EP.52 [EN] - 0xOdia: Solend as a Developer-powering Lending Protocol / Solend: 一个致力于服务开发者的借贷协议
43:37 Share

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 truly excited to have one of the founding members of Solent to join us at 51%. Welcome, Odia. Hi, Mabel. Thanks for having me. No problem. To start our conversation, I'd love to maybe chat about the team's background. I know you're all anons, so maybe you can just talk about your experiences and how you started the protocol and whatnot.

Yeah, yeah, definitely. I think kind of like being A9 obviously has its drawbacks. Like there's definitely times where we kind of wish we could have shared a bit more of our background, especially in the early days to kind of give that trust, get that leverage.

But, you know, we still managed to get off the ground. But yeah, there's a fair amount we can share. We are like a pretty seasoned bunch of both crypto vets and just traditional fintech vets. The team has grown a bit, but I can kind of just go over like our core, like founding five team members, like, you know, starting with Rooter. Rooter just has, you know, definitely a

in certain circles, a pretty recognizable name from the Ethereum world. Coming on to Solana, he's yeah, so he kind of like leads the team there. Personally for me, I come from more of a Web2 background. I've always been involved kind of like tangentially in crypto, but my previous endeavor was more of like a fintech startup.

And then we got Nob, whom we acquired. He was, I think, working on kind of like a lending aggregator in the early days. And in his other persona, his Doc's persona, he's a pretty big

big contributor in crypto twitter whether it's like discussion open source and stuff like that and we got like that's this one who's uh he's comfortable saying he's one of like the earliest early employees of robin hood and cactus just a general all-around also fintech guy so yeah we got a we got a pretty cool mix of uh tradfi and uh you know crypto ogs

That's pretty funny. When Ruder reached out to me about this pod, I already thought it would be Das Lichuan who joined because the name sounds like someone who could speak Mandarin and then it wasn't. And then a really short funny story to our audience. We originally wanted to do this in Mandarin but

figure that it's probably hard to chat about money market in like all the professional terms in Mandarin. So at the end, we decided to do it in English. Yeah, personally for me, yeah, it's definitely something my parents would be very ashamed of me, but I kind of had to admit at the end, my Mandarin is a little bit too lacking for this. No worries. I had that problem too, even if I'm a native Chinese speaker.

No, I was just going to say like, it's what's, yeah, what's tricky for me is because I was listening to your podcast. And there are just some words that you would use a Chinese translation and some words you would just, you know, straight up use the English and accept that people should know it. So kind of like knowing what is what takes a bit more experience, I guess. No, it's because I don't know how to make up the Chinese on the air.

I see. It's more because of that. Yeah, I felt bad because I usually try to be completely Mandarin so that people who don't understand English, they can just understand. But for some words, it's just very hard.

But yeah, it's funny. But yeah, like you mentioned that like there were some cons of being a non. I'd love to learn a bit more about that because we only I think over the past podcast, I had I had Mackie, who was also a non. He didn't talk about, you know, the pros and cons. We'd love to hear about that more.

Yeah, so kind of interesting story. I think the original motivation is kind of different from the current motivation. So the original motivation was actually we were just we were still moonlighting at the time. Like Solana was cool. It was DeFi summer, but still not enough for us to kind of like some of us to fully leave the day job yet. So, yeah, for us, it was just easier to kind of create an identity and kind of like, you know, while I was doing my startup in the day, I would come home.

become Exodia and start working on this, right? And then, yeah, and then later, it was, it really became, we started talking to people, and we started to really see kind of like the security benefits of being Anon. Like, right? Like, I just, you know, I think, I think we are kind of lucky we're in the world where kind of like,

organized crime hasn't really like caught up to like, you know, the lucrative of like going after crypto people. Right. I think like last year we were looking at some incident and it was completely unrelated to crypto, but it was like, there was a, there was like some missionaries in some central American country and they were like held hostage. And it was a, you know, they were willing to take on a global crisis. Like there was global intervention and they were willing to do all of that for like a $17 million ransom.

And I kind of like, you know, just attend crypto events, see how people talk about, you know, how they're storing stuff, how much they're storing. I just think it's like, it's pretty, like, it's going to become more and more imperative to kind of like take these OPSEC measures, such as being anonymous.

