Ep.28 [EN]: Pacman: the great path that Blur takes to scale the NFT trading network
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You are now listening to Hotlong. I'm the host, Mabel Zhang. This show attempts to shed light on the broader Web3 community. The guests will include Web3 operators, investors, or ecosystem participants of other forms. The show will also have a special focus on the Asia-based Web3 world. Connect East and West. Enjoy the warmest Web3 conversation.

Hello everyone, welcome back to the latest episode of Hotlong. Today we are super excited to welcome a very interesting guest, Pac-Man, the core contributor of Blur. Welcome, Pac-Man. Do you want to say hi to everyone? Yes, hi everyone and thanks Mabel for having me on. Of course, of course. Thanks for coming on. Just start with your background. You can tell us, our audiences, your background and what you did before having Blur. Yeah, absolutely.

So I'm Pac-Man, one of the core contributors at Blur. I'll just give a quick summary of my entire background. So I basically got my start in Silicon Valley around eight years ago as a software engineer. I started off as a software engineer at a tech company called Teespring. I worked there for about a year. And then I had a bit of an atypical path. I actually dropped out of high school to go through Y Combinator when I was 17.

So I went through YC, started my own business, and I was 17 at the time. And after doing YC in winter '16, I decided that I really wanted to go to college. So I ended up applying and going to MIT after doing YC. So I dropped out of high school, did YC, and then ended up studying at MIT. I studied math with computer science there for two years, and then met my co-founder, Gallagher. He was studying CS with a focus on neuroscience and AI.

And we basically just started hitting it off and building various side projects together. We ended up from MIT leaving to start our first business. Gallagher graduated a year early, and I received the Teal Fellowship, which is this fellowship that actually Vitalik received back in the day when he was starting Ethereum. So I received the Teal Fellowship to drop out of school. And with my co-founder who graduated, we started Namebase, which was our first business together.

Namebase was a small niche business, but it was in the crypto space on a blockchain called Handshake. And we ran that business for three years and we sold it at the end of 2021 to Namecheap, which is actually the second largest domain registrar in the world. So if you've ever bought a domain, you probably bought it off of either GoDaddy or Namecheap. And so we sold Namebase to Namecheap.

And then basically throughout that process in that same year, I had personally gotten really into NFTs. I minted a blip map as my first NFT, held it up to around 25 ETH and sold it. And then I just got really hooked onto NFTs afterwards. I was just really, really caught up in the energy. I love the trading side of NFT specifically.

And as I was trading the NFTs, I found myself increasingly frustrated with the infrastructure. The leading marketplace at the time, which is OpenSea, now Blur is much larger than OpenSea in terms of the volume. But at the time, OpenSea was the largest marketplace. And I found myself fighting the infrastructure. I really wanted something that was more of a Binance for NFTs, really just like an advanced trading platform for NFTs. So we basically sought out to

build exactly that. We started Blur 472 days ago, back in January of 2022. We built up a team of 10 and we've been building for the last 472 days. Many of you might be familiar with Blur, but I'm happy to kind of go into more details on that as well.

Out of curiosity, did the early experience building Namebase help you understand how the better trading experience for NFT work? Yeah, absolutely. Namebase was actually a very formative experience for us because, you know, in a nutshell, Namebase was a decentralized domain registrar for assets on the Handshake blockchain. But because it was so niche,

There was no infrastructure for Handshake at all. We had to build all the infrastructure ourselves and we had to even build a Fiat on-ramp. So we are a registered money services business and we also built our own spot exchange. It had just a single pair, H&S BTC. Actually, some of the Chinese listeners might be familiar with it because there was a massive airdrop

that Handshake did and a lot of Chinese users were actually eligible for the airdrop. So everyone was getting free money off of main base for a long time. But we basically had to build all of this infrastructure and we had to build our own spot exchange. And I think that experience was really informative to us

for Blur because when we were looking at the NFT space, we realized that what we really wanted was something like an advanced exchange for NFTs. And we knew we had the capability to build that because we had built, you know, an exchange, a very different kind of exchange. It was a centralized exchange at Namebase, whereas

Blur, it's a decentralized NFT marketplace on the Ethereum protocol. But there are similar concepts and just in terms of learnings, it was definitely very informative to us. For sure. So you mentioned about infrastructure, but I want to talk about that a little bit later. Maybe to start off, I'd just like you to define Blur. Who are your target audiences and users? Absolutely.

