Projects
![]()
No projects found
Investors
New
DAO Treasuries
DATs
Lend / Borrow APRs
Chains
Categories
Spaces
Partner Spotlight: Kinto Round 2 - the modular exchange era
Recorded: May 8, 2025 Duration: 1:09:10Space Recording
Short Summary
Kinto is making waves in the crypto space with its recent token launch, strategic partnerships, and innovative project developments, including a new lending market and a no-fee launchpad for upcoming projects.
Full Transcription
Music Thank you. Music Thank you. Music Thank you. Hello, hello, testing, testing.
Hey, hello, hello.
Yes, doing some testing.
Awesome.
I think I shouldn't say some things like this but i think my android device is not very friendly with the spaces it happens it happens yeah but well um yeah i think i'm set up uh if you can hear me then should be should be fine cool
super happy to have you here again by the way uh victor just before we officially
yeah of course All right, it looks like we are set up.
So I'm just going to get it started real quick with the intro and opening.
And yeah, I'm happy to be here today well hello everyone and welcome back to the
partner spotlight brought to you by Anker and Anker is an all-in-one web3 developer hub that
provides a full suite of the tools to build web3 apps and power them with high performance
connections to over 70 blockchains now.
I have just counted them like five minutes ago, so this is accurate.
And I'm your host.
And today I'm excited to welcome you to another episode where we unpack the world of Web3
and spotlight the builders shaping its future.
Today we are doing something a little special.
We are welcoming back a familiar name.
And if you have been following us, you will remember our conversation with Kinto,
a project that has been steadily redefining what a chain can be,
especially in terms of compliance and institutional-grade infrastructure.
This time around, though, Kinto is back with a fresh narrative
a new product and some major milestones from launching a modular exchange to becoming the
fifth chain to reach stage one status and if you're lost don't worry i am too but we have
brought the experts here today to tell us everything about it.
So yeah, please bear with us.
And on our, on our end, Anchor's role has been evolving too.
We are now proud to be validating Kinto as part of our deepening collaboration.
Yeah.
Before we dive in, let's give our guest the mic as well. And for listeners
who might be new or those who missed our first chat, could you briefly introduce yourself
and tell us a bit about what you do at Kinto? And yeah, of course, welcome back, Victor.
Thank you so much for having us. And yeah, thank you. You are so polite. You know, you
say this is something special,
the special thing is that I spoke too much in the first time.
And now this second time, we needed more time to talk.
So that's the only special thing about it.
We spoke too much last time.
But yeah, thank you so much for having us.
Obviously, Anchor has been a great infrastructure partner
since the very beginning, right?
The load balancer of our RPCs runs through Anchor.
My name is Victor Sanchez.
I'm the CTO and one of the co-founders at Quinto,
together with Ramon Roqueiro and Hannah Jones.
And about Quinto, Quinto has always had the same idea,
and it's making the crypto experience as easy as possible,
whether you are an expert crypto veteran for three bull runs or you are completely new to the space.
The way we are doing so is by developing what we have called
the modular exchange.
And we have put this name very consciously because Kinto can do everything
that a centralized exchange can.
You can buy coins.
You can hold them there.
However, we do some things that no exchange,
no centralized exchange would ever do, and is that we give you control over your KYC information.
We give you a self-custody, a smart contract wallet that is a multi-seed by default. And on
top of that, we're going to give you access to products and to DeFi options that are rare to see in other places.
Yes, there are some exchanges that have purse, Kinto have purse as well, but we have lending, borrowing, we have swap, and we continue to add new categories of assets very easily.
By the way, not through the massive hurdle that is to integrate anything on a centralized exchange.
And of course, we continue as well to integrate use cases but I'm not gonna interview myself I'm
gonna let you ask the questions but yes super happy to be here thank you for
having us well yeah it started a strong huh and yeah thanks for that definitely
I had my coffee to today yeah yeah I can um yeah let's get right into it and well of course um from here
i just want to say hello to to ramon as well and well to hannah um unfortunately last time on our
last um partner spotlight we initially had ramon's kettle but i think we had some scheduling issues
um if i remember correctly
and uh yeah we had uh victor on the space and now he has become our favorite person at kinto
sorry or not sorry i don't know um anyway now you're gonna grab me in trouble with my boss man
well i'm sorry about that and um yeah so I wanted to start it with this very new messaging that we've seen recently, right?
And which is well, so what you have started with, just Kinto as a modular exchange.
That really caught our attention, right?
It feels like a powerful reframe, especially as the modular narrative seems to be starting to gain traction
across the, I mean, pretty much the entire blockchain stack, right? So for all of us who are
not very familiar with the concept, being, you know, me the very first one who doesn't, you know,
fully know or can't fully grasp what it is it's about can you explain what the modular exchange
concept really means in in kinto's context or you know um broader definition and how it contrasts
with the more familiar models um also special mention to amms and centralized exchanges
of course yeah let me give it our best try, right? I think to understand why this
change of narrative, right? Because the use case of Kinto, what Kinto does, hasn't changed, right?
And our objectives as a company and as a chain haven't changed either. The reality, though,
is that we needed a better way to tell the story, right? And if you look at Kinto from the very
beginning, we were talking about, oh, Kinto is from a technological perspective, and this continues to be true, fundamentally an L2.
It's an L2 based on the arbitrary nitro stack that settles on Ethereum mainnet.
However, that is not important.
It is important for us and for Ramon and for me because we are both engineers and we, you know, engineers have our defects.
We don't admit them me, because we are both engineers and we, you know, engineers have our defects.
We don't admit them often, but we do.
And one of them is that sometimes we focus too much on the technical, right?
And it's not about what Kinto is, but about what Kinto does.
And what Kinto does is the following.
We allow you, right, to choose a KYC provider when you arrive to Kinto.
And I know that a lot of people is very allergic to this KYC idea even, right?