So yeah, slowly I think that transition into, once we left our regular job, we were going full time, that became part of the reason. And also, I guess, yeah, so one of the cons, I guess, obviously is some of the team members do have pretty reputable backgrounds that will really help build trust, especially when you're building an early landing protocol for a hackathon.

Certainly, it would have helped to leverage that. But we also kind of found the right balance where because we have these very angel investors kind of mean more than normal for us, right? Because they know who we are, IRL, and they're able to kind of back us.

And yeah, I guess the other main con is just kind of like when we attend events. So, you know, we are distributed across the globe and we try to like get in touch with, you know, much of the crypto scene as possible. And when we go, we either have like two choices, right? Like we either go as our regular persona, our regular name, like our Doxed persona. And then we just have to kind of make up a story, right? And sometimes I just go like,

you know they're like oh who are you i'm like oh i'm you know this person and uh what do you do i'm like you know i'm into nfts and sometimes you can kind of just like see the light leave their eye where they're like oh yeah no and nothing you know there's certain events where that might be more interesting but you know i'm at a defy event i'm saying i'm just like so you can the convert it's hard to have a certain conversation sometime like getting really deep into stuff

And then, but also sometimes it's nice, you know, you can just have like a very natural conversation just about what they're into and stuff like that. And we also have the other choice where, you know, I go as Exodia.

But then you start to have to manage the people, right? Like, the people who I introduce myself as Exodia, I need to make sure I'm not in a circle with those guys, right? So there's these kind of little things. And ultimately, we're not, like, super strict about it, I would say. I would say, like, you know, obviously, if there's someone we're going to work very closely with, we will maybe dodge stuff. And I guess there's a difference between, like,

you know, doing it on a person to person basis where if you tell N people and people know versus like you tell N people and you don't really make it a secret, then they tell N people, you know, then you get this like exponential kind of thing. Right. So, uh, yeah, it's, uh, exactly. It's a weird thing to manage sometimes.

I think it's definitely something very interesting for some of you because some of you came from the Web2 world where you can easily leverage the experience that you had before and to kind of just get to the next step. So I think you truly earned it for Solend. It's completely based on the community work and the product that you did, not something that you just leverage with the name. So I thought that was pretty impressive.

No, and just, I think it's, like, really kind of on brand with something I noticed in Web3, which is, like, it really is this kind of, like, meritocracy where people aren't really interested in your background. They're interested in what you build. And, like, in terms of, like, you know, right now we're hiring, we're looking at people. There are the people who would send us, like, a giant resume of, like, their past background. And then there's also just, like, you know, kids, like, very young, like, still in college, just sending up a list of their, like,

what they've already built on top of Salen even, right? And it's certainly, yeah, it's people. I think it worked for us because I guess it is this culture where people just want to see what you build, not what your background is. Absolutely. No, even when we were hiring, like we asked people to write a post, not a resume. So I can definitely resonate that.

Yeah, I was going to say, I was going to ask you about the experience from like the fintech background and also like Robinhood and whatnot, like you just mentioned. How do you feel like those, I guess, insights helped when you structure the product? Honestly, honestly, it really helped.

I guess the closest thing, the biggest thing we got out of it is really the passion. We understand the space. We're interested about the space. In terms of I think a lot of these fintech companies we worked at, the problems we were dealing with had to do with scale and stuff like that. Celenda originally was literally just a front end and everything was on chain. A lot of our expertise was

probably actually not as relevant at the time. But what was the most helpful is we kind of like spoke that common language, right? We had that like, had that passion. And in terms of like far out roadmap stuff, like whether it's, you know, like, you know, starting to give liquidity mining as options, like there were all stuff that like, you know, came to us as ideas earlier because of our background.