Blur is an NFT marketplace for pro traders. What that means is, you know, similar to when if you look at token infrastructure, token infrastructure started off

in a very simple manner. You had peer-to-peer trading on local Bitcoin, and then you started having very simple buy and sell experiences for retail, like from Mt. Gox to Coinbase. And then over time, the infrastructure developed and it became more and more advanced. You had Coinbase Pro, you had Binance, you had BitMEX, you had Darebit. So all this advanced financialized infrastructure started developing, and that really enabled the growth of the token industry. And NFTs

All we had before Blur was basically these very simple buy and sell experiences on existing marketplaces. There were no marketplaces that was really serving the trading segment of NFTs, which is responsible for the vast majority of volume in the NFT space. So we basically set out to build that. And it's kind of akin to, if you've used Coinbase Pro or Binance, it's kind of akin to the Binance of NFTs. And we started off with spot trading. And most recently we launched

Blend, which is a perpetual peer to peer lending protocol for NFTs. And that's been integrated into the Blur marketplace as well. So now you can buy NFTs in a financialized manner that was not possible before. Specifically, when you said pro traders, what do you think traders care or appreciate the most in terms of the product design of Blur? Obviously, I think you mentioned infrastructure earlier.

you know, compared to some of the existing players at that time. What else did you guys optimize? So I think the easiest way to understand the difference between Blur and the other players that existed before Blur is if you look at the difference between

something like Binance's more advanced exchange and something like Coinbase where if you go on Coinbase, it's like a very simple buy and sell experience, right? You just, it's a very simple UI. You just put in the amount of Bitcoin or Ethereum you want to buy and you click purchase. And it's like a very retail friendly experience whereas if you use, you know, Binance or Bitmex or Deribit or any of the other advanced exchanges or any of the more advanced like spot exchanges,

You have a depth chart, an order book, price feeds. Everything's updating in real time. There's a lot of condensed information. It can be quite overwhelming for a newcomer or retail buyer. But for an advanced trader, if you're making trades in size, buying a lot of NFTs, flipping them, this is the kind of interface that you actually want for NFTs. And so that is what we built.

for Blur, that's like the first product that we built. And then we ended up introducing more efficient ways of executing trades in the market through the smart contracts as well. And I can get into that in a bit. But basically, we started off by just building more for a target user that was actively trading NFTs versus like a retail newcomer. Maybe they just want like a normal shopping experience that's very simple.

And we kind of diverge from that and focus on the very active trader. If you don't mind, I actually wanted to double click on the fast because you always emphasize fast on your website and everywhere. You know, the fastest 10x faster than any of the other marketplace, so on and so forth.

So when you're saying fast, like you talked about the trading experience, the smart contract execution, are there any other optimization that you've done that you also would consider make yourself stand out? Yeah, definitely. So there's a number of dimensions that we focus on. One was we were the first real time exchange for NFTs.

every other marketplace at the time they really treated nfts like a shopping experience which is really good for retail but not for traders and so that meant that you know for hot collections it would be almost impossible to go and execute your trade because you're trying to buy an item but by the time you click on buy the item's already been sold and you don't even know that so we actually built real-time infrastructure from the ground up to support this trading and we

We knew that NFT marketplaces had to deal with really huge scale. All the marketplaces that we had saw were always dealing with downtime and just really struggling to keep up with the speed and scale that was required. In order to build Blur, we actually recruited a bunch of our friends from MIT that had worked on real-time systems and trading systems in the past. We recruited our engineers from Citadel, Five Rings Capital, which is a trading firm, Twitch,

companies like that where we had confidence that they would be able to build up this real-time infrastructure. And then on the smart contract side, we also recruited one of our acquaintances from MIT. They previously worked with Starkware and MakerDAO. And we built a bidding system that basically allowed you to bid using funds from a bidding pool, which is this on-chain pool. And

