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Llama Party feat. @bennylada
Recorded: April 3, 2025 Duration: 1:34:46Space Recording
Short Summary
In a lively discussion, key figures from the Curve ecosystem shared insights on upcoming project launches, strategic partnerships, and the importance of community-driven funding. The conversation highlighted the growth of Curve's lending products, the impact of grants on development, and the ongoing trends in the crypto space, emphasizing a shift towards sustainable building amidst market fluctuations.
Full Transcription
GM, GM fam, or for many of us, GN. It's not yet Friday where I'm'm at but on fridays we like to have llama parties which
means you know we kick back we have a beverage we have a good time and talk with some people
and the only way they could work out is uh to get this particular guest who i've been hoping to have
on for a really really really long time and it's finally happening was if i caved and i did it
thursday my time uh to accommodate his busy busy busy life but it worked out
so we are going to be having an outstanding llama party for the ages it's going to be
probably one of the best ones we've had yet so anyone who's watching it live on X or YouTube
yeah because it's not our normal time slot let's go ahead and share that and get the
viewership like way way way way way up before we get started I just want to give a quick
couple of shout outs
to winners of last week's auction.
So this gorgeous QR code here will take you to Curve Lomaland,
special beta version of it.
And what I think is cool about this
is Curve doesn't pay for marketing.
This is just Curve fans that chipped in to buy the QR code
for this week's rights,
because they're such big fans of Curve.
So, if you're bored listening to a Cmr, click that link and check it out. And if you big fans of Curve. So, you know, if you're bored listening to us,
Yammer, click that link and check it out. And if you don't like Curve, then head to our auction
site where you can bid on next week's QR code and replace it. Also a big shout out to the winner
of last week's Squid Pass, which is, let's get that up. It is not a random string of numbers. It is Switzerland.
If you're going to be in Switzerland from May 1st to May 26th and looking for some Zuzulu type vibes, make sure to check out Switzerland.
So with my relentless shilling out of the way, let me go ahead and turn back to a different form of relentless shilling,
which is that I have been working so hard to capture
interviews with the people who work at Curve,
who are sometimes difficult to pin down.
And Benny, if I'm not mistaken,
you are working part-time, full-time, no time,
but just contributing.
What's your relationship with Curve officially?
So I guess I'm now employed by SwissStake,
which is, I guess, the main subcontractor
for development for the DAO.
Yeah, so I still do-
I'm happy to call you Curve,
if you feel like you identify as Curve.
Yeah, I mean, it's the DAO, right?
Like anybody's free to identify as a Curve contributor.
So I guess-
Same people who bought this past. Yeah, yeah. as a curve contributor. So I guess that works.
Yeah, yeah.
So yeah, and like the hours are, I guess, flexible.
So it depends on, you know, with the,
I do a bit of work for trying to help Viper
resupply launch this week
and we've been working a bit with them.
So yeah, like sometimes I don't get
the time to work full time,
but that's hopefully where it's headed.
Yeah, I don't think anyone's going to complain too much
if you're helping out Viper, helping out Resupply.
I think those are boosting the broader Lama ecosystem.
So at least if it comes from me,
I'd say you're okay.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, it's really nice to be working in that ecosystem
because there's such sort of, I don't know, alignment.
Like, it's really nice to work with people
that have the best interest of the other projects at heart
and to see it all come together.
And like with the launch of Resupply, for example, like seeing how it's benefiting curve
and the lending products that curve has been trying to push is really heartening.
Yeah.
I mean, what I think is really wild about it is we have seen the markets in the past
few years become the most PVP you could possibly get.
Like everyone is trying to eat each other, and
somehow this broader flywheel, for the most
part, has not been turning into a
circular firing squad. So I've been very
impressed to see the building
energy that's been coming out of the
broader flywheel.
Yeah.
I think it's like...
I don't know if we were lucky, we were spared the bull market.
And so all the contributors that remain and the community members, you know that nobody's here for the price action anymore, maybe.
And so people just decided, we're going to focus on building, on making things better, on developing partnerships with new chains that are launching new protocols.
And so far, maybe the price action doesn't necessarily follow.
But I say if you look at the way that Curve has grown, the new products that are being shipped, I think it's definitely been a very positive couple of years for Curve.
Oh, I 100% agree.
And it was a few months back, I think it was just after the election, when there was this
really short miniature bull market where things were going up.
And we started to see the problems of the bull market coming in, right?
The cameras and the fraudulent stuff
and just the moon boys.
And I was like, I'd almost forgotten it.
I almost memory hold what it was like
to have a bull market.
And it's not as good as people hope
because you have all these problems.
So thankfully, macro conditions mean
we don't have to worry about it for some time.
Maybe never.
I mean, price going up is always a good problem to have.
A lot of people might be willing to put up with the moon boys,
but I think what may have been, and you've probably seen it,
what I guess also got me worried, not necessarily about Curve,
because I think our contributors are committed enough
that it didn't really affect us,
but you'd see some pretty prominent
Ethereum people, like very, you know, like highly respected developers that, and you could sense
that they were getting tired of all the grift. And I think there's something fundamentally,
right, like more, even more than disappointing when you see projects that have been building for years
that are pushing the space forwards, that are making great technical contributions,
and they just don't seem to be getting any love or attention, and not necessarily just in terms
of price. And then you see all of MeanCoin hype and AI agents projects that really like the
white paper. It looks like it was written by like some like GPT-2, not even like a recent
version. And yet people still claim that this is the future. I guess it does make you doubt
what the industry is really trying to push forward. But yeah.
Yeah, I very much hear that. I very much hear that. And yeah, it's, what's also funny about
it is like, for the first time since I've been following Curve, you know, most of the time,
like, following Curve has made me like a pariah, because like, everyone was like,
hating on Curve completely irrationally, in my opinion, for so much time.
And it's only the past maybe month or so
that all of a sudden Curve, I open up the timeline
and people are uniformly bullish on Curve.
But of course, Curve only gets its bull run
at a time where everything's going down.
So it's just like its bull run
is it goes down less than everything else
is the funny thing.
Yeah.
And I guess with the fee distribution
and the protocol growing, like one advantage,
or I think like what we're seeing also this cycle
for older projects, like, I mean, AVO,
I would say is in the same,
they've had better price action,
but I think, you know, like revenue network effects,
fundamentals are also like older projects are starting to get valued more on fundamentals.
And so of course it's not as good for the pump. But, you know, if you're in it for the long term,
I think it's a lot more, it's a lot more bullish because you're realizing that the value accrual is
going to come from adoption, from the Dow actually making money from the products that
people are willing to use and pay for.
And I think, right, like, Curve is really in that phase where we're trying to mature
the project in terms of our offering, in terms of how we try to understand our users and reach out to them, in terms of how we deal
with our finances, and our code base.
There's a lot of work that's, there was just a forum post
recently on the governance forum where someone was complaining
about how we need a doge for Curve to keep the devs in check
because we don't know what they're doing. And it's probably just trolling, but it's true that a lot of the improvements,
there's a lot of dev work that's been done, and I think we're one of the top
repos for developer activity in DeFi.
There's a tremendous amount of work that's being done that's not super visible.
It doesn't result in shiny new features,
but it's taking care of technical debt.
It's making small incremental improvements
over the basic tech that we have to give better user
experience, to make sure that our markets are safer,
they're better monitored.
And so all of those things, they're not
impressive in themselves.
They're trying to version our contracts better
so that we can keep track of if there is ever a bug,
what's gonna be affected.
So none of it is really easy to sell.
Like they're not marketing selling points,
but I think they're very, very important
for the future of the protocol.
And they're gonna allow us to really scale once DeFi adoption ramps up.
Yeah, very much so.
Here's that up-only chart of the dev activity on Curve Finance,
which is really, really quite impressive.
And Curve has done a better job since the launch of the new site
of kind of having an official place to get the story out.
But like you highlighted,
even then when you're talking about like the official story,
it usually tends to cluster around like the kind of big features
that package nicely into a story.
So oftentimes like, for example, like an L2 launch,
which takes a couple of minutes because we have the code.
Oh, shoot, we lost Benny.
I guess he was not a fan of my relentless curve shilling, but I'll just go ahead and do it even without Benny. I guess he was not a fan of my relentless curve shilling, but I'll just go ahead and do it
even without Benny. So even without being able to see the full effect of what's going on,
Benny just confirms to me in chat. He's going to be back in just a minute.
me into chat he's gonna be back in just a minute so uh basically like when benny gets back i'm
gonna ask him about like a lot more of the activity that's been going on at curve uh because a lot of
it's interesting and um you know benny also being a super contributor to viper as well as resupply
which i'd like to get his uh thoughts on um he's in a really good position to not only like explain
it but he's got a fantastic
sense of humor, as you've probably already seen.
Just a really great person
to talk to. He's going to
be able to translate this in a way
that's going to be really fun. Hopefully,
we're going to get a chance to talk about some of the upgrades.
