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On-Chain Incentives & Infra: What’s Next for DeFi Builders
Recorded: June 12, 2025 Duration: 0:38:13Space Recording
Short Summary
In a dynamic discussion on the future of DeFi, industry leaders from Lightlink, Amped Finance, and Oku explored the evolution of on-chain incentives, the rise of stablecoins, and the integration of real-world assets. Key insights included the importance of performance-based incentives, strategic partnerships, and the need for improved interoperability to foster growth and sustainability in the crypto ecosystem.
Full Transcription
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Hello, hello. How are we all doing today?
Pretty good, thanks Roy. How are you mate?
I'm doing well, just adding everyone.
Nice.
Nice. Thank you. . My X crashes now. Hopefully we're back.
Yeah, we didn't get rugged, thankfully.
In the past, we'd have to reboot this whole space, wouldn't we?
Yeah.
All right. Seems like we're all here now.
Let's get started.
Welcome everyone to our spaces.
Today's topic is on-chain incentives and infra.
What's next for DeFi builders?
Thank you for everyone joining the space today.
My name is Rui Hui.
I'm the CEO and co-founder for Lightlink Network.
I need to invite Oku as well.
How about if we go around the hall and do a brief introduction of all of us?
How about you go first, Dan?
Sure thing.
So I'm Dan Enride. I am the ecosystem lead for Lightlink but also the founder of Amped Finance, which is perpetual swaps on chain exchange, which is essentially it's a fork of GMX and it's a multi-chain solution but founded on Lightlink and has expanded
to a few other networks now as well. Yeah, excited to be
building alongside Roy and alongside the other great
speakers and protocols that we've got on the spaces today.
Great, thanks for joining us.
And let's go to Austin at Alpha Growth.
Hey, everyone. Calling in from the Uniswap Growth account here. Excited to be talking with y'all.
My name is Austin. I'm with Alpha Growth, a premier growth services firm. We work with a bunch of different protocols and ecosystems
to help them grow, in particular Uniswap.
So excited to talk more about everything that we're doing today.
Fantastic. Thank you for joining us, Austin.
Let's go to Venki at Metrom.
Hey, guys. This is Venki, the founder of Metrom.
Glad to join this space.
We are building the next incentive engine
in the DeFi space,
where we're trying to see if the incentives
will be targeted and throttled
based on outcomes and performances.
Excellent, thank you for joining us as well.
Let's go to Getty, the co-founder of Oku. Hey good morning guys thanks for
having us here excited to chat about Lightlink, Uniswap B3 and Oku and
incentives and such on Lightlink. We have a lot of features on the platform.
There's new fun features coming.
So if you haven't already checked out Oku,
do give it a quick peek.
Excellent.
We love Oku as well.
So let's do a quick warm up round of questions.
If we can each do a sentence,
what's broken about DeFi incentives today?
Feel free to jump on.
I'll jump in and just say,
I'll go ahead.
Okay.
Yeah, I mean,
just jump in and then say that,
you know,
most DeFi incentives today
are just spent blindly up front.
Most of the protocols change. they just throw money at lps without um having or driving meaningful outcomes and uh
that's what we are trying to fix at metrom so instead of paying rewards flat out we're trying
to tie them to actual performances um so if we can get the flat incentive structures to become better at performance-based
or outcome-based, I think that would be amazing for the ecosystem.
Most certainly. Let's go to Getty. Maybe you can tell us a little bit more about what's broken
and what your solutions are.
Yeah, well, I think one of the things that's broken is that a lot of the incentive programs that we see folks turn on in various chains that we're affiliated with, it's that they kind of just are binary.
Like, the programs are either on or they are off.
or they were off and there isn't a like phase for turning a program on and
scaling it up and then like bringing it back down I think this is like what
leads to if you see some TVL charts and different chains or different projects
that like look pretty like insane when you get these like hockey stick moments
like I think a lot of the technology needs to be updated where it looks a bit more like a takeoff and a landing, like a flight, you know, like you go to the airport, you get on your plane, you start on more or less sea level, you cruise say day, three days, whatever, week. And then you have this cruise
where you're, okay, this is how I want to have my incentives be for the duration of the program
generally. And then on the back end, okay, it's time to come back down. I can't have these on
forever. Let me wean them off over the course of a week, two, three weeks, et cetera. I think
this is probably the biggest thing missing in incentivization like mechanics
today across the space and like projects that are doing manual incentives right now.
