bit lost there with, you know,
some of the aims and things that we were doing for a while there.
But I think, yeah, we're starting to find our feet.
And I think DeFi is a really key component of that.
And privacy also, like these things actually work really hand in hand i guess i
give a bit of a context of like basically what we were seeing in crypto and and just like what
led us to to this direction um so you know there's a lot of a lot of projects out there uh
there's a lot of i guess like incentive models and just like a lot of projects out there. There's a lot of, I guess, like incentive models
and just like a lot of activity happening on chain,
but it's only really happening because there's incentives.
And we were like, okay, this is interesting,
but at the same time, it's like nothing is really taking off organically
and nothing is like compelling enough for like real world users,
real world businesses to
actually come in and use this technology and probably like the number one thing that we
identified that is missing you know along with like us ux improvements which you need to continue
to to improve of course but the number one thing that we saw that was totally missing was like privacy. Like every single company in the world is paying their staff, you know,
with some privacy, you know, otherwise like their competitors would know,
you know, how much they're paying their staff and they would pay,
they would poach those staff, you know,
every individual in the world is making payments every day, multiple payments.
And they're doing that privately, again, because you need some security over what you're doing, where you are.
And as soon as you give away that information that you're at CVS on whatever road, like people can just follow you around so so like this is a
fundamental thing that has been missing from from crypto and um one thing that has blown up that
has been really great is these public markets you know the things that you guys are building
at revolve the things that sure that meridian is building with lending and, you know, being able to mint USDM.
These are important public markets, but like you need the ability to actually interact and use those markets privately.
Sure, sure.
Yeah, we saw this opportunity, I think, to push Telos forward to a point where you actually bring in real users real businesses
so then they can actually engage and use these public markets and we can start to like stimulate
the number of transactions from real users real organic users not ones that are just paid to be
there and and we can actually make telos you know fundamentally sustainable sustainable. So that's kind of where we saw things and why we
have, you know, gone full on into privacy. I mean, and obviously we were already building ZK Tech.
We kind of knew that we were heading in this direction, but we started to realize we need
to go more aggressively and actually get to like deploying the use cases,
deploying private transactions now instead of, you know, five years away.
Sure. I think you're right. You know, my experience in this industry over five years,
six years at this point is that there's a ton of blockchains doing the exact same thing
and trying to bribe users to be there. And these users are by and large there
to collect those incentives. It's mercenary liquidity. It's mercenary action on the
blockchain that's rewarded. And when those rewards go away, the users move.
And the problem there isn't that distributed public ledgers aren't an amazing step forward.
They really are. But in that, sure, you're missing not just privacy, but overall differentiation.
not just privacy, but overall differentiation.
And if the only reason that we're able to do
a large amount of transactions on a given blockchain
is because we're paying out three times more money
than we're bringing in to make that happen,
it starts to become sort of a race to the bottom.
And so Telos has sort of figured out,
it sounds like that, you know,
this differentiation is what's going to
matter moving forward for them yeah you've hit on a really key point there if we don't
differentiate from all the thousands of layer ones and layer twos out there then like what's
the point in using telos like yes it is incredibly fast and performant and a great network a great community
but like at the same time there's other projects that are doing that as well and there's like many
of them and they're a lot bigger so yeah it was really critical that we like put our foot in the
sand and like differentiate ourselves and do something interesting um and another point I just want to quickly, um, touch on is, uh, you, you mentioned like,
yeah, incentives, incentives are great.
Like we've seen web two companies bootstrap using incentive models like Uber, you know,
they were giving out like $25, uh, to, for signing up and you could refer other people
and you get $ 25 for every person
you sign up they got 25 and like it created this like network effect and brought in new users
so web3 is amazing for incentivization like but at the same time we're not following that
tradition that those companies like uber did where you know you bootstrap your your network by using incentives but then there's
sustainability that comes from that um so so we need to like move more towards like yes incentives
are great but like the end game is not more incentives more incentives more incentives it's
like getting to a point where you actually like have sustainability and the core product you're offering actually like is sustainable.
It brings enough revenue in.
And I think that's another part of what privacy will bring in is the,
the way that we're structuring fees will be a lot more sustainable.
And then we'll have the increase in users and businesses and all sorts of
operators that make it more sustainable.
Well, let's go ahead and bring Tim in on the conversation as well.
Tim, you want to introduce yourself real fast and let's just keep it going between the three of us
because I think that there's a lot to talk about here.
Yeah, there's a lot to cover there.