That's awesome. So I think it's time to talk about your mission and vision also, like how you set your image. Because I think it's pretty interesting that I think for some of the, for example, compound, I'm not going to use any product that's based on Solana. It's harder to tell because, well, also because it's a shorter period of time. But think about compound, like their kind of image is about being compliant and then relatively transparent.

less degen versus like Abe obviously we're trying to introduce a lot more number of markets on top and also like going multi-chain and whatnot so yeah we'll love to learn about you know how you think about your image and then also obviously the long-term vision and mission

Yeah, yeah. So, um, I would say, um, like, I mean, yeah, so I definitely have an answer for that. But I would say like, first of all, like, you know, there are definitely art companies where I've worked at where I found the most important thing to do right away is to like define a vision, a brand, a culture, and, uh,

build towards it, right? And I think that makes sense if you're like, you know, like setting up like an accounting firm, right? Like there are like tons of accounting firms that the industry is like understood, the process is understood, your customers and employees, you know, you know how they're going to work. You can set a culture, right? And target it. Like with something as like nascent as like crypto and DeFi, like we kind of just realized

you almost like you're most effective when you're just, uh, the team is just, you know, you're yourself and the team is, it's, is itself. Right. Um, it's, it's really too early to kind of like define what will be kind of like the winning, the winning culture, like the culture of crypto is changing every day. So I would say for like, you know, the first few, um,

The first few months of Selen, we were just ourselves. We did think about that problem a lot, going from Rari, the permissionless pools, to Aave, to Compound, where we wanted to be. We just had the Compound protocol, Twitter, I mean, sorry, the Selen protocol, Twitter, just put the very formal stuff. Then we had Ruder. Ruder just was Ruder, and he's doing his thing. I think gradually we grew into this

this dichotomy where um we uh there really is two like cultures cultures of uh crypto i think there is that you know the the more like conservative the more like people like more just interested in the yield and they want something reputable they want something secure right and

Our Twitter strategy kind of reflects this, where we have like Selen Protocol that's not just tweeting announcements, but tweeting insights, tweeting posts, doing partnerships. And then we have like this Rooter account is basically how we like try to capture like the gems, right? And you'll kind of actually like notice this in our kind of like every time we make a post with Selen Protocol, like the Selen Protocol will make a certain announcement and then Rooter will kind of like quote tweet it. And, you know, yeah, so like the Selen Protocol might be like, oh, like you should run a like

liquidator bot to make 5% blah, blah, blah, blah. And then router was retweeted like, Oh, look, it looks like a bunch of DJs got wrecked. Look at this graph, you know? So we're, we're really trying to appeal to both. And, um,

It's like arguably lack of focus, but it's also like a very deliberate focus on two specific things. And yeah, and this kind of reflect and recently, this might be something we talk about later, but recently we launched kind of isolated pools. And this really allows us to do that, right? We can continue to have this main pool that can hopefully...

still garner the appeal of a compound where it's, you know, conservative parameter is very managed. And then we can still push the cutting edge. To be honest to me, like DGN and cutting edge are kind of like synonymous sometimes, right? So we still want to be able to push like the DGN and the cutting edge, whether that's like NFT lending or like, you know, supplying Dogecoins, Invictus, you know, you know, Omfork and stuff like that.

Right, yeah, like that probably brought to the second point, next point that I wanted to ask you about, which is the priority of your products. Like maybe you can like walk our audience through what your main product are and then also like, you know, some of the things that are coming up in the pipeline and how are you thinking about in terms of how you prioritize them? Yeah, yeah. So, yeah.

We started, yeah, Celan kind of like we launched on mainnet back in August. And, you know, the first few months we just got our, yeah, got the protocol really stable, listed a bunch. We had, you know, we wanted to list the main, like the main Celana assets as soon as possible. And then our first like really big product launch was the isolated pools. And in isolated pools, we have these separate like,

cross collateral pools that will allow us to kind of like list riskier assets. So most recently we listed Invictus, which is kind of like the own fork on Solana. And then we also it also allows us to kind of have these like special purpose pools, too. So we launched what's called like TurboSol, which allows you to supply Sol and borrow USDC to kind of achieve like a 10x leverage. And this might

go up later. And then the other big thing is, um,

We invested a lot into like our developer portal, our developer experience. So yeah, like you said, I think, you know, when it comes to operating a lending protocol, like you supply assets, you can borrow against it in an over collateralized way. It is kind of like there's limited ways to win by product, right? So yeah, one thing we kind of already touched on is brand and how we think about that and trying to have like a,

two-pronged brand approach to try to win that. But the other way of kind of like making the capital, the TVL a bit stickier is just via integrations, right? Like making sure that we're like the premier integration experience on Solana when other protocols need a lending protocol.

