Stella

Hey everyone, this is Dawei from Exponential and you're listening to Degen Responsibly, a podcast where we invite protocol builders to showcase their innovations, how they work, as well as do a deep dive on risk. Exponential is an investment platform that makes it easy to discover, assess, and invest in DeFi yield opportunities. We want to help you understand the tradeoffs and opportunities so you can degen responsibly. In this episode, we sat down with Apoorv from Stella XYZ to talk about how they're building the next big leverage strategies protocol following their learnings during the bear market from Alpha Homora. We also talk about how interest rate mechanisms are misaligned in today's DeFi markets, how they enable zero cost borrowing for leveragers, and the risk factors to look out for as a lender. Hey Apoorv, thanks for joining Responsibly, appreciate you jumping on the show. Thank you so much for having me. I think I've been a big fan of this show for a while, and it's just amazing to be here to speak to you and get to talk about Stella. Nice. Nice. Yeah, it's exciting times here in crypto ecosystem and for all the participants of Airdrops. Before we dive into all the degen stuff, I wanted to ask about your background, how you got started in crypto, what was your journey there? For sure. So like I'm Apoorv, I got into like university in engineering. So I did my bachelor's in bachelor's and master's in electrical engineering. So I had an engineering background and I also did minor in finance. So I was very interested in finance since college days. I was like, I was participating in some college hackathons in crypto back in 2017. We were trying to do some stuff around like, you know, like synthetic stocks using crypto. You are way out of our depth. We had no idea what regulation would be, we were just having fun, right. But after the market died out in 2017, 2018, after that cycle, I joined Swiggy, which is like a hyper local product delivery company in India. It's like Uber Eats or Grab, right. And I did join it when you're like at around 100 people. I left when we were at like a thousand people, right. And really got to see like a scale up of a startup into like a big giant and worked in the product side of things. And I just fell in love with consumer products, right. Loved the feeling of building at scale. From Swiggy, I moved into Flipkart, which is like an e-commerce giant in India. It is the biggest e-commerce company and helped launch the groceries division, moved to Flipkart Ventures, did some corporate venture capital. And that's when like the 2020 cycle, 2021 cycle started kicking in. And that's when Flipkart did Flipkart Labs, which is like essentially their Web3 arm. And we launched the first India's first NFT marketplace at scale called FireDrops. We tried to move our loyalty program on chain, like Polygon got involved, we launched Polygon and that's how I sort of re-met crypto in some sense. And like, and I really enjoyed it. And that's when I thought that I need to move from this Web 2.5 version into like the proper DeFi crypto side of things. And that's how I joined Alpha Homura. Awesome. Yeah, you definitely have a lot of startup experience. Yeah. Curious about your work here at Stellar XYZ. I understand it's a leveraged strategies protocol, but wondering if you could talk a little bit more about that and what happened with the rebranding from the Alpha Venture DAO? Oh, sure. For sure. So I'll sequentially go, I'll talk about Alpha Homura first, like Homura V1, V2. Then I'll talk about the rebrand from Homura to Alpha Venture DAO. And then I can talk about the rebrand to Stellar and what we're doing right now. So essentially, Alpha Homura, the version one launched in 2020, right before DeFi summer, you are one of the first sort of protocols to build on Ethereum. And you were the first to do a leveraged yield farming on Ethereum. We launched in a couple of months, like we immediately found product market fit. We scaled to like 2 billion in EVL at all time high. And you know, it was the Wild West during that market, you know, and like immediately found product market fit. In fact, at that point, we were contributing to 50% of the TVR in some of the top Uniswap V2 pools, right? So that was the inception of Homura. We went on to raise from Binance Labs, Spartan, Multicoin, some of the best investors in DeFi at that point of time. And then we launched Homura V2. But unfortunately, Homura V2 had a hack and we were working with a partner called Iron Bank on the money market side of things. And because of that hack, there was a bad debt on Homura that we were supposed to pay out to Iron Bank through our protocol fees. We were doing that. But at some point, our protocol fees dipped when the bear market came in and sort of Iron Bank decided to seize user's fund that we're depositing on Iron Bank's lending contracts. And that's when we had to sort of, you know, take a step back, we had to do a governance voting on it. And then users voted to do some legal action about it. And they're pursuing that on the site while we set up a goodwill fund for Alpha Homura depositors. And we have also relaunched Estella, we have moved to Arbitrum because the gas cost on Ethereum mainnet was just too high, like opening one position on a leveraged ETH farming protocol like Alpha Homura was costing like $150. So essentially, we had to move to an L2 at some point, right? Because $150 position. Requires like it wipes out like a big