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Why the Sonic Ecosystem? A Roundtable - w/ HeyAnon, Pendle, Shadow,Rings/Paladin
Recorded: March 24, 2025 Duration: 1:20:22Space Recording
Short Summary
In a dynamic roundtable discussion, key players in the crypto space highlighted significant developments within the Sonic ecosystem, including upcoming token launches, innovative projects like Pendle and Rings, and strategic partnerships aimed at driving growth and user engagement. The conversation underscored the importance of incentives, yield generation, and the evolving landscape of DeFi as participants shared insights on how to attract and retain users in a competitive market.
Full Transcription
OK, so we are live.
Welcome, everyone, to a live roundtable.
Haven't done many of these.
It's normally one-on-one or two.
Think I've done four or five in a chat, like two or three times.
So let's see how many questions we can get through.
So today's roundtable is getting some of the heavy hitters and participants who are building in,
obviously, the the Sonic ecosystem. Some familiar faces around, Tien and Danny, well-known
individuals in DeFi space, and then Fiegg and Crypto Ham, first time to meet you guys, pleasure.
Fiegg and Crypto Ham, first time to meet you guys, pleasure.
And today's chat is just about just highlighting what you guys are doing on Sonic.
You know, what the value propositions are.
There's obviously a really big airdrop that's coming to Sonic sometime this year.
And everyone's starting to pay attention to the value of real airdrops.
And it seems like this is a good one.
And you guys are obviously doing some really cool stuff on Sonic.
And I wanted to just get you guys around the table
and kind of just chat about what you're individually doing
and whether there is a crossover in terms of what you guys are
doing and whether there is some kind of synergies.
Danny did mention that they were looking to do something
with Pendle next week.
Daniel says he's apologizing that he isn't on camera.
He's apparently really underwater, just obviously
top-blasting the top and not really capable of dealing
with people at the moment.
So he thought he'd be off camera.
No, just joking.
He says he's tired.
He's been working hard.
I just missed all the Solana and BSC and all the fucking
runners. I missed them all. I just missed all the Solana and BSC and all the fucking runners.
I missed them all. I just can't.
I just top blasted them all.
Like what can I do about it?
Looking horrible today.
So, I mean, let's just kick it off.
Tien, you go first. We'll go clockwise and then Daniel after.
Tien, tell us who you are and what you guys are doing.
I mean, for anyone who doesn't know who Pendle is,
this is for you, but go for it, Tien.
Good to have you.
Yeah, sure.
See you again soon.
Thanks for having me.
So I'm Tien, the CEO co-founder of Pendle.
Pendle is a protocol for the tokenization
and the trading of yields.
So effectively, the two most common outcomes of using Pandal,
firstly, is for rate points or yield to be traded.
This is typically done in the form of YT.
And then the other very common use cases,
for users to obtain fixed rates on the underlying.
So the YTPT, so the fixed rate part is denominated
in the form of PT and YTPT collectively,
they have a very interesting dynamic
that enables the two different types of use cases
that I've just mentioned.
So we are relatively fresh on Sonic.
We started to see more traction
starting late last week, early this week.
And yeah, looking forward to see,
to explore like more ideas
and see what more we can do to grow the ecosystem.
Danny, you have next.
I finally understood Pendo.
That's insane. Good one.
I needed you to explain it to finally get it.
Hello guys, I'm Daniele. I'm the founder of HeyAnon, Wagme, Apes.Twin, the world famous
Hello, guys. I'm Daniele.
Wonderland, Abracadabra.money, Popsicle Finance, a lot of other stuff that you don't know that I ragged on the background with my alts. But yeah, we back on Sonic and I'm
super happy about this. And this round table is very beautiful. When I saw Pendle deploying on
Sonic, I like, oh, now it's a real change. Like now we got shit to do. So we have we have Shadow, we have Pendo, we have
Wagmi, we have a Heianon, we have so much stuff and it's starting to really to really be nice.
Like I feel like the substance of Sonic is increasing. I really feel that you need things to do
for the make a chain behave well in some way
because you need to keep people busy.
And I think in this panel,
there is a lot of stuff for keeping people busy,
which is the attention economy, right?
Like at the end of the day,
now we live in this world
of a super high, fast rotation.
Everybody is trading to the seconds rather than months
like we used to do.
There is this new wave of users that are active
that have different expectations
and seeing the ecosystem of Sonic growing with a lot of opportunities
and a lot of protocols, a lot of deployments, it's just natural and it works very well.
Because the more things that exist, the more Aztec engines can put the Lego pieces together and spark new ideas
and put together new protocols, farm new tokens.
And yeah, very happy to be here.
Good to have you, Figue. Welcome from Paladin and Rings.
Tell us what you have to say and what you guys are doing.
Thanks for having me.
We basically started building in DeFi Paladin four years ago around
helping projects grow the liquidity on chain. And we've basically kicked off a new chapter
with rings, which is a meta stable coin on Sonic. It serves three use cases. The first
one is it's a utility sync for other stable coins. The stable, the second one is that
it's a savings account, probably even the biggest use case.. The second one is that it's a savings account,
probably even the biggest use case.
And the third one is that it helps provide
sufficient liquidity on Sonic for the whole chain
to run properly around lending markets and AMMs.
So we, I think we launched three months ago.
Basically we launched before the bridge was launched
on Sonic and we have roughly 130 million TVL of
assets in the protocol. Right. Crypto Ham from Shadow. Yeah from Shadow. Some people
call me 24. Before I talk about myself, Danielle had a nice point. The
user base has changed. People care about different things. People care more about UX.
And centralization isn't as important as it used to be,
as long as the UX and safety is there.
But anyways, I'm from Shadow.
I was the main liquidity hub on Sonic.
Do a lot of the volume there.
We pioneered this new X3.3 system,
which is just a lot more user-friendly and accessible to people.
In terms of incentives, the incentive models
is more fair and accessible to users.
You don't have to lock for four years.
And you can exit at any time, any size,
without a counterparty.
So it's awesome.
We built on Andre's VE33.
We've seen his success in the wild on certain chains.
And we were trying to figure out why
did this work on this chain and not the other a lot of the times was incentives or external support?
um, but
Most of it was actually the user the team that built it
So we just uh try to emulate some of the good stuff we saw change the the tokenomics
It's a little bit more accessible and fair for users. It's all it was always plus the ev
protocols to lock for four years versus users.
So yeah, we just wanted to improve the model.
I was a power user, and I always felt
like things could be improved, at least in my use case.
And yeah, we built Shadow, and we're on Sonic,
and decided to talk with the rest of these guys.
We've all kind of worked in some way and some form,
whether it's indirectly like us hosting
Anon or hosting rings assets or in the future,
some Pendle markets on certain assets.
But that's what's nice about Sonic.
All of us in this chat have talked and tried
to figure out ways we can kind of contribute together.
So excited to speak with you guys.