But when you arrive for the first time on Kinto, you will select your KYC provider. You will go through KYC. And this is really important because you are already KYC-ing in other exchanges. You
are already KYC-ing even in mainnet. If you want to go to things like Ondo or Bakht or Dinari,
you are going to have to KYC. The difference is that if you want to buykt or Dinari, you are going to have to KYC.
The difference is that if you want to buy shares on Dinari, buy Ondo, buy Bakkt on any other network,
you need to KYC three times.
One for each time that you use a new use case.
And that's horrible.
And the second thing that matters quite a bit is that you're going to have to go and give all your information, including your financial data, to your centralized exchange if you ever want to sell that thing that
you bought and bring it back. So in the end, you have four KYC processes that are similar,
but not exactly the same in order to do four different things, which absolutely sucks.
So Quinto, right, has the KYC aspect, has this L2 technology that only allows people to transact that have either KYC or KYB.
So it gives you this very safe space where you know that everyone in it has done this.
Kinto is also a wallet.
It gives you a smart contract wallet that will allow you to add up to three signers and do everything throughout the smart contract wallet. That smart contract wallet is insured. No one in the space provides insurance.
We have up to $2,500 insured for a smart contract tax in every single wallet that has money on the
chain, which is, again, unheard of, right, anywhere else. And finally, once that you have that KYC done and you are in this secure space,
you have that smart contract wallet that allows you to add multi-seek once more another layer
of extra security, what do you do? You buy stuff. You buy RWAs, you buy mincoins, you buy shares
on the stock market. But when you do, you already need your KYC, so you don't have to re-KYC
for some of these use cases. You only need to agree to share a specific field of your KYC
with some of these things. So after that, you have the swapping, the borrowing, the lending.
Now you are going to have the launchpad, which we'll be speaking about later. You're going to
have a lending market for our native token, 4K, which is something new
as well that we are
preparing. You can stake your
Kintone token, etc. So, if you
zoom out for a second,
what do you call a thing
that allows you to do all of
the things that you can do in DeFi,
all of the things that you can do in a centralized exchange?
The reality is that
we don't have a name for it, and we had to invent it it. And you know, I'm terrible at naming. Fortunately, Ramon is much
better than me. And he came up with the modular exchange concept. And it's exactly this. Everything
that your centralized exchange does without the downsides of giving essentially all of your
information to everyone on that exchange
and without the downside of it is the exchange, right?
Not your keys, not your crypto that keep your coins
because Kinto will always give you the self-custody smart contract wallet
that you are in charge of and nobody else is, right?
So that's the reason why, right?
And that's how we got to this kind of modular exchange concept
is what's about trying to put together.
You can do so many different things in Kinto
that it was hard to make people understand what Kinto actually was.
And I think we finally nailed it.
And the modular exchange is the perfect name
for what we tried to express.
And nowadays we have what we wanted
and it's about 30% institutional, 30% veterans
in crypto, 30% newcomers to crypto, all of them attracted to Kinto by its security and
by its usability. That's what we wanted.
Wow, that sounds balanced. And yeah, it sounds like a big shift you know not just technically but also in how people might use
and think about uh the platform and it sounds definitely sounds well I don't know if you say
um revolutionary yeah I think I think probably that's the word I'm looking for and definitely
I'm also allergic to KYC man um but yeah i understand you know i think we all understand
it's a necessary part um in crypto but at the same time it's as you said you know it's it's a pain
to deal with that honestly in the end and the insurance part of course for me right in the end
with the with the with the kyc it's about asking yourself this question right and it's first of all
um who are you going trust your data, right?
And this is something that Quinto,
the answer to that is don't let us choose, you choose, right?
Pick the KYC provider that you like.
And we selected the KYC providers
that are already on your bank,
that are already on your previous centralized exchanges,
that are already in other crypto use cases.
So we tried to, you know,
gave those options that are KY in other crypto use cases. So we try to, you know, give those options
that are KYC, sorry, crypto friendly for the KYC choices. And the other thing is, are you willing,
right, to take that KYC, IML, KYT, if we can give you, you know, two degrees extra security, right?
If we can give you a place where everyone has KYC like you,
if we can give you a place where everyone is doing KYT and AML every single day, right?
And the reality is that, yes, we all hate KYC, but we all hate being drained much more, right?
So in the end, the price of security, I think it's absolutely worth it.
And then not only that, right, it's about the security
and having one KYC for everything inside Kinto
instead of having to KYC over and over and over again,
which absolutely sucks.
Yeah, 100%. I couldn't agree more.
And it feels like it is the right approach.
And, you know, I can't be really definitive, unfortunately,
but yeah, it feels like that to me personally, of course, just my two cents.
And building on that, because it feels like a step forward, right, in DeFi.
What are the problems in the current defy landscape um you know that this modular approach
like aim to solve most directly and I think it's well as you said security security and more
security right I think that's it right I mean the reality is how kinto got started and I'm sure you
know many of you have read Ramon's post about his previous company, Babylon Finance.
Babylon Finance was never hacked.
However, through Compostability, they had vaults onto Rari, right?
And Rari was one of the famous hacks of the last cycle, not for the hack itself, but for how they handled it, right?
Basically, Rari got hacked.
It affected Babylon.
And when that happened, governance became a mess.
Governance first said, oh, we're going
to give back all of the money.
We are not going to give back the money.
In the end, after more than a year,
they gave back all the money.
But by that time, they have killed many projects,
including Babylon, which was Ramon's previous project.
So DeFi has the magic of DeFi is composability.
But also, it's the poison apple, right?
Because through composability,
do not fault on your own, right?
You can get absolutely,
I'm sorry for my French,
screwed in here.
So the reality in the end is
you need a place, right,
where composability is safer
than it has ever been.
And this is where our developers, right?
Whoever deploys a smart contracts for these protocols,
they are also KYC and KYB.
So basically, when you are interacting
with the binary contract, for instance,
or the mountain contract,
or whatever contract you have inside the Kinto network,
you know that these developers have passed through the same things that we ask you,
either to KYC or to KYD.
