hello everyone thanks for joining we'll be kicking
the space off soon just waiting for the room to fill up a little bit more
um yeah thanks for joining us here we'll be ready in
about two minutes, thank you
Hey, we're just waiting for our host for today, Nico, head of DeFi, and then we will get kicked
Hey, everyone, it seems Nico is running slightly late, so I think we'll get kicked off.
And yeah, we can get going.
So yeah, thanks for joining everyone.
Today we are joined by the founders of Plenty Network.
A lot of you will be familiar with Plenty.
You would have seen them in the ecosystem.
But for those of you that aren't, we are joined by Bernd Ostrom, one of the co-founders of Plenty,
and we're also joined by Om, who is actually part of Tezos India.
So would you guys like to introduce yourselves, give us a little bit of background, starting
Very cool to finally be on the space hosted by the official Tezos handle.
We have also a little bit of experience doing Twitter spaces ourselves.
I think we hosted around 70 Tezos community calls, weekly Tezos community calls over the
Yeah, it's great to be back on Twitter spaces.
Om and I met each other in 2018.
Been in crypto since 2014, I think.
We met each other during incubation or doing entrepreneurship training in Silicon Valley
created by Tim Draper called Draper University.
And there we found out that we were a really good co-founder match, and we started working
But one of the first decisions we made was that we really wanted to build something on
And from there, the journey started.
We started building developer tools for Tezos, eventually launched a yield farm on Tezos
called Plenty Defy that escalated into a token to token exchange.
The first token to token exchange on Tezos.
And after that, we took over the Ethereum to Tezos bridge, launched a polygon bridge,
launched a mobile wallet.
Co-founded Tezos India together.
And what else did I miss?
Someone is ringing my doorbell.
And we have we have actively.
Hey, you're cutting out there a little bit.
Could you start over for us?
We have been together for quite some time.
Together we have tried to build a lot of tools, developer applications, products on top
We have tried and we are trying to expand the Tezos ecosystem in Africa as we can
through education, developer option and many other initiatives like Tezos India.
Since, I guess, 2021, we started focusing heavily into Tezos Defy because Tezos is
a blockchain had become quite mature.
And there was a need of Defy ecosystem on Tezos.
So we took a charge and we initially built a plenty of farm just as an experiment.
It became quite successful in our town in many terms.
And then we never looked back and we kept building up an exchange, a decentralized
exchange, a members like UNICEF V2 style.
Then we built something like V33 model, solid list style.
Then we also launched UNICEF V3 style, plenty V3.
And in all our products, we have put a lot of works.
We have put a lot of love care and a lot of detail insights to build the best
product possible, not only on Tezos, but overall in the crypto.
So I would encourage all of you to go check out all the plenty.
Plenty.network and everything that we have built and give it a go.
And now we look forward to the future things that are going to happen on Tezos,
including Tezos layer one.
And most exciting things are saying is e-tilling, there is going to be layer two.
Layer two plans have been there for quite some time.
We have always been excited, but now it's really good to see then all of those
plans, all of those hard work coming together to create a, I would say,
world class product like ether link.
And we are really excited to see how we can contribute to all the good,
all these great, you know, Tezos network extensions like layer one,
layer two and how we can contribute more to the ecosystem.
I'm glad you brought up ether link because we would like to go into that a little
I know some of the community are really eager to dig into it.
I'll definitely have some questions for you on that side.
But you touched on a little bit about how you came to the decision to build
within the Tezos ecosystem.
Could you go into a little bit more detail?
You mentioned it was a mature chain, but what else was the, I suppose,
attracted you guys into the Tezos ecosystem?
Either one of you could ask that.
The main thing was that I was scared away by Ethereum.
Back in the day, the DAO hack happened.
I don't know which year exactly it was again, but basically what happened
was a smart contract was exploited.
Well, the smart contract worked as intended.
But yeah, the smart contract wasn't tested properly.
And to resolve loss of funds, there was a hard fork.
And Ethereum classic was born.
And then suddenly there were two chains.
And one of the most important elements of, or USBs of Ethereum
that was on their pitch deck was immutability.
And that was thrown out of the window, the first side of the problem.
So yeah, that scared me away a little bit.
I regret that a little bit, I guess.
