How is this any better than the banking system? How is this any better than a casino? In fact, it's probably worse. The banking system itself extracts over, like, $10,000,000,000,000 a year globally, and it goes into the pockets of a very few amount of people. Like, for every winner, there was 50 losers, if not more. And now when you ask people, you know, who are not, like, it is knee deep in everything as we are, what they think about crypto, and the first word out of their mouth is it's a scam. Well over $1,000,000 now on audits, which is very painful to do, but at the same time, what's more painful is the protocol getting wrecked and people losing money and maybe taking their lives. Like, I'd rather go bankrupt trying to make it secure than want something that's unsafe. We need to have a way for people to say, no. I'm reclaiming my sovereignty.

Yeah. Thanks for having me on. I'm Scoopy. I've been in the crypto space since 2016 when I originally went down the Bitcoin rabbit hole, which was kind of, you know, a very eye opening thing for me at the time because I became disillusioned with the kind of financial system after the great financial crisis in 2008. And I kind of just, at the time, felt powerless against our banker overlords who own and control everything. And then when I read the the the coin white paper and I started learning about it more and more and more, I was like, oh, shit. Like, this has a lot of potential to change the world, and it's an exit, so sign me up. And that naturally led me to Ethereum and, you know, decentralized applications, and I started experimenting with them in 2017 and 2018. I'd say the the ones I really enjoyed the most were, shamefully admitting this, but they were Ponzis. One of them was something called proof of weak hands, which is essentially a bonding curve contract. But, like, if you had the bonding curve token, there was a tax buying and selling, and that would go to the people who had the bonding curve token. So it had, like, a kind of, like, this kind of communal and social socialistic aspect to it that that really drew, you know, me to it. And then there was this FOMO three d that was affiliated with that same project that had it was, like, it was a blockchain lottery with Ponzi elements as well. And while I did enjoy those, it did leave a little sour taste in my mouth because I knew that these were zero sum games and that for every win I had, you know, that somebody else had to lose for it. And that just didn't, like, sit quite right with me. And so, like, after that period, a few of the guys that were in that discord, we kind of created a little friend group amongst each other, and they ended up becoming the the cofounders of Alchemax with me. And one of our kind of ideas that we had was we wanted to make something that was more positive sum that didn't screw people over that, you know, you know, would lead to better outcomes without destroying lives. And that was kind of the original inspiration for Alchemix. And we had, like, a eureka moment during the the craze of DeFi summer when we saw all these crazy yields. And we thought, what can we do with these yields? And, you know, as we were iterating on lots of different ideas, we all kind of converged on what became Alchemix and the concept of self repaying loans. And so, yeah, that's how we got started.

And then, you know, some of that would be, you know, maybe borrowing DAI from MakerDAO at, like, 1% interest, then supplying on Compound for in earning four or 5% interest. So you could arp that that rate right there or becoming an LP on Uniswap or supplying, like, liquidity to things like Aave or Compound. And these things started, like, really taking off. And then Yearn and these yield aggregators came along, and they just packaged that into a token itself. So they abstracted away all of the processes on the back end and then just presented you with, hey, put your money in here, you get this token, and now this token is earning yield. And so what we did is we took these yield tokens and we made them as collateral for our system. And as far as I know, we were the first to to do such a thing. Now it's kind of commonplace. But where we differ from a lot of the other implementations is that we do a like kind to like kind. So you put in a stable coin, and you can borrow a stable coin synthetic, or you put in ETH and you can borrow an ETH synthetic. And one advantage of this is that it's very price insensitive. So it doesn't matter if the underlying Stablecoin deep pegs or if ETH tanks or moons in value because the synthetic tracks, the the collateral, we have a liquidation free system as a result. And the way the system works from there is that anytime the system attempts that the yield tokens have accrued value, if it's sufficient value enough to run these processes economically, then what we do is a yield harvest. So we'll do a small liquidation of that collateral that has appreciated, and then use that slice to repay a slice of your debt. And thus, it is self retained loans. So you put in, let's say, you know, a thousand dollars, you you borrow maybe a $100, and then your yield or your your collateral earns, like, $10, it will reduce your debt by 10 as well when that happens. So, you know, with enough time and patience, it will repay all of your debt over time, and you don't have you're we don't charge interest on the loans either.