Viper has been
doing a fantastic job
lately of
really... We'll get to some of the developments there. doing a fantastic job lately of, of it really like,
well,
we'll,
we'll get,
we'll get to some of the developments there.
Curve also is where I'm going to hopefully start and excellent.
Benny,
sir.
Welcome back.
Sorry.
I'm still on mute.
Is this okay?
You're great.
You're great.
All right.
Yeah.
Sorry about that.
Yeah.
Just brother crashed for a second.
No, it happens like back in the, like you're too like young to remember this back when people watch tv
like they'd have like a screen that went up that said warning technical difficulties um please
stand by i should get one of those made so that i don't have to sit there and vamp because the uh
few hundred people we got watching this are probably not entertained
yeah yeah yeah.
I do remember those, like the little collar wheel or whatever.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Anyway, you were about to talk about Curve specifically.
I think we should start with Curve and then we can branch out to Resupply and Viper and stuff like that.
But you've been working on a lot of projects.
One of them I wanted to ask you about was the fee distributor.
Is that something that we could like pick your brain about as to like what's been going
on with that?
Yeah, sure.
I mean, I think the basic, the very basic idea was for a few years now, I've really been skeptical of that revenue distribution that Curve has, which is, it's not the revenue distribution itself.
You know, of course, as a decentralized project, like you want to give money out to the stakeholders.
But it just felt like there was so much, we were pissing money away at a stage where, you know where Curve is still a new sort of...
It's a startup.
It's still a new venture.
It needs a lot of money to fund its development and to allow it to scale.
And we've been doing that with a little bit of...
Michael has been supporting the team for a while, but I think we're also reaching a point where we need to have a sustainable and also a decentralized
way to fund development in the future of the protocol. And so the idea started by, well,
you know, where are we going to get the money from? And I don't think as a DAO and as a commercial
product, I don't think we really want to be trying to go down like chasing rent and passing off as a public good and relying on charity to fund the protocol.
I don't think that's really going to work, especially when we're making a very decent amount of revenue every year.
So the idea is just it's very simple.
The idea is just it's very simple.
It's just that we're going to take a little cut from the revenue that's distributed over
a VCRV and we should try to build a treasury with it, which some of which could go to funding
development, some of which could go to other use cases.
We've been talking for a while about bad debt insurance.
So that's one possible use case.
We have the community fund that is kind of for this,
but it's been used for the Viper compiler bug,
like compensation for the victims.
So now we're a little bit short on funding
if we ever want to do something, like having an insurance fund
again.
So that's something that it could be used for.
And usually the bad debt problem, they're really, you know,
they're just a few like thousand dollars here and there
on small markets.
So it's not the same amount of money that would be needed.
So all of those are things that we could be looking to fund.
The grant program itself, it's got a treasury,
but it's not gonna last forever.
And at some point we want to replenish it.
So there's a number of things that we can do with that money.
And again, it's not even really taking away from VCRV
because the money still remains in their hands.
It's going to go to a contract that will be controlled by the DAO.
So it's up to them, really.
It's up to the voters and the DAO to decide what to do with
this money. It just doesn't go directly into their pockets. But if at some point they decide to vote
for to give themselves a lot of dividends and plunder the fund to distribute it to VCRV,
that's not really something that anybody can do anything about. But I think, you know, the community is responsible enough that
they will fund development and fund other ventures that are positive for
long-term value accrual instead of just trying to line their pockets.
Yeah. I mean, it makes perfect sense to me, especially because like,
it's kind of an underrated thing that Curve had millions of dollars
in its war chest for a rainy day
and then got hit with a completely unforeseeably absurd
Viper reentrancy bug
and just paid it out of pocket to make everyone whole,
which is another amazing thing,
and still actually happened to have a little money left over.
But it's just it didn't have what could have been
an expansive cushion that might have lasted years it uh just put things
like kind of in a dow and you know to everyone's credit like um like was able to find like some
stopgap solutions but completely agreed that like there needs to be like long-term sustainability in
mind because like yeah people made the arguments like for a long time
to me at least they're like um why do we need to fund devs at all and it's kind of like well like
do you expect that d5 is going to be the exact same today when you're asking me is it's going
to be in one year two years five years ten years a hundred years like at some point you need to
start making plans for the future um and you need to be able to keep up with evolving narratives and evolving trends and release
new things like TriCrypto, LlamaLand, and Llama Soft Liquidations.
Anyway, you posted this on March 3rd to the forum.
So it said about a month to gestate at this point.
And I saw a lot of really positive reactions,
but kind of what's the... Has there been any pickup since then?
Did it just get posted and it kind of sits there?
Is there going to be an on-chain vote?
What's the status of this in terms of governance?
In terms of governance,
well, I guess the first thing that I was surprised by...
When I was writing the proposal,
I was very much on the defensive because I would assume
that there would be a lot of backlash.
And very surprisingly, there was not a lot of it,
at least coming from the community.
And so some of the discussion in on the forums,
but I got a lot of feedback as well
over Telegram and Discord and Twitter.
And I think overall from within the Curve community,
like people pretty much realize that at this point,
this is a necessity and it's just got to be done.
And if we're not going to discuss,
like if there's something to be debated,
like people were more concerned about what
is the percentage going to be? And it's like,
well, just set a number
and then we might argue about the number
but the underlying needs
to fund developers,
like that's something that everybody agrees on.
There was an interesting discussion
about whether
like the money right now would be taken as CRV USD and kept that way.
A number of people thought that this should be used to do buybacks and then buy CRV and then lock it.
And then the DAO would use the yield from the CRV to fund itself.
But it's just not really realistic with the amount of money.
Like, given the cut that we're offering to take
and the amount of CRV that this would allow us to lock
and the current yield on it, the profit would just
be too small to actually fund the current expenses.
But it was an interesting thing.
Sorry?
Buybacks don't even work all that well.
Well, I think the question was less about the buybacks.
Well, I guess people are worried about the price action.
So I think a lot of the rational behind that,
like people say, let's keep it aligned
and create incentives for the team
to create value and revenue.
And I think a lot of them are just more worried that instead, you know, like this is not going
to be used to pump their bags and that buy bags might actually impact the price.
But I guess there is another, you know, you could say that to show alignment, like it's better for the DAO to keep its treasury in its own token or for the developers team to be, you know, to sort of have that incentive to keep the price up because their rem'm too convinced about it. Like, you know, we were talking about this just a few minutes ago.
Crypto markets are not very efficient or very rational.
There's not much a developer can do over the course of a couple of years
to really influence the price of a token.
It's so narrative driven that ultimately,
at least at the stage that the market isn't,
it seems
to me like it's a very poor choice to tie the future of your project when it's still
in that sort of nascent stage to tie it to the price of the token.
And then you create a lot of uncertainty, like a lot of anxiety for the developers team.
It's like, well, you know, like it doesn't matter how hard I work
if the market doesn't really value it,
then maybe next year I won't get paid.
And so I'm just going to go over to MoonboyDAO
because they have great marketing
and they'll be able to pay me
and I'm sure I might still,
like I'll still have a job in two years.
So yeah.
I mean, so the funny thing is like i could give millions
of examples of curve price then and now and all the technology but i'll just take the easier
example like the price of ethereum now is about the same as it was before the merge right like
obviously there's been a ton of amazing technical development even people who barely understand
technology understand like the amount of like like what an amazing feat it was for Ethereum to pull off the merge.
And yet the price is now back down to before that happened.
So it's like, were the developers improperly incentivized?
Like, no one's going to be making that claim, right?
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, it's definitely, well, I mean, you could make the claim that Ethereum also has.
I mean, Protocol Guild does a very good job of trying and funding the developers.
But I think there is also a problem to keep Ethereum developers funded.
And it's sort of, you know, like maybe if we talk about Viper later, we can get back to that issue.
But there's a real problem in Web3 with developer compensation.
And I would say it affects some of the most legit and decentralized projects first,
because they're the ones that don't raise money from VCs.
They try to handle things without KYC, without overburdening the debt with compliance requests.
And that makes it a lot harder to get funding
yeah very much so um so part of your proposal was to essentially use a forked version of the new fee splitter contract um i think that you're interested in talking about some right
yeah um well there is it might be a bit different but I guess it's going to be like a 2.0 version of that contract. So I talked a bit with Alberto and he's got some aspects of this contract that he wasn't fully satisfied with.
using this as a basis, but making it a bit more generic
so that it doesn't have to work with CRVUSD only
and that it can be applied to, you know, like take any source,
any level of like any percentage of the total revenue from Curve
and then direct that to a number of different avenues.
Right.
But I think what's nice about it,
so I was just pulling this from the bottom of your post,
where you mentioned here that would require a contract akin to it,
but adapted to Dex pools.
And you give some of the pros and cons.
And this is particularly just where your thought was like,
why don't we just take fees from three pool?