And yeah, thanks, Will.
For a bit of context on who I am, I've been building Intelos ecosystem for about four years now.
For those that can remember Omnidex, that was my first exchange, so main developer at that.
We then kind of transitioned from Omnidex to a rebrand really to Meridian after the multi-chain hack back in 2023 and since then we've been
building Meridian which has got a well the stablecoin protocol USDM that everyone everyone
knows and uses on Telos and then we've got the lending platform as well so those are two big
products that Meridian offers so yeah I think it's really interesting now that Telos is
approaching, going from a different approach towards privacy and bringing that into the
ecosystem. Because it is pretty crazy that everyone, you know, openly doxes their wallet
balances within DeFi and that's just taken as standard practice. But in the real world,
if you shared your bank details with everyone in the world, that would be pretty ludicrous and a pretty big infringement on your privacy.
So I think bringing this technology or privacy technology to Telos is a big step forward.
So, yeah, interesting to see where this goes.
Well, you know, like the counterpoint when I first got into like Bitcoin
was like, oh, it's got to be a CIA inside job to track all of this, you know, and, you know,
all the wild folks come out on the socials and everything. But there's in that wild stuff,
sometimes there's a small kernel of truth, right? And that is that in a distributed public ledger,
you compromise something.
You compromise your own potential,
potentially your own security.
You compromise, by compromising your privacy,
you know, depending on where you live in the world,
you could get yourself into a lot of trouble.
And it's not, you know,
the old school sort of privacy stuff with Monero,
I think was seen as a way to move money undetected, just like I think Bitcoin was at first,
but I think it's really grown, uh, into people understanding that privacy is not just, um,
you know, for, for folks that might be doing things that they don't want the government to see, but it could be business competitors.
It could be, you know, that there are any number of things that make privacy important.
So let's talk a little bit about how we're going to do it.
And then I want to talk a little bit about what it means for DeFi in particular, as this is the DeFi Power Hour, and how we've seen it kind of start to change the world of DeFi.
But, Justin, can you talk a little bit about how does one go about building a privacy layer on Telos, and how are you all going about planning the future of this privacy layer on Telos?
Great question.
So we are adapting some technology that's out there,
and it's deployed on some other networks.
But what we've noticed is the user experience is kind of poor uh i think partly because like these these networks aren't built for
or configured for like highly scalable privacy uh there's also like the user experience is kind of
poor so we're like taking some some technology that's out there and then we're like configuring
our network and and adjusting the technology so then we can actually like, you know, start to solve some
of these problems that are like holding back, you know, why there's not like mass adoption of this
at this stage. And it's going to take some time to get there. We're looking to do like an MVP by
end of year so people can get in there, start using the tech. And then that will also help guide us to improve the technology
to get that feedback loop going.
And initially, I think it will be highly useful
for a lot of different use cases.
Like we've already got some Telosians who run businesses
in different countries, and they want to use this on day one
to basically for their payroll, which is really great, you know,
because obviously they can't like use public Telos or Solana to pay all their employees for
obvious reasons. And so this is like an opportunity for them to start to use Telos to save money on
their payroll costs and, you know, actually handle cross-border payments as well which is
something like the traditional system doesn't do particularly well um so actually we released the
roadmap you can jump into that there's all these different uh you know phases to what we need to do
uh there's like a public ceremony that's involved um to initiate the technology. We're deploying our own wallet,
which will be configured to make this super usable.
And yeah, we'll obviously eventually partner
with third-party wallets and really expand this out.
But yeah, there's a lot of different processes
and our goal right now is get this to Testnet,
which will happen over the next few weeks.
That'll allow us to do our internal testing,
maybe even put that out to the public,
allow other users to get in early and test things.
And then we can build our more detailed roadmap from there.
But current state, we've got a roadmap
that takes us
all the way to mvp and then starts to identify what are those next steps that come after that
and that's like developing uh the wallet technology to be like more mainstream as well and and also
adding in like you know the different payroll features and other like low hanging fruit use cases, we want to start to service those really quickly.
There'll also be like available APIs and documentation and other things that allow
you guys basically all the DeFi platforms to hook into this.
So then they can start to service these, you know, private wallet users from day one.
So that's also going to be exciting and really a key element to this
because it's only so useful if you can do private transactions,
like simple transfers, but you take it to the next level
when you can make a private loan from your ZK wallet
or change your assets.
I think Tim made a really great point that, like, people need to be able to hold their assets privately.
Like, and eventually they'll have all different kinds of assets.
