AMA: Evgeny Yurtaev, Co-Founder of Zerion

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from xerion xerion is an interface to all sorts of d5 protocols i probably use this tool on a daily basis it's a great way to view assets across all of your various d5 wallets and to actually manage transactions i'd be kind of lost without this tool um this is your opportunity to ask questions of yevgeny so if you have a question go ahead and uh you know comment in youtube david or i will get to it we'll prioritize it um and if

you're in the backless discord as well you can ask a question that way and that's mainly for the periscope uh people if you are watching this on twitter that's fantastic but if you want to engage with the youtube comments and get your comments to you afghani you got to go to the youtube welcome to bankless it is great to have you we are in a crypto bull market i think my friend but you were building this during the bear market weren't you what was that like uh it was actually way more calmer and

thanks so much for having me it's it's great to be on the show and actually this is my first live ama uh so i'm excited for this fantastic yeah it was during the bear market i kind of like it because you know people are not running around and like screaming about the prices so it's much easier to build you just like you you forget about the price for a long time and you can actually focus on uh building stuff um and this is like the currency of the bear market is like what you ship shipped versus like how much it's worth uh but yeah i don't i don't

mind the bull market either obviously so um it's good to meet her you know so since this is your first ask me anything um i think it would be great for the bankless community to kind of get to know you so can you tell us a little bit about your crypto journey how did you end up here yeah sure so in short i think crypto has been throughout my life like the only big thing in my in my whole life so um apart from of course like engineering and so i started as a software engineer myself like i was studying and like i did a few

internships uh here and there uh but then like since i discovered crypto that became my whole thing and like the biggest part of my life in a sense um and specifically i think ethereum was the most exciting um thing among all of all the crypto things simply because when i discovered bitcoin it was just you know it was great as a concept but i couldn't see how i can participate apart from just holding it and that seemed like a very boring thing to do so when ethereum came around i guess many software

engineers felt that that you can actually start writing things on top of this machine and that is you know groundbreaking concept so this is how i got into it um my co-founders they are also fascinated by the concept so we just got together and wanted to do something we didn't know like yet what's gonna happen but uh we really wanted to be a part of this journey so it's it's been since like 2015 i think we've been um on this um and uh yeah we never we never stopped since we started and so

what what's the idea behind xerion like um you know did did you envision it would become what it is today or did did it start with a different premise why did you decide to to build it and like what is it yeah so first of all of course like any product is a series of iterations but i think the core ideas and the core concepts that we had in mind when we built this particular product were there and they're still here um um while we're

making changes to it so essentially when we started we noticed this fragmentation like we knew that it's it's not there yet in a sense because like we we've only tried out what you swap and maker and compound i think by the time but we just realized that it's going to be a way more things on in this defy thing so people will need tools to make sense of it and looking at the number of tokens that are appearing on the blockchain it's like in thousands uh every single day now probably like it

wasn't thousands months before and given number of protocols you know just to compare that in 2019 we integrated about five protocols in the whole year and then in 2020 we integrated over 50. i actually i lost so that is like just to show you the scale of how many new financial instruments are appearing so um i think in the future it's similar to how internet was uh evolving so you know in in the beginning you only had a few websites out there and people knew them all by

heart in a sense but then you have you know this explosion of new different things and you need to keep track of them you need to find them you need to evaluate them and that's uh that's what zirin helping you to do so um we help keep to you to keep track of your d5 portfolio we help you discover all new assets and we help you execute the trades uh at the lowest rates possible so yeah that's that's the core premise of syrian so you have gunny i want to i want to hear from you how you would explain zirion to somebody who you know

knows about bitcoin maybe they've heard of a theory maybe not but they are they and they understand that there's this weird crazy thing called crypto how would you explain zeroing on to somebody like this with this sort of understanding and so i think what i'm asking is like for people that are looking for like legacy mental models to map onto how would they understand xerion and then maybe after you're done explaining that to them how would you explain the the features of zirion that xerion has that they would never be able to find in the legacy world yet they

could probably still resonate with yeah i think the the closest to in the traditional world is i think many people use this analogy something like robin hood uh so looking at jiren it's an asset management tool it's an investing app so you can find any asset you can click to buy it and we were actually we're inspired many like ui decisions and ux decisions by robin hood and other um investment investment apps so essentially i think this is the closest uh as an analogy as it gets um in terms

of like how what are the features that zirin has i think the biggest one is this you know it's the whole narrative of web3 how you have um an address that you plug in and you instantly get all the data kind of it comes with this address right away so you don't have to start it over again you don't have to deposit money again so this gives you a whole lot of freedom and the people who are complaining about the ux of crypto they just haven't tried it fully so you they haven't really used it much so once you get to to use

metamask on a daily basis you get to you know understand how frustrating it is to sign up every time and like connect your credit card and connect your you know fill out the details of your account and everything so i think this is the biggest benefit and uh just us as a company we we're taking a lot of advantage off of that because we can get a bunch of information just from the blockchain and users are getting this amazing user experience right away and all the assets they're all public on chain all the transactions

are still there so you don't need to build out this your relationship with the user and your journey with the user is actually much much shorter so you can start quickly and start helping them quickly uh and this gives and for the users as well this is beneficial because they can you know if the ux really sucks they can just switch um and uh i think this keeps us even though it's like a lot of competition and it's harder to make money off of that and like be rent seeking but i think that's a good thing overall and crypto will win because of

that you know another analogy i like uh evgeny is like the early internet type of analogy that that you talked about in the early internet there were just a few websites to keep track of now like in crypto there's d5 there's all of these different money protocols to keep track of zurion is almost like a a netscape navigator i feel like right so you kind of all you have to do is completely non-custodial right so all you have to do is bring your etherdress whether that's on a hardware wallet or whatever wallet you have in metamask whatever you