chunk of retail audience, right? Unless it was just $10,000 in size. It just doesn't make sense so that's why we have to sort of move to like an L2 and I think our bit room was like the obvious choice given the flourishing b5 ecosystem there and yeah, we launched on our bit room in late June and Yes, ever since then We have gone to almost 7 million TVL very recently and done quite a few cool integrations Yeah, so we'd love to talk about like how the stellar model is different from Alpha Gomora What are the new innovations that we are doing and more around those next as well? Yeah for sure That's interesting a backstory there. I do remember What occurred with the whole situation with our bank seizing funds I think that's when we kind of the whole DeFi community realized that some of these protocols are not as decentralized as What what we had previously thought with? with the whole multi-sig Control and everything. But yeah, let's let's dive into Stella. What can you tell me about Stella? How's it different from? You know alpha homo or v2 I know one of the interesting aspects that you guys kind of highlight is that leveragers coming to Stella are able to You know get get into these these strategies without having any borrowing costs, how is that possible? Like how did you guys achieve for sure for sure? So essentially I'll just give like a backdrop to listeners on How like traditionally farming and Alpha Gomora Essentially work and then I'll talk about like how Stella is different right and how we enable that 0% cost to borrow so essentially Alpha Gomora was a traditional leverage yield farming protocol. It was very simple We enabled like LB's liquidity providers on Uniswap or other yield sources to take a leveraged LP position there Right, there are two paths to it There is a sort of a lending market where there are lending pools and users provide liquidity into those pools And on passive yields right and then there are the borrowers or like how we'd like to call them as leveragers They sort of come in They deposit some collateral they borrow more from the lending pools they create a leveraged LP position and then they LP into the yield source, right and The LP tokens of that yield source are held in like the leverage yield farming protocol smart contract, right? so that is very crucial because this enables the sort of leverager or the borrower to take an under collateralized load and leverage LP but the the Overall protocol remains over collateralized at all points, right? Because it holds the LP tokens in its smart contract and can liquidate it at any point to ensure that the protocol does not incur Bad debt. So that was the idea around Alpha Gomora, right? But and that worked great in the bull market, right? There were four digit APYs to farm out there And there was like a big arbitrage between the borrower APY and the farming APY and users were using that to farm In the bear market things changed, right? There were no 4-digit APYs to farm out there a lot of times in fact, the borrow APY was more than the farming APY, right and even if the farming APY was more like if the farmer would open a position and the Utilization rate of a certain pool would suddenly spike right at the lending pool would spike and that would cause the borrow rate to spike Because it worked on an interest rate model and it would make the borrow APY more than the farming APY And again, the the leverager would essentially get wrecked on their position for no fault of theirs because of an obscure Utilization metric that they have no control over right that that they cannot sort of account into the strategy that they're opening on the platform so we have to sort of come back to the whiteboard and think of a model that Enabled the leverager to really farm without having to worry about things that were not in their control which they could not account into the strategy and we had to figure out a mechanism where we Could help the leverages win and we could align the incentives of both the lender and the protocol and the underlying resource So that all of us are sort of aligned Together right and sort of win-lose sort of an equation and that's where Stella sort of came in right with Stella We essentially allow users to borrow at 0% cost, right? They don't pay any upfront borrowing fee. It's very similar Then there's a lending market as a leverager the leverager comes in they put some collateral they borrow To sort of create that leverage position. They don't pay any borrow cost on it They simply LB into that yield source They farm that yield source once they close their position if that position is profitable They share a portion of the yield with the lender, right? And if that position is not profitable, they don't need to share anything with the lender. I Think this is very powerful primarily because first of all, the leverager does not have to care about the utilization rate of a pool or some other Metric that they can't control right? They just farm their positions. They open it and Yeah for the lender as well Like this makes sense because now that incentives are aligned with the leverager, right? They want the leverager to make money because they make money when the leverager makes money For us as a protocol, we only charge protocol fees as a percentage cut on the leverages profit, right? So if the leverager makes money we also as a protocol make money So essentially the incentives are aligned in a manner where everyone the lender the protocol and the leverager