EP.29 [EN] - Tascha Punyaneramitdee: Scaling DeFi Problem Solving with the Alpha Launchpad / 用Alpha Launchpad 规模化 DeFi解决方案
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Hello and welcome everyone. I'm Mabel Jiang, the host of 51%, a podcast series presented by Multicoin Capital. This show is the exploration of blockchain's rapid development across Asia with a particular focus on the perspectives, communities, and operators based in China. My goal is to bring Eastern perspective to West and Western perspective to East so you can better understand the crypto's unique market structure and how these distinct communities think and operate.

This podcast will feature a mix of English and Chinese discussions. The language you're hearing now will be the language I use for the rest of the podcast. Stay up to date with my latest episode by subscribing to this podcast. Thank you for listening.

Mabel Jang is a principal at Multicoin Capital. All opinions expressed by Mabel or other podcast guests are solely their opinion and do not represent the opinions of Multicoin Capital in any way. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be construed as an inducement to make an investment or led upon as investment advice. Multicoin Capital may at times hold positions in some of the tokens or companies discussed on this show. Hello everyone, welcome back to 51%. I'm your host, Mabel Jang.

Today, we are happy to have Alpha's project lead, Tasha, to join us again. She's joining as a guest a second time on 51%. Welcome back, Tasha. Thank you, Mabel. Glad to be back and always nice to chat with you.

Of course. Yeah, so today I'd like to kind of chat with you about a bunch of Alpha's updates. Before we head into that, would you mind giving us some of our audience an update? Like what is Alpha? Because not many of them have heard of the previous episode.

Sure, yeah. So Alpha Finance Lab is a DeFi lab, right? The fact that it's a DeFi lab allows us to build a number of alpha products and also incubate a number of new DeFi projects

through what we call the Alpha Launchpad, which is an incubator program. So from all in all, you will see that Alpha Finance Lab will be an umbrella of different ecosystems. We have the Alpha ecosystem consisting of a number of Alpha products. We also have a number of ecosystems that we incubate through the Alpha Launchpad. And the reason that we want to structure it this way is because we

when we look at DeFi, right? Like we see that DeFi will be here for the long term, but how DeFi will look like will definitely change, right? Depending on the regulatory landscape, depending on different bulls and bear market, different protocols,

interacting with new other protocols, creating new themes and everything, right? So because of all those, a lot of changes that we will go through and given that DeFi is in such a young stage now, we see that those changes are inevitable. So in order for us to make sure that we stay relevant at all stage of DeFi,

until it reaches the stage where, you know, massive adoption, right? Then we gotta make sure that we are a DeFi lab and able to innovate and pivot and add a number of products and ecosystem under the Alpha Finance Lab brand and, you know, stay relevant across the whole life cycle of DeFi.

So that's, you know, a nutshell about Alpha Finance. And, you know, happy to share and really talk a lot more on Alpha Launchpad, which is what we just announced, an incubator program.

Sounds good. We'll definitely talk about that later on in this episode. So before we jump into some discussion about the recent update about the Alpha Finance Lab, when you guys launched at the beginning, I think you were pretty focused on how you guys were able to fast identify the problems within DeFi and then to be able to solve it.

So since you launched, what were some of the milestones that you hit? And then in addition to that, how did you decide to kind of change the roadmap as you see fit? So first, we launched a project back in around...

So it's October 2020 last year. That's when we first launched the first product, which is called Alpha Homora. And Alpha Homora is the first leveraged U farming product in DeFi. And we created the category ourselves, which we call it the U farming. And this all comes from how we built the product from looking at different market gaps, innovating, you know, rethinking a lot of different things and

And Alpha Homora itself has grown a lot and become a pretty massive product on its own to a point that we decided to launch V2. So Alpha Homora V2 now, so both of these are on Ethereum. V2 actually can do a lot more things, scale a lot better, can accommodate a lot more strategies, different kinds of strategies, complicated strategies. So pretty much,

can handle a lot more things right than our far more v1 and from the v2 product itself we now are having about 1.5 billion total total value locked across all our farmer products so those were you know the number as of the latest update and one thing that we also need to mention here is that

