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The Monthly DeFi Space NEAR’s 10mil Orderbook Fund: Who, How and Why?
Recorded: Dec. 2, 2022 Duration: 1:07:40Space Recording
Full Transcription
Hi, hello.
Can people hear me?
Okay, cool.
So welcome to the monthly DeFi space.
Today is we're doing the December DeFi space and we're actually bringing back some of the same guests from the November space when we did an order book special.
But this time we're under drastically different circumstances. So very interestingly, order books are now more relevant today than compared to the last time we spoke.
Today we have three main order book or cloud projects on NIR, orderly, spin, and tonic. And we also have Kendall from Proximity who together launched a $10 million fund dedicated to decentralized order book solutions on NIR. And we will get into the details of why, who, and how. So if you're a builder and wanted to know more about how this fund may apply to you, this is your space.
And just a quick PSA that the spin Freaky Elves NFT giveaway winner will be announced at the end. So stay tuned.
Let's do a round of introductions. Let's do a round of introductions. I want to hear from everyone about who you are, what you do, and if you can give a brief description of your project. Since I see tonic first. Marco, do you want to start off?
Hey, can you hear me?
Yeah.
Great. I'm Marco. I'm the co-founder of tonic. We're the first open source order book decks on NIR. And I'm a software developer, but I split my time between writing software and doing business development for tonic.
Arjun or Ivan, Hippo, anyone who wants to go?
Sure, I can go first. I'm Ivan. I'm on the business side of spin. We are a decentralized order book exchange on NIR featuring perpetuals and options.
Hi, everyone. I'm Arjun. Again, I'm on the business side over at orderly network. Orderly is a central limit order book trading infrastructure looking to provide key middleware for DeFi protocols on NIR.
Hey, everybody. I'm Hippo from Sellfy. And Sellfy is a decentralized liquidity provider protocol that helps everybody to be the market maker on order book decks.
Hey, everyone. My name is Kendall. I'm one of the co-founders of Proximity. And we basically just support talented DeFi projects and founders building on NIR, like the ones that we have here today.
Perfect. Well, let's get into the why part of the $10 million order book fund.
So what brings us here today, I think, is obviously the downfall of FTX.
And I think both on the media side and CT, we've seen a narrative form afterwards about how the failure of FTX did not necessarily mean the failure of crypto and the need for us to return to our roots, which is decentralization.
And then for us, very relevantly, this makes a strong case for DeFi. The fund, as a response to the situation, seems to reflect this very conviction.
So Kendall, I want to ask you from the Proximity perspective, could you give us an introduction to the fund?
And maybe we could kind of start out by giving your thoughts on what you think is the main lesson learned from FTX and how do order books fit into this picture, which gave birth to this fund consequently?
Sure thing. Yeah, I mean, I think one of the there are a lot of takeaways from what's been happening with FTX and it's still likely to happen.
But I think one of the major ones and really one of the things that crypto was kind of created in order to address is around transparency.
You know, we still don't actually know what exactly happened to user funds or what like failures at FTX, you know, led to, I guess, a misuse or a loss of user funds.
And I think what's, you know, really elegant about the solutions that we have here today, like with, you know, the three different order book teams and cell five building on top of them, is that this this problem is removed.
You know, if you're using if you're using if you're using one of these order book solutions or any any decent, well, ideally, any properly, any truly decentralized exchange, then you can see what one you know for sure how your funds are being used.
So that's very transparent to you. And most importantly, your funds really shouldn't be being used in unless you've actively, you know, delegated them to be used in some way.
So that that's a huge advantage, you know, this idea of like a non custodial nature.
And even when your funds are custody by a smart contract, ultimately, they reside, they reside with you, or at least the control over them resides with you.
And and if it doesn't, you know, it's done in a completely transparent way where you're able to see exactly what it is that's happening.
So I think, you know, now more than ever, especially given that most of these exchanges that have had these issues are designed to trade crypto assets anyway, you know, it's become even more apparent that the right way for this to be done, at least for, you know, for a larger, I think, segment of the population than previously thought maybe was necessary, should be done on decentralized exchanges.
And I think order books in particular, there's a reason that, you know, the vast majority of the world's assets, or at least like the world's liquid assets, you know, trade on order books, and it's because they are just way more efficient for price discovery.
So AMMs are definitely going to have their place in the world, they're not going anywhere. And I think they're an important part of, you know, of the decentralized exchange landscape. But you know, we're extremely, extremely optimistic about the potential for, for order books to, you know, to really be where the bulk of this trading happens.
And, you know, we're fortunate on their ecosystem, to have three extremely talented base layer projects, and, and to have, you know, very, like, continually more projects building on top of them, such as cell buy. And so the, you know, the launch of the order book fund, you know, really, the point of it is just to provide support for the many talented teams out there that are building on order books, and, and also just to signal to teams that are really considering leveraging order book infrastructure, that, that there are resources available to them.
And so the way the fund has been designed is, you know, we, it's basically a joint effort between proximity, you know, which, which, you know, we do, we do invest in teams, we do provide grants, we do provide a bunch of different other resources, along with the orderly tonic and spin teams, who also be providing similar resources, specifically when, you know, teams are interacting with with their protocols. So, yeah, I mean, if anyone out there is listening, and, you know, what we just described might, might, you know,
point to you, please don't hesitate to, you know, reach out to us personally, or to apply through our, you can go to proximity.dev, and you can find links to the, to the post there, or you can, you can read our blog post and see the link for the specific order book, kind of, I guess, not really application form, or just kind of like a reach out form, just to get in touch with us and let us know what it is you're going.
