CENTER STAGE - DAY 1 - Kendall Cole: The State of NEAR’s DeFi Ecosystem

Captions as YouTube publishes them, usually machine-generated, so product and people names can be misheard.

1. 0:04

   wonderful welcome kendall let's give him a warm welcome hey everyone my name is kendall i'm the co-founder of a company called proximity labs we do a few things we build d5 products and we're also about to launch a dow that's focused on really just supporting the default ecosystem and we're going to talk a little bit today about the state of defy on near as it is today we're also going to then touch on where it's going to be going over the next few months and hopefully years so let's just start with a few numbers

2. 0:39

   kind of giving you guys an idea of where of where the defy is right now all of these are also out of date by the way which is a fun uh occurrence so the the total value locked on here recently crossed 150 million just to kind of define what that means total value locked is essentially a measure of the value of the assets that are currently being you know used or or stored in d5 products on a blockchain or in a protocol so yeah

3. 1:06

   recently 150 million i think actually pretty close to 200 as of today there have been five major token launches on year what you mean by that is that uh each of these projects has uh rapidly accumulated several million dollars worth of liquidity and also value that's been transacted for it um a few of these you may have heard of and and we'll also cover later in this talk uh we had our first 100 million dollar single protocol congrats to the the ref

4. 1:30

   finance team on that accomplishment uh excited to see that turn into a billion and more and there's five pools yep there is five pools with more than 10 million in liquidity which is really exciting a lot of those are actually near native tokens um there's more than 10 million near tokens that are currently locked in d5 this is pretty cool measure of you know there's now actually alter like things

5. 1:52

   for people who are holding near tokens to do other than just stake them we'll actually talk about how they can do both as well and uh more than 70 million has been bridged from ethereum another number that we're expecting an increase very aggressively very soon but also just shows that you know near is starting to attract interest from a lot of different uh ecosystems um so why near for d5 projects

6. 2:17

   so one of the things we actually don't talk enough about but it's pretty interesting is that near has among the fastest finality of any layer one blockchain it's about you know one to two seconds which makes a very big difference when you're building financial applications as you know that can really impact you know uh what kind of return you can have uh near has future-proof scaling via sharding um you know this is something

7. 2:41

   that uh you know we believe like some of the early you know members of the near community that sharding is the right way to scale over the long term you know it's not just about uh you know making some short-term changes that get like extra numbers it's about uh you know this is this is something that we can we can expand up to like as this ecosystem grows over many years uh there is the choice of synchronous and asynchronous environments which is not something that's really touched on

8. 3:04

   enough on near because we have products like aurora where you know you can deploy evm-based applications those applications can interoperate with each other atomically which is an important part of how a lot of the the current d5 products are structured but what we think is really important is that in order to scale over the long term these products are going to have to be designed for an asynchronous environment so we're at least believers that this is the only way that dpi can

9. 3:28

   really scale on here you can actually choose which one you want to use depending on like the nature of your application which is really powerful as we touched on just briefly nier has pretty flexible support when it comes to what developers can choose to build using so they can use any language that compiles the webassembly they can use languages that compile to the evm like solidity which is by far the most popular choice these days and they can

10. 3:51

    also use substrate and build app chains using a product called octopus that i believe spoke earlier today trustless bridges you know this is a big one if you're really a believer in decentralization and also if you just want a good user experience this is going to play a big part in like the safety that you have uh you know you want to believe that your assets are not actually able to be taken by any one actor or small number of actors and we have trustless bridges to near and this one's a little bit controversial but

11. 4:15

    i'll make this claim i i do believe that right now nir actually has the best mobile experience in d5 when it comes to the web version of this experience which actually scales really well you know arjun is doing a fantastic job as a single wallet for the ethereum experience and these built native integrations but on here you can use any d5 product with the the mobile web wallet and it actually works pretty well but please try it out and and challenge me if you don't think that this is true

12. 4:41

    all right so now we're going to touch a little bit on some applications that you can use today that were built on native near so this is the web assembly based version of near and there are a few uh right now there's about eight that are either live or planning to go live over the next two or three weeks i would say so we're going to cover a few of these but yeah if you're interested in trying

