Daniel Tal on ICHI’s community based DeFi platform and branded stablecoins

0:00i'm ashton addison from block west capital for investmentpitch media in the cryptocoin show and today on blockchain interviews with daniel tall network steward of ichi daniel welcome to the show and it's a pleasure to have ichi back once again thanks ashton excited to be here and talk to you guys a little bit more about ichi definitely a lot has happened in

0:21cryptocurrency and with ichi overall since we last spoke uh almost six months ago um which is like years in cryptocurrency uh so let's first of all get the viewers up to speed on what is ichi for those who haven't seen our first interview and and what are the main focuses that you're bringing into the d5 in the blockchain space yeah great question so uh ichi's been

0:44around for a while now in uh in d5 terms for sure um and you know we consider ourselves a uh of course a dao first and foremost um working as a community to build out uh d5 and specifically financial decentralized financial infrastructure for uh different types of protocols in the d5 space um originally and i think last time we

1:11spoke we deep dove a little bit into uh our stable assets or what we call our branded dollars which are stable assets for different communities backed by their token and usdc and since then we've we've um kind of built out a little bit of our quote-unquote arsenal of products um that we use to kind of help build out uh the dow infrastructure for different

1:37communities and and protocols um and basically the way we see it is uh the d5 space has three main pillars that we're looking to tackle um one is the stable coin or stable asset pillar uh the second being the exchange pillar uh and the third being the lending pillar and since we last spoke um outside of you know some of the big partnerships we've uh we've kind of signed and and uh

2:05connected with dow to dao which we'll dive a little bit deeper into i'm sure in a bit um we have uh very much focused on within these three pillars uh continuing to build out our branded dollars and the stable coin pillar um building out our angel vaults which is our new product in the exchange pillar um and creating our new uh lending pool on rari which has done extremely well i think

2:31it's the third largest pool after about six weeks of being around so um on rari capital so uh yeah that's where we are today very incredible uh great updates daniel thanks for sharing that to kick us off and yeah i did see a lot of news about these angel vaults which sounds new to me i haven't heard of angel vaults and defy um you know i know there's a lot of

2:56angels getting involved in investing in in d5 and large institutions as well maybe you can elaborate a little bit more on what exactly is the purpose of the angel vaults and how does it benefit these organizations yeah definitely um vault is probably one of the most overused words in the d5 space when it comes to different kinds of protocols and uh and

3:19things being built but uh on our end the angel vaults are really a uniswap v3 liquidity management protocol um specifically uh for both um you know protocols themselves for for d5 projects but also um for d5 users um and the idea behind them is that we're really trying to align uh the goals and vision of uh protocols and d5 users general liquidity

3:49providers so what we do is we enable users to have general d5 retail users to have the experience that they had using uniswap v2 so you know depositing directly to a liquidity pool and kind of forgetting about that liquidity not having to manage their position to earn fees um with the power of concentrated liquidity right which uniswap v3 provides being able to

4:16concentrate your liquidity in a cert between certain price ticks and earning more for the liquidity you're providing now on the other side for the projects themselves we are actually building these uh these angel vaults as a way to uh provide price protection for them in a downward uh turning market and specifically decorating their

4:43token price from the price of ethereum when the price when when the market goes kind of uh bearish as it's been recently with some of the uh unfortunate news and allowing it to continue to be correlated directly with eth when the price of the assets start to rise um great back story on that that bringing what i got out of that what you said was you know aligning the

5:10incentives of defy users with the protocols and i feel although defy is uh early on it's already been you know a couple of years that it's been been being worked on i'm curious from your perspective being deep in this trying to align these incentives how big of an issue is this i feel like you know the incentives should be aligned um already if not you know

5:34needing all these other solutions to do this is this a huge problem and are there other people working on it that it's such a big of a problem or do you really have a stranglehold on the solution yeah that's that's actually a great question um and it kind of leads to where we started when we uh decided to build out some of these angel vaults um and the protocol in general at the

5:56beginning um you know when when uniswap v3 launched um i think when we looked across all these different um amms and decentralized exchanges what you saw is the way uh different types of uh of projects uh were able to incentivize liquidity was through providing these yield farming strategies and providing rewards for users to deposit their liquidity

6:24in two assets basically a 50 50 mix of usually their native token and you know eth or usdc or some other base asset into these liquidity pools and then it allowed for you to gain back that lp and deposit it to earn to earn rewards usually offsetting some type of impermanent loss but also allowing you to earn um on the fact that you're locking in your liquidity

6:52um and really this kind of led to a few problems one uh these sort of mercenaries right who would uh deposit their liquidity just to earn these high fees and rewards and then pull that liquidity out um and uh the other piece is that uh when you are doing this as a liquidity provider you're providing a native asset and and some other base asset to liquidity

7:18pools what you're essentially doing is creating both buy and sell pressure by creating this market for these two assets on on a native on the native token so you see communities incentivizing different different liquidity providers to provide both buy and sell pressure and we wanted to solve those issues what we wanted to do was say hey why as a community are you paying out

7:47these liquidity providers in your token to provide both buy and sell pressure on your token um that could be both positive and negative it could it could actually harm you what these angel vaults do instead is allow people to only put buy-side pressure on their asset um so that if there is any type of cell pressure in the in the market it stops that token's price from going down uh

8:12and and that's the idea behind these angel vaults you deposit one type of asset uh directly into the vault uh and that's not your native asset it's the one paired with it and what it does is it creates this large wall of buyers of last resort so that if people start to dump your token in general into uh tries to try to sell it you know on uniswap v3 uh there's this

8:39large bywall ready to uh stop the price from dropping going full circle back to the angel vaults i appreciate all that information i think it's very valuable for people that don't really understand exactly how the liquidity pools work and how decentralized exchanges are able to build order books through the people and and not through a centralized order book