Yeah, it's good. Thanks for the intro. And yeah, it's good to meet you, sir. And we love what you guys are doing. It's been really cool to see kind of like this unknown element come to the fore. And
it's I think it goes for everyone sitting at this table is that I think you've all contributed in
like a really big and positive way to Sonic and And just to get into the first question is why Sonic? I know that that sounds like maybe a
simplified question, but I know that obviously this airdrop is a big thing, but then there's
other stuff as well. And what are your strong points, Tien, that you are enjoying about Pendle,
Sonic as a distinguishing factor,
you know, versus other ecosystems. Yeah, sure. So I thought to just give a little
like pretext before I answer the question, because this is my first time doing a round table panel with Daniele.
I wanted to say that back in 2020 when Wonderland was launched,
so at the point in time, Pendle was very, very tiny.
Sorry, this was 2021.
And we, on a good day, daily trading volume would be maybe 20k to 30k.
So we were really looking very hard
to experiment with more interesting assets.
So that was during the OME season,
and Wonderland was the most prominent one on Apple launch. So we launched a time market on Pendle.
And I think within the first two weeks,
we were able to grow our daily trading volume from the low five
digits to as high as $5 million.
So I just want to say that thank you for launching the
market because you wouldn't know this, but for me that was one of the most defining moments
in the early days of Pendle and it gave me a lot of conviction to continue to build what Pendle
to continue to build what Pendle is supposed to do.
That's fantastic.
I just connect with that.
Like the first idea of utilizing yield bearing tokens
in general was with Abracadabra, if you recall.
And I feel like really Pendle is doing an amazing job
of extending that concept of saying
these assets are actually usable. They have value. It's just that they are somewhere and maybe they
have a time limit or some conditions in which it can be unlocked. And this is where the DeFi 2.0
started, right? And I think Pandor is almost like the beginning
of DeFi 3.0, I would argue, because at that point,
I didn't know that you guys did the time market at the time.
This is super cool that some of our users at the time
could actually motivate you guys and make some money.
But this is the exact concept of why DeFi, it's so beautiful and how we
pioneer experimental things and at the end of the day is the network effect of these assets that
generates the yield and the experimentation and the logic of builders like you, like 24, like Fig, that try to figure out
how can I put these Legos together
and build this beautiful castle that is DeFi.
And Sonic represents definitely this.
I will let you continue.
Yeah, I wanted to share that context because I'm really grateful for that moment.
It was a very defining moment for a Pendle in 2021.
But yeah, coming back to Sonic, for me, I've long admired Andre and I am also reasonably well connected with Michael.
And I definitely have a lot of respect and admiration for these individuals who have built Phantom.
And I believe that a lot of the ecosystem play.
So maybe at this level, the tech differentiator to most users,
they are not super differentiated.
And then I think what matters more to users at the end
of the day is really the culture.
Andre, of course, he's a genius in his own ways.
But I think what he represents more
is that culture of innovation,
especially like within the DeFi sector. So he's pioneered, he's built Yern, and then he's also
involved in a host of other projects. Just knowing that he is one of the main people behind Sonic
gave me a lot of confidence to want to participate in the
ecosystem because I know he's able to inspire a lot of other creative individuals, like
all those in the panels today, right, to just take part and contribute to the ecosystem. to Dan's point earlier, we are always,
because of that very interesting culture and diversity
within that ecosystem, we might still be very small.
But I think when we start to cross-pollinate,
I think very interesting use cases can be enabled.
And that's when I think the tipping point can be hit,
and growth can really accelerate.
So we're all trying to figure that part out.
But I'm confident that we can get there quite soon.
Danny, would you like to add to why Sonic for you guys,
and particularly why you chose Sonic in light of the fact that you've been
pretty much everywhere in DeFi, you've built everywhere.
I mean, how does this compare to also the old days of Phantom?
Was this a coming home or was it quite different in terms of round two for you?
Well, I will be brutally honest in this podcast.
I deployed the Anom token on Sonic because I had this concept.
I'm Italian and I'm a little bit of a nostalgic person. So the first token that I saw, and I think it was the first meme
coin on Sonic, was Fbomb. I don't know if you guys remember.
Of course.
Fbomb. And Fbomb started to spread pretty hard when we started pushing on the Popsicle Discord. That was the Super OG Discord of Phantom.
And then we did the hard drop.
And it was the first DeFi protocol Popsicle finance
on Phantom.
And as I come back out of retirement,
I felt pretty nostalgic.
And I'm like, look at the timing.
It looks like that Sonic is deploying the version 2 of Phantom,
and I'm coming back.
So it's kind of like a sign, a scaramantic sign,
that I must deploy a new token there.
That needs to be cross-changed, just like Popsicle.
And hopefully, it will do the same
to spark that initial movement of people coming into Phantom at the time,
where there was all the trading volumes, I was pushing Sushi and all the guys to deploy and everything,
and I did the same when we deployed Anon because we deployed Wagmi,
and for a long time we have been the only thing that you could do on Sonic for like a month or something
like that. Like it was pretty crazy, like there was nothing else and that was I think my contribution
to kickstart the ecosystem and bring some ice to it. And then I find myself into a good tech. Obviously now I'm having fun, but tying up like a good tech serves a purpose.
I think that Sonic purpose is pretty good.
As much as I hear a lot of people saying meme coins are bad, like rags are bad.
Like, rugs are bad.
Like, in all honesty, like, Sonic is the primed place for enabling, like, ultra-high fast trading on chain.
And it's missing an opportunity if it doesn't do it.
Because, in all honesty, I've been thinking a lot in the last weeks as I've been trenching pretty hard with a lot of Chinese groups on WeChat and
hardcore groups on Telegram of cabals and all sorts of stuff.
And I realized that the user experience of all of these trading is where
Sonic could have a real edge
just because of technology point
rather than anything else.
Like the MEV, for example,
it's not even like so much in question
due to the speed of Sonic.
Like it's so fast that being able to front run things and sandwich attacks and stuff like this
requires such compute power and reordering blocks and all of this kind of stuff is complicated.
On the other hand, like you can see I've been trenching pretty hard on BSC and losing all my
money in the last month. But you can see the difference already
in between BSC and Solana, for example,
in my opinion in execution,
even though like you use the same tools,
like for example, GMGN or Photon or whatever,
BoolX or whatever you like,
but you can really see the lag and the latency
in between these trades.
Something that an interface like GMGM,
if it were deployed on Sonic,
would showcase to the world a complete different story.
Even because like the refresh rate
on the chart of your buys, it's pretty much instant.
So you would be able to really visualize
how fast and instant Sonic is in those cases.
And I hope that we get to some sort of meme season now,
especially for this reason.
Like I recently launched apes.win,
and we haven't slept much. So it's not that I'm launched apes.win and we haven't slept much.
So it's not that I'm underwater that much.
I just, we haven't been sleeping much with the amount of attacks and all sorts of stuff
that have been happening on the platform.
Everybody trying to cheat in a way or in another, the crates and stuff.
But we have done something like 250,000 transactions
and an average of 15% of the entire transactions
on the network per day, just by dice rolling.
