Minterest breaks $10M in DeFi TVL with MINTY launch planned for Q1 2024

0:01I'm Ashton Addison from the cryptocoin show and today on blockchain interviews we have back with us Ken the CEO of minest Ken welcome to the show and it is great to see you again oh thank you Ashton it's always a pleasure to come back and speak with you you know we always have fun conversations so yeah thanks a lot you're very welcome uh likewise I'm excited to hear the latest

0:21updates on uh miness defi growth we've had you guys on times and each time the market is hotter in crypto and there's a little bit of a needed cool down right now because Bitcoin has been you know double since we spoke two times ago and and the dii tvl in all blockchain ecosystems is also growing exponentially um and I know that is also trickling into minest uh so I'm excited

0:49to dive into the latest with you um but I'd love to start off from a high level for those who haven't seen our previous videos or they may want to know more about minest you could start by just giving a high level on what exactly is a minest def5 platform and then we can dive into all the latest details yeah absolutely certain Market is crazy man but anyway let's talk about

1:09minest so minest is the next Generation defi lending protocol so uh the way I generally describe it as I had before it's it's sort of like having banking on the blockchain so you know about 90% 85 90% of users um who have cryp who hold crypto assets they hold it in their wallets and as I've said before sort of like the proverbial holding it under your digital mattress so to speak you

1:34know like having cash under your mattress um what mentors allows you to do is deposit those assets into a decentralized bank of sorts and you can earn interest right as you would in the real world where you're depositing into your bank account that's the high Lev gist of how to think about minest um it's about pooling assets together from around the world it allows for anyone to

1:56participate now the way mest works is that you know you have people who will Supply you will deposit and then you have people who will actually borrow those assets for various reasons um in some cases you'll have Bitcoin miners who they've earned Bitcoin but they don't want to sell it just yet so instead they'll say I'm going to deposit my Bitcoin and I'm going to borrow some

2:15usdt so I can go buy some more miny equipment which I guess is very going to be very popular right now before the happening especially um you know that's one use case and then you have Traders as well who do the same thing so there's a robust ecosystem of people that are utilizing lending now with minest we we go one step further from everyone else basically so most lending protocols they

2:36capture every lending protocol they their fee generating machines that capture a lot of fees but those fees that are generated tend to be extracted away they go to third parties they go to protocol owners not back to the users of the protocol so for us we thought how can we make di fairer and for us it's about taking all those fees which tend to leave that system and bring it right

2:59back to the users so we redistribute all fees captured back to the users of the protocol and by doing so your deposit rates are effectively higher than the market rate and your cost of borrowing is lower than the market rate that's the gist of how we designed minest and um at this point minest V1 as well as we call it is now fully featured and fully

3:27deployed on the mantled network it just happened this week we have not announced that uh so I guess you're the first one to hear it um but it's really exciting to have the entire feature set of V1 ready to go very exciting and thank you for that explanation Ken and there are some great examples in there of it's a decentralized bank and it's like holding

3:50cash under your mattress except for uh as Michael sailor says C anybody who's holding cash you're losing value because of inflation and hopefully if you're holding it in ether for example um even if you're just holding longterm just a stack of ether uh you're hopefully that's going to appreciate but also if you're using defi if you just have a stack and it's just sitting there uh

4:12being able to supply that or lend it out to somebody else in a safe way uh maybe you're not even borrowing you're just putting it in there to earn a bit of interest um then you're going to be getting more on top of just the appreciation can you talk about in in a dii platform what is you know what what ideally should somebody look for say I have a stack of ether do I look for just

4:35the highest return or low cost or the engine that under underlies the defi mechanism what makes a defi platform special sure great question so as with anything that you're utilizing that requires more contracts um you know you want to make sure you're protecting your own assets so it's important to look at when when you look at any project whether it's a lending protocol like

5:00interest or if you're looking to utilize a DEX like Unis swap or whatever it might be always look to see um about the underlying smart contracts have they been audited if they've been audited by whom you know how often are they doing it um are doing these audits because that gives you a sense for the legitimacy of the underlying code at least that's the first piece of it the

5:24second part I generally like to see if the team itself right the PE members of that team if they're docks as in like can you actually find out who the people are that are developing it right because though in our space um we're accustomed to having a lot of anonymous teams operating businesses operating projects and that's perfectly fine this is a decentralized space and we can do what

5:46as we wish but for me I tend to really only use projects where I'm like I kind of know there's a history with the founders right or the history with the team there's a team there um it just provides a little more sense of um uh safety for me me personally right um the third thing is obviously then from there you know cuz you may be attracted to something because it's going to provide

