Episode 21: Graadient: Gro Protocol | The Story of a Fintech Degen
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Status
Timestamps:
1:17 Graadient Introduction
3:13 Early Motivations leading into Crypto
8:08 Genesis of Gro
9:18 Benefits of Gro Protocol
10:36 Protocol Portfolio - Vault and PWRD
15:13 Risk Balancer
17:25 Gro Labs
21:47 Gro DAO
26:12 The Two Types of Gro DAO Contributors
27:36 Gro Partners
30:36 What’s Next for Gro
Gro Protocol
Humpty Calderon: [00:00:00] Welcome to Crypto Sapiens, a show that hosts lively discussions with innovative web three builders to help you learn about decentralized money systems, including Ethereum, Bitcoin, and DeFi the podcast is for educational and entertainment purposes only, and it is not financial advice. Crypto Sapiens is presented in partnership with BanklessDAO.
A movement for pioneers seeking freedom from the limitations of the traditional financial system. BanklessDAO will help the world go bankless by creating user-friendly on-ramps for people to discover decentralized financial technologies through education, media, and culture.
Hello everyone, and we are back with another episode of Crypto Sapiens today we are talking with Graadient, aka Hans Gray, founder of Gro Protocol we discuss his journey into Web three, starting at Spotify to revolut and eventually to creating Gro [00:01:00] protocol. We compare TradFi and Defi including deposit protection and insurance, while exploring the innovative strategies available on Grow i.E Vault, a leveraged yield optimizer that takes on the risk on behalf of the lower risk vault, the powered savings product.
Let's get started.
Graadient: Hey, thanks for having me and us on board here and letting us discuss some of these exciting topics and things that are happening. So yeah, my name is Graadient or Hans Gray. My roads into the Wonderful land of Defi when us is the case of many others through the winding paths of Bitcoin many years ago.
Into more of a DeFi smart contract world a couple of years ago. And then as my day job about a year ago when we set up growth labs the software company that's developing big Gro protocol. My day jobs through the many years before working on protocols have been in, in kind of consumer techs.
I was working at Spotify for a long eight years bringing music to many parts of the world and doing global expansion. And then after music, I went into [00:02:00] finance actually. But the traditional finance, I worked at a mobile bank, a new bank called Revolut where I did growth. So bringing mobile banking to more corners of the world.
And and then as I was diving deeper into finance in my day job, I was finally able to happily let the two paths converge into Defi when we set up Gro Labs and started building on group Protocol, which is the first product we launched last summer, last autumn
Humpty Calderon: That's great. Thanks for that wonderful intro.
I find myself recently having these conversations with people that are coming in from the traditional web, two space into web three. And I no, not small projects, but we're talking about like real meaningful projects and popular and with tremendous reach and Spotify is definitely no, no slacker in that space.
So maybe let's talk a little bit about your transition. Like how, like when you made that decision to go from, Spotify to this FinTech company and then eventually to creating Gro what, how did that transition [00:03:00] feel like what, I guess what were some of that
what was some of that inspiration? And what were some of the takeaways from the traditional web two space that allowed maybe some good influence into how you're building today.
Graadient: Okay. Yeah. I think there's a personal motivation and larger kind of macro drive movement. a, On a personal level, I had been an entrepreneur in various startups like Spotify, Revolut for 10 years or so.
And in a prior life I was an entrepreneur sitting up businesses, and I missed driving something, building it from ground up so that was a personal desire to get back into that and build something from scratch again after having done it in the context of some other larger scale ups.
But then from a kind of larger market movement than, and the tide that was happening, I. I've been working with, consumer tech changing industries, changing music consumption and then changing mobile banking. And DeFi was a, or is a way that finally had a lot of the building blocks in place back in 2017.
I, I started as my, as a hobby in the nighttime [00:04:00] product building a decentralized fund with a kind of dow the already the OG Dow type of approach to DAO votes for. For due diligence deal sourcing and DAO service related to an investment fund. But as a lot of products needed, longer lead times, and many of the basic building books right in place.
Didn't decide to jump on that and make that my day job, but kept on looking at the space and being involved in the space as a nighttime engagement throughout those years and seeing the many of the financial primitives being put in place. So many of the core building blocks that makes traditional finance and normal banks work, right?