Like we're advising some other projects who are doing incentives and this is the sort
of stuff we tell them to do.
But maybe Metroman can work on some tooling for this or maybe they already have some tooling
that works for this. Interesting they already have some tooling in the works for this
interesting so uh thanks for a comment dan um what do you think
yeah i i would say that sustainability is um probably the biggest issue so yeah a lot of the capital that sort of makes its way around on defy ecosystems is quite
transient and mercenary in nature and um you know they'll go and park their liquidity where they can
earn the highest yield and then move on without i guess being invested in i guess the network's
outcomes like they would take the, for example,
if the incentive is in the form of a native token
for that network, you know, they would sell
or dump that token after they've farmed there
and move on without sort of blinking an eye.
I think if we were to be able to incentivise liquidity providers who are also motivated to see healthy growth of the ecosystem, we might see more sticky liquidity and also probably maybe they would go to reinvest the tokens that they earn from providing their capital in the first
place as well. So yeah, that's kind of like where my head's at with what's broken with DeFi
incentives at the moment. I wonder if it's a sign of times, right? Like we in such a fragmented
world with all these disconnected economies and I wonder where we're going.
Austin, what are you seeing at Uniswap Growth? What are your thoughts on this topic?
Yeah, I mean, I think I'll definitely be echoing a lot of what everybody said so far,
but I do think incentives are a great way to get the party started, right. I think even as a form of marketing, just to bring some awareness to different ecosystems and get people to interact with the chain.
I think the real goal is to create that organic volume
as an ecosystem or as a protocol.
So that way you can really wean off those incentives
in the longterm to have that sustainability, as Dan said.
I think that's super important not to just look at incentives
as a be-all, end-all and the silver bullet
for ecosystem growth or protocol growth,
but how can you leverage it to get to the next level
so that way you're creating that flywheel for organic growth?
Yeah, excellent point. I think creating that flywheel and getting to that next level so that way you're creating that flywheel for organic growth yeah excellent point
i think creating that flywheel and getting to that next level is tremendously important
um so over to you uh getty in um oku i understand uh there are a lot of ux forward trading tools
available i wonder um with the smarter front ends that you guys have been deploying, how are you helping projects to get to that next level, just like what Anthony was saying, Austin was saying?
Yeah, I mean, this is the nice part about the Oku-reacts that as over time, you know, we've been alive now for almost two years, here in a couple of weeks, we'll be celebrating our two years
of being available and supporting users.
We have this expansive feature set for folks.
So you can come into the platform,
obviously we're talking a lot about LPing right now,
but the LPing on the platform
is really just one component of the site.
We have your trading functionality.
So that's why, you know, hey, you're LP,
you need to do a rebalance in some way or other.
You have your response functionality there.
I need to move assets from one chain to another.
Let's say there's some great incentives.
Okay, we need to make that convenient for the user as well.
And so essentially there's all these actions
related to participating and being a good liquidity manager.
And we just wanna make sure that Oku can provide the user all the tools at their fingertips in one simple UX,
rather than having to deal with this fragmented DeFi space that we're unfortunately generally all subjective to,
where you have to find the bridge that works on one chain but doesn't work in another chain or the swap router that is ideal one place but not ideal for the other and
so on so forth we just want to streamline these things make them simple and easy
to use for LPs and for any you know any traders yeah that's really interesting
I wonder on top of that what actually works to getting sticky liquidity
on new chains? Maybe Venge and Metrum can comment on that.
So we've run a couple of KPI based tranches with Lightlink so far.
And what we observed is that in the first tranche was more about educating KPI based incentives.
And in the second tranche we found, we saw the real shift wherein protocols and LP started to understand goal based incentives.
I think the standout pool was
Tablecoin pool and we saw a lot of good sticky liquidity there. So we first initially set
the KPIs at around 500k. I think the pool had somewhere around 90k to 110k I think when we
started the incentives. So we set a KPI at 500K and LPs actually overshorted.
And so we rolled out a stretch campaign to reward that extra performance.
So stretch campaigns kind of work and also incentivizing liquidity providers
that stay on for a long time and then push the TVL higher than the goal.