And as you can see, it's a tech application,
it's a tech point.
If I would do this on other chains,
it wouldn't be the same user experience.
On the other hand, the users are having a blast
just playing like it is seamless game on your iPhone.
It's a seamless experience on chain on Sonic.
And this really opens up particular use cases
that I see on the tech side, obviously.
And it's really, really, really, really cool. cases that I see on the tech side, obviously.
And it's really, really, really, really cool. Like I think it's the first time that they have
probably only based, I had a similar experience.
Like, but Sonic being an L1 and not dominated by the CIA
and all the feds and all the guys that don't like me.
I'm way more comfortable having assets on Sonic than on Bass, so I don't get arrested.
Big, wow, Sonic. There he is, there he is.
Ciao guys, you see I'm decent, but I'm just super tired, I just want to say hi.
Why Sonic? Well, there's a lot of reasons honestly. It's not just vibes or incentives, it goes way further than that.
Sonic comes, it's not a brand new chain, it's a chain that comes from
operators that are experienced in chain building. It comes from people that have a past and that
were, I don't want to use the term rugged, but the technical problems that happen in Phantom were
I don't want to use the term rugged, but the technical problems that happened in Phantom were
not because of them, which makes them extremely hungry. And it's very pleasant to work with
hungry teams that are very experienced and that know that what they're doing.
It played a big role in us moving to Sonic. We basically are, I would consider us
theorem axis beforehand. The fact that we were ready to move to Sonic was because
it's basically the best place we've been to for
projects to build on
The foundations know how to help you they connect you with the right people
They make sure that the right infrastructure was in place. There's also a lot of great teams that are joining
We have the Pendle team. We We have Shadow that's a great AMM.
We have Daniel that we use.
But there's a ton of other places, of other technologies.
And on top of that, we have FIAM,
which is basically a way for us to get incentivized for bringing
in activity on the protocol.
And it doesn't sound like much, but it's basically
paying one developer per month for us.
So it's an extra person we could have,
we can have thanks to this system
that we wouldn't have otherwise.
So all of these adds up and it makes Sonic
for a very pleasant place for us to build.
This counting the fact that we were basically
the first protocol deployed on Sonic.
Where we deployed, I think on the 17th of December,
there was less than 500K of TBL when we deployed.
Like for a month we were wondering whether or not the 17th of December, there was less than 500K of TBL when we deployed.
For a month, we were wondering whether or not
Sonic would be worth just to have deployed for us
because at the beginning, it took some time to start.
You needed to breach, you needed everything to happen.
Now Sonic is over a billion TBL.
We have over 130 million.
No complaints on our end.
We're very happy, but it's very different to go
and build now on something
than it was three or four months ago.
You have all of these integrations that are done.
You see that the system is working.
It's blazing fast.
And it creates a very nice place for people
to interact with G5.
And we're seeing a lot of new users we didn't know before.
I wonder if there's a program, an incentivization program,
that gives builders when they speak positively about an ecosystem,
maybe we need to speak to the foundation about that.
Really cool feedback. Thanks, Feeq.
24, your thoughts.
Yeah, I'm going to respond to a couple of these guys first too.
Maybe they give us extra gems and anytime we talk nicely so we wouldn't
know maybe they drop an extra one or two. Yeah, Daniel you'll send them to me too because I didn't
receive them. I don't know how much you were involved but do you remember FUST frapped USD team? I remember early on like a lot of the the fat idea did
Yes, thank you. So obviously thank you for that and you too fig
Cuz early on like you said early it was really just ring stuff to do
I think for the first week like minting rings. So that was awesome as well
So for why Sonic obviously if it was reason, it can't be one reason.
This is such a big decision. It's not one thing that propelled us to choose Sonic.
But a bunch of things. But I want to say first of all, they've clearly done a great job at attracting builders.
As you can see by the roundtable and the people building things on sonic a lot of new
stuff's coming out and there are some other networks that launched in similar times that
they weren't able to capture you know the same builders the same defy energy but uh first of all
pm's amazing um we haven't even really been taking full advantage of that we we uh looked
over the weekend and like maybe like seven out of like 4,000
of our contracts were submitted. So we're about to get a huge jump in that. And that
itself can propel our entire flywheel, our entire AMM flywheel with X3 and bribing and
the token of price appreciating. Another thing I really liked, too, was the gems.
I feel like gems are a godsend for just airdrops in general.
I know Blast tried to do something similar.
But with this, it's like everyone,
you can perform with the gems as a protocol or not.
If I'm an AMM and I'm the same level as another one,
statistics-wise, metric-wise, we're about the same.
But I just choose to incentivize my users a little bit better
with the gems.
It means the world.
It gives you another way to perform.
And if you're not performing with your gems, you have to.
You're seeing a lot of projects now
tokenizing their gems in the last few weeks
because it's a huge boon to your project.
Imagine using your gems to incentivize more
activity which gets more gems and points in general. So I think that also is huge too.
Every protocol has a tailored airdrop incentive for themselves. Everyone's doing a little something
a little bit different, their own little point metrics. Silo has points. Rings has like a point system, I think, with API. I'm
not sure. I'll figure it out. But everybody's doing something, right? And when you have 37.5%
of the airdrop tailored to every protocol because they have to cook or they're going to die,
I have no one more to say die, but they're not going to perform as well. I think that's awesome.
And early on, we had conversations
with other networks.
And a lot of the conversations were
like what they could do for us.
And when we spoke to Sonic Labs, it was more
like what the network, what we could do for the network.
And we talked about how we could scale the network
with the incentives and the AMM.
And we've seen V33 do so well and other networks
From day one they they were excited about tokenizing gems for vote incentives
They knew how like as an indirect thing obviously you can't directly reward your governance token But as an indirect thing, it's a way to prop up the system. They've given us like four different extra flywheels
I swear to God where we could just like add it to shadow, throw
gems as vote incentives, FEM as vote incentives. And a lot of people are like, oh, why don't
they just give up like straight up incentives for certain stuff makes sense, lending and
things like that. But they are, people aren't paying attention. They've they're giving shadow a lot through these these gems and FEM
So that was like free to us launching
Obviously Andres a great you know reason you know having being able to talk to somebody about a protocol they built and
And something that you're adding on top of and and you can actually ask like hey, what was the reasoning for this? Oh, it was this, like for example, VE NFTs,
like in 21, people really thought they could tokenize
a house in an NFT or their car.
And in 25, that's really not been the case.
Kylie Jenner's not buying board apes anymore.
It's definitely slowed down in that regard.
So a lot of the things people thought were like a staple
to the model is so important. It's like like oh, it was just kind of like a product of the times
So we made a lot of those changes and then post launch or sorry not post launch like during our launch
We I think Sonic
Technically support might not have been ready or something
there's something that required us to launch just to to deploy on another network, just to test things, just to simulate some stuff. And then the whole website user experience just
dropped to zero pretty much. It was insane. And the only thing that changed was where we deployed
versus Sonic. So number one, user experience. Number two is support. And number three is incentives, dude.