Yeah, I think that provides a really good framework. So, on the one hand, what people want, they like using our order book based trading protocols, or this infrastructure, what people need, as the FTX fallout has very much highlighted, is a decentralized version of this, where transparency and the non-custodial form of asset holding is, is by default.
From the project perspective, I'd also love to hear what, from your perspective, or the main takeaways from the FTX fallout, how decentralization maybe can, if you agree with the thesis, how decentralization can fix some of these problems, and what this fund signifies for you.
So, if any of the projects, Tonic, Orderly, or Spin, or Cellify, want to go ahead, please start.
I'm happy to jump in. I think there are a few takeaways, and I think Kendall referenced them really clearly as well, but you can see that there's a clear need for self-custody, right, and or creating more options to showcase greater transparency and drive trust towards users.
I think that's pretty much the bottom line, in terms of where everyone feels right now.
I think what the fund signifies, I think it signifies a few different things, but like, I think it signifies the need to support builders to be able to do it.
It's a clear showcase to the rest of the ecosystem, saying that we understand what's happened, we understand the need for change, we understand the need for greater transparency, but we're all here together today to be able to help support it and facilitate it.
I think one piece that is, especially like, the verbiage around the word fund, it's very, you know, we highlight a monetary figure, and it's very easy to focus on that.
I think some things that the fund also represents is, between all of the projects on the call today, there's a wealth of engineering support, business resources, you know, everything that we're doing in the ecosystem is more about collaboration than competition.
I think that's a really large, important headline for me.
Beautiful.
Does anyone else want to add something of takeaways from your perspective, Marco, even Hippo?
Yeah, I think what we've learned starting all the way, going back to Mt. Gox, and we keep seeing the same story over and over, over the years in crypto, is that, you know, we can't just build platforms that are relying on trust to facilitate decentralized, trustless networks.
We need to go build the trading infrastructure, you know, the financial infrastructure in a decentralized way so we don't have to keep relying on trust and seeing this story play out over and over again.
Yeah, just want to add a little bit on this, that what I think is most important on this part is transparency, that even we know there are also some risks with a decentralized solution, but all the risk is just visible to everybody, and it can be diminished in way in advance.
And nobody can get more access than everybody else, and every user on the blockchain is fair to get access to the assets and to the protocol.
So, and I think that's a very important part.
Well, we believe that decentralization is key to personal freedom.
So, if you want to be in control of your assets, you will have to use decentralized solutions in the future.
And I think that centralization of exchanges was mainly necessary because there was not enough sophisticated decentralized technology to enable high-performance products like exchanges.
But now, with more performant blockchains like Nier, it is possible.
It's still very hard to build because on one side you have the highest risk in decentralized products is security.
So, the biggest breaches and hacks were happening on decentralized exchanges because of hacks, not because of someone stealing your money.
And on the centralized side, obviously, way more risk because it's not transparent.
You don't just simply have control of your assets.
And I think the example of FTXRO is just how far you can risk it to lose everything.
And I think now people are getting more and more aware of that risk and will search for alternatives where they are in control of their digital assets.
So, if I quickly summarize, it seems like this fund is a collective effort on the one hand to realize the vision that we have for DeFi, which is that, you know, on the one hand, you have to have institutions or infrastructure, which is by default transparent, which gives back the freedom and autonomy to the users themselves.
And then also a show of support, I guess, on the one hand, that we want to support builders who are making an effort into this direction and we want to head into this meaningful effort together.
So, I think that's a great way to move into kind of asking the who and the what and the how of the fund.
So, Kendall, I want to ask, you mentioned this is a joint effort of $10 million and you're going to make, you're making a call for builders to come build on near using these existing orderable infrastructure or to kind of signal to projects that are already considering to make the final decision.
I want to ask a little bit more because people have been curious who the fund is for and who are you looking for in terms of the ideal candidate.
Could you kind of give us an idea of what is it that projects could build or should build and maybe some of the characteristics that you're looking for in the team?
Absolutely. So, definitely, I think an incentive around the timing of the fund came very much in the wake of FTX and how there's that series of events had broad impact across the space and on many very talented projects in the space.
So, certainly, we are very interested in working with projects that may have been directly or indirectly affected.
I guess probably all of us are indirectly affected by that and maybe are looking for basically different ways that they can reach a different audience in the space or leverage a different type of infrastructure in the space.
So, certainly, if you're an existing project and you're interested in leveraging these new types of order books, then we absolutely encourage you to apply.
But that being said, I mean, this space, there isn't any sort of like one size fit or like perfect size here when it comes to or even perfect stage of project here.
I think we very much do want to encourage projects that are much newer to apply as well, just as much as we encourage projects that are already existing and maybe already have user base to apply.
And, you know, I think that the options that will be available to you will very much just kind of scale based on where you are.
But we love to work with and do work with projects of all different types.
And I think that goes as well for the order book teams that we have here today.
As far as like what, you know, examples of what we might like to see.
So, I think there's a few different categories here.
One category is building products so that sort of leverage order books.
I mean, if you think about like order books are useful for trading a wide variety of projects, you know, everything from like spot, you know, just trading one asset for another to, you know, more complex derivative type of products.
I think the perpetual soft is a really, you know, popular one.
Like spin already has that live on the platform.
And I think that, you know, orderly tonic and others will have similar products live pretty shortly as well.
You know, options are another one that another complex derivative product that can, you know, blends really well to an order book.
And even things like lending.
I mean, you know, lending and borrowing, like placing, you know, like certain types of durations and just the value that like what are you willing to accept for a specific loan.
Like that's another type of thing that can be built using an order book.
