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defi/acc: monad defi opportunities w/ james hunsaker
Recorded: Dec. 10, 2025 Duration: 0:59:40Space Recording
Short Summary
The conversation dives into the evolving landscape of the crypto market, focusing on the resurgence of Zcash and the growing interest in privacy protocols. Participants discuss the launch of new projects and decentralized exchanges on the Monad platform, highlighting trends in DeFi and the importance of regulatory compliance. As the ecosystem expands, the need for education and community engagement becomes paramount for navigating the complexities of new opportunities.
Full Transcription
Thank you. so gm gm how we doing guys hello hello How's it going? Good. Enjoying Wednesday. How about you?
Yeah, doing well. Getting up to speed. Sweating this Zcash bag.
Definitely looking interesting. Maybe I'm not the happiest with how it looks, but we have faith. Are you a big privacy guy?
I'm going to love privacy until I sell my Zcash and then I won't care about it so much.
No, just kidding. I don't know. I think I like the emphasis that people have brought back in light of Zcash doing well.
It seems like a good thing for the space.
Yep. Definitely a flash from the past for a lot of people who have been in this space for a while.
I remember Zcash was super hot back in the 2016-2017 cycle.
And then everybody who was long Zcash just kind of regretted their decision for the
longest time until this big comeback more recently but yeah we have we have james on
uh rocking the emo pfp hey james how's it going hey what's up
what's your um just out of curiosity and we'll we'll get into other things but
while we're on the topic of privacy what's your what's your take on privacy
uh i mean i used to trade zcash a lot actually you just mentioned 2017 back then i love i love
zcash the problem became at some point like it was hard to get it like on centralized exchanges
right because they were like blocking it I
think I think that was one of the main reasons I had what's that a exchange
is like in Seattle or something
yeah go ahead what's the other main what's the other major u.s exchange beside coinbase
kraken kraken kraken yeah kraken yeah yeah that's what that's why i had a kraken account
was actually pretty cash back in the day wow yeah that's wild i think um yeah i think the
a couple of these privacy coins have had these issues.
If I remember, Monero was actually pretty hot in the 2017 cycle as well.
I used to be a big Monero fanboy back in the day.
To this date, a lot of people actually argue that Monero's privacy tech is way better than Zcash.
And I do remember that Monero eventually ended up getting delisted from most of the major exchanges.
And I think Binance was the only last one kind of left.
And then Binance delisted it as well.
But my understanding on why they did that was because of regulatory reasons.
Yeah, I think the Zcash thing is good.
I think bringing it back is good.
But I think the current state is it's just kind of a meme.
It's not really practical to use
such a volatile currency.
Use such a volatile asset as
currency.
Yeah.
Definitely. I think it's
Go ahead.
This is definitely going to be a focus of
monad um the main issue is sort of the legality of what what is actually legal there's no point
in building something that's not really going to be legal or can't really be used in commerce by
institutions or businesses or that sort of thing so that that's, you know, that's what we need to figure out is like what,
what is privacy vote that's that highly regulated sort of entities can still
engage in. Right. For people, they probably don't care.
Like people are not going to get in trouble with the government for using like
Zcash, but banks and businesses and those sorts of
things would so um you need to kind of find a balance and but this is going to be a focus for
the for the team here nice nice that that's good to hear yeah i think the the overall privacy space
has been um getting a lot of heat over the um past few months and like privacy has definitely been
um a narrative for quite some time um and i know that there's been some privacy protocols in the
past that became pretty big and then eventually did not do so well like one of those that i remember
is um secret protocol um i believe it was a cosmos chain um back in 21 or 22. And I think they were using some kind of an Intel encryption technique
that ended up basically not being as secure as everybody thought it was. And then eventually,
all of their encryption basically became useless. And I think the project kind of
didn't really be like, like remain a thing after after that Intel thing happened.
didn't really be like like remain a thing after after that intel thing happened um but yeah i've
been i've been seeing interesting privacy use cases um from teams that are are building them
out on public blockchains which is interesting so there's for example there's this project called
in cypher um and um right now i think their product is live on solana they're also planning
on bringing over some products to monad and they offer privacy on transactions and like basically privacy stable coins and a bunch of things
happening on public blockchains. Um,
and I think they're either using like a trusted execution environment or
something, um, to mask some of the activity. Um, but yeah, to your point, um,
I think a lot of this eventually also boils down to how do you build privacy
while ensuring that there's some level
of auditability for it to be okay from a legal perspective. Because I think that's what the
problem usually ends up being like, yes, you don't want to be advertising your financial activity to
everybody on a public blockchain. Like similar to how you use a typical bank, you're not advertising
what you're doing, the only one who has that information is your bank.
But then the information,
your financial transactions are always auditable
by those banks.
And if there's, for whatever reason,
like some regulatory authority that needs to look into things,
they can get the approval and get access to that data.
I think it would be kind of a similar situation
in crypto as well,
like if we were to remain within legal frameworks.
Yeah, I think you have to have some balance
between being principled
and actually being able to transact with other people.
And if I sent you Zcash,
like no one's gonna be breaking down our doors,
a large financial institution
or a large business would not
touch that right now.