6:08you with good returns that's super but at the end of the day these two first these two first pieces um I Look to and then from there certainly like looking at the kind of returns you can get and you know how you can utilize a protocol is it easy to do it um making sure that you know for for mest everything's very liquid so you can deposit you can withdraw at any time no liquidity is

6:29locked in from interest there's no impermanent loss you don't have to worry about like whether or not your assets are going to lose value if the market moves one way or the other like you would on a on a uni swap or an amm a DEX right so I look for things like that because for me I don't have time to keep managing my positions so I would rather just go somewhere where I can say okay

6:47I'll get a general return maybe I won't get like a thousand X on things but at the end of the day I'm also not going to go to zero necessarily I'm happy with that I can focus on other things in my life so that's that's my that's the way I do it right uh everyone else has their own approach to doing things but hopefully I give you just a little sense

7:05for kind of what I look at yeah no I'm glad you mention that because I feel like a lot of people are hesitant or don't want to take the time to understand defi even though they have a lot of ether or other coins that they could be earning interest on because they've heard of you know there's extra risks to understand like impermanent laws I I understand with

8:30deployed on the manal network back in January we ran this campaign and what the way the campaign run ran was simply we just said hey you'll get some rewards just come to mest deposit any asset any amount that you want you know $1 whatever you want and you can withdraw at any time you don't have to keep it there that's it and I think we discussed last time people came there they did

8:53that but then they just didn't withdraw because they realize why should they they're just they're earning interest so simple for them that's very cool and I love that there's no limit there in the sense that if you had 10,000 and you deposited it you're going to be getting the same apy percentage per year as somebody who's putting in a dollar and you know if a lot of places you go to

9:17some fund manager and you say hey I have 20 bucks can I earn interest they'd be laughing at you because you know they they they won't accept somebody of your level U but with defi you have that ability to hey I just have you know $1,000 that I've saved up over a year in ether let's get some extra apy on it and there are I know there's different mechanisms on different di5

9:41platforms with miness earning from what I understand there's you know you're earning in the the token that you're depositing but also in with because of the mantle bonus and then there's the minest token there's like multiple ways that you're earning can you talk about exactly how that works when you deposit ether for example uh on on mantle Network absolutely I'd love to tell you

10:05about that so on mterest you can earn up to five different yields it's kind of crazy so I I'll break it down simply basically so all right the first thing is it's the the base interest rate that you earn so like when you go to a normal Bank you deposit your dollars you're earning some percentage whatever it's 0.1 or whatever the heck it is that we're earning today you know 5% right

10:28you're earning that that's the base interest rate same thing on on on Min you get that that's the first thing the second is that you will also be earning emission rewards in the minest token minty so you'll be getting that as a second one there's a third one for most of the markets as well um for most of the token markets that we offer that's the MNT token so that's mantel token

10:54itself mantle Network token so there are two emission rewards that you earn one is minty one is mantle that's three uh that's three forms of Interest the fourth one is there are certain tokens that are interest bearing by themselves so on mantle Network they have something called me e it's mantle e which is basically like staked eat like lios Stak eth and just by holding that

11:18token you already earn an interest within on on an eth basically right so that's the fourth one and then the fifth one which we just launched this past week week or this week I should say is something we call an nft boost so I'll explain that in a second but basically what this means is you will be earning an additional yield on the minty tokens and the MNT tokens those emission tokens

11:46you earn a boost in those rewards and the way that works is miness has launched a series of three it's a 3,000 uh nft collection um and these nfts they're not just pretty look at they celebrate the top 100 most influential influential in blockchain Circa 2021 so you have some really Infamous people there with interesting biod description from 2021 and you can probably think of

12:12a few people off top of your head who might be on that list and we are not altering any of that stuff so it's it's a piece of History basically anyway so these nfts they are structured into 12 tiers of Rarity and what they do they have they have actual functionality within the mest protocol they provide anywhere between 20 and 50% boost in your emission reward so for

12:39example if you have our rarest one which is Satoshi Satoshi provides 50% boost so let's say today you're supplying on minest and you're earning 10 minty tokens and you're earning 10 MNT tokens the mantle token well if you hold Satoshi you won't earn 10 of each you'll earn 15 of each 50% % increase in both 15 minty 15 MN simple math the purpose behind the nfts is number one it rewards

13:08our users basically our liquidity providers gives them an increased yield secondly it's a great overlap with um an audience who love nfts but maybe have never used defi so it's a wonderful way to kind of educate new people about the fact that there is something called Defi and they can do more with it back in 2022 I went to nft NYC and there it was a whole nft conference and that all

