Kaaran Kalantari on Wingriders, a DEX for Cardano

0:01i'm ashton addison from block west capital for investmentpitch media and today on the cryptocoin show we have karen kalintari spokesperson at wing writers karen welcome to the show and thank you for taking the time today thanks ashlynn good to be here likewise i'm excited to dive into cardano ecosystem uh let's just break right into it with what is you and your team at wing riders

0:24working on uh in the ecosystem and then we'll dive into all things wing riders sure maybe i should start off with kind of what we are we're essentially a decentralized exchange or a dex built on cardano and um a decentralized exchange is generally non-custodial trustless permissionless if you like and um essentially we have as you said we're built on cardano it's a place

0:47where traders or swappers if you like come and trade different tokens buy and sell them you can provide liquidity as a liquidity provider and also you can do yield farming so that's the basics of it wonderful nice and succinct and i feel like this is the necessary addition to growing the cardano ecosystem you know i'm i'm starting to see defy and cardano growing and you know

1:13there's a i feel like there's a huge gap to be filled in a lot of the network effects sort of been built on ethereum and these other ecosystems and um there's a lot of room for growth for people that are investing in the credential ecosystem right now sort of catch up um where do you see the ecosystem at right now okay yeah i mean really from uh when

1:33sort of um i feel like smart contracts were enabled um towards the end of last year on car dyno that's when you obviously see uh eco system start to build out dapps and obviously we're adapt we're a decentralized application and from there really it's been quite explosive if you've read the other media obviously around kind of the development the growth rate of decentralized

1:56applications has been enormous um you may have also read obviously cardano is a little bit slower in development and that really comes from an angle that it's very much research led so you know peer-to-peer reviews and all that good scientific stuff to build a very kind of robust if you like um first of all layer one blockchain and then obviously once that's all good then

2:22you get all these great projects coming on to it and building on it and really this is all just started towards the end of last year if you like yeah so i you know i've heard um on one hand they say you know build fast and break things and then on the other hand you know cardenas ecosystem is yeah go slow steady and thoroughly uh with you know the best scientists and researchers in

2:46the world and get it done and i'm curious on your perspective and the balance between those two with wing riders specifically as well yeah i mean yeah so going at the high level obviously you probably a lot of the audience knows the history obviously charles and vitalik and a few others gavin wood they kind of started up ethereum um launched it around sort of their i think their tg

3:09was around 2014. that was one of the first projects i got involved in then and obviously they parted company because of disagreements now that's a positive thing in many ways uh it may be seen as negative but it's actually quite positive because when obviously charles sort of broke away from there you've got all the experiences that happened on obviously the biggest

3:30layer one which is ethereum at the moment with most of all the dapps nearly 90 something percent on there and you walk away with the experience of saying okay what's right and what's wrong in an ecosystem and you try to build something different and cardano very much is the third generation blockchain taking on all the kind of good lessons from ethereum which is considered i suppose a

3:51second generation and we've got bitcoin which is the first generation and taking those good experiences and building something that's much more robust um great development it's just like i suppose building a hand-built car you know which lasts forever or a great you know kind of i don't know museum piece or something it lasts forever it takes time to build great things and

4:11i think it's not about how fast you build it i think you kind of alluded to that it's really how um useful good you know scalable interoperable sustainable all those good things that cardano really has and tackles is what is needed in a layer one so for me i think it's it's it's an amazing kind of platform to build on yeah great perspective karen and now

4:36talking about the deck specifically um you know how long has your team uh been working on it i'm guessing like since the start of the smart contracts and where exactly is it at right now yeah just kind of just before then realistically um if you imagine the end of summer 2020 the team got together they kind of started um planning and really kind of developing and thinking

4:58about what to develop and how to develop it and yes with kind of the smart contracts becoming live that was the kind of get-go but we were in stealth mode actually till sort of um the beginning of this year end of last year and then we came out and in a very rapid way um we kind of developed a robust platform that we could show people and our first version actually

5:24was um a demonstration how um the decks can fit into another dap realistically which is new five which is essentially a staking wallet now there's a there's a method to this um sort of madness if you like or why would you go there and not launch your mainnet because really we want to be a if you like infrastructure piece for the whole car nano ecosystem so as as far as

5:50decentralized exchanges go um a lot of applications or dapps a lot of wallets will require kind of a swap facility where you can buy one token and sell another and vice versa so our first test that version um that we launched just shortly after that was um um the integration with new fight and then in march obviously we went to um the main net launch and before that obviously we

