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 trade-offs and opportunities so you can DJ Responsibly. In our latest episode, we sit down with Mai, co-founder of Curvance, to discuss the vision and strategy behind their omni-chain lending market. We'll explore the mechanics behind Curvance's protocol and tokenomics, how they manage lending market risks, and gain insights into their approach to building the Everything DeFi app. All right, welcome to DJ Responsibly, Mai. Glad to have you on the show. I know you guys are building a lot of cool things in DeFi. But before we jump into what you guys are building at Curvance, I wanted to hear about you and your background. What led you into DeFi and crypto? Yeah, thanks. Thanks for having us. So I'm Mai or Chris, whichever people prefer. Before I was in crypto, I came from a traditional finance background. So I would be what people would refer to as like a quant, I guess, which for people not in the industry, it's like a data scientist focused mainly on finance. I focused predominantly on fixed income, though I did work with equities as well. So I did things like building a systematic trading algorithm for merger arbitrage. I've worked at hedge funds as a manager and built pretty robust machine learning models or linear models and worked with portfolio managers, traders, the like, in trying to achieve what they would call like best execution. So getting the best possible deal for the particular trades you want to make. So I looked at things like time of day, things like how to sell a billion dollars across the globe in an effective, timely manner, whether that be electronically, over the counter directly to people and so on. So I've built a lot of TradFi, as people call it in the industry, solutions. And now I'm working on building Web3 solutions. Nice. Yeah. Super impressive background coming from TradFi focused. So you guys have been building in stealth now for a while, I think, like 19 months. It's pretty incredible for a DeFi app since everything's always constantly moving and changing. I imagine your roadmap kind of changed throughout these past one and a half years. Yeah, I guess I wanted to ask you about what your vision is with Curvance. You guys refer to yourself as a cross-chain yield optimized money market for any EVM asset. And for me, you know, coming from being in DeFi for a couple of years and being the trenches that I have a basic understanding what that means. But, you know, for someone relatively new to DeFi who just has to just understand what Aave and Compound is, how would you describe that to them? Yeah, good question. So yes, you are right. We're 19 months into development here, which is very long. You know, we had to make a decision during the doldrums of the bear market after Luna and FTX whether we wanted to pursue kind of like the conventional V1 that a lot of protocols will go with. And we made a what I would describe as unusual decision, which was to really look at everything apple pie in the sky, what we really wanted to build and to take the time and build that with care rather than going to market with a token pretty quickly and, you know, like try to get something out there. So we went for that kind of delayed gratification approach. So we were able to build something that I think is more substantial. So Curvance is a full service cross-chain money market, as you said. We handle everything from yield bearing assets to LSD5 products, liquid restaking tokens, tokenized treasuries like real world assets and even primitive stuff like, you know, wrapped Bitcoin and Uni tokens. So the way I often describe Curvance is that there's two market segments. There's essentially all the exciting stuff being built in Web3. That's the option underwriting, the perpetual exchanges, the automated market makers, you know, all these different kind of technical innovations and novel stuff that people are building and all the opportunities that come with them. And then you have kind of the tried and true, more conventional, capital efficient, borrow against your assets and go buy a car or something like that. Those two things have been disjointed for a while. A lot of times, if you're underwriting on a AMM, you're not going to be able to borrow against your assets. Or if you're trying to tap into like a newer ecosystem, the liquidity might be really thin. So for us, you know, we're active DeFi users ourselves, and we wanted to build something that we would actually want to use. And what Curvance really aims to be is this kind of one stop shop for DeFi. We kind of look at solutions in Web2 kind of like Robinhood, for example, where people would be able to tap into the stock market and stuff as an average person. But it was more difficult. The barrier for entry was higher, was larger. And when Robinhood came out of the scene, it became really easy. You just download an app, hook up your information, and now you're able to buy shares all the way down to like a hundredth of a share. So that really opened up the stock market and investing to like a much larger audience. And that's really what fundamentally we're trying to do at Curvance. Yeah, the user experience today for crypto and DeFi is still pretty hard to grasp for an average user. That's also, you know, one of our focuses here at Expenshale. We're trying to enable one click investing into DeFi pools. So I