And not only that, in order to have a smart contract,
you usually will require different accounts,
different bad actors to attack that contract in different ways.
In here, you would need to commit several crimes
in order to be able to even start hacking on Kinto.
You have to steal or buy several identities. You have to fraudulently pass that KYC, which is not easy because you need to have a live net check with your face
as you go through it. And you need to renew it as you go over time. So the reality is that,
And then you have to pass all of my paranoid checks, which are plenty.
and then you have to pass all of my paranoid checks, which are plenty. But I have plenty of,
But I have plenty of, you know, from IP, et cetera.
I have a lot of ways to detect civil attacks on top of the KYC.
So the reality is what DeFi lacks today is that safe composability.
And on top of that safe composability, the easy composability, right?
And for me, even though it has been quite easy, right,
historically in places like mainnet the reality now is that we want things that we didn't want before in crypto
we want to buy real estate we want to buy art we want to buy pokemon cars we want to buy a lot of
different things and funny enough if you are buying physical things, you need to have a physical identity in the world, a KYC.
So now composability in mainnet, in many cases, is super broken because you cannot compose two protocols that have two different standards of KYC.
So not only Kinto can give you a more secure space to do DeFi on, it can also give you the possibility to mix things that you couldn't mix before.
And that's really interesting
because it means that new primitives,
new use cases will appear around that concept.
Yeah, no, I mean, that makes sense.
And especially in terms of,
well, possibility, of course, as you've said,
you know, managing complexity over time as well, it feels.
And well, i imagine this also
opens up more opportunities right for um strategic partnerships and uh i'm silently silently deleting
that question which is um if uh you know if you would facilitate things for for a good friend
and host of a kind of popular Partners Pollite series.
But yeah, I guess not.
No, sadly, I'm really sorry,
but you're gonna have to KYC like everyone else.
There is no exceptions on Kinto.
And it's funny because there is no exception
even for us, right?
I am a senior living in the US,
but I live in the US,
therefore my proof of address is in the US.
So sometimes we have things that US residents cannot do.
And it's really funny when I try to use Quinto myself.
I was like, oh, of course, I'm a US resident.
I cannot do that.
Go plug out yourself.
So I need to call Hannah.
And I think, Hannah, you're going to have
to be my European test today because I am a US resident.
So no one in Quinto jumps the road, including us. OK? I thought, Hannah, you're going to have to be my European test today because I am a US resident.
So no one in Kinto jumps the rules, including us.
Okay.
The rules are absolutely for everyone because to be honest, it's the only way to guarantee security.
And how seriously we take it is that these rules apply to us even for testing.
That's how hard it is.
Fair enough.
100%. to us even for testing that's how hard it is fair enough 100 and um yeah with that in mind um so i had an issue initial question written down which is how do you see this modularity helping kinto
grow right but i think you have covered quite a lot of ground on that regard um so i think i'm
going to modify my question a little bit which is how do you see this modularity helping the whole crypto space grow?
This is a very important question.
And I think Kintot doesn't want to be an island, even though sometimes for security we have to be, right?
However, from the very beginning, together with account abstraction, which is what we use for the smart contract wallet,
account abstraction, which is what we use for the smart contract wallet,
we have also been working in chain abstraction,
which is why we work together with Socket and other RPC providers like Anker,
right, on this piece.
How are we going to communicate with these other chains
that may have some KYC requirements, some extra security requirements,
but they still want to keep their own chains
or their own protocol. So we do two things that are pretty unique in order for that modularity
to not become a prison. The first one that we do is we have not redeployed liquidity for each one
of the assets that we have on the chain. In fact, most of the assets do not have native pools on Kinto except USD Plus and other native assets on Kinto.
But if you are, let's say you want to borrow USDC, you are not borrowing USDC on Kinto.
You are borrowing USDC against Mainnet, against Arbitrum or against BASE, which is the chain that we have integrated so far.
We are working more into that. So basically through the chain abstraction,
you can cross-chain borrow, land, swap, buy and sell through Kintos.
So you still keep that security, but you pull liquidity or innovation.
Maybe there is something new somewhere else that we want to have.
We don't have to redeploy the contracts, redeploy the liquidity.
Thanks to chain abstraction, you can keep the security, but tap into anywhere, right?
Any of those chains.
And we'll continue to add EVM and non-EVM chains because we're working on solar integration now.
In order to make that modularity feel not like a prison, but an opportunity.
So now let's say that you are on the other side, right?
You are an arbitrage, you are a mainnet, you are on any of these chains that we integrate.
You want to keep your liquidity there,
but now you want to do your ICO through the launchpad,
let's say.
You can't because you need to identify your people.
You need to identify if this is a US-equipped investor
or not.
You need to do a lot of things, right,
in order to make your ICO, your risk of money compliant.
So now, even though you want to keep in base,
you cannot do that unless, for instance, you rates of money compliant. So now even though you want to keep in base, you cannot do that.
Unless, for instance, you use Tinto. So you have your ICO on Tinto even though your protocol is not.
And that's totally fine. And that's where the modularity and the flexibility becomes kind of the staple of Tinto.
Another thing that we did very recently, and I don't know if anyone read that article,
we rewrite and talk too much in general, but we had to redefine what Kinto metrics, important
metrics are, right?
Like the TVL, because people would say, oh, what happened to Kinto TVL?
It's going down.
It's not going down.
It's that now people is borrowing, lending, swapping, because we added all of these features.
And there is a lot of Kinto-controlled TVL, right?
Kinto-controlled, I mean, Kinto users-controlled TVL that lives on other chains.
And that is totally fine.
But of course, the TVL metric is no longer a good metric because the money inside the chain,
it doesn't matter as much as the money that the chain affects and
control and that money right now is absolutely everywhere in different protocols and different
chains so we even had to redefine our own kpis because they were no longer valid thanks to this
modularity that makes sense it's like um gdp sometimes can be tricky, right? You have, and that's why we, yeah, we, we, well, no,
not we as, as me and anchor, but we, the economists, right?