If we just break it down to those three,
other networks weren't able to emulate that for us.
User experience is obviously number one.
Like our app feels so smooth.
And what's the point of us making a,
like we cut down state below like insane.
Like there's probably like some of the stuff
that would take 2000 lines of code on our our front end like take a hundred lines of code
now maybe 50 lines of code now and nobody would know anything about that if
we launched on another network no one would feel that no one would feel how
much faster the site is it wouldn't mean anything but on Sonic it's like wow you
guys really stepped it up the CL mint feels fast the pages feel pages feel fast. And I'm like, I keep telling people
Sonic gave us the fastest car.
When smart contract transactions
feel so much faster like that,
it's actual tangible speed.
It's not just like, I'm gonna transfer one Sonic
to this address repeatedly and circle jerk
and make a graph on Twitter.
No, it's like I'm depositing, I'm swapping, I'm adding liquidity,
it feels so much faster. So I'm going to stop myself here because the reasonings for choosing
Sonic is it's so vast and everyone here has already spoken on some reason but it's just a better
experience for users. Yeah, awesome answer 24. You really did capture probably the main points
that have been spoken about quite a bit over the last few months.
You also landed up answering another part of this discussion,
and that is how are you actually utilizing.
Next question for you guys is how are you utilizing
this incentive program and
obviously this airdrop into your day-to-day operations on Sonic. For those
of you who don't know the fee monetization is actually an incentive
for builders and the 90% of the gas fees on the network basically go back to the
builders and the builders who are generating the most gas will land up getting that fee.
So it's not being retained by the network itself, it's being distributed 90% of it,
which is obviously an insane incentive.
We haven't seen that before, not to my understanding of it anyways.
And I think it's obviously coming up now as to why you guys are building there.
Just coming back to my question, how are you, Tien, kind of using this airdrop and obviously these incentives to kind of play the game and to get people to use your products?
So the fee monetization, as far as I'm concerned,
last I checked, we're still trying to grow our fees.
So we're still very tiny in that regard.
But I would imagine with the fees
that we accumulate over time, we would pass it back on to users.
So ultimately, it stacks up on the APY.
And that it just makes the product more appealing
to entice user participation. Now, one thing that I like to add though is that
with fee monetization bid, I would be very interested in exploring how we can tokenize that and make that into something tradable.
Like how we've done with points and yield.
So this is effectively a form of yield, except that right now there is an on-chain representation of...
Like there's a dashboard, there's a display for it, but it would be good if further down there is a way to represent it on chain,
maybe in the form of token. And then from there on, then we can actually tokenize that and make that
tradable. And I think it can be a different kind of way for users on Sonic to express support for
users on Sonic to express support for protocols that they like.
Cool. Danny, is he still with us?
Yeah, I'm alive. So for us, obviously, I'm using the entirety of, well, hey, Anon doesn't get any gems,
so I can't use any gems or anything.
But Wagmi and Apes, they do.
So basically, what we are doing is transforming all the FEM
that we are getting into potential liquidity
for the game.
And the whole idea of the game is that people participate
and make money by trading meme coins for free.
And still, in everything, every action that they do, they earn something.
So that being points for the AirDrop, that being their winning coin
gets the liquidity added so that they can dump on it, I guess.
They can just extract those fees or whatever with an infinite potential of upside,
because potentially some of these communities could be really, really, really good in trading volumes and building up. And the whole idea is just to everybody here
is using these incentives in different ways.
I think in this instance, strangely, I
don't represent DeFi that much.
Even though I have my protocols at this point
are a bit different than they used to be.
So I'm way more focused on the Gen Z type of user at the moment.
And I use these incentives to attract them, which is pretty cool.
Without the FEM, I would have not deployed APESWIN on Sonic, for example.
Like I would have done it in a completely different way.
And this is one of the reasons why it's interesting, right?
Like APESWIN exists because the token economics of Sonic allows it to exist,
which is a new paradigm.
We have not been able to change the way that token meme coins launches, fair meme coin launches,
exist. They've always been sniped and all this kind of stuff. So we are trying here to see if
thanks to the token economics of Sonic and some smart,
crazy ideas from Italian Plumber,
we'll put it all together and make sure that we focus
on having a meme ecosystem on Sonic
that is fundamentally generated by value of community
rather than just the value extraction. So this has been the point for me.
Even though I already see that a lot of people is trying to cheat, but they can't cheat me
because I have the power of being around for a long time. So I can see these guys. We have been freezing a lot
of coins in the last 24 hours, so they can't fuck around. But I tell you something funny.
And I'm sure that this guy is listening to me right now. So there is one guy that has $13 million
So there is one guy that has $13 million worth of Sonic.
That's a lot of money and still needs to try to see Bill
attack for a worthless coin.
My game, because I don't know what kind of theory he has because
obviously he's a smart person because if not, he wouldn't have
extracted from Sonic $13 million because he's a smart person, because if not, he wouldn't have extracted from Sonic $13 million
because he's doing all sorts of attacks and stuff like this.
But I'm like, bro, let us play in peace.
Like, I'm going to get you.
And at the end of the day, the whole game was designed to be fair.
So I had a lot of fun.
If you want, we can discuss this a little bit, which is funny.
Had a lot of fun and saying, yo, there is people that are acquiring bananas. How do they have 2 million bananas? And I'm like, bro, they're Like I saw some guys that sent me on the DMs, like their roles.
And I'm like, holy fuck, first of all, you are a crazy gambler because he's putting all the time Max bet on everything.
And second, I saw a guy with the maximum amount of banana lost.
He lost seven million bananas.
Seven million.
Like at that time, he could have turned an entire vote by himself.
He just rolled a triple six at seven million.
He thought he was invincible.
So people, people is asking how they get the bananas.
They get lucky.
Like that's the whole point.
Like I tried to design a system in which if you are lucky, you're getting more allocation of you need to imagine that your basic is sniping the initial
supply of the coin by rolling dices and being lucky. Like which is which is funky. On the other
hand, there has been a lot of speculation about coin because it's a tradable asset,
right? And it's on chain. Everybody has his own theories of what I'm going to do in the future
with coin. Now, I don't want to push the speculation, but the point here is another.
These addresses that have been trying to Sibyl attack, including this guy that has $30 million, has been trying to acquire as many coins as he can.
Now, there can be two reasons. One reason could be that he's speculating on the fact that eventually coin might have a value by itself, like a token from the platform or something like this,
which I can understand the speculation.
The second could be that he wants
to acquire enough coins to snipe himself the coin liquidity
add.
And this was the fad.
A lot of people were saying, like, ah, this guy,
now we're going to have snipers again because of the Sibyl attack, and then he has A lot of people were saying like, oh, this guy, now we're going to have snipers
again because the Sibyl attack and then he has a lot of coin and is going to buy a lot
of the LP when you add it. Or third one is just bored, which I think it could be. It's
just very bored. Or fourth, it could be that he's trying actually to help the game, which I
wouldn't exclude because if you have so much money, maybe your interest is actually to
buy certain amount of the coin for holding. Maybe. I don't know this. But he didn't realize
that we never said how much liquidity we add to the LP.