Using those funds, you can not only bid, but you can also buy NFTs using that pool at the same time. And while it sounds very simple, it is actually a big unlock because prior to Blur, the only way to bid was you had to convert your ETH into WEATH.

you know, wrapped ETH. And if you wanted to buy an NFT, you had to convert it back from wrapped ETH over to ETH. So it's this really annoying thing where you have to kind of manage your ETH and your WEATH balances. And I mean, for an experienced person, it's annoying. For a new person, it's also annoying because you have these like two different currencies that you're using to buy these assets. So that was another inefficiency that we worked on resolving. So there's a combination of, you know, real-time infrastructure that we had to build and also protocol level enhancements to make

the process of trading NFT is better.

Very helpful. So I think now we can dive into talk about Blend a little bit more because I think like, you know, now we explain how you optimize and improve the whole trading experiences. And then you also mentioned that it's targeting pro traders. So you just deliver this new P2P perpetual lending protocol called Blend. What are some of the most important points that Blend attempts to achieve? Yeah. So just to kind of put everything in context,

of the trading that's been going on in NFTs. So, you know, blur will do, um, you know, billions and volume per month and NFT trading. All of that volume is actually spot volume. Um,

And that's because NFT infrastructure is still very, very primitive compared to token infrastructure, which has had 10 years to really develop. So if you look at an exchange like Binance, a bot volume is actually a very small portion of their total volume. The vast majority of the volume in the market is from more financialized volume, right? It's like derivatives, it's margin, it's futures options, et cetera. And NFTs did not have any of that infrastructure. So

the next evolution from what we can tell was improving the economic efficiency of NFT trading, which meant unlocking the value held in NFTs through borrowing and lending. So we wanted to build a lending protocol for NFTs. The thing about NFTs though, that's a little bit tricky is that they are fundamentally different from tokens. They're non-fungible items. And so you can't just copy paste what worked in

the fungible token market and apply that to infrastructure for nfts so we had to basically build a new protocol from the ground up to support the fact that nfts are non-fungible as much as much more a liquid market

And what is like a lending protocol and borrowing protocol look like, you know, in that context? And so we ended up working with Dan Robinson at Paradigm. And, you know, Dan was one of the key inventors of Uniswap V3, which is, you know, the largest DEX on Ethereum. And we basically ended up working with him to design from the ground up a NFT lending protocol that was basically catered to the NFT market.

But then what important things do you think the borrower or the users of Blend would care? Yeah, absolutely. So there's two sides of the equation. There's what's the unlock for borrowers and what's the unlock for lenders. The first unlock is in a lending protocol. So if you're familiar with DeFi lending protocols, most of the popular ones like Aave and Compound are peer-to-pool protocols where everyone is basically pooling their...

ETH and supplying it at the same loan terms. It's usually like a 60% LTV or something like that, or 50%. And the protocol basically has to limit the max LTV that can be given to borrowers because it's a pooled model. So you have to basically be more conservative because otherwise you have systemic risk, right? If there's ever like a price drop, then the entire

pool of the entire protocol can be wiped out. And so basically that means that in a peer-to-peer model, you actually have to have more conservative risk parameters because you have to have the same risk parameters for everyone. Versus in a peer-to-peer model,

each lender is basically able to make loans given their own risk profiles and tolerances and understanding of the market. And that basically means that you can actually have loans across a full spectrum of risk. Basically means that in a peer-to-peer model, you can have higher LTV than is possible in a peer-to-pool model. When you look at that, the existing peer-to-peer models that we were looking at, they were very confusing because it's not me if I'm just kind of giving too much context, but basically...