Given that Alpha Homeware v2 is a lot more complicated than v1, like the code-based level and many other angles that are more complicated than v1. Obviously, the more complicated the product it is, the more loopholes there can be, right? So unfortunately, Alpha Homeware v2 was exploited back in February and we quickly realized

make sure that we close the loophole very fast and making sure that we rethink a lot of things on the security layer. So we also put out another blog post on security measures, which includes not only multiple audits from the top tier firms, such as OpenCiplin, which we also got, but also having multiple peer reviews from the top

security researchers in the space, which we also got for our Bahamora V2. And also making sure that we have the internal monitoring tools all the time so that we are aware of any potential, you know,

situations that may have before anyone else. And then the last thing that we also did is to have the active bug bounty program. Active bug bounty program here means that whenever we push the new line of code out to the public,

It will get sent across the whole community of developers who will help look through and read through and become the white hacker or the good hacker. So they will try to help us find loopholes. And if they do, then they will reach out to us.

So these are pretty much all the things that we have put in place to ensure that it won't happen in the future. And so far, we have been going pretty smoothly. And also, we're confident that we will continue to go smoothly because of all these new security measures that we put in place.

That's pretty comprehensive. So I'd like to actually ask you about your experience back then dealing with all these security incidents. But before I jump into that, I remember a few months ago when you guys were deciding on the roadmap, you also had the product AlphaX and some of the other ones like Hedera. I forgot the name.

What was the idea about those? How did those come up? And then why did you guys decided to reprioritize those to something happen later?

So Alpha X is very interesting. We came up with the idea towards the end of 2020 already. So once we launched Alpha Homera and we saw such a huge adoption with the product and we saw that a lot of people are being exposed to short positions.

um which i don't want to go into the detail too much right because um so that might get too too technical and everything but from using alpha v1 itself not v2 you can be exposed to several short positions um so we can we thought that okay if in order for us to grow the product even further we should be able to find an angle to hedge this risk

And so that's why we explored the whole new area, which is called Perpetual Swaps, to make sure that we not only just create a new product, but have this new product also bring benefits and synergy to the old users and the old product that we already have. So that's the Alpha X idea that we have. And then that was back in 2020. And we were going to launch it in 2020.

shortly after Alpha Hummer V2, right? But given the exploit, we definitely have to rethink a lot of things. And we also wanna make sure that we put a lot of the attention to ensure that Alpha Hummer V2 is getting all the attention it deserves, right? Before relaunching and everything. So now we have relaunched Alpha Hummer V2 already back in May.

And now we're rethinking on the product itself of Alpha X, because if you look at the whole landscape from 2020, late 2020 to now, the whole perpetual swap market has changed a lot. A lot more products have come live, a lot more different products.

ideologies, different theories have proven wrong on a number of angles. So we're actually taking this time of gap that we have to make it be beneficial thing for Alpha X. So we're taking all these data that we have, all these usages that we're observing in the whole market to rethink how else do we have to adjust Alpha X given the landscape change to make sure that when we launch, we actually reach the maximum product market fit.

So I think that's still being done internally and we're doing that right now. But in the meantime, we also want to make sure that we don't stop building and we don't stop incubating because we're a DeFi lab and that's why we are

launched Alpha Launchpad out, which is an incubator program that will not only allow us to continue building the Alpha products internally, but also allow us to help train the talent in DeFi to pretty much grow and launch a new DeFi project out within the Alpha Finance Lab umbrella.

That's absolutely smart. I think knowing when and how to pivot is as important as knowing how to fast launch something that has a good product market fit at that point. So definitely kudos to you guys.

Can you expand a little bit more on Alpha Homora V2 and how exactly it is doing right now? I know it's horizontally and vertically expanded as a product. Obviously, it was connected to more DEXs and also supported more assets. So how are all these different assets and different pools are doing? Maybe give a summary.