So yes. Right. Yeah. So in that regard, that was it was kind of like a time arbitrage. And, you know, I think when we first designed the system, we we designed it, you know, while there was a ground surge and interest in crypto. There's, DeFi somewhere. We were in a bull market where the interest was very intense, almost sort of like the interest in AI is now. And, like, we we had made some naive assumptions because we were building in in a bull market, and we thought that since everything was working so well that it wasn't because of any external factors, but because we were geniuses who designed this beautiful elegant system. But then FTX and Terra Luna and all the stuff went down. And the real bear market came in, and then we realized some of the mechanisms we designed are incomplete. They're they're not sufficient enough to do that. And it's really put, like, kind of a ceiling on how much we can scale because we also naively launched a token, you know, in the era of valueless governance tokens inspired by Andre Cronje and things like that in in the era of yield farming. And we're we're working on correcting that too. That that's actually very far along in the pipeline and how we're going to address that and improve the tokenomic situation for the token. But first things first is, like, our our v three system, which is coming soon, very soon. It's spent the greater part of the last year in audit as we are extremely cautious about security, and we wanna make sure that we keep our track record of our protocol not being exploited and losing user funds. I know that, like, when when, you know, exploits happen, that if the losses are significant enough, it can actually lead to, you know, people committing suicide. And I just I don't think I can live if, you know, something I created caused someone to kill themselves. So, like, I really take it seriously. And as somebody who also wants to use the systems that I've created, I also want to, you know, not get wiped out as well. So that's kind of why it's taking so long for it to get through is that we just wanna make sure, like, it is rock solid. It's airtight. Like, nothing can you know? But that it can be reliable infrastructure indefinitely.

like, we had a a liquidity pool in curve, and there was a reentrancy vulnerability at the compiler level, and that led to a huge loss. And we were able to get the majority of the funds back from it from the hacker. Like, everything he stole, we already get back. But, like, when they drained the pool, they they only drained the ETH. And there was, like, zero ETH and, like, like, a few thousand alleys in the pool. And then arbitrage bots immediately just scooped it up for, like, free at the same block as as it happened. And, like, Coinbase got a 500 ETH MEV bounty for processing that block as well that they didn't ever get back to us, and, they said they never would either. So good job, Coinbase. Soon. Yeah. I think they could have afforded it. Yeah. Yeah. Whatever. I guess that's in the past. But that was, like, the major thing that that's ever happened to us. And, you know, we together with, Curve and the funds that we rescued, we tried to make the LPs who were affected as whole as possible. I think we covered about 8085% of the losses that happened with our LPs. So they didn't totally get wiped out by that. So, you know, myself included because I was in there.

time Yeah. Yeah. Financial arbitrage? So in v one and v two, I can talk about some of the real world use cases people have used it so far. So early on, there was a guy who had, you know, more than double the money that he needed to buy a car. And so what he did so let's say that car was 40 or $20,000. Right? He and he had $40,000 cash on hand. He could have spent that $20,000 cash on hand and just paid for the car outright and then had $20,000 left over that he could, you know, put in, like, a, you know, some type of savings, like, you know, vehicle to earn interest on and stuff like that. But instead, what he did is he put the the 40,000 Alchemax and then borrowed 20,000 and then paid for the car using that borrowed money. Now this borrowed money had no interest on it, and the collateral at the same time, the full 40,000 was earning yield in d five. So instead of having a a collateral or, like, a a basis of 20,000 to earn from which to earn. He has a a basis of 40,000 with which to earn. And then that 40,000 is now servicing his debt. So all the interest from that is servicing his debt. So it's a way for you to, yes, get a time arbitrage for your money. And so you can preserve the the kind of advantages of having a larger capital base versus, you know, direct cash spending and then losing that advantage. So there's a guy who did that with a a car. There's a guy who did that with a boat, a guy who did that with his grad school tuition, a guy who did that for the hospital bills for his newborn daughter. And then what I wanna really highlight even more than any of them is this kind of crypto media and event planning organization. They're called Rare Evo. And they originally were like a a Cardano initiative, and they've branched out beyond that. And they do Ethereum. They do other things in the ecosystem, and they put on conferences, and they do event planning. And they've planned our events for the last few years because one of the guys on their team is a diehard Alchemix fan, and he has stuffed their entire treasury into the the Al Eth side of Alchemix. And whenever they need to, you know, borrow things, like finance stuff for that, they just borrow what they need, and they keep their their collateral basis, you know, their principal basis the same and have that service the debt over time. And he said that's helped them really extend their runway. You know, it it's not like, you know, Ponzi yield. We're getting, you know, 4%, you know, on on your ETH. It's, you know, either urine, vesper, or LSTs right now that you can choose from, and the yields have compressed pretty low for them. But at the same time, you know, that 3%, you know, if you have, like, a million bucks in the treasury, that that's $30. That that might be an event right there that you get to do for free every year because of this system. And, you know, it adds up over time. And so, you know, I think that that's one I'm really proud of and are you know, just very loyal and and always, like, kinda communicating with us. And and people make fun of the guy. His name's Rand because all he does is talk about alchemix. But, you know, you know, I'm happy he does, and I'm happy that his org is also getting value out of it. Other ways people can use it is, like, in the v one and v two system is that we had, like, a 50% LTV. So you put in a 100, you can borrow 50. And so you could do is you could take that 50, buy more collateral, put that back in the system, then borrow more and loop that and and get kind of, like, a two x leverage of your yield in the system that way. And so some people have used that to enhance base yields or multiply them. And I think that's a really good segue for for v three because, like, it kind of enhances that much more.