But at that moment I found the white paper and position paper of Tezos
in which Arthur predicted the problems with Ethereum.
And yeah, I was hooked right from the get-go
and found a chain that I wanted to develop on.
Nice. That's often a very similar response.
When I ask this question to people, to builders,
I often get a very similar response about,
ultimately you want to be able to trust the chain you're building on
and be able to feel like there's a long-term sort of future here
without having to worry about forks and hacks and things like that.
That happened on a lot of other chains.
And I'm glad you came to the Tezos ecosystem
because Plenty's a really cool product.
And I guess for those who aren't too familiar with Plenty,
could you go into a bit more detail on how, I suppose,
what Plenty offers to the community?
And also go into a little bit about, I suppose,
the continued development of Plenty, in particular surrounding Etherlink.
And then I suppose we can kind of dig into Etherlink a little bit more.
But yeah, firstly, Plenty, what does it offer the community?
And yeah, where's the future headed?
We wanted to test the waters back in 2021 to see if D5 was even possible on Tezos.
There wasn't any back then.
The first Ethereum to Tezos bridge was just launched.
So it was possible to move assets to Tezos,
but there was not really a reason to at that point.
So what we did, we launched a yield farm that we developed in a few days.
And you could also stake bridge assets for a reward.
And that escalated into $70 million TVL in a few weeks' time.
So we proved that D5 was possible on Tezos back then.
And from there, we started developing more with the Plenty brand.
Before that, we played around with different kind of brands
and weren't sure which direction to take.
But at that point, we knew, okay, let's focus on Plenty and make everything...
Let's use the Plenty brand for everything we do in the future.
And yeah, there was no token-to-token exchange back then on Tezos,
The team that did that bridge that we used in our first product left the ecosystem.
So we took that over and rebranded it to the Plenty bridge.
Did I miss anything there about the history?
I see this. We also launched it.
But that's not really using the Plenty brand, of course,
but it was an essential piece of infrastructure for the Tezos ecosystem.
So what's next for Plenty?
So Etherlink was mentioned there.
And I suppose, could you go into a bit more detail
about how you see Etherlink timing to those future plans?
You want to take it home?
So, of course, Etherlink is an exciting development.
I think there has been a great demand to create some sort of bridge
to basically invite those ETH people and those L2 people over Tezos
and give them a test of our cool technology
and to show them that it is possible to achieve decentralization
and core principles of crypto without giving up decentralization
or without giving up control and that kind of stuff.
I mean, you could essentially try to build an Ethereum to Tezos bridge.
We have that, but that's not the most scalable approach, in my opinion.
How I look at it is that Tezos is sort of like a layer one,
which is a really cool tech.
It is, if you see the recent block of nobody,
10-second block times, minimum hardware requirement.
You can run it over a two-network as well, real sensitive resistance.
And then came the idea of L2s, enshrined roll-ups, which we call it.
And these are basically extension of layer one itself
where you don't need any multisite,
so you can create wasm kind of environment, you can create.
And that's where it became very exciting that you can also now,
because of that, create some sort of EVM extension
without having a multisite bridge,
without having to do any kind of multisite based approach
or without keeping a small set of validators.
So it achieves EVM compatibility without giving any core principle
that it is built on. That's super exciting.
And so we have always been a bit hesitant to try out EVM
for the reasons that Banders share and many other things internally.
But now we are thinking to expand our product portfolio.
It's exciting development.
We, of course, have expertise in DeFi.
We have a bunch of things on DeFi.
And we are also, since Etherlink is a new,
it's going to be a new roll-up,
and every new roll-up or every new blockchain needs
some fundamental pieces of DeFi infrastructure
that needs to be there at the first place for DeFi to grow.
Like few things are DAX, you need Lightning Boring platforms,
you need, you know, maybe Logspares,
you need different kind of textures as well.
And after much consideration,
that's what we have decided that we would very much,
and this is still initial plans that we have,
that we think we are going to go with a landing product on Etherlink.
It does enable leverage for users,
and you know, Lightning Boring platforms has been a great product market fit
and we have seen a lot of successful examples.
I think it's something that we are planning.
Every day we are discussing and brainstorming a lot of ideas
like how do we combine our original vision of Planty Network itself,
and how do we fit this into our product portfolio
so that, you know, it benefits everyone, our existing users,
the new users, and it becomes really seamless.