Yeah, so we have more than $1 billion of total value lock on Alpha Homero V2 alone after about less than one month of launching. And within Alpha Homero V2 itself, there are two ways that users can interact. One is lenders who can lend, and the other is leverage you farmers who can come in to become leverage you farming, open their farm position.

So what's very interesting about AlphaHomera v2 is on both sides, but for lending particularly, if you go to homera-v2.alphafinance.io/earn, you will actually see that there are so many assets that we accept in the lending markets from the popular assets, for example, ETH, USDT, USDC, DAI, to many DeFi coins, many DeFi governance tokens like

you know, LingQ,

than these tokens, right? So what we see here is that Alpha Home RV2 has become the place that generates the highest yields across the board, not just the popular tokens, but also for all these governance DeFi tokens too. So I think that is a pretty unique thing and also shows the power of leveraged yield farming, generating yields to not only yield farmers, but also to the lenders who lend those assets out.

So, you know, that's the nice thing about the lending part of Alpha Home Army too. From the leverage to farming part, what's also interesting here is a lot of the pool TVL itself is

I would say, staggering in more of the stablecoin pools, right? Because leverage-y farmer depositing or collateralizing stablecoins to borrow other stablecoins to ufarm in the stablecoin pools bear a lot less risk than if they were to ufarm on other volatile assets pool. So that's the trend that we see. And we're probably going to focus a lot more on the stablecoin pools on the leverage-y farming side too.

Did you guys do any customization for Uniswap v3? We are doing internally right now. So it's being done, developed in the moment. As we speak. Got it. So I don't think you ever talked about the kind of takeaway or as someone who actually experienced the security incident.

So what was the kind of feeling, I guess, for you back then when you really received a notice about there were some hacking going on for Alpha and then...

What were some of the learnings? I mean, obviously, you shared a bunch of action items that you guys did. And I thought that those were pretty effective. But I think generally speaking, as a founder or as an entrepreneur, you probably also have a lot of thoughts after that. Can you share a little bit more on those fronts? Yeah, I think...

It really reinforces my team's thinking of how early DeFi is. And this is also why we also want to launch Alpha Launchpad 2. So I think a lot of things...

kind of fall into places and lead us to what we launch next, the strategy, the direction that we do next. And internally, you know, we're really excited about Alpha Launchpad. So, you know, thankful for the lessons that we got from the incident because without that, we may not have Alpha Launchpad that come this early, right? It might come later down the line. And the learning here is that, you know, DeFi is a really young space, not only just the security front, but also in

in general, from the talent pool, from the resources available, offering to the new talent, from...

from the product itself to the need of innovation that will pretty much push the DeFi landscape to grow it out even further. So I think there are a lot of angles that we learned from that, which we took all those learnings to make sure that we benefit from it and the whole community benefits from it by launching Alpha Launchpad. We have the idea of Alpha Launchpad already

back in the days, but we did not think of launching it this soon. We were probably going to think of launching it next year, right? And the whole idea of Alpha Launchpad is that, hey, we actually know how to start

and grow a lot of product market fit products, right? We know how to spot market gaps. We know how to handle a lot of things on the business growth hacking sides and also on the technical sides as well. And we have put in place a number of security measures that can actually be applied to many other projects.

So how can we bring this benefit to as many people as possible? So with Alpha Launchpad, a number of benefits are accruing to Alpha Finance Lab directly, which I can talk a bit more. A number of benefits are accruing directly to the developers that apply to the program because they will pretty much work hand in hand with us through a lot of

And then a number of benefits are accruing back to the whole DeFi ecosystem because at the end of the day, we're creating a larger, a safer, a more expansive DeFi ecosystem. And finally, DeFi will grow a lot faster than what we see before.

Well, you just told me, I think perfectly bridged into the topic I'd like to gear towards, which is Alpha Finance Launchpad, obviously. So maybe you just kind of intro at the beginning what Launchpad is in one short sentence, but can you expand a little bit more on what exactly is it? How did you come up with the idea?