The TE
stuff is more like, I wouldn't
trust,
like you mentioned Secret Network, I wouldn't trust
the TE
stuff for privacy where like your freedom is at risk or that sort of thing. You know,
that's more for like, I don't want people to see my trades or even like in the short term,
I don't want people to see my trades because they might, you know, try to front run me or
take advantage of information. So TEEs are fine for that sort of stuff. But, you know, try to front run me or take advantage of information. So TEs are fine for that sort of stuff. But, you know,
Zcash is really built for like, you know, I don't,
I don't want to go to prison because I transferred money to somebody or something like that. Right.
So that, you know, some taxes or other sorts of these,
these things are not the same sort of privacy level and people should,
my fear with like secret network and these sorts of things is they,
they mislead people to think that their stuff is really private.
And,
you know,
somebody is going to end up in jail one of these days because they think
they're using a privacy protocol and it's not really private.
Right.
So it needs to be like this
definitely um i think like one of the people that i saw questioning um like a zcash thesis um
especially around you know why um like as a as a medium um of of exchange or as a store of value
um why zcash um would not make sense in the long term.
And I think the counter argument that person had was interesting,
where he said that there's a whole SHTF community on the internet,
like when shit hits the fan and people preparing for a doomsday scenario
for a number of reasons, whether geopolitical reasons
or economic collapse or something of that nature.
And somehow Zcash is pretty popular within that community.
Like those people view like, oh, if like, you know, currencies collapse and like, or,
you know, you have some kind of intense geopolitical problems or, you know, government shutdowns
or things of that nature, then, you know, the only thing that can protect you from your government um could probably be you know something that is extremely private that you know not even
governments can be on a public blockchain um but then the counter argument that person had to that
was that he said like hey if you're if the like if the entire country is going to um then
you know a super volatile cryptocurrency is probably not going to be the best bet
to hold up in an environment, which I thought was an interesting argument and not entirely
untrue. But yeah, I know we've been talking about privacy and definitely got off track
from what we were supposed to talk about. but just pivoting pivoting back to the um
topic at hand james how are you feeling about monad been at launch
uh you know it's very it's been very smooth i think the the um
chain experience is pretty amazing like I mentioned this before like transferring
money like from coinbase withdrawing money from coinbase to my dad like it
was just extremely fast right I put took some you to USDC from coinbase and by
like by the time that I like change tabs found the right tab in my browser so I
always have like 100 tabs open and like refresh like the money, you know, the USDC was already on Monad.
So, you know, the chain experience is really good.
A lot of the apps are really good, really polished, just like really good UX.
Some of these I weren't even weren't even originally aware of and so
it was cool to see things that I didn't even know existed
and yeah just playing
it's fun yeah
nice nice yeah I think
like obviously Monad had been in
works for a pretty long time
and people in the community and you know
people that were you know just part of the broader crypto community,
like everybody was waiting for this milestone to happen for a really long time.
And I know you guys at Category Labs have also been working around the clock to make a lot of things happen.
And then the minute launch itself, there was tons of traffic coming in, coming in, like 9am Eastern time on November 24th when everything launched, like, you know, there was like so much activity happening on decks, bridges, like so many things going on.
What was, what was going on through your mind at that time? What were, what were things that you were, you were checking that at 9am on launch date?
at 9 am on launch date um we had like the war room set up right to just like one monitor and
watch everything but yeah i don't think anything really happens it was kind of a from a technology
and like infrastructure point of view it was kind of just like a boring day um the i played around
with a bunch of apps.
That's probably where I spent that week of Thanksgiving,
just playing with apps.
I kind of got too distracted by the meme coin stuff,
and so I need to get back into playing with more of the apps
because meme coin is not really my thing.
The more sort of, I don't know what you want to call it,
traditional DeFi of staking and looping and all,
you know, earning yield and all that sort of stuff is more sort of my thing.
So I need to spend more time with that sort of stuff.
And, and I've been selling my NVIDIA.
Now I have all this cash I need to put to use.
So I'm going to probably move it to Monad DeFi.
Nice. Nice, nice.
I think that rotation is probably going to go down in the books.
But yeah, that's awesome to hear.
And yeah, I think when we went live on Mainnet on November 24th,
we had about 50-ish apps that were live.
And over the past two weeks,
we've had about like 30
or 40 more apps come online already. And there's quite a lot more apps that are going to be coming
live over the next month or so as well. And yeah, I think a lot of people that are tuned
into the space right now as well also saw you pretty active playing around with all the apps
and kind of publicly documenting things that you found exciting and, you know, things that you were playing around with. So yeah, maybe just to,
you know, go by categories and, you know, talk about some of the apps and, you know,
some of the things that you've found entrusting in those apps, as well as, you know, any areas
for improvement that you think exists within the DeFiFi ecosystem because of course a lot of these apps are launching a midnet environment for the first time and obviously
midnet is an entirely different kind of a beast versus testnet because like there's actual money
on the line and people are getting a lot of entrusting feedback or edge cases that maybe
did not exist on on testnet yeah so maybe starting off with the with the dex space
um what are um some of the dexes that you that you tried out and like what are some of the
interesting things that you've found so far uh maybe we can talk about both the the cross-chain
ones because i'm sure that there's some cross-chain ones that you maybe have not played around with
before um as well as some of the native ones.