in the the synthetics, so they can get the synthetic off the market, buy it up and repay their debt, or they can use their collateral to repay their debt. And those are both we call that self liquidation. And so there's no penalty in doing that at all. So it actually helps the system because the the price of liquidity is not free. So having people be able to service that, it creates also another arbitrage opportunity. So if, like, synthetic paint drops, they can buy the debt for cheaper than they sold it for and then repay at a discount. So there there's advantages to, you know, doing that.

Oh, glad you asked. Oh, yes. So I think I need to talk about the big limitation of v two and why we are building d three is that the the peg stability mechanism for v one and v two was that the yield that was, you know, liquidated to to pay off people's debt would go into this this contract called the transmitter. And so what you could do is you could put in ALUSD or ALETH into the transmitter, And then slowly over time, it would convert it to the underlying assets. So you could put it in, like, the dye transmitter, the USDC, the USDT, and the FRAX one. And over time, the yield from those vaults would essentially convert that asset back to the original collateral. And the big problem with this is that the yield, you know, is a highly variable rate. You know, One week, it could be 10%. The next week, it could be 5%. So we didn't have predictable flows, but also since the the only flows were from yield and yield takes a long time to kind of accrue and and, you know, for it to process. It's not this immediate, like, get rich quick type of thing is that sometimes the the amount of funds that were flowing into the transmitter were not enough to service any market contraction that needed to happen to protect the peg. So with that in mind, we have designed v three with a new mechanism that allows for fixed period redemptions. So when you get to the site, you'll see, okay, redemptions are going to take three months right now. Okay? So and and in effect, what this does is it creates a fixed yield primitive with Alchem x v three. So let let's say, is 99¢, and it's a three month redemption. So you're getting that that, you know, one cent arbitrage every three months. And if you annualize that, that would be like a 4% fixed yield. And the lower the the pet gets, the more attractive and the bigger this this fixed yield becomes. And so the demand for the token goes up, which and becomes a self stabilizing system on its own. And we have one of the levers we have to kind of influence this in the protocol is by being able to adjust the redemption time. So if we're finding three months is too long, the peg is is drifting too far with that. Okay. We can ratchet it down to two months. So in that scenario I just described before, that 4% would become a 6%, you know, because of, like, you know, how it arbitrages. If we go down to, you know, one month, then we find two months is too too long. One month would then turn that rate into to 12%. So we do have some very powerful levers to influence the the cryptoeconomic systems of it. And on the flip side of this, we have to find some way to guarantee these funds by that date. And the only way to really do this is through redemption mechanisms. So what'll happen is as these these these transmitters positions, these redemption positions start maturing over time, it earmarks a part of your debt that will be essentially, you know, reserved for future redemption. It converts your debt into a different type of debt. And so it's this kind of positional decay, but of your debt. And then when the redemption is called, it will then, you know, forever much that one that that one redemption is proportional to your share of the earmarked debt. It will then take a part of your collateral and then repay the same amount of debt at the same time. So it can transfer that collateral to the the person who's doing this redemption arbitrage. And and the cool thing about this is that there's, again, another time game, a temporal game being played here is that because we have these gradual redemptions that happen, but they're being earmarked for later. It's not like as they're being mature, the the funds are flowing directly over to the redemption module. It's just keeping track of how much needs to go over there and what everybody's share of that is. So you get to earn on your full collateral in the meantime as that is happening, and your collateral in v three actually accrues and compounds, whereas in v two, it doesn't. So there are, you know, some certain advantages for this. And I think this balances the system more because in v two and v one, LPs, like, your liquidity providers indexes, were often taking on a lot of peg risk. And so, like and also later borrowers when the peg was lower, it was less attractive to come in. And so, like, it didn't balance the system between all the participants, but this new system does. Because if the peg does drift so much, the LPs can be like, okay. I can just withdraw these assets and then redeem them one to one, erasing all of my impermanent loss. So they can feel comfortable, and even de pegs can become opportunities for them because the the nature of these LP tokens are is it's kind of like a ratio between tokens, and that that determines, like, the the price of each asset in the pair. And so if you withdraw on a d peg, you'll have a lot more l USD or l ETH as a result of it, and so you can actually profit from them as well. So it creates a a good environment for LPs to feel comfortable, you know, participating in the system. And for future participants, the peg will recover through these mechanisms, creating very good opportunities for them to get into the system and borrow and get the full value of their synthetics when they borrow them.