What are the best ways to do that?
we are glad that this will enable our foray into EVM space,
and we are glad that we'll, you know,
we probably will be the initial first ones to deploy something on Etherlink
and try it out and, you know, test it to its full.
I know a lot of the community have been talking about, like,
lending platforms within the ecosystem,
so I think that's something that people might be super excited about.
I suppose this is more just like a subjective question for you both,
but I'll ask what excites you guys personally about these next steps
you'll be taking, and you've touched on some of them,
but personally, what would you have to rank at, like, number one,
But you can start off with this.
I think that being more connected to the rest of the crypto ecosystem,
a few years back, we made analysis that Tezos might be more secure
for smart contract development,
and it made more sense to build stuff on it,
but the market decided to go in a different direction,
so our assumptions were slightly wrong in that.
So now we can build stuff using EVM logic,
but at the same time use Tezos security.
So, yeah, we have best of both worlds, like Om said.
That's the thing that excites me the most about the nearby future,
the fact that we have this security, we have this strong backbone,
but now you can finally open the doors to where the big capital is.
Like, all the LPs are basically on EVM.
Most builders are on EVM.
Most open source code is on EVM,
so there will be a lot more possible in the nearby future for builders,
and many people that come from EVM that are on Ethereum,
that are on Polygon, that are on Albertson,
they will find out about Tezos.
So, yeah, it's going to be a nice mixture of both worlds in the nearby future.
Yeah, I think it's that sort of cross-chain philosophy
that a lot of people in the space hold.
There's an ex-colleague of mine used to say,
a rise in tide lifts all boats,
and so I guess this sort of approach kind of embodies that.
What, I suppose, excites you personally the most?
Sorry, I lost you for a second.
I was just asking, what excites you personally about the sort of near future of Plenty
and the developments coming up?
Yeah, I mean, first of all, I love DeFi.
And I mean, anyone, if they start using it in the right way, of course,
they will love it because it's a frictionless way to do a lot of things,
that would probably take 100 different forms,
200 different signatures in a traditional finance world, right?
Creating or exchanging one asset for another asset,
it can be done in simply two to three steps.
I mean, just try any traditional stock exchange,
So, I love the way, I love the idea of decentralized finance.
I love the way it opens up inclusion of all kinds.
You don't have to have a credit score.
You don't have to have certain things.
Somebody suddenly decides and you can't borrow any more.
So, these are the ideas that excite me.
And especially in finance, when you look at trading and leverage
and lending borrowing, these are very super popular applications.
And I think, even in Vecte, it has, since the introduction of primitives
like Oracle's, MakerDAO, AWEI, more recently,
a lot of perpetuating platforms and now a lot of options
and a lot of different kind of DeFi primitives coming in.
I think the industry as a whole has become quite mature,
even though we have seen a lot of cases like USD as well.
But overall, if you look at the good sites,
there has been some genuine good innovations.
And that's what excites me as a builder.
I would love to contribute to that innovation.
I would love to build something that basically enables the use of DeFi on Tezos.
We have built plenty on Tezos.
We have built something like CDP on Tezos Layer 1, deployed basically.
We deployed CTS. We have built an exchange on Layer 1.
Now, Etherlink opens up a whole lot of possibilities,
a whole different world of distribution.
We can basically go to a million monthly active users
and go say, hey, this is a cool product, you should try it out.
And it has all the USPs, even better USPs
and unique advantage than other L2s or other products that exist.
And that's what excites me.
It's going to be really cool to build something cool
like a learning boring platform
and then enabling all those EVM people,
and not necessarily EVM people but normal users as well,
to come check this out, try it out product.
And that's what excites us to take the feedback of users,
iterate, improve, and end up building the best product.
I have no doubt that you guys are putting in a lot of work
into bringing that into fruition.
And as you mentioned, you guys have put in a lot of work so far.
We've just been joined by Nico, head of DeFi at Trillitec.
Nico, would you like to jump in and introduce yourself
Sorry for being very late.
Last-minute meeting with an external stakeholder.
Yes, I'm Nico, I'm the head of DeFi for Trillitec,
well, Trillitec vertical of DeFi and for Tezos at large.