get a lot of what you're saying with building the everything app for DeFi. I'm curious about how exactly the platform works. How do you enable leverage on these LP tokens? What's sort of the underlying architecture there? Yeah, great question. So, you know, obviously with my background, I've looked at a lot of like fixed income technology and kind of how markets have matured and how to best kind of segregate risk, you know, segment risk for users so people can opt into kind of their own risk profile and how to really build these like robust, tamper-proof systems. So we've looked at a lot of solutions, and this was one of the biggest boons of building through the bear market, what currently has been most successful and really trying to improve on, you know, building on the shoulders of giants. So we've built everything from new interest rate models to how things are liquidated to how we segment assets to, you know, oracles and all the like. Largely, I would say it's more versatile. So rather than depending on a single oracle provider, we could use any oracle provider rather than having to build one technical solution for every asset. It's more broad where we can support a whole ecosystem at once due to this higher versatility in how we value assets, how we manage risk and the like. In addition to the kind of technical jargon of the oracles and all this stuff, we've also built functionality that makes it easier for the end user. The example I usually would give here is if someone's trying to tap into like Ethereum liquid staking, they might need to keep looping stuff, right? They deposit their liquid stake thing, they borrow more ETH, they either deposit it into Lido or wherever or swap it, deposit again, borrow again, deposit again, borrow again, and so on and so on. But with math, you can actually figure out what those final values are so that someone could leverage up or they could leverage down in a single transaction. Or because we're working with partners like 1inch, we can have people go from one basic asset, like say USDC, and then route that into a very complicated position, taking some LP token and then routing it into Curve LPs and then into Convex to yield optimize it and all these kind of more nuanced strategies that people will look up a guide to do if they aren't like super DeFi savvy. But now anyone could do it. And that's really what a lot of our mantra is, is like kind of building that level playing field for everyone where, you know, anyone can use Curve Ants and anyone could get like maximal value out of that, whether you're the DeFi veteran or you're looking up guides on SushiSwap, how to LP stuff. So yeah, I think once we're able to break down those barriers and make DeFi a little bit more approachable, I think it's definitely the future. And while I don't think it's going to consume any, you know, like Web 2.0 industries and stuff like that, I think we're going to see a lot of this technology eventually be championed and integrated into some of these more legacy systems. Yeah. So you mentioned like the kind of zapping feature, which is pretty awesome. I imagine the end goal would be anyone can come with any type of asset and it'll just be all routed to the underlying LP token. Is that how it would work? Like sort of like a big zapper almost? Yeah. So it could do anything, right? If you want to go from USDC to like, you know, liquid staked ETH, you could do that. If you want to go from, you know, ETH to an LP token, you could do that. If you want to go from one stablecoin to a treasury backed stablecoin, you could do that. So really it's like, again, trying to abstract away a lot of that complexity of where is the liquidity on this DEX or, you know, how do I bridge onto this chain or how do I create this position? So it's like, you know, we can display the information and then users can really decide what they want. And we can, you know, crowdsource a lot of information on the different ecosystems so people understand the associated risks and such. Cool. And how would that work exactly? Like, do you have like some type of underlying routing system that will automatically do all these swaps and exchanges through the different aggregators out there? Yep. Yeah. So we, you actually hit the nail on the head. We have what we call like Zapper contracts. So we have like a complex Zapper, we have a simple Zapper, and then things for like repaying loans. So you do have to build those a little bit more custom because every ecosystem behaves a little bit differently. But for like basic assets, it's, you know, one size fits all. And then for each of these solutions, like Velodrome and Curve and Balancer and so on and so on and so on, you just build those like kind of white glove approach. So which ends up being really good for the end user because when you're able to string all of these operations together, not only is it way easier to kind of like do the mental math and, you know, just do the process, but it's also cheaper because, you know, of how like the network works, you're able to consolidate all these operations together. So you end up with like a cheaper, a faster, and really a safer approach to tapping into any of these ecosystems that you really can't get anywhere else. One of the ask about the borrowing lending side. So yeah, maybe I don't know how much you can talk about, but some of the partnerships