It's important to kind of understand the landscape before Blend was launched in order to kind of understand why we designed Blend the way it was designed. All of the peer-to-peer protocols that we found were very borrower unfriendly in the sense that for each loan, they would have a principal, an interest rate, and also a fixed duration. So every peer-to-peer protocol

NFT lending protocol prior to Blur was a fixed duration protocol. So it's like you could take out a loan for 30 days, for 14 days, for seven days, but it was a fixed amount of time. And that meant for borrowers that they need to remember to actually repay their loan within a specific period of time. And if they forgot, then their loan would get liquidated. And this happened multiple times. We would talk to people where...

they mentioned that they had like forgot to set a reminder because they forgot to set a reminder. They actually lost their NFT, even though they had enough ETH to repay their borrow. And in addition to that, not only was that, you know, difficult for borrowers to manage, but also for lenders because they had to basically lend out

their NFT for a fixed duration of time and they couldn't basically like liquidate their position. It meant that they had to be more conservative on the lending terms because they needed to be confident. If you're going to make a 30 day loan, you need to be confident that

the collection price will basically stay high enough over that entire 30-day period such that you're going to get your money back. That means you need to be more conservative than, for example, an exchange where when you borrow funds on an exchange, the exchange usually has an instant liquidation process. That means that the exchange can actually offer you much higher LTV on your borrows than if the exchange had to take 30 days to liquidate you.

So basically, you know, that's the context in which blend was designed. So what we did was we actually designed a peer to peer perpetual NFT lending protocol where each loan is actually made within from an individual lender. So it's not pooled. Each lender can choose their risk parameters, but the loans don't have any duration. Instead, the lenders can basically call their loans at any point in time, in which case the loan goes into an auction to find another lender to step in.

And I can talk about the specifics of how that exactly works. But basically what it enables is that it allows borrowers to take out loans without having to worry about specific durations and set reminders and stuff like that. It also allows borrowers to get higher LTVs. It allows lenders to offer higher LTVs while also reducing their risk. Because instead of having to set an LTV that you think is safe for like a 30-day period or 14-day period, you can set any LTV you want

with the confidence of knowing that when you want to call that loan, you can get your loan back within a 30-hour period, which allows for higher LTV without increasing your risk. What you were saying earlier, I was going to comment that people talk about lending

in terms of collateral liquidation, expiry, price feeds and interest rates and stuff. I think it's interesting that you mentioned some of these peer to pool models where like in fungible token world, like you actually would face Oracle failure, but then when there's no price feed, I mean, for an NFT, it's just like impossible to do price feed anyway. So I think this is a very interesting part, but

I was wondering though, because it's clear, I mean, in this case, that borrowers are the ones that want to buy now, pay later, and then it gives them flexibility. But it sounds like for lenders, it's a very high requirement for them to understand and manage the risk. Where would you source them? Yeah, so there's a few different ways.

aspects to this. And you're totally right. It's not something that I explicitly mentioned, but Blend is actually an Oracle-less protocol. So there's no risk of Oracle failure because Oracles are not even part of the system at all. And this is another nice benefit because if you look at DeFi lending protocols, pretty much every hack that has ever happened has been due to an Oracle failure. And in this case, there's actually no Oracles at all. So we can

improve the security of the system by removing one of the key ways in which it's a lending protocol is usually exploited. For lenders, you're right that this does create some more complexity in managing positions. One of the benefits of a peer-to-pool model is that it's very simple, right? You can just put your ETH into the pool, it starts getting lent out, you don't have to think about it. What we've noticed is that in financialized markets, as the market grows,

the liquidity providers actually become more sophisticated. A good example here is if you actually look at token trading, right? DEXs. Uniswap v2 was a very simple pooled model. Everyone just put their tokens into the pool. There's just like one pool. It was very easy for people to kind of manage these passive positions.

What Uniswap v3 did was it actually blew that up entirely. And it said, instead of having a singular pool, everyone can have different ranges for their pools. And it allowed you to have fragmented pools, basically. This is way more complicated for liquidity providers. But what it enables is it actually allows sophisticated liquidity providers to come in and provide pools of capital at

a much broader range of liquidity. And now, Uniswap v3 is the dominant DEX model on Ethereum. And the reason why it became that way is because that more expressive model is much, much better for the users, the end users of the protocol, the demand side. And it's actually much more flexible for the liquidity providers. So Uniswap

In every kind of space, maybe the space starts out with these very simplistic liquidity providers that are less sophisticated. But basically over time as the space grows, the liquidity providers and pretty much like every financial market ever, they end up becoming more sophisticated in order to chase yield in more creative and diverse ways.