Yeah, so Alpha Launchpad is an incubator program, which means that Alpha Finance Lab team will work with the incubator projects who apply to Alpha Launchpad program on a number of areas from finding the product market fit, spotting that market gap or fine tuning the product that they have.

to technical consulting, diving into the tech itself. How do we make sure it optimizes for security, for gas, for a number of angles, right?

to business and growth hacking side, I think this third pillar here is also a lot undervalued by other teams, right? But it's something that we value a lot because I think from the tech alone will be enough, but not possible to take you to where you want to go, right? You need this business and growth hacking side that will push you forward.

to the full speed. So we will make sure that they have this recipe and the playbook that we do ourselves that we can implement for the other projects too. We also will help with the fourth pillar, which is more on the token design. How do you structure the token incentives and tokenomics to make sure that it aligns the incentives for the whole community and making sure that it brings a lot of product usages back when the product is launched?

So as you can see, there are so many angles that we're helping and these are just a number of lists. But we actually have a pretty expansive list that we keep on our website, which is alphalaunchpad.alphafinance.io. So that will give you a lot more bigger view on what we do to make sure that the incubator projects actually get the whole recipe and the whole playbook to launch and grow successfully.

So that's pretty much the context of how we work with the Launchpad projects, right? In terms of what we get and pretty much like what alpha community gets, right? Is that there are three things that we like to

pointed out. The first thing is that whether you're Alpha users, you will definitely benefit from this because the incubator projects that we're incubating will be launched under the Alpha Finance Lab universe. So what that means is that there will be synergies among different products that are launched, whether launched internally by Alpha team or launched through incubations.

So from the user perspective, using the whole ecosystem would bring you more benefits than if you were to use a single product alone. So that's the first thing. The second thing is from the token holders side. So I think this is where it gets a lot more interesting in terms of value accrual. So typically right now, if you are to stake alpha tokens on tokenomics.alphafinance.io, what you would get is you would get

a share of the protocol fees that Alpha products have collected. So in addition to that, what you will also accrue is a share of the new incubated projects tokens. So as we incubate more projects, we will also allocate a portion of those project tokens to distribute to Alpha's takers. So that's the second thing that Alpha community is getting.

The third thing that Alpha Green is also getting is that once we drive the incubator projects to grow really fast and also grow and adopt the usages

to the maximal, right? We are also bringing the value accrual of those incubator projects back to alpha stakers as well, in a sense that a portion of the protocol fees of the incubator projects will also be distributed back to the alpha stakers. So I think all in all, like the two parties really win, alpha community wins,

the incubated projects also win. And once these two parties win, the whole DeFi also wins because there are going to be a lot more talent pool flowing to DeFi, a lot more projects that are incubated out from Alpha Finance Lab. This is super comprehensive and I think the community will definitely like the additional value accrual for the token.

In terms of the projects that come to you or seek the help from Alpha Finance staff, what kind of support will they be expecting to get from you guys?

Yeah, so the pillars that I mentioned earlier are some of the support that they can give. So let me just name out the pillars, right? I think that would be a pretty good high level overview. So one pillar, the first pillar is product market fit. So what this means is we work with the incubator projects to fine tune the product market fit.

The second one is tech consulting. So this covers not only the smart contract, but also full stack development from front end to back end. How do you set up a structure to scale and having security at the top of the mind? The third one is business and growth hacking, which includes marketing, business development, investors relations, community building, all these things that really allows you to grow successfully in the long term.

The fourth thing is token design. So as mentioned briefly before, you know, how do you structure token incentives, tokenomics to ensure for a long-term success? The fifth one is fundraising process. So if the incubator projects are looking to fundraise through different kind of, you know,

you know, investments, right? Then we also will help with these. We are pretty well connected in this area as well. So we can help connect to the great investors that we know will definitely can bring a lot of value to this type of project because different types of projects would need different kinds of investors depending on who would be the right strategic investors. So we can help forming that. The sixth thing is

getting the launch to be supported by Alpha. So what that means is, you know, we have the whole launch playbook for all the Launchpad projects. There will be different AMAs, there will be different marketing support from Alpha community to make sure that the launch is, you know, amplified as much as possible and making sure that it reaches the right users that the incubator projects should reach. And then the last and seventh thing is that