that you're looking at or integrating with, what type of collateral tokens can we expect at launch? Yeah, it's a good question. So we want to capture both like the kind of broad tried and true assets. So that's things like you would see, you mentioned on like kind of more incumbent platforms, like Aave and such, where you can tap into things like Uni and Maker and Wraith and Wrap Bitcoin and Link and all the kind of like more conventional things, Liquid Staked Assets and so on. But so kind of that, I would say, mature side of the market. And then a lot of this more unexplored, more long tail asset, right? So that would be things like LP tokens, both for automated market makers, I already mentioned a few, but just to go through them again, like Curve, Balancer, Pendle Finance, those types of LP tokens, and then also Perpetual Exchange LP tokens. So things like GMX, and we're also looking at MUX, for example. And then things like these kind of more, I would guess, synthetic assets, right? So that would be things like tokenized treasuries and Liquid Restaked Tokens. So you kind of get this one stop shop approach where, you know, it's like, oh, well, I want to tap into LP tokens, okay, I go to Curvance. I want to tap into, you know, I have, I'm, you know, Liquid Staking ETH and I want to go borrow some USDC to pay my taxes or something. Okay, I could do that on Curvance, or, you know, actually, you know, I'm tapping into these tokenized treasuries, so I don't have to move money to a custodial account and then, you know, pay JP Morgan 20 bps fees, okay, I could do that on Curvance. Like you could tap into all these different market segments on Curvance and really want to be a holistic approach where any, like whenever you think of, I want to do something in DeFi, you just are like, oh, I could do that on Curvance. Why would I go anywhere else? That's really the end goal. And we've been able, obviously, as you said, 19 months here, we've been able to take the time to really build all these solutions together. And we'll probably have some form of staged approach, right, just to mitigate like, you know, risk and any rollout just so there's also excitement around like, oh, they're coming out with this this week and this month and so on and so on. But I think you have both the kind of broad assets and then a lot of what I would call almost native asset support. So that's things like, you know, Arbitrum has GMX and MOX, right, which is very different than something like Optimism, which has Velodrome or, you know, maybe even newer markets. I mean, we're talking to a lot of these newer chains like Mantel and Scroll and Blast and all these different providers and seeing if there's alignment there on what they, you know, what their mission statement is, what their goal for their chain is, and whether we can help them facilitate that or not. Nice. Yeah, this is super cool. I think, you know, unlocking all these Dormant LP tokens will drive a lot of capital efficiency in DeFi. Like today, I'm in some of these GM pools and I'm kind of just sitting there with it. But with Carvance, I'll be able to unlock some more leverage there by borrowing stable coins, right? Yeah. Yeah, and you could even be, you know, there are users that probably just want to take the other side of that trade, right? They might not understand these things or maybe they're afraid of like impermanent loss and stuff. And then they could be the counterparty and lend, right? Because it's peer-to-peer lending. We're not underwriting the loans at all. And, you know, one of the things that I think is pretty unique about Carvance, too, on the money market side is how we're able to facilitate both. like the yield side, but also the money market side, because you essentially can yield farm an unlimited amount of stuff. Like you could use, you know, your GM tokens as you gave an example that have all the rewards compound back in. So you don't have to manage that. You don't have to pay any of the gas and it just auto compounds and actually gives you, you know, usually a higher yield because you're getting interest on interest. But secondarily, we're also able to protect the lenders because there's gaps for how much of an asset can be put up as collateral. So we can look at things like on-chain liquidity. And then when, you know, for example, you have a gigantic amount of collateral being posted in that asset, we can kind of top that off and cap that, but people can still deposit to yield farm. So you could have a billion dollars yield farming, but maybe liquidity only allows for 20 million to be collateralized or something. And that really allows us to capture the whole market there for all users. So people can just yield farm, but they could also potentially tap into this like capital efficient solution as well. Nice, nice. You talked a little bit about risk there. So I wanted to bring up the topic about risk. Why do you think LP tokens today haven't really been utilized much in lending markets? Do you think it is mainly because of the risks of integrating LP tokens within the lending market with, you know, the oracle risk and the manipulation of the liquidity pools? Is that something you guys have thought about in your approaches to the building this funding market and, you know, ways that you've thought about to mitigate these? Yeah, no, that's a really good question. So