Similarly for Blend, it is definitely more complicated to wrap your heads around initially, but it enables a much more expressivity from a lender perspective. And therefore it enables basically a much better borrower experience. And we've already seen that where, you know, in Blend's first day of launch,

even though it was like a new protocol and even though it was complicated, we saw the liquidity come into Blend very, very quickly. And now it's the largest lending protocol, NFT lending protocol on Ethereum by volume because it's a much better borrower experience. It's very easy for the borrowers to use. And the lender is basically...

they come in because they can earn yield on their ETH. The liquidity will chase the yield. They can earn yield on their ETH. It's basically like, even though it's a little bit more complicated, they can put in the work to learn how it works. And once they learn how it works, it allows them to be more expressive with their liquidity because they can choose the specific risk parameters. They can choose when they do the liquidations, when they don't. And so it's kind of beneficial for both the lenders and the borrowers at the same time. I've seen

on one of the tweet thread you guys are saying that you're only offering for azuki punk and melody i think yes um was that like intentional risk control yeah so because blend is a peer-to-peer model we can enable blend on many more collections than a normal peer-to-pool model

Because in a peer-to-pool model, because you have this issue of systemic risk, because when in a peer-to-pool model, the counterparty, it's not a pool. It's all of the lenders providing liquidity into that pool. The only thing the pool does is that it basically forces everyone's risk parameters into the same risk parameters.

Like you could mimic that on blend, for example. You would just have to make it so that all the lenders are all choosing the same terms and you can do that. But the issue with that is that because you have a lack of diversity in terms of the risk parameters, you now have a much greater level of systemic risk. So for peer-to-pool models,

whether it's in DeFi or NFTs, they always have to limit the markets that they can enable, right? So if you look at Aave or Compound, they only have like 10-ish markets each. If you look at like Binance, for example, if you go look at the markets that they enable borrowing on, they have like hundreds of different markets that you can borrow from. And this is because they can...

It's not a pool model, right? They have market makers offering terms on all these different markets and they can basically reduce the level of systemic risk because they can have the full expressivity of the risk in their lending terms. Similarly with Blend, Blend can, because it's peer-to-peer, can basically be enabled on many more collections than if we had gone with a pooled model.

Because this is a new protocol, we wanted to make sure that there was sufficient liquidity, lending liquidity for each of the collections that we supported. So we didn't want to launch with like 100 collections at once because then it would fragment liquidity. And it's a new system and we want people to kind of learn how it works. And so we decided to start with only three collections at three different price points to allow the market to basically learn how the protocol works and build up liquidity in them. And then from there, we can...

add and whitelist new collections. And the reason why we started with such a few number was because we wanted to build up a liquid efficient market. And the way that blend works, basically it's like,

you know, if there is yield to be made, lenders will come in and liquidity will come in and it'll become efficient. Like the market would just become efficient over time that it always trends towards that direction. But if we had gone with a hundred different collections, maybe the market would have trended towards efficiency over the course of a month, but we didn't want the market to trend towards efficiency in a month. We wanted to market to become, you know, liquid instantaneously on day one. So that's why we started with only three collections, just to kind of concentrate the liquidity and attention so that people could learn. Uh,

And then now, you know, it's been a few days. I think the lenders are kind of learning how the system works a little bit more and more. So we'll be adding new collections shortly. Got it. I have two more questions that's related to this. So one question is around liquidation. Now, because it's bear market, you know, gas is low whatsoever. So then like there's no such thing called a liquidation fail or like there's no clogging.

But like in bull market, I can almost see that this type of thing just gonna happen So have you guys considered moving to some of the other I guess like EBM chains? I understand that there's no assets right now yet but

let's just assuming there is like would that be something that for you to consider yeah definitely i think when we you know as core contributors when we think about blur uh expansion to other chains is definitely something of interest but right now we still see a lot more opportunity on eath and there's still a lot of infrastructure that we want to develop on ethereum first once we do that then we will basically explore moving to other chains but we want to make sure that we take eth nfts

and grow them as much as we can first because it is the largest NFT market and we just we still see a lot of low-hanging fruit in terms of what we can improve so we want to do that first for sure even from my angle I can see that like as the financial product become more sophisticated on

NFT side, I think there's also more opportunities for MVV to be explored on Ethereum chain. So I think that could be certainly very exciting. The other part about this is

I think you mentioned that Binance, Spot was only a very small portion of their volume. And it is true that I think they really become the absolute leading platform after they started off doing perpetual swaps and some of the other things. I think even when they're only doing margin trading, it wasn't the case.