And I also, I'm working very closely with this link,
I used to run the project.
So I joined six months ago, I have a trading background
by historically I've been only in trading roles for 12 years.
And more recently, and since 2016, I've been in crypto
and I've been a builder on Avalanche for some time.
And a trader on the variety of EVM and Solana for DeFi,
I used to run DeFi trading for a prop trading firm.
I reached out to plenty as I joined
and I've been having multiple discussions with them
over the last six months.
And one of those things that we landed on,
which I'm sure was a main focus of that call until now,
was this money market, so borrowing and lending marketplace,
where the protocol itself would be deployed
not on the Tezos layer one,
but on the Easter link layer two,
which is upcoming and will be released relatively soon in March.
That is a roll-up enshrined into the Tezos alone.
And so an optimistic roll-up with very cheap fees,
very fast pre-confirmation times by the sequencer.
And that is something that needs
common building blocks that you would have
on any new chains that gets released,
but particularly on those new layer twos
that have tended to mushroom like crazy
as launching your layer two becomes easier
and as the tech underlying the various tech stacks,
like Polygon, CDK, Optimistic tech stack,
and Arbitrum gets refined.
And those three sort of building blocks
that I see every time, four even,
which typically is not centrally mint order book
like the one we're doing,
but it is a simpler version with AMMs.
Think of Uniswap v3, for example,
concentration of liquidity AMMs.
There would be also a money market every single time.
So money market could be either
typically either a compound v2 fork
like if you look at Manta Pacific, at BLAST,
at some of the others that are upcoming this year,
they all have a version of that,
or usually even both of them.
As money markets enable you,
enabling you to deposit some like
and to borrow some stable coins against them.
And then you would also have typically
enabling you to trade derivatives,
which in crypto are very commonly perpetual swaps,
which are essentially futures that don't expire.
And those can be done in several ways.
The way we're doing it currently
with an upcoming protocol on Misalink
to be announced is Oracle based.
So you have Oracle price feeds feeding your poll
and the poll always takes the other side
of the transaction against you.
in a really proper way, which is harder
with central limit order books,
which is something that Hanji's spot
decentralized exchange that we have building
But that is quite complicated
and there's a lot of edge cases in that type of protocol.
And finally, the ones that like most
already existing layer tools have as well,
That's not really my department.
And there's more of a question for arts and culture.
Hello. Hey, sorry about that.
Yeah. So thanks for that, Nico.
We kind of dug into a little bit about
I suppose the future of Plenty
and I suppose the sort of relationship
what I guess we're excited for there on that side.
I suppose from your perspective,
I shot this question across to,
to burn and own from your perspective,
what excites you here about this collaboration?
You touch on several points here,
but personally, from your point of view,
what is the most exciting thing?
And what should the community be most excited about here?
Is this a question for Brent or for me?
Yeah, I think for me, what's interesting.
like at those layer tools that have mushroomed
over the last few months,
typically what you see is very little innovation
at the level of those very basic protocols.
And for example, they would for Compound V2 and that's it.
And literally it would look like copy paste
on every single platform.
If you go right now on blast,
even the latest iteration,
if you look at the winners of the Bing Bang,
they've all like pretty much forked,
you know, Compound V2 or Ava V3 with rare exceptions
and similar on Mentor Pacific.
What Brent and the team are working on
is not only forking Compound V2,
but actually adding stuff to it
in a way that is harder to achieve,
but ultimately more useful
and enables more composability
between the various protocols
that will be there from the get-go only on this link.
For example, Iguana decks,
that spot decks that is being developed,
which is a fork of concentrated liquidity decks
like Univistry has LP tokens, right?
So you've deployed your liquidity
EUSD is a stable kind of ether link,
upcoming announcement as well.
You've deposited in XTD, EUSD
You now are issued with an LP token,
which is a receipt for that liquidity
that you've deployed in that port.
you can then use in DeFi.
And in particular, potentially,
or to any money market on ether link
that is supporting that function
and use the LP token as collateral
to borrow some more stable coins
or some WBTC or some WWEs or anything else.
And that's something that is quite capital efficient
because you're already making money,
hopefully, net of impermanent loss
from your position as a liquidity provider
And you're now able to go a bit further.