And we mint how many freaking coins we want.
So even if he has a lot of coins,
like we are now doing an air drop
to all the meme coin holders of the meme coin season
from, you know, there was like,
how it's called, was called thing meme, meme, uh,
some a sonic thing. Uh, and, uh, we are dropped to all of the addresses that have a certain amount
of those. So we basically dilute the coin, but we get more traders on. And at the end of the day,
it was a zero sum game because it was trying to acquire a useless coin. You know, like it's just
a game asset. But all of this still created a massive amount of transactions while he was
doing it and collected the fee VM for us. They then go to the liquidity together with every trade that
is done on wagme.com. All the gems that are collected by Wagme,
all the gems that are collected by apes.twin, they all go in a way or in another somewhere
back to the guys.
We have a funky logic that is called the pump vault.
The gems go in the pump vault.
The pump vault, people can click it and basically try their luck. There is a chance that 25% of the entire pump
vote buys the coin that they choose.
Nice.
Straight up pump, pump it baby.
So yeah, Sonic is fun.
We need to make it more fun.
Fig, what are you guys doing from the incentive side and how are you incorporating it into
what you guys are doing on a daily basis?
So weirdly enough, I think I see incentives more as a curse than a boon.
I'm not going to complain.
It's a huge plus and it helps a lot.
The problem with incentives, it kind of hides product market
fit.
So when the music stops, because you're never
going to have incentives forever,
you can basically remain without a chair, which is something
everyone wants to avoid.
I'm very happy about the way the FlyWidth design is going.
Right now, we're offering something like 75% APR for VUSD
and something like 120 or 130% on VEF.
The yield on staking is still insufficient
because we're doing progressive optimization.
It's a big system and it's decentralized,
so it takes time to do all of these.
So the points and incentives
have been helping us stabilize the system and make it work for every actor to be here at the beginning.
Otherwise, it would be hard to bootstrap the system properly.
So it helped us reach the TVL thresholds we needed
for this project to be profitable.
It helped us reach, basically, stabilize the protocol when
it needed some optimization.
Now we're getting to a position where
we need less and less incentives for this to work at a very high scale. stabilized the protocol when it needed some optimization. Now we're getting to a position where we could
less need less and less incentives for this to work
at a very high scale, but they're still welcome to help us
basically push this to the next level.
The question once you're at 100 million TVL
is how you go to 500 and when you are at 500,
how you go to one or two or three billion,
where do you get these new users?
Where does that capital come from?
Can you still be at that scale with the infrastructure you have?
Now, this is a question I'm asking myself, maybe Crypto Hamar with Shadow,
because they've been scaling insanely fast.
I know Tien had this problem a few years ago, so he is on to the next level.
Apparently, if you buy Tien really good wine and buy him dinner, he'll tell you how he did it.
Send me a message answered by France.
I come from a wine country.
Cool.
Sounds good.
24, you obviously gave us a rundown.
I mean, how does it look?
How does it look?
So I'm going to start with you on the next question.
And it's like, Nafiq, you touched on it really, really
eloquently, is that it is almost like incentives
are almost like hiding what the product market fit is.
And people don't really come for the product.
They come to, obviously, whether they're sibling
or whether they're farming.
And then generally, what you could assume happens
is that they pack up and they leave.
Are you guys doing anything just from shadow side
to retain and create the stickiness
so that people don't pack up and leave
after the incentives are over?
Are you using incentives to create continuation?
What does that look like for you guys strategically?
Oh, absolutely.
We're definitely thinking long term too, even after season 1.
But we're just using a lot of math.
So one of the ways we're really incentivizing our users
is we tokenize the gems.
So gems, later on after season one in June,
you can actually claim underlying S.
And it's not like the regular points airdrop, which vested and there's like an NFT I believe or something where you trade
There's a whole order book. The gems are really nice because it's it's
Liquid right? It's just liquid s and I think the projects handle the distribution
For us we've just been using a ton of math we've been kind of like scaling the
Incentives the gems incentives over the six months how much we should vote bribe or LP bride
So what shadow you we don't like to use the word bride should be incentives by the way legally
incentives
We were providing them as vote incentives, right and some weeks
You know, we kind of do the math a little bit. It might
be a little bit better to directly provide them as LP incentives as we've done. And yeah,
we just kind of been using a lot of math to kind of figure out how best to use it. But
one of the things I think we did well was we jumped the gun right away. As soon as we
knew about gems, we knew from day one that we were going to tokenize them as vote incentives and
even Sonic labs was telling us like yeah, that's something we see these gems being used as and
Within like a week or two. We were already rolling on those and it was a massive boon for
TVL on
On some of the pools where they don't really generate that much
fees, like the stables and the LST pairs.
So GEMS Incentives has been huge to direct some liquidity there or grow liquidity in
those positions, but GEMS have been pretty awesome for us.
We've been using know using them to kind of grow shadow
We've been using at the end of the day the way everyone should really think about this and I'm glad this finally pops in my mind now is
there's
There's gonna be users here for the airdrop right if you think about it. You have a market size of users on Sonic, right?
They're already here. I'm not trying to make any stipulations
on how to attract them.
Let's just say a million users are already on Sonic.
They want to do stuff, right?
And we got to target what they want to do stuff with.
Stables, so we started incentivizing those.
And we just try to make sure our liquidity and the emissions
and yield are good enough.
But essentially, we're just using the the airdrop to bootstrap, you know low fee generating pools
Add extra incentives direct more emissions to them
And it's kind of been like our like like you got a band who's a guy with the stick, you know
The gems is our stick. We're able to kind of be like, hmm
Let's get some BTC liquidity this week.
And then I tell you, you know,
the gems to kind of do their work.
So it's been a boon for us to kind of grow liquidity
in places that isn't the easiest to grow.
You're on a new network, Bitcoin liquidity is immature.
ETH liquidity is immature.
LST liquidity is immature.
And we're just like trying to make it more mature
with gems for lack of better word. So we've been
cooking, it's been a huge boon for us. You can see the results on our weekly bribes and how much emissions they're
getting per dollar of gems. And let's be honest, gems are a speculative asset. We let people speculate, we're not like
providing too much liquidity, we put it out there, we tokenized it, we're not increasing the supply, we are not like providing too much liquidity we put it out there we tokenized it we're not increasing the supply we're not minting more so if
we're earning more gems just based off of how things work the value the gems
are gonna go up because the supply can't right so we made it in a way where you
know people want to buy in they want to speculate but we're also using it to
propel the platform.
I kind of ratted and said not much, but gems are good.
They're goaded.
That's all I have to say.
Cool.
Thanks for that.
Tian.
You mean on my view on incentive and whether they can sustain?
