Mission: DeFi

Latest Episodes:

DeFi Lunch - 9/29/2021 Sep 29, 2021

Show notes

A review of DeFi news, market opportunities, and ramblings by Brad Nickel and Joe Cawley served hot, fresh, and live daily on Twitter(https://twitter.com/b05crypto), LinkedIn(https://linkedin.com/in/bradnickel), and YouTube(https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCllRhrCFGEF5Wi2kQ2T7ikw).

Ep 16 - Count your magic beans Jack - Beanstalk is taking on the giants of stablecoins Sep 29, 2021

Show notes

Guest Info

Name of Guest: Publius
Name of Project: Beanstalk
Project Twitter URL: https://twitter.com/BeanstalkFarms
Project URL: https://bean.money/

Project/Guest Description: Beanstalk is a unique new algorithmic stablecoin based conceptually on ESD, but built from scratch to avoid the problems they had. Mission driven to build the primary stablecoin for DeFi, the team is fighting to deliver a powerful protocol that is permissionless, decentralized, and censorship resistant.

Show Notes

ESD influenced
Wanted to build something
Scalability
2nd biggest opportunity decentralized algo stablecoin
ESD design fixes
Game theoretic design flaws
Became all encompassing
9 months of dev
50 days ago deployed
ESD price too high increase supply
Ground up reimagining

Collateralized Models
USDT and USDC
$100 billion in collateralized
Reliance on centralized party to administer the system

Oracle is eth / usdc and bean/usdc

DAI
Basically add value
Collateral not decentralized
Still an element of centralization with DAI
Mint DAI against the CDP
More assets backing the DAI
Capital inefficient
Locking up Ethereum isn't a great solution
High borrowing costs to use DAI
Cost prohibitive
20% borrowing costs changes math on betting markets

No premine
Works from launch
Initial 100 minted

How beanstalk works
Every hour - season
Price oracle is queried
If price too high increase supply
If price too low, then soil debt
Pods are debt bearing asset of the system
When price is below to encourage debt
Supply of soil

Behavioral econ theory built into it.

Participation

Business Development

EP 15 - Is Zeus of Olympus DAO the god of protocol planning we didn't know we needed? ($OHM) Sep 27, 2021

Show notes

## Guest Info

Name of Guest: Zeus

Name of Project: Olympus DAO (OHM)

Twitter URL of Guest: https://twitter.com/ohmzeus

Project Twitter URL: https://twitter.com/OlympusDAO

Project URL: https://www.olympusdao.finance/

Project/Guest Description:

Reserve currency protocol for DeFi

### Bitcoin Disappoints

Disappointment in Bitcoin and it's community can lead to amazing innovations.

Disenchanted because bitcoin kept shifting the narrative of what it was. It was no longer a currency and now was a "store of value".

Michael Saylor being a hero of Bitcoiners was a big factor. Felt like the community only cared about somebody pumping their bags.

### Turned to create something better

Ampleforth caught his eye. Found it to be super interesting

Tried to hold a $1 peg by changing holder balances to change the value

He thought it was a big innovation.

Really hard to control price in a market with all the volatility and lack of liquidity

The important thing is value

Function of price and supply

Can't control price, but can influence price with supply.

Thought that this kind of thing is what would replace bitcoin.

### Control the supply

Moderate functions of the system to influence and manifest desirable behavior of the currency.

Bond system that the system can use to influence economic behavior

Liquidity is critical to the success and that is the entire model of the system.

Bonds and how they function in Olympus DAO.

EP 14 - DeFi Marketing With Dragon X - Callan Goldeneye is working to change how we buy ads & he's using DeFi Sep 24, 2021

Show notes

Guest Info

Name of Guest: Callan Goldeneye
Name of Project: Dragon X
Twitter URL of Guest: https://twitter.com/callangoldeneye
Project Twitter URL: https://twitter.com/dragonxapp
Project URL: https://www.dragonx.app/
Project/Guest Description: Callan is the founder of Dragon X a DeFi platform for marketing.
Why they are a guest: I don't know of any platform like this in the market today and advertising is a critical component to success.