Have pretty much generated like more different kinds of metrics,
as you say, because we need them, right?
We need them to check like in more detail, as you said,
because it's, it's so functional that sometimes GDP sometimes GDP can be a little bit clumsy at that point.
And yeah, thank you so much, Victor, for covering the modular exchange part.
And another thing that I mentioned was the exchange one status, which we were particularly interested in, which is another major milestone.
interested in and which is another uh major milestone right so um let's talk about that one
if you um you know if if you're okay with that and uh yeah then we will move on to the to the
launchpad which is also another one that i have in my my notes and well kinto becoming the fifth
chain to reach stage one status first of all congratulations um i've been told that
the big technical and symbolic achievement so both um now can you walk us through what stage one
actually means in this context what has to happen for a change for a change sorry to reach that point
and you know why it is important so funny funny enough, thank you, first of all,
because Anchor is a part of that achievement.
As you mentioned, you are running one of those validators.
And without five validators, you cannot be a stage one.
At least five validators, you cannot be a stage one.
So Anchor is part of that success as well.
So thank you for that piece at the very least, right? And for the
support over the months to making it happen. So a stage one for Quinto, what's supposed
to be impossible, right? People were saying, oh, Quinto is totally centralized. They are
doing KYC. They have to be centralized. They will never be a stage one or a stage two because they have these kind of restrictions and these data.
There is no way that they are decentralized enough
to be even considered into that framework.
So we did the typical thing, and we took it as a challenge.
And it's like, of course, we can be still as decentralized
and as secure as any others in the framework.
So what does it mean for Kinto to be a stage one?
Basically, the first thing, right, in this stage framework, is a matter of security, right?
Having a properly set up security council.
So Kinto has nine members inside that security council.
nine members inside that Security Council.
We need to achieve seven out of nine, right, or six out of eight
in that Security Council system in order to make any changes.
And the Security Council takes care of the upgrades.
We very recently voted the Pectra upgrade.
We have to make some modifications a few days ago,
and we didn't break anything if something is working.
Pectra happened and Kintan didn't break.
Therefore, the Security Council did well on that upgrade.
But having a properly set up Security Council
and not being Ramon, Hannah and me, making the decisions
and updates for the whole network matters quite a bit.
All right.
And this Security Council, if you're curious,
take a look at right? But it's industry experts
from people of security companies
that we trust,
security auditors that we trust,
providers that we trust,
et cetera.
The other aspect, right,
of being a stage one
is that not only your decisions
and your upgrades
need to come from
a properly set up security council,
which now we have,
and has control over all Kinto contracts.
You also need to have a proper proof system, right?
Basically be able to verify
that what you are posting on the other one
is actually what it's supposed to be posted, right?
And you have to have a way as well
of posting fraud proofs, right?
If someone decides,
oh, this is not the blog that I was expecting,
then what do you do
you have to publish a fraud draft and
who takes that responsibility
of monitoring what Kinto
publishes to the L1 and
taking the really important responsibility
of saying hey
this is a contest against what
Kinto just published this is not true right
this blog is incorrect and
the role of the validators
so as part of becoming a stage one kinto have five validators uh anchor being one of them once more
thank you so much for that and now these five actors caldera memorial apps anchor hypernative
and then can issue uh fraud proofs right? Sorry, can issue fraud challenges, right?
Onto that part.
And in fact, we actually did test this
as part of our stage one exercises, let's say.
We test this and it works very well already, right?
I mean, obviously this is Arbitrum implemented.
Everything done by Arbitrum works really well,
but we have these validators coming into place as well.
And then the asterisk, that matters quite a bit
because Kinto is the fifth chain to reach stage one,
but the first up chain to get into that.
And it's that we have an asterisk on here.
And it is, yes, this is true.
Kinto is a stage one.
However, if you happen to be a bad actor,
you do have an exception in here.
And it's that the chain can essentially
revolve against the bad actor and stop them
from exiting the chain, which is exactly
the purpose of Kinto.
So basically, we are a stage one for everyone, except if you
happen to be a bad actor. In that case, your ability to get out of the chain can be trumped
by the chain itself. And you can be outvoted, stopped from living with our money. And you can
be not only outvoted for that, you can also, the chain can vote to reveal your identity. And this is the only way that your PII can ever be connected to your KYC.
It is if the whole chain votes to reveal that to the authorities, right?
And this is what makes us different.
This is why we have an asterisk in L2Bit and we have an asterisk on our article.
Because we are a stage one for everyone, unless you are a bad actor.
In that case, don't expect to be a stage one on that on that piece because we are going to be able to stop you
wow all right um yeah i got it so it's more than you know just a label it's a signal that right the
infrastructure has matured to a certain level and honestly i'm impressed and
no wonder you know you talk and and write so much since you have so many things to to say um
and um yeah i mean i'm you know um i would never thought we could reach that state so quickly
in yeah so i'm honestly just genuinely impressed.
And thank you, Victor, you know, for putting it in such a simple way for everyone to understand.
And I think one another question, probably next question in my list, of course, but that
probably is on many people's mind would be,
what does that unlock for the Kintos users?
You know, I think it's clear it's security, of course,
but developers as well. Are there like more specific advantages or toolings
that this milestone enables, or would that be it?
I think in my head, developers are users as well.
They use different things, right?
Developers are users.
They should be users, right, of that chain,
even though they have something different.
But the reality is that developers come to Kinto
for the same reason that the user does, right,
for that security and for that usability.
And once more more they find and
one hurdle right one ring to jump that is not anywhere else but they find a set of advantages
that are not anywhere else here let's say that you are uh i'm gonna use a real case without putting
a real name uh let's say that you are a mortgage company right a crypto mortgage company and you
want to put mortgages on chain,
which is a really good idea, which I really like.
And now you have mortgages are complicated as hell.
They are different in every country.
They are different laws.
Yeah.
Different compliance aspects of it.
Risking mortgages is massively complicated.
So you have to do all of that.