first I'll say that, you know, again, one of the boons of building during the bear market is we've been able to see what's been successful and what's not. We've definitely seen our fair share of protocols that have tried to support some of these more exotic assets and then blow up because they go to market really fast. They don't do sufficient auditing, you know, exploratory analysis and the whole thing just collapses like a house of cards. But for us, I think the two major, three major issues that we've seen for supporting some of these long tail assets has been one, oracles, which you already touched on, which we're able to facilitate by having essentially a much more robust oracle system. We could take two oracles from any oracle provider out there, which is way better than being shoehorned into a single solution. Two is the amount of an asset that can be collateralized. That's what things like these collateral caps fix. And the third is what people would call rehypothecation. So being able to, this is like the highly profitable trading strategies that people have done in the last cycle where they're trying to manipulate prices and short an asset. I mean, if you just think about it, if you're able to essentially borrow an LP token, you could just unwrap it and then sell it on the LP, right? So you can't, and now you're getting, you're pulling the LP while you're selling the token. So you're really like double screwing the market there. So one of the most important things for Curvance was pulling out that piece of rehypothecation where you deposit your asset and anyone could borrow it. Now you need to opt into it. So now you either are a collateral depositor or you're depositing assets for people to borrow, right? You're like potentially underwriting debt. And that really unlocks being able to support anything. And with a broad market structure, what we use, what we call like a pod style, which is halfway between the fully cross margin, fully just one market to rule them all approach. And then the fully isolated models that you see more recent money markets tap into. Because of the structure of that, the collateral, the oracles and the removal of rehypothecation, we could build really structured, safe, but also exciting markets for people to tap into. So for example, we can have one for people to leverage LSD5 products, or maybe someone wants to essentially use Curvance as almost like a spot leverage tool, right? Like as an alternative to perpetuals, we could facilitate that. Maybe they want to do that with like tokenized treasuries instead of now paying funding, they're receiving yield in the treasuries. We can do that. We could support basic assets that people are loaning, or maybe people want to short those. We could support all that without introducing like massive risk. And we are working on things like being able to lend to multiple markets at once as well, that really fixes like any of that fragmentation that you'd see. So we've looked at a lot of the solutions, and we've tried to see where we could improve in every category. And we think we've managed to do that. Are the markets isolated or are they like, is there like a shared collateral pool that everyone deposits to? Yeah, good question. So we support both cross margin and isolated margin. So presumably there will be some markets that are isolated and there will be some markets that are cross margin. We're able to support cross margin without any of the problems that previous implementations of cross margin have had, because of a few different categories. One is that collateral cap mechanism, because you're essentially able to limit any risk to lenders, right? If there's 2 million max that can be collateralized of an asset, that means that times whatever the collateralization ratio is the potential blowback to lenders, right? Say it's 50%, that means at most $1 million is at risk to the lenders. The second piece there, and this is actually the really unique thing about our markets is we've added what we call bad debt socialization. So typically in a money market, when a user based on whatever parameters, either they're trying to manipulate prices or they did authentically enter into a bad debt scenario, maybe Gary Gensler attacks the market and says that everything's a security when they're not, and then the market crashes, right? And it blows past someone's liquidation levels and now it's bad debt, and now no one wants to liquidate it. Well, in conventional money markets, there's really nothing to do there. Really best case the asset goes back up and then into a position where it can be liquidated for a profit and then someone does it. But that's really it. I mean, you have essentially two solutions that people often do. They have a 50% close factor, which means when someone can be liquidated, it lets you close up to 50% of their position. And a lot of them have moved to 100% as well, which is really bad for people using the market. But in both of those scenarios, in the 100%, people are getting screwed with these liquidations. And then in the 50%, you never close out their position fully because you do 50% of 50% of 50% of 50% and it keeps getting smaller and smaller. So over time, if the market moves against a protocol, like a tech stack, then you're just going to have bad debt accumulating and accumulating and accumulating. And it's really the only