Ingamar Ramirez on Sovryn’s decentralized Bitcoin DeFi platform

0:00i'm ash and addison from block west capital for investmentpitch media and the cryptocoin show and today on blockchain interviews with ingemar ramirez the contributor at sovereign ingomar welcome to the show and thank you so much for taking the time to come on today thanks a lot ashton happy to be here yeah i'm excited to dive into d5 with bitcoin which i think is

0:22especially important for the industry right now and not enough people know about it i would love for you to kick off our discussion with just a high-level overview of sovereign some of the d5 solutions that your team's bringing to the space yeah sure uh so sovereign in a nutshell is a d5 project building on top of a bitcoin sidechain that allows users to

0:45lend borrow trade leverage um on on a protocol all in one place that serves as a financial layer on top of bitcoin so the platform is secured by bitcoin transactions are mined by bitcoin proof-of-work miners and gas is paid for in in bitcoin very cool and yeah they know the d5 space has been exploding uh with ethereum the decentralized exchanges

1:12and it's not too often that i hear stuff with bitcoin being on d5 but there is a lot of solutions like this uh that are coming up and i think it's bringing a lot of utility and value to bitcoin on top of just being a store of value so can you talk a little bit about how that exactly works as a side chain and you take your bitcoin and move it into sovereign and then you can use it with

1:34the financial products yeah um so yeah to take a step back uh bitcoin is you know basically the number one untapped liquidity source for for big uh for d5 and uh you know in the spring summer of last year a lot of these new um uh lending and liquidity pool pool and yield farming protocols emerged um and it was a crazy summer and i fell in love

2:02with what you could do with permissionless uh you know trading of cryptocurrency uh around the world without kyc uh without any centralized uh middlemen and i i was all for it i fell in love with it and um i was i was brought on to sovereign um and fell in love with with with bitcoin in in the sense that uh it is the most secure chain is the most decentralized

2:30um you know digital reserve asset in the world um so i just wanted to bridge these two things uh together and and support any project that that did that so the premise of of sovereign really is to compete with uh centralized finance that uh demands that you give up your custody you give up your your power over you know your digital property rights in order to use

2:56your bitcoin um and so you know the solution is to just build ways to do it without all of that trust and without all that um all those attack vectors on your own money totally and i i know what you mean where you see some of these centralized finance lending protocols they have yields for ethereum for stable coins and for bitcoin uh and then when you look at

3:21the decentralized ones it's not really you know catered around around bitcoin too much at least you don't hear it but as you mentioned it really is the untapped liquidity source you know the most value out of any cryptocurrency is all locked in bitcoin and those people could be utilizing that value to you know lend to uh or an interest in in other ways where

3:43they don't have to give up the fundamental principle of bitcoin which is their private keys for bitcoin you know right exactly uh so you know we're the sovereign team we're not we're not bitcoin max maximalists we're not um you know willingly ignorant of the innovation that goes on in other ecosystems we admire it um for sure i personally view the ethereum community as like a mad

4:07science laboratory where there's explosions there's uh you know broken beakers but there's also unicorns and there's also like things we've never seen before emerge and i think the bitcoin community would do well to observe these innovations and adopt them uh you know adopt the best in into bitcoin and you know leave out the rest definitely and i'd love to get uh sort

4:33of a snapshot of where sovereign's at right now you know is there already bitcoin in the system uh tapping into those liquidity sources you know how long ago did you start it and where's it at yeah yeah it's about a year old actually and uh we went fully live around april um with no limits to uh you know the liquidity you can put in um we do audits regularly

4:59so we wanted to like ease our way into opening up to to all users um and just yesterday we reached 100 million dollars worth of value locked in in the lending the amms and the staking contracts so it's a big milestone for us you know yeah we congratulations thanks um so we we don't really like we can't leverage the ethereum community we can't leverage the polygon the dsc um

5:25you know we're uh we're building an uh entirely on the on the root stock chain and that you know that is a that's an early that's on the come up basically yeah um so yeah we're happy to to push that ecosystem forward um and yeah it's a huge milestone for us definitely no that's huge congrats on that ingomar and you know i wanna i wanna break this down

5:49for people who aren't really in d5 but they hold bitcoin you know usually you're holding bitcoin and ethereum or some of the major coins and they're like how can i bring more utility and capitalize on the bitcoin that i'm holding um so i'm curious with the side chain do you move your bitcoin somewhere and then you still have the private keys or is it

6:08wrapped into something how does that work for the bitcoin users yeah so the the way the rootstock sidechain works is you send uh your your bitcoin into a federated peg and it's secured by hardware secured modules um in a an 8 of 15 multi-sig held by by multiple institutions um and there there's no way for the for the the

6:37bitcoin to actually be be taken away um the hsms basically sign the transactions from from the bitcoin chain to the to the rsk chain i'm not the most technical person but that's more or less in a nutshell how how it works it's a lot more uh decentralized and secure than something like rap bitcoin uh which is regulated and could be shut down at any at any point