And on top of it, mortgages in most countries,
in order to buy any index-made mortgages, let's say, right, you need to be KYC. You need to have
that piece. So imagine that you're a startup that is trying to do mortgages on chain. And now,
after you have done all of this that you needed to do to make mortgages happen, now you have to do KYC as well.
And you have to spend six, nine months to do a proper KYC, to integrate with these sometimes really hard to integrate providers.
You have to do KYC.
You have to do AML.
If you are a company buying a mortgage, you have to do UBO.
You have to do the KYB with all of these massive details.
So if you are a developer that wants to do mortgages on chain,
you probably don't want to do KYC yourself.
You can come to a chain like Kinto, to a modular chain like Kinto,
and use our KYC and KYB.
Use our KYT.
Use our AML.
And enjoy that extra security that the Kinto wallet provides.
Enjoy that composability with other RWA that no one else can offer you.
So suddenly, right, for a developer, it's like, oh, I have to KYC.
And now everything needs to be a user operation because they use a smart contract chain,
but a smart contract wallet, right?
But suddenly, yes, there are two additional hurdles, like it happens to the user.
Oh, I passed two KYC. There is an additional point of friction. But in return, you get a
paradise of new features, right? And a paradise of new potential integrations. So reasons why
developers comes is easy, is secure. Reasons why developers stay and are able to develop more is because all of these characteristics of
the chain are not for us only.
We share them with everyone on the chain, including developers.
That's great context, especially for builders listening in who might be looking for, you
know, environments to launch in.
And yeah, definitely.
I think we, well, I personally, I always
do this distinction between devs and users,
but I often forget they themselves, they are users as well.
Sorry to all the devs out there.
And also, Victor, I love how your analogies are so great.
And they make me depressed. and then you come like shading
the light you know like the light um like at the end of the tunnel you know like oh buddy
and i'm like oh nice you know our lord savior um i start getting depressed and then you know
we have a solution which is great um also in our last, the question, you know, before this one, you also mentioned how,
you know, the role of Anchor shift and well also how it expanded.
Right.
And I was so busy, like trying to process everything that I had forgotten about that
had forgotten about that as well um we will get back to that also um i have a new question on on
as well.
We will get back to that also.
this regard but yeah thank you again so much uh you know victor for um always well um looking to
to work with anchor and um yeah i'm so glad that uh well um you know even with this shift um we we
could um continue working together.
And yeah, that's of course why we are here today as well.
And well, now moving to kind of a new segment,
shifting gears to the, well, the token launch, right?
Which is, Kintos token is now live and trading as well.
And it feels like that moment brought a,
quite a lot of momentum with it. And after, well, Kintos token is now live and trading as well. And it feels like that moment brought a quite a lot momentum with it.
And after, well, Kintos token is now live and trading, as I was saying, after the
ICO, which I kind of closely followed because I reached out to Victor and
Victor told us like, oh, we are right now, you know, heads down, super busy with it.
Yeah.
Let's do the let's do the partners spotlight after that.
So I was like, okay.
I was like checking the
calendar all the time. Like, has it been done yet? Has it been done yet? So yeah, first of all,
congratulations on that milestone. It's always big, you know? And yeah, just out of kind of out
of curiosity, right? And also trying to look how it works from the inside, right? Looking back,
what were some of the biggest takeaways from
that launch um how are you thinking about the next phase of you know the community growth
now that you have passed that um initial push
it's uh this this one is gonna be hard to answer um what a roller coaster right um obviously
we've got an ico right which went really well and was just in our launch pad.
And we had that ICO in January.
And users essentially decided that the price of the token on that ICO through price discovery in a Dutch auction was going to be $15 per token, right?
Then the market, tariffs, and politics, I'm not going to get into that, but let's say that the market from January until April, it went down a little.
For different reasons, it went down a little. However, crypto was frozen in a bubble, in the bubble of that bullish momentum of the ICO that happened on January.
momentum of the ICO that happened on January, right? And on release date in April, what happened
is that suddenly everyone wanted to sell and make it all back in one trade with that $15 price
frozen in time that Kinto had. And I mean, in retrospective, what happened after kind of makes
sense. And is that everyone tried to set our token on day one.
This triggered a massive down spiral
that lasted for three or four days,
disappointed many people that participated in the ICO
and other members of the community,
and most importantly, disappointed many,
I have to say, quite rude and and annoying farmers that made a lot of noise
about these facts. So finally, we found ourselves losing 80% of value on those first few days.
Kinto did what we promised that we would do, and is we would work before, during, and after
the listing. And seeing then, from that low of 2 point something,
we are today at 660 something, right?
So Kintok Pay continues to recover value, propulsed basically by the community that
do trust us, right?
And the community that does exist.
And once the farmers left, the sentiment became quite different, right?
And it is, we expected more from you guys.
And honestly, the team expected more as well
from ourselves and from the price action.
But the only thing that we can do for us
and for them is what we are doing.
And it's continued to work extremely hard
to demonstrate that, you know,
the K value or the K price
does not represent the K value, right?
And that's what we do every single day.
And obviously this is not investment advice,
but we will do what we promise that we will do.
And it is we continue to work on adding value
to Kinto as a platform.
And it is only logical to see what we have seen
as a team when we work.
We have also started a program of rebuys,
which has been very important, I believe,
in kind of imprinting community trust. But overall, even though the first few days were
extremely hard, the beauty of the next month after those few days is that you really see
who your community is, you really see who your users are. And the reality is that as long as we have a real community, as long as we have real users using the product every day, as we do have and we have seen already more than proof, we're going to be fine.
And that's the hope and that's the work in theory.
And that's what's happening every single day.
That's what's happening every single day.
But in terms of the token launch itself,
I think the lesson is to be mindful, you know,
on farmers and airdrops
and how much do you put in hands of who.
You know, not every token is appreciated the same
by different people.
And I think we learned that the hard way on the one.
And then the other thing is there are bad actors that are ready to hurt you if they have the chance.