If you look at a normal bank, P & L, net interest income, lending income, basically difference between your lending and borrowing. On your lending business is the core business of a bank together with trading, enabling transactions between different parties of assets. And so those two kind of core financial primitives.
They were white papers in 2017. And now, Across the last two years, they've gone pretty far from being a white paper to being a permutation iteration 25 [00:05:00] and intermingling with other later generations of those things. And so now when we have a lot of those basic building blocks in place, now we can get to part of building integrated, complex experiences that take into account and can build on that.
So you can stand on the shoulders of many giants that are standing other giants. .
Humpty Calderon: Yeah. So it sounds, Excuse me. So it sounds like there was a transition, as you went along, but also it's inspired by that desire to build and seeing or participating in some of that building of that early ecosystem.
Graadient: Yeah. This is I wanna say it's a li once in lifetime opportunity to build, to join the movement and help build it. But but then again, we, it's also within our lifetimes that internet and the mobile revolution and probably the AR revolution, et cetera, happening as well. So there are a couple of revolutions happening, but it's definitely one of the big ones that we can be at the, for four seat of the forefront of making happen.
Yeah,
Humpty Calderon: Personally, it may come from a very biased point of view because I am so deeply immersed in this ecosystem, in this community that is Web three crypto that I'm, I certainly am aware of some of the other emerging technologies, AI and [00:06:00] and some of the other ones that have been mentioned too here, But I don't know.
I just, Oh, virtual reality, that's the other one, right? An augmented reality. I feel. There is something very empowering about the space that we're building here, right? That maybe is missing in some of the other ones. There's a very human element to it, both in terms of, leveraging technology to facilitate open accessible financial systems for people, right?
What is def. And even in terms of like governance with DAOs where there is a, an opportunity for people to participate in how something is built and then earn rewards for that participation, right? Get getting incentives that are aligned to your own personal values too. I think that is really interesting to me.
I wonder how you feel about that.
Graadient: I think that's spot and we are here in, in the Bankless style talking about this, right? There's there's also a good piece by Jess here around one of our investors in Vaon Fund about the ownership economy and how the people are from being products of the media that they're [00:07:00] consuming a lot.
Facebook being sold to advertisers now actually take part in, in building and taking part in the value that's being generated by these different platforms. And I think. Community and protocols and the DAOs that are now becoming increasing to trend with many of these products is also really in the zeitgeist where the very nature work is also changing.
Where in a time of COVID where suddenly a very large chunk of people find themselves working in places that didn't expect themselves to work in from home from coffee shops from, the mountains, wherever. And so the nature of work and how you create your daily life is changing.
And I think making a living in finance is a key part of that. And the various organizations that we associate with and collectives now or do that we associate with is part of that. So I think it's really it's a timely, it's a timely, challenging and redefinition of the nature of work that's happening here now.
Humpty Calderon: Yeah. No, you're spot that as. So walk me through the, genesis of Gro how what some of the first I guess iterations of it, how [00:08:00] it's being developed and evolving over time and yeah just a little introduction to the project before we get deep into the nuts and bolts of it.
Graadient: Sure. As I was wrapping up at Revolut, there was the defi summer, the Wonderful Defi summer was kicking off and there were some pretty spectacular yields basically available in that space. And when you talk to people who aren't in Defi yet about this the kinda default challenge of that or questioning that was yes.
High yields, but that's because you're taking on a lot of risk as well. And yes, of course there is a fair bit of risk and as sufficient market hypothesis goes that things are perfectly priced. So risk means higher yield and higher yield means risk. But our feeling was that there's was an opportunity to to more actually price that risk basically.
There was not this, the yields weren't really corresponding to the amount of risk that some us included felt there actually was in the market, and so we wanted to create something. For some, you meet someone on the street and say, Here's an interest rate account with 10% yield [00:09:00] for you, or even 5%, cuz many of them are doing nine.
The normal banks offering much lower rates than that anyway. And but how can you get them to have a feeling of security and not that it's, yes, this is magic internet box and the money might disappear. And so the design objective for Gro Protocol and the first product was basically a high yield savings account with deposit protection.