Once the incubated project is incubated, they can leverage the whole user base of Alpha Universe. Alpha Universe here doesn't only include Alpha products, but also includes the incubated projects that we incubate. So pretty much you can see this as the whole suite of user base that you can tap into, depending on what kind of integrations, depending on what kind of partnerships you want to do. You have this base of

protocols of user base that you already can tap into. Right. Actually, how the structure gives me a direction of how in the future the DAO will be operating. So I actually had a lot of interesting thought about this. But let me ask you a question. How are these projects being selected into the Launchpad? How will the committee members participate in the process?

Yeah, this is a very good question. And what you mentioned is interesting too, because it's what we're thinking of in terms of the structure of decentralizing this going forward, right? So...

In the beginning, now that we're launching Alpha Launchpad, a lot of the things are not decentralized yet because we have to find the right model. We probably have to pivot different things along the way until we reach the model or the criteria that actually work or even the process, right? So once those things are optimized and we know that these processes work well and these criteria work well, then we will transition to a decentralized model

or DAO sense of structure. And then once we reach that stage, that's when alpha token holders can actually be the one really participating in selection processes, in helping incubating new projects and pretty much benefit from helping the whole community out.

Got it. Yeah, the reason I mentioned that I thought this was interesting is because I've been seeing some DAO as a service projects coming around lately. And what they're essentially doing is they are also going to do a bunch of pillars that you just mentioned, including fundraising access to investors, obviously one part, and then tokenomic design,

Also tech consulting or business development consulting and even growth hacking as in, because, you know, having a, being able to get a really good community at the beginning is really hard. And then, you know, having a community like alpha, which is already there is really, it's something that you don't get all the time. It's like, you know, the community is like for, for alpha, for Thor Chang and for some of the other ones, it's just one of the,

like most scarce resources that you could ever have the luxury to have. So then like all these services that they provide will be charged with a certain portion of the token of the projects or, you know, in that sense is like consulting fee in the traditional SaaS service. So I realized that this is becoming a very common organizational structure for a lot of the

new projects to come around, which is kind of step on someone, a giant's shoulder rather than they just do everything from scratch on their own. So I thought that was pretty interesting because you guys originally started as a lab, like DeFi lab to build on different things. And you guys realized that you have all these expertise to offer to community and then so that you can scale even faster. So I thought this is like a pretty interesting kind of development.

I'm not sure if you have thought about on the same direction too. Oh, I see. Yeah, yeah. I think those are interesting points. One thing that just came out to my mind that is really important too and I haven't been mentioning it is that

What I see as really unique about Alpha Launchpad, right, comparing to other Launchpad programs or even different kind of structures, is that it's a Launchpad program, an incubator program, which is created by builders for builders. And it really focuses on incubating new DeFi projects out from the ground up to driving significant growth post-launch. So I think it is pretty much like a full service kind of thing. And I think...

it not only just helps Alpha grow a lot, but it also helps really bring in new talent to DeFi, right? Like let's say there are great talents in traditional, you know,

And they want to jump into DeFi, but they pretty much don't know where to start. They can here now start at Alpha Launchpad because we will provide the full service for them. And we're builder-minded already. So we're focusing on making sure that it is launched

in the most successful way as possible. So I think a lot of things will come into play once we launch more projects out and a lot of the community will really realize that this is not only just alpha, right? This is really benefiting the whole DeFi ecosystem.

I think one additional comment I've made is that, so let's say, assume all each of the E5 projects on the market is one single DAO. I think the future that we will be heading into is every single person is a part of many different DAOs.

So then on Alpha Launchpad, basically all these different DAOs can cross-promote to each other. And then a community member will, let's say 50% of the original Alpha community member will be in some other thing, some other DeFi projects that are launched on Alpha Launchpad. And then the rest of them will just coming from some other projects

the community of the other project launch on the alpha launchpad. So I thought the cross community promotion aspect is also going to be very interesting.