13:32these cool people who came into um blockchain because of nfts they found their nft Community they love their nfts but and that's how they got introduced to ethereum and eth right it's a whole new crew of people was pretty amazing but they didn't know what defi was and that's totally cool it was great to hang out with them but that's kind of the idea there's this

13:53intersection here and that's what these nfts also represent great way of U be able to share the word like what interest is and and and bring in new people into Defi and also reward those people who are already defi nuts and just want to basically double down and get better returns no that's actually five yields that's crazy um and I didn't know that

14:15about the me that there is like an integrated yield that's really cool um I do experiment a little bit with uh me eth on the mantle blockchain I want to I want to ask a little bit more about the mantle blockchain um because I feel like another thing that is sort of stopping people that have a lot of ether or coins sitting in Hardware wallets from going

14:38to defi is not only the risks but the options now that there's so many blockchains uh to choose from you know in the past in the past cycle ethereum was sort of the main place where the value was locked in but still if you only had $1,000 maybe to do some would cost you a few hundred and it's just not worth it for people that aren't super wealthy and can afford to

15:05spend hundreds of blockchain to make transactions but there are so many different blockchains um I'm guessing you have a strategy behind why is a mantle blockchain good for for defi forist uh and what does that really look like for somebody that has never used mantle before and what how easy is it to get started getting the meth and and depositing into the

15:34platform yeah great question so mantle um it's a layer to and so it's built on top of ethereum uh so it's actually pretty simple uh to to move on to mantle Network um they have their own native Bridge so if you have some eth on ethereum you can easily use their bridge to bridge ethereum over to mantle Network or any other supported Des like usdc usdt whatever you want and what

15:58mantle does is that if it's for the first time that you're using their Bridge you will receive they they have their own gas token that's the mantle token Mt and so you know when you bridge your first time you bridge your assets over to mantle they give you a little bit of an airdrop of MNT tokens so that means that you have the ability to operate on the mental Network because

16:18they given you they've given you the gas token essentially so I think the onboarding experience is very easy on that front from there it operates just like ethereum does so if you have a metamask um you can easily use that they have you know similar structure uh ecosystems in terms to lending and borrowing and I mean uh amm dexes and nft marketplaces is the same typical

16:41structure it's just much cheaper to do all the operations that you want um and just to give you an idea of the kind of impact that a much cheaper blockchain um you can provide our users in terms of value on ethereum we had roughly about like maybe about when we first launch on ethereum about 200 users at the very start we had a private launch and all of them pretty

17:08much had a balance that was over $1,500 you know minimum on mantle Network right we have over 9,000 suppliers on mental Network right now and when you look at certain some of the mark the token markets you have you know about 5,000 people who are depositing assets uh in one market and the the range goes from the lowest is $3 and a large part3 and $50 basically a big

17:39chunk of them and then from there you you'll have your whales and things like that your dolphins and your whales have a large chunk like you know you have like you have like 3,000 people who are depositing between like three bucks and 50 bucks they can do that right as we were discussing right there's no minimal amount as long as you're okay paying you

17:57know a few cents in in gas fees it's very affordable uh for anybody and that's the whole point uh in terms of what we're trying to build at M so yeah mantle Network um much more inexpensive easy to use um they're very the team itself is very uh strategic they're very aggressive as well in the right way they want to build want to have a great experience for their users as well as

18:20for their ecosystem Partners they're very serious about that so it's one of the reasons why we we chose to deploy there plus I think as I mentioned maybe earlier they have A2 billion doll Treasury and so they are well equipped to you know continue building for the long term it shows that hey there's nothing

18:56to be afraid of if you're just want to start experimenting with this um for the first time so that's really cool uh and I was looking at the the platform you know I can't I can't see the exact users in the numbers but I can see the overall value locked in the platform and it's around 10 million now and it seems like it's been growing in the last month even

19:19with the Bitcoin going down a little bit which is a healthy correction uh the platform has been continuously growing since the mantle launch few months AO go um how do you guys create a an ecosystem that has sustainable growth we don't want to have like the video game it comes out and people get excited but then they get bored after like a month or so um obviously it's different with

19:45defi when you have yields that you're continuing to earn you just deposit and you know forget about it for six months a year um but what's sort of the strategy in continuing to grow the value locked question so yeah so for just from a statistics perspective as of today we deployed two months ago on mantal network and we're ordered the fourth largest protocol on mantle Network by