Like, and then, you know, another category I think is really important and Solfy is a really good, really good example of this is, you know, products that make it easier to use order books in a certain way.
So like Solfy in particular, you know, makes it easier to act as a market maker on exchanges.
And that's a really important category.
So I think, yeah, those are probably two of the major ones.
And I guess the third baser one would be, you know, different types of order book infrastructure itself.
All three categories are interesting.
I think particularly the first two, just because we do have, you know, the very talented teams here who are building kind of the base layer infrastructure itself.
And we're really excited to see, you know, the possibilities of the different types of products that can both make them easier to use and then just leverage them and let users trade different types of assets.
Yeah, that's a really helpful rundown of potential projects that people could think of when they apply.
Do they have to necessarily build on existing infrastructure like Orderly, Tonic, and Spin?
I know it's a joint venture, so I would imagine that would be ideal.
But what if a project says, hey, I have my own order book solution?
Is that something that they could work with for this fund?
Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, RG made a really good point here that I think one really important aspect of this fund is that it is signaling sort of a collaboration.
And that collaboration would definitely be open to, you know, different types of approaches.
I think that there's a lot of ways to do this.
You know, we do want to, I think we do want to work together to just create, you know, the most liquid sort of ecosystem that we can when it comes to these different financial products.
But, you know, absolutely, I think that there are opportunities, you know, to build different types of order books.
I'd say that, like, if you are going, if you are doing that, very much think about what exactly it is that your solution will bring to the space and specifically the near ecosystem that doesn't exist yet that maybe these others are not.
And if that is something that's a little bit difficult to come by, then maybe it's instead worth thinking about how you can leverage sort of these existing products.
Very much, this is a time for collaboration rather than competition.
But, yeah, I mean, it goes without saying, I think that, like, very much this fund is open-ended.
I think there are a lot of projects that can qualify.
But the main thing you need to be doing is just solving problems for users.
That's the core of this.
Yeah, 100%.
That's something to keep in mind.
And with regards to support that is coming through this program, I know that there is a number attached to the fund.
But is there other support that projects can expect from Proximity, for instance, other than the financial?
I would say the majority of the support that we like to provide is outside of that.
And I think many teams would probably say that that's actually where they got the most value.
You know, look, we like to work with teams in a variety of different ways.
I think the main focus is just what you need help with, you know, whether it's, like, we're happy to talk through, you know, your go-to-market strategy.
We're happy to, you know, make as many interests as we can.
We're happy to dive really deep into both your code base or just kind of, like, the higher-level architecture.
And most importantly, we're happy to introduce you to the really talented folks that we have here on the call today,
who I think can provide even better support in certain ways or maybe even more specific support.
So, yeah, look, I mean, we're here to support founders in whatever way they need help with.
So there's not really a, I mean, outside of certain, you know, constraints, like legal and otherwise, you know, really, like, we're here to do what needs to be done.
Okay, that's really great to hear.
So this is a promise, I think, for the proximity side that if you are working with them, that you will be getting a full-stack service, not just a financial, but advisory, you know, technical support, go-to-market, and so on.
Let's take a, I would love to hear from the projects themselves because you're also coming into the fund and saying, hey, projects come build on top of us.
I want to hear from you guys, what kinds of solutions are you providing, and how would you differentiate yourself from the other two for builders considering to apply?
So basically, show your project and tell us a little bit more about yourselves.
Whoever wants to go first, please go ahead.
I was trying to be, I was trying to be really kind and let others go, but nobody really jumped in first, so you have to excuse me.
So I'll jump in.
I'll try and keep it snappy and let Tonic and Spin jump in after.
So I'll try and answer your questions in the order as well, Rhonda Jack.
So firstly, Orderly has no front end, unlike the rest of our partners.
We're really focused on the middleware and infrastructure narrative and ensuring that we can improve and refine our offering as best as possible so that all the builders on top of Orderly have to do is really focus on user experience and the front end side of things, right?
User flow, experience, et cetera.
Secondly, in terms of other core differentiations, I'm not entirely up to date with the different intricacies of Spin and Tonic and what they're building out, but I do know that the current offering is fully on-chain, whilst Orderly isn't.
So it's probably an important topic to address with a few different directions that we're exploring, but for one of us, one of the key pieces, and I think at Dishonored Spaces last week, we keep talking about the importance to move from Seafire to DeFi or what that transition looks like.
And myself and Ivan have had countless conversations and coffees talking about this, of what should be on-chain, what shouldn't be off-chain, and the answer is right now, none of us know, and how do we drive user adoption into DeFi with that type, you know, like, how do we give that Seafire experience with the transparency of decentralization is really key.
So, as an example, we're going to release version 2 of Orderly at some point soon, if you want some alpha, and the purpose is to kind of, like, tackle this decentralization finality compromise, if you will.
Well, we have off-chain computation, but that's handled by an operator network, and that operator in, like, yeah, so we have off-chain computation that's handled by an operator network in which validators need to secure an off-chain order book and matching engine.
So you can think of it like the operator network as a mini-layer 2, whose sole purpose is to verify the validity of the orders and process the orders, send them back to the main layer 1.
So we're able to have fully on-chain custody settlement and on-chain order flow, but an off-chain order book and matching engine to match Seafire standards, but is sufficiently decentralized by this validator network as well.
I think that's a core part that differentiates us from the others.
That doesn't mean one is better than the other.
Like I said, myself and Yvonne have had countless conversations regarding this, is let's see what users want to do.
And this is the purpose of the fund, right?
Like, we're all here together to collaborate to find out what the right solution is for the user.
Right.