want the leverager to make money and we all get a profit cut from them, right and Yeah, that is the reason why 70% of leverager positions on Stella are profitable with average APY being 600% Compared to something like alpha homo or other leverage is protocol where more than 50% of leverager positions were in fact negative Despite whatever is the APY that is out there Interesting. Essentially, you're saying the prevailing interest rate model across DeFi today, it creates this misaligned incentives between the borrower and lender. And what you guys have built is that you kind of, you know, fix this misaligned incentive mechanism where now everyone's, you know, aligned to only get profits when the leverager or borrower is earning profits, right? I think that's, to your point, it's pretty powerful because like that's a super interesting stat that you mentioned where 50% or over 50% of strategies on AlphaSmart were not profitable. Yeah, I mean, this is really interesting. What are some of the early strategies that you're seeing being used right now on Stealth? So essentially, like, I think, for us, we fundamentally believe that swapping is the most fundamental use case of crypto, right? As a user, you need to be able to swap your tokens in a decentralized manner. And to enable swapping, AMMs are like the go-to way to do it right now. So essentially, LPing becomes very fundamental to enabling DeFi. And that is why we feel that LPing is like going to be the bread and butter of all eSources in the future. And that is how you start off with LPing. So we enable leveraged LPing on Uniswap v3, which is their concentrated liquidity AMM. I think the only protocol in DeFi to enable leveraged LPing on top of Uni v3, because Uni v3 is already concentrated liquidity. So it's some form of leverage. And we enable like a leverage and higher capital efficiency on top of that, right? So we did that with Uni v3, then we've enabled leveraged LPing on Trader Joe v2, which is their concentrated liquidity AMM. They also call it as liquidity book. I think it's a very fascinating protocol mechanics, a bit different from Uni v3, but still very capital efficient. Yeah, and then we think, then we went on to like integrate with Pendle and PenPi. So we are the first protocol to build leverage natively on top of the Pendle AMMs, right? So Pendle has these AMMs for their PTSY assets. So we support the LST based PTSY pools on Pendle. And since it's a PTSY asset, it's a pegged asset pair, users can take really high leverage. And there's minimal impermanent loss and earn like very high like up to like 60-70% APY on their ETH LSTs, right? Minimal chances of impermanent loss. It's in fact, one of our most popular strategies right now. Interesting. Do you think we can dive a little deeper into how exactly these strategies work? Specifically more interested in like the Uni v3 and Trader Joe ones, like from the strategy side and the lender side, like for sure, what's sort of, yeah, what's sort of the like the flow for someone coming to Stella and they want to LP within one of these concentrated liquidity pools? For sure, for sure. So for a leverager who's opening a leverage strategy on Uni v3, right, it's very simple. You've tried to abstract the process as much as possible. So you essentially go to the strategy page on Stella, you'd see a list of strategies. Say you figure out you want to LP into the ETH USDC pool on Uniswap v3, right? I think it's one of the most, you know, popular or classic, classical pools in DeFi, the ETH USDC pool. And say you want to LP into that. So you essentially, you can provide, so Stella selects, pre-selects the ranges that you want to provide liquidity in, right? It can be either wide, medium, narrow. And we have done like a thorough statistical analysis on figuring out the best price ranges for that strategy, depending on the risk appetite. Given like the narrower you choose the price range, the higher are your fees, but the higher you're prone to permanent loss, right? We've also considered like allowing custom price ranges, but we don't do that essentially, because it becomes, the feedback was it was too complicated for the retail user, right? So we allow like the user to simply choose between wide, medium and narrow ranges. And then they can very simply provide either of the assets, either ETH or USDC, one of the two assets. And they can just simply select the leverage that they want to provide and click open. It's as simple as that, right? And we very clearly show like the health ratio of that of the sort of leverage that they have taken to ensure that the user can track it and make sure that their position does not get liquidated, right? To go a step further, we have even facilitated single click long and short strategies. So essentially, you can provide either of the assets and you can single click say long ETH USDC. What that means is to create that leverage position, Stella will essentially borrow more USDC and it will swap it into ETH, right? So essentially, you are taking a long position on ETH and a short position on USDC. Similarly, if you want to do short ETH USDC, it would go the other way around. Stella will borrow more of ETH, it will swap it to USDC so that there's short exposure on ETH. And finally, you also have like a single click delta neutral, where users can just take delta neutral price exposure to the asset. Yeah. So that's how like the user flow of how leveraged LPing on Uniswap V3 works. It's very similar to Trader