How can you get someone that can put your money in here? You get great returns, but it's also protected. It's not a bank, but it's like putting it in a bank in terms of protection. Now if you want to be protected though, that obviously comes, you have to pay for it somehow. And so we looked at the broader like protection space, I guess you can call it and different ways that the insurance basically, or protection was being handled.
You had insurance protocols where you could buy protection against failure of assets or online protocols in a, in an itemized way where you said, I wanna be protected for the failure of compound for and the failure of USDC but then you had to buy that protection A La Carte you have to specify a period of time to pay separately for it.
Now that's not really how it works. If you go to a bank and you say, Hey, I wanna put in a [00:10:00] thousand bucks, the bank doesn't say, Okay, for how long would you like to buy deposit insurance? And can you please pay me the extra for the deposit insurance? It's just this intrinsic built in quality of the deposit.
And so how can you replicate that type of experience in DeFi what's the equivalent? Like a defi savings account with deposit protect. And so DeFi way that we decided to fund that, maybe, and I'll start to dive into protocol design, but yeah, that, that was the backdrop. How do you create a high yield savings account?
And then the flip side of that, the way that you fund that is by having someone else that takes on that risk. And in return they get high interest and basically on the, you can call it getting leverage on their
Humpty Calderon: assets. Yeah. So yeah you're about to jump into nuts and bolts of it, and I we're gonna be talking about PWRD and Vault, right?
The two strategies and the way that Gro has implemented that insurance protection, if you will. So let's get into it. What are these two products? I maybe they're the main products of the platform. I know there's one other strategy, and we can dive into that one a little bit. But what are those two strategies and how do they work?
Graadient: The protocol has a portfolio actually of many different strategies. Right now, [00:11:00] there are seven live strategies and they are generating yield in a number of different through lending income, trading income and governments token incentives. The yield and the risk of those underlying strategies is broken up into two products.
And so depending on your risk profile, you can select a high yield, high risk one, or the low yield, low risk one. And I say low yield, still much higher than the bank account, but less than leveraged yield in defi. And so the leverage product is to what we call the leverage vault, the v, the leverage vault product.
Which takes on then the risk on behalf of the lower risk vault, which is the PWRD savings product. And so they live in a kind of symbiotic relationship. It's not that they have different strategies, they actually have the exact same strategies in, in fact, they need to have the same strategies because by having the exact same strategies and capital allocation, we can create this tranching, this breaking up of risks.
So can you explain what that tranching first of all, what does that mean in terms of defi [00:12:00] and how does that tranching works in terms of how grow leverages both of those? Both of those not gonna use the word strategies, but how it uses vault and powered.
Yeah.
So Tranching is one of those nice words that maybe best use in the context of eating cake but also slicing up risk. And risk. Tranching is something that's done in tradify. So you have like senior and junior tranches of depth, for example of, or various financial instruments. And there are various other risk tranching protocols out there as well.
That tranche very specific assets or or protocols. What Gro does is create a portfolio of assets and a portfolio of yield sources, and because there's a portfolio of them allows this tranching to also tranche and divide up risk, let's call it divide up risks that are also, or exotic
so maybe an example would be the easiest way to explain how that would work. Let's assume you Gro we have $50 from the leverage vault. So there are $50 put into the high risk, high yield tranche the high yield product leverage vault, and we have [00:13:00] $50 put into the powered savings product.
We have a hundred dollars in total in the system. And then let's say that let's say that Tether is 20% of the portfolio. Now let's say that tether blows up. Tether goes to zero, God forbid, because that would be tricky for defi, but tether blows up. Then there's $20 lost inside the system. But instead of taking $10 from leverage vault and $10 from the powered saving side, we take the whole $20 from the leverage vault.
So the leverage vault goes from having $50 to suddenly having $30 left, whereas PWRD savings product keeps on being protected. So it's a place where you can basically put in stable coins. You start off as stable coins, but once you have them in there, you're protected against the failure of tether or die or used to sea or the online protocols.
So the whole loss is taken from the vault side first.
Humpty Calderon: So how does this balancing get done? I guess what's the strategy for [00:14:00] balancing these two different products and in terms of the U S D C, U S D T and die balancing between them.