We got the DDoS attack as well the day of the launch.
Unfortunately.
Made this, you know, much harder.
So, yeah, I think I am a little bit less naive.
But, yeah, hopefully it doesn't show anymore.
But a little bit less naive than I was before that.
But other than that, again, we are very happy with the community.
We have price action is finally showing what we wanted to show.
And we continue to work to add value.
Yeah, 100%.
That's, first of all, really interesting and also inspiring.
So thank you for your honesty, victor of course and um for your
well the transparent approach right um it sounds like it um was a successful launch but then you
faced some challenges and unfortunately you know i think during that period um most project most on
the price wise right faced um challenges so it wasn't definitely wasn't only you guys uh
but it's also you know good to know that well it seems that uh you guys are recovering and that's
great and yeah it was also a um so i joined a xpaces i think of yours um last week if i remember
correctly or maybe the the week before.
I couldn't listen to the whole thing, but yeah, you and Ramon, you were both in there.
And well, of course, Hannah as well.
Those are, you know, a great way to clarify direction and also grow your community in a healthy way.
Right.
And I really liked at least the part that I listened to.
I really, really liked it.
Just wanted to say that. And i appreciate that yeah yeah 100 and uh i would like to quote peter in here uh well i don't have
the exact quote but uh yeah peter said something along uh these lines which is that looking back
a few years back uh right? And everything seemed more genuine.
You know, everyone was basically just putting the efforts
in the same direction, right?
Right now we have people of all sorts.
So this part is already like my personal addition,
but yeah, we have people of all sorts,
malicious actors, as you said right and then people
who are just looking to yeah unfortunately you know to either do bad things or yeah people that
are maybe overly greedy right um but yeah well you know i guess it just means that we are growing
like we as of uh the crypto blockchain you know uh world it world it's growing and it's attracting all kinds of people
right and well it is what it is as you said we are less naive day by day and well unfortunately
we have to learn the hard way sometimes right definitely so yeah and yeah so moving from this
topic right and speaking of launching let's talk about the next big piece, which, well, I think you already know what I'm going to ask about, which is the Kintel Launchpad. So what makes the Kintel Launchpad different from other launch platforms we've seen?
of launchpad when you initially presented this to me you know i was like oh wow that's you know i
it's been a while since i last heard of these launchpads that were really really popular and
hot at the time uh well maybe two years back um so yeah what kind of project is it designed to
support uh what makes it different so you're absolutely right right and it's somehow uh
So you're absolutely right, right? Somehow, launchpads and ICOs in general went out of
style. After 2017, they went down, down, down, down, and yeah, they almost disappeared by the
time that we arrived here. And you're right, right? Probably before we were speaking about this,
no one was even considering ICOs or launchpads anymore. But we realized that we were in a very good position
to recover ICOs in a compliant way.
Because one of the issues,
well, there was many issues with ICOs.
They were easily gained.
They were not civil resistant.
They were a lot of bots involved.
And then a lot of the money that you were raising,
you got scrutinized by the
regulator because what is this money coming from? Who is investing? Is this money, you know,
coming from financing terrorism, from porn or from casino, you know? And the reality is that
no one in the ICO community could answer that because you don't know where that money was
coming from. You were expecting to be from nice community members, but honestly, how do you prove that?
You can't, right?
So ICOs kind of died by their own weight, right?
Bots, civil resistant issues, duplications, easily gamed, and finally the compliant issues
that came after basically killed ICOs.
So we realized that because of that extra security, civil resistance,
and the compliant aspects of Kinto is, wait, everything that was wrong about ICOs
is not wrong in Kinto. This could work again.
So, you know, what do you do?
You go back and you bring them back from the dead.
So basically we published this article in January, right, called the ICOs are back.
And we decided to launch the first ICO was Kinto, was K.
And right now what we did is, you know, this, when we were preparing actually our launch pad for K,
we decided this is not for us only because nothing else on
the chain is the security the apis right all of that is for everyone launch fact has to be for
everyone as well and that's what we did we launched k through the dodge option um you know and this
has nothing to do with our launch if you remember our ico in january it went really well super smooth
with the price discovery mechanism. It makes it so
exciting. We had 4,000 people almost participated, 5,100 bids, $3.10 million raised through the ICO
process. And what we have done now is basically we have extrapolated that price discovery type of
ICO. You also have an option to do a fixed price ICO.
And inside the next project,
it's an AI project coming from Solana called Taurus,
and it's gonna use the second modality of the Launchpad.
And what we have been doing in the past month or so
is essentially start talking to projects
and prepare a calendar of launches
of people that is gonna use Kinto and the Kinto launchpad in order to have compliance, secure, civil resistant ICOs from now on.
So ICOs are pretty much bad thanks to the launchpad.
Yeah, nice. I have just shared a couple of tweets.
just shared a couple of tweets so one is a recent one from kintokyc which is the kintel launchpad
is really finding icos which is in line of with uh well what you have been talking about and um
yeah then uh the i also found the one written by ramon which is uh icos are back um so yeah
they're all peeling here for the audience um if you would like to you know give
it a quick look um it's what should be on your screens and yeah thank you victor for that and
sounds like it's a carefully curated approach right um it's not just about volume but also
you know quality and pretty much aligning with the kentos. And yeah, that's great.
Yeah, so thank you for all the insights
and details on that one.
I might have to, you know, re-listen to this part
because I was looking for the content
and missed, well, a bit of it.
I had you in the background kind of.
Yeah, friends at the Kento KYC, oh my gosh, XYZ account,
feel free to share any kind of content
that you think it's relevant to what Victor is speaking about.
And yeah, you can share it directly.
You're a co-host.
And well, just a quick question as well uh victor for projects on boarding through the
launchpad erda like any specific design principles you know you pair uh built to help these new
projects on board like securely well this is important right um in the end from we offer a
ton of things from projects, right?
Non-crups, Saudi and civil resistance, 200 plus countries,
U.S. accredited investor.
We are compliant.
No fees.