Joe V2 as well like a very similar flow. And yeah, like users can simply click single click long short exposure position. So essentially, if you think about it, there are three places that the user earns like leveraged yields, right? One is Uniswap V3 is concentrated liquidity. So that's some form of leverage. Stella adds a layer of leverage on top of that. And as a user, you can choose like long or short a particular asset as part of your strategy. right? In the LP pool. So you get an additional asset price exposure as well. So it's sort of like three key drivers of leverage, which really turbocharge the yields on startup. Okay, got it. Got it. Interesting. So the main point of the leverage strategies is one to earn that concentrated yield or the fees from the trading of those two assets. But you're also saying that you can also longer short one pair of assets within that pool as well? Exactly, exactly. To sort of get that price exposure as well, right? Suppose as an LP, I have an opinion that ETH is going to outperform in the coming week. I can definitely take a long ETH and short USDC exposure. Short USDC is basically like USDC and I can earn additional yields from that price exposure. Super cool. And then what about from the lender side? Where are these, for the leveragers, where are the funds borrowed from on the lender side? Is it just from the respective asset pools on the lending pools? Right. That's a good question. So essentially, let's just pull the thread on this example that we have taken, right? For the ETH-USDC pool that the user had opened, say, the additional leverage, depending on what asset is being borrowed, but it would come from the ETH and USDC lending pools, right? And once it would be used to create the leveraged LP position, the user, the leverager farms that position. Once they close their position, like a portion of the yield, and if the position is profitable, a portion of the yield goes back respectively to the ETH and USDC pool, right? In proportion to how much of each asset was being borrowed, right? And there are like single pools for single assets. So like all ETH based strategies will take liquidity from a single ETH lending pool, and that ETH lending pool would essentially derive yields from across all ETH based strategies, right? So that's how it basically works. Like for a single asset pool, the yields are essentially socialized across different strategies. And then, you know, for the lenders, right? Like they're only earning interest when leveragers are profitable. I'm curious, like when leveragers are profitable, or if you're a lender, then you're essentially just not earning yield. Yeah, that's a great question. And we get that a lot, right? So two parts to it. Number one is as a lender, in any case, you cannot like your capital is protected, right? Even in case of like a black swan event, or like markets really plummeting or something going wrong, you can never lose your funds because we hold the LP tokens in Stellar smart contract. And as soon as the position goes up for liquidation, the LP tokens get liquidated. And the lenders essentially never lose their funds, right? That's number one. The second part is like how much yields do lenders essentially earn, right? Is it more compared to the interest rate model type scenario? Or is it less, right? And to answer that, like, first of all, like the leverages get to borrow at 0% cost, they farm their position. And since they borrow at 0% cost, like 70% leverages are profitable on Stellar, right? And as more leverages are profitable, the lenders essentially get like a profit cut from a higher number of profitable positions. And that's how like more number of lenders are profitable on Stellar. That's part one. Part two is the profit cut that the lender gets from the leverages positions is not a constant number. So there's a graph that we've built out, which essentially defines like how much is the profit cut, and it changes as a function of the overall P&L of the position, right? So if the leverages make a lot of profit on the position, the profit cut for the lender is essentially small, right? But since it's a big P&L, in absolute numbers, it's still a big chunk, right? And we don't make a very big profit cut in that case, because we want to incentivize the leverager to farm more. And we want to incentivize good behavior, right, turning a profitable position. When the profit of the P&L is low, then the lender gets a bigger percentage cut of the position. Because essentially, we want to be fair to the lender and make sure that even if the leverage is not making money, but is profitable, the lender gets a profit cut from it, right? And because of these two reasons shared, like the lending APY, in fact, on Stellar is much higher than it was on Alpha Homora, organically speaking, right? Without like native token emissions. So, which is the reason like why like we're able to bootstrap lending liquidity much faster without native token emissions. I'm also seeing on these, on your pull pages, there's the hyper strategies versus the standard strategies. Could you talk a little bit about that? And what's the difference there? For sure, right. So, essentially, first, we did like the Uniswap v3 and Trader Joe v2 type of strategies, right, which were the sort of blue chip battle tested protocols over the years, right. But at some point, we also wanted to integrate with them more novel and innovative protocols like Pendle, PenPi, and like, even newer DEXs