essentially, you know, earn on your your collateral while, you know, spending at the same time so you can save and spend. Imagine it's like a like a high interest savings account married with a credit card, but that credit card has 0% interest on the debt that you borrow. So it's a really good deal. And so in that sense, you know, and it's automated as well. You don't have to do anything to surface your debt. It'll just take care of itself over time. Of course, you can go in manually if you want to. But the efficiency gains of this and the peg stability mechanisms that we have have also allowed us to increase the LTV from 50% to 90%. And so just like you could before in v two at 50%, loop it to get close to two x, you know, you know, because it you know, leverage on your yield with 90% LTV that can asymptotically get close to 10 x leverage on your yield. So you can multiply your yield that you get in DeFi. So if you see a 5% rate on alchemix, you can multiply that to thirty, forty, 45%. Now you you will take some losses on slippage as you do these loops. If it's, like, at 99¢, right, that's a 1%, you know, upfront interest rate that you're essentially paying on it. But even then, like, you don't have to worry about the long term interest that accrues to to the account. So what I'm excited about is, like, somebody comes in, and they don't have to be a whale to benefit from the system. Let's say you you have $10,000 and you wanna start saving and and accruing value, and you're saving up for a house or whatever, your retirement, anything. You take your $10,000, and instead of just earning 5% on $10,000, you could loop it. It means, let's say, five x, and now your principal base is 50,000. So it's almost like you're earning 25% on your original $10,000 deposit. And I think that makes it very accessible to, you know, you know, medium sized, you know, savers and investors as well. Whereas before, due to gas prices and some of the inefficiencies of v two, This kind of use it as a as a yield or let you know, device or savings device was made more sense to whales, especially when you factor in, yeah, transaction costs and and DeFi. So I think that this new system, yeah, is is is made for both the little guy and the big guy this time around.

how to use it best and efficiently because we don't have necessarily the same amount of resources as the other side does to, yeah, to to to function up. Just have financial independence and be a parasite for the rest of your life. Yeah. Type of thing like that. But, like, I I think that this is, like, a like, kind of ideologically, like like, they're you know, the banking system itself, you know, extracts over, like, $10,000,000,000,000 a year globally from the world. Yeah. And it goes into the pockets of a very few amount of people. And it's this perpetual thing that will never shrink, and it's only going to grow and become a bigger albatross on society. And I feel like like this new model that we're creating kind of democratizes that superpower that only the the few elite had, and it kinda gives it to everyone. And it says, hey. The yield is yours. Like, we're not charging you interest. You know? You don't have this this this, you know, this money sucking demon always requiring you to work harder and harder and harder to harvest your energy and your soul from you. And and it's sort of saying, like, the yield is yours. It was always yours, and we're just giving you tools to realize that. And, like, that's, like, where I'm at, like, you know, spiritually and ideologically when it comes to, you know, like, trying to build cool things in DeFi is, like, how can I make things that change structures for the better? And, you know, like, that was originally what we came with, started Alchemix, and I think we've refined it to the point where it's ready for the world. I think this system is scalable, and we think it can make an impact, you know, for for everybody.