So one thing that's already going well for us, you know, is we have the most TVLs that usually incentivizes people. But then we launched a developer portal. And then in that developer portal, we have like we started to build like a REST API, a TypeScript SDK so that other teams can easily integrate with us. The other thing we recently launched is like

you know, C tokens, which is like the, you know, you deposit USDC, you get the C USDC back, that's yield bearing. And we want to get that into the ecosystem more to kind of be somewhat of a primitive

And then like, yeah, moving forward, we eventually like the big goal is going from these isolated lending protocols that we control to like permissionless pools. Like we want any protocol to be able to create a pool, choose their tokens and other assets that make sense, kind of become that, also offer that kind of like RARI experience.

Other thing we're kind of launching in the future too is we want to experiment with liquidity mining rewards as options. That's something we want to experiment. And kind of like, I guess what motivates these specific things we build is...

it's it's again going back to i guess how i personally feel um like the eco like solana defy in general is just too early to kind of like you know like pick winners right the if we were to just like chase the market like something we want to do is like uh doing nft landing right so there's this protocol called solvent where you can deposit your nfts into a pool and get like a

fungible token back. It basically turns your NFTs into FTs. And we want to be able to people to be able to, you know, use that as collateral. And if we were to like, if we were chasing the market, like this is probably not a huge, large addressable market, right? It's not a lot of TVL, but I think we, I think part of like what we decide to build is just really like cast a wide net. Like we're an entire team of engineers. We want to build what's cool. That,

that interests us and we want to build what other engineers will think it's interesting to build on top of. So

Yeah, I mean, that kind of explains it, right? Like we don't want to like target specific actions. We want to be permissionless as soon as possible so we can capture the tail end. And, you know, when some random winner pops up in the future, they are automatically supported by Solend or like cool things like options and NFT lending. They might not be big now, but, you know, who knows? So, yeah, that's kind of, I guess, how I would say our strategy towards building is not really the most, you know, this...

business 101 kind of like addressable market chasing it's building for builders and building for the like the widest net possible yeah that that totally makes sense actually on the point of nft lending sometimes i do feel like it's it's more about like whether you are actually offering the product to the right group of people yet what that mean what i mean by that is um like for example if today like on magic eden you have a um

like a front end somewhere, the UI for them to easily just deposit their or collateralize their ape, the degen ape.

um and then into something i mean that's like a pretty renowned collection so like there should be at least maybe like ltv like what like 30 40 perhaps i think like because people are not offered with such option like they wouldn't think about doing it but i definitely think there's there's actually quite large of a addressable market for nft lending at least for pfp i'm not even talking about like some of the generative arts and stuff because like it's much harder to evaluate those

So I think, yeah, I agree with you. It's also sometimes it's just about like being there rather than what's happening right now.

But it's interesting that you mentioned obviously right now Solana is very early so that the number of the markets that you can offer is also quite few. I'm not talking about the single bond lending, but more like the main money market. But in terms of what you choose to offer on the single bond lending pool, I guess what's the consideration?

The reason I'm asking here about this is because like you obviously there's beta finance. I'm not sure if you're familiar with the thing. It's that's on alpha launchpad where you can use a single pull to the short assets.

So like in order to make that like very popular, you have to chase all the hot stuff like and then offer those pools so that people are going to short whatever they're being discussed. And then like Ferrari is a different focus. So I guess I'm curious like how you think about like what you choose to list on as lending market for the single lending?