13. 4:58

    a few out please take a second to look at some of those urls and give them a shot and also give those teams any feedback if you have them so the first one we're going to dive into a little bit as we mentioned before is ref finance so refinance was actually the first the first d5 project on nir and they're also the first decentralized exchange and what's called an automated market maker which is just a specific type of decentralized exchange that works pretty well especially in less liquid markets which is usually where

14. 5:23

    you start when you're building out an ecosystem um they launched their first product several months ago and it actually has some unique properties that other popular automated market makers don't i think one of the most interesting is that it's built to support multiple what's called curve types this is essentially how you know the relationship of assets to each other a really good example of this is uh you can have um what's called a stable swap curve which

15. 5:49

    is where you can have similar types of assets um that will trade at who are supposed to trade basically at about the same price so if you have a hundred thousand or a million die and you want 100 000 or a million usdc you can use that type of curve for this type of product but then you can also you know use different types of curve curves to trade say near to usdc or near to ethereum and what's really cool is that

16. 6:12

    you can actually do trades across these pools using ref or well we'll be able to soon and this is something that doesn't exist or at least it's not very popular just yet amongst other products and it's really going to be a differentiator i believe uh as we mentioned before they recently crossed 100 million in total value locked really exciting accomplishment if you're interested in learning more from this team you can go ahead and follow them on twitter they're pretty active

17. 6:34

    there and we'll keep you updated much better than i can second product we're going to cover skyward so skyward has been a big part of a lot of these tokens that have been going to market it's actually a pretty fascinating product for price discovery i actually think one of the best uh out there and the way we sort of seen that is that products or tokens will launch on this platform um it's it's done by our unique auction mechanism that basically splits an auction into an

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    auction every second it's a fascinating mechanic that's a bit complex they have some great materials about how to understand it uh but it's been very successful so across just four white listed auctions there's been more than 50 million dollars worth of tokens raised those tokens have been a near and east and in die it's been really exciting uh skyward has its own sort of mechanism its own sort of treasury that's accumulated 15 million dollars i think

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    that's just the start to see we're going to see a lot of dows and treasuries that are going to get like be this large and even larger and if you want to stay up to date with what this team is working on go ahead and give them a follow um metapool so this is one of my favorite products for a specific region which is that they enable you to stake your near take your near and stake it you know we could even envision a world

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    where basically all of the near estate but what they do is they give you a token back to represent that stake near why this is cool is that you can then take that representation of near which is more or less redeemable one-to-one or for both your near and the staking words you accumulate and you can use it in in d5 uh what's really great about that is imagine a lending product one of which we'll talk about in just a second where you want to you know use your near as

21. 8:14

    collateral for a loan but you also want to have it staked because you don't want to give up this 11 staking words and most importantly you want to do your part and secure the near network and as we know with proof of state networks the higher the stake the more security so with with metapool that you no longer have to choose between using your near and define securing the network and well those two things basically or giving up your rewards um they launched a few

22. 8:38

    weeks ago and when they did launch they very quickly accumulated three million um three million near that was staked which is pretty impressive and also another interesting part of the product is that they have this concept of uh rapid unstaking which means that you can um you can bypass the normal 48-hour waiting period to one stake by using this liquidity pool that they've set up

23. 9:01

    and they had a decent bit of liquidity you know well over a million that was in that which is really cool and they're also the second largest pool on ref i believe it was around 30 million um total value lots the last time i checked so go ahead and give them a follow a very interesting team and then the last one we're going to touch on nativener before talking about some other other parts of of of near uh is burro suburo has not

24. 9:26

    yet launched this is a team that we're working very closely with and we're actually building out their smart contracts at proximity uh and it's going to be a written in rust so native to near pool based lending product um the focus for boro is really on borrowing and lending these interest bearing assets so you know unlike other major protocols like ave and compound really want to focus on being able to deposit stake

25. 9:50

    near staked eath other types of staking derivatives and intersparing assets and borrow against them the reason that's cool is that the um when you have an intersparing collateral the value of like the collateral using for your loan will grow over time while usually the actual loan value itself will you know stay the same or even decline over time and what this means is your loan is effectively paying itself