Yeah. Here's what you think. Honestly, I think a lot of things started to kinda go wrong, you know, towards the tail end of DeFi summer. It wasn't just a few blue trip protocols with limited kind of bootstrapping programs, but then became this food token Ponzi banana bonanza where, you know, like, people were just forking protocols left and right lazily attaching a new token to them, having, you know, extremely attractive yield farming terms, you know, for for LPs and stuff like that. And it kind of a lot of the the stuff where the the attention went away from the protocols and more towards the tokens. And then, you know, once the liquidity dried up after, you know, FTX and Luna and Three Arrows Capital, all the blow ups that happened, you know, Celsius and everything like that, and, you know, there wasn't enough funds to go around to support these tokens and everything like that. Like, it it left a really sour taste in a lot of people's mouths. You know? Then when you add NFTs and to the mix and to the stupidity that was going on with $100,000 JPEGs on the Internet, really bad art, and and, like, there's a whole mess of problems with that, I think, too. And I think it led to this sense of financial nihilism is that this space, in order to succeed, you have to basically take money from someone else. And this, I think, culminated in pumped up fun and the meme coin kind of craze that happened over the past few years where, you know, the most successful people on that platform would launch, you know, dozens of tokens a day and pump and dump them. And there were Cabals who would coordinate for pump and dumps and run it up really high and then just send that thing down and just destroy so many people in so many lives in the process. Like, for every, you know, winner, there was 50 losers, if not more. And, you know, now when, you know, you ask people, you know, who are not like it is knee deep in everything as we are, what they think about crypto, and the first word out of their mouth is it's a scam. And I think that's really, really sad that the the well has been poisoned this bad. And I think, you know, I've been a meme coin hater since day one back even when they were primarily on Ethereum, and you actually had to have dev skills to make them. And I think it just got it got worse and worse. We saw influencers like Ansem, and then they brought in celebrities. And what do the celebrities do? They scam people, like, relentlessly. And, you know, and then Jesse from base is coinage, you know, and tried to copy the scam over there and was just completely tone deaf that people were getting, you know, fatigue over all this stuff while they were making this this huge crypto social push. And I just think, like, this this model that it has to be a Ponzi bonding curve in order to monetize content is just so hilariously misguided. And very cynical how they went about everything and how they tried to make it into this positive, oh, rah rah. We're we're coining things. This is the new version of content going forward, but all it did is just, you know, hurt people financially to the benefit of a very few. And it's just like, how is this any better than the banking system? How is this any better than a casino? In fact, it's probably worse. Actually, much, much worse. And, you know, I think, you know, the the space is leaning into, like, the the hyper gambling degeneracy, you know, with 100 x leverage perps with, you know, these these prediction markets that are you know, they they'll they'll they'll try to, you know, rationalize why it's not gambling, you know, the sophist they are, but they at the end of the day, it it's gambling. Why else would you have sports outcomes on there? That's, like, the most popular form of gambling. Right? Like and that's their biggest market is betting on sports games. It just shifts the model from the house versus everybody to PVP model, you know, and that's really the only difference. And I think information markets can have value, but I don't think there's any value in speculating on who's gonna win a sporting event. It's it's, you know, it's it's the carnival. It's the circus. You know? It's it's not it's not anything that's really that important. It's just entertainment. And I think speculating on entertainment is just, like, silly as far as, like, it being presented as an information market. I think they should just be honest and be like, yeah. It's sports betting. And then I'd be like, okay. It's sports betting. Yeah. Okay. It should be illegal or at least be regulated more than it is, but, you know, be honest with yourselves, guys. Come on.