9:02management market makers as they do in the old days and in centralized exchanges so thank you for like clarifying all of that i appreciate that daniel for everybody sure and you also mentioned you know out of the three pillars there is the lending as well and it seems more and more people uh especially when the markets at its top and in the bull market are

9:23looking to like borrow capital and get extra capital um to invest in more digital assets uh as they rise and with that lending aspect you're now partnering with rari is is that right can you talk about what's going on there with ichi and and how that integrates into the other pillars yeah definitely um so we built out uh a rari fuse pool uh about six weeks ago um

9:51and really the idea behind it is of course with borrowing and lending making everything more capital efficient for uh defy users and specifically defy users who are um interested and are using ichi ichi's protocol and nichi's tokens um and what we're able to do was build out uh with the help of the rari team this uh this lending and borrowing pool on rari

10:19and within six weeks we're actually able to grow it into the third largest pool across all of uh rari's different different lending and borrowing pools but yeah the key there was really we wanted to give people who were holding egr governance token xcg the the state governance token as well um and people who are depositing into our angel vaults the ability

10:46to take those tokens use them as collateral and borrow against them and one of the most compelling aspects of this is remember because of these angel vaults i know i always go back to them but they've they've been so incredible in the last uh over the last 90 days that um it's been it's been awesome to watch uh since we really launched the the angel

11:09vault for ichi um the ichi price has been stable and actually has has risen i think almost 4x at this point um through this kind of recent bear market um but the key there is because of that angel vault protecting the price of ichi we see users feeling really comfortable uh depositing or supplying ichi and and xichi and all these um ichiback you know

11:39tokens into rari and using it as collateral because of the lower risk for liquidity um and that's i think what's really fueled our ability to grow this uh lending and borrowing platform uh to you know propelled it to being number three in tvl on there definitely great to hear and yes back to the angel vaults uh allowing people to get collateral to lend i think uh it's

12:06obviously important to know when uh what tokens you're going to uh put up for collateral and and what that collateral amount is you know and because as you mentioned there with the angel vaults uh keeping the e.g price lifted um if you are taking a loan with collateral and it's a an asset you know if it's a smaller cap coin that doesn't have an angel vault in some other

12:29project and then the price of that dips uh you know you're gonna be getting a margin call or you're gonna be losing your loan and losing your capital so i think that's good to understand definitely the risks and rewards when you're moving into different assets like that to especially when you're margining or lending are there different types of risks um that aren't

12:52what you would see in a traditional lending platform because of the way that the et network is set up so i think risks are always there um you know taking into account the fact that there are always um you know smart contract risks um things of that nature uh in in this kind of space um that that's always up there i think the cool thing about rari is the ability for anyone to

13:20come and create a borrowing and lending pool and be able to uh play with those levers right of the different types of supply caps close factors whatever that may be that's what's super interesting about rari and really being able to incentivize each of those supply or borrow assets accordingly so that's what's interesting there it does open you know like anything

13:45lending pools are open to different types of liquidity risk as well as smart contract risk around these different these different protocols and from an ichi perspective you know we take security extremely extremely seriously we have a multiple bounty programs with unify and hats finance uh we've been audited multiple times by uh quant stamp sertic and

14:12a few others um and uh and we actually are now partnering uh with a few insurance protocols uh or i would say protection protocols for things from smart contract protection with insurance uh to even dpeg insurance uh or or dpeg protection really with uh risk harbor uh around our branded dollars so uh we're really really focused on security in all

14:39angles whether it's um you know smart contract dpeg and we're looking at ensuring that our users feel comfortable uh holding eg and and understanding that uh we're doing our best to minimize risks across all these different platforms definitely and thank you for covering that good to always mention it although you know not something to be scared of um just something to be aware of as as

15:04you you know it's your capital especially in defy you're controlling your own keys and you control where those funds go and who you lend it out to and what risks are associated with associated with that and great to hear about all of the audits and and security measures that that ichi is taking uh now there's so many great things that we've already spoken about that you know in

15:24these three pillars that ichi is working on is there anything else that the viewers have to look forward to as 2022 keeps going ichi continues to grow that maybe is coming down the pipeline in the coming months yeah yeah great question um we are always heads down working at ichi um i think uh you can see that from our from our past you know we had a fair launch

15:50uh didn't do too much announcing and marketing at first just focused solely on building the best product for uh d5 protocols as well as our users we are definitely definitely very focused on this multi-chain world we believe it's a multi-chain world and as of today our native smart contracts are only on mainnet but in

16:17very very soon we are looking to move over to a new blockchain look for an announcement in the coming week so we will be on an l2 soon which is super exciting lowering fees being able to have a lot less friction when it comes to gas fees and minting and creating different types of assets um and we are super focused on

16:43both the the multi-chain aspect as well as building out a lot of our current infrastructure so again tackling those three different um pillars being stable assets lending and exchanges across these different multi-chain across the multi-chain world so that's where we're focused on um we're going to continue to build and uh get excited for it

17:11definitely it's very exciting uh for the viewers that want to follow along with that update that's coming out and everything ichi uh i'm excited to hear about you know what is this layer two solution where is the best place to follow along for those updates and to get involved and and speak with the eg community yeah great great question um you can follow us on twitter uh at ichifarm uh

17:35follow us in our discord and in our telegram uh you will be able to find those links directly in our twitter uh and um you know ichi.org for all the information you need on ichi as well as our app which you can get through there so that's about it awesome thank you so much daniel appreciate it i will leave those links in the description box below all the

17:59best with this update coming for ichi and all the updates and let's follow up in the near future awesome thanks so much for having me ashton it's a great time you