I'll buy it at the cost, right?
At the cost because you're going to have to pay
on that stablecoin borrowed position.
And you're going to take those stablecoins
and do something else with them.
because that's something that very few ecosystems have.
I've announced just to have that back in the day
and the newer one called Delta Prime,
which is essentially a prime brokerage type protocol
but completely within the whole garden,
which wouldn't be the case here.
So that's something that I'm quite excited about with Plan
because it's not only a fork,
it's a fork that innovates
and adds functionality to the base,
And other things that later on could happen
potentially is adding a stablecoin
that therefore would be a decentralized stablecoin
That is a work in progress
but that could be something like, you know,
both of the major players on Ethereum
are struggling to get adoption
but we could land on a solution
that actually has product market fit.
For example, if you look right now at Aave.
Aave v3 on Ethereum comes paired
and that Go token is a stablecoin
paired with tracking dollar fiat 121.
And, you know, like that stablecoin
has some links to the rest of the Aave platform.
It hasn't been going too well
in terms of amount outstanding
but that's something that, you know,
people have been talking about quite a bit
over the last six, seven months.
And similarly, from the other side,
there is a DEX on Ethereum called Curve.
Which is relatively well known
for its stablecoin offering
because they use a flat curve
that makes it more capital efficient
but Curve is actually more general
and they also have some non-stable pairs
And they've created that CRV-USD
which, again, doesn't really have
product market fit as of now
and Curve has been really like
seeing its volumes to window and stuff
but could be tweaked in a way
that would make it interesting
to have a decentralized stablecoin
essentially the collateral
being deposited unplanned potentially
whether it's a certain type of collateral
or all the collaterals being eligible
bearing in mind that compound V2
does not let you introduce
isolated ports by default
and therefore we would have to be
in the way this is being implemented.
But that's something that essentially
the team and I have been talking about
which I guess we can announce it at this point,
in the DeFi Catalyst Accelerator
that me and the DeFi team
are running from the 15th of April
with two weeks in person in Singapore.
and something that will be
massively communicating around
and we're quite hopeful will create
some very innovative and very interesting
and for Tezos over the next six, nine months.
So with plenty and planned
taking part in that accelerator,
the whole idea is to tweak things
in a way that can achieve product market fit,
there's going to be a lot of conversations,
a lot of late night drink-slash conversations
and stuff for trying to understand
what is the best way to offer
capital efficiency and interesting functionalities
which should be one criterion.
So ISARLink is rolling out
in beta mode for the mainnet
and the mainnet will be fully, fully
featured by, let's say, mid-May.
So by that time, we really want to have
a minimum of functions available
from the get-go and after that,
everything can always be refined.
But that is the goal at this point.
Sounds like there's a lot coming up.
Lots of development, lots of hard work,
I suppose this is a question for you, Bern.
What can the Tezos community,
because we have a lot of active community members here,
what can the Tezos community do
to kind of support this development
and the wider ecosystem as you see it?
Yeah, give us some insight into that.
Well, definitely try out the products
that we currently already have
and move assets from Ethereum
Try out our vote escrow system.
Also, when we launch our first version
of our platform, give us a lot of feedback.
And the doorbell is ringing again.
And my friends, Bulldogs go crazy
One thing that we try to focus on a lot
We definitely can do a lot with feedback
Also, give feedback on which platforms
and we can try to incorporate
good points from those platforms
and give us a lot of feedback.
As we come to the, I guess,
I want to ask a question.
We're all thinking or looking to ask,
where did you get the idea
It kind of looks like a squid
Is there a story behind that?
The hard-hitting questions there.
I thought the question was going to be,
what's the name of my friends?
What are the names of my friends,
Yeah, that's a good question, actually.
We'll go with the squid first.
How did we come up with the squid?
and it happened, I guess,
a year, a year and a half.
We had these design sessions
we had where we should be going
and sort of like a vision quest
And it is not supposed to be
It's supposed to basically
share three fundamental principles
we were building plenty V2.
V2 is more like a voted-as-scroll system
inspired from Solid League.
I'm giving you this hand.
There are three core principles
during the design session,
everyone saw something different
and apparently that's a good thing
if everybody sees something different in it.
It's not a super exciting story,
but that's why we went with this logo.