Oh, I don't know that I necessarily know exactly what the cross chain ones are.
Are you talking about Uniswap or that sort of thing?
Yeah, so the cross chain ones would be Uniswap, LFJ, Curve,
yeah, like a pancake swap, these kind of decks. Yeah, of that set, I really only played with Uniswap because I wanted to put some mean coin pools.
Capricorn is Monad native, right?
And so I think one functionality they don't have up yet, or maybe they do now, I'm not sure, but creating the pool with the different sort of fee tiers.
And I just think fees on like meme coins should be pretty high as opposed to like, you know, traditional like fees on like ETH versus USCC should be low low obviously very low but Fees on like meme coins are just they're just so volatile right and everyone's shooting for like, you know 10 or 100x sort of thing and so
I put some put some uh rules on Uniswap. I think they're all gone now
Yeah, it was it was pretty fast pretty seamless
it was pretty fast, pretty seamless. Uh,
Uniswap is not something that I normally play with again,
cause I'm not really into this. Don't do a heck of a lot of trading these days,
but, um, yeah, it was, it was pretty smooth. I'm on it.
James, what, what sort of fee tiers are you proposing for, for memes?
You think they should be higher than 1%?
Well, the fee tier that I originally put on Uniswap
was 10%.
Geez, yeah.
So you're really hoping that
the range that you select,
you're like the only liquidity that's there
for some amount of time, huh?
In that case.
Yeah, and stuff did start to,
people did start posting liquidities at low,
did start putting up liquidity at lower fee tiers. And then I did see like my volume drop off for sure.
And then I readjusted.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But yeah,
I think,
I think features could be like dynamic,
like an exchange should just basically, But yeah, I think features should be dynamic.
An exchange should just basically... Because the aggregators are just looking, finding routes,
and they should just basically look at the...
An exchange should just look at the other routes
and then basically set its feet here high enough
to be probably the best route or something like that.
That would be cool for people to be able to opt in on that.
It's funny.
One of the things that I did notice in the first week, especially is like you mentioned,
like Capricorn right now, you can only LP on pools that already exist.
And a lot of times the only liquidity that existed for these was, you know,
the set of liquidity that comes from the launchpad graduation process. And so some of these APRs were
like, you know, pretty attractive if you were like the first LP outside of the programmatic liquidity that gets locked there.
So we'll see.
I think it takes time to build up those like the participants that are willing to engage
in that sort of thing.
But, you know, this sort of trade has existed on like Meteora where people race to be the
first voluntary LP for a meme coin that's
doing a ton of volume so hoping that sort of that stuff uh catches up yeah those you know like flashy
aprs for something for a coin that's going to zero is not that great like it doesn't really make sense but um it is it is definitely a trading dynamic that i'm not
usually that familiar with because i don't usually trade main coins so um there is some games to be
played here like like you said rushing in you know maybe pulling back there's different sorts of
things i'm i'm learning just like anyone else uh to play these games. It's very interesting for sure.
Yeah, I think also one of the things...
Yeah, go ahead, Faze.
I've talked to a lot of the teams.
Like Capricorn, for example, I've talked to them quite a bit.
They all have really good roadmaps. You know,
some features are not there. They're testing them.
Stuff's on the way. They're aware of the issue. That's overall,
it's been a very like positive interaction talking to the DeFi teams.
Actually on this note, not to cut you off, Abdel, but, but James,
I wanted to ask you, so Capricorn right now, their instance is basically a V3 concentrated liquidity DEX.
But their end goal is to have a prop AMM, which I'm not sure if you've dug in deeply on Humidify or Gunify or all these different prop AMMs that exist on Solana, but they do a crazy
amount of volume on majors, specifically the sole USDC pair on a very small amount of capital.
I'm curious if you've looked at like the market structure for those and have any thoughts on like
how that will end up working on EVM?
Because I do think it's on everybody's minds of, yeah,
what competition will look like between prop AMMs and order books.
I don't really know that much about that.
Can you define prop AMM?
So I think there's, this is a very crude explanation, but there's a few dynamics, at least on Solana, where there's some semblance of like source aware flow.
So people are basically saying like, hey, like this order is coming from the Jupiter front end.
You know, we are the Prop AMM and are actively giving different quotes to flow coming from different venues
based on our understanding of how many players here are informed versus uninformed.
And so the baseline of liquidity that can be accessed by some of the prop AMMs is like
pretty much that of like a V2 curve.
But in places where they suspect there's a lot of retail, they're like happy to give better pricing,
given that they think, yeah, there's like 40% of the participants coming from Jupiter are not
adversarial, and therefore we're willing to quote better for that group of people.
And that way, just they end up surfacing the best quotes through all of the aggregators for majors, for things that have, you know, an updated price every single block that allows them to do this.
Yeah, I see. I mean, this is, this is basically what brokerages do,
you know, traditional trad5 brokerages do, right?
You give,
you give even price improvement to retail because retail is probably usually almost always making the wrong decision, at least in the short term.