So, Arjun, would it be correct if I summarize what you're saying is that with, you know, decentralized order books, you have to make certain choices when it comes to, you know, for instance, the order book or the matchmaking engine.
If it's on-chain, there may be certain compromises with regards to, you know, speed or liquidity or efficiency.
And then if you take things off-chain, you also lose some of the, you may potentially lose some of the merits of decentralization when it comes to transparency, you know, having all of the data on-chain and so on.
And you're saying that with orderly, your approach is a little bit different because you have the matchmaking engine off-chain and the rest of the flow on-chain.
Would that be correct?
That's completely correct.
So, we have like a, so we have this decentralized operator networks and each validator needs to work together to be able to secure the off-chain order book and matching engine.
So, operators ensure each order is sent and processed.
They keep each other in check.
They operate actively, publicly, monitorable.
Almost, if you will, like, I don't know if this is the correct type of terminology, but like, the matching engine is sufficiently decentralized.
All right.
Well, this is the kind of hybrid angle that orderly is taking.
We'd love to also hear from Tonic and Spin to hear about the kind of solutions and the roads that you are taking.
Yeah, I can jump in.
To Arjun's point, there is a spectrum here.
Like, even the most decentralized projects may have like some, maybe not centralized component, but at least a group of people who are, you know, strongly influencing the project.
But I think on that spectrum, right now, Tonic, we're taking, you know, the more hardcore decentralization approach.
Everything we have is open source.
We have, we do everything off-chain, on-chain, sorry.
We have no off-chain component.
So, if any projects want to build a front end, you can just go rip ours at github.com slash tonic dash foundation.
So, yeah, that's the approach we're taking as far as our, as the technical side goes.
As far as what we offer to the fund, you know, we are also contributing on the financial side, but more importantly, like, business and technical support as well.
We're pretty involved on the technical side.
Our team, all but one of us are developers, so we're happy to be pretty hands-on during the integration process.
It's your turn, Spin.
Hey, my network is kind of not registering this.
Can I leave and quickly jump back?
Sure.
Take your time.
Take your time.
While we wait for Ivan to come back, maybe we could still talk about Orderly and Tonic a little bit more.
I do think all the builders that may be listening to this space would also be curious about what the development statuses look like.
So, let's say I'm trying to jump in and build on top of Orderly, Spin or Tonic.
I would also love to know how far you guys come and where I can come in.
So, if you guys can tell us a little bit more about that, we'd love to hear it.
I think Hippo would have the best perspective here because he's the one who's actually come in, built on top of the Orderly book so far on Nier.
So, I think, Hippo, do you have any thoughts?
Yeah, I think going fully open source is very helpful to third-party integrations.
And we've been working with different types of projects.
Partly, some of them have a hybrid solution like the on-chain, off-chain.
And some of the projects are half the open source or even 100% closed source.
And to be honest, I'm working with Tonic Dex.
It's a very enjoyable process because, you know, every time we came across a technical issue,
we can just jump into the source code and find our solutions.
solutions and, yeah, and the dev team there is very supportive and have a very swift response.
Thank you, Hippo.
And now that we have Ivan back, do you want to elaborate a little bit about what this approach that Spin is taking in terms of order book solutions
and what makes you a little bit different from the other two?
Yeah, thank you.
I think the main differentiator here is tech.
So, it's not really trivial to build a decentralized order book.
So, you have to have a lot of expertise in optimizing code because the nature of blockchains is that you want to fit in as little,
basically, data size of code as possible.
So, that's why Rust is actually a really good language to do so.
And so, we have pretty good expertise in optimizing.
And we have been able to bundle, basically, order book perps and options into one smart contract on four megabytes, even a bit less on Nier.
So, the options will be live.
They're actually ready, but the front end is just lagging behind.
So, I think in this month, we will launch the options as well.
And I think that's the main differentiation point because here, a user can basically have all the three primitives he would need to invest and hedge risk.
So, you have futures in terms of perpetuals, you have options, and you have the spot market.
In terms of performance, this can further be optimized with shards.
So, I think the unique sharding structure of Nier allows us to use a specialized sharding solution, which is a sidechain on Nier,
basically a private sharding solution called Calimero, which will further optimize our speed and throughput.
And I think this is kind of the way forward.
So, you will have to build products which are both super high in throughput, but also fully decentralized.
And we are, I think we are currently here.
So, it's just about executing on tech.
And I think later on, it will be also highly relevant to utilize bridges so that users not just from Nier can interact with the smart contract,
but users from every blockchain in the world.
This is kind of what we are up to.
So, pretty easy.
So, you have everything you need to trade, everything decentralized, running on Nier, but accessible for everyone from every chain.
So, for spin, I guess the unique angle would be that, first of all, you're putting everything on chain, just like Tonic.
I guess the trade-off with optimization in terms of the performance you are solving through a private shard solution working with Calimero.
And then, with regards to the development status, you're saying the spot is live, perps are live, and also options is coming very soon.
For orderly, could you also tell us a little bit about your development status as well for any of the builders interested?
Sure, of course.
So, we've been live on mainnet for around about five weeks now.
We will be moving very closely into testnet on perps, mainnet not too shortly after that.
As I mentioned in my last answer as well is solving the decentralized finality compromise.
So, orderly v2 is not far away as well.
We'll be able to share a lot more details from there.
Right now, in terms of developers that are building onto it, right now we have five different projects that are building on top of orderly.
We've announced one of those.
One of those is Refinance that we announced on a space previously with them.
We have four others that will have full builds out and ready probably by the end of this year, the early part of next year.
So, and that obviously aligns with our launch of futures as well.
Brilliant.