They'll have, like, obviously USDC, they'll have Telos, they'll have Bitcoin and Ethereum.
obviously USDC, they have Telos, they have Bitcoin and Ethereum, but then also like all
their like ownership of different stocks, ownership of different houses even eventually,
you know what I mean?
So peace to their door, like, and that needs to be held within a wallet.
And sometimes they need to be able to like swap those assets, you know, swap some USDC
for some Euro stable coin or
you know what i mean like so they need to be able to like hold these things privately and like
transact and and trade with these things privately as well so all that documentation that we'll
release will also be really key it's interesting and tim i wanted to kind of chat a little bit about thinking about like, one thing I remember is, you know, one of these fantastic ideas that I had that we build and, you know, it just didn't end up getting traction, which but, you know, we came together and we built these sort of what were essentially liquidity pools, but acted more or less like, because
we have the ability to do multi-assets in a pool, change weights, do things like that.
So we were trying to build more or less like a basket of assets.
One could even call it, basket of assets that changes weights that essentially acts as an investment vehicle onto itself.
But one of the biggest challenges that we had with that was initial liquidity.
And nobody wants to be the first into one of those sorts of things when you
only have five figures of liquidity in there. I guess what I'm trying to say is almost impossible
to attract somebody in when other people are going to know that they're the only ones
in that pool with the liquidity in there initially. you can't attract those big six-figure
sort of liquidity investments. It makes it really difficult to do.
But anyway, I think what privacy in DeFi really does is it allows us to say,
yes, we can prove that the liquidity is there, that it's usable, but you don't need to know which specific wallet
is holding it. Now, there'll be some purists, I think, in the DeFi world that say that that
public ledger is the most important part. However, when it's inhibiting growth,
it's certainly something to look at. So Tim, sorry, that was a long way to introduce a question.
That was a long way to introduce a question.
But Tim, how do you see DeFi sort of adapting to a blockchain world where the right to privacy starts becoming more of the norm?
Yeah, I think that use case you touched on there is actually a brilliant one.
I think that is a limiting factor because you know humans are herd animals
if they see that no one else is jumping into a liquidity pool they'll just avoid it even if the
code's secure um so that i think that's brilliant um one other use case i was thinking of uh revolves
around lending so um there's a new market at the moment called risk curation which you guys have
probably heard of um but if you haven't
heard of it it's essentially where companies such as gauntlets or re7 or mev capital they'll fund
that they'll create their own fund where they pool users money together and then they'll build their
own strategies on how to deploy that capital through different lending platforms that could
be you know delta neutral trading that could be looping strategies on lending platforms there's
really quite a variety of different strategies they use but one of the big
problems that they face today is that they get copy traders so they'll create
their fund with a strategy where they do do thing but then they'll charge a 1%
fee on this for a 0.5% fee.
And people might jump into that pool because they think,
okay, the yield's very good.
But then you'll get a copy fund,
which does the exact same strategy,
but undercuts their fee to maybe 0.1%. And so this is a big problem for a lot of the risk curators
at the moment,
because they just basically can't charge any fees
because as soon as they charge a fee, someone just undercuts them with the same strategy
um so i think an interesting use case there would be to create um you know this privacy layout on
top of telos and then try and get the risk curators to deploy their strategies on the telos network
and the reason they want to do that is because they can now manage their strategies privately so they won't have the issue of other people copying
their strategies undercasting them on fees and they can actually monetize
risk curation properly. It's almost a way to protect somebody's knowledge and
yeah yeah it's a very interesting use case and and i think that it's it inhibits
um on-chain trading and i think then you start to see the rise of of you know or or the consistent
use of coinbase or binance or any of these sort of places when, you know, this industry was never
meant to be that. It wasn't meant to be Web 2 layered over Web 3, you know. Justin, what do
you think about some of these use cases for DeFi and privacy? Yeah, that was actually a really
great example. And I think that shows the exciting thing is that like there is all these different
use cases that like you don't really think of until i guess you start to consider that
it could be different there could be privacy there um i'm always just like even thinking just
like the the low-hanging fruit of like people paying for for things you know people trying to
run their payroll, you know,
because those are some things that we can service really quickly. But I mean, actually,
like this is something that is serviced like really quickly day one as well, you know,
is just the fact that you can, a company can trade and not have their ip stolen or their their strategy stolen essentially because like basically
this will just show as like the the privacy layer contract you know making trades with revolve or
whatever defi decks it is but the users won't be able to see well who's actually running that
you know who's who's making these transactions, um, which makes it, yeah, really, really interesting. Like you could
maybe see that some big moves are being made and you don't even know who's making those moves.