Graadient: So right now the distribution is even, it's it's a governance parameter that can be voted on, but right now it's an even distribution 34% for USDC, and 33 for the two others.
So yeah, even distribution, which that then that also, there's also a cap. Basically, you can't issue more of the protected product than there is leverage vault, right? Because the leverage vault is the protector of the PWRD savings product. Part savings also more kept out at the amount of leverage vault in there.
So it's a combination of a diversified portfolio of different strategies and stable coins as well as a, an upper cap from Vault TL for how much powered savings there can that can be there that allows the powered product to, to remain maintain protection.
Humpty Calderon: From my research and the work that was contributed here as well for preparing for this conversation.
I understand that there's a risk balancer for vault and power, and that is like where [00:15:00] like the real gem is the risk balancer can you talk a little bit about that in terms of, how it works? I see that. Balancing between like Aave compound curve, what does that mean? How does that interact with those other protocols?
Graadient: Yeah, so the risk balancer looks at the current distribution between different stable coins. And when someone deposits asset, it checks whether the asset being deposited is into something that's already too exposed. And if the asset is too exposed, as in there's a high concentration in that asset, then it swaps it over to the underrepresented.
So that allows the risk to be distributed in a balanced way, in a, in an automatic, decentralized, user driven way. So it's not that the protocol or the or at central team has to go in and move assets around between them to maintain. This balancing the, basically the deposit and withdrawals of users clarify whether an asset should be swapped or moved somewhere [00:16:00] else in order to maintain this this balanced exposure.
So if, for example if DAI or let's say USDC is the most concentrated asset, there's let's say there's 50%, that would be to be too . There's 45% USDC in the system and someone wants to deposit in, USDC. Then there USDC gets swapped into, let's say, DAI if die is the, an underrepresented one, which then continuously drives the protocol towards a balanced exposure of assets.
Humpty Calderon: And so in terms of these products, it seems like these first two unless I miss something operate on zksync and we were talking about that brief. Can you share why it was launched on zksync versus, another platform or directly right on onto Ethereum?
Graadient: So the core protocol was was launched on Ethereum first.
So the core Gro protocol has been liven Ethereum for for a couple of months. And then we launched with, we actually launched with Argent as well on base Ethereum. So if you [00:17:00] download the Ardent app, then also on your Ethereum account, you can access both powered and and leverage vault.
Now as Argent geared up for their zksync launch which now you can access if you have that either you can add on an extra sync to account to your, to normal account or just create a z sync one. Now the vault, their leveraged vault product is the high yield leveraged offering for stablecoin in, in that app.
The access to gro protocol through zksync is through the argent experience where you can at a very low gas cost and of course with high transaction throughput as well and deposits, stable coins into the Vault product.
Humpty Calderon: So there's a third product here called Labs, and it sounds like that's like an experimental.
Strategy with higher potential yield, but obviously risk. And this is operating on avalanche. Can you talk a little bit about labs and the decision for launching it on avalanche?
Graadient: Yeah. First off, and maybe you wanna relate on this in like the multi chain world, but what we noticed as [00:18:00] the number one inquiry and request from the DAO community was to go to more chains.
Drive down gas costs and increase speed. So we talked about L1s and L2s and there were a lot of people who expressed interest, especially in Avalanche, who had some pretty vocal supporters of Avalanche in the DAO to begin with. And as we were considering the different options for a multi chain expansion, we we also had one of our other partners called Alpha Mora or sorry, Alpha Finance.
Which has a leveraged product called Alpha Mora. They were also launching an avalanche. It was a multiple aspects aligning, both both our community wanted us to be an avalanche, as well as one of our partners just also launched an avalanche. And so the labs product was combination of a new product expansion as well as going multi chain.
I think multi chain or especially basically. Faster and lower cost chains is an absolute requirement. We talk about the design rate of higher savings account is to be able to have the kind of protection that you would have on a bank account and feeling safe with that. But equally, people don't expect to have to pay maybe some [00:19:00] basic account opening fee on a bank.
Not the ongoing account management fees that banks would have are probably, are less than you would pay for gas on Ethereum. So that's also I think an absolute requirement as we head into a broader market and to meet that demand.