Because three pool is its own thing.
And then strategy two was like, okay, let's like,
just take a 10% slice across the board.
Now, one of the interesting things aboutPool is that at least in the past month, 3Pool had had the strategic USD reserves launched as to flipping three pool in terms of volume,
despite being still a very small fraction of the TVL.
Yeah. So those pools have been incredibly successful. I think we, I think the idea came
from Phil, who's working on the, well, the curve monitor team. And him and Fiddy were looking at,
there was this guy,
I don't know if you talked about it a few months ago,
that was deploying,
he deployed like 10 different pools
with a very tiny amount of TVL in each of them,
but different fee structures.
So that guy was like basically sort of,
I guess you could say like trying to make
like almost a uni V3 position, concentrating liquidity
at different points with different fee structures, and trying to make money off of it.
And some of the...
I don't know if overall he made that much money, but some of those pools were very successful.
And so that kind of gave that idea that, well, maybe we don't need to get crazy TVL on some of those pools.
We could just concentrate the liquidity around certain points.
And maybe we'll get enough volume that this will be self-sustainable.
And so those strategic reserve pools kind of started off off of that observation and as an experiment and it's
probably been one of the most successful experiments that we've had in the like in recent history um
they're doing extremely well uh they're also very you could say like self-sufficient like even if we
don't there is incentive but we don't really need to direct incentives towards them to make them
attractive like the base yield on its own, is fairly rewarding for the LPs.
Yeah, so that's been a fairly successful model.
And then that also has given us, I guess, more confidence
to experiment with 3Pool.
So we've changed.
Well, the first big thing for 3Pool,
and which was also one of the starting point
for the proposal for Treasury
was that we removed the split towards LPs.
And so everything in 3Pool now is basically
going back to the DAO.
LPs, I guess you can see it, right?
Fee is the same as the DAO fee.
So people in that pool don't make anything
from the base APR.
And so that allows us,
because 3Pool is one of the highest
revenue generating pool for Curves.
And so that allowed us to, well,
increase Dow revenue pretty much from one,
like overnight.
So the original idea was like, well,
you know, now we've got that extra income.
Like, why don't we use it maybe for an insurance pool
or for something, like fund development.
Let's just try and, you know, like this is extra money
that VCRV is going to get without really doing anything, right?
So why don't we take a cut from this
and keep it to help the protocol?
And so that was strategy number one that explains also
why it's the first one, because this is where the idea
is sort of originated.
But it turns out from the feedback that we got
that everybody hates the idea.
Just take a cut on the whole thing,
which is probably a better idea.
It's going to be much more manageable
rather than trying to target specific pool.
We'll just take a cut on the revenue overall. MARK MANDELAVYSCHIHLAMIJSCHIHLAMIJSCHIHLAMIJSCHIHLAMIJSCHIHLAMIJSCHIHLAMIJSCHIHLAMIJSCHIHLAMIJSCHIHLAMIJSCHIHLAMIJSCHIHLAMIJSCHIHLAMIJSCHIHLAMIJSCHIHLAMIJSCHIHLAMIJSCHIHLAMIJSCHIHLAMIJSCHIHLAMIJSCHIHLAMIJSCHIHLAMIJSCHIHLAMIJSCHIHLAMIJSCHIHLAMIJSCHIHLAMIJSCHIHLAMIJSCHIHLAMIJSCHIHLAMIJSCHIHLAMIJSCHIHLAMIJSCHIHLAMIJSCHIHLAMIJSCHIHLAMIJSCHIHLAMIJSCHIHLAMIJSCHIHLAMIJSCHIHLAMIJSCHIHLAMIJSCHIHLAMIJSCHIHLAMIJSCHIHLAMIJSCHIHLAMIJSCHIHLAMIJSCHIHLAMIJSCHIHLAMIJSCHIHLAMIJSCHIHLAMIJSCHIHL on some level it's like we'd like to phase out three pool but if like uh yeah if we're still
like if we can't phase it out then like why not like you know like like align it so it's like
it's doing something for the team uh but anyway that's neither here nor there um like the important
thing is like you you know you put this out it's like the first version you took the heat um which
always happens whenever you toss an idea out now do you think it's at a stage to refine it and present it?
Or what are the next steps?
The next steps, no.
There's still a bit of development work to do,
which I've been just keeps getting delayed by some of the,
like all of the other, like sort of everyday tasks
that I get to do for Curve, like working on the backend.
Like there's always going to be a bug,
or there's always, you know,
or now that we're on a lot of chains,
there's always something to do with a new deployment,
or we're tracking points for this protocol,
and there's gonna be,
they're gonna need some data.
So that has delayed a bit the development of the contracts,
but hopefully, right, this will get done sometime soon.
So I mean, we saw the graphic developer commits.
So we know you're busy.
You don't need to try and justify that.
Let's talk a bit more about the back end analytics stuff
that you do, because this has also
been another big initiative, which
is just better understanding the user base of curve and there's been a lot of uh a lot of efforts done in this
front of course curve is not going to be installing google analytics like most companies because that
has like terrible tracking um tracking like spyware stuff built into it uh curve is like super serious
about like protecting people's privacy so it's not installing any of those weird plugins, but that also means it's like more difficult to get a lot of data, but the data
still exists on chain, right? So it's like, there's still really good data. It's just sometimes tough
to tease out. So what's been your experience so far with this project to like better understand
Curve's users? Yeah. Yeah. So as you say, there's a really strong,
like we are very conscious about user privacy and tracking.
And like people that do UX and UI for Curve,
I think would be very much interested
in actually having maybe something
that's less invasive than Google Analytics,
maybe something that's opt-in,
like not by default,
but users, you know,
actually agree that I'm okay with being tracked
and I know exactly where my data is going to get.
So this is not completely off the table,
but we really do want it to be non-invasive
and to be opt-in only.
But for the time being, yeah,
what we've got to work with is mostly on chain data.
We've also been doing user surveys
to try to understand a number of things
about how users use the protocol,
also how they see the protocol and the brand of Curve
towards more sort of like abstract values,
like how do you consider Curve security
as opposed to other projects or legitimacy in the space.
And so that helps us refine a brand strategy
and also how we present information in the front end.
Yeah, but for everything else...
Sorry, that link handy?
I'll put that link up on screen so we can...
Anyone who hasn't taken the survey yet can uh i i it would take me way too long to uh find it in this like i'm not sure
if they're targeting like specific users um okay never mind never mind don't take it but i saw i
saw kerv's twitter account at some point but kerv's been very chatty lately. Yeah, I'm not sure I can find it quick enough
for it to be, yeah, it would take me some time.
I'll see if I can do it.
You keep spouting off brilliant things.
I'll keep doing basic Google searches.
But, you know, like we, this was an interesting survey
because there were lots of things
and previous surveys as well.
There were lots of things that we didn't really expect
in terms of how users see
curve.
One of the most surprising findings to me was that people don't actually hate
the UI.
Like we love to beat ourselves up on like how shitty the UI has always like
curve is like defined by shitty UI.
Um, and I think, you know, like people in the UI team
on the front end have been doing a great work
over the past couple of years
to make that experience better.
And it turns out that when we ask users,
you always get like a couple of OGs
that are like bring back the classic UI.
You know, like we want the old school look,
but most people are actually quite satisfied
with the way things currently work and are presented.
We've had several protocols that use the pool deployment
wizard on the UI that said that it's the best experience
they've had, like deploying capital or deploying pools
better than Uniswap, which we were really surprised about
because we thought all of the settings and everything
might be terrifying or very obscure for protocols.
But that was not the feedback that we got
from the people that we questioned.
So yeah, very interesting to hear from the users
because sometimes the things that we see as pain points
and that we want to focus on, they're not actually what the users care about.
And by the way, here's that link.
So if you haven't taken that survey,
it's going to be a little bit complicated,
so I'll drop the link in the chat.
I don't know if you're still accepting responses
or if there's like a cutoff time.
I know I did like an informal survey last year
and like that was one of the things that drove me crazy
was people continuing to submit after deadline.
I think, well, we've done like,
we've compiled the results already
a couple of weeks ago,
but I think if there's enough new people
that are taking the survey,
you know, we might just run it
and look at the results
and if anything's changed since the last ones we got.
It's not a lot of work now.
It's just, yeah, we can just replug in the data
and get the charts out.
All right.
So UI, that's a big learning.
People actually kind of like the UI.
And I agree.
I think the UI is slamming.
Were any other interesting findings so far?
Yeah. The trust in Curve, I think the UI is slamming. Were any other interesting findings so far? Yeah, the trust in curve,
I thought, you know, given the hack and the way that,
like, again, this is a sign of why,
like, price action is a terrible indicator.
I would have assumed that if you look at the price of CRV
and you map it with a hack chart
and you realize that things have been going downhill
since then.
And I thought this would have given a big hit
to Curve's credibility.