There is two ways of selling.
There is a community of investors,
but we require some things from these projects.
Number one.
Sorry, you said no fees?
There are no fees.
We charge no fees during all 2025.
There are no fees for projects that are uh uh coming into the kinto launchpad no fees for projects and if you compare with everyone else that is already a
massive advantage but yet no fees yeah sorry for interrupting because i i was like i don't know if
i heard no fees or more fees you know i was like i i don't know which one I heard. But yeah, thank you for the clarification. It was no peace.
But yeah, what we require though for these projects is the following, right?
Number one is you need to have live users and a real product, right?
So if you are only paperware or white paperware, I would say, you cannot launch on Tinto.
You need to have a relatively low FDB and high float.
You need to allow users to enter at the same price,
at least that this is BIT.
And this is the downside of the no fees.
What is that we ask you to do then?
Basically, you as a project will buy K-token,
will stake K-token during your ICO as a security guarantee.
So basically, if you are a good actor and all of the ICO goes well and you distribute the tokens, that is fine and you will recover your stake K.
However, we hold that stake K as security guarantee for whatever could happen during these processes.
for whatever could happen during these processes.
And then the last thing is that every single project
that participates on the Kinto Launchpad
needs to have an airdrop for holders of a state game.
So basically, they don't pay us, right?
There is no fees for the Kinto Foundation
or for Memory Labs Incorporated,
which is the company that runs the chain.
All benefits, right? That airdrop of tokens goes to the community never to us
oh wow okay yeah i mean love it you know it's uh sounds like a well designed um on ramp and
yeah i think it um you know when it's designed like this it definitely can make
huge difference uh especially in today's regulatory environment right and um i don't know man sounds
like something uh like it sounds like the finance launchpad kind of thing you know when when they
get air drops and well i don't know about the fees there, though, but yeah, man, it sounds really interesting. I don't know about the fees. I cannot comment, but I don't know about the fees there.
Oh, OK. OK, you know about the fees. OK, yeah, no, no, no, no comment.
No comment on that regard. I'm going to mute. I'm going to mute Victor right now.
We are all friends. We are all friends. I'm not going to comment anything on that.
Of course, of course. But yeah, it sounds really good.
You know, like I don't even know what to say because I was kind of surprised, impressed, call it whatever, you know, but a no fees part.
And then when you said it comes with an airdrop for K holder.
Yeah, that's huge.
Yes.
Staked K holder.
Yeah.
Oh, sorry.
Yeah.
Staked K holder.
Yeah.
I mean, that's huge honestly and well um thank you for uh for you know um sharing some light on on the token listing sorry on the launchpad and uh
and tokens ico's uh part and that was really interesting and um yeah i think the weight was really worth worth it um and now um
i think we are we are close to the one hour mark um just wanted to bring it back to uh
our side of the table right so anchor um i am i am learning you know these uh well. I've learned it from Victor. So Anchor recently became a validator for Kinto.
And well, I think I want to say it's something
that I'm really proud of.
And yeah, of course, this has strengthened
the collaboration between Kinto and Anchor, I think.
We are playing a whole different
role at the at kintos um we initially were what we were providing the rpcs um if i uh if i remember
correctly which uh it's kind of a you know standard um uh standard business of uh of anchor right and uh yeah so you know uh victor just on this regard
could you share a little bit you know on like how we are bringing value to kinto i know you've
talked a little bit about this when you uh when you mentioned the security council uh but could
we have like a more you know dedicated answer on, I think what we were doing, it's clear, right?
But maybe a really quick run through.
But yeah, how that shifted and how we are bringing value and how this has been strengthened.
Of course, basically, our relationship has started in a very kind of easy, out-of-the-box way, in the sense that we were looking for the best possible RPC providers, right?
And we also were very clear with every provider that we wanted to have more than one provider and that there would be a load balancer, geographical load balancer on top in order to happen that.
on top in order to happen that.
And the only ones, to be completely honest and fair,
the only ones that told me, oh, sure, it's super fine
that you have us and other providers.
And not only that, we are going to provide for you
the load balancing system, because we have one,
and we're going to provide it for you.
And that the only people that were willing to give us RPC
nodes and to put a load balancer with the competition, which
is kind of remarkable because they show you how confident Anchor was on their product.
It was Anchor.
So our load balancer that is behind rpc.kintoro-rpc.com is Anchor provided.
And most of the times you will hit an Anchor RPC, but we have other RPCs connected through Anchor as well,
other providers.
And in case that anchor ever fails,
it hasn't since we started.
But in case Anchor ever fails,
the load balancer will go to other providers
depending on the geography,
depending on the latency, et cetera.
And it's really cool that Anchor provides both that RPC
and that load balancing service, right?
And then after a year passed, right, almost a year passed,
and we were looking for the validators, and it's like,
okay, who do we know that nodes never go down?
You know, that they have done.
And obviously there hasn't been any downtime, I believe,
with Anker since we started, but there has been some issues, I believe, with Anchor since we started.
But there has been some issues, some things that we need to change, some updates that we need to do on Node.
Things happen because, you know, crypto happens and it's run by humans.
But who is it right that always replies in times, that is always faster in updating our Node.
And the reality is that that was Anchor. So when we realized that, the logical thing was
we were looking for validators.
Validators need to be trustworthy companies
that are able to run nodes with no downtime.
And in case that there is an issue,
they need to be responsive, right?
Because validators are extremely important.
They need to always be up and running,
and they need to be run by trusted parties.
So it does make sense to ask anchor to
run to be completely honest and we were really happy that you guys answered yes of course
right and um well when you mentioned the security console part right uh that to be really really
honest with you hasn't been 100 clear to me um could you remind us uh what that was about
100% clear to me. Could you remind us what that was about?
Yeah, so basically in the Security Council, right, and the members of the Security Council and the validators are slightly different, right?
But of course, the Security Council will advise us as well on who to pick, which is another of the reasons why we did that. But basically, in order to add any validators today to the Kinto chain, you have to go through
the Security Council because basically the validators are white listed.