So do you see the launching of more sophisticated product for anything related to NFT? And do you see that's potentially possible to be delivered by Blur or maybe someone else? Yeah, so if you study financial markets, every financial market, like every trillion dollar financial market, it always grows through NFT.

increasingly advanced financialization and professionalization. It's what allows the advanced, like big institutional players to come in and start entering market. And that enables more liquidity, enables better prices for the end users, enables more growth. So if you look at token trading, right, we evolved from spot trading to margin to options, futures, derivatives, et cetera. And as the infrastructure developed and became more advanced and financialized, the space grew massively.

we see that same trend happening for NFTs. The difference is that NFTs are a very unique asset. They aren't fungible tokens, right? Each NFT is unique and individual. While there is some level of fungibility at the floor level, and maybe for like mids and rares, there's still at the end of the day, non-fungible assets. And that means that while we can take inspiration from the

development of the token market and how that happened and some of the infrastructure, we can't just copy paste the infrastructure. That's why for like lending, for example, we couldn't just copy paste like Aave or Compound. We had to design a new protocol with Dan Robinson from the ground up. When it comes to other advanced financial infrastructure, I definitely think that, you know,

Our entire thesis is that we can grow the NFT market by building this advanced financial infrastructure that can enable more liquidity, more players to come in, better experiences for the end users. But it has to be done in an NFT native way. I think this is why you've seen, you know, even when it came to like the spot exchange, which was what, you know, Blur started with. Every big crypto exchange, every big token exchange, right, like Binance, OKEx, Coinbase, etc.,

crack in every big one launched their own nft marketplace not a single one of those nft marketplaces got off the ground and the reason why is because nfts are fundamentally a very different asset class than tokens and you can't apply you can take inspiration from the ideas but you you can't actually just copy paste what works over to the nft world so

I do think that we'll be doing more and we're very excited to explore that. But I think it's going to require more invention as well, because if we were to just copy paste some of the ideas over from tokens to NFTs, I am quite confident it would not work out. It would only work if we basically invented something new that was NFT native.

Very inspiring, that's for sure. So now let's switch gears a little bit and talk about the governance of Blur because I thought that was very interesting and that's also very tightly kind of blend into whatever that you guys are doing for setting the parameters. So what can the holders of Blur, like Blur token, use their governance power to do, especially for blend protocol? Yeah, so the key thing that we thought about when it came to designing the token

was one of the beauties of Web3 is that we found Web3 makes it possible to basically give the end users of the protocol control and value accrual over the network, right? Because at the end of the day, the only thing that matters for a marketplace, like a marketplace is only valuable, not because of the infrastructure, but because of the network that develops around it. And in Web2,

there is a very key distinction between a separation between you know the owners of the marketplace the people that benefit from the network and the network itself but the of the value that comes from the marketplace only comes from the network itself so

When we looked at Web3, something that's really stood out to us is we realized that, oh, with Web3, with the primitives that are available in Web3, we can actually construct a system so that the network participants themselves, the ones who are actually creating the value in the network, we can provide infrastructure to kind of give them guardrails. But ultimately, the value that the network produces can be captured and delivered in the form of a token and given back to the network itself.

So when we designed Blur, we wanted to make sure that the Blur token had control over the value accrual and distribution of the network. So specifically, Blur can be used to enable fees on both the Blur marketplace and the Blur lending protocol, Blend.