You know, hedge fund comes in and you basically,
sometimes you even turn the hedge fund away because you don't want to trade
with them at all because you assume they have like some, you know,
inside knowledge that you don't have.
So, yeah, that's interesting.
I didn't know that we had didn't know that they were,
that we had that same sort of thing going in DeFi.
For sure. Yeah. We'll, we'll see how things play out. I think, uh,
Capricorn's maybe a few months away from having an MVP on this.
So we'll have to pick your brain. Yeah. That'd be cool.
Yeah. I think it'll be an interesting product when
it when it comes out because especially if you look at how the flows have evolved on solana over
time um i think prop ams have really been eating into volumes um and if you look at it from an end
user perspective i think it just results in better execution for users especially if like on solana
for everybody that's using jupiter a lot of lot of the Jupiter volume ends up getting routed through prop AMMs. So I think we'll
probably end up seeing similar for aggregators on Monad. So I'm personally super excited for that
development to come in. I do think that it's super early for prop AMMs overall, though,
generally within crypto. I've not seen prop AMMs be as big within the EVM space.
crypto. I've not seen Prop AMMs be as big within the EVM space. Intense have been big in the EVM
space, but I think it'll be interesting to see it play out. With that being said, James, I know
you also played around with a bunch of MemeCoin launchpads, including Nat.fun, Printer, and maybe
others as well. how was your experience
playing around with them um and have you used like any of these meme coin launch pads on other chains
before that you can compare the experience with or was this your was this your first time
uh i had not launched i i had traded pumped up fun memes a few times on solana uh but i had never launched
the coin i think the only coin i ever launched uh was the was the james test on printer um
which i got a lot of shit for uh but the the um you know i do trade on that.fun on some of these meme coins.
I've been mostly losing money, but it's still fun.
I think the that.fun interface is pretty good.
It shows you basically what you care about and is easy to use.
I'm looking to
I'm very interested in seeing what the next
sort of thing is.
The Dump.fund
put the streaming back, right?
I think it would be cool to see that
as well on Dump.
I don't have
a super Dump.fund because I'm not really, like I said,
meme coin trader, but I do like the,
go ahead.
Yeah. I don't want to, I don't want to spill the beans too early,
but they do have, I think the next feature that's coming up,
relates to very retail friendly
options so we'll see how that goes but at least from the the mock-ups that i've seen and the way
that the functionality should work it'll add another really cool layer of speculation on top
of memes yeah meme coin trading is a different type of trading which i've learned
right and it's it's kind of like can you collectively get some momentum and people with
uh sort of social pressure and momentum to not sell and you know not have too many people selling
i don't know it's just very interesting but i have not been that successful so far
yeah i think i think training meme coins is um is is really interesting and yeah i've seen i've
seen a bunch of people in the community playing around with quite a few of them um and yeah
interestingly we also have we have kb from the fromuru team with us. KB, how's things been for you guys over at Kuru?
I know you've also been pretty active in the Monad meme coin trenches.
So how's things been overall?
Yeah, everything's great.
Great haircuts, by the way, both Abdul and James.
But yeah, everything's going well.
And the trenches have been fun like you said it's it's I think it's that is all just fun um I was on that fun myself kind of
like trading 20k toppers and dumping on people's heads um but obviously not like you know posting
on the timeline or anything I think that's stuff you want to do like kind of like just and again it's just yeah you gotta you gotta stick to one coin
when it comes to the meme coins otherwise it just kind of like dilutes the whole thing um because
it all is just kind of like social pressure and you know who's holding the charts and you know
what's going to come out of these communities later um And yeah, as far as Kuru, like, we're, you know, you can also like LP,
I used to talk about LPing like these meme coins and kind of getting more fees.
Like you can do that in Kuru as well.
There needs to be a little more volume though for us, I think, for that to be successful.
I did LP, the emo coin, and was, yeah, basically liquidated or whatever pretty quickly on that.
But yeah, everything so far has been really well.
Just, you know, we're definitely, I think a lot of it's on the chill side, right?
We've had our momentum, two weeks of now momentum prizes.
So we had one this week as well, or today was the winners.
And next week we're going to be giving away scrumpies as well.
Part of the momentum like prizes.
But yeah, I think that, you know, as we figure out more of these things for Kuru and the decks
and seeing kind of where we thrive is, is yeah uh kind of the focus like i know you guys are talking about
like aggregators earlier and a lot of these um platforms are using the current aggregator which
is great for the that part of the volume but maybe not so much on like the meme coin dex trading i
think capricorn is definitely leading that through bots like base bot and
and things like that um and i know for you can trade the nad fund tokens on kuru but we haven't
enabled um pre-bond trading yet which i think is pretty huge for these kind of like early
meme coin tokens but that's not something that we're necessarily focusing on like we're not
trying to be like a gmgn right like we're i think we're going to focus more on like the the larger
pairs like moving forward but um yeah it's it's been a lot of fun um i'm really enjoying it i have
my profile page up i you know i got you know even for me like I traded emo and chug first on basebot um because
it was quicker and I wasn't on my computer right and I think that's like a huge thing um with like
just uh deep you know this kind of like meme coin trading and not so much defi but um you know being
able to have the trading on your phone I think is huge for like a lot of participants especially in this
sector um but I did you know but you never want to keep too many funds on a bait on a bot like
that's also very risky um when you are trading on these bots they really are meant for sniping
or getting in really early or on the go so I did move all my tokens to my Kuru wallet um and so from there I get to see like the nice
like portfolio and you know I can set my limit orders for when I want to sell or buy more and
things like that um but overall pretty good our vaults are a lot of fun um I've been testing that
out um with the Agora Vault and Mon.