like Camelot. And essentially, for these sort of strategies, we wanted to sort of create a separate lending pool called ETH Hyper Lending Pool. A couple of reasons for that, right? Number one is you want to obviously isolate the risk. Like as a lender, I should be able to choose into what sort of what sort of strategies is my lending liquidity being utilized, right? And we want to give that choice to our lenders. We wanted to isolate that risk. And number two, I think the sort of APYs that users expect on the ETH Hyper Lending Pool. and ETH Standard Lending Pool is very different. The Standard Lending Pool generally has high APYs but it can fluctuate a lot because it's based on Uni-V3 and Trader Joe V2 type pools which have huge fluctuations in overall APY given market conditions. On the other side, ETH Hyper Lending Pool is more on like the Pendel, PenPy strategies where the yields are lower but it's much more stable and it's like a constant source. Organic Yields, which is the essential reason why we sort of decided to segregate these pools so that as a lender you have the flexibility to choose the risk versus reward appetite that you have and APY accordingly. Interesting, that's pretty cool. I see your integrations are really cool how you can keep integrating with all the top yielding protocols across DeFi, PenPy, Pendel, some of the hottest ones. Curious, what other integrations are you exploring? For sure. So essentially, like I said, we started off with Uni-V3, Trader Joe V2, LPing. We got a lot of requests for, and if you look at like some of our pools, we are supporting a lot of native Arbitrum project pools on Uni-V3 and Trader Joe V2 as well, like HMX, Radiant, Pendel, ETH. I think Pendel, ETH, we are supporting up to like 50% of the T-Well and the like pool. So we're getting back to the Alpha Gomora ratios pretty soon. So that was on the Uni-V3 and LPing side, right? We got a lot of requests for Pendel and PenPy. I think it's a no-brainer that strategy, you essentially park your ETH and you can take a very high leverage position on 60 to 70% APYs on Wrapped, Staked, ETH, Arith pools on Pendel. If you do it through PenPy, you get the additional PenPy boost. And like that strategy is getting like the Pendel boost, it's getting the PenPy boost, it's getting the Pendel Stip incentives, and it's getting the Arbitrum Stip, the Stellar Stip incentives, right? The STIP Arbitrum incentives. So it's like a pretty turbocharged like strategy with all the incentives going back to the strategy opener, right? We as a protocol don't keep anything. So next up, we are supremely bullish on Camelot V3. I think we were always a fan of what the Camelot team has been building, but we are waiting for them to sort of move to concentrated liquidity and they did that with the V3. And we got a lot of involved requests from like native protocols launching on Camelot V3 and getting like great volumes and TVS there. And that is the sort of next thing we are looking at. Even while we are building on Camelot V3, like you, you'll be able to see like the beauty of modularity in DeFi blockchains ecosystem, because Camelot V3 is again concentrated liquidity. Gama Strategies is essentially an active liquidity management service which is built on top of Camelot V3. And Stella is building on top of Gama. So essentially users with a single click will be able to take a leveraged LP position on Camelot V3, which is actively managed for them by Gama. Oh, wow. That's super cool. Um, yeah, and I think Camelot will be a huge addition there as well. I'm also curious, like, how are these new strategies added to Stella? Is that currently more of a team decision? And I imagine there's also some some risk framework you guys have to look through in terms of new protocols and assets being added as strategies and lending assets. Yeah, definitely. So right now, we don't have like an active governance process set up for Stella because we are a fairly new protocol. It's just been like four months of launch. But we do want to obviously transition into that phase, right. But given like, we're just like four months old, and we want to, like, you know, do as many integrations as possible move fast, and ensure the security of the protocol. So like, the strategies to support the assets to add the pool, the yield source to build on is currently a decision of the team. But obviously, it will change in the future, right? That's number one, talking more about the risk framework, right? That's a great question. And I think that is supremely, like, core to what, what we're building at Stella, right? Like the risk framework is the most important thing. So first of all, it's about choosing the right yield source to build on top of, right. So we only choose like the best DEXs, best protocols, the yield sources that we think are high enough and are sustainable enough, we only choose to build on top of that. We work very closely with the teams before launch. We like look at the smart contracts, ensure that, you know, we do some due diligence there. Once we are confident of the protocol and the yield source, the next thing we look at is the pools to support. So we only support the pools which have enough liquidity, enough volumes, to ensure that liquidation is possible at all times. And gaming the pool or doing some sort of malicious actions around it is not really economically feasible, or at least profitable for the attacker, right? After we are convinced on the yield source, we are convinced on