But when you ask users, like, how do you feel
in terms of safety, like using Curve
or what is your level of trust in the protocol,
it's extremely high.
And so I think, you know, like all of the work
that we've done with Viper on one hand
to secure the compiler, the refund of the hacks,
which like we talked about this before,
and I used to be pretty opposed to it.
Like my general stance was that, you know, you're an LP,
we were giving out CRV rewards, and that was compensation
for the risk, right? And there's no rational for you to ask for your money back. You took on that
risk, you were paid for it, and now you got to deal with the consequences. But I think paying back
the victims probably did a lot to restore confidence in Curve and like people just know that the protocol has their back and
that we're going to try everything to um to make things right if there is ever a problem uh and so
i think this was yeah probably played a an important role in restoring that that faith in
the protocol i don't know if you remember like def Lemma had those stats. It was a few months ago where they looked at the survival rate of protocols that got hacked.
And, of course, there's a bit of bias there.
But the protocols that paid back their users or issued some form of compensation,
like, they have a much higher survival rate than the ones who don't.
So it's like if you just decide to close shop have a much higher survival rate than the ones who don't.
So it's like if you just decide to close shop or if you just decide to keep things running as usual
without dispersing anything to make the victims whole,
well, either you probably weren't
a very serious project to begin with
and so the project's just gonna fold,
or your users are just going to completely lose trust
in their protocol and they're going to migrate
and move away and that's going to be the end
for your project.
Yeah, yeah, I'd agree with that.
One of the things I was watching,
because I still remember back,
that was like such a traumatic weekend.
I got most of my gray hairs, I think,
from that one week alone.
But as far as this question of like like do will
people ever trust curve again like that was definitely one of like the big talking points
you know the fudsters were like oh no one's ever gonna trust curve again um but to some level
because curve is just like essentially just like giving out money and saying like uh you know we
will you know give out like um tokens of curve or whatever up until people are
like willing like people stop taking that risk um i'm like not a phrasing this point very eloquently
but basically like the returns of curve on all these various pools is a measure of the proxy
measure for the risk right so if curve was completely untrustworthy like and you went to
see some like stable coin pool with like curve us completely untrustworthy like and you went to see some like
stable coin pool with like curve usd and something else like you would expect to see like 50 60%
curve yields and no one biting um i was like paying attention to a lot of the key curve pools
after the fact and like the returns they were at were like pretty close to the returns before so
it was kind of like in the not too like um distant amount of time, people were seeing the emissions to Curve pools.
They were like, okay, I'm willing to take that risk.
They're satisfied that Curve was doing a lot to protect safety
and doing all the right things, moving in the right direction.
So at least from what I've seen,
the question of people trusting Curve,
thankfully seems like it's like
we're more concerned about it
than the actual market proved to be.
Yeah, but I think strategically
and for the long-term growth,
it's also important to have that,
I mean, to have secure that confidence from the users.
Because as you said,
there's a direct relationship between,
and this is much more rational
than the actual price action of the token.
If you look at the yields on those different platforms,
the risk premium is a lot more rational and reactive.
And so for us to continue funding the growth of Curve,
the fact that the users trust us,
that allows us to spend a lot less money
on incentivizing capital to come and use Curve.
And that's capital that's freed up that can be used
for development and other things.
Yeah. That being said, though, since the hack,
the TVL has not been good for Curve.
The TVLs have essentially been static.
Although I'd argue that the efficiency
seems like it's gotten better since then um yes or more stable swap tv2 pools crypto swap tv2 pool yeah yeah so we do uh we do try and monitor um uh utilization of the pools and that has been a
much better metric i think than overall tvL. Another thing that I guess you
should take into account is just the general rise action for the type of tokens that are
traded on Curve. So obviously stable coins are a big one, but we've also got crypto assets and
we don't really do the crypto assets that have been doing well this cycle right so there is no meme coins
um we don't really do like the big ai like fancy projects um and i think part of it is that we're
not really trying actively to get that business uh when it comes to meme coin i think it's also
that the developer skills are pretty low in that space. And so the barrier to entry is probably higher.
Like, why would you bother and learn about how to make a curve pool
when you can just go with UniV2 and be done with it?
Like, you can copy-paste the script from the other project anyway.
Curve has arguably been hostile as a team towards meme coins relative to the stablecoin projects, I'd say.
Of course, it's not hostile in terms of anyone could come and launch a pool and it's decentralized and all that.
But I feel like Curve's, the team's focus has much been on more serious stablecoin projects, it seems like.
on more serious stablecoin projects, it seems like.
Yeah, it's just, I mean, I guess individually, all of us,
none of us is really interested in what's going on in that space.
So we're not going to actively pursue that business.
And yeah, as you said, we're more interested with things
that are going to be relevant five years down the line.
So making sure the protocol has a reputation that's high enough
so that when real world asset issuers come on chain
and they're looking for a home for their product,
they're going to come to Curve.
When on-chain, foreign exchange starts becoming a thing,
we want Curve to be at the center of this.
When lending becomes bigger, we also want to be at the center of this uh when lending becomes bigger like we also
want to be a part of that expansion so those are the things that we've got our eyes on um
and duck coin number like 20 000 like we don't it's probably still going to be in the space in
20 years but i don't think we're very well positioned to get from it you gotta pick your
battles so yeah yeah you mentioned lending markets and i think this is so funny because remember how
i was saying earlier like curve had this like for the first time it's caught the narrative and it
just so happens to have caught the narrative when everything's going down so it didn't bother to
help anything i feel like the same thing almost is happening with resupply where resupply comes along with this like once in a like uh lifetime like
i don't want to say once in a lifetime because the convex team like frequently and your team
frequently come out with like bangers like this but it's just like a brilliant idea that like
came out left field as far as i'm concerned no one thought about it and it could have like really
really dropped rates except it came at a time when like no one was interested
in logging Bitcoin because everything's tanking.
So yeah, we've managed to drop our market rates here
from like 0.08%, 0.07%.
So everyone load up.
Yeah, it's literally free money.
But maybe one thing is probably
there hasn't been enough communication on this yet.
So I guess we should try and do better.
We could compare, you know, like have a tool to compare those rates with other competitors
and sort of try and communicate a bit more on that.
Like, I don't know if people outside of the ecosystem really, really, how much of an impact
like resupply has had on the rates and how there's like
money laying on the floor. They are just waiting to be picked up.
Well, I mean, there is like a,
like a thing in this space where there is information overload.
So a lot of people like, no matter how much you shout,
there's a million other people shouting and no one like, you know,
it's tough to like pick out one voice of the crowd,
but we got 300 people watching right now. So why don't we make the case?
And by the way, for those 300 people watching, please retweet and share and like this to get this up to like 3000.
And then we're like going to hear from Benny.
What is this free money hack you referenced?
Like you said that there's free money lying on the table.
But if I'm like a smooth brain, how do I get that free money and get it into my pocket?
Why don't you walk me through the steps like I'm on the left side of the bell curve?
Yeah, I mean, you borrow money at a very
low rate, you can get stable coins
in exchange and then you can
just, for example,
stake it on resupply and get 20%
yield and you can take out a loan
against your CRV USD, get some
re-USD,
stake that in one of the pools
or in the insurance pool for resupply
and you get another 23% yield on that.
So you can get close to like 40% without even any leverage,
but resupply also has leverage.
So yeah, instead of just looking at the rate here,
you might also look at the opportunities
that borrowing on Curve gets you
just through resupply, for example.
So why shouldn't people be more skeptical of super high yields? Is it because it's too good to be true? Well, I think for resupply, the tokenomics are very much like Convex in that
they're opting for sort of like trying to get a
head start. And so they're very aggressive in the early days. So like now is the best time,
you know, like it may look like the market is down, but this is when the opportunities arise,
right? There's not a lot of people, I mean, resupply has grown tremendously, but compared to
the yields that are still available, like there's still a lot of room for growth.
And so they're not going to last forever
because more people are going to become aware of it.
And so they're going to start using resupply
and they're going to drive the yields down.
And the emissions at some point will also decrease.
But right now, at least,
it's probably the best thing,
the best yields you can get on stables on chain,
especially when you consider
the risk reward.
Yeah, I'm not sure if it's necessarily the best
yields on stables, but adjusted
for risk reward, yes, and also adjusted
for the complicatedness of it.
We've had on some stablecoin
farmers who talk about these insanely
to me complicated
strategies where you have to like super leverage
these things and then like to redeposit to pendle and then like short all these stuff and it's like
i take notes i'm like okay yeah i get it okay yeah but it sounds like a lot of work and like i'm lazy
um so like full disclosure like i'm using resupply it's amazing i am making a lot of
money um i hope people don't use resupply because the more people that use it, the more that they get diluted.
But I'm still here saying it's really good.
So that screenshot I was just showing, the basic rewards are 22% on just like the...
You take your whatever...