20:09number of users um you know it's only the ogs that have been you know on mantle that are larger so it it it definitely highlights the fact that you know for us it's about how do we target the whitest um the whest you know birth of users um on meal how do we onboard them in an easy way and so for us the way we've done it is we launched m in stages um you know we deployed

20:32individual features along the way initially which just supplying you could just deposit there was nothing else you needed to do kep it simple basically we ran a campaign with mantle Network to highlight that piece of it and so that was really a great way of onboarding in the initial set of users then we deployed the feature for borrowing and so that was it its own thing people

20:53started learning how to borrow and we kept it so that you could only borrow a small amount because on a lending protocol you can get liquidated if you borrow too much and you don't understand how the borrowing Works compared to your deposits we kept all of our users safe you just said you can borrow up to a certain percentage it's highly unlikely you'll get liquidated unless the market

21:13really drops like 80% 90% so you know the idea was educating them about that then they started hey I'm I'm earning I'm actually earning right now on M you can actually earn by borrowing you're paying a small interest rate but you're earning emission tokens so it's actually profitable to borrow at this point right so that was the second part of it the

21:35third is with the launch of these nfts that we've just done um you know right now uh on mantle uh their nft Marketplace is called mental so a lot of alliterations there uh but anyway so the nft marketplace uh miness were we are I think this we're the second most active nft uh product on on mental at this point because people are now realizing they want to get those nft boosts which

22:01we just launched this week and lastly something that we have not announced yet but will be announcing next week is that now uh users can do uh fullon borrowing meaning you know they're not limited as they were before and what that allows them to do for the degens out there uh they like to kind of double triple quadruple up on their earning so they'll

22:24Supply earn yield on that then they'll take whatever they supplied and then they'll borrow from that and right now again it's profitable to borrow on minest and then whatever they borrow they'll then Loop it back around Supply it and borrow and Supply they just do this looping thing it's not for the faint of heart because it can get users liquidated at some point basically it's

22:44leverage it's leveraging right as you would on your trading but some people love to do it and so essentially because we've been launching all these new features and we also ran another uh campaign with mantal network when we were launching the nfts right it's helped to bring in more and more users beyond that we have some really good um individual in the space people who are

23:06wellknown kol's influencers whatever it might be you want to call them who also have been supporting us in terms of bringing more awareness to the work that we're doing on mentors I think all of these things combined it's helped us to kind of grow steadily that tvl and hopefully it will continue moving forward that's incredible and that's exciting to hear the the borrowing is is

23:27opening up um I that's an interesting strategy I I think one way to potentially lower the risk is from what I understand you can supply USD stable coin and you can also borrow stable coin so if as long as no one company you know Circle or tether doesn't explode um you hopefully won't get liquidated on stable coins um and but I know that a lot of people I know personally a lot of people

23:54that uh whether they're on a centralized exchange or somewhere and they have ether it's like hey I could borrow more because I think that ether is going to double and bitcoin's going to continue if we look at launch and everything um this is a bull market uh you know I instead of trying to go to work 80 hours a week instead of 40 I can just borrow a little

24:17bit of capital and and use that to trade uh it's not a bad strategy U especially if you're early on on borrowing and the so there's not uh there's more Capital to borrow so hopefully the rate would be better and also if you're doing it on Min then you're earning other tokens which could also appreciate in the future um so there's a lot of variables you're absolutely correct and

24:41you know each of these points you brought up are are different strategies that there are different reasons why people do utilize lending protocols and that's kind of the you really highlighted the flexibility right of like why people use them and what their game might be you know um how they want to do it just deposit your asset just let it go you know just chill basically

25:01or yeah maybe you you leverage up on some safer assets potentially like stable coins but and that's the lovely thing is you can do you also have you people who um they'll use it to even short positions so you know like if you think the Market's going to go down then what they'll do strategies like they'll say okay I um I'm going to supply $100 of usdt I'm going to then borrow $50 of

25:27Bitcoin I think bitcoin's going to drop in value they take their $50 of Bitcoin they go to a market they sell it for usdt then they wait for the price of Bitcoin to drop then they buy the Bal Bitcoin that they borrowed pay back the loan and they pocket the difference I mean so like you have all kinds of strategies that people use um and it's it's it's actually quite it's quite

25:48enticing to see kind of how they how they do this one um one person we we met actually a major liquidity provider group they actually you know that's what they do they're gen liquidity providers and it was interesting to hear their strategies where they they participate both on herxes where they have funding rates and they'll have short positions there where they can actually earn also