Yeah, so definitely not my area of expertise, but

I'd say like, you know, obviously there's the whole host of like security concerns being number one, right? So we have like a diligence process that like, nope, spearheads just on, you know, liquidity and liquidity for the token, the economic viability of like exploiting it and price manipulating it and stuff like that. But yeah, beyond that, I think it's just, it really is just, yeah, just like use cases, right? Like,

like for example like ray is a really good example of like a token that has like a very um

you know very uh natural use case in a lending market like ray is uh to get you know whitelist into certain like projects that they launch um you have to have x amount of ray and uh ray on our platform just has consistently very high borrow utilization and um yeah because people need to borrow to kind of try to get into those whitelists so yeah it's certainly like things with uh you know once they're past the security bar it's uh what are some like interesting use cases that will uh

So part of it is we want interesting use cases so people actually use it. More users means better numbers for us. But also, yeah, we're just kind of like genuinely like we are. We love DeFi. We love like fun things you can do with our platform. Yeah, I don't know. Is there anything else you want to dig into on that? Yeah. Okay. So partially the reason I asked you about this is that I've been talking with DREF team.

They're thinking about what asset they want to offer on top. I guess for a perpetual swap, they need to have something that has good liquidity. So the number of choices they could afford is actually even fewer.

So instead of listing Solana native asset, they actually brought on, I think, Polkadot, I think the bridge version or the wrap version of Polkadot. And I think AVAX, I think if I didn't remember incorrectly, and some of the other ones.

So I guess that's like an interesting area, like for a lending market as well, because obviously if you're listing in those markets into your, into your money market, everything is connected. So you'll have to consider, but I'm just not sure if there is such demand for bridged assets. Because I think about like the warm, warm hole hat, right? Like,

Honestly, I think it was pretty lucky that not many people were using the sole base Ethereum. That was my read there. Because otherwise, I think a lot of things will be really wrecked. So I'm curious about your take on listing some of the other bridged assets on money market.

Yeah, so certainly, yeah, that whole wormhole fiasco made us kind of like rethink everything. And I actually think we are going to go through some like parameter changes to try to mitigate that next time. But yeah, like I think...

Yeah, it's a tough one because like so basically, I guess to kind of answer your question a little better earlier, I do think as long as the asset is secure and there is like there is, you know, enough liquidity and stuff like that, like we're definitely not like the compound type where, you know, we were pretty selective with a very small pool. Like if we believe that.

the asset is like economically secure uh and or from like a contract risk perspective secure we will list them so in that sense we are kind of like even in our main pool i think more more fitting the bill of a ave uh but uh in uh yeah in terms of like more wormhole assets it is tricky like

like the whole wormhole project is as like, you know, almost as reputable as you can get, right? Like, and certainly like if there are use cases for these bridge assets, we will, and there's enough, you know, liquidity and circulation for it. We will want to list it. It is just definitely a lot more due diligence on, yeah, like, like the, you know, the contract risk of these bridges.

Right. I think security is one aspect here, though, right? The other aspect is whether there are actually people going to use sole-based AVAX or sole-based Polkadot. I don't know. When they said they're going to list that, I was actually...

That was quite questionable for me, at least. So that's why I was curious your thought here. Yeah, I mean, it is kind of interesting. I guess maybe they just do want to leverage the faster and cheaper DEXs or per trading protocols of Solana. And maybe, I don't know, maybe this Solana, and because being on Solana is a lot faster and cheaper, there is a, I can see it being like a,

you know, where people want to use lending protocols to short these bridge assets or borrow off of it. Yeah, I guess like the way I read it previously was that because like, you know, a lot of these L1s, like people are actually thinking of it as a

kind of come competitive to each other so that like maybe the native assets more important but maybe i i could be wrong because maybe some people just like thinking about solana as the trading settlement layer so that like the asset being listed there doesn't have to be just solana native it can be also be like you know some of the other things happen it's just like on finance or ftx like you have a bunch of different things i thought that was like an interesting

um thing to think about because like you want to offer what your traders right now wanted and it is possible that some of the trader actually do want to long short some of the um assets that are not available on on the current native chain um but you know that was something that i didn't think about in the past so i thought it was an interesting discussion to bring on so that's why i asked yeah no it's

Yeah, no, it's really cool. Like I think, yeah, no, that's an interesting point. Like Solana being more the settlement layer, because it is a chain that's like growing fast, new cool protocols all the time. And yeah, with its speed, this might be the place to do a lot of those things traders want to do. So I guess the next question I wanted to dive into a bit is your partnership with some of the other DeFi protocols. I know you've been working with

like some of the other Solana-based DeFi protocols? Maybe you can expand on that a little bit. Yeah. So I guess in terms of the big ones, actually, you know, we touched on...

nft lending earlier right and that has a few uh big uh you know big players involved right so um you know we left magic eden at some point and solvent to kind of like convert that uh convert that nft into like a fungible token uh with uh with offering uh

With, you know, like options as liquidity mining, we, you know, we're working with like SAI options on that. And just we have a pretty big lineup of, well, not that big, but we, you know, with isolated pools that we now have, we are working with like several teams to kind of create isolated pools that make sense for them.