And in some, the whole community would just grow larger because maybe someone originally weren't interested in Alpha, but because one of the projects launched there, they started to learn about other projects that are launched here. And then your ecosystem becomes large. So I thought that was definitely a compounding value cruel to the Alpha ecosystem.

Yeah, that's very well said and well summarized. I'd like to ask you about some of the... Because you said at the beginning you might want to be more hands-on in terms of taking the projects and the things that are needed on the market. So what are some of the things that you are thinking in mind in terms of the Launchpad projects and what are the problems you'd like to solve? Yeah, so...

and this might be a little alpha leak, but there are a number of market gaps that we see that are still not yet being addressed. And I think these are very good candidates for the following alpha launchpad projects. One of them being that there are a number of tokens or even

overvalued tokens in crypto in general, right? If you compare that to traditional finance, you will see that

It's pretty much similar, but it's a lot more, I would say the impact is a lot more emphasis here in crypto because of how fast things move and the speculative nature of the industry in general. But one thing that pretty much the traditional finance has is a number of tools that allow investors to offset inflation.

this overvaluation. So we think that those set of tools are needed in crypto space, in DeFi space. And those are the kind of tools that I think are one of the examples of things that we're going to incubate out. Another interesting angle is also on the stable coins market. I think

Although we have a number of stable coins in the space already, but there are still a number of room to innovate, given that there are a number of angles that are not yet optimized in a number of ways, from capital efficiency to many other areas. So that's also another area that I think is worth exploring.

That'll be interesting. I think definitely there are a bunch of things on the market that is yet to be explored. Even one of the things that I think people have been discussing is how do you provide liquidity onto Uniswap v3 for retails and easily access to that process? Because I think a lot of people may not understand the

liquidity, like how it exactly works for Uniswap v3, like what's the best strategy for them? So then, you know, there are a bunch of machine gun pool for people to put their liquidity in and those liquidity provider will just provide liquidity on your behalf. I think that's, you know, a perfect,

project for Alpha Launchpad to launch. Not suggesting specific projects because I don't have anything in mind. I'm just saying that would be something, a small problem to solve. And I'm sure there are a bunch of other things

that people will see and then consider, oh, this is something great, but is this a product or a feature? I guess we always come to this question when you look at projects that launch as a new protocol, like launch in DeFi. But then I thought it would be interesting if it is something that's complementary to DeFi

whatever that exists in the current DeFi stacks, and then be part of the larger ecosystem. I thought that would make total more sense when those kind of projects launch. Yeah, I think that's also going to be a pretty huge thing on how do you make the interaction between retails and Uniswap v3 to be a lot more friendly. And I think a lot of projects are exploring that area now.

Right. Yeah, I'm just trying to think. I think a lot of the projects that I came across in the past often would get the question, oh, how do you bootstrap the initial liquidity? How do you get your initial users and whatnot? So now we have Alpha Launchpad, a launchpad that's run by builders, to your point. I think it's

Exactly is what I said earlier. They can build on the giant's shoulder with a lot of the support they have originally. And then it's almost like if you need liquidity, you have a share pool that you can tap into and then you can actually benefit a lot from that. So I thought this is actually pretty interesting and I look forward to see what projects will build on top of Alpha Finance Launchpad.

Yeah, very excited too. And let's wait and see. Should not be too long. So final question, how can projects find you and then feed their ideas to you guys? Yeah, so they should go to our website, alphalaunchpad.alphafinance.io. It has all the information in terms of the application processes, the requirements,

what are the next steps after applied and more details or you know if you don't want to apply through there and you want to consult with us first maybe because you have different concerns or anything right you can reach out to my twitter too so that would be t-a-s-c-h-a underscore p-a-n p-a-n touch underscore pan pan

Great. This is super helpful. Thank you so much for joining me today, Tasha. Thank you so much, Mabel. Really glad to be back. Yeah, very exciting. Thank you so much.