One thing that we also learned was that we had a bit of a gap between the incentives
between the tranche one and tranche two, and the liquidity kind of drop i think we were somewhere
around 300k in tvl and then it kind of dropped to like 19k or 100k um i mean like austin said we
would want to move towards a space where the volume is big enough for uh for the liquidity to stay in. But I think we should try to keep the incentives going
until we reach there.
And we should not have this gap between the campaigns as well
because then the LPs kind of rotate fast.
And once they are gone, it's hard to bring them back.
But we are lucky this time and i think we were able to
you know increase tenfold in tvl um yeah that's that's that's what we should
uh yeah dan and i was really excited seeing the um extended coming through. And thank you for helping us, you know,
creating a amazing reward based system.
So over to you, Dan,
because you actually wear two hats
being a ecosystem leader at Lightlink
and also founder at Ampt.
How do you see infra and incentives come together in the broader
DeFi system for Lightlink? Yes, I think both work hand in hand. Like, for example, we've got
a couple of protocols established as core pillars
of the DeFi ecosystem on Lightlink at the moment,
one being the native DEX in Oku and the other being Amped
as the perpetual swaps exchange.
We'd really love to extend this to include also a lending
borrowing platform.
But to do that, we need to build our TVL a bit more,
which is where Metrome has come in.
They've been able to assist with that growth of TVL
so effectively with their KPI-driven model
of incentivising liquidity provisioning.
We've just also started working with Metrome for AMP as well
so that we may be able to introduce a points-based system
because we're prior to AMP's TGE.
Metrome has the capability of not only distributing token rewards
but also assigning points, and we'll be utilizing
metrome to allocate a future amp airdrop and that's where um protocols come in as well with
with their own tokens that can be provided as incentive on a network as well. So not only will we have Lightlink token rewards, but we'll also have AMP token rewards up for
grabs.
And these can potentially be provided to the same liquidity provider.
So they can be double dipping on their rewards.
And we add a third protocol to the mix, say if there's the lending borrowing platform
where someone has supplied their Lightning tokens.
You can get a real effect of the whole being greater
than the sum of all of the parts that have gone
into a DeFi ecosystem.
So something that I'm excited about as well,
I'll just add this in, is that AMP just released today a yield-bearing vault,
so an auto-compounding version of the liquidity provisioning token
that can be used as an ERC-20.
So this means that traditionally if you were providing liquidity on AMP, you would have to go about claiming your rewards manually yourself.
And not only that, your liquidity provisioning tokens would be non-transferable. is composable and usable within a broader DeFi ecosystem
and have those rewards automatically rolled up into that token
and compounded on quite a frequent cadence.
So, yeah, it just squeezes a little bit more API out for users
and unlocks a whole lot of DeFi opportunity as well.
So, yeah, there's all sorts of ways that these incentives
and protocols can be combined to help benefit liquidity providers.
That's amazing to hear, Dan.
Love to hear all the innovation that you guys are working on.
So Austin, what are you observing from a growth perspective in the Uniswap DAOs strategy?
Like, what are you seeing across different ecosystems?
What works?
What do you think about all the various things that we're doing now?
What do you think about all the various things that we're doing now?
Yeah, from an ecosystem growth standpoint, I think you kind of look at it in four phases of different maturities for different ecosystems, right?
So in your first phase, you're really laying the groundwork and the infrastructure. You want to make sure that your chain is usable,
retail and institutional investors feel comfortable bridging over, bridging out, and just
being active on the chain. I think from a growth standpoint, the second phase is really getting all those DeFi primitives. I think Lightlink is really starting to strive here.
As Dan said, DEXs, perps, coming soon, a lending market,
and having those composable and starting to interact together.
So that way you can create different strategies in that third phase
for structured products.
So that way it's a one-click fault,
allowing different users,
especially institutional investors,
to be able to easily use the ecosystem
in the way they want to,
whether that's leverage loops,
delta neutral strategies.
And so that way I think back in 2021, we've all were in hot DeFi summer have everything out from the get-go.
And then that way in that last phase,
it's really starting that party with those incentives
and bringing in different liquidity deals to the ecosystem.
So that way you can leverage that organic growth
or organic volume, as I talked about before,
out before to be able to keep that flywheel going.
to be able to keep that flywheel going.