The Blur token basically controls the value accrual of that protocol. And it also controls the distribution because there is a large Blur treasury. And the only way treasury grants can happen is through votes from the Blur token holders. And those are the two key primitives that Blur enables, which to us is what gives the entire network its value. Because as long as you have a token that gives you control over the value accrual and

and distribution of the network then that's basically what gives anything value right it's like being able to capture financial upside of the growth of the protocol which only happens through the decentralized adoption from the community so that's that's really how we think about blur and the other key thing that it really enables when we looked at the nft market specifically

If you are a investor or an institution or anyone, an analyst, and you're looking at the NFT market and you want to get exposure prior to Blur, there really wasn't any way to get exposure to the NFT market because the NFTs themselves are not liquid enough for you to like buy $100 million worth of NFTs. It would just that'd be a crazy amount of liquidity injected into the market.

And you wouldn't be able to get exposure that way. The only other way would be if you got like private equity in like OpenSea, for example, but that's very inaccessible to the vast majority of the world. Whereas now with the existence of Blur,

Because the majority of volume in the NFT market is flowing through the Blurred Marketplace Protocol, and now the majority of volume in the NFT lending market is also flowing through the Blurred Protocol blend. Basically, now there is a way for anyone to basically get...

you know, decentralized exposure to the growth of the NFT market, not just beta to the entire market, but also exposure to the fastest growing segment of the NFT market, which is the financialization and the pro segment of NFTs, which, you know, like token markets, it's that institutional advanced trader market is actually the fastest growing

segment is like the most valuable segment. So what Blur the token enables is it lets anyone get exposure to that growth and to that market. That's very cool. So like what you just said made me think of it's the mass adoption version of the FAT protocol thesis because I think a lot of people had the problem understanding FAT protocol thesis within something that's more on application layers. But I think

what Blur was able to achieve definitely showcased how the power of decentralization can also be benefit from the growth of a large mass adopted application layer protocol. So I think that's really interesting. Yeah, and actually I would say it's like a

an evolution or a modification of the FAT protocol thesis. It's more of like a FAT token thesis because the Blur marketplace protocol and the Blur lending protocol, these are actually separate protocols. They have separate contracts, but they are all controlled by the same token. And the reason why it makes sense is because they're all related to the growth of the NFT industry. So whether you believe that NFT spot adoption will grow

or whether you believe NFT financialization will grow. The BLUR token, because it's the same token that controls the value accrual of both segments, it's basically like a fat token that encompasses index exposure to every segment of growth of the NFT market. Very nicely spoken.

I have one last question for today. Do you think the current UI design, sorry, UI/UX design for Blur, which is optimized for the trading of community-oriented NFTs like the PFPs and stuff, can also work for the in-game or in-app asset trading? When I said in-game or in-app, I was more thinking like, you know, StepinApp or maybe some other games that have like an integrated contextualized trading experience.

So if not, then how do you envision the market for those asset trading to be? Yeah, I think the interface absolutely can. When we think about the evolution of

I think Binance really gives a good case study where they started with focusing on the pro traders and the crypto natives. And then over time, they expanded their product offering and protocol offering towards broader segments of the market. So there's a very nice Binance app. There's a very nice Binance retail website. But then there's also the futures trading, the advanced spot trading, perps trading, etc. And it's a very broad product offering.

When we think about Blur, we would definitely, you know, we focus on the NFT natives, but as core contributors, you know, we always have an eye towards expanding the product and building on top of the foundation that, you know, Blur already has. When we think about the current interface, ultimately the interface is really geared towards advanced trading of NFTs at large.

So any type of NFT, whether it's a PFP or an in-game asset, you know, if it's a, if it's an asset that has an image or some sort of visual representation and traits, if it has those properties, then it's something that can be suited to being traded on Blur. If it's something like a one-of-one piece of artwork, or, you know, there are certain types of NFTs that have very specific, unique properties. So for example,

you know, ENS names, right? Names don't really have like a visual component and right. It's just words. Um, so that's, that's a very different type of asset and that's not something that blur is as suited for. Uh, and one of one are, it's a little bit different because you're not really ever going to be trading that, uh,

you're really kind of like buying and holding for a long, long time. So that is like not as good of an asset type, but anything that is actively traded and visual in nature with traits, that's something that Blur is definitely well suited for, even in its current form. Awesome. Thank you so much, Pacman. It was really a nice conversation to have with you. And I hope our audience also learned quite a bit from this conversation. Yeah, absolutely. Thanks so much for having me, Maple.