Marco, was there anything you wanted to add additionally about the development status of Tonic?
Yeah, so we've had perps on testnet.
Our competition was wrapped up on Monday.
We are taking tons of user feedback we received during the competition and improving both the UI and making optimizations to the contract.
And we should get to mainnet there pretty soon.
And to Yvonne's point, definitely shaving off bytes on your near contract helps a lot.
I think that's like something that's pretty different as far as near development and how much of a difference it makes.
So, for any fairly new devs to the ecosystem, there's a lot of alpha in that statement.
All right.
So, we talked a little bit about the unique approaches each of us are taking for the order book solutions.
Also talked about the development status.
Let's get into the actual call to action with regards to the $10 million order book program that we're all participating in.
What kind of projects do you want to see build on your platform?
And if you want to give builders ideas about what they could do, this would be the time.
So, maybe we'll start with Yvonne this time.
I think for us, the current status is we are aiming to get as many users as possible and also as many projects involved with our project as possible.
So, we are trying to have good relationships with, first, like our goal is to have very good relationships with everyone who is on Nier.
Now, utilizing this fund and this initiative with proximity, we want to also expand these partnerships with projects not building on Nier.
So, anyone who is on Solana, Avalanche, maybe also on the newer chains like Aptos and maybe also on Sui and maybe EVM-based chains.
So, basically, everyone is kind of invited to talk to us and find common solutions because I think everyone here is kind of – we are building, like, the same thing.
We are, like, in the pretty early stages of the whole space.
And I think it will become more and more obvious the more matured the inter-chain technology becomes.
So, we will go back from these, I think, paradigms of having, like, one ecosystem and then the other, like, siloed ecosystem.
I think we all should work kind of – strive to work kind of together.
And I think that's the ultimate decentralization.
If a user can basically utilize cross-network any project, so if I want to use, let's say, orderly-based projects or Tonic, but I'm on, I don't know, Avalanche, I should be able to do so.
And I think that's kind of where we want to set a pretty big focus on.
So, having Nier as our base, having Nier as a very decent technology, maybe the fastest in the space, which is, like, enough decentralized, but also allowing for anyone kind of to work with us and getting users and projects from other chains to interact with us, but also with Tonic and with Orderly, we are here.
Like, if someone can profit more from working for Orderly, we're more than happy to send them in Arjun's direction.
And also with Tonic, like, if someone is more, like, interested in working with them, we, like, we want to be super open here and want to open source everything also in the future.
So, like, Spin is not meant to be a centralized company in the, like, way where we are kind of the owners of Spin.
Spin should become, like, common good in a few – maybe, like, in a year or maybe a few months so everyone knows the code and everyone can utilize the tech and build up on it.
I love it.
That's a very, I would say, Taoist approach to building an Orderbook deck.
And the call to action goes out to anyone and everyone, so that's really easy enough.
Marco, would you have a specific call to action, specific types of projects you're looking for?
We're casting a pretty wide net, I think, right now.
So, you know, the most important metric for me is actually just getting the total number of users into the Nier space higher because there's, you know, only, I think, a certain size pie at the moment with just the market conditions and Nier being an all-for-one.
Whatever we can do to bring more users onto the platform is great.
There's only so many people who are, like, very active traders themselves.
So, building anything that lets them be passive participants.
I think Sellfy is a good example.
I've had one or two other projects reach out with, like, passive investment products built on top of Orderbooks, be something we're interested in.
I think there's other less conventional financial product stuff that can use an Orderbook, too.
I had one game reach out, you know, where the game contract itself would, like, sell tokens, but they wanted the ability to place limit orders, which is pretty neat.
Not, you know, what I originally expected from something like this, but I like the idea.
I'm sure plenty of there'll be other similar projects.
So, we're, yeah, pretty open-minded.
Okay, but in general, projects that can bring mass appeal, whether they're financial, maybe even in the category of passive investment, or even outside of the immediately financial products, like, you can gain fun.
So, that's very interesting.
Arjun, what would you say in terms of your call to action?
So, I get the harder job going third to Marco and Nivan here.
Like, these guys are spot on.
Like, I echo everything that they say.
One thing I'd love to see is more or a bigger, wider Orderbook Perps platform in the ecosystem.
We hear about all these different platforms on these different blockchains.
I'd love to see that come over.
I'd love to see that narrative poured over into the NIR ecosystem, especially off the back of the technology of NIR directly.
Really, really strong Perp adoption is a personal ambition of mine.
I'd love to see larger retail-facing dApps.
To Marco's point, there's a small sample size in it.
Like, anything that can increase the adoption of active users, but at the same time increase the education of YNIR is also really important to me.
So, anything that can facilitate the adoption for growth is key to me.
But, yeah, Perps are definitely one I'd love to see.
Right, so Perps adoption and then mass adoption in general.
We, Tonic, with Marco, we mentioned a little bit about how CellFi is a great example of the kind of project that the fund could support, the kind of projects that we could be looking for.
Hippo, if you are able, could you give us a higher-level overview of what CellFi is building and what are you bringing to the Orderbook scene on NIR?
Cool.
CellFi is a decentralized liquidity provider protocol for Orderbook decks.
And, in a nutshell, it is more like an LP token for an AMM decks.
And the new generation of Orderbook decks is only made available on high-performance layer 1s.
And it is more capital efficiency and has more flexibility in terms of price discovery.
However, we see that it makes it harder for retail users and non-professionals to provide liquidity to them.
For traditional pool-based AMM, providing liquidity is nothing more than just putting paired tokens into those pools.