And these kind of like, yeah, these kind of like big, big name partnerships, definitely like something Rooters managing, but also a lot of like the, you know, there's going to be a Solana hackathon going on. And we just recently released such a wide host of dev tools. We are certainly also just working with a large number of very small nascent protocols that I personally chat with a lot.

I'm kind of curious here. Because I know like some people are, like you said, are building on top of Sol and what are some of the interesting use cases of the sorry, not use cases, but like like things people are building on top that you feel like it's actually in high demand potentially?

We have a, we actually like have a list that we keep trying to promote for the hackathon. But I think one, yeah, but a couple of things that keeps popping up is like basically like a prize pool, you know, like a no loss lottery thing on top of Selene using Selene yields.

The other thing, and this might be a good time to also preface, you know, that I am kind of like coming from the Web2 world, but certainly like a lot, you know, you got a lot of the structured product protocols coming up, coming out, right? With like Chess.Fi and like Katana. So certainly there's a lot of like,

those kind of like options-based strategies that you kind of see in ribbon. They kind of sometimes use like a yield-bearing token and I'm not too sure on the details, but that's something like I think Bruder is in a lot of discussions with. Just getting that C token to kind of be the yield-bearing primitive for these things. Got it. That's interesting.

Another aspect that you touched upon earlier was Sol Line being a front end. In terms of go-to-market strategy, I thought that's also something worthwhile to discuss as well.

In different countries or different regions in general, there are just different types of ways to get compliant. For some of the underlying protocols, for example, Uniswap, they would say if you're going through Uniswap, you can't do this and that. But if you're directly interacting with the protocol that did not go through our interface, you can do other things. It's permissionless, whatever.

So I definitely see DeFi in the future becoming more like this, as in different people can host different front ends and then underlying people can just be permissionless. So from your perspective...

Oh, and then I'm seeing Aave, for example, they are trying to explore different types of front end, as in some of those are providing to the institutional clients. And then so those are going to be more restricted versus like for the general public, there is another one.

I'm curious, like from your end, first of all, it's like, are you thinking about maybe encouraging more different types of front ends? And then also, in terms of different regions, are you going to try to engage them differently with like different types of go to market strategies?

Yeah, for sure. Just on like the different front end nodes. So, you know, when we were building kind of like the TypeScript SDK, we actually built it in a way where we can convert like our front end to use basically a fork version of that TypeScript SDK to power our own front end. So basically that SDK that anyone can use.

use it is as powerful and you know has the full feature set of what's needed to uh power the salem front end so it really is just like slapping some buttons in a ui and use our sdk and people will be able to host their own front end and i think like some very like you know

important use cases for that is like for like the zappers or you know, you're familiar with like step finance and soul scan, basically these apps that kind of let you manage your, you know, net worth across multiple wallets. We've made it and we made it so that they can essentially build, you know, our, all our interactions and our front end as like a, you know, mini subset of theirs. Right. And I,

And, you know, this something, yeah, like having this out just kind of like really increases the surface area of people using Solan. Like we'd love to get this into like more wallets, right? Like Phantom, all these other wallets. Yeah, so there's that. And sorry, what was the second part of that question?

Oh, it's in terms of like different markets. If you have a differentiated go to market strategy, which is kind of tied back to like why I guess Ruder wanted to have this conversation because maybe you want to, you know, just introduce Seoul and a bit more to the Asia base or Chinese China base and stuff. Right.