thing that can be done is the Dow or whatever entity is facilitating that market just essentially sends money to it and backstops the positions. Now, we don't want to touch any of the market. It is fully non-custodial, fully peer-to-peer. And essentially, people can liquidate positions in bad debt like they would actual real debt. efficient, profitable positions. So what do I mean by that? If you have an asset or an account that has, say, $1,000 in collateral, but it has $2,000 in debt, that's $1,000 in bad debt. In the conventional model, you couldn't do anything to liquidate it because no one's going to pay $2,000 to get $1,000 unless they're benevolent, I guess. But in Curvance, they could liquidate that position and we would say, well, what is the base penalty you get? What rewards are we going to give you? Say it's, I don't know, 5%. Well, maybe then they get $1,000 in collateral and they pay $950. So they still make money, right? As long as gas is less than $50, which it hopefully would be. And then the lenders essentially eat that $1,050 loss. But instead of it being in current models, when essentially bad debt accumulates, whoever's last out the door eats 100%, right? So you get this kind of race for the exit. You get a bank run, essentially. But with this model, it's done on the exchange rate of the token. And I won't get too technical here. But essentially what that means is that that $1,050 gets spread to everyone equally. And usually bad debt is very small. So in this case, they might make up that interest in seconds or minutes or hours or whatever the kind of numbers, the math behind that is. It fixes any, it essentially recapitalizes the market instantly because the liquidators are happy because they made their money. And now the people actually underwriting stuff are also happy because they don't have this like looming black swan event of like their assets, them being, them falling asleep and then waking up and everyone left the market and they have no money left because they were the last one out the door, which does happen in some of these cases. So it fixes any of those issues with cross margin that people often find because the reason people went to isolated is because of that. And because of like segmented risk and stuff, which we tapped on or touched on earlier in the call. And the combination of collateral caps, better oracles, and this obviously a little bit, the third one's a little more complex. That fixes all the problems, at least that we've broadly seen in cross margin, which means that we could actively support cross margin markets again, which are way more capital efficient, way better for the people actually building positions on there because they're able to build more sophisticated strategies and it's going to just get everyone better rates. It creates much more liquid markets. It's very popular when you look at centralized exchanges, for example, almost everyone uses cross margin instead of isolated. So it's clearly what people like and we wanted to build the method in which we could operate it for as many assets as possible. Nice. Yeah. Thanks for going super in depth there. That's helpful for grasping your risk model. And then I would imagine managing all these different parameters, collateral, caps, etc. is a lot as you slowly add more and more tokens to the platform. Is your plan to kind of manage that in-house or will you leverage one of these third party risk managers like Gauntlet? That's a really good question. So I would say part of it is handled by code. So a lot of things are dynamic, things like interest rate models. We don't really need to update in real time because they're dynamic. So they actually ebb and flow by themselves. And same with the liquidation model. We have like a pretty sophisticated liquidation model, which we also could go into a bit too if you'd like. But essentially we don't need to update liquidation parameters quite as much. So it really becomes a function of like, do we want to recalibrate the system more broadly? That would be handled by the DAO. So the DAO could decide we wanted to use like a Gauntlet of sorts or ChaosLot Labs or whoever. Or you could have in-house people, you know, that maybe are, maybe they have a background in like FRAD5 risk or something and they're well equipped for that. It's really broadly what the DAO would want to do when it's live. The DAO side, would that be managed by a potential token? I think the CVE token, anything you can talk about in terms of the launch there, is there an airdrop? What are some of the things you're looking for? When token? Exactly. So, yes. So we have a very staged approach. We wanted to make it community owned. So we have an incentivized testnet, which should be coming up when this is actually live. And people can basically participate in that, provide feedback, fill out a feedback form and get points. There will also be a beta launch, which will be on mainnet and a bunch of L2s and maybe all L1s as well. That people can also receive points for depositing assets, building positions, lending, basically using CurbAnts and those points may unlock the opportunity to participate in the DAO. May or may not. Okay. Well, we'll see. Yeah. The points is the latest hype right now in all DeFi, right? Yeah. Yeah. I think it's a really good way of doing stuff. We've spent a lot of time building off-chain