26. 10:15

    off so imagine being able to borrow against your future you know staking yield for for near and then you know get them like essentially you don't even need to get a mortgage you just buy a house in cash or buy a car or you know finance a lot of things that you wouldn't usually be otherwise be able to do with the yield you might accumulate over a year or two uh the beta will be launching pretty soon if you want first dibs on this then follow us at burrowcash we'll be posting

27. 10:39

    updates there and there should be some more information very very shortly okay so that was native near uh as many of you may have heard you may have spoken to this team or you may have you know learned more about it uh there's another aspect of near another sort of environment that is aurora so aurora is compatible with the basically the developer environment and also a lot of the tooling from ethereum which is going to be a big

28. 11:05

    unlock for the types of developers and the types of products that are able to be launched on near so yeah reasons that aurora is really cool familiar wallets you can use your metamask you can finally use metamask on here metamask very popular wallet something people want to do and it also just like you know is very familiar to people already it's a much improved experience over ethereum the confirmation times are you know native near confirmation time

29. 11:30

    so we're talking that one to two second finality uh also very interesting currently it's actually no get there's no gas cost to using it but even once they enable gas not only will it be very cheap you'll be able to pay an eth you'll be able to pay in here see 20 tokens or really just have a lot of flexibility around how you can cover your very very low gas fees and then most importantly when it comes to the types of applications that we're going

30. 11:52

    to see launch it's more or less fully compatible with the ethereum developer experience so recently there was the first launch on aurora which is a decentralized exchange called tri solaris so try solaris team is really awesome i definitely recommend if any of you you know have the chance to meet them go speak with them because like they're a great team going to be great builders in the near ecosystem they base their contracts off of sushi

31. 12:15

    which means they're already audited and you know going to be pretty safe to use right out of the gate it's actually live now um there's yeah they have some pretty exciting announcements coming up soon and yeah you can try it out right away and uh coming soon we have a few that you may have heard of from the ethereum community so one of the ones we're really excited about is curve finance is

32. 12:37

    going to be launching they are a staple swap protocol and they're not actually writing all the largest d5 protocol that goes to the great team over at ave but they kind of trade back and forth as to which one has the largest tvl that's going to unlock a lot of opportunities for users of near and beyond sushi swap is launching as well they are what i would call one of the more flexible dexes they are launching a new product called trident that has a lot of

33. 13:01

    different types of markets that you can launch i'm very excited to see them coming over to aurora dodo is another really good decentralized exchange that uh has unique mechanisms that enable sort of deep liquidity pools with a lot less assets which is really fascinating and tying them all together is kyber kyber has what's called a distributed market maker which essentially aggregates

34. 13:24

    dextrades similar to a product to one inch and can actually utilize all three of these to give users the best price for their trades and there are quite a few announcements that will be coming out very very soon if you're interested in learning more and like keeping up to date with those either give the aurora team a follow or if you follow us at proximity five we'll also be keeping um keeping you up to date as well

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    all right so that's the present that's where we are today that's we're going to be over the next few weeks i just want to take a brief moment here to sort of spin where we're going in the future and not even that far of the future so i think it's only going to be a matter of you know a very short amount of time before we see billion dollar protocol dials you know this is like the the dow four unit swap for instance already a

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    billion dollar protocol down the dial for sushi shop already there we're going to see this on near very very soon i think there's some some teams that are building up this momentum pretty quickly and what's going to be really interesting is when these daos actually start building products and utilizing products that allow them to to act with each other like end users would act with

37. 14:28

    uh with these protocols so imagine dowels lending to each other imagine dials like doing swaps with each other uh all trustlessly all through smart contracts um as i've spun on a lot about uh like how much i'm a fan of liquid staking liquid staking is a small uh subset of a much larger idea called superfluid collateral what this means is you basically have your asset in one place

38. 14:52

    and then you're able to use it in two or more other places so the simplest example of that is that staking derivative that stake near where it's locked and staked in the network but then you're using the stick in your token in a lot of other uh protocols you know and i think what's going to be really fascinating is we're going to see this being used across chains so on near you're going to be able to use your assets that are currently locked in say ave on ethereum on polygon bsc or