I definitely see either a squid
and it could be almost anything.
But it is a really cool logo,
and you forgot to tell us the names
of your two French Bulldogs.
Shout-out to Herman and Yopi.
I guess we're closing out this space.
Are there any closing comments
you guys would like to make
anyone who listens to this afterwards,
and this is back to recording,
where should they check out next,
or just anything you'd like to sort of close with?
Give our current platforms a try.
Let us know what you like,
and especially what you don't like about them.
which platforms on EVM you really like,
which apps and which platforms
do you like the UI, UX of.
Join our Discord and engage with us,
we are making these products for you guys.
we would love to work side-by-side
in the next couple of months
to make the best possible defile
Perfect. How about you, Juan?
We are actively brainstorming,
working, thinking about ideas
the next phase of our roadmap
that is landing platform on ether link.
But I would also encourage everyone to,
there's a lot of defile that already exist on this.
And you can try out the Ethereum to the spread.
You can feel free to pitch some stuff,
There are some good platforms,
which are also quite decent.
There's liquidity baking,
up to more than 2% on your Bitcoins.
It's not quite capital efficient
or as liquid as we would want it to be,
but if you give it a try,
these are pretty cool products
and you can get a hang of it.
And I've seen usually, you know,
once you get a hang of Kitezo's L1,
maybe you already know EBM,
but if you also get a hang of L1,
it's pretty hard to leave
because it's constantly improving L1
And we hope to bring you the full suite of products
in our portfolio very soon.
We already have quite a lot of products on L1
and now we look forward to our L2 quest.
That's the Ethereum roll-up quest.
Any closing comments for the community?
So there's a few things that for people
who would start building on ether link right now,
whether they're historically TESOS builders,
whether they're existing LVM builders
and other LVM-compatible chains and so on,
that are like finally being around out,
and we'll make it literally plug and play
One of those things is that the various partners
be it Oracle price feeds like Redstone
or subgraph providers like Zograf and SubSquid
are now fully compatible.
which deploys our endpoint V2 on the ether link testnet
and we'll do the same as soon as the mainnet launches.
And the wrapped-asset bridge is almost ready
So those things are kind of ready to go.
The gas model has also become more predictable
and the latest update will be pushed
to the testnet relatively soon.
So it's a good time to finally, right now,
give it a shot in a way that won't be rocket science
and will literally correspond to your experience
if you've tried arbitrary one before
or mainnet or BSC or base.
Now, in terms of what, you know,
exciting things are coming up specifically
with the finance sunshine angle on ether link,
I can talk about like, you know,
plan is obviously a big one.
And it's actually like, you know,
many markets on newer EVMs, they're enablers.
They in and of itself are interesting.
In and of themselves are interesting.
they make a lot more things possible.
You want to LP in an EUSD pair
You don't want to sell your EUS.
You can borrow the EUSD, the EUSD stablecoins
and then you can LP with both.
And then it's up to you to figure out
whether the calculation makes sense or not
based on how much LP fees you're expecting
to gather, net of income and loss
and net of the fees you're going to pay
to borrow the stablecoins to begin with.
And we're actually going to make you
Obviously, they are bread and butter
But we might have newer existing community members
of Tezos who are less well versed in DeFi,
specifically because until very recently
with Test Fin, we did not have a money market
and essentially a borrow and lend platform
because those things can be quite complex
and it could be interesting to give them a leg up
in describing in relatively simple terms
taking our time what the base building blocks
of DeFi are, how they work,
and how they can take advantage of them
to do whatever they desire on the newest protocols
All the existing ones on Tezos,
because now that we have Test Fin,
there's more plays available than what we used to have.
So yeah, pretty exciting.
And we're hoping that by the next community call
with you, Jeff, probably,
we're going to have actual protocols to demonstrate,
which means that we could also post a video on YouTube
and people could be able to follow what we're talking about
with the screen being recorded at the same time.
I'm looking forward to doing those sorts of calls,
I'd like to thank you all for joining.
I'd like to thank our guests over from Plenty.
I left a comment underneath this space.
I've tagged them, so please follow them.
Check everything they've got going on,
and yeah, let's support them.
We will have more calls coming for you very, very soon.
Yeah, stay safe and take care, everyone.