Um, so I don't know what like exciting things that will bring, but it's just like going to
be very, very interesting. I think think, to see that kind of thing.
I can't actually think of any other specific DeFi things other than just as core users, I think we're all going to want to just hold our assets privately and not have everyone snooping on how much of everything that we own.
I think that's really key.
I think we most likely have three folks here that have been involved in governance at some
level and we're a dying breed gentlemen, people that have been around in this industry long
enough to care about governance, but that we still do exist.
I know that it's a reason that a lot of us got into this world in the first place.
But I foresee a use case as well where, you know, you can have private voting where it's all verified.
It's only the right token holders that are voting, only the people that fit the right parameters.
But you have private voting.
You don't have to go through and read the list.
And that can be useful. I mean, it's been a principle in democracies worldwide,
right? That people aren't supposed to be able to tell who you voted for. It's a private ballot.
I understand that there's also a lot of love, from included for the public bit of blockchain.
But that doesn't go away just because you build a privacy layer.
This is a choice for people to make.
Nobody's mandated to move down this path.
And I think that that's an important thing as well.
That it's a layer and the same great telos that you'll uh was used and
known and loved is still going to be there
that's a fantastic point about like voting especially like um there's definitely lots of
different reasons why people need to be able to vote without, you know, disclosing. I think like
it's a huge inhibitor for people to even vote, like especially like a big whale,
like to have the public constantly like questioning them, oh, why did you vote this way,
etc. It's just very frustrating and it leads to to less voting in my opinion um but it's also
kind of interesting like um people always talk about like oh let's move like national elections
on to on chain and it's like how can you do that on like a fully public blockchain it's just like
a recipe for disaster you know what i mean like to for for governments
to to be able to identify what who everyone voted for like it's just goes down a rabbit hole that no
one should ever want to go down i think um so definitely a different a very interesting use
case to bring up um let's shift gears a little bit.
And in the time that we have left,
we're probably going to go another 10 minutes,
but I'd love to talk about sort of a telos defy just a little bit.
Let's check in on sort of, you know, I mentioned,
and I alluded to the fact that I think, and with Justin and Tim,
we were, we were all there for the ride,
but I think we really started to pick
up some momentum. We had some, all of the tokens, including the Telus coin, we're doing fairly well.
We had a lot of momentum in the DeFi space. You would see millions of dollars in liquidity on
multiple. There was decent enough on-chain liquidity. And, you know, I think that
if we're honest, we look at ourselves and we say that's not what, that's, we're not there.
And I think, you know, I think that there are a lot of reasons for that. And I don't think that
I'm going to put a lot of fault in anybody in the room here or really any. But I think that there is a path forward.
There's still some, I think, really good DeFi options on Telos. And I'd like to just kind of
think through a little bit about kind of where we're at and where we can go moving forward.
And sort of maybe starting off just thinking, like we have two
very active protocols. You have both, you know, you have Meridian, you have USDM, which is a
stable coin protocol that I think everybody's come to know in the TELUS ecosystem over the years.
Really cool ways right now, including like 10% APR to deposit USDM on the lending market as well as part of Meridian Lend. Meridian
Lend was built on top of Aave contracts, really solid protocol, and a good place to earn a little
bit of extra on Telos that you hold or some other major assets as well. And then, you know, so you
have sort of the Meridian suite of products.
And this also includes Telos Pump, which came out of, you know, activity has slowed down, but adds some really nice activity.
And it's really fantastic tech.
And then, you know, on our side, we've got Revolve.
And, you know, Revolve was built by the architects of Symmetric,
and so it's similar.
It's built on balancer contracts,
but we've kind of really redone the tokenomics. We've airdropped all of our users and TSIM holders
and built bribe markets,
which you've seen Telos have a lot of success with over on base,
which has made the Telos token coin available on Coinbase.
So we've got that same tech on Telos now.
And then sort of who has the most liquidity right now is Oku, who is just an incredibly solid protocol built on Uni V3, but it is Uni V3.
It's the exact same contracts.
It's endorsed by the Uni team.
So we kind of have the building blocks there.
You know, there's fantastic APR over at Revolve, there's opportunities to earn from both due to the unique setup of Revolve,
both from Meridian Lend and from Revolve at the same time. You got Oku there. But how do we kind
of build upon those building blocks? And how do we, I think, increase the use of what we already
have? Let's talk a little bit through that. What do you guys think?
