Will Harborne on DeversiFi’s DeFi solutions and DVF token

0:02i'm ashton addison from block west capital for investment pitch media and the crypto coin show and today on blockchain interviews we have will harbour the ceo of diversify will welcome to the show thank you for so much for taking the time to come on today thanks very much excited to be on very excited to dive into the world of d5 with you diversify is working on some

0:23good solutions which i think will help bring more people into d5 and at least wrap their heads around it i would love for you to kick it off for us with a high level overview and the focus of the platform and then we can dive into the details so diversify's goal is to make d5 accessible to everyone and that may sound crazy because the whole point of

0:45d5 is supposed to be that's open for everyone already um you have decentralized protocols that anyone can access on ethereum or other blockchains but the real problem is that actually there's a big technical barrier to getting involved and there's a high cost barrier so if you want to use d5 protocols on ethereum today often gas prices mean that it might be 50 60

1:04dollars to make a transaction and that's not acceptable if we want to scale this to everyone in the world um and so as d5 becomes more mainstream uh we've built diversify for that purpose and in particular what you can do is trade swap your tokens borrow and lend and send them to other people without paying gas fees and we've done that by using a layer two solution on

1:26ethereum so you get the same security that you'd get from using any other uh decentralized protocol um but without the cost without the friction and we've got a really amazing slick ui that helps you do that and now we're starting to get more and more accessible as our user number's grown we've found that they need um mobile wallet uh other ways of onboarding um and uh we're really

1:49scaling diversified for kind of the kind of next wave of crypto users definitely great introduction and yeah i i heard of the announcement on the layer 2 solution we'll dive into that in a short while here i want to talk a little bit more about why when you started the platform the solutions you're looking to drive obviously as you mentioned d5 should be accessible by everybody you

2:12know there should be no restrictions whether you have a bank account or you have a specific credit score in what ways were you looking to bring that accessibility to allow more people to get on whether it was those limitations or just the technical knowledge and how did you bring those solutions into the platform itself yeah it was really it's really on two

2:33two things that we see one is um that we actually needed fundamentally a way of scaling um scaling decentralized finance and by scaling i mean allowing more people to use it at a lower cost and and that cost had to really be i think competitive with the centralized exchanges that people are using today so um even even a dollar or two per transaction is too much compared to

2:58being able to trade for free on finance or um other other solutions and so we started off looking at what was that there and this was now two years ago so people weren't really talking about layer two in ethereum at that point and there were some people working on things like plasma which is kind of a precursor of optimistic roll-up um and talking about

3:19zero knowledge proofs um but the idea of roll-ups and layer two wasn't really in the kind of kind of common discussion so that was like one side of our solution and the other side was that we get very much like a fragmented experience of using d5 still today um which is that if you want to trade you probably go to uniswap or something else and if you want to borrow

3:40and lend you might go to the rv website and you have to you have to hop amongst these protocols and it's becoming even more complex now that we have different side chains layer two solutions different block chains where you might be able to do d5 and so it was trying to unify the experience and now you can do all of that um in one place without need

3:56to without needing to hop around and that really makes again it more accessible for the average person who's used to being able to do that and doesn't want to necessarily explore and understand um the different user experiences and bugs of different um defect protocols definitely will and maybe you can talk a little bit more about the products itself uh for those people that as you

4:18mentioned you're trying to get more accessibility into defy say someone hasn't really been into d5 before uh what are some of the basic products that they could start using uh with through diversify so the simplest thing is if you're an investor who's looking to have exposure to crypto long term and you can move funds onto diversify and use that to buy a whole range of

4:42like the top crypto uh so ethereum bitcoin and a whole bunch of d5 protocols and rather than just leaving it sitting there you can also then earn yield on those so um you can then start and some interest basically on your tokens over the next few months and when you're ready when you want to you can be ready to trade um and you can also send your tokens again

5:04without paying any any fee for doing that and so really makes it very easy to manage your portfolio in a very sort of unified way and without even needing to worry about the complexities of the blockchain but still inheriting the security of it for example we never hold anyone's funds we can't send those funds to anyone else um we have no no control um over those assets except

5:28something that you specifically authorize and so you can have the full sort of knowledge that even for example if diversified as in our company that we operate that built this protocol went extinct tomorrow you can still get your assets back and you can get it get them back very quickly and easily so um it really kind of is the best of what people might be used to from