Right. Yeah, I will just also kind of like add one more note is it's actually also built into the protocol to pay like a host fee. So, you know, Selen makes fees when a user borrows. And if you were to kind of like run your own front end and does the borrow on behalf of the user, there's a certain like cut that that host will take. So definitely it's kind of like

Yeah, it's built into the protocol and into the strategy to kind of have like really distribute the front end. In terms of, yeah, in terms of like kind of going to market, we are pretty,

so I would say I think right now 50% of our users are in the US. And then from there we had, and initially I do recall in the early days, we had a very like strong user base from Asia as well. And actually kind of like looking at the numbers now, it's Europe has come into second, but certainly like Asia is, is a place that, you know, we want to expand to. And recently we've kind of hired like a,

community leader from part of that part of that part of the world so yeah that that is certainly the next step i wouldn't say we have any uh kind of like concrete strategies there but yeah also to kind of touch on uh like uh kind of the front ends one interesting thing that we really noticed was um like close to like 50 percent of our users are actually like using from using mobile especially the users you know in south america europe or asia

And that's really led us to, yeah. So yeah, I mean, something you noticed particularly with Solana, just having that like really snappy, responsive transaction time that really lends itself to a mobile experience. And we really started to also kind of just build mobile first. And yeah, users on mobile definitely probably aren't the,

biggest, you know, biggest users in terms of like contribution to TVL, but just they certainly are like by number of accounts, you know, a really substantial amount.

No, I definitely resonate that. I think I don't know too well about Europe, but I would definitely think a lot of the developing countries in South America, Africa and Asia prefer mobile. And one of the primary reasons was because they don't have computer. Meaning they just didn't go through the era of computer or laptop and they just go directly into a smartphone where they can do everything.

So even for me, like when I transact on Ethereum, I would prefer sometimes like using mobile, it's just on the go. But that also requires you to have a very good wallet, mobile wallet experience. But I think, yeah, like right now Solana maybe have some pretty good ones. So that made it happen.

Yeah, yeah, it is really funny. Like finance used to be, you know, I think the thing where, you know, you go up in a suit, make an appointment, go to the bank and like do it. And now it's just, yeah, people are on their toilet moving millions of dollars.

Yeah, I mean like the Robin Hood experience, right? Like you just, like it just makes people feel like they prefer using it on mobile. Otherwise, like there's like nothing on the chart. It's just the lines. And then what else are you going to look at with the screen? Yeah. Awesome. I guess like the last question, will you consider to keep being Anon for a long time? Have you thought about that?

Uh, we talked about it a little. Yeah, it's, um, I think, uh, yeah, it's that thing where, like, uh, you know, once you, once you take it away, it's, like, gone. Like, um, to be honest, like, it, it is almost a little bit, like, pretentious at times where, like, it's not that, like, we think we're important enough right now to be A-9 because of security reasons. It is almost for, like, the

best case or worst case scenario, if, you know, Celent does get really big that we, it might become a security issue. But then also even in that world, like if the protocol can, you know, we're still on the path to like full on decentralization, right? Like, like a lot, a lot of Celent projects, you know, bootstrap themselves very early with, you know,

Certain practices that aren't as common in Ethereum being fully decentralized. But yeah, I do think once we reach that, from a security perspective, there is definitely more leeway into not being as anonymous. But honestly, it's just kind of fun too. At first, it was kind of cringy to introduce myself as Exodia, but you start to kind of like this identity. And I don't know, personally for me, no plans for that.

Yeah, I think some people are addicted to being anon because like there's another image they can put on. It's like you can enjoy another persona almost while you can also have your real life. So sometimes like it is funny to actually, you know, do something like that. I haven't really tried so. I wrote something in the past, like, you know, not with my own name.

It's just much easier to say things when you're anon and stuff. But I guess that's a bit different for you guys now because you do have a gig where you guys are the founding members of Solenn and people will associate that with the brand of Solenn. So I think that's already, it's not completely anon because you'll have to be a bit more responsible.

Yeah, yeah. And to be honest, I even have another anon that I tweet thoughts that probably I don't even want to associate with this anon account. Exactly. That's what I'm saying. Because this is more of representing Seoul, and so that one can be more, I guess, more natural, more real. Right. Exactly, yeah. Awesome. Thank you so much for joining me today. It was a fantastic talk. Yeah, thanks for having me. That was a lot of fun. Great.