So in order for us to approve any validator, the Security Council has to approve it.
So basically, if we choose a bad actor as a potential validator,
one of the security responsibility would be to analyze that new proposal and refuse it.
And in the case of Anchor, it was an anonymous, sorry, a unanimous yes to approve you as a validator for obvious reasons.
Because you guys do excellently well.
Oh, all right. All right. right yeah thank you so much for the
clarification and um you know i i was just uh yeah making a mess uh to myself um i i don't know
i was mixing mixing concepts um pretty much and yeah great to hear and i think this kind of uh
partnerships you know what helps take change from, you know, promising the production grade.
And of course, Anchor, it's a two-week street, right? And at Anchor, we have learned a lot from
you as well, especially today, me personally, the listeners, right? We have learned so much,
so many new concepts. And yeah, now when we, you know know when we gather with other crypto people hey we can we
can speak about things you know more topics yeah we can sound more knowledgeable which is great um
and yeah um i had some rapid fire questions but uh you know we have just hit the one hour mark
um i'm gonna just choose one of them and which is what excites you
most about the next six months at kinto oh uh very hard but i'm gonna say three things very quickly
so number one uh is the lending market for k i think this is gonna be really really cool we are
working very hard on it um and we are very excited to be able to provide chaos collateral and burrow against it.
I think it's going to be a massive thing.
Launchpad, the Taurus
launchpad is coming soon
and we have great exciting projects
queuing up on the launchpad
itself. We'll share now
the form. If you're interested, if you have a
project that believes that could have an
IC on the launchpad, we'll share that as well.
And then I have to pick the third. I'm going to cheat. Solana integration and mobile app.
It's coming this year as well. So yeah, a lot of exciting things.
Victor?
Yes.
I think we have, well, I don't know if we have lost you or if you finished when you said Solana
mobile app. Solana integration and the mobile app. I was trying to, well, I don't know if we have lost you or if you finished when you said Solana.
Solana integration and the mobile app. I was trying to be short on this one.
Oh, okay.
Okay, cool.
Yeah, yeah, no, 100% sure.
I thought we lost you for a second.
I have a very, very quick follow-up question,
which is when you said lending K, right?
Yeah.
And you said when you're a stake when you're a staked holder of K
you get the airdrops
so when you lend your K
so who stakes that
and who gets the earnings
so basically the users
are going to be able to buy K
or use the K that they have earned
on the rewards program
on the mining program
they're going to be able to either stake it
and then they will get USDC rewards
and the drops from the projects coming to the launchpad,
or you're gonna be able to lend it
through our lending protocol
and be able to borrow against it
to do other things on the chain.
So you will have both options,
either you buy K and stake it,
or you get K and stake it, or you get K and you lend it to borrow against it, which is another great way, you know, to have that price activity continuing to be positive, but also give utility to the token.
Or further utility.
All right. Yeah, no, that makes sense. That makes sense. Yeah, thank you so much for, you know, for sharing some light on that one. And, well, I think, you know, these are probably questions that the K users and holders will have. So where can they, you know, where can I find you?
and in our bio you will have the link to our discord which is the most active piece
and yeah once more thank you so much for having me we totally nailed it we said 30 to 45 minutes
and it was an hour and two minutes so in absolutely on our average totally nailed the timing as always
i mean you know spaniards uh we're a bit late no worries yeah we like to talk it's our problem
We are a bit late, no worries.
Yeah, we like to talk.
It's our problem.
Yeah, it is.
It is.
Definitely it is.
But I mean, honestly, that's been a great conversation.
You know, thank you again for joining us for a second round.
Thank you for sharing, you know, what's next for Kento.
And yeah, if there are any questions coming from the community,
please either raise your hand or request to speak while um well while we do the the outro uh which uh well unfortunately you know
um everything comes to an end right and um yeah but before we we say goodbye before we let you go
victor uh not just kidding uh we all always like to give our guests the final word.
It could be a quote, a message to builders,
a bit of advice, a piece of advice,
or maybe, yeah, well, I think I've said a quote
that you like, or simple goodbye, simple sign off.
So I will leave it to you.
How would you like to close
us today of course no i think uh again thank you so much for having us we really take it at heart
to be there for for partners but especially you know with this uh good um i think we have lost victor actually this time hello um yeah we lost you uh for a few seconds
yes sorry about that my my phone rang and it interrupted uh it interrupted this uh no i was
saying that thank you so much uh we always love to come to these anchor spaces
because the questions are absolutely on point
and you guys follow so closely
all of our developments.
It's always super appreciated.
I see so many community members
that stood until the very end.
So thank you so much for that real community
that is always here listening,
even though they already know a lot of a lot of
this um on this field but we always appreciate the the support and yes for those that doubted
kinto we are going nowhere uh six months full of new things to deliver we'll see you all soon and
yeah thank you anchor for this hopefully in a few months you know i have a lot more to say so if you
are up for a third round let me know oh yeah i mean 100 um i think definitely you know i have a lot more to say so if you are up for a third round let me know
i mean 100 um i think definitely you know you you have a lot of things to say uh but yeah things you say are interesting as well and also we learn every time you you come to the to the spaces
you know we learn something um so that's uh great and huge um Thanks again, Victor. And yeah, as you say, we have the brave ones, right?
They stayed till the end.
So thanks again to everyone for listening.
And if you enjoyed this episode, of course, don't forget to give us a follow.
So both Anchor and Kinto, share it with your team, community you know and we'll check out more episodes where
we spotlight the builders um shaping the web 3g future and yeah again thank you victor uh thank
you so much um we uh we always say a big hug a hub a hug big i forgot what's the joke actually
uh that we say in in Spanish but a hug I think we say, because it's like a direct translation, right?
But yeah, definitely see you next time in round three.
Absolutely. Have a good one, everyone. Cheers.
Have a nice one, everyone.
Yeah, thank you for joining us today.
Bye. Thank you.