You have to spend 3% to borrow the REUSD. you take your like whatever, like you take your like,
you know, you have to spend like 3% to borrow the REUSD.
You're getting the 20% right there.
And then as mentioned, like the,
you go back to curve with the REUSD that you get.
And those pools are doing very, very good as well.
Let me just pull up the S curve USD, RE usd pool that i'm in well uh we're
oh shoot it's going slow right now i'll get that up but it's it's it's good it's getting good training fees and it's getting um and it's getting like insane emissions so and it has a yield
bearing stable coin as one of the tokens so like it yeah it's it's a no-brainer here we go
16 million re usd 5 million s curve usd so a lot of lps have have figured this out base
vap wise two and a half percent which is pretty close to 67%. I mean, it's good stuff.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, so it's a great opportunity.
If you're doing it in the pool, you get CRV rewards,
which I think most of the viewers will be bullish on.
If you're in the insurance pool on resupply,
then you get your rewards.
I mean, as well as on your loan for borrowing rewards,
you get the rewards. I mean, as well as on your loan for borrowing rewards, you get, um, the RSI token, uh, reset. I'm not sure how you're supposed to say it.
Um, which is an interesting token at this point, like the price action. I don't know if you've
been following it. It's been very volatile. Yeah. It's been a super interesting. Let me pull that
up because there's not that much of it. Like, like the tokenomics of it, like,
I don't know if like their insider deals or something where people got a lot, but I was kind of keeping an eye on the staked RSUP. Because I got like some vestings RSUP as a result of being
in Prisma, which means, you know, like from now for the next five years, it's just going to trickle
my wallet and I'll, you know, occasionally I'll claim it, I'll stake it and all that. Because I'm don't learn my lesson. I keep doing. I keep,
I keep max locking these VE tokens. There's not that much RSUP is the moral of the story. Like
it kind of like trickled on the market. It seemed like it most people just got it is this kind of
fair launch vesting. So it's like super small supply still right yeah it's
still it's still below 1 million so it's what the total supply now is that uh 60 million on here
and circulating would be below 1 million
which is kind of crazy so i'm just going to pull up the curve pool here because
I mean,
the big part of this is actually also,
I mean,
I guess,
yeah,
it's,
yeah,
it's below 1 million.
And,
you know,
just a fraction of this is going to be in the liquidity pool.
Right.
Right.
So you've got that up here.
Yeah.
So there's about 200,000 of that million is sitting in this curve pool.
So it's pretty wild
because with a total of a million dollars in there,
it actually doesn't take much
to swing the price massively.
Yeah, so the price action right now
is probably not going to be very meaningful.
That's why you get those huge pumps and dumps.
It's just that the liquidity is very small um exactly it's a very rare asset and slightly to remain that way for
quite a few years like as you mentioned a lot of the uh r sub that was distributed like there's
no real insider deal i mean convex and urine get a big portion of the original supply but
it's permanently locked in a contract.
So that's never coming out.
It's not really circulating.
And then the rest goes to the Prisma hack victims.
And so those are locked for five years.
Pretty much everything that's been distributed at launch
comes with a vesting period.
So you really got a couple years before the people that got any sort of distribution at launch comes with a vesting period. So you really got a couple of years
before the people that got any sort of distribution at launch,
which isn't even that many people,
will be able to dump their rewards on the market.
So yeah, I think there's a good setup for Pumpanomics,
at least at the beginning of the project.
So here's the RSUP staking screen.
And like when I was first watching this,
this was like not as much, 650K of the RSUP is staked.
Does that include in the circulating supply?
That would be included in it, yeah.
Yeah, so like basically you add the liquidity pool
and the staked amount and like that would give you pretty much the entirety of the supply.
And then the rest is just really just emissions that people haven't claimed yet.
Which is just wild.
Because going back to the liquidity pool, I don't know if you can see it on the screen.
If I took two Ethereum nodes, validator nodes offline, 32 ETH apiece, and pl plowed into rsup that alone would cause a 20
price swing um assuming that go for it go for it right now well that's why you see these like
crazy swings where like every now and then like you look at coin gecko and you'll be like okay
it just shot from two dollars to three dollars in a hot minute yeah yeah yeah you get like 50
in just one trade uh It's wild. Yeah.
So it's been fun to watch.
And then it's in particular been fun to watch as just dollars keep flowing into things.
Yeah, I mean, the staking yield is very decent as well.
And that's a testament to the sustainability of the project.
I don't know, like the TVL, if you go back to that page,
I think it's still below 100 million,
but it's a fairly good number.
What are we at, like 50?
Which page do you want me to pull back up?
Sorry.
Resupply.
The total TVL.
Yeah, let me get that up.
The total TVL.
Right here, $1 million USD.
Oh, sorry, I meant in the protocol itself.
Oh yes, one second, one second.
Let's switch.
But I guess like the point is just,
this is still a very, like, this is still very early stage.
It launched about two weeks ago
and the vip the the vapr that you're getting on staking is all from revenue right it's got 50 million it's like yeah yeah but it's making a lot of money on this like the fee distribution uh is
pretty good already i mean it's not gonna last as more of the supplies uh the supply unlocks like
more people i guess are gonna stake um but it's doing a great job at generating revenue and and distributing that to
token holders and at some point hypothetically markets uh broadly might stop going down it might
start going up and people might start like getting interested in longing uh bitcoin ethereum things
like that on llama land on, on CurveUSD,
which in theory would cause borrow rates to also spike.
And what does the RCEP universe look like
once, let's say, CurveUSD borrow rates
are up around 10% or something?
Right, yeah.
I think it's, yeah, it's going to be like, it's tied sort of, it's, it's a,
it's in a very symbiotic relationship with the lending, uh, products on curve. And I think it's,
I guess it's going to be the flywheel, right? It works both ways. So like growth right now is
kind of limited as long as people are not longing, but the moment that CRV USD takes off, then resupply is just going to take off with it.
And then they're going to feed on the growth of one another.
And so that's going to give us two very successful protocols.
I mean, yeah, it's good.
It's exciting stuff.
If markets ever go up, right?
We don't have any evidence that markets are going to ever go up again.
Yeah, well, you know, we're, I guess we wouldn't be in this space if we weren't
optimistic about the future of what we're building. Are you getting jaded after so many years?
No, no. I mean, I'm super excited about this space still. Like there's nowhere else I could
go, but I'm also like highly unemployable anywhere else.
And I think a lot of people in the crypto space
fit that as well.
Yeah, yeah, I guess there is,
there's definitely some stigma.
Like I'm not sure with my resume over the past five years,
if I were to go to like a regular job interview
and explain the HR people
what I've been doing with my life. Not sure how that would work out. Yeah.
But anyway, whatever. Let's talk about Viper. Because I've already been yacking your ear
off for like an hour. Do you have like a hard stop? Do you still have time to talk about
Viper or do you have to jump in?
Yeah, sure. I love talking about Viper. Yeah.
All right. All right. Good. That's what I like to hear.
All right.
So what's the path to Snek supremacy?
Right.
So this is something that I think is becoming clearer every day is that people are just tired of solidity.
Right.
And I don't mean that as a diss for the team that's working behind it, that's doing great work.
But I think it's suffering.
And in a way, a lot of original crypto projects kind of have this, where you started in this period of incredible growth and experimentation, and you had to make technical decisions under pressure.
And then you kind of had to double down on it because so much of the ecosystem was relying on those decisions and you couldn't make changes anymore.
And so that means that the language has accumulated a lot of technical debt.
And it's trying to deal with it in ways that are either not really sustainable or
piss off people. Like, I don't know if you follow the EOF debate at all.
Oh, yeah.
A lot of people are starting to think that, like,
the Ethereum as a whole is now sort of, like, trying, like, leaving.
They're left with holding the bags for Solidity's technical debt, right?
Or they have to take on extra risk because of it.
And I don't know if you've seen this tweet,
like just this morning,
Georgios from Paradigm,
like tweeted about how bearish he is
on the future of solidity and asking whether,
like, I guess Paradigm itself,
that like they've been instrumental, right?
In providing excellent dev tooling for Solidity.
And it's looking like they've got seconds out now.
Like, have we been backing the wrong horse?
So should we just launch a new language
or should we support Viper?
And I don't know which way they're going to go,
but I think it's just a very good sign
that people are starting to look for alternatives.
And more than look, they're starting
to really feel the need for it.
And so I think there is a great opportunity
for Viper to move in and gain adoption.
Because we already have, with the improvements
to the language that have been done over the past couple of years.
We're in a very mature stage.
I think you've worked with Moccasin, have you?
I haven't yet.
I've been meaning to.
That's next on my list.
Actually, the thing about it is
Titanoboa solves all my needs at the moment.
So I kind of don't need Moccasin.