7:01totally so so i guess the user flow would be um you know hop into sovereign you you click your mega your metamask you connect your metamask it'll you can have it automatically switch to the rsk chain in just one click and then you would go to um you go to fastbdc which is like a quick a quick bridge uh generate the qr code send your bitcoin to the qr code then it shows up

7:26in your metamask wallet as rbtc or ptc on the rsk chain okay and then and then starting yeah right there you can you can trade uh against ether or stable coins um bnb and various tokens that we have listed in the exchange very cool and yeah i'm not sure if everyone's familiar with rootstock but i did speak to diego uh way back about rootstock and from what i

7:52understand it's bringing smart contracts and and decentralization to bitcoin they're sort of the leaders in that space so that that sounds like it allows you to put your bitcoin into metamask which you normally wouldn't be able to do and sort of bring it into that you know with d5 most of the applications just connect to your metamask easily right and that's

8:11why bitcoins had a hard time getting in there so with the rootstock in metamask that makes sense that you'd be able to easily tap into the ecosystem right yeah um you know sovereign is is uh we view sovereign as like long-term a multi-chain project but the great thing about uh rootstock is that it has two main things that we really want the security of bitcoin it's secured by

8:35bitcoin proof-of-work miners and it is uh compatible with the ethereum virtual machine so basically anything on ethereum we can port over uh quite easily to the rootstock chain and it makes it easier for the users as well and developers definitely and now inside of the actual dap with the different financial products that are available on sovereign for bitcoin uh are do you have all of

9:00the sort of fundamental d5 products where it's lending staking interest farming pools things like that is that all available yeah yeah um you know so you can swap like it's using a swap you can you can borrow like it's compound you can earn interest like it's ave um you can leverage like it's you know fulcrum dzx um we're trying to provide like a like a mac os experience

9:26where it's not just it's not just a word processor it's not just a calculator it's not just a browser yeah it's an all-in-one uh place totally and uh i was looking at the platform as well and i know that you know besides wrapping your bitcoin there's also a sovereign network token as well and i'm curious if you could touch on the the sov token how that is incorporated into

9:50the d5 platform and you know what's the main functionalities of it yeah sure so the sob token um is designed to be a governance token a way to make decisions collectively on on upgrades to the system new features new products um decisions that that move the community forward um and i think the really innovative thing about it is that uh you can't just

10:15borrow a bunch of sov override a proposal and then give back the sov and pay essentially nothing for it um in order in order to accrue voting power you have to stake your your sov tokens into the system you decide how long you want to do it the longer you stake the more governing power that you have it actually gets multiplied depending on how long uh up to three years

10:37you stake it so um i think it's a great way of incentivizing um long-term thinking from the sovereign community and and with that uh it's not just voting power you do accrue more fees that are generated by the system as well as staking rewards great yeah i think that's a great incentive for long-term growth and we are so early on especially with bitcoin

11:01d5 that you know three years comes really quickly yeah totally uh it's still an emerging space um you know i love all all of these attempts at bringing d5 for bitcoin whether whether it's on a side chain whether it's on a different chain altogether you know even if it's on ethereum um it's it's becoming a a real emerging um part of the discussion and i think we're still early

11:27definitely and speaking of three years down the road um and having token holders contribute to you know the future you mentioned that part of the vision was to be multi-chain and to interact with all of d5 and i'm guessing there's also more financial products and updates coming out uh on the roadmap as sovereign continues to grow maybe you can talk about the future plans and the future

11:49vision for sovereign yeah i think very long term uh like i could very well see um like mortgages um real worlds you know legal contracts being executed using the sovereign protocol that's pretty far down but in the short term we are working on a permissionless bitcoin backed stablecoin um we're working on a launch pad called origins which allows new communities to

12:18to fundraise and self-generate uh using the same system that we did to launch our own community to watch our own governance and our token um so you see these you see these ecosystems polka dot solana with their own launch pads you know we're trying to make a decentralized one uh for the bitcoin uh builders out there uh we also want to integrate uh our stable

12:41coins with a lot of the mainstream to traditional financial applications um you know we're not trying to like stick to the our own little silo we want to bring our platform to as many users uh as possible definitely yeah great well you know with if you're trying to bring into as many people as possible um and all this stuff is live uh already that we've spoken about what's the best way

13:07for the viewers to you know start using the platform but also get involved in the community and follow along uh with the updates for sovereign yeah uh great so live dot sovereign dot app sovereign spelled s-o-v-r-y-n um that's if you want to just get to using the platform right away if you want to see what the discussions are you can follow our discord there's

13:28forum.sovereign.app if you want to see what types of threads were we're discussing and twitter is also a great way to uh you know get daily updates twitter.com sovereigndtc great thank you so much ingemar for taking the time to talk about you know decentralized bitcoin d5 i think is a super important uh initiative that your team is working on i'm excited for

13:55future updates for sovereign i will leave all those links in the description box below for the viewers to get involved and try it out and let's follow up in the near future cool thanks a lot man i appreciate it