Yet, for Orderbook decks, if you want to be the market maker, you have to place limit orders, cancel them, or add the orders according to the price change on the outside wall and the actual trading dynamics within the decks.
So, you have to decide the order's size and price within milliseconds, which is impossible for manual operations.
So, this requires a full-featured trading infrastructure and a solid knowledge of DeFi and blockchain if you want to be the market maker.
As well, you have to know a lot of trading strategies.
So, these requirements will just prevent most users from being a market maker on Orderbook decks.
But, here at CellFi, we just endeavor to fill in this gap between the retail users and the more advanced decks.
That we will take care of all the infrastructure covering from blockchain accessibility to DEX integration and also to the trading strategy.
So, retail users can just put their money into CellFi's contract and enjoy the market making strategy yield on all of those DEXs we support.
So, basically, we just want to bring two things to NearEco.
The one thing is everybody can, every user can get access to being the market maker.
And the second part is we want to bring some native yield farm for all the users on NearEco.
Yeah, that's super interesting.
I love the vision that you are empowering users, whether they're familiar with Orderbook decks or sophisticated or not,
to be able to leverage some of the strategies and efficiency that market makers or high-volume traders enjoy.
So, I love this vision.
Could you tell us a little bit more also about how it works?
And I would also love to hear about how the yield is generated and what kind of fee structure are we looking at?
Cool, cool.
Actually, we are generating some native yield out of the price changes throughout the whole crypto industry.
And the yield comes from three ways.
The first is the trading strategy yield.
And the second is DEX trading reward.
And the third is some extra incentive.
So, let me elaborate on that.
That cell-fi is among the very first protocols that brings high-frequency trading to the DeFi world.
And theoretically, we have a trading engine that supports a bunch of trading and market-making strategies.
And at this very moment, we are featuring grid strategy, which is a very stable and straightforward strategy
that has a mass adoption throughout the world.
And we are generating some native trading yield from price changing, and we are buying low, selling high.
And that's the first part of the grid strategy itself.
And the second part is that we will help users collect DEX trading reward,
usually consisting of market maker, the maker order rebates, and some trading incentives.
Because we are trading using a strategy that runs 7x24.
So, we are generating a lot of trading volume that will collect a big sum of trading reward for the users.
And the third part is that now that we have a LP token minted to the liquidity provider,
we can work together with DAXs and the token issuers to further incentivize those users.
We are actually working on this part.
And this is pretty much like Uniswap's LP token staking reward.
You can get extra incentive from holding that LP token.
And for the fee structure, we are actually not charging any fees in the process of trading.
And actually, we are sending 100% of what we get from the DAX rebate to our end user.
And we are only taking a performance fee after the user's net positive yield.
And what's more is that we are taking all risks into consideration, including some possible impermanent loss.
So, we have a very aligned interest with our users and all the retail users across the ecosystem.
Okay, that's super interesting.
I also want to hear a little bit more because we mentioned throughout the space your relationship with Tonic.
I want to know a little bit more about how CellFi is leveraging the existing orderable infrastructure on NIR.
And is it primarily Tonic?
Is it limited to it?
Or are you looking to expand?
Would love to know more.
Cool, cool.
So, yeah, after we came to NIR ecosystem, we have to do some technical review of all these DAXs.
And technically speaking, all the three DAXs and also include some centralized liquidity, AMM, that all falls in our range, that our trading engine can work with all these DAXs.
And these DAXs is a full-featured orderable DAXs and support, technically speaking, support exactly the same operations as a centralized exchange does.
So, we think it's very mature and we can build what we have built elsewhere and we can build our full-featured trading bot here.
And, you know, as our technical structure just consists of two parts.
The first part is the on-chain contract and the second part is a signal provider.
And we just have to write a NIR contract to store the user's asset and interact with all these DAXs.
And then we just chain that thing up with our signal provider.
And we can, the signal provider part remains the same.
And, yeah, that's how we integrate with all these DAXs.
Okay. Well, speaking of, you mentioned in this tip of your answer that you migrated to NIR, I want to ask, and I will open this question up to the rest of the projects as well.
So, what makes NIR suitable to become potentially leading orderable chain because this is what the premise of the fund is all based upon?
Hippo, from your experience, how do you find building orderable solutions on top of NIR?
Cool, cool.
Actually, one of the spirit we feature in crypto industry is freedom and permissionless.
So, actually, every layer one with high performance will support our protocol.
And we actually did some literature review of all the layer ones before we actually carry out our project.
And the first thing is we're just valuing two things.
The first one is the blockchain performance and what is the layer one's block time and what's the average confirmation time in practice.
And, you know, we are featuring high frequency trading and you can't look at carrying out high frequency trading in a blockchain that has a confirmation time of half a minute.
And the second thing we think is even more important is that whether the ecosystem is mature.
You know, we are not a something like a layer one protocol on a blockchain.
We have to build upon other DEXs as our trading venues.
So, we just want to build our protocol on a, firstly speaking, battle-proven tech stack.
And secondly, we just want to find some very experienced builders to work with.
We all know that DeFi is featured with composability, but composing protocols together would just set an even higher standard for all the developers and for all the protocols.
You know, while integrating with DEXs as a third-party protocol, we would run into some more practical issues that no one could just think of when they are only taking the end-user interaction into consideration.
And sometimes we might even commit some new PRs to other protocols.
And the excitement of building on here, apart from the technical thing, is that we got very sweet response from all our partners.
Actually, we have some technical overlap with all these DEXs and also some other protocols that's not here today.
And we're just thrilled to find everybody's being very responsive and everybody's doing a swift job.
And, yeah, that's, I think, the most exciting thing I find beside the technique itself.