Either one, who wants to jump in on that one?
Yeah, I can try and jump in there.
Well, one of the things that we're doing at the moment
is we're looking at different types of DeFi primitives
that we can bring to Telos.
I guess in my mind, what I always thought is that
for a network to really succeed, it needs like a killer application.
So one direction we're going at the moment is insurance, since the insurance space is very, very young right now within DeFi.
I think there's only Nexus Mutual in the space at the moment.
And they've got a few kind of fundamental drawbacks about their products.
So we're building a new type of insurance product which is parametric with instant claims,
instant settlement. Everything is managed end-to-end by smart contracts so no governance
votes over the claims processes. So fully amuseful and like trustworthy essentially.
so fully amuseful and like trustworthy essentially so I think this kind of product
would draw more users into the Telos ecosystem because if you are a risk-averse user and you
don't you know maybe trust depositing on on a lending platform without much liquidity
or you don't trust you know making a swap etc on some platforms or depositing into a vault then you could do you
could take part in those activities and be fully covered so really it opens the door to to a lot
a lot bigger user base and potentially even like an institutional user base further down the line
where they need risk adjusted returns so, I think insurance is an interesting one.
And then, yeah, I'll pass it over to Justin.
That's very cool.
I think you're dropping alpha for me there today
because I'm talking to you guys all the time,
but I didn't know about this, and this is awesome.
Really cool news, Tim.
Thanks for sharing today.
Justin, what do you think? How do we can how do we grow this back into a megalith here?
to head and certainly like aligns with where the foundation is heading,
you know, bringing in privacy,
bringing in more real world utility use cases and,
and more real users.
So with that,
you need these things that real world users expect like insurance.
So that,
that sort of is,
is the direction that I've,
I've been thinking.
But yeah,
I want to give some credit to Nikki,
who built our DeFi ecosystem up so well in the past.
And then unfortunately, when she left us,
no one else was put in charge of DeFi in the same way
that she was.
So that was a real shame. But from that adversity of that drop
in interest in DeFi, now we have an opportunity to look at the markets, look at what's working,
look at what's not working, look at what's about to fail, basically. And that creates this
interesting opportunity and then puts us focused know focused on these like directions that work
And and I think part of that is like adjusting our DeFi protocol
So then they are like quite sustainable and I think what you guys are doing at revolve is really excellent in
The way that this bribing market works. I don't know if you guys call it bribing or use a different much nicer
terminology, but I don't know if you guys call it bribing or use a different, much nicer terminology.
But it does seem to be... It almost sounds like we're doing something illicit or something, doesn't it?
Yeah, it kind of sounds illicit and not nice.
But the way it works, I think, is showing a lot of legs, especially on Aerodrome, which is really exciting.
So I think that thought process is definitely a part of it.
And I know what you guys are doing at Meridian, Tim, is really cool.
Like focus more on, you know, going deflationary and not giving out too many rewards.
Or I think you guys are frozen rewards at the moment.
But the thing is, you guys have Meridian Land, which like it does have like organic demand and it does have organic revenue
streams for the users who are lending out, say USDC and people are borrowing against
their Telos like and paying like a 3% or a 5% or 10% yield.
Like this is the way things need to go because like there's actually real yield involved.
And I think like both platforms are really thinking about that sort of thing which
is really great and i think the other element of this is like let's bring in more projects
to trade on these platforms um that that that are more real world focused that do have real
world revenue streams um you know we we made a really great investment in collector coin. That could be a
good example. But like there's like real world revenue streams that can happen on chain and
especially with what the current US government is doing in terms of regulation. That's going to
open up more of this. So I think we'll see more real coins more stocks
even commodities like trading in the defy ecosystem of telos and as like the confidence comes back to
the telos ecosystem we're also going to like see that liquidity return back i mean it returns back
organically almost because like as the telos price rises all the things that trade against telos uh
those liquidity pools grow with it so a lot of opportunity is going to come out of this i think
and there's a lot of excitement i think ahead yeah i want to center back in because and and
and give some props to uh to meridian because um you know I think that they're going the same way.
You know, what we saw early in the DeFi industry was a lot of Ponzi DeFi, right?
You saw these tokens that were ultimately unsustainable
or were only sustainable at some level of revenue or fee generation.
And I think what Meridian has figured out and what we've figured out
is that if you have a token that's directly tied to the fees that you're bringing in
and is ultimately then essentially deflationary, if for any, but it's also true, that it's infinitely scalable each direction.