the pool, the third thing we look at is the asset. So for the asset, we make sure that they have like a chain link price feed or some sort of a robust price feed that they're very confident on. Because any sort of liquidation or pricing mechanism ultimately comes down to the Oracle pricing. So we only support like extremely blue chip assets, which have like a robust price feed. That's in terms of diligence in terms of like, how do we decide the leverage or stuff like that, essentially, like there are a bunch of parameters that we look at. To explain very simply, it depends on like the sort of asset that you're putting as collateral and the asset that you're borrowing very similar to like how a money market works. So if it's like a ETH USDC strategy, the max leverage would be lower because it's an uncorrelated asset pair, compared to if it's like a like a Pendle strategy, right, where there's like, ETH racks take ETH. So essentially there, the correlation is very high. So you can go up to 10x leverage on such strategies. Yeah, so this is essentially like a high level view of how we look at choosing a like a yield source or a protocol to build on top of and having finalized that how do we sort of figure out the stream work around? Yeah, I think what I'm hearing is for the lending side and borrow side, you have like collateral and borrow factors based on the specific assets. And then, you know, based off the leverage strategies as well, the ones that are have more uncorrelated pairs, you kind of limit or put a cap on the max leverage a user can do. Exactly. Pretty much. Yeah. And then I think there's also maybe instances where you guys can't fully capture the risk, maybe just the Black Swan event could be ROSDC depeg, like like we've seen previously, or smart contract hack occurs on LIDO or Rockpool where the asset depeg significantly. So I'm curious, like what happens in the case of there is a bad debt event? How does the protocol handle that or the risk system handle that? Got it. Yeah, I think that's a that's a good question. Right. And I think on sort of any protocol, so let me address like the first part, like essentially for for any strategy on Stellar, like what are the risks? Right. There is the smart contract risk of Stellar. There is the smart contract risk of the protocol that we're building on top of. And then there's the depeg risk of the asset that we are supporting. Right. And like these these the these risks are very real. And there's like we try to mitigate it as much as possible, especially the part that is in our control. So for Stellar smart contract, we have gotten audited by three audit firms, some of the top ones like PECSHIELD, DBOM, Trust Security. For the for the smart contract risk of the underlying protocol, which is why we are very selective of the ones that we build on top of, like they have to be heavily audited. We look at that code ourselves and we ensure that, you know, like they've been battle tested. The third is like the depeg risk of the asset, right, which is essentially why and that is a very real thing. Like if USDC can be depeged, you don't know what can be like, essentially like everything is a risk. But which is also the reason that we came to the LST strategies very late, like RAPS take the I think ever since the Shanghai upgrade in February, it was like quite trendy, but we came very late to the party until we saw and we are very sure of like the depeg risks, how bad it can go and you know, like what is the worst case scenario look like. Right. And yeah, that is why we are very selective of the sort of assets that we support. And in the case of like a higher depeg risk, we don't support very high leverage on those strategies. So that is the first part of what are the risks and how we try to mitigate it. But given the situation, like if there is a bad debt, right, how do we sort of figure that out? So essentially, the current tokenomics is like the token stakers are essentially the backstop for in case of bad debt. And that is the case with like Aave and most like big money markets where the stakers are in some sense the insurance pool. So only in the case of extreme black swan events where, you know, like the protocol incurs bad debt and the protocol mechanics fail, do the stakers will be asked to step in to cover that loss. Note that this does not include events of hacking. It is only in the case of black swan events where like the market suddenly plummets or the underlying protocol gets hacked where the token stakers will essentially be the backstop. Gotcha. This is the alpha stakers that would be the backstop. Exactly. Yeah. A token ticker right now is alpha and they would be the backstop. Okay. Yeah. I want to ask also about like how your liquidation process works. I noticed I was looking into some of your strategies and all of them have an expiration date of about like 30 days from opening position. Can you talk about sort of what's the rationale or reasoning behind having these timed positions? For sure. So essentially, since Stellar works on a profit share model, like from the closed positions, we want to ensure that, you know, the leverages are essentially closing their positions for the profits to be realized. Only when the profits are realized do lenders get a profit cut from it. Right. So that is the reason that we have kept a 30 day mark where leverages need to close their positions and essentially, you know, like get the profit serialized and share it with lenders. And this