26:12an interest and then they'll counter that by supplying another asset on minest to earn an interest rate there so they actually hedge potential downfalls and they make a significant profit on that so again everyone has their own strategies and is it's fantastic to learn about it yeah no it's really interesting uh especially with who knows what's going to happen next in the

26:33market um I'm I'm hoping you know it we continue upwards it seems like that's been the trajectory of 2024 um and I the T you know defi as in industry is there's a lot of room for growth I think how I see it is you know the Bitcoin ETF really pushed a lot of more institutional investors and people that are familiar with trafi or borrowing and lending in traditional markets uh they

27:01get Bitcoin and then they look you know when that when they filled their bags they look towards ethereum and then when they filled their bags they're like hey how can we actually utilize the financial products in web 3 to either borrow or earn yield um and that's where the explosion in in defi really happens and I feel like that's going to the next you know few months to a

27:26year two um it's it's going to be a wild ride so I'm excited to see how uh that that minest follows along with that path and um I'm curious if you have any insights into where you sort of see defi going do you agree that you know there might be this trickle down effect uh or how might defi be affected by all the capital that's coming into crypto so when it comes to defi um the

27:54way that we've thought about it from the beginning is that there there are multiple categories of projects different types of projects that will be coming and going but one thing that is here to stay is defi as a category because um you know uh blockchain the entire structure of it the the the source was Bitcoin and the whole point was having Financial Freedom

28:21when it came to bitcoin and decentralize decentralize money or store a value however you think about it and fi is just the next step of again decentralized banking it's not going to go anywhere basically it is a core part of what allows people to trade allows people to transact value allows people to build their value so I don't see that going anywhere and what I do see is that

28:48yes in terms of the ETFs um we have now opened the door to potentially trillions of dollars coming in to to blockchain because the ETF gives incredible credibility to the space you know to begin with and then from there certainly opens it up to institutions and all kinds of other organizations to participate just to put in like 1% of their billions of dollars

29:17you know that they have Sitting aside to put it into crypto and then that essentially if you just look at the numbers it's massive in terms of what it could do to our space our space is very tiny actually compared to pretty much any other space Commodities in and and you know the Forex space it's tiny right so when you have just like 1% of of of the of the

29:40global wealth coming into the space it's going to make a big impact and that will have a trickle down effect trickle down effect as you said because it means that more people will be wanting to hold their Assets in blockchain meaning they'll try to figure out how to put their money to work and at the same time with all these new blockchains that are

29:59launching um what is going to link them together it's going to be how do you trade on them how do you lend on them how do you connect them together all these different chains and for us we see lending as one key piece that will unify all that liquidity otherwise you'll have so much fragmented liquidity so money will come from the top and then we will

30:21find a way to unify that across all the different chains through lending that's our thesis at least it's an exciting future ahead Ken and I'm looking forward to that multi-chain unified liquidity I feel like that's going to be a big move um especially with all that that Capital that will move into defi um I'm sure miness is going to play a role in it I'm

30:41excited to see how it plays out uh for so we don't have a lot of time left Kim but what is the best way for people to take some e deposit it or just learn about the mechanism uh see what the yields are right now or check out the nfts that that just dropped that you mentioned how can they get started to get involved sure absolutely so simply go to mess.com and right there what you'll be

31:06able to do is you'll have a link to the application the minest application you click on that and from there you'll get to see the marketplace you know all the different assets that you can lend and borrow and you'll also have a link to the nft gallery as we call it so you can then on the exact same page you can see all the nfts and how they work um so all

31:30the information is there including our socials uh including the blog you know everything is there so you can you know get access to all the documentation so mess.com is the best place to go to uh just to kind of start that journey and have plenty of educational material there for anyone that wants to do it awesome thank you so much and I love that the nfts actually bring utility and

31:52value into defi myself I'm more of a finance guy than an nft guy but when you incorporate that kind of value into an nft it's no longer just a picture of dog or of a famous person all of a sudden you're actually having utility behind that so I love that I I I hope that that becomes a trend for more nfts um and I'm going to check out the marketplace from

32:14what I understand there's not as many available because people are holding on to them for the yield um but I know that there are some so I'm going to check it out I'm going to leave a link to the nft marketplace as well just a direct link and to the uh minest app uh for people to check it out I appreciate your insights into Defi and the growth of interest it's an exciting path and let's

32:36definitely follow up in the near future again Ken love it Ash thank you so much it's been awesome it's been fun talking about nfts too it's one of my passions so um thank you very much for letting me have a platform for that that's pretty fun