tech so we could look at all the stuff people are doing in the ecosystem rather than making a system that's easily sibled or just broadly doesn't reward people that put in, move mountains to really support an ecosystem. So that's something we're going to be bringing to market as well and maybe helping other protocols integrate as well. I also wanted to ask about what your initial security practices will be around the platform itself. I imagine something complex as CurbAnts, the team will initially need some greater control over the protocol in case you need to pause certain markets, et cetera. So will that initially be all on-chain DAO governed or will there be some parameters that is team controlled via multisig or something? Yeah. That's a really good question. So for us, we wanted to make it something that people have confidence in so we don't use any proxy contracts like a lot of money markets do, which also means that our security practices audits prior have to be ironclad, which we have done and can talk about after I respond to this. Our model has been the DAO operator, whatever that multisig is, should be able to do everything on a time delay. So no instant actions. In the current model, it's a seven-day delay. However, there will be an emergency council multisig, which will be made up of probably DAO operators plus external parties, people respected in the industry. And that's kind of like the, oh shit, something really bad is happening situation. And CurbAnts broadly, as you said, has a lot of levers and dials to modify because it's so dynamic and supports a wide range of assets. So in theory, a lot of different stuff can be updated or modified. So that's things like the bridging system. them to what assets are supported, to the configurations of those assets, and so on. We have taken a lot of time during our audits to also minimize any potential, in the case of some compromised action, that no immediate damage can be done. So again, that's like the seven-day delay, but also things like maximum fees and not being able to touch people's assets. So even if somehow everything got compromised, there's still no way for anyone's assets to be taken, which was pretty important to us. So again, because we're DeFi natives ourselves, we build things that we want to use, and I wouldn't really feel comfortable if two people or one person or whatever could just pull people's money at any time. So we've really had that decentralized approach where the DAO is the operator of everything, but even the DAO has additional quality controls to make sure that the users are protected. Yeah. Very well thought out with the backup council. Back to the CVE token, anything you talked about in terms of economics, is there any protocol fees? If so, what are the protocol take rate on the lending market? Yeah. Good question. So there can be fees on pretty much every action. We took that Uniswap approach of having fee switches in a lot of different areas, even if they may be on day two, they may never be on, depending on, again, what the DAO wants. We haven't finalized exactly how we want to handle periods like the beta, where we expect a lot of usage for people accumulating points. But broadly, the key ones that we think people would be exposed to would be on auto-compounding positions. So for example, someone's in like an LP token or something that generates additional tokens, the DAO can run bots essentially to auto-compound those positions and again, minimize any cost to users. 1% of that is taken for paying the transaction basically. So we can have an off-chain relay or look at when stuff needs to be executed and then it can do it. And then 15% of that underlying yield would go to VECVE token lockers, since there is a gauge system for rewards. And that's basically the way to essentially equalize it, right? The users in those pools presumably are getting CV streamed to them and in return, the VECV lockers are getting 15% of those compounded fees. For more basic assets like liquid stake tokens and tokenized treasuries, there's no fees associated with that. However, there is the potential like solutions like Aave and Compound and other money markets to take a percentage on the interest rate. Currently, that can be zero or up to I think 25% or 50% is the theoretical maximum. But I would be surprised if we approached anywhere near that maximum. But again, that isn't 100% fleshed out in terms of the numbers yet. There is the potential for people leveraging up and leveraging down to take like an open close fee similar to things like GMX. And I believe we're also working on having people be able to take their fees from like VECV epochs and actually have those auto compounded back in. And presumably that would have a fee to again for gas, but also just as an additional quality of life expense that people maybe would want to opt into. That's what immediately comes to mind. But I think the two big ones are the interest rate and the auto compounding position piece. We also could take a fee on liquidations, but presumably that'll be set to 0% unless there is an asset that's like highly toxic. Nice. And these fees, they go to the VECV lockers? Yeah. So we don't like... Good question. So there's essentially this what I would call like system that we call the fee accumulator that can like take all these rewards and crunch them and then distribute them