Well, I mean, like, I'm a big believer in in cryptocurrencies, like, the crypto networks. Like, I think, you know, when like, you know, like, with Metcalfe's law and stuff like that, like, these networks have value, but that that's for the native tokens of the networks themselves. Like, I think Bitcoin has value even though it's not backed by anything. You know, money is a construct anyway for the most part. And if, you know, it has really good properties as far as known supply. It has, you know, permissionless, you know, neutrality and rails. So anybody can send to anybody else without censorship. And same thing with Ethereum, and they extend that with, you know, the ability to to make apps on it. And I think all these things are are very valuable. And and I think the market is also, you know, like, actually cares about decentralization, you know, because that that's the number one and number two asset in in the world or in the crypto space are arguably the most decentralized, you know, projects in the space as well. So I I think, like, there is value in cryptocurrencies, but the problem is is these, like, we're you're alluding to earlier, these tokens that that don't have any backing. They're just purely speculative plays. And then I think in the middle, we have protocol tokens, which a lot of them are kind of like almost like early stage startups where they might not be revenue positive or maybe not revenue positive enough to do revenue sharing just quite yet. And I think this is the kind of growing up period for a lot of these, you know, crypto, like, dApp protocols in in trying to address the these concerns around their tokenomics and, you know, find sustainable business models that don't re you know, solely rely on token emissions, but through actual sustainable businesses. And that's something that, you know, we're we're highly aware of on our end. I realize that I'm a hypocrite to some extent as well as this. We have done, like, buybacks for our token over time, and I know, like, you know, MakerDAO does the same thing and various other protocols do the same thing. But that's not exactly the same thing as revenue share. And so, like, we are really working hard on creating a new system that kind of learns lessons from both the Ethereum two staking system as well as the the vesting escrow system that that Curve Finance innovated on number of years back and trying to find something that's better. And, like, one of my employees, I don't know if you know him on Twitter, is a block enthusiast. He's a bit of a a mad scientist of sorts, and that's what I love about him. He thinks very out of the box, and he's the one who's come up with this system. He's calling it a vesting cue, so v q. And so it it addresses both yield dilution when people pile into something, but also, you know, the amount of time it takes to get out your commitment to the system. And so as a queue getting in and out, and then once you're in that, you invested into the queue into the system, you kind of have, like, these kind of senatorial powers of governance and a share of revenue. But the really, really, really cool thing and this allows, you know, for governance disputes to be really elegantly handled, is that these this queuing system is recursive. So subdows can permissionlessly spawn from it, and they'll start having revenue streams directed to them for their initiatives. So, you know, if Ave had this system, maybe ACI and, you know, other labs wouldn't have defected from Ave because there could have been room for disagreement between them while still staying under the Aave umbrella. And they're we're gonna be releasing a lot of research stuff. This is gonna be completely copy left open source stuff that we want to give as a gift to the world. It'll be out later this year. It it's it's approaching audit at this point, but we're not sure how long that's gonna take. Of course, it's always impossible to give accurate timelines if you're trying to do it securely in the space. But and and part of this VQ system are are revenue streams. Like, we could have a sub dial for Al USD, a sub dial for Al Eth, or a sub dial for any new product that we wanna launch, or any other sub dial initiative. And then the revenue that those subdows generate will then go to the people who have invested into those subdows. So there's, like, multiple revenue streams. There's, you know, there's lots of really cool properties about this, and it gives people signal. It gives people agency, and all this stuff is gonna be fully on chain once it's all ready. So we're we're really excited for that stuff. And we think that definitely a prerequisite for this working is, you know, a a protocol that has revenue. But there's a lot of them out there that do. And so, you know, like, I think it's we're gonna mature. You know? There needs to be growing pains. Some people need to get wiped out. It's very unfortunate that we saw a balancer essentially throw in the towel earlier today, and that really hurts me because I love those guys. And, you know, I think they're one of the most cracked and talented and innovative teams in DeFi. And, I know that they're gonna be doing the the people who are part of Balancer Labs are gonna go on to do amazing things in the future as well. So but I think yeah. You know, it's the time of soul searching. That's what bear markets are for. It's for building. It's for realizing the error of our ways and trying to correct them moving forward.