39. 15:16

    avalanche and then use that in maybe even ave on near which is going to be really fascinating um another team who's working on some really interesting projects this is like basically what's called single-sided staking which basically gives you some passive low risk income i'm not going to touch too much on that one but i think it's an exciting concept um taking advantage of the unique scalability of nir we're soon going to see order bus bait order book based

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    decentralized exchanges uh there are a few of these that are in the wild now on on protocols like solana and others um nir is definitely uniquely well positioned to to expand this offering and we envision a world where you basically will be able to use these derivatives with intersparing assets as the collateral which just improves your basically your payout potential and one of my favorite features and i think

41. 16:04

    this is the future we're going with all stablecoins is we're going to see derivative back stable coins that'll have perfect price stability uh if anyone's interested in this concept please come talk to me uh i'm very bullish that this is actually going to play a major role in uh near's stable coin future and will be a very bright one now let's walk through a quick scenario uh that i think is a really exciting illustration of what kind of the kind of flexibility that near offers

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    so let's imagine that you earned samir on near crowd which is a great just kind of work for near earth like do some work and earn near don't even have to buy it wait to get onboarded and it's been actually providing a lot of people some interesting income earn some urine near crowd you then take that near and you stake it in metapool so you're securing the network but you also have this stake near that you can now do something with you then go over to burrow you deposit

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    this stake near as your collateral and you borrow some dye against it and all this is happening on native year now is where it gets interesting you take that dye and you supply that die on curve now curve is running on aurora but this is going to feel completely seamless you're still all in here um but it's as though you didn't go anywhere but you're now using curve a completely different product designed for a completely different virtual machine you get some 3-pole tokens and you'll also be earning

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    curve as their native token so yield is just going up and up and now imagine that you take that those three pole tokens and you you deploy them into we'll call it perp chain a decentralized exchange that's basically running as its own app chain using substrate-based app chain using octopus and you buy some leverage new with this so you basically have gone through all of these different

45. 17:40

    environments all running on near starting with samir you ended up now with a leveraged near position and you're basically earning a lot of tokens along the way by providing liquidity to different actors in this space and all this is happening on near in three very different environments this is the future that is is actually not very far at all uh and i think it's very exciting and it's not something that we see offered anywhere else now taking a bit of a detour and talking

46. 18:04

    about how we're at like one of the many ways that we are going to build this future and get here um one of the things we're really excited to talk about last week for the first time uh the proximity is a big part of is this defy grand style um so the headline number is pretty is pretty exciting 40 million year which depending on the day is worth you know certainly not a small sum of money um what we're trying to do here is

47. 18:28

    really just look for the top d5 builders on any blockchain and work with them to build out and like great new applications because we believe near is the best blockchain for this uh we're targeting to distribute this over a period of about four years but i actually think that this is something we can make even more sustainable uh and it could be you know a way that we can support teams for the long term not even just give all of this money away um one of the things we're trying to do

48. 18:52

    differently than other programs is like for us the most important aspect of this is that it's community-led we don't have a whole lot to share on this right now unfortunately but it's going to be a dow from day one there's no single party that's running this and over time the community is going to be involved in a big way this is an important part of we believe to make this initiative sustainable and also to have the biggest impact and if you're interested please go ahead

49. 19:15

    and apply there's a little bitly link for you if you're a builder if you're just interested if you want to learn more go ahead and shoot us an application and someone from the team will get back to you um all right so that's what i have for you guys today um yeah we're we're we're big believers that near vember is coming um and yeah if you're interested in getting in touch with me or other people from the team please go ahead and give us a follow or

50. 19:41

    shoot us a message thanks guys if anyone has any questions we have a little bit of time here so happy to pass the mic around and answer anything oh even better even better hi uh super interesting uh can you go over aurora uh i'm just trying to figure out you said you can use metamask um i guess it's an evm compatible chain right um if you could just expand on that and also what happened to the rainbow bridge is that still a thing or yeah great question so the rainbow

51. 20:29

    bridge is still a thing um it's actually built or currently maintained by the aurora team so just to give more context on what aurora is so the easiest thing to think about is that aurora is an evm compat fully compatible environment that is running on the near blockchain so the ramifications of this developers who have built say curve the curve developers can basically change uh like one pretty small change you change the