Just in terms of what you guys are doing for a long term,
kind of like stickiness around incentives,
because obviously we're finding that people might pack up
and leave afterwards.
How are you planning on keeping them active?
Yeah, I think ultimately it all boils down
to the value proposition that you can offer,
like bring it back to the users.
So I believe like with any new ecosystem,
having the initial incentive to bootstrap liquidity
and activity is essential
because otherwise you're not getting any kind of activity.
There are too many options for users
and they can put money somewhere else.
But after the first or initial phase,
the rest of it is really dependent
on the respective protocols on that ecosystem
to find the product market fit.
And this is where I think Sonic is also
doing a bit more actively.
Beyond just incentive, the various DeFi representatives,
they would actually propose ideas and then
match the teams that are synergistic with each other to explore collaboration. These
are the things that I believe will ultimately contribute to inelasticity in liquidity. Because I think Daniel was the guy who said it, right?
People need to make their money work.
Otherwise, they get bored, and then they look for new
opportunities elsewhere.
So I don't have too much else to add there.
It's really just looking for use cases.
Fiek, do you have another meeting to go to?
Do you want to go next?
I want to keep you so...
Yeah, I'm supposed to jump just after.
Sorry, guys.
No, it's all good.
I mean, I already gave my opinion and incentives to just...
They're super useful.
They should definitely.
It's just we don't see them as anything more
than a means to an end.
I think the Sonic Foundation doesn't
have an incentive in spurring projects
if they don't actually lead to something.
I think the success of Shadow is a very good sign of basically
the opposite.
They have capitalized a lot in creating volume,
in creating pairs.
So for example, they use gems to incentivize our liquidity. But despite the gems, like they're
actually doing a ton of volume, the pools. So it's up to the projects to capitalize on the incentives
and creates a very organic system where if you do well with your gems, your gems are going to be
worth more. So people are going to be happier and they're going to attract more liquidity.
But if you do bad with them, well, you wasted your opportunity and that's on you.
So it's up to builders to capitalize on these incentives.
And it's a good system because it creates a lot more independence and rewards for projects that use them properly.
I'm probably going to move on after that.
So thank you very much, guys.
Thanks, Figue.
It's great to meet you, by the way.
And thanks for taking the time out.
Really appreciate it.
Danny, just back to you.
So are you guys kind of taking the whole incentive thing
as a form of bootstrapping liquidity and continuation
from that point onwards?
Or are you looking at it in a different way?
I mean, as I mentioned, that we use it as a flywheel for the entire game relies on the fee BM.
So in reality, the gems are not very important.
Like when the gems end, the gems end.
Like still the fees are going to be captured anyway,
like as I understand.
So that doesn't really affect the application by itself.
If it does and there is not going to be any more VVM
or stuff like this, I will buy a casino license
and make people roll with real money.
What can I say?
Probably people would like it more like that even now.
But it's a, yeah.
Go ahead.
The question was, I mean, to what extent
is there experimentation?
I mean, I know that DeFi is there
is a lot of experimentation. But I mean, I know that that defy is there is a lot of experimentation, but I mean is it a case of
Continuing to experiment around product market fit and then like you said get a casino license or whatever the cases
I know that you're joking, but you're also being dead serious and I've just wanted to kind of like
Yeah, just I mean, what does that actually look like not only for you guys
But just in general around kind of like, you know,
the products that you guys are putting out there as a collective?
I mean, at what point do you stop experimenting and then kind of like drive, you know, the product market?
Is there ever a point where you stop experimenting?
I mean, Tien, are you kind of like comfortable that you like, okay, well, we figured it out and now we carry on?
Or is it just a constant experiment going forward?
Danny, you can go first in terms of answering that question.
I was talking yesterday with some large investors
and about this, actually.
And I think there is two sides of this.
One side is founders.
I feel like a lot of founders don't use their own products.
And that's why they suck.
It's not about product market fit.
There is plenty full of founders that suck balls.
Because they pretend they have these massive egos on thinking that they have a better idea than their users.
They know better than anybody else.
And that how they do it is better because they did.
And this is one of the reason
why so many DeFi protocol fail.
Because they don't listen.
They don't have,
maybe they would have a product market fit,
but they don't work towards that fit.
Fit in the product market is the most important part of product.
If it doesn't fit with the user base currently, it doesn't fit anywhere.
Everybody say 2021.
Yeah, 2021 is 2021, bro. Like, literally, like it has nothing to do. Like, and I wish
also like chains like Sonic and this is not a criticism. But but in general, I would like
to see chains to be 2025. Like this is what I want to see. Go for it 24.
25. This is what I want to see. Go for it 24.
You muted, bro.
Listen, when I do this sort of stuff, I'm just agreeing with what you said.
You're spitting facts. If you're a founder and you're not using your site,
you're, you're cooked. And if you're a founder who uses their,
who's using their site and is not paying their team to be like, yo here here here here
You also don't care a site should always be iterative
It should keep improving every second a lot of people get stagnant
But I'll give I'll give some relief to founders because there are some teams that just aren't agile as well
like
founder might be like do this do this and nothing ever happens, so
I can see it on sonic even with the collaborations, but within our team like there's some we don't like we're pushing or even feedback like
we're probably gonna be changing just a little bit how the the site is organized just cuz uh
you know when we created the site it was all about X shadow and we we created and
audited x3 3 maybe in the month before
December right so it was closer to our launch and the site isn't really indicative of the use of x3 3 it really needs It's all my section with stats like we're gonna treat it like a little
Staked eat where you get to see your rewards every week or something. And we're, we're figuring that stuff out.
But anyways, every data sites improving every day, we're adding some every day
we're making changes and if you're not like agile enough like that, even back
into solidity, um, you know, you're just not treating it as a business.
You're not treating it as a product.
You really just wanted to get it out and make your money.
And if you're a user, you should really look at how teams are aligning themselves with
the users, right?
For Shadow, we just have a voting position just like everyone else that earns money.
So if Shadow's not cooking, we're not earning anything.
It's not like we sent token allocations to each individual.
It's like in an M state and we vote.
So we have a dashboard where
we see how we're performing fee-wise. We see how we're performing volume-wise. We see if there's any
pools that are doing a lot of fees that aren't gauged, that aren't going to our holders,
we're paying attention to all of that. So we're max trying to perform at all times. Like if I see
that. So we're max trying to perform at all times. Like if I see something to bring you up, Daniel,
if I see something on Wagme doing so well volume wise versus us, I'm trying to figure out what
the hell happened. I'm making our dynamic fees more dynamic, dude. I don't even care. We're
going to dominate right now. Just our gauge pools. These are pools that we've provided gauges to.
This is what we're providing emissions to. We're currently capturing 81.7% of all fees,
and that's just gauge pools.
If we do all our pools, and this is a permissionless stuff,
anyone can put stuff up, honey pots, whatever the fuck,
we include all that, it's closer to 90%, right?
And that's the last 24 hours.
Over the week, we're about 67.5,
and that's for gauged as well.