does not sort of go against what leverages really want, because if you if you look at the data on Stellar, which, by the way, is open source on our analytics page, we exactly show that the average duration of a position is 11 days. Right. And that is like skewed because of the Pendle PenPy strategies. But if you remove them, like the average duration of a position on Stellar is seven days. So essentially, leverages don't really want to keep their positions open for very long. And so this is not against that like usual product behavior anyways. Right. So that is the main reason that the 30 day mark is there. Speaking in terms of liquidation, to answer your second question. Right. So I think like liquidation on Stellar is a little bit different from normal liquidation. I'll first talk about how normal liquidations work and how it works on Stellar and why it is the way it is. So essentially, like normal liquidation is very simple, like the liquidator comes in, they repay their position, they take the the collateral out and they sell it right and the owner like the owner of the position gets the leftover collateral. On Stellar it's a little different. Once the position is up for liquidation, essentially the P&L is frozen right. The liquidator comes in, they buy the position all in stablecoins right and essentially like the stablecoins go to the position owner right, obviously minus the premium for the liquidation and the liquidator can then liquidate the LP token and essentially you know liquidate that to get their profits and a liquidation premium in Stellar, Stellar starts at as low as 0% incentives because it's a decentralized liquidation mechanism, anybody can be a bot and since the since like essentially that for the liquidator to be profitable, the liquidation premium has to be more than gas cost and since gas cost on Arbitrum is so low that the liquidation premium is very low right. So like most liquidations that occur on Stellar are in fact like less than 1% premium and yeah that is why like you just don't get wrecked in the event of a liquidation. Yeah I'm looking at your analytics page and it's pretty very thorough, really cool stats here in terms of seeing the leveraged yield, lender yields, you know what the average duration so yeah really well done on the analytics page. Yeah I think you know it's a really good conversation. As we're approaching the end here, I was curious what's next on your roadmap and and where can users learn more about Stellar if they're you know interested in exploring all the leverage shape? For sure so I think what's next in the roadmap, I think we want to do new like more integrations like I said we'll be launching on Camelot v3 next week and that is an integration we're super excited about because like Camelot is doing some of the highest yields on Arbitrum right now because the STIP incentives, Gamma is on top of them with the STIP incentives and Stellar comes on top of that with the STIP incentives you know and that there's like an additional layer of leverage and active liquidity management at every level. So I think I'm pretty confident we'll be offering some of the highest yields in Arbitrum DeFi over the next couple of weeks and that is like an integration I'm very excited about. After that we're also looking at other chains to go to like some of the exciting opportunities and teams that we're speaking to specifically is Mantle. I think they have like a lot of strong ecosystem tailwinds behind them and we're super excited to sort of launch there very soon. I think Pendle, we're waiting for Pendle and Grabstick ETH contract deployments to happen there. Once those guys launch, we'll essentially launch on top of them. In terms of Stellar we're also working on tokenomics. We're trying to figure out our tokenomics how do we sort of revamp it to ensure to maintain preparedness for the bull market and ensure that the flywheel kicks in at the right time. We're also in fact already working on a Stellar v2. We should make it live in Q1 2024. I think now that we have built in a bull market, we have built in a bear market, we have a fairly good perspective on what works across markets and trying to imbibe all those learnings to launch Stellar v2 in Q1 2024. Wow, super exciting stuff. I think this is a great time for a lot of people to start exploring these lever strategies with the bull market kind of upon us now and the whole animal spirit of crypto tending to be aping to these lever strategies. So yeah, super excited for the Stellar v2 and all the other launch announcements that you mentioned. Of course, for sure, for sure. And like, super happy to share them with you. I think this platform is a great way to sort of get the word out amongst degens. For those of your listeners who are interested more about Stellar, please do visit our website. It's StellarXYZ.io. Our Twitter handle is at StellarXYZ underscore. Please do follow us on Twitter. We post like regular updates, AMAs on the platform. Do join our Discord server. Also, the link is in our Twitter description. And please do come say hi to us if you have any questions, anything that are there to answer 24-7. All right, awesome. Well, thanks for joining. And, you know, yeah, excited to see what's coming for Stellar. Thanks a lot for having me and definitely like super excited for the bull market and for the changing sentiment. And hopefully, yeah, I think we talk again very soon with Stellar V2 and updates around it and some bullish metrics to share.