Okay, so from Hippo's point of view, for CellFi at least, NEAR makes it a suitable place for what they're building because it has the performance.
It meets the performance metrics, especially in terms of finality, which is needed for high-frequency trading.
And also, it comes with a mature ecosystem that is potentially very composable with what CellFi is building.
I want to open it up to everyone else here and ask you guys what makes NEAR suitable to be the leading order book chain.
And I would also love to hear, because we're talking two builders that we're calling for this program,
is there a reason a potential project should look at NEAR versus building their own L1,
as we have seen some other order book DEXs do recently, versus building on an L2 or roll-up on Ethereum?
Whoever feels comfortable, please go ahead.
I can start.
I think the reason, what brought us to NEAR was the developer experience.
I just genuinely like writing NEAR contracts more than Solidity or any of the other alternatives.
I think the other aspect is performance.
To Hippo's point, there's only the handful of chains, I think, that could really support something like this.
So when you take the combination of those two things, like NEAR was the natural choice for us, at least as a team.
To your other question, as far as, you know, why not build your own L1?
Why not go build your own L2?
I think that's like, it's a very large technical lift to go and do that.
Like, even we've seen on NEAR, right?
Even if you have a very large, well-financed team with tons of, like, skilled developers,
it takes a long time to build an ecosystem from scratch.
Even if it's, like, a focused one, like, for an L1, not only do you have to make the core L1, like, very good.
And there's tons of stuff.
If you're building your order book, you have to take into account.
But then on top of that, all the logic that you need to just go and create, like, a functional blockchain, that's a huge lift.
I think, same to a lesser degree for your own L2, then all the ecosystem around it, like, you know, oh, go create your own block explorer.
There's nothing like that.
Go create your own basic DApps.
Like, a lot of those don't exist.
And you just add up the work.
It's probably an order of magnitude harder to make your own L1 than just write a contract on a good, kind of robust, general L1, like NEAR.
So, I think, for us, the choice was clear.
We decided just to build on a platform like NEAR versus reinventing the wheel.
Makes perfect sense.
Anyone else would like to shine in?
Yeah, well, I think that NEAR is pretty decent when it comes to decentralized runtime, as I said.
There will be certainly more throughput chains.
I think the innovation will never stop in that front.
So, there will always be someone with a newer Layer 1, or even on NEAR, I think there will be more and more Layer 2s.
Same, and then you have also the whole conversation about Layer 3s on Ethereum.
It's not just only the Layer 2.
So, on the infra side, innovation will happen and happen and happen.
And I think that's natural.
And this is also happening in the centralized space where you have the innovation from hosting service on-premise, and then you have cloud, and then you have AWS, and then you have Snowflake now.
And it's always evolving.
The leader of the infra is always evolving because there's always new technologies to be developed, which are faster and higher throughput, et cetera.
The key here, I guess, is having a product which people like to use.
And the infra itself, like, near, I tend to always say it's very similar to having underlying technology, which you would typically buy.
So, you would typically buy, let's say, AWS, or you would typically buy, I don't know, Snowflake servers or Google Cloud.
So, you pay for them in a, like, centralized world.
Here, you get it for free, and you even get help on top of that.
But I think the main and hardest part is you have to build a product that people want to use.
And that's really hard to build and to do and to execute.
And I think what's, like, really, like, important is to focus on the user, user experience, what the users really want.
And we believe that users want the simplicity and the freedom, and they want to have a freedom of choice.
So, you should be able to have everything in one platform, everything decentralized.
So, a pretty similar experience you would maybe have at Binance, but fully decentralized.
And I think this is the, currently one of the missing products in the whole crypto space is kind of this, we have this over-dominance of centralized exchanges.
Like, there's hundreds of them.
And then you have, on the decentralized side, you have, like, a few, like, smaller DAXes on every ecosystem, like, scrapping together, basically, liquidity.
And that's where we're currently at.
And I think this problem, solving that problem, creating, like, this unified trading experience or trading network, running across maybe also multiple chains.
And having Nier as a backend, because it has super high throughput, I think that is the goal for, should be the goal for everyone to work at, because it would give the user the best possible user experience.
Yeah, simplicity and freedom and Nier being one of the places where you could potentially realize this vision.
Arjun, would you like to add anything?
Sure. So, when the question's kind of, like, why is Nier suitable, I think, like, Marco especially, but, like, everyone covered it from an engineering perspective, right?
Like, speed, security, the scalability of sharding.
It makes it a very obvious choice.
But we have, right at the beginning of the space, is we referenced how well-timed the fund is due to the impact of what's happened over FTX.
Like, there's a huge ecosystem that needs an extremely relatable engineering transition.
Obviously, to Marco's point, it's very enjoyable writing Nier contracts, but Solana and Serum are in rust.
So, the engineering transition is a lot easier, comparable when speaking to going to another layer one.
But from a timing perspective, and literally the purpose of this space, right, we're all here to collaborate and work together.
So, when you ask the question about what makes Nier suitable, it isn't just from a technology and engineering standpoint.
It's also from an ecosystem, a development, a marketing perspective.
Like, we're all here today, contributing to a fund, contributing time, energy, resource, with the same common goal.
I'd potentially question you if you can find that on another layer one.
And that's why I think that Nier is suitable to be a leading order book chain today.
Yeah, very strong point.
I think that the momentum, I guess, on the Nier side for order book DEXs and the resources that we're all pulling in together from each of the projects and proximity attests to why Nier should be your choice for building the next order book solution.
So, I think that's a really great point.