When I first started like developing
in crypto like brownie was useful because it like took all the things that were confusing and kind
of like made it super simple um but like at this point like i'm like technical enough that like
just the kind of swiss army knife approach of bo is sufficient for me okay yeah but like if you try
it out you'll really get that sort of experience that you had with Brony
where things just click.
You don't have to deal with any of the complexity.
You don't have to deal with all of the boilerplate
of setting up,
especially if you're interacting with on-chain contracts,
I still feel like Brony, Titanoboa is a lot of work
to set up with existing contracts.
Like the whole mocking process is a bit,
it's work intensive is how I would put it.
It is.
It is.
I have a few helper functions that I've developed
for pulling contracts that make it a little bit simpler.
But yeah, there's a couple tiny tweaks.
I will say that Brownie just nailed the user experience.
And just little things that you wouldn't expect,
like the shell worked so well,
the interactive tests,
I felt like dropped you in the command line
at just the right place.
So maybe I should give Moccasin a try.
Yeah, definitely.
Because Patrick, the developer from Cypherin
that's been working on it,
he's very open about it.
I'm trying to write this.
I'm trying to recreate that Brownie experience.
And so you'll get that same like excellent,
really easy UX with moccasin that you had with Brownie,
except that, you know,
it works with the latest versions of Viper
and a lot of the bugs of Brownies have been ironed out.
So yeah, I think like we've got,
we're doing much better on developers tooling um we're also
trying to communicate more and i think this is probably our like main hurdle at this point is
that we need to get more adoption so we need to sort of spread the gospel like we need apostles
to go out conferences organize hackathon um and we've been doing a bit more of that
and we're already starting to see some sort of
like a network effect where it used to be,
you know, like we knew everybody
that was doing Viper events, right?
Like it's like there is a conference
and then we know like this guy that's within our small
like circle of Viper dev will be there
and we'll give a talk.
But now we're seeing stuff like, we'll learn on Twitter that there was a Viper hackathon or a Viper workshop somewhere in India or South America or Europe.
And we don't know those guys, right?
But they just gave the language a try.
They loved it.
And they were like, I'm going to go out and I'm going to get other people involved.
And so the more of those things that we see, I think,
the more adoption we're going to see in the future.
I mean, I will confess to being one of the Viper enthusiasts.
I just did a Viper coding tutorial yesterday in the Baruchain Discord.
I have a video. I just got it back.
Excellent. Excellent.
Yeah, no, you should send it over because we're also like, you know, the Viper Twitter account will be very happy to retweet that.
Like, if anybody among the viewers right now, like, if you're interested in organizing a Viper event, a Viper hackathon, anything related to Viper, like, we're more than happy to support it with the socials.
Oh, yeah.
I appreciate it.
Like, I've definitely posted up someplace it ended up like
it was supposed to be like an hour and it ended up going for two and a half hours um but people
like just kept listening and sticking around so i guess like they liked it so it's a it's a doozy
but it was a lot of fun to do yeah yeah one thing again like in terms of user feedback one thing
that's very heartening with viper is just how much people that use the language love it.
And you don't really get that with Solidity.
You'll have wizards that they don't mind doing assembly,
and they're fluent in Yule.
And they're like, Solidity is fine.
I like the language.
But when you talk to beginners, it's
a completely different story.
People are confused.
They're worried that they're going to shoot themselves in the foot because they're not aware of all the hidden traps and foot guns
that you have in Solidity.
And just going to Viper where none of those things are a problem
gives you as a beginner developer a lot more confidence.
And of course, a lot more law for the
language because you don't feel like it's going to betray you behind your back right like right
right another cool thing about viper is just like the access um if you do hop in like the viper
telegram or the viper discord to top tier devs uh like i think like that is unmatched that like
you can kind of go on and be like hey i, I'm trying to do this and I'm confused.
It's not working.
And you'll have like, you know, like insanely genius programmers like within minutes be like, what are you trying to do?
Like, let's see if we can solve this.
Let's see if we can find like the best way to do it.
In some cases, they'll be like, oh, you actually stumped us.
you know you actually stumped us we can't do it here here's a quick uh fix and they'll like just
We can't do it here.
Here's a quick fix.
release within like a few hours like a new like build a viper that actually solves the problem
that you have yeah i think that's that's actually that was exactly my experience and what got me
interested in viper in the first like in the first place is i was working on some contract like
something very tiny and i needed just a small feature, and I asked about it on Discord.
And I was like, oh, right.
And like half an hour later, there was a PR with a feature request in it, like taken
care of.
So I don't want to oversell it because I know that, like, this is definitely an advantage
that we have over Solidity, but I know that this advantage only comes from like the smaller
community that we have at the moment.
That's true.
Right. But it's definitely a strong selling point.
If you're a new developer with Solidity, it's really hard to find support.
There's a few Discord channels out there, but also you never know who's really going to try to help you
and who's actually just a scammer.
actually just a scammer.
The people that help you might also just be beginner.
The people that help you might also just be beginner.
So just as you said, like really having crack devs
answer your question,
that's really something that you're not gonna find
with Solidity.
Or let me just try another angle out here.
If you're a star chaser out there
and you pop into some of the Viper groups,
you might bump into someone with the initials VB.
Absolutely.
So this has been a new development.
I think he joined the Viper sort of insider telegram
and is now also in our public channel.
Yeah.
So he's been loving Viper for a long time.
He's given us like shout outs in the past,
but this year, Vitalik actually built like a new contract in Viper.
And then he'll pop in,
he'll pop up in the chat every now and then and just,
yeah,
like give feedback on his use of the language,
participate in discussions around like EIPs and like,
you know,
like language design.
Some, some, some memes. He weighed in some memes, I believe.
Yes.
Yeah, those as well.
Yeah.
I guess we could call it like branding.
But yeah, it's been great to have our grandfather or father back, right?
The founding father.
Yeah, absolutely. He founded Viper way back when and he's back uh came back to it um and I think this also gives us
a lot of like a lot more legitimacy when we're trying to sell the project to like other like
L2s for example uh this gives us another argument for you know why you as an L2 might want to fund us is we're a project by the original Ethereum founder
who's still actively involved in the project
and clearly he sees values in this
for the future of the chain.
So if you're an L2 and you pretend to be aligned,
why not fund Viper?
Yeah, and every L2 listening, by the way,
should fund Viper
because there's amazing devs
building amazing applications in Viper.
Like one of the things I've noticed is like a lot of the like serious DeFi protocols,
you know, Curve, Lido, some Aerodrome, Velodrome contracts, the original Uniswap contracts,
like a lot of DeFi contracts are like pretty serious and, you know, not building like just
like little gimmicky apps, building real stuff people people use and they've been using viper uh so if you want to attract like some serious users
some serious like heavy dev firepower to your chain like there's active viper like people like
myself they'll be happy to come by and like teach uh teach your devs how to uh get some simple like
defy native smart contracts going in viper yeah so this is something that I wanted to try and calculate is like the
personage of original contracts that are written in Solidity, Rust and Viper.
And I think like because there's so much forking, especially if you look at Solana, like a lot
of the contracts are just going to be, you know, like factories from Pum.fun or whatever.
And so there's going to be a lot of redundancy.
But when you look at some of the repositories
that try to compile like an archive of Viper contracts,
like you realize the people that are using the language,
like they're just all, they're doing their own thing.
They're not just copying and pasting an existing contract
and just putting like a name on it.
So there's a lot of original work that goes with it.
And I think for an L2, that's definitely an argument that it's going to bring developers
to your chain.
But I think there's also sort of like second and third order effects that are less, they're
harder for us to sell to L2s.
But I don't know if you've seen that study on open source development where like for
$1 that's invested in open source development, there's $2,000 of value that's created.
So it's insane.
Try and pull that up.
Sorry.
Let me try and pull that up.
I think I saw that.
Yeah.
It's, uh, it was on the Twitter account of the, uh, hugging face guy.
Um, it's got a French name.
Uh, guy. It's got a French name.
Face guy.
Clement Delong.
No worries.
No worries.
We'll post it. Wait, wait.
I think I've got it here.
Can I?
Yeah, there's a private chat.
Type in the chat.
I don't think I'm able to.
Oh, private chat.
Put the bottom left.
Yeah, yeah.
That's what happens. You're when sweet nothing's in your ear.
You're not replying.
Yeah, right.
And so I have it here, right?
And it says, if you're a company, you need to spend 3.5 times more on software than you currently do if open source wasn't around.
And so I think for the development of Viper, you're funding the language.
And so I think for the development of Viper,
you're funding the language,
you're potentially bringing Viper developers to your chain,
but you're also unlocking other things.
If you think about Viper, it's also Curve
and the innovations that come with it.
So soft liquidation is about to become a standard in lending.
AVO is implementing it.
I've seen a number of other protocols
trying to come up with their own version of it.
But that idea originally, right,
that was only made possible by Curve,
and then ahead of that by Viper.
The same for like, your own volts
and what they've done with their Volt Factory.