5:49centralized exchanges or even the kind of best challenger banks today um in the traditional financial world um with the security of d5 and i think three years from now what we're hoping is that we'll be able to really take those same tools and apply them potentially also to um central bank digital issue digital currencies so digital euro digital dollar um and others um as those come

6:14out and so that's kind of the future we're building for very cool and uh you mentioned there being able to buy those assets but also stake them and in the decentralized finance world there's also liquidity mining and amms can you talk about that part is that involved in diversify as well and can the users explore that yeah so one of the things that we found

6:36when we first launched diversify on this layer 2 solution just over a year ago um was that to start with we had a good number of new users who were trying it out um but liquidity was and is always in a lot of these things that kind of challenge and so um we sold that in a few different ways over the last year but what we found was that we got really strong

6:59liquidity for the biggest cryptocurrencies ethereum bitcoin if you want to do those you can get pretty much the best price anywhere and by diversify or as good as all of the top exchanges but if you wanted to trade something less well-known um it's much harder and probably you're not gonna get the best price on diversify today um so we spent most of the last six

7:19months working on a new solution for that which is uh automated market maker pools very similar to some of some of the others that you see in um in d5 today but then combining them with our other sources of liquidity including order books and so that you get a really um really flexible way for liquidity providers to provide capital um and we will be

7:43launching uh in the next few weeks uh a liquidity mining program essentially to incentivize anyone whether you're technical or not to be able to put their assets stake them into these liquidity mining programs providing liquidity on many markets for other tokens and earning our new uh governance token dvf so and that's kind of a new thing we we actually probably two years ago when we

8:09were starting off this project didn't think that we would launch a token um and that kind of came about in that we saw such enormous um sort of takeoff in january or february of this year with new users and who started to use this and that we kind of realized actually there was an opportunity to really hand over the protocol to a community and so this token has come about and i think

8:31it's once this liquidity mining program starts it's going to have a really big impact on um improving the experience for users but also meaning that anyone can earn these tokens by being a user that's great to know and you mentioned earlier the layer 2 solutions you're looking at implementing it looks like you've integrated the polygon bridge which i think is one of the best

8:55solutions for lowering cost can you talk about that integration uh and how the team has done and now that it's in there and what are the next steps yeah so that's actually a newer integration and like our core platform is built on um starkwear technology which essentially is a zero-knowledge proof-based technology so um when we have transactions um we could

9:20have let's say 5000 transactions in a few hours we create this zero knowledge proof just cryptographic proof and that uh creates a sort of quite a small amount of data which we then put on chain and is verified by a smart contract so that's really what underpins most of our platform um so but the the kind of polygon bridge you mentioned is a newer integration so really actually

9:42we see that d5 is going to be a sort of multi-chain multi layer 2 solution future and so we didn't want to be limited only to one particular area because there's lots of interesting stuff happening on polygon and others and so um what we announced this week um which was really exciting it kind of pretty much industry first in terms of connecting together two layer two

10:06solutions was a bridge between the two which means that if you have funds already on polygon which a lot of people do this has been such a huge takeoff in really the first half of this year it's been kind of phenomenal to see because i think a lot of you a lot of new people have tried d5 because of that you can instantly move them to diversify and start using d5 on diversify as well

10:28and when you're done you can move back to polygon and vice versa and instantly so um it's a really exciting integration from that perspective because we're really joining together to d5 ecosystems and meaning that the opportunity cost to move between them is almost zero compared to if you want to move from ethereum to diversify or ethereum to polygon actually it's much slower and

10:48there's usually a cost involved because you have to pay for ethereum transactions so i think this is kind of the future that we're now really excited about is that maybe even a year from now people will be moving between a lot of these like lower cost d5 ecosystems without ever really needing to go via the main chain but still getting the benefit of security from it

11:08definitely yeah that's great to know that it's interesting to hear diversifies using the starkware and that you're also obviously focused on low cost from the beginning that's going to make a huge difference when people are getting yields uh and you know it's like a traditional banking system it's like here's your yield but then there's all these costs as well and if you can avoid

11:26those then overall you're going to be higher up in the returns and you mentioned there that the users could when they're earning they also can earn with the dvf token i want to talk a little bit more about that diversify token as well can you talk about any of the other use cases or how it's completely used within the ecosystem and uh does it benefit the