Humpty Calderon: Yeah, certainly. I think there's something to be said for accessibility and efficiency.
And in terms of, it sounds like there's a clear sense of like how users can be onboarded to use Gro and in terms of allowing them to use it in user friendly ways. And so one, obviously it sounds like your. Collaboration with Argent and supporting, and operating through that wallet experience is one way for users to be able to have a more accessible experience, but also in terms of multi chain, right?
And then listening to the community and their demands, and then going to another chain where there is opportunities too to onboard new users. . So it, I know early as we were preparing for this call, we were just briefly touching on like multi chain and cross [00:20:00] chain, and I was wondering, as a protocol as Gro the platform, what are your thoughts in terms of operating, in this multi chain ecosystem?
Like what are some of those advantages? Are there disadvantages and, how can you, benefit users across the entire ecosystem? Without excluding those in maybe another blockchain
Graadient: I think we're seeing it now there in the begin, in the beginning earlier, a lot of people are just coming from Ethereum and and trying out other chains and testing out other L1s
and they've all had their wave and their own kind of mini DeFi Summer as there's been a uni swap version popping up on it and a compound version popping up on it, et cetera. But I think that initial stage has now passed and now we're getting to a point where you have.
Native communities popping up on these various chains where many of them are, they are, say, polygon first or avalanche first, or, pick your chain first. Not just migrants from Ethereum that are feeling the burn of ethere in gas, in [00:21:00] their wallets. And I think we'll continue to have people who are, of course people migrating anywhere from Ethereum, but most of 'em have already probably done their explorations.
There will be multi chain defi users, but I think we're also starting to see that there are some communities building up and in specific chains and that's there, their home. And so probably we end up being a hybrid world where you. Citizen of multiple chains and those who are educated to, to, to single chains.
And obviously, since many, not all but most are EVM compatible from an kind of innovator innovator side. While the communities might be semi. Semi isolated and some bridges, the innovation certainly is not right. And the innovation spreading quickly across different chains. So one EVM innovation quickly becomes everyone's innovation.
Humpty Calderon: Yeah. So I hear you also talking about community, right? In terms of the community demand for. Launching on different protocols, for example like Avalanche. So let's talk about how Gro [00:22:00] engages that community because Gro is also a DAO correct?
Graadient: Yep, that's right. That's right.
Humpty Calderon: So there's a token that I imagine is used for governance so what are some of the kind of unique ways that is being used today and how is grow I guess getting temperature checks on the community and how active is that participation from the community?
Graadient: So we started off with we call it emoji governance, where we were basically doing roadmap and preference polls inside Discord with, discord bots in the poll bot. And asking what people would like us to prioritize what we would like to do next. Including this was driving a lot of the earlier focus on and still actually ongoing focus on multi chain.
So what the. After that, the kind of second request was to transform the community from emoji governance to DAO governance. And this, Bankless DAO being one of the larger DAO, the DAO and governance in itself is a product, right? It's building the community around [00:23:00] the protocol and how the protocol in the community can interact is in itself almost a dedicated work stream.
So after the initial core protocol launch, that was the next thing that the community wanted is to like basically pro productize and make it more formal. And so what we did across Q4 last year was to launch the DAO and right now we know we have our snapshot votes gro.xyz community.
Gro.xyz where we are running proposals and and both as forum votes forum discussions as well as. Snapchat. Those, I think that's a pretty, standard playbook of many DAOs to use a combination of those two, including may, maybe more informal conversations in around the upcoming topics and discord or Telegram.
Maybe one of the things that were unique in the inception of the DAO was that the DAO basically got to vote and not just vote, but also execute its own exist. So what I mean by that, we created this temporary non-transferable ERC 20 token that we sent out to everyone who had used the protocol.
We call it [00:24:00] ex-Gro it was non-transferable, so anything you could do with it, you could basically vote on a snapshot page. And then we discussed with the community what the DAO should look like in tokens for the DAO and also whether we should do a token distribution event. Then after that we created a vote on Snapshot, which was tied together with a Gnosis safe.