Thank you for illustrating the progression and the maturity of how things, you know,
becoming more and more adopted.
I like observing how the traditional market has responded to Circle's recent IPO.
You know, that's just super awesome to see and see all the ETFs coming online.
I wonder, you know, when would DeFi just become FI, you know,
an infrastructure for the new financial world?
With the remaining seven minutes that we have, I sort of wanted to open up
the questions to everyone and just wanted to get a take from everyone else. Just wanted to know,
like, especially in the current macro conditions, right, like it's just shifting quite a bit. And
do you reckon there's less free money as you know all of these incentives that we're
talking about in the system and how do we like think about what we're doing and making the yields
more sustainable maybe we'll get to you first Geddy Hey, sorry about that.
Do you mind just saying it one more time?
Yeah.
How do we look at the current macro conditions, right?
Like when there are less free money available, how do we make these yields more sustainable?
more sustainable?
I think what we're going to see a lot of over the next several years is like, I think
obviously everyone agree here probably that we're in the era of the stable coin at the
moment where the popularity of it, certainly post-Circle IPO is immense.
I think with the era that we're going to be entering over the next, you know, probably in the beginnings here, I would say like maybe we are in the slightest beginnings, but not really to a real noticeable point for until the beginning of 2026. And then probably 26 through 28 is going to be a lot around like the onboarding of a lot more traditional assets, particularly like equities
and commodities. I think we'll be starting as an industry, starting with publicly listed assets.
And then on the back of kind of 28 and through, we'll start to see assets that were previously
private assets that have a hard time finding liquidity and liquidity for their assets,
begin to be able to fetch a bid and see utility from these things.
So I think really what it's all about is, yeah, as you're kind of saying before, like
how do we drop the D from DeFi and it just becomes finance.
It's going to be these things, these initiatives, as we kind of get through the early days here
of meme coins and silly governance tokens and such, and we get to, you know, past kind of utility tokens, you know, subsidizing yields for their adoption, it's going to be, hey, such and such company is actually doing a debt offering.
They're going to have a 10% yield on these bonds.
Who wants it?
Oh, OK, by the way, you can probably take that bond, stick it in a borrow-lend protocol like Morpho.
You know, you can have that person who's the junior in there or the actual holder of the debt, borrow against it for some other folks willing to lend them cash, loop it up.
Next thing you know, this bond that you're earning 10% yield on, you're actually earning 50 because you've now looped this over.
And like some of these things that historically in the traditional system have been really hard to do or like very arduous through paperwork and access will now become a lot easier.
So it's going to be a long road, but this is very much like how you get to a point where like the incentives,
the yields not only are as good as what they are today, but also will continue to even get better while also becoming more legitimate at the same time.
Yeah, it's really interesting to even reflect a year ago, where we're in this heavily
regulated environment, and just imagining what a year from last year could be, you know, just seeing
where we are today, like a much freer from a regulatory barrier perspective and seeing all of these RWAs or Genius Act being talked about.
And I totally see this feature of 2028 where stablecoin being a substantial player in our financial market.
stablecoin being a substantial player in our financial market.
Anyone else would like to jump in and talk about
sustainability, yields, and the future of DeFi?
Maybe I'll throw it to you, Dan.
It's funny when you ask this question my mind like goes back
to a few years ago when we were farming yams for 12,000 APY we've come a long way since then
where you know essentially farms were being spun up where there was literally like free money being
generated uh which people were throwing their uh free money out in order to earn um so yeah it's
it's good that we've made these steps um to where we are now i mean we've we've had meme coins along
the way but for amped we're seeing a lot of fees being generated,
which have been looped back into our liquidity providers,
which is like actual sustainable,
real money being earned for a service that's been provided.
I think that's what DeFi is great for.
And as Getty was getting at, I think as we see more real world assets
or assets that can be composable in nature within DeFi,
adapted from traditional finance, make its way into a more,
traditional finance make its way into a more like less cumbersome way
of working with those instruments in DeFi, I think we'll see a lot,
yeah, a lot more growth, a lot more yield being generated
and a lot more opportunities as well.
I think there's a lot of innovation that can come through
when those steps start to take place, especially with the advent of AI as well.
AI being combined with TradFi and DeFi, I think, is an exciting prospect to look ahead to.
Yeah, I saw something that Bankless guys posted recently about this automated AI DeFi farmer capability.