Right now, like I've been asked to do
for like a new project,
like a sort of auto compounder type of thing.
And I don't really need to write the contracts myself anymore
because the work that URN has done and open sourced
is just already audited and secure enough
that anybody on any chain can deploy it.
So funding Vypr is, sorry.
When I was shouting out projects and DeFi using Vypr,
I forgot to mention URN is like a huge, huge Viper user.
Yeah, right.
And they're doing some of the most,
like yield aggregation is really one of the most common
use cases in product in DeFi right now.
But they're the ones doing it right.
Like if you want to fork something,
like if you want to even look at something
to learn how to do it,
like their contracts is the way to go. Because we've been doing that for Lamar Air Force, right?
But I looked at their factory contract and there's so many edge cases that are taken care of
that only a protocol like them that really has their hands in like every single aspect of DeFi
for their strategy, right, would really be able to have that sort of systemic
view of what all of the things that you could need if you were to do a vault. And so that's now
available for anyone to use, right? And so if a new chain launches, probability is they're going
to have a bunch because those are usually the first mover, right? Like you get the DEXs and
then on top of that, you get the yield aggregators.
And so you're probably going to get a lot of those that will be either looking at your own contracts or forking their contracts and deploying on your chain. And that's going to bring value to it. And
that value is only unlocked if the original language that made it possible is finance in
the first place. Yeah, 100%. The Yearn thing is a really good example
because their contracts are battle-tested.
Many have been audited.
So you can actually just copy-paste production-level code
that solves a lot of these problems.
It's great stuff.
Curve ended up doing that for some of its recent stuff.
Let's get back to this question of public goods funding.
And we talked about how like
vitalik has been like poking around viper lately but there was like a fair amount of conflict um
last year i think it was when the ethereum foundation was essentially like creating a fund
to fund like pretty much every language but viper after viper had been like trying for like the
longest time to get public goods funding.
And that like feud kind of like subsided a bit, right?
Yeah.
Well,
I think one misconception about it is people had the impression that Viper had been asking for funding for a long time.
And that just wasn't the case.
So I think it was about two years ago, maybe now,
when I just sent Charles a DM and I was like,
did anybody ever, like, is there like bad blood
between you guys and the EF?
And I got the sense that, you know,
like there were some old like stories there,
but basically no one had been in contact with them
and no one had asked for funding in recent years.
And part of it was because up until that point, like Curve had been the main sponsor of Viper,
but that also created a dependency relationship that wasn't very healthy because we had like
because we had one big sponsor.
one big sponsor.
And then when that money dries out
or isn't enough to finance the growth of the language,
you're left with, well, basically the situation we were in,
where we start to have to look around for funding.
So it wasn't like, I guess there's also an important lesson
for public good funding in there, which is that a lot of people for a long time were complaining that the Ethereum Foundation wasn't funding Viper, but it turned out that nobody had actually taken the time to fill out the form and ask for money.
So I guess it's easier to write a tweet in 140 characters than it is to feel a form with 20
fields.
But yeah, it's also like a lot of
I see always there's a lot of
drama and indignation on Twitter
by people like fund this and fund
that.
But that doesn't always translate into action.
So I think if you're seeing
your favorite project struggling with
funding, just try and get involved.
It's hard to get the money, but it's definitely not
going to happen if nobody does it.
And the developers just don't have the headspace to do it.
One thing that I've noticed trying to chase money for Viper
is just how time consuming it is in terms
of building relationships, like chasing the grant
programs, like trying to see like, you know, who might be inclined to fund Viper and for
what reason.
So it's a lot of time and it's not something that the devs should be spending their energy
So, yeah.
So I mean, then we did apply for funding and it got rejected.
So that part wasn't great.
But this is when the Twitter drama comes in handy, right?
Because the backlash lasted for a couple of days and then we got an email and they were
like, oh, it's a misunderstanding.
Like we didn't.
And maybe it was.
But in any case, like that had the positive effect that we thought we weren't going to get any funding, but they emailed us back and they said, well, look, this is not what we're trying to do.
We really do want to fund Viper.
And so we kept the conversation going and we got support.
This, like, a couple of months ago, it was made official.
made official.
And so we got a very generous amount.
And so we got a very generous amount.
Some of it is matching.
So some of it is directly, like, we
get to use that money to pay the devs and their salaries.
And some of it's going to be a matching scheme.
So any money that we get from other protocols,
the Ethereum Foundation is going to match it
to a similar amount.
So if you're an L2, if you're a protocol,
you want to fund Viper, do it now.
Because we got about, I think it's like 300,000,
I forget the exact number,
but it's several hundred thousands of dollars in matching.
So if you give us,
even if it's only like 10,000, $15,000,
it's instantly gonna be doubled
because the Ethereum foundation is gonna match it.
So where do people go if they want to donate to Viper
and take advantage of this?
Because I actually like, I have to admit,
someone was asking me that, and I was like,
oh, it's on their website.
And then I looked at it, and I was like,
okay, it's not on their website.
So it's not easy to accidentally give money to Viper.
So, yeah, we need to work on that donation page
on the website a little bit.
There is a link on the GitHub repo
that will take us to our multi-seg.
It should be, I don't know if you've got the page open.
It should be on the, right, so if you go to Viper Lang,
right, and then Viper, the first one at the top, right there.
And go down a little bit.
Oh, sorry.
Isn't there a sponsorships page?
Oh, oh, oh.
It should be on the thing like above languages.
Right, sponsor this project.
So it's not really visible.
I guess that's a good, like we spent two minutes
looking for it. Under it's not really visible. I guess that's a good, like we spent two minutes looking for it.
Under releases and over used by, on the toolbar on the right.
No, on the right, on the right.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So go down a little bit.
You've got releases and then you've got sponsor
of this project.
And so, right, so we've got ether scan if you want to give out, like, just money.
GIF is matching, I think.
The campaign is still ongoing, so that's the best way to fund us at the moment.
Like, if you send it through GIF, right, we're going to get a little bit of matching from that project.
we're going to get a little bit of matching from that project.
Right.
So that's just give eth.io slash project slash Viper.
I'm dropping this in the chat.
We'll drop it in the show notes too, because I think 516 bucks.
Come on, people.
Like I've spent more on gas in the bull market.
Yeah.
So we failed to get on the latest Gitcoin round
because the application is just so complicated.
No one filled out the form.
We did fill out the form, but their website is just...
I think it's just fucked beyond repair.
We're not the only project.
We just couldn't submit our application,
and we tried for like two weeks,
and we got the support involved,
and eventually it just didn't work.
But there's a bunch of other grant programs
that are out there.
And we're very much looking for also,
I think, like, grant programs have also
become more formalized across Web3.
And I think they're great for, like, incentives program
or, like, fostering new protocols that are kind of up and coming
and they need a little bit of money to pay their devs
and then they can launch and actually make revenue.
But they're not well tailored to larger, more mature projects like Viper.
So if you know people that are in grant programs
at major L2s or L1s or DeFi protocols,
like anybody that might be interested in building a partnership with Viper, like we're really
interested in developing that and getting funding that's a little bit outside of the
traditional grant program.
Like we'll apply to those, but the amounts and the scopes, they're not necessarily like
they don't really fit the needs of the project.
But there's a lot of things that we can do with L2
in terms of like organizing events, hackathons,
like educational material, working,
if you've got a developers community,
like we're more than happy to organize events with them
and like get them started with Viper.
Sometimes, especially if you're like,
L2 is not entirely EVM compatible yet,
maybe we can do something to add better support
or make it easier for developers that use Titanoboa
or Neo-Moccasin to be able to interact with that chain
so we can sort of tailor a little bit to your needs
and to make sure that your chain is more visible
and easier to deploy on with our dev tools.
So yeah, like I think there's many avenues
for cooperation with those projects
and we're happy to explore them.
Excellent, excellent.
Let's talk about Veriferium.
I don't know if I'm pronouncing that right.
And Viper formal verification.
Right, yeah.
So I think that's one of the most exciting developments
that we've had this year. So this started with Romana, who is, well, I kind of came out of nowhere, at least in the Viper community, right? heard of him before but he'd been in wet three for a while he was a contributor to rocket pool
and then he shows up one day and he's like well you know like i did my phd thesis in formal
verification and turns out like there's only a few maybe like a few fully formally verified
compilers in the world there's like three or four of them maybe. And so what formally verified
means is basically you can mathematically prove, like your compiler takes a high level language
like Viper, right? And it's going to turn it into machine code, into byte code. So it's like a
translation process. Yeah. And what verification allows you to do when you're using it on a compiler like Viper is to prove mathematically that that translation process is sound.
So typically, example of a compiler bug, what happened with the reentrancy hack?
Like you were using the high level language and you were writing non-reentrant.
And so you were expecting that the compiler
would interpret that higher-level language
and translate it to something that actually does that
in machine code.