Well, so multipart question here. So I'm gonna take on crops first. And I I think it's it's a good goal and and everything like that. But at the same time, I think that if you are super rigid with your thinking and there's no room for flexibility and understanding other perspectives, then it becomes problematic. So, you know, if you have people who are harassing a project because they slap a a BSL license on their code, I I think that that's a little bit too extreme. It doesn't take into any of the reasons of why they might consider a BSL in the first place. So if we look at the context of, you know, how things have gone down is that, you know, everything was, like, prior to Deep by Summer and threw out most of it was open source. And, you know, and, basically, what happens is you you make this protocol and you open source it, and then you have all these people, these opportunists who just fork it, attach a token to it, and then use it for exit liquidity, essentially. And, you know, but if you look at any l two or alt l one, it's just a bunch of these copycats with teams that don't have the technical expertise to really handle the operation of the protocol. They don't have that deeper knowledge, and they're more prone to exploits. Even the earnest teams, they're more prone to exploits. There's, like, several, you know, compound forks that have just blown up spectacularly because the people operating them did had no idea what they were doing. End of business running it because they didn't have that expertise. You have a million Uniswap clones, you know, with SushiSwap Vampire Attack being the original sin of that. And, like, so you just go around and you see a bunch of the same things, but crappier versions with with teams that are not as committed as the original teams that that originally developed them. And in a lot of ways, it's quite injurious to the the protocol or the teams that developed them in the first place because they can be vampired, and it steals their liquidity. And they have these Ponzi schemes to to vampire OA users and and stuff like that. And they don't give back. They don't develop and then send downstream to the mother protocol. They don't profit share. They don't do anything like that back to it. So it's like a very abusive relationship. And in that regard, I think, you know, protecting your IP can can make a lot of sense because if you are the one who can grant the license to other people because you have a BSL, then you can make sure whoever's forking you is aligned, that they might come to an agreement about, you know, sharing things because, you know, they have this advantage of not having any of the cost of r and d and audits and everything like that that the original protocol did. Like, for Alchemix v three, we've spent over $3,000,000 on r and d for it between developer salaries and audits. It it's it's not cheap, but we've really, like, you know, we've used a lot of our runway trying to really make this good and and spending, like, well over $1,000,000 now on audits, which is very painful to do. But at the same time, what's more painful is the protocol getting wrecked and people losing money and maybe taking their lives. Like so I don't want that on my conscious. So, like, I'd rather go bankrupt trying to make it secure than launch something that's unsafe. And and for that reason, we are having a two year exclusive, like, BSL license. We'll we'll have, like, a friendly fork framework. So if anybody wants to to fork us, they you know, there's some very basic things, like boilerplate things they could agree to and just get the license automatically, or they can work with us and negotiate something that works between both of the teams. We'll be super flexible about it. And as long as we like the other people and we think that they're trustworthy and their intentions are good, you know, we're more than welcome to be flexible with them. But, like, I've caught some flack and some potshots from from some of the, you know, more, you know, extreme zealots in the space about that. And I don't wanna hear any of that because it's like, what have you launched? Are you running a business? Are you supporting this, you know, the livelihoods of, you know, a dozen or more people? No. Okay then. Like, please, like, you have no grounds to criticize. And I think, like, when when people are so dogmatic about it and there's no room for any understanding or nuance, that's the danger of such mandates like the EF put out because there are those who are just, like, so hardcore, whatever the title says. There's this aye aye captain without thinking twice. And I think that's kind of, like, antithetical to the ethos of Ethereum as this open ecosystem anyway. And I I understand this is more directed towards the EF and, you know, stuff like that. I'm choosing to view it as kind of like a spiritual recommitment to our values, and I I agree with a lot of it, but I just think that there needs to be some room for nuance and for people not to be, you know, extremists about it.

Gonna catch so much flack. Yes. Yes. I I mean, I I go back and forth on, you know, love and hate, milady, honestly. Like, in in some ways, like, I I I'm down with it, and, like, I like how, like, subversive it is, but then some of the crowd attracts are, like, really, like, Nazi adjacent or fascist adjacent. And, you know, even, like, you know, the the leader of the lady Charlotte Fang is, like, admitted to working for for Palantir, which is, like, I think highly problematic because I think they're, like, one of the most evil organizations in the entire world. So it's like, is that where you guys are spiritually trying to align? Really? Maybe rethink that a little bit. And it's not all in the ladies. There's a like, a lot of my friends in the crypto space, you know, rock a milady profile, and they're they're very nice and very good people who are not fascists at all. If anything, they're very left leaning. But, at the same time, it's like you know? I always like to say to to my children, like, look around at your friends. This is your future. Right? And, you know, so choose your friends wisely. And, you know, in a spiritual level, like Indra's web is like, you know, this this giant spider's web. And at every single intersection, there's like a, you know, a gem with facets that then reflect all the other gems in the tapestry. And so, like, we're a piece of everyone else who's around us. And if we're associating with with people that have such ties, then we can't help but be associated with them by others and also probably influenced by some of their their less than ideal ideologies. And so I think, you know, for that to be, like, this core Ethereum cipher punk, you know, ethos of Milady, it's like maybe we should rethink that a little bit or refine it or or distance a little bit from it, like, because it it's not all there's a lot of bad that I think is associated with it as well. So I'll I'll just leave it there. And if I say much more, I'm gonna be brigaded by a bunch of my ladies next time I make a tweet. So