6:17had the main we call it the platform testnet and we rapidly kind of move from there so in literally three to four months we went from a poc proof of concept to a kind of mvp and then the mainnet launch so which is very rapid i mean um you might say i'm biased but really the development team we've got a absolutely amazing you know they are really really

6:40dedicated they really know what they they're doing a lot of them being in kind of the cardano um sort of development ecosystem for the last four years which is as long as cardano's being around that experience really helps kind of propel a lot of the innovations features and various other aspects that we develop great insight and i'm curious on the the

7:02front end of the the decks and you know people that are familiar with unit swaps making it so easy to just be like one button swap done um was there uh the usability user interface for wing riders um you know how does it compare to people that are used to the simple taxes on ethereum yeah i suppose uni op is a granddaddy of all taxes realistically and many of the

7:27models of texas including ours were obviously initially built upon that same if you like architecture and thinking if you like um yeah when you look at the decks itself if you go to wingwriters.com you enter the app you see a very clean kind of interface where you can swap one token for another and again i mean i'll talk about some of our usbs that we have

7:50in terms of what we think is actually unique and is actually unique um but it's very clean it's very easy to use there's not much difference if you use binance or if you use kraken or any of the centralized exchanges they're probably a little bit more complicated they've got various layers of swapping whereas our decks you just come onto it you just pick your token the amount and

8:10then you put what what you want to buy and essentially that's it done very simple very clean amazing and you know one of the limitations that we've seen in unit swap at least is sort of making advanced order books or adding more functionality is that something that's possible or maybe in the future for wing routers to do some decentralized limits or anything

8:36like that well i just wrote a paper on it so we launched that one so if you go to our medium you'll see it so yeah so from when it went live realistically what a lot of people didn't realize is that you can do limit orders and market orders um right on the decks and we've got this flexible also limit order so literally um the dex is it looks very simple the

8:59interface but when you go to the settings for instance you can change a few parameters of the swap and essentially then you'll be either in a limit order or a market order or a flexible limit order what i mean by that is you can press a button and it instantly sort of buys for you like a market order or you press that button and essentially it's got rules

9:19that i would not pay more than a sort of one percent slippage which is kind of a flexible limit order and a normal limit order which is says you know similar parameters but yeah you could do that from the get-go as i said you know i'm not blowing our own trumpet you know which a lot of the audience might be thinking i am but really the the the devs we have every week we're

9:39coming out with something new every week we're coming out with a new integration etc so yeah you know if if you follow our notifications and kind of you know and have a look at kind of the decks closer every week we're trying to innovate i mean what you said was very interesting and i think there is this kind of chasm at the moment between centralized texas and decentralized

10:00texas where a lot of people think these orders don't exist or i don't if i don't know if you remember and i think of 2015-16 it was it was the first decentralized exchange that i actually had to go on which was called ether delta i don't think it's around it was all the book decks you just had to hang around for hours before your order went through etc not anymore

10:21you know it's very like smooth you you put the order in you execute it and more or less in a few minutes sometimes a little bit longer depends on network congestion all those things that are not in our hands realistically but the orders gone through and voila yeah very cool and yeah i remember ether delta back in the day yeah and yeah and that's cool because not many people

10:43remember that ashton it wasn't it wasn't the easiest to use and um you know that was before like the the amms could could build liquidity protocols so you sort of just had your order sitting there waiting for somebody to fill it and um you it was also not didn't have the best protection you know if you typed in the wrong number um or the wrong decimal point uh the funds

11:03were gone and absolutely that happened to many people that i know um so i i'm glad we've improved upon that now um now i'm curious a little bit more on the decentralized um system within cardano and on wing riders you know are you just trading between cardano tokens and is there a cardano token standard and are there a lot of tokens to trade in that ecosystem

11:31okay no that's very good question yeah so one of the things actually that makes this unique at the moment in the cardano space in terms of dexes is that we you can come and trade a cardano native token for another card down the native token now that's not possible as far as i'm aware on any other decks because generally you have to swap into ada or cardano either and then

11:54go back into the other token through either so that you're incurring fees all along so that was one of our first sort of innovations that you could do direct kind of swaps from one to the other um there's others but i'm just trying to stay on focus on your questions so i won't go further but yeah there's quite a few features we got we which we believe are quite unique so if you want

12:15me i can elaborate on that as well yeah i know that sounds great um i think that's important to save fees obviously um and i feel like as dex is continue to grow and there's more options then it should make it more competitive for not being too expensive but i feel like it would be it's uh likely cheaper than trading on you know the new notorious uniswap um fees and