So Gnosis besides being a Multisig wallet, they can who last us together with, colleagues or friends or whatever. It's also a multisig that you can execute transactions and through this plugin between no and Snapshot, the community was actually able to not only vote on the tokenomics but there was the specific payload, the actual transaction on train, transaction payload was put inside this vote.
And as the vote was coming to close the community basically. Created itself or created the tokens itself as per those payloads that were in the, in that boat. So to maybe put a Yeah, a self birth of kind. Maybe that's not an image you want I printed in your mind, but Yeah. So that was an interesting origin of the creation of the [00:25:00] DAO
Humpty Calderon: yeah. That's really good. And. Having been, I guess a contributor or a visitor at times of several DAOs that are just forming, I wonder if you could share with us your experience in terms of. That genesis of the DAO some of the challenges may be early, and some of them may be ongoing challenges in terms of how DAO governance may work and some of the opportunities that you see in terms of just generally DAO, but also in how grow with leverage the DAO and its community power in the future.
Graadient: Yeah. Then the sequence of events are interesting in that we launched the core protocol first before the DAO and we had an initial core community, but still relatively limited. We're talking like in the hundreds of people who are in our discord in our telegram. Kicking the wheels in the product, trying to figure out how it was working and what could be improved.
But it was still, it was not with any kind of governor's token associated with it. Then when we [00:26:00] launched the DAO that really kicked things into gear. It's fascinating how token connect as a forming and aligning force and post creation of the DAO has really attracted a lot of really great contributors.
We have this, we have two we have two types of contributors that have some special types of roles. We have something called the OGs, the which are people who are, helping out a lot and with. With questions, et cetera, in the community. And then we've launched a decentralized marketing team called the GForce.
And so the GForce basically works in epochs where they are. There's three different categories you have. Broadcasters, content creators and DAO ambassadors where these, the g-force is basically collaborates in their little groups, but also at the same time, semi competitively around the charts of who can help build the DAO and the protocol the best.
And so that's also been really fascinating to launch kinda a decentralized marketing team which works in a quite different way compared to the TradFi consumer takeaway of building up a. Let's say where you don't know the real name of half of the people on the team, but [00:27:00] also interesting to see the very, the extreme diversity of it of the people who we do actually do calls with. So we get some voice to it as well. And the types of activities that they contribute with. So that's that. I think the launching the DAO and the token with that has been a really accelerating force for the community.
And I think having said that, we were, I think we were, I didn't think, I'm quite happy that we started with the product first because, A dao and working with the broader community also takes a lot of effort. Very rewarding, but also takes a lot of effort and would probably slow down our protocol launch if we had started with the DAO earlier before the protocol in initial protocol
was launched.
Humpty Calderon: Yeah, that's wonderful. And thank you for sharing that story as well. So one of the things that I've heard you talking about with some regularity here is your partners, right? And so you mentioned one of the partners that you had having already launched on Avalanche, and that kind of being part of I guess an incentive for the project to, to go to Avalanche.
I've not, I'm not sure of the word partner is the right word to use for Argent, but maybe they are also a partner. But I wonder how you [00:28:00] see partnerships in this space and, leveraging these relationships, these web three native relationships to grow both the value of the project in terms of, the way that it, it's able to maybe access new communities, but also increase the value of the existing community that.
Or return that, that value back to the community that it has. And the reason why I ask that is I see that there are some conversations in terms of having I guess connected with Olympus DAO and I believe the other one was like, FEI/Ondo. What does this mean in terms of enrichening, I guess the ecosystem for grow and aligning with the partners that you have.
There's obviously, sometimes it's just commute overlap that the nature of the DAO working world is not that you are, you're sitting on a cubicle in a company, but rather you're standing across these multiple communities where you have different degrees of engagement. So just by nature of that being the world, it's gonna already be a lot of overlap where people in our DAO are also people in your Dow and, the dos have a lot of.
So [00:29:00] I think that's just part nature of it, that there is that kind of organic overlap because people are involved in multiple products that they have some kind of affinity to. And then that starts to crystallize different types of cultures and culture overlap between the different communities.
Graadient: The nature of partnerships and interesting one though, because the, there's. Defies this permissionless world with protocols, but still at the same time, there are very clear alignments between different communities and different protocols. Maybe it happens organically. But yeah, like we, we have a number of our integrations as well that are maybe some, to some degree also like precursors of of more open permissionless innovation.