But we didn't really have a way to verify, except for artists,
that this was actually happening.
And so what formal verification does
is that it allows you to confidently, like mathematically
say that this feature is going to behave the way that we expect it at the bytecode level.
And so what this unlocks is basically a whole new level of safety that's currently unmatched
in Web3.
Like you can have total confidence that the code that you write in your higher level language,
once it's translated to bytecode,
it's gonna do exactly the same thing.
And that's also a very different approach from Solidity,
that's kind of trying to push for like inline assembly,
which is very hard to read and very hard to audit.
And then you also have to trust that the dev
is competent enough to actually handle that bytecode.
Whereas here, right, you don't have to worry about inline assembly
because you know that everything you write
in a higher level language, which is simple,
is going to behave exactly that way at the bytecode level.
And so if you look at, there is not a lot of compilers
that are, like C is one of them. But basically, any industry that is,
like where the software is going to be mission critical,
so things like aerospace, some aspects of finance,
you're going to want to have a fully verified compiler.
Because this will mean that any code
that your developers write, you're
not going to have to look for bugs
that are introduced by the compiler
and that are kind of outside of your...
It's out of your hands, right?
Because you're not building that compiler.
So it's exactly what happened for Curve, right?
It wasn't the full...
Curve developers did everything right.
They used the language a proper way,
but then the bug was on the compiler side.
And so having this really unlocks an entirely new level of security for Web3. And again, I think this really
positions Viper for the future. Now you're starting to see a lot more, like, TradFi institutions come
on chain. And I think their first and foremost, their concern is going to be security. And what language are you gonna adopt?
Like the one that actually gives you mathematical proof
that any code that you're like,
you write code and you get an audit for it.
And then, you know, that's all you gotta do.
You don't have to worry about the compiler
introducing your bug.
And that's gonna be the, like the only compiler language
in web three with that value proposal is going to be viper yeah makes sense it makes sense i mean i've always
had the impression that like viper just makes more sense for d5 where things are mission critical
whereas if it's like a fun nft project or something like well maybe it doesn't matter as
much but if you're talking about like we would like to build stuff to scale to hundreds of billions or trillions of dollars of TVL, you
care about making sure that every single penny is accounted
for.
So it makes perfect sense to me.
Yeah, right.
And so Verifarium starts with Viper.
But they're also going to allow, like, it's going to be,
you know, it's just starting out, obviously.
And we're also looking for funding to help Romana build
this project.
But it's really going to, like the end game is to be sort of like a full toolkit for formal
verification.
So this will also apply to contracts as well, eventually.
And so you can, you know, like you're writing your DeFi protocol and then you can easily
use with Veriferium
formal verification to try and prove
that there is no unexpected state and unexpected bugs
in your contract.
So it's going to make formal verification a lot easier,
you could say, at all levels of the stack.
Very nice, very nice. So so makes sense to me uh especially with viper like continuing to like
release new versions because like viper is still at it like and i know that like viper 4.0 with
modulars uh modularization took a long time to get right um but there's already some talk of
like some changes to like how dinner rays are going to be handled in Viper 4.2, I understand?
Yeah, I guess I think some of the main things
that people are asking for,
obviously dynamic arrays are a big one.
Packing, value packing as well.
Because this is still sort of a weaker point
as opposed to solidity.
We can claim,
we're doing a lot better on gas optimization,
but this is also sort of a low-hanging fruit for it.
And this has been a constantly requested feature.
So those are some of the things that are being built.
Yeah, but I would say overall,
well, what I like about the way that Viper development is going as well
is that there is also a lot of care
to really keep the language simple.
We want to add new features.
But at the same time, we want to make sure
that the semantics of the language
remain as readable and as simple as possible.
And we don't want to just rush into things
and add 1 a thousand new features
that then we're going to have to maintain
or that are going to get deprecated over time
or that they're going to add like code lines
to the code base
and it's going to be harder to ensure their security.
So that effort to keep the language lean,
I think is very commendable.
And of course, it's also going to contribute to the security of the language lean, I think, is very commendable. And of course, it's also going to contribute
to the security of the language.
One of the main, like we were talking
about formal verification, one of the main pain points
for formal verification adoption
is that you formally verify your compiler,
but it's usually just one version.
It's sort of a fixed thing.
And as soon as there's a new feature in it,
well, you have to rewrite.
You have to also make a new version of the Verify compiler.
And so it can be very hard,
because usually this team on the Verify compiler
is going to be a lot smaller than the one
on the original compiler.
It can be very hard to follow the developments
and the new features.
And so what you get usually with those formerly
Verify compilers
that there are always gonna be a few versions
behind the latest version.
One strength that Viper has is that
because the semantics are so simple, right?
Like you only got a few instructions
and everything in the language is built
with that philosophy of simplicity, right?
That also means that keeping up with, you know,
the latest version
for the formally verified version of the compiler
that's gonna come later is also going to be a lot easier.
Yeah, very much so, very much so.
Good stuff.
So we covered, I think most of what you were here
to talk about, right?
Like you wanted to talk about some curve stuff.
You wanted to talk about some resupply, some Viper.
Anything else in that big, rabbit-y brain of yours?
I don't know.
I think we've covered a lot of, yeah,
like a lot of the things that at least I've been working on
or that I find interesting in the ecosystem lately.
If you've got three people in the chat,
the chat's been super quiet.
Usually this time of the day
is when crypto's really quiet.
Or maybe it's just because
you and I work on Curve, so the Curve
team that's in Europe is kind of
asleep right now.
Yeah, maybe everybody's got tariff fatigue
after the last few days they just can't
take it anymore um but uh no it's always good to hear your thoughts we keep having this like talk
that we're going to like um organize some sort of like viper like marathon where you get like a
bunch of viper builders to like do like a bunch of showcases about their projects i'm still game
if we can organize it i think yeah we definitely should do this like there do a bunch of showcases about their projects. I'm still game if we can organize it. I think, yeah, we definitely should do this.
There's a lot of super interesting things,
yeah, from the history of Viper.
I think if we could get Romana to come and talk
about the work that he's been doing on formal verification.
Like he's a, you know, like, it's his vision and his project.
And I think he'll be much more...
He'll be much better at explaining exactly what he sees for the future of formal verification
on Chain and for Viper than I would.
And yeah, I think Charles would also be happy
to come and talk about a lot of the new things
that are being cooked in Viper.
So yeah, let's get this done.
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.
So we'll talk offline about that. And I'm, I'm,
I'm sure like once we've sent the call out, like put the bat signal,
people will come.
Yeah. All right. Yeah.
Maybe I'm just going to try also and paste the link to our telegram for
Viper.
If anybody's interested in getting some pointers on how to get started.
I don't know if you have it.
Yeah, let me pull that up.
Because I just figured out how to get them on the stream here, right? I've got it here.
Oh, here we go.
Here we go.
Yeah, so we're always happy to onboard new devs.
And then something that's going to be cool
is the Lamas, the NFT project, right?
They've got a job board coming up.
I think it's already live.
But they've been talking to a number of projects
and trying to get Viper jobs up on that job board.
It's not quite there yet, but I think
it's planned for the next couple of months
to have more just job offers using Viper on there.
And so if you're a new developer
starting in the ecosystem and you're
looking for work and you want to try out
Viper, that job
board is going to
have some offers pretty
soon. And so we'll advertise it on Telegram.
So if you
want to
just keep up to be updated on what job opportunities
are available um then telegram would be the way to go excellent how about you if people want to
get in touch with you mr benny leda benny lotta uh i'm on twitter now i created an account like
right about the time i started you know trying to get funding for Viper just so that I could shill it.
My account is basically a Viper shill account.
With every now and then, if I find something interesting in Curve Analytics, I'll post about it.
But I do have a Twitter account now.
out now. Let me just get
Let me just get the profile address here.
the profile
address here.
Yeah, it's just B-E-N-N-Y-L-A-D-A.
I'll go ahead and toss that on the screen, too.
Excellent.
Excellent. All right. We ended this with
400-some people watching watching which is not bad
considering uh considering that this is like that past most of like crypto's bedtime uh
it seems like so a very successful llama party um now i know that some of you are disappointed that
like uh you know usually llama parties happen friday morning our time uh don't worry we're
gonna have something going on tomorrow morning.
It's going to be, it can be very fun.
So I will post about that.
My Twitter feed.
I'm sure you will be able to see it.
Other than that friends, thank you so much for joining.
Always great to get Benny.
Like anytime, like just to get like interact with him in DMs.
It's a pleasure.
So to actually get like multiple hours of his time time here is a really, really great treat.
Really appreciate you coming online and doing this.
Come back anytime you like.
All right, cool, yeah, thanks for having me.
It's always a pleasure to be on here,
be able to talk and shill the things that I care about.
And yeah, thanks to all of the people who've tuned in
and stayed until the end.
All right, squids, we'll catch you on the next Tide. All right, see you guys.