Kendall, I want to ask, from your perspective, you have a great bird's eye view on everything that's happening with regards to Nier in general and especially Nier DeFi.
Is there any alpha or upcoming protocol updates, products, or integrations that projects should keep in mind in the case of, you know, towards the case of why Nier is going to be your choice, why it's so attractive?
Yeah, certainly.
I mean, there were some just really, really good points made by everyone right there that I think kind of ties into all of this.
So, I mean, what we're really excited about and what we've always been excited about Nier and focused on is just access and usability.
I think that's, at the end of the day, what's going to make the difference for, you know, it's sort of like the why people come to Nier.
But then I think what, you know, what Arjun just hit on and Marco and Ivan as well is that the reason people stay is because of, like, the ecosystem.
So, there's going to be some really exciting things happening on just that access and usability front.
And I think, you know, between self-custody solutions that are just much easier to use, much more user-friendly, feel much more native to the devices they use every day.
And also just the, I guess, the way that you can sort of sift through and access these applications, mainly talking about their front ends and some really exciting things that we're doing at the protocol level
that will just make it easier for these talented teams to build these verifiable and decentralized front ends.
There's going to be some, yeah, keep an eye out in Q1.
A lot's going to be happening.
But, yeah, I mean, like, at the end of the day, the main reason that we're going to all be successful here is because of the, you know, the talented builders that we have here today
and just continuing to attract and retain more and also build up a really great ecosystem of users who are welcoming and instructing people on, you know, what it is that exists and how we can solve problems.
for real people and, like, real problems for real people.
All right, that's great.
And I think it was very timely that we also mentioned that, you know, in our effort to make DeFi as sexy and as competent and as usable as CeFi,
its usability and accessibility are two huge pain points that we have to solve.
And it's great to hear that even though we're not naming exactly what these things are,
there's something to look out for with regards to NIRS, I'm going to be excited about in terms of enhancing user,
accessibility and experience when interacting with NIRS.
So really good to hear.
Because we're already hitting the hour and I don't want to take up too much of everyone's time,
I'm just going to ask kind of a closing question for everyone.
First of all, Kendall, I want to give you the opportunity to let everyone know how to get in touch
for this $10 million order of a fund if you're interested.
Yeah, absolutely.
The easiest way is to just go to proximity.dev and apply there.
And we will get in touch with you as quickly as we can.
Perfect.
And for the rest of the projects, I'd love to hear about what is on your roadmap for the rest of the month.
There's only one month left in 2022.
And what 2023 looks like for each of you guys.
Hippo, would you like to start?
Hippo, I'm going to start.
Hippo, I'm going to start.
Yeah, for us, it's pretty much straightforward.
We just want to integrate with an additional one or two DAXs out there within the next month.
Perfect.
And just very quickly, is the NIRS community able to use CellFi right now?
It's already live?
Yeah, exactly.
It has been live for a week, for more than a week, actually.
And you can just visit cellFi.io and start yielding on Tonic Dex.
There you go.
Ivan, go ahead.
From our side, we will launch the options and the vaults.
The vaults, so everyone can basically just push a button and have a delta-neutral investment
strategy, similar to what you would get at a high-level investment bank.
And after that, we will launch more and more vaults, because then we have kind of all the
primitives you need.
Like, you need options, perps, and spots, so you can combine all these elements and then
you can create, like, potentially, like, tens and maybe 1.100 of vaults for users.
And you can basically just pick your risk appetite, what underlying strategy you want, put in
capital, and watch it grow.
And, yeah, so that's kind of our roadmap, I add.
And the community can try it out on spin.fi, is that correct?
Correct, yeah.
Right now, with the perps and the spot, and very soon, the vaults and the options.
Perfect, thank you.
Arjun, do you want to go?
Sure.
I'm also trying to think about what I'm allowed to say, so you have to bear with me.
So we're going to have additional DEX integrations, some really exciting ones.
Some super cool partnerships will be announced in terms of integration swaps.
We'll have perps close enough to testnet, if not already on testnet at the end of the year.
The build of our on-chain order flow announcements regarding a really, really large self-custody
wallet that we'll be using orderly as well.
Lots of really, really cool things.
And, of course, some exciting things to look forward to in 2023 is, like, our decentralized
operator network options, our community pool for lending and borrowing as well.
So, yeah, go trade it out.
The first DAP that's already built on top of us is Woofire.
So you can find that at dex.woo.org and start trading spot on orderly already.
Perfect.
Marco?
Yeah, our focus through the end of the year is going to be on perps.
And then early Q1, we're going to be building out our on-chain governance for the platform.
Perfect.
And Tonic would be tonic.foundation?
That's correct.
Okay, great.
And, Kendall, I don't know, would you say that Proximity has a roadmap for 2020 to 2023?
Is there anything you want to share on that note?
Our roadmap is to help all of these teams with their roadmaps, if necessary, and to bring
in as many talented people into the ecosystem as possible.
So business as usual?
It's never a business as usual, but, yeah, something like that.
All right, great.
Well, before we close things off, I will announce the giveaway winner for the Spin Freaky Elves
NFT.
And the winner is, congratulations, Crypto Bunkers.
If you are the winner, your week will be contacting you afterwards.
So congratulations.
And I want to thank everyone for joining us today from Tonic, Spin, Orderly, Selfie,
and Proximity.
If you are interested in building orderbook solutions, if you believe that hashtags orderbooks
are near, tell your friends, tell your family, and contact Proximity through proximity.dev.
The fund is waiting for you on top of all the other support you can get.
So thanks, everyone.
And bye.
Thanks, guys.
Have a nice rest of the week.
Thanks, guys, for running.
Okay, bye.