We wanna keep increasing that stuff., we're about 67.5 and that's for Gaged as well. We want to keep increasing that stuff.
So we're performing like our dev, we pushed the sidebar update over the weekend.
We're pushing the charts whenever like I could be traveling.
My team could be here.
All of us are self-motivated.
You know why?
Because Shadow's doing well and we're doing well and we all have like a big piece of the pie.
So I don't have to stand on top of each person
they're all cooking because it's like such a great vibe and experience and and um,
I'm gonna just keep trying to keep that going. I don't even remember what the question was but uh,
As a team
We're on the same page as the users and that helps us like really give a shit
Where's sometimes people launch the product and they leave because they're done.
They raised, they went through their VCs.
They did multiple rounds.
They, they probably did an extra round.
They didn't even need to do just to increase the evaluation for everyone else.
Um, and at the end of the day, if, if shadow didn't do well, we'd be like, okay,
whatever we, we put in the time and effort and we built it and if it didn't cook, then that's it.
Like a lot of people don't really have that mindset.
So everyone's hungry.
And the founder does use the site.
In fact, I might've been using it during this call, but such a great point.
I like a lot of the stuff Daniel says.
It's good. Good speaker.
Good brain. He gets it for real.
Tim, you've obviously been walking this
path as long, well, almost as long as as Danny and being hugely successful.
And for you on the other side, I mean, I can see you smiling.
And and obviously
24 has got this amazing energy and sometimes I wish I could bottle that energy and kind of sell it
and make a trillion dollars. But I think for you, it's kind of like maybe it's a little bit different,
but then maybe it isn't. Are you still experimenting? Are you still out there kind of like getting your
hands dirty? What are your thoughts around this product market fit
versus experimentation?
Experimentation is one of the most important aspects
of running a protocol, because market conditions change.
If you don't change when everything else changes,
then you will get left behind.
Simple as that. Now, I would also add that with smart contracts, maybe
more specifically in the case of Pendle,
we have audited our core contracts in 2022.
So that core component has not changed since then.
What we've been iterating is more on the UI UX
and the different types of use cases.
So eventually, a panel has been very thematic in our strategy,
strategic approaches.
So we recognize it is important to stay on top of mind.
So what we do is we will identify themes and narratives
that are probably
going to do quite well in the next couple of months.
And we figure out angles to anchor
and affiliate pendle to these various narratives.
That is the level of experiments that we're still
doing very, very actively.
Like, for example, this year, we believe
that stablecoin is going to be a very important part of DeFi
narrative.
So we have been sourcing for many different types
of stable coins.
And then also, just being more present in new ecosystem.
So that's something that we are also very actively
participating in.
Core contracts, there's a danger to it.
We've done the core.
If we change our core contracts too actively,
it can become quite dangerous.
Because if I can recall, maybe last year,
there have been several exploits that
happened because of one or two line changes in the contracts. And maybe to most people, yeah, to the developer of the effective protocol,
one or two lines wouldn't make a lot of difference, but the fact is they do.
So we try not to touch a core contracts and we just keep the core as it is.
But we will do a lot more experiments on other aspects.
Yeah, I like the fact that you brought up looking ahead,
because I think it's really quite easy in anything,
not just in crypto to get comfortable in a space that you're in.
Then in some instances,
quite arrogant and you think you're bulletproof,
and obviously that's when things go wrong,
but then also you get left behind.
I mean, I love the fact that you guys looked at the,
at the Bitcoin DeFi part of things.
I mean, you and I chatted, I interviewed you around that.
And I think that's just one iteration of how this thing goes.
I know that Danny, you've been,
you've been very much the kind of person that identifies
narratives and you come in and in many ways you are found anyways that you almost reinvent the way that you
approach it so I think time was a very good example of that I think popsicle
finance was as well around staking and and the iterations around that and where
do you see things kind of like in terms of your experimentation where do you
guys see things going is it about the gambling license?
Is it about kind of like making memes fairer or are we kind of like reach the end of that
road and looking to something else after that?
Would be an interesting metric to know how much money is gambled every day on slot machines worldwide. Yeah. Just to give it, to understand that actually
the amount of volume that there is in meme coin launches
is really small.
And the reality before I go on on this
because it's quite of a tangent,
but I wanted to say that the protocols like Pandor
are already at the cutting edge of everything.
Because just by default, taking in new assets
even without changing any contracts, et cetera, et cetera,
and doing the due diligence for those assets that they take in
is already very flexible.
Like it's already very, very, very advanced.
And that's where also applications like HeyAnon
allow to discover the work that they do
through their artificial intelligence,
knowing that the fact that they don't update
these contracts is good.
You know, there is a point in which we needed
some larger concept for abstraction
that allows teams like the Pendo team
to be discovered by more people.
And at the same time, have a larger oversight like AI
that is capable of classifying quality teams against other
more risky plays and be able to value the yield based on the actual risk management
strategy, which is complicated because when you see like 30% yield, 32% yield, 50% yield,
which one is better?
Like, it's difficult to answer.
But I feel like AI has an edge in there.
Going back to narratives, I have started Def.AI this year.
And today, I saw the post that is the best performing
narrative in the last months.
I feel like the next thing is also like we explored almost everything now.
Like we pushed the limit and beyond the limit of what traditional finance can be applied
into decentralized version of it.
Like it's not that traditional finance has not done stuff.
Like they've done all sorts of poncys outside of DeFi
that have been translated into here.
They have done all sorts of ideas
and complex structure products and all sorts of things.
Tokenization unlocked new ways to extract from these ideas.
And that's where DeFi 3.0, Pandal,
for example, Shadow protocol,
all of this comes in in innovative ways
to redistribute yield to participants in proportion of what the participants go.
But now what we really need is put this all together
under interfaces and user experience.
Because I don't feel like it should be TN job
to figure out what is the best interface for his product. I feel like it should be my job
or the job of wallets to do it. I think he should be focused on figuring out the best way to give me
yield rather than thinking how do I explain how I give yield? Like that's a little bit like the point
of where I see the market going.
And I am really pushing in that direction.
And I feel like we have this AI,
which eats UI basically is the kind of motto.
And it's already happening where we have a chat GPT
that is now the staple for researching anything, which is crazy.
How long did it take? 20 years of dominance of Google, six months for Chatch GPT completed to take over.
It doesn't really... it is going to use Google. You see where I'm going.
It does use Google as a backend tool, but the user has a different experience of browsing the web for research
purposes. And the same way is where we are going with AI, DeFi AI, and all of that is how do we
apply this concept, the most natural concept of interacting with anything into really bridging
interacting with anything into really bridging people from centralized finance to decentralized
finance and also bridging people that are already inside of blockchain and Web3, but
that have no idea of what the landscape actually is.
They have no idea that Pendle has just released a new thing about the USDC and it's on Sonic.
They shouldn't care that it's on Sonic even.
They should just know that there is an opportunity because they have a thousand
dollars of USDC laying around on their wallet that it's safe because it's a
solid team that has the auditing and everything and you can participate in
this and gives you an explanation.