Background:
Freelance developer
Helped build a crypto exchange
That got him into crypto.

Problem they solve: Most crypto projects are banned from advertising. How to give them an outlet so they could gain new users that is simple and easy to use and drives users to their platforms.

Callan has always been an entrepreneur at heart and he previously started his own ad brokerage company which was the precursor to Dragon X.

Dragon X is a new marketing platform and protocol that gives DAOs, DEXs, Dapps and blockchain entrepreneurs a platform to reach new customers.

We discuss how he built the entire thing himself from scratch.

We walk through how their system works.
How projects can start generating users using the platform.
The tokenomics of the system that burns tokens when they are used for ads.

We also go deep into what it is like starting a project.
We cover the things that projects must learn to handle.

We also discuss how they will have to automatically adjust their algo price per click to adjust to the price of their token called DAX.

Ep 13 - Felix Leupold of Gnosis on MEV, COWSwap, Origins of AMM, SAFE, and much more Sep 23, 2021

Show notes

If you want to understand MEV and how it impacts you and how to avoid it, this is the episode for you. If you also wanted to understand the incredible value that Gnosis brings to DeFi, then this too is the episode for you.

Find out how COWSwap makes swapping safer and easier.

Did you know that you can do complete swaps at the best rates on COWSwap without having any ETH in your wallet?

This is a powerpacked episode, because Felix Leupold not only helps us understand MEV and why they built COWSwap, but also how critical Gnosis is to the DeFi ecosystem, how COWSwap came about because they saw the problems with MEV long ago and they decided to build a different swap capability that avoided the issue.

Name of Guest: Felix Leupold
Name of Project: Gnosis / COWSwap
Twitter URL of Guest: https://twitter.com/fleupold_
Project Twitter URL: https://twitter.com/MEVprotection
Project URL:

https://cowswap.exchange/#/swap

https://gnosis.io/

EP 12 - Yunt Capital - Shitposting their way to the DeFi moon with a DAO investment & advisory group! Sep 14, 2021

Show notes

Can you build an investment firm on the basis of shitposting. The folks at Yunt Capital have and they are having a great time doing it.

Name of Guest: Sath / DeFi Berg
Name of Project: Yunt Capital
Twitter URL of Guest:
https://twitter.com/EdTweetsWords
https://twitter.com/DeFiBerg
Project Twitter URL: https://twitter.com/YuntCapital
Project URL: https://yunt.capital
Project/Guest Description: Shitposting #DeFi fund

Background:
Berg is a tech consultant in SaaS. Helps implement platforms for companies.
Sath is an astrophysicist and applied mathematician. Did the 2017 run. Left the space through 2020. Missed most of the DeFi run up. Came back in.
Is now leaving his job in academia to focus full time on DeFi investing.
Shitposting is the theme
Discord for Alchemix is the core of where they all met and formed.
Berg is a tech consultant in SaaS. Helps implement platforms for companies.
Sath is an astrophysicist and applied mathematician. Did the 2017 run. Left the space through 2020. Missed most of the DeFi run up.
Came back in
Is leaving his job in academia to focus full time on DeFi investing
Was pigeonholed in his career and couldn't move out of it.
Wants to solve problems, so this makes sense for him.
18 people in Yunt Capital
They want to be able to help projects and tell them how they can improve.
How they structure deals.
Each person decides individually whether they want in to a particular deal. Starts with one or more people presenting an opportunity and then they create a separate deal channel in their Discord to discuss further. Everyone deep dives in and then they get on calls to discuss further.
Content is King for Yunt. It is driving extensive deal flow to them and is a powerful driver for them of all the deals they are doing. They are pretty amazed at what is coming to them.
They work hard to teach others in order to help them learn themselves.
We discussed the details of setting up their Wyoming DAO and they had one member - Tilt that really drove that forward.
Why they chose a DAO over forming an offshore corporation.
They setup accredited investor status as well.
They are actually mostly anonymous as well.
Why it is so important to set it up correctly.
How they handle the investment funds going in together and out to a project.
They do take equity in projects.
They get advisory tokens for some projects and those get divided evenly amongst the group. Great way to reward the other members driving content and deals in.
What NFT project do they think will actually become a powerful IP.
What chain they really like and some cool projects coming out of it.
Who they think are the most important people to them in the space.
Fitch from the NFT world
Danny from popsicle and abracadabra

EP 10 - Tally's Dennison Bertram building the foundations of DAOs for the future of finance Sep 09, 2021

Show notes

You are going to learn a lot from this episode and be highly entertained by the charismatic, clever, and smart Dennison Bertram of Tally.