to VECV lockers. That's day one that's initially set up for the auto compounding positions, but we could also introduce routing for things like the interest rates, any potential liquidation fees and so on and so on. As of right now, those other things would just go to the DAO treasury, but yeah, nothing goes to like the DAO operators or anything like that. It all just goes into the DAO system. What about the token emissions? I think the large portion of that will be controlled by the vote locked CVE holders. They can direct, I guess, emissions to all of it. Yeah. They get full autonomy over it. So our system is like, I would say a bit different than everyone. You can not only incentivize people on the lending side, or sorry, on the collateral deposit side, but also the lending side. You can vote from any chain to any chain. Fees are distributed cross chain. So whether you lock your tokens on Optimism or Arbitrum, you get the same fees and the chains themselves could actually incentivize people to move locks there because it's like a new way to drive volume and TVL onto a chain, right? Presumably Ethereum would be making the lion's share of fees because that's where the majority of DeFi is. But if somehow, say Arbitrum or Polygon created incentives to create locks on there, whether that just be supporting the community very heavily there with activities and events and stuff or things like short term incentive programs, then there's a reason to move your lock on there because you can move these locks cross chain as well. And now it creates an incentive where if there's a bunch of fees being made, now you have tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in TVL being moved over every two weeks. And then people usually, they tend to invest in local native projects on a chain rather that most people aren't going to receive fees on Arbitrum and then go and invest in something on say Mantle or whatever chain. So it adds a lot of value to those chains if they're able to entice people to move over to that network. More broadly, DAO controls everything, right? So how those fees are distributed, what chains are incentivized, what pools are incentivized. There's also autonomy for people receiving those emissions. They can either choose them in a liquid form or they could choose them in a VECB lock with a boost. And that boost also can be controlled by the DAO. That's also to align incentives, right? Because there's really two groups that would want to capture those emissions. There's the people that maybe don't care about Curvance broadly and they're in it for more of the yield and they could take the liquid option. And then there's maybe protocols, chains and individuals that are very bullish on Curvance that maybe would be okay opting into a one year lock and then they can receive a boost. So they're going to be receiving just more yield than the person that's just kind of tee you up dumping. Right. Yeah. So kind of setting up for a Curvance wars ecosystem. Yes. Exactly. Super cool. Do you have partnerships with like Convex already on like a liquid wrapper there? So we're currently talking to Urine about a liquid wrapper. We are talking to other groups about like them also doing liquid wrappers, but that's the one that's probably I would say the furthest along in discussions where we're actually like scoping out how it would look. So yeah, we love all those guys. We love, you know, the Urine guys, the Convex guys, and you know, all these, you know, there's a lot of like new entrants too that are looking at liquid wrappers as well. So whether it is important to us that we get that decentralized model together, you know, we would prefer not to have a liquid wrapper having 70% of all CVE or something. So we'll see how we can like best facilitate that because I think there are people that will want liquid wrappers, but I think there's also value in having that, you know, CVE distributed across like a larger group of, you know, custodians. What about roadmaps for your multi-chain expansion? Can we expect you guys to launch initially and, you know, what's on the roadmap for future integrations? Yeah. So we are currently in talks with like pretty much every chain. We've committed so far to Ethereum, Arbitrum, Optimism, Base, and Polygon-Z KVM. We are in talks with Blast, Mantle, Scroll, and a few others as well, like Barachain, Monad, and so on. So whether those all come to fruition, you know, really depends on the DAO, right? Because the DAO is like the custodian for any, or they're the determining factor for any like future roadmap items. But I think for us, like the biggest piece with chain expansion is that we don't want to just be everywhere just because we can. We want to like strategically work with chains that champion us. We want to build with them, not for them, right? So what that means is like building strategic initiatives with each of those teams directly and then kind of taking on the world together. So we've been very blessed, like we've received a ton of support from off-chain labs and Polygon labs. So we definitely want to do right by them. And we've also, you know, received a lot of support from groups like Scroll and Mantle as well. So we'd love to include them. But we, you know, we can strategically, you know, collaborate with each of these teams and champion what they want to champion, right? So maybe some