Second is where I'm going is that I feel like we need to accept the fact that DeFi in some way has failed.
I don't know how to explain it, but I came to this acceptance to the point in which DeFi so far has failed and has failed for the reason not because of yields
or anything has failed because it's too complicated.
And we had the only instances in which DeFi actually worked
was actually centralized.
Like I give you the example of Macinski,
what was his app called? I forgot.
Like Macinski's app.
Curve. Curve Finance.
Oh no, you mean...
You understand the one that you deposit.
It was also Bitfinex.
Yes. Well, those instances were where people actually liked it. the one that you deposit. It was also Bitfinex.
Well, those instances were where people actually liked it because they had just Android iOS app
and they could just deposit their USTT.
Celsius.
Celsius, exactly.
So that is the only instances in which DeFi in some way won is where the user
experience was as easy as I just registered to this app and I fucking dump it somewhere.
You know, like that's where it actually worked. And it didn't matter that they had lower yield
than everybody else. Like they were giving out like a 10% on USDT when Aave was giving
out like 16%. Like imagine, they still managed to fuck everybody.
Danny, it was less than that. I think it was 5 or 6%.
Yeah, when Aave was... And they were depositing on Aave for 16%, they managed to fuck everybody
anyway, but I don't know how, but I didn't really follow so much how they fucked it up.
But in general, I think USD actually,
I think USD they were exposed to USD, to Terra Luna.
But the whole point here is that now we spark
a whole new era in which potentially we revive the FI
with AI.
And second, we need to rethink not only the interface of DeFi, which is something
that I think we can solve and I'm going to solve it because I don't think there
is anybody with more experience than me on DeFi that can actually solve the UI
than me on DeFi that can actually solve the UI situation with AI in that case. But also,
I started experimenting on the fact that in my opinion, also the trading experience,
it's not matched. Like I feel like we have an entire generation on these groups where I am that they are 18 to 24 years old. Some are 16 and 14 years old.
Okay. And they enter these interfaces that it's the most boomer shit that I ever had. So
like I realized this, I hate it. Like it's the trash. Like we are giving 16, 20 or so the people the interface of a banker from 2020.
Like not even from 2016.
We haven't changed.
Like we're giving them a trading view.
That is something that Bloomberg terminal users use.
And I feel like this is a complete waste of time. So, and this is where we need to continue going forward.
And yesterday I was trolling a bit, but also not.
I said that probably the best way to interact with the chart,
instead of being a mouse and a keyboard,
there should be a PS5 controller.
Yeah.
I feel that, man.
I feel that. Don't you feel it?
Yeah, I was actually going to add...
He's right. I wouldn't say as strongly as DeFi failed,
but the barrier to entry is extremely high.
Part of the reason why we made Shadow was I felt like V33 the barrier to entry was insane, dude.
You have to lock your tokens for four years just to get involved.
Normal people aren't doing any of this stuff.
So the only people that are in DeFi are people that experience who can make it past that barrier to entry.
Obviously, AI interface would be the best solution, right?
Like once that works, that's great. But at least on our end
That's the whole motivation for shadow was you know reducing the friction voting every week on Wednesday is friction
Having to lock for four years to boost your APR friction having a lock for four years to get incentives
Friction all this was friction. Let's take it out and then still even after I spoke with you know
Sonic team on the weekend. It's like there's so much even more stuff we could add to reduce friction
And I think that's a problem. That's gonna always be there
Solana you bring up memes so I did a great job with the mobile
Barrier to entry you download a wallet on-ramp there and instantly start trading.
So Sonic is really working on a decent mobile on-ramp. Not Sonic directly, but the team's
building on Sonic and then Sonic working with them. And then memes, hopefully that'll be a...
We don't have to fake memes as Danielle says. It just has to be organic and the
info has to be ready. there has to be cool stuff like
a twin
For us, we're giving fees back to meme coin launchers like pump fun
I say pump fun just because everyone knows that but any launcher that uses shadow
We can white list them to get you know percentage of fees and we send it to a contract and they could do whatever they want
With it, but that barrier right now, let's we got to be honest
DeFi is great, but the main use case for crypto is like, you know gambling, you know speculation
Buying trucks stuff like that. I hate to say that that's not the case anymore, but
It's a huge boon and so people get into this into it through poker whatever it is
And if we cater more to those guys, we get a nice mobile app. We let them on-ramp directly
And they start using some protocols on sonic
There's some cool stuff happening where like I said fees go back to them
Maybe the handler deposits in a leverage app like zero lens lever or options options didn't really do well
I think options will kill it with memes because uh, you know modern-day options
It's all zero-day options is basically gambling
Um, so essentially I agree with him. We're we're trying to reduce that barrier to entry as much as we can
As often as we can um, but ai interface is obviously
Dude, my grandma could say, you know swap swap to this and do this. So that's obvious easier.
But on our end, as DeFi applications, they need to get faster.
The barrier to entry needs to be reduced.
We need good mobile apps, not just on Solana, but on all EVM for people
to just on ramp and jump in.
And if they want to gamble, let them gamble, let them lose some money on a mean
coin and then let them try Pendle.
Let them try, wag me, let them lose some money on a mean coin and then let them try a pendle. Let them try
Wag me let them get on shadow. You got to take that first L
But we want to at least make it an enjoyable experience. We want the UI UX to be good
We want good mobile on ramp, you know
Evm is better. I don't understand why Solana's become the hub for this just because they've improved the UX and the barrier of entry.
So I agree with you. I don't say DeFi has failed. DeFi hasn't done a good enough job at reducing that barrier of entry.
It shouldn't just be Chads like us.
In and out. Let's get like, you know, for lack of a better word,
exit liquidity. I don't mean to say exit liquidity that they are exit liquidity, but they're just new users.
It's not the same funds in and out swashing. Let's get some new folks. Exit liquidity, I don't mean to say exit liquidity that they are exit liquidity, but they're just new users
It's not the same funds in and out swashing. Let's get some new folks. Let's get them into crypto
Uh, but yeah
So here's to experimentation and yes account abstraction is definitely the way and I think it's happening already
I think this kind of like mindshare is being followed through
Gentlemen hard stop. Unfortunately, I could carry on for another two hours
with you guys.
But we've got work to do.
I know that there's meetings lined up
in two minutes for all of you.
This has been an absolute pleasure.
Truly honored to be sitting here with you guys
and the opportunity to chat, especially
with the heavy and busy work schedules that you guys have.
To listeners, please like and subscribe to our channel.
We can't do this without you guys giving us the love.
Danny, it's been five years in the making.
I've been wanting to do this with you for way too long, brother.
And thanks for everything that you guys do in this space.
You guys are the real Chads, and it's been an absolute fucking honor and a pleasure. Thank you.
Thank you so much.
Ciao everyone.
It was a pleasure.
Finally we made it to Jedi.
Thank you so much.
Take it easy guys.
Thanks everyone and yo, check you guys later.
Take it easy.
See ya.