12:42ethereum transaction fees where at the height you're paying hundreds of dollars yeah yeah no comparison i mean cardano is a very kind of um if you like fee-friendly environment to trade in so literally a fueder will kind of get you a trade most times and you know it's deterministic as well you kind of know how much fees you're going to pay up front which is nice as well whereas

13:05the ethereum as you said for instance uh after the summer of d5 and things just started going crazy you're paying like three four hundred dollars for it and i heard some even crazier stories of people paying like three thousand or something you know for a kind of you know swap to go through which is absolutely ridiculous really it shouldn't be like that things will

13:24change but i think that that is just not on really and in cardano you don't get that i mean it's a much more fee friendly if you like environment definitely and what's the situation with um like how unit swap works with the automated market makers building liquidity having different trading pairs to help build order books from you know a decentralized

13:49perspective um like on with wing riders how does that work yeah so i mean i suppose it's good to sort of give a brief kind of overview of how decks actually operate so the main difference between a dex and a centralized exchange and obviously unisop is a decentralized exchange but they all work from the same principle um instead of trading um between sort of if you like

14:13a buyer and a seller what you're doing is you're actually trading against a pool now what does that mean so liquidity providers provide um liquidity into a liquidity pool and those pairs say aida and usdc okay or usdt so they're always in pairs and you're trading against obviously those pairs from a liquidity pair now the liquidity providers are obviously incentivized to provide

14:38liquidity to these liquidity pairs um because of incentives so they get um essentially they get a portion of the fees that they um that the actual dex generates and put back into the pool and they get a share of that and also with our decks for instance again what's unique is the ada that they put in so any pair that contains ada as one of those assets essentially

15:04we stake that at the moment for them and they get a portion or well they get the staking rewards put back into the liquidity pool so it's a double whammy realistically of rewards now then what happens then for those of us who are not in d5 um when you provide liquidity to a liquidity pool like say ada and usdt you get these tokens which are called lpts

15:29so liquidity provider tokens and then you can take those into water farms so essentially you put that in and in our farms essentially at the moment what you get is as rewards again are our governance tokens so realistically you're getting a try um a triple kind of reward system within this whole ecosystem which is needed for a dex to operate the swap function

15:56functionality really wow very cool and and thank you for that explanation i think that helps um people getting into d5 to understand where when i'm trading where does this go you know what is the mechanism behind the doors yeah um yeah you're so right i mean i mean this environment needs a lot of education still i mean i'm sure i think you've been in it for a while i've been

16:17in it since i actively got involved from 2014 and to be honest with you most of no one was interested until 2017 then my phone wouldn't stop ringing from family friends etc and you know it's about education really they're all you know a lot of people who are not involved they're very scared and especially now we're where we are with the market ashland you know the whole thing is uh

16:39tumbling at the moment 50 60 down on bitcoin and then you got the rest of the target people are like absolutely panicking and going oh this is just fake and you know nonsense but i i explained to them like if you've seen one cycle i've seen two of them and realistically you just know what's going to happen this is just part of it great place to buy and also d5 what it gives people is

16:59that opportunity if you're um bag holding if you like or you bought some either you know so at the top or something at two dollars three dollars whatever it was you can actually stake it and you can actually get rewards for it and accumulate it and this market will change i'm i'm 100 sure i can tell all your viewers this has just happened um you know many

17:21times now and we will get back to a bull market in the next however long six months a year two years whenever that is you know so yeah that's that's the opportunity that d5 does provide um audience and education is very important of course definitely karen and yeah great perspective and yeah i think we've both been through multiple cycles and it only

17:40gets bigger on the next one and no one can predict whether whether it's six months or a year but eventually you know you can predict that it's coming back um so great perspective there for the viewers are uh looking to learn more about um you know wing riders the updates that you guys are making use the decks what is the best way for them to to learn

18:02more yeah um join our discord obviously we got in our announcements channels obviously on twitter and telegram as well we've got a medium obviously for our blogs as well you can head over there all the latest developments are there in an extended format and get down to that we're currently running our whitelist as well that's a great opportunity if you

18:25want to have an opportunity to buy the governance token it runs till sunday if you join discord there's clear instructions there and there's different levels you can buy you know as little as a couple of hundred or as much as kind of you know higher levels and so i would head over to discord just join it follow the instructions and that's a good way

18:43to go as well great i will leave those links in the description box below as well karen thank you so much for your insights on the cardinal ecosystem and everything about wing writers with with the white list and the growth of the decks and let's follow up in the near future okay great thanks lord ashton great to be on the show you