11:51users of the ecosystem to be utilizing it yeah so dvf is very new so we kind of did the the very early stage of the launch about a couple of nearly a month ago um and it's still rolling out so this week we'll be launching the kind of governance component which is really the core of the token and fundamentally dvf is a token for governing the diversified

12:13protocol which is this layer two protocol for d5 that we originally built and are now handing over to the community um and what the token allows users to do is first of all uh to spend a very big treasury of of dvf tokens so 50 of the supply um is really controlled by existing token holders most of it is planned hopefully to be rolled out for and this liquidity mining

12:41and so will be earned by future users and community um but that could change if token holders wanted to change um and fundamentally uh the way that diversify works is that all of the transactions that are going through this the system um pay fees and currently 100 of those fees are set to go to the operator uh which is kind of a what one of the um entities involved in running

13:09the layer 2 um system and actually that's like our company diversified labs um but there's an ability to change um to change that and it's expected that part of those fees will be redirected to go to um the governance module um and so in the future uh as diversified grows um the value of fees going to that governance module will grow

13:35um and that will uh create a really healthy ecosystem and incentivize people to participate in governance and to really steer the protocol to grow and to focus on on user adoption um in addition there are several other sort of pieces where we expect dvf um to be used but really that's that's the core of it definitely and you mentioned a couple different

13:58updates that you're looking at rolling out into the platform maybe you can talk about from now until the end of this year what are the most important things that you and your team are looking to roll out and bring updates into diversify yeah so there's going to be one stream for the next few months which is really about the rest of the rollout of the

14:19token and building the community building the governance system and staking um the second stream which is also going to be launching at pretty much the same time um is for automated market maker pools so anyone can provide liquidity and then from liquidity mining um and then the third is all around accessibility but one of the biggest things there is launching our mobile

14:42version of diversify so today it's desktop only and of course most people want to be able to manage their funds when they move on their mobile and so um we'll be basically launching um our version for that which has taken a lot of work we wanted to make it more than just sort of shrinking things and sort of fitting them into a smaller screen but really

15:01making it native to um a kind of native mobile experience so those are three biggest things there's a lot of others including other bridges to other layer two solutions um again make it more accessible fiat on-ramp to allow people to deposit directly with pounds and euros and you can kind of see the theme here it's all about helping more people to get on at a very and to access the

15:25ecosystem um and then we've also got some kind of wilder projects in um in the mix um which kind of longer term uh but sort of more fundamentally building new new building blocks for uh kind of making use of the tools that we've already built so one of them which actually took two of them which we're really excited about and um it is first of all uh the diversified

15:49launch market so this is something that we trialled with the dvf token itself um so when we launched it we made a small part of the supply available that people could buy and it used a kind of an innovative mechanism to try and get a fair distribution and we saw therefore a lot of people managed to participate and get these tokens um at that stage and we're gonna open that up so that

16:11anyone can can use it to launch their token similar to a balance and launch pool um if you've maybe ever tried that process but without the kind of cost of participating because there's no transaction fees um and the second is is an air drop mechanism so that if you want to run an airdrop you can come on to the diversify ui um you know put your tokens in and choose

16:34addresses that you'd like to send them to and and then and then send those out without needing to um to pay a gas cost so these are things that we've already sort of used and actually lido token ran the first airdrop um last week um so really exciting um but yeah a lot going on and really the aim is to make it so that all the tools are available for anyone to

16:55build their own sort of d5 within diversify wow definitely a lot of different updates wales is very exciting uh all the best to your team on rolling those out for the viewers that are looking to utilize diversify right now plus follow along with all these updates uh when your team does roll them out what's the best way for them to get involved in the

17:15community it's i think that the best thing is to it's the first of all join our newsletter and you can sign up on the main diversified website um and then also to join our discord if you really want to get involved and understand more about the roadmap join the community and start to participate there's going to be a lot of different bounties um and sort

17:34of ways for community members to get involved especially with the rest of the token launch and so if you're looking to work or get involved please do get in contact with us sounds great will all the best uh with all of that with diversify i will be watching as you roll out those updates and utilizing the platform as well and let's follow up in the near future

17:55awesome thanks very much you