And I think when Mon pumps a little bit more,
I didn't put a ton because, you know, again,
just like trying to like learn the platform myself.
Because with Testnet, I feel like Testnet just wasn't real to me in a lot of ways.
And I'm definitely more of like a doer.
Like I need to like actually like do things
like genuinely understand them and before monad i really didn't have like the liquid to participate
to participate in like defi um you know in just defi right like i was definitely the one soul in
a dream like trench trader that's definitely where i come from you know nfts so this is the first time um on
a consumer level where i've been able to play around with these like kind of defy and like yield
um you know staking and um i staked on uh diego's validator on gonads uh yesterday so that was cool
for the nads validator um 154 and yeah i'm getting 12 yield on that which
diego explained was like the safest right there's no smart contract like involvement and things like
that so i'm very comfortable for there i stake some mon on fastlane as well to test out like
the liquid staking and then when it comes to the crew vaults I'm actually wanting to wait a little
bit I think that mon is a little too low for me to because I would have to um for the amount that
I want to put in I would have to get the AUC liquid as well right I have to sell my mon and
I just don't really want to sell that amount at the moment so um I'm kind of waiting for mon to like go up a little bit more to do that
and then to to stake in the vault and see what happens in like a month but the api for the career
vaults um are kind of insane right now uh so yeah um definitely our boost rewards are up there and
like it does change every day because of volatility volatility, but yeah, it looks good.
It looks juicy.
People are happy.
Awesome.
Yeah, I think some really interesting things
that you brought up and definitely a lot of good tips
for other people as well.
I think the most important one you called out
is definitely be mindful of smart contract risk.
So it's good to see that people are using
both regular staking as well as liquid staking.
And yeah, I've personally played around with Kuru a lot.
I do think that the state that Kuru launched in
on mainnet date versus like a lot of fixes going in over time
based on, you know, bugs or things that were reported by people. I know that, you know,
the Kuru team's been working around the clock to get a lot of those things in order. So it's,
you know, awesome to see that, you know, everybody's just shipping at a really fast
pace. And yeah, I think overall the meme coin trenches have been really interesting so far.
I think it's interesting because generally the market right now is not super risk on.
Even on Solana, we have not seen a runner in months at this point.
I think the last time we saw a runner was probably pre-summers, if I'm not mistaken.
And yeah, there's just like people are not
um willing to believe in something at the moment um it's kind of one way to put it but um i think
the interesting thing that i've seen um this is kind of just based more on the sentiment that i'm
seeing on the timeline is there's definitely a bunch of meme coin communities forming uh within
the monad trenches um which is super awesome to see um and
i actually had like my pfp right now is um i think somebody from the from the emo community like just
making this pfp for me um and i just found it really really cool and i was like okay i'm gonna
put this on as my as my pfp um but i think we're seeing similar things with a bunch of other meme
coins like 143 and mon cock and chog these are all good communities
that I think will thrive over time so it's exciting to see things happening on this front these are
also things that in my opinion were really just possible post-midnet but not like pre-midnet I
know like chog is something that had a community before midnet launch but for all these other
meme coins like these are all launching post-midnet and you know there's a bunch of really smart folks that you know are talking
about them that are excited about them um so it's it's good to see these these uh different
communities forming in in different parts of the ecosystem um but yeah overall appreciate you you
sharing all of those those insights um maybe maybe to James here and talking about a few more categories within the ecosystem.
So James, you mentioned that typically the way that you've played around with DeFi on other chains has been around yield products or lending protocols.
So curious if you've played around with some of them on monad so far and um
what have been your what have been your thoughts on um you know the kind of opportunities in the
ecosystem the kind of assets that are available so far yeah my my usual d5 stuff is more in the realm of like you know the curve ants neverland
money new digital town square these sort of apps right I was I was a big you know
an ethereum I was a big Athena farmer for a long time for like almost a year
for a long time for like almost a year
buying basically
you know getting yield from pendle looping on some you know morpho or these other sorts of platforms
using some of the auto looping protocols as well
so that's that's kind of like really what I usually do in DeFi. And that's, you know,
the protocol I just sort of listed is in that space. So really nice to play with these.
I did get distracted somewhat and didn't get a chance. But yeah, I do plan to move some of my
personal funds. I'm not going to use my public wallet for this stuff yeah i do plan to move some of my personal funds i'm not going to use my public wallet for this stuff but do plan to move some of my personal funds from my dumping
nvidia uh stock into into the monotaur ecosystem and put in the protocol i listed and and you know
farm to yield but that's you know that that stuff is uh yeah my main focus. Looking at sort of the UX of these,
it's really cool.
I love the Neverland money sort of UX.
MewDigital is pretty good.
The pools,
some of these pools,
I was looking at Curveance.