As also permissionless ness is I guess in some regards for protocol development can be security risk. So many of the permission is protocols are still sometimes permissioned. The, I think community helps bridge that and helps create confidence in, in, in the different community how different protocols can collaborate.
And yeah, some have done a great job of creating many of those bridges. And we are very keen and very happy that we have many do ambassadors in our. [00:30:00] Pushing to build more of those bridges.
Humpty Calderon: Yeah, I like that. Community as a bridge. That's that's definitely very refreshing and I think very true, especially in terms of DAOs and people's contributions across several of them.
I certainly have seen that at Bankless DAO in terms of, different projects being brought forth by contributors. Of the Bankless DAO, but also from other communities that they participate in. So yeah, I think that's really interesting because I think that also is a, like you said, very organic sustainable, and probably a better way to do it because there's value alignment from the very beginning in terms of connecting communities in that way.
Graadient: So one thing that's that's quite exciting that's happening right now, and again, a big part of the community conversations are on this. It's pushing towards even more higher yields. So right now we're working on the next iteration of some of the core parts of the strategies. And so we have a, yeah, a forum post that's currently under discussion where, basically where we're going to dial up the dialectic allocation to some of the higher yielding.
[00:31:00] Which, yeah, which will provide even more compelling yields for the vault side without compromising and the protection for the lower risk side.
Humpty Calderon: That's interesting. Actually, you know what, One thing that I did wanna touch on, Before we close out is stable coins. I think that's a very popular term right now just because of market dynamics.
I think a few folks would be swapping out their tokens for stable coins and then looking or exploring for ways to earn yield from that stable coin instead of just leaving it in your. What is some of that, like chatter happening and some of that activity within your own platform in terms of the current marketing conditions and the fact that you, that Gro is a platform for earning yield on your stable coins?
Graadient: Turbulent or crabby markets is a great time to yields on your stable coins. So if you've gone to stables, then don't hesitate to get some return on your stables. That's the thing with these types of products that they can offer something in every type of market condition.
So there's a time to be long and there's a time to be short and there's a time to, [00:32:00] to be yielding heavily. The role of stable coin though is yes in between Central Bank digital currencies as well as, A plethora of new stable coins being launched. I guess the question is what's gonna be the non defi native usages of stable coins?
And I'm not saying that because I wanna queue up and say that it's gonna be the cbdc stable coins that are gonna succeed with doing that. But the majority of utility of stablecoin so far has been to use it for protocols, internal usage or stake into curve gauges, et cetera. But there's another, Couple of billion people minus 10 million that haven't used stable coins for their daily lives yet.
I think that's inevitable and that's when we'll start to see what are the different types of stable coins that will be used for those daily usage and how will they differ in nature. So that's I think an exciting coming dimension of stablecoin usage.
Interesting. Do you see Gro supporting stablecoin like CVCs to your.
Let's see when the CBDs launch. Where they get any traction. That's, I think they [00:33:00] will, unless they're become govern, governmentally mandated, then they will have to fight on a, on an even footing with other stable coins for utility within ecosystem. But I could see how non defi businesses starting to use defi would bias to use a cbdc just because, it's closer time to what they're used to seeing in their bank account.
And then the interesting thing will be whether those currencies, are they gonna be, which chain are they gonna be on? Are they gonna be bridged? How will they integrate with DeFi are this gonna be two parallel ecosystems for basically CBC ends up being in a kind of close network? Or how's that gonna work?
I know as a, as internet beat out no network and other various local close networks. I think also and I'm personally bullish on an open financial system and an open internet currency to beat out closed ones. But that war, if you will, war is maybe the wrong word. Cause I don't think it has to be that aggressive, but that that, that competition and that That play has yet to count.
Humpty Calderon: And that's a wrap. I hope you enjoyed this [00:34:00] conversation. If you'd like to learn more about Gro please go to gro.xyz that's Gro.xyz and on Twitter at Gro Protocol. Thanks for listening to Crypto Sapiens. Please give us a follow like and a five star review wherever you enjoy your podcast and stay tuned for our next discussion.