Dennison discusses how and why he and his partner Raf created Tally, why DAOs(Decentralized Autonomous Organizations) are important and where they stand today, and how Tally is approaching the types of governance they support.

We also discussed a recent problem they had with vote counting and delve more deeply into how difficult testing is in Web3 and how this type of bug could be a security issue for all users.

Dennison also does a great job of breaking down the layers of Magic Internet Money and how it led us to the decentralized autonomous organizations we have today and much much more.

Please rate, review, subscribe and tweet this episode to help us spread the mission of financial freedom in #DeFi.

Tally Website - https://www.withtally.com

Tally Twitter - https://twitter.com/voteWithTally

Dennison's Twitter - https://twitter.com/DennisonBertram

EP 9 - Alan Chiu & Boba - Faster, cheaper, privacy centric transactions for #DeFi on #Ethereum Aug 27, 2021

Show notes

From Stanford business school to distributed cloud services to blockchain, hear Alan's journey to crypto and DeFi and why he and his partner are so driven to make Boba work.

While driven by privacy/performance, Alan and the team are creating a model that could drive 100s of new developers into blockchain and DeFi with their hybrid computing model that makes it easy for devs to build applications requiring more processing than is possible on Ethereum, while still leveraging blockchain for those applications.

https://twitter.com/bobanetwork

https://boba.network

They are also working on a derivative tracking capability for NFTs.

I was really impressed with their engaged and smart community.

Enya's goal is to restore balance of power between users/companies over data

Started with edge part to use cryptography on phones

Realized needed decentralized infrastructure.

Step one is making Ethereum able to reach 7 billion people on the planet

Explains how roll-ups work.

How the changes get written

Starting more centralized, but later will be more decentralized.

3rd party operators will be stakers that prove the changes.

Expects 50X improvement in performance

Why Optimism

Differences: No 7 day withdrawal period

Their bridging method is minutes with stakers verifying

Will work with multiple bridges

Hybrid allows people to deploy to AWS, for example

Allows for machine learning/AI, etc.

Is a hybrid decentralized and centralized model.

Allows for much more powerful applications

Already developing a dev network and working to get them onboard the platform

Ep 8 - Frax' Sam Kazemian Thinks Algo Stablecoins are the Future & Has a Plan to Replace the CPI Aug 23, 2021

Show notes

The people in this space working to change the world for the better are a delight to interview and Sam Kazemian was exceptional. If you are like me, your head will be spinning with what is possible after you listen to this episode. Financial freedom is coming and people like Sam and projects like Frax are going to push the boundaries for all of us.

If you like the show, please rate & review on Apple Podcasts or Google Play and subscribe wherever you get your pods and please share this episode on Twitter. It helps us spread the word about financial freedom in DeFi.

This was a discussion that covered every aspect of Sam's project Frax in the world of crypto and Finance. We discussed his start mining Doge in his dorm room, his progression into building a better Wikipedia called Everipedia, how the idea for Frax was conceived, and why he thinks it is so important. We also got into why he thinks Bitcoin and Ethereum can't be a unit of currency for normal things and how important one will be that adjusts dynamically like Frax.

Sam goes deep into not only how and why Frax works and maintains its peg to USD, but how the team is working to create a global consumer price index(CPI) that they are currently calling the Frax Price Index, we also deep dive into the extension of the Frax AMO into other platforms and what the team is doing next.

Frax Website - https://frax.finance

Frax on Twitter - https://twitter.com/fraxfinance

Frax on Telegram - https://t.me/fraxfinance

Sam on Twitter - https://twitter.com/samkazemian