I've been to a couple of the Milady parties, and there's always some weird vibe that did not agree with me at all. And I was like, I I gotta get out of here. Like

Well, I wanna see really is, you know, people being true to, like, crypto native applications and building an on chain economy. I think inviting TradFi into Ethereum is a kind of a double edged sword where, you know, as it's not just stable coins are added to the system. It's more like they supplant the crypto native assets that are already there. So we see this already with stable centralized stablecoins kind of dominating versus decentralized stablecoins, and then people preferring to hold and trade with stablecoins instead of crypto native assets, thus reducing demand and the network effects for those crypto native assets. And especially in a proof of stake system, it's kind of self referential in a way in that, like, you, you know, you need to have the the token the network token have value for the network to have security. And Ethereum at $30 does not work. I'm sorry, but it does not. So I I think, you know, like, people committing to that and not taking shortcuts, not taking the CD five shortcuts where they just have a a few dudes on a multisig or an MPC server running everything instead of actually, like, on chain code. And we saw with Resolve just a couple days ago, another example of one of these kind of CDFI platforms, which really did a good job of fooling people into thinking it was actual DeFi, like, blowing up because whether it was an inside job or not, the the the key got leaked, and it was used to exploit the the protocol. It was just one EOA that got leaked and compromised. Like, not even a nose to save three or five. And I think people taking these shortcuts to to chase narratives, And then this whole, like, you know, everything needs to be a stablecoin, you know, and and this this kind of push for genius acts, you know, regulated stablecoins. And I feel like it's going to push crypto native assets out of the way, and Wall Street will start to cannibalize and absorb, you know, crypt you know, crypto networks. And if they end up getting enough influence, they will be able to determine four choice rules. And we already have this problem with the USDC and Tether to an extent. And the more entrenched they get, the harder it will be to actually control the network, and then they'll gain more influence, especially if the Ethereum Foundation subtracts itself over time. Then other groups will then have influence over future I EIPs, and there won't be, you know, the the EAF mandate and Metallica and the true cypherpunks out there to safeguard things. And they'll take shortcuts, and they'll they'll do bad stuff like that. And and I think, like, even with RWAs, like you said, like, there are some bonds and things like that. But the stuff that they're throwing on chain are, like, junk bonds, stuff that's gonna hurt people and likely go bust. So I think, you know, we have to be cautious with how we integrate with, you know, TradFi. I don't think we can outright, you know, kick them out. I think, you know, Ethereum's the open neutral platform, and that's impossible. But at the same time, I think we should be skeptical and not openly embrace it and do it the right way and make sure that it doesn't corrupt our values in the process. And for the people who are building on chain apps, like, really, like, try to have a reason for them to be web three instead of web two. Like, you know, really embody the the good properties of, you know, of what blockchains can can give, especially this kind of openness, censorship resistance qualities where they're p two p and and owned by a network of people instead of centralized party. I think if we stay true to that as our blockchains are getting more scalable, more economically viable, you know, for applications to run on them, then, you know, it's just a matter of time before someone cracks it, and we hit critical mass. And we have decentralized versions of the things that we use today. You know, especially with the walls closing in around privacy, you know, they wanna make you KYC for every single platform now. That's the big push. Even at the OS level, they're trying to do this, and I think that we need to have, you know, sanctuary technology. We need to have a way for people to say, no. I'm reclaiming my sovereignty. I am not going to subject myself to the surveillance state and give up my human rights. And I think that, like, you know, that's the part of the theory mandate that resonates with me the most is, you know, we we have this opportunity. We're at a critical juncture to really, you know, change the direction of civilization. And I know that sounds like a really big, grandiose thing to say, but I really think that we are an important player in this game of civilization, and, you know, we have the power to do tremendous good and bad. And so I'd rather we, you know, are on the side of good and for the people and for democracy and democratization and empowerment of the masses and not just the few. So that's where I'm at.

Alright. Thank you for having me on, Josh. It was a fun chat, man. So and good luck to you with bread and,