chains are very heavy on the liquid staking side. So we're building out like novel solutions on the liquid staking side for them. Or maybe they're very heavy on the real world asset side. And maybe we're working with them to, you know, build deeper liquidity for those real world assets. Or maybe they're very heavy on like the flywheel narrative and having all these like kind of nuanced deep eye solutions and like, you know, deep liquidity. Well, maybe we could, you know, act as like their liquidity layer. And, you know, there's an infinite, you know, like set of opportunities there. And you know, we're going to hopefully be able to help a lot of different chains with all their initiatives. One question I forgot to ask earlier, you know, with all your different multi-chain deployments, would a user be able to come, say on Arbitrum, deposit a collateral token there and then borrow on a different chain? Is that possible? Yeah, that's a good question. So yes, with an asterisk. So when you have like an asset, like collateral on one chain and then like a position on another, there's some scary situations, like for example, network congestion spiking, or even like a sequencer or something going down, right? Like for example, with all this inscription stuff, we saw Arbitrum go down briefly, right? Well, what if you have your collateral on Ethereum and then you have your debt on Arbitrum, right? Now the network's down, so you got to add some like, you know, fail safe there so they can't just pull their stuff out. Or maybe you need to liquidate someone, but gas on Ethereum is 900, so it costs $1,000 to liquidate them. And now you have a position enter bad debt. So it's like these kind of scary situations. So we thought about that and how to best mitigate that. What we've done is we built the ability to delegate borrowing. So what do I mean by that? That means if you deposit collateral and you post it as collateral, you can then say to someone else, I'm going to let you borrow on my behalf. So you could do that to essentially our cross-chain zapper, our cross-chain borrow zapper. And now you can have your stuff on Ethereum, for example, and then borrow it and then actually receive it on Arbitrum. So for example, I'll give you an example here. Maybe you have $10,000 in liquid staked ETH and you want $5,000 in USDC on Arbitrum. Well, you can borrow that $5,000. You could delegate the borrowing on Ethereum and then the router, the zapper can then borrow that $5,000 in USDC or whatever, and then go and bridge it over to Arbitrum and then you receive it just the same. So now the debt is documented on Ethereum. It pulled the liquidity from Ethereum, but you still have your asset on that other chain, which is really important for, again, like high network congestion. Any other solutions that have these cross-chain accounting will have much slower and more dangerous execution of things like liquidation or just their broad security model than Curvance with this. But this allows you to do pretty much everything that you otherwise want to do. That's super cool. So you're saying like everything happens on the base layer, essentially on Ethereum and then you could do that from Arbitrum to Ethereum, or you could do that from Scroll to Mantle or wherever. So it really just, it's more about the accounting logic there, where it makes it really efficient. And then you can just receive your stuff wherever, right? And you can even sap it in other things. You could borrow DAI and then route it into USDC and receive USDC on that other chain. So it makes it really versatile for what you want to do. Well, yeah, that's a lot of stuff that we covered today on Curvance. Anything else that you want to cover or that we missed? No, I think we hit pretty much everything. I think, you know, for us, we're just really excited to finally start talking about this. Early last month, we announced our seed round. We raised a little over $3.5 million, $3.6 million from over 20 different DAOs and DeFi builders. So, you know, everyone from Polygon co-founder to Offchain Labs to Wormhole Foundation, Scroll, GMX, Eigenlayer, Curve, Convex, Mantle, I mean, the long list of groups. So we're super excited to finally be talking about this with like a lot of, you know, the broad DeFi ecosystem, crypto, Twitter, you know, the whole zeitgeist, I guess. And, you know, having such support, such broad support from so many different angels has been really cool. And we're excited to bring this out and cue one of those here. Nice. Yeah, it's awesome that you got, you know, the people who are integrating into your platform to be also the investors there. So, you know, they got that stake in the game. Yeah, really. Yeah. Yeah. I think I think it's really good just confluence that like, not only are we supporting. these groups but the you know the DAOs themselves or the angels you know the contributors on those projects are actually excited about what we're building because that means we're on the right path. So I would say yeah future looks bright and we look forward to people using Curvance. Follow us on social media on Twitter at Curvance and you know try out the test net when it's live. This show was brought to you by Exponential. Exponential is on a mission to democratize access to the best yield opportunities in DeFi. Join Exponential.fi now to start your DeFi investing journey.