I don't even know what these things are,
so I got to do a bunch of research.
But yeah,
I think I'm just going to be spending a lot
of time just doing a lot of research on what on what all these products are and seeing like where
i can get good yield and that sort of thing nice yeah i think um for a lot of these um protocols
that went live in in week one um they have been pushing out more markets over time as well um and
a lot more like like i'm well. And a lot more like,
like I'm starting to see a lot more looping activity.
For example,
I'm seeing Mon being looped against LSTs on a few of these protocols with a
lot of interesting rewards going out for those markets.
Similarly,
there's the earn a USD product by upshift and Agora,
which has been yielding like between 10 and 15 percent um and
that is also getting looped against stable coins like usdc and ausd um then yeah as you as you
pointed out mu digitals um asian asian credit yield bonds um they're also yielding um somewhere
around 15 to 20 percent We're also seeing...
So interestingly, we're seeing multiple opportunities
on these stable coins or kind of major assets.
One, we're seeing single-side deposit opportunities
on lending protocols like Curvans, Neverland,
Town Square, Euler, Morpho, all of these lending protocols.
But then since the ecosystem
is also in a liquidity bootstrapping phase for DEXs, there's also a lot of really good double
sided liquidity provisioning opportunities for Mon against a bunch of these assets. And
I saw some folks within the broader DeFi community, like Stephen from DeFi Dojo,
like posting strategies on
how you can kind of hedge the impermanent loss within that opportunity and make really good
yields. Definitely recommend people check out his profile. I think he shared a bunch of strategies
that he's running within the Monad DeFi ecosystem right now. And but yeah, like on that, on that topic of yield overall,
James, I remember on one of the past few spaces, you also mentioned that you use Pendle quite a
lot. And recently, we saw an announcement from Spectra, that they're planning a deployment on
Monad. And I think they're probably going to be bringing their products live in the in the coming few days and
they're going to be running yield derivative products um around mon lsts and like earning usd like some of these yield bearing um products um do you do you plan to play around with spectra
or have you used it before on on other chains uh i have not i don't think i knew of them that
they're similar to pendle
correct yeah so they've been they've been around for a while i think they were called ap wine back in the day um and if i'm not wrong i think they started off on terra in like
2021 or something um but yeah they're they're a yield derivative protocol extremely similar to pendle
um yeah i will definitely do that uh um
i think it i think that this that sort of depends on like
um that's the it's just a very interesting market right like the athena sort of, uh, YTPT sort of dependent on what the estimated value of like
Ena was going to be and what the airdrop size was going to be.
Um, and so I, I do really sort of like, like that market.
Um, but I don't really have a lot of time in my personal life to like sort of analyze
like what are the potential values of points or that sort of thing.
I was still just mainly looking at the PTE yield that I could lock in, looping, that sort of stuff.
These are all very interesting markets, and I love this stuff.
If you have run out of time to do the research on these kind of things,
I know a guy called John W. Richkid.
He can look after your funds, James.
He will invest them in the best DeFi opportunities available on Monad,
of which there are many.
So there's a solution to your problem there, James.
I can put you in touch if you don't know the guy.
I would not trust that guy.
But you were talking about all these opportunities.
You were talking about the memes as well,
the memes and the trenches going on.
And it is good to see KB and James with the emo haircuts.
Abdul, yours has gone more Karen.
I don't know what happened
with your...
He got the Karen version.
Mine is definitely not as intense as James is.
James' PFP is
super intensely emo.
Yeah, it's very,
very good. on terms of the you know these these
defi opportunities one thing i'd love to get your view on it abdul love to get yours on it james
i saw an interesting um response from barry butterhands he's one of the ogs uh in the monad
space he's been around a long time.
And he replied to someone and said, look, I'm happy in spot.
I'm just keeping my mon as my mon in my wallet because, you know, I'm just more comfortable that way.
And, you know, I saw some of that myself, you know,
put a bit in Fastlane, you on day you know on hour one but then
i sat in spot for ages and i think there's kind of a bit of um you know almost um what's it called
when you have too much choice you know and you're kind of like hey i don't know what to do and and
mon is almost the meme and the theme and and what you know we're excited about. And so I wonder from both of you,
how can we try and get more people that hold them on right now
to be using it in the ecosystem if they're a bit unsure?
James, do you want to go for it first?
Yeah, obviously there's different levels of risk.
It's a new chain, it's a new, some of these apps are new. I think they've all had audits, but you know, there is risk that spread, spread your risk around, right? Like, don't, don't put it all, don't put all your eggs in one basket. That always screws somebody over, you know don't uh test them out and then just like
it will take some things cannot be solved some things just take time and people need to build
up confidence put put some money in there's protocols that i just slowly on ethereum that
i just slowly increased my deposit over the span of months, right? Because I built up more confidence.
I talked to the team, you interact with the team, you see, are they competent? Are they
competent team or are they just fly by night sort of operators? Right. So, um, if you have
questions, engage with the team, uh, read the audits, read the, uh, look at the interface.
Does it look professional? These people that know, you know, look like they know what they're doing.
And then just spread your risk around.
But yeah, you know, hacks are a thing and DeFi mistakes are, you know, a thing.