You can scale it down when you need to. You can scale it up when you need to, because it's going
to essentially be tied to the success of the project. The token is going to be directly tied
to the success of the project. So, for example, the way that we use this mechanism
is all of the fees are ending up directly back
in the hands of liquidity providers
and then the bribe market,
and that is through Revolve holders.
And so all of the fees through the project
are going back through the token itself.
And these are the only tokens that end up
distributed. We don't distribute more revolved tokens than we're ultimately buying back.
And so it's infinitely scalable in this way. And I know Meridian has sort of
worked towards the same sort of deflationary principles in a slightly different way.
Tim, you want to tell us a little bit about kind of the thinking behind what you all are trying to do, because I think it's similar.
Yeah, we follow a similar dynamic. Essentially, we make most of our fees at the moment from the
lending platform and historically a fair bit from the stablecoin projects as well, USDM.
historically a fair bit from the stablecoin projects as well, USDM.
But yeah, we take those fees and then we distribute them to our stakers.
And then the longer you stake your MST for, the more yield you'll earn.
And that yield's paid out in things like USDM and actually real assets.
asset. So you state your MST and earn real yields. So I think this is, as you're saying,
So you stake your MST and earn real yields.
Will, it's kind of essential for projects these days to actually have a real revenue distribution
model to make sure that their stakeholders actually have a reason to hold the token.
And yeah, yeah.
No, I think you're spot on at the end of it because, I mean, I think the common thinking right now after the experience post-DeFi summer is that don't hold a DeFi token any longer than, you know, you have to.
You know, it gets hot in your hands.
And, you know, we've seen some exceptions to that rule with projects that have exceptional success
but um ultimately it's not sustainable um and so building these sustainable models is what we've
set out to do and and i know you have as well and i think um again the beauty for me is that we we
might be pretty relatively small to where we were at, but that model scales up just as quick as it scales down.
And when more fees come in, that's more revolved that are ultimately coming off the market and then going back into the market.
And that's all.
And so I think that this is key.
and I think you're seeing a lot of other sort of DeFi protocols move that way.
And I think you're seeing a lot of other sort of DeFi protocols move that way.
Some of them were so tremendously undervalued
that the teams were raking in incredible amounts of fees.
Some of them never had any model whatsoever,
and I don't think that's acceptable anymore.
And I'm glad.
I'm glad it's not acceptable to users anymore because it shouldn't be.
Yeah, I agree. I think once you do a token launch you have an obligation really to
to distribute some of your fees to to users or to your token holders otherwise it's a bit of a scam
really yeah and and i'm happy with the industry moving in this direction. Well, gentlemen, let's wrap this up. Any parting words, Justin?
Just like, yeah, stay tuned to what we're doing
with the privacy layer.
I think it's going to be really exciting.
Yeah, as I said, we're going to release some documentation,
so we'll be in touch with all the developers
on in the ecosystem, especially the De defy ones so we can start to
to build this like connection between the privacy layer and the public layer so then we can get like
all these new users to be able to basically use all of our defy which is going to be amazing i think
other than that yeah we've got a ton of different announcements coming um just join
join the telus community start getting involved um start talking about these things um yeah and
also yeah jump jump on and start using meridian and revolve like you guys just released your
rewards right so um now is the best time I think to start engaging with revolve
before things get get hot yeah our APRs are very nice on a couple of pools you know in your 30%
and stuff like that and one of those is is just for holding telos so if you hold telos that's
take telos wrap telos pool is fantastic right now but if you want to provide
liquidity on revolve you know we're talking four figures we're talking three figures on usdc and
stake telos and and all of these are also augmented um um and boosted through meridian
land which then boosts the revolve token itself so it's cool stuff. Go check it out, Revolve.Fi. Telos is our only chain right now.
We're going to be... But yeah, let me go ahead and say that before we go. And Tim, any parting words?
Also check out Meridian and their entire suite of products at meridianfinance.net. Tim,
you want to add anything? Yeah,
I'll just say there's around 10% yields on the USDM pool for lending right
now.
So definitely check that out.
If you're looking for a good place to earn yields.
And yeah,
thanks.
Thanks a lot.
Wolf hosting.
10%,
man.
We need to make a USDM boosted pool over there.
Don't we?
Yeah,
that'd be great.
That would be great.
Yeah.
All right. We'll get that done.
Thanks, gents.
Thanks, everybody, for listening.
We'll see you next time.
Thanks, Will.
Cheers, guys.