It's just mind-boggling, right?
So, Venky, Austin, do you guys think RWA and all those things that we are talking about, does that fit into your view of what's next for the defi infrastructure
world yeah i would say it's definitely the evolution of assets and just echoing what
what dan and getty have said um we're we've started with more speculation you know eight
four years ago when you didn't feel comfortable holding the assets that you had
for for an extended period of time and and now we're starting to move into those real world assets
like index funds gold on chain stocks on chain and i think the the beauty of of DeFi is allowing those different assets to be leveraged in different ways, whether it's providing that as like lending for a lend-borrow protocol.
This could be liquidity for a perps DEX.
I think there's a lot of ways that you can go about it.
I still don't think we've gotten the liquidity rails in terms of a lot of ways that you can go about it. I still don't think we've
gotten the liquidity rails in terms of a lot of those RWAs set up to make that possible,
but I do see a big future and big bright future for RWAs and a lot of those different use cases
coming very soon, especially as the regulatory landscape has changed quite a bit over the past
year. I think we'll start to see a lot more of those opportunities open up.
That's definitely really welcome to hear.
Vanky, what do you think about what's next from a DeFi infrastructure perspective?
What do you think builders are sleeping on?
What do you think builders are sleeping on?
I think interop has been a word that has been thrown out a lot these days.
I think that is something that I would love to see more dApps being built.
If I'm holding a liquidity position on mainnet, I mean, I should just be able to, you know, bridge my liquidity directly,
a portion of it at least to Lightlink, you know?
So without, you know, removing liquidity,
bridging over, having a GAF token
in the destination chain and all those,
I should just be able to, you know,
if it is Univ3 liquidity,
then I should just be able to bridge over.
Yeah.
So I think, I think interoperability between chains, I think we'll get much, much more
easier in the coming years.
This is what I feel.
I'm not, I wouldn't say that the builders are sleeping on it.
There are a lot of good builders that are working on it.
Uh, but, uh, yeah, I think that's, to make DeFi move towards FI, I'd say.
Excellent foot. And I think AI would really help us with that as well,
in such an abstracted way, right? Like you can go maximize my yield or look up for my portfolio a little bit better than who I can.
So just to conclude,
two more questions,
maybe two more concluding thoughts.
Anyone who wants to jump in,
maybe if you could share
what are your thoughts
on the larger DeFi ecosystem,
you know,
maybe just the observation
of where we are
or where we're going.
Anyone feel free to jump in?
Yeah, I can speak to that.
I think we've gotten to, at least most recently,
a place of fragmentation, you know,
whether this be different chains,
different protocols, different bridges.
I think Oku does a really great job of being an aggregator of aggregators and allowing folks to simplify their DeFi experience.
I think we're going to start seeing a lot more of that in terms of either roll-ups or aggregators to really leverage some of this fragmentation and make things a whole lot easier and a whole lot
better. Because when we really come together, I think as a DeFi ecosystem, we get to be so much
more powerful. Excellent. Anyone else would like to comment?
We're mega bullish on RWAs and commodities.
Very, very soon will be a whole big offering inside of Oku.
So we have that.
Also, I think like in order for the industry to mature, we need to improve like the sophistication
of what a DeFi offering actually looks like.
Like a big reason why people are still using a Coinbase in the Binance is that these things
are just a lot more robust and that
DeFi still has a lot of catching up to do so these are the top two things are
like on our mind as a team is like how do you close this gap in feature offering
and functionality with the kind of legacy exchanges and then from there like
how do you one-up them and resume past and I think both those things are we do
those we're gonna be in a very happy place
a few years from now.
Yeah, I totally agree that RWA
is a huge segment
that we haven't fully capitalized yet
because I think a lot of these industries
are segmented into their own ecosystem or geography,
and DeFi truly unlocks that global nature and that cross-chain liquidity, hopefully, aspect to it all.
Well, thank you everyone for joining, and I really appreciate all the help everyone has given to us here at Lightlink.
everyone has given to us here at Lightlink.
Metrom, Oku for doing great things
with the current campaigns that we have going on.
And Austin at UniswapDAO as well.
Really appreciate everyone for joining the spaces.
And thank you for tuning in.
See you next time. Thank you.
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LightLink ⛓️
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