And it just takes time to build confidence.
And I think, you know, there were some events, right, that happened.
I'm struggling to recall right off the bat, right off the moment,
but, like, there were a couple of events that Pendle just handled really well.
I think there was, like, I think some other protocol got hacked
and, like, Pendle, like, responded and shut down the trading of those PTs
or something.
I don't know.
Maybe, Abdul, maybe you remember better.
But, you know,
that builds confidence in, in that team. And so, you know, some,
some things just time just takes time and, and, and just slow,
constantly take your time, look around,
try to understand what's going on, read the docs.
If you're not satisfied with the docs, ask the team, I don't understand this part of your docs. I don't understand where my money's
actually going. I don't understand this. I don't understand that. Ask them and build a confidence
and that helps them improve as well because they'll improve their docs. They'll improve
their communication. They might improve their risk't, I don't treat these things as like,
this is a take it or leave it sort of like service, right?
Like, you know, if you're not satisfied with your auto mechanic,
you go and talk to him, right?
And then you say, hey, like, I don't understand what you're doing in my car.
You know, you build up confidence. And then you build a relationship with that guy,
you build confidence and,
and you're more inclined to recommend that auto mechanic to other people.
Right. And so that's, that's what needs to happen. Don't, don't just take,
just don't go to the website and take it for face value and try to understand,
especially if you're using these these protocols you might be putting significant
sums of your wealth in these protocols uh you know which is maybe a little bit different than
you know trading meme coin trading that sort of thing so take your time make sure you understand
and just yeah it's going to take time for these protocols to really build up you know a very large
tvl yeah yeah really good points.
Abdul, how do you, yeah, what do you think we could do about this?
Yeah, definitely a big plus one on everything that James said.
I think for any new user or an existing user coming over to Monad,
it does take time for them to build trust with a lot of the apps that exist in the ecosystem,
as well as the opportunities. I do think there's some merit to what you said as well barry like
there's definitely a choice overload for people um because there's a lot there's a ton of things
that you can do with your mon in the ecosystem right now you know you could go and stake it
you can liquid stake it i think if you go to the merkle dashboard and you look at opportunities i
think there's like over 30 or 40 opportunities
for Mon with different liquidity pools because there's so many liquidity bootstrapping campaigns
going on. So there's definitely a lot of opportunities. And for somebody that is new to
DeFi, who's not taken part in these opportunities on other chains before, he could feel overwhelmed or, you know, just find things to be too complex or risky. I do think educating yourself on how a lot of these
protocols work and how a lot of these opportunities work is definitely worth the time. And, you know,
a lot of the people that are putting in that time and taking part in those opportunities,
you know, will end up, you know, making good returns by participating in those opportunities.
But as James pointed out, everybody has their own risk tolerance.
And there's levels of risk that you could potentially end up taking with some of these opportunities.
It's always good to understand them.
And what I always personally did as a DeFi user when I started off in 2020, i actually even do it right now from my alt telegram
account like i would just go join their telegram account or their discord and basically just ask
a lot of questions especially if i don't i really understand um you know what the what the points of
failure within their system are you know how um potentially funds could be lost or things of that
nature um i also think as you know james as James pointed out, there are a lot of protocols.
And even if their smart contracts are entirely secure,
there's other vectors of attack that can be exploited.
Things like their front ends being taken over by a hacker,
which is something that happened to Pendle, as James pointed out.
And I think the way that the Pendle team handled the comms around that in the entire incident was really good. And again, I think
these are these kind of incidents, and how the team deals with them really are things that,
you know, bolsters the confidence of users and, you know, makes them trust the protocol even more.
And, you know, start allocating their funds into it if they weren't doing it previously.
But yeah, I think for a lot of these things,
it's basically a matter of education.
And part of that responsibility falls on the users
who are gonna be using them.
And then part of that responsibility
also falls on the protocols to make sure
that all the right information is available.
And in case it's not, then when people go and ask them,
then the protocol should make more efforts in educating people and make sure that their docs are up to date.
There's as much information possible that makes users comfortable in using their protocols.
Yeah, super cool.
You mentioned the education there.
And earlier you told us about an ex-account, someone with a Twitter handle that had done a thread on some really good DeFi opportunities
within Monad. I wonder if you can
share it to the space so that we
can see it, because
I think a lot of the listeners would
love to check it out and see what
their view is.
One question I had is, who
do you see in
the Monad community that's doing
a similar kind of thing right now
is trying to find those DeFi opportunities
and share them with an audience?
I know a lot of people look to you, Abdul,
specifically for that, you know,
because you're arguably the biggest DeFi voice in Monad.
But can you see anyone in the community
taking that opportunity?
Or do you think that opportunity is still there for us to, you know, almost create our version of that guy that's creating these threads of, okay, this is how you approach this DeFi opportunity.
This is how you best take advantage of Fastlane or of Moo Digital or of, you know, Kuru or whatever.
whatever. Definitely. I think, I think there's a lot of opportunity and I encourage everybody,
Definitely.
um, who's tuned into the space and is playing around with Monad DeFi to, you know, talk more
about these opportunities and educate more people. Um, I think there's, there's a lot of opportunity
to build an audience for that. Um, and that's because a lot of people within the community
who are using the chain actively fundamentally don't understand these opportunities or the risks. And typically people get overwhelmed when they see something too
technical. So I think there's a big opportunity for someone to be breaking down these things and,
you know, explaining how they work so that people feel more comfortable in using them.