52. 20:54

    rpc node that you're targeting which would be the aurora rpc node deploy their smart contracts like to through that rpc notice so it'll end up being wrapped into a near transaction and then i'll actually be deployed or deployed into a smart contract that's running out near so i think it's actually one of the fascinating things about aurora which is complex but we do think is really cool is that aurora is actually a rust smart contract that is essentially executing

53. 21:19

    evm bytecode and so this means that yeah anyone who's developed an evm application can deploy it to aurora and then even probably more importantly and more excitingly people can use that application using any sort of evms compatible like uh wallet so meta mask something by a wallet connect etc you just have to kind of change if you've ever used a different chain that's similar evm compatible like polygon or

54. 21:43

    avalanche you kind of change the environment that you're targeting and you just go ahead and use the application how um how easy is it for someone who's 100 into solidity and they want to come over through aurora um because one of the biggest complaints i've heard from if developers is that you know they're just too lazy to learn russ right so i'm just trying to get an idea like is it that simple i mean i did meet somebody here who was into uh pretty much everything but they started as a solidity dab and they're coming

55. 22:16

    through the aurora bridge uh but can you just give us an idea how easy or is it difficult what's the learning curve there it i mean it's it's it couldn't be simpler no i mean you know yeah it really couldn't be simpler um you the the you basically change one line in your deploy script and it'll just work and then for user now for users they have to bridge right you know it is a separate

56. 22:40

    blockchain so you know you have to like say you have let's just say you have ethereum on um you know on ethereum you have ether on ethereum you want to use uh you know say sushi on aurora you use the aurora bridge which is really just the rainbow bridge it's just that it's it's specifically pointed at aurora instead of pointed at native near and you send your you're basically sending ethereum to the smart contract um the bridge sort of re-layers work their magic and you know they'll see that

57. 23:10

    there was sent there so like that ether will then be locked they'll then basically mint new ether on the near side to your account it'll be your same account so it'll be your same um you know like ethereum address 64 character address and then you can just deposit it using metamask into sushi now the only thing step for the user there is that they'll have to change their environment to aurora thankfully metamask has made

58. 23:32

    this really easy and it's sort of just one click to add aurora and then they you know go use sushi and to bridge back is there like a delay of seven days or is it instant 10 minutes yeah that's a great question so there is a delay it's i think four to eight hours right now um that's just yeah you know something that we do want to improve there's a great opportunity for products

59. 23:54

    there where you can because it is sort of a similar to an optimistic roll-up but with a much like much less latency and it's provable that that though that uh those assets will eventually end up on that new chain uh but there needs to be a time basically for someone to kind of like challenge in case it was you know like an invalid uh an invalid transfer uh so there's a great product to be built there where you can have a fast withdrawal where you basically are just

60. 24:19

    lending someone the asset for 48 hours taking a small fee and then they get it instantly so we're working on that super cool thank you uh looking forward to this develop oh uh okay so i guess we'll just a show for tomorrow so we have a d5 panel tomorrow with some great uh other teams from the the near ecosystem tri solaris is going to be there panther protocol i believe one inch as well um so definitely tune in for that i think it's around the same time but check the schedule um

61. 24:52

    yeah cool any more questions we've got about five minutes here uh all right looks like we got one over here hi oh hello hi kendall hi huge fan um i'm just wondering how important you think it is in terms of cross-chain compatibility right so just going on from what that gentleman said you know we've got the bridge to aurora and we're getting the bridge to bsc how important do you think it is to bridge to all of the major low ones

62. 25:31

    yeah super important i think cross chain compatibility is is really key and not even just so that you know we can get assets from all of these chains and have them be used in in products on near but also so that products built on near that are native to near can be used on these other chains yeah i guess like you know yes we want we want near to you know to have its own really big really mature ecosystem but i think there's some fascinating products that are being

63. 25:54

    built on other chains that you know are not as easily compatible with near just yet a big part of the initiative for aurora and octopus is of course to bring this to near and i think over the time just about every product we'll be able to run natively on near but there are certainly you know markets and users that we want to attract on other chains and yeah i think that that's extremely important and cross-chain compatibility good bridges all of that is uh one of the most important things happening in

64. 26:18

    in crypto and d5 right now cool i think that's uh yeah right that's it and we got sasha here all right thanks everyone you