Personally, I do try and bring more attention towards opportunities, but because of legal reasons,
I can't go into too much details about exact strategies or other things.
I would love to see the community take lead on these things and would love to support these people from my side.
Obviously, if I can help answer any questions or guide people on how specific protocols work or help them connect with the teams, I'm more than happy to do that.
I think one of the really cool accounts from within the Monad community
that I've seen is like Pince Croco,
who's posted like these mini infographics.
And she shared, you know, kind of the strategies that she's running
with LST protocols on, you know, Curvance and Neverland and basically a lot of looping opportunities.
I think her audience is extremely small right now.
And a lot of the times like in her post, she's literally calling out like,
I cannot believe like more people are not taking advantage of these opportunities.
But then again, I do think part of it is an education problem where a lot of people are maybe not aware,
or they don't understand those opportunities, which is why they're not taking part in them.
But yeah, a lot of those opportunities are really attractive.
And yeah, I definitely encourage a lot more people to talk about them.
I think a lot of people will end up becoming extremely influential within the Monad ecosystem and the broader crypto ecosystem as a result.
in the Monad ecosystem and the broader crypto ecosystem as a result.
I think some of the biggest KOLs that we see in the space
and we've built a really big audience.
One big one that comes to mind is Miles,
who I believe at this point has 500, 600K followers.
And his Twitter account was literally born out of the meta
when Wonderland and all these DeFi protocols were launching back in 21 and 22.
And there was this whole community of people that were looking at what he's talking about
and understanding the things that he was explaining.
And I think some other big DeFi threaders were also born out of that time
and talking about big opportunities in 2021.
I think we're at a similar stage right now, given that there's a lot of opportunities
happening on Monad.
So it's a big opportunity for folks in the community to talk about it and build an audience
around these DeFi opportunities.
Yeah, huge opportunity.
What was the name of the lady that you just mentioned who's doing a
good job so far yeah the the twitter handle is um pince uh pince underscore croco it's spelled p-i-n-c-e
underscore c-r-o-c-o and um yeah she's been she's been sharing a lot of alpha about lsts about
lending protocols um but a lot of things.
She has a really small audience.
I think one of the most underrated accounts within the Monad community,
I think she has like 1,200 followers.
But yeah, she's been sharing a lot of alphas.
I definitely recommend following her.
Yeah, cool.
I've just followed her now.
I can't seem to share her tweet to this space.
Yeah, I was trying to do that myself but but could not
either um but yeah i definitely recommend checking her out and then there's there's a bunch of other
folks that have been um posting as well um for some reason i can't recall their handles at the
top of my head but yeah um i generally do engage with a lot of these with a lot of these
tweets so yeah if any of you guys uh post something cool about monad defy definitely do tag me in your
tweet i would love to check it out and you know share it with more folks and yeah with that you
jump into your name yeah definitely with that i'm also realizing that we're towards um the end of
the of the twitter space where we're less than one minute left. But CJ, I know you had a question for James that you wanted to ask towards the end of the space.
Yeah, just a quick one.
I wanted to ask, now that Monad Minute is live, but what kind of new DeFi use cases are you excited to happen on Monad
that specifically is meant for Monad's architecture?
Yeah, I still think there's going to be a lot of improvements in the still,
you know, the common sort of perpdex cases, the meme coin stuff.
The demand there is going to increase. And so Monad, you know, I think Monad is already fast,
but, you know, we need to look as well as future enhancements to Monad
to compete with, you know, the hyperliquids and asters
and lighters of the world sort of stuff.
And so we have that coming.
And I just think, I think just betting in
general is going to continue to increase and, uh, you know, you're going to need a lot of
throughput, I think for the future of, of betting. And so, um, that's another kind of area I see that
maybe the, some of the stuff that we're working on technology wise, throughput wise is going to,
is going to really matter.
Definitely. Definitely, that makes sense.
I think we're all excited to see new use cases kind of pop up.
And I know FITS specifically has been working pretty closely with a bunch of really cool apps within the more speculative side of things.
And one recent one that the consumer team and Fits have been working with was Hyperscitions.
Anybody that hasn't seen it yet, definitely recommend checking it out.
I wrote about it briefly a couple of days ago, but it's an interesting mechanism that's
kind of a prediction market, but at the same time, it's not.
It's a super cool experiment within the ecosystem.
But yeah, with that, we are at the end of this Twitter space.
I do want to thank everybody for coming on.
It was like having James on is always a great space.
I think if I'm not mistaken, I think James, this was your first third time on, right?
Yeah, I'm not sure.
But cool. Yeah. Thanks for coming on thanks kb and and barry as well um and for anybody that tune in late and wants to go back and listen to the
conversation the space is recorded and we do it every wednesday at 11 a.m eastern time and yeah
with that we'll close it out thanks guys all right thanks thanks everyone thank you everyone
thanks james have a
good one cheers bye