have and then you just plug it in and then the world of d5 kind of opens up to you you get a bird's-eye glance of all of the assets inside of your portfolio you have the ability to interact with these various uh d5 protocols and money legos do you what do you think of that analogy right so like netscape really helped to mainstream the um the chaos and the navigation of the early internet right and so a user interface like xerion is kind of helping to to mainstream this internet

of money that is defy i really like that analogy um but i still i would probably say that banamask is this netscape browser uh as a better analogy at this moment so um for for ourselves of course we're currently non-custodial but for for the new users where like we think that at some point we'll roll out the support of the wallet itself so people will be able to create a world on xirian and uh hence they can explore other interfaces outside of the of zero eventually so um i really hope

that zoom turns out to be you know chrome browser rather than netscape but i think that's it's a great analogy we've been thinking about that for a while uh you know the dap browser id did not materialize which is you know a bit sad i would say but kind of expected um and i think what do you mean by the dap browser what was that uh so with the dab browsers you know how on mobile phones all the wallets they were trying to push this like the app browser uh thing inside their

wallet but like the usage is really low and it's much harder to kind of um to trust the websites and and everything that's why actually we with the xirian app now it acts like a depth like a native app rather than um a website inside of that browser if that makes sense it does yeah i don't know if people are familiar with the adapt browsers you're talking about but like i get the picture of like i remember in 2017 like the state of the art was something like the coinbase wallet on mobile and it was fashioned very much

after like an app store type model right very skeuomorphic to like um what came before which was an app store so it would have like little tiles that you would and it wasn't very crypto native it wasn't very user friendly you could do a lot with it exactly and i think later on apple also went after these types of browsers so they pretty much kicked everyone out um if you were trying to replicate some sort of app store functionality within your app so i i think on ios it resulted in

all the wallets deleting their web browsers which essentially means that your crypto is locked and you cannot do much uh with your crypto if you have a mobile wallet so yeah i think that so that's like one of the reasons why we wanted to have this wallet connect connection to all the wallets natively on mobile so you can actually start doing more things with your money uh even if they're on on your mobile phone so i want to get into some of these questions that we're getting in from the youtube and the first question i i i think is a good question to start with

is uh we are curious as to how xerion monetizes how do you how do you guys actually fund the business do you take transaction fees on actions executed by xerion that's uh that's a good question um we get it quite quite a lot uh so at the moment xirian does not earn pretty much anything um i would say that so um for full transparency the only thing that we're currently making is the referral fees by one inch so whenever we post the trade to one

inch they share some of the revenue that they generate from the transaction and they share i think about 27 of the um positive slippage that they take so this is not something that we really like um wanted and envisioned as a long-term business model but this is just something that happens and we only we didn't make too much out of that the the largest i mean the only way we're funded is by the vc money at this point so we took um money from placeholders our lead investor about a year and a half ago and

uh yeah we're still running off of that money what are the possible models uh for you into the future have you given any thought to that and of course the topic if it hasn't been asked in youtube it's about to be asked about like the potential for a token as a consideration what are the possible models what have you guys batted around uh is the idea of some sort of a token appealing to you or not yet yeah so starting with the models that we'll start explaining remaining as soon

as like q1 of this year is actually taking the transaction fees but we want to be we don't want to be rent seeking as i said before because it doesn't make sense the users would just you know leave us if we're trying to be uh you know squeeze the fees uh into everything so what we we will be doing the fees only on the things where it makes sense when we're actually helping the user so uh imagine you're trying to buy like a a wide earned strategy that is like it takes you you would need otherwise to make about like three to four

transactions in order to execute that uh or you would get a lower rates or you need to manually go to some other aggregators to find the best rate first to exchange and then only to deposit into the strategy so stuff like that where we are simplifying uh the experience and making you your life easier then i think it's justified with justifiable that we take the fee so this is something that we we have in mind for the short term i think in the longer run um yeah we can talk about the token so uh we're definitely not anti-token uh we we

like the ideas of tokens and we think that pretty much any company um in the crypto space is going to have a token at some point or like die in a sense um because like you know because this is just a new way of um doing equity i would say um and i think it's inevitable that uh this is just a better instrument to do equity and uh it makes perfect sense for us it's better to reward users using that uh and it's much more flexible and you

can be you know as crazy uh in terms of actual implementation and the model itself um we first will never do the token just for the sake of the token so this is like definitely not our plan um and uh the airdrop like people are going crazy on twitter asking about the head drops we are considering that so i'll just say that so keep using zero if you want to be part of that drop but i don't i'm not making any promises here of course of course let's say that so

evgeny a token has can do almost anything because that's the power of ethereum that's the power of tokens yet we've seen tokens um be tools to achieve the decentralization of some aspects of a project right it's a way to turn governance over from a centralized team to the hand of the token holders right what things about the xerion platform do you think you could hand over control to a set of token holders have you guys thought about this yeah so this is the biggest challenge i would say so we are not a typical d5

protocol company so if we're taking compound or like maker this is pretty much all of their business is on chain so it's much easier to you know just decentralize the governance over that stream of money and have it all worked out by the and controlled by the token so with our case most of the value is actually not on chain so we only have pretty much a small portion at this point on chain and most of the things are happening either on the front end or on like or the data that is streamed on the from the back

end so this is the biggest challenge that we see and um for i think there are not many examples at this point when companies like ours were able to introduce the token that was um like representing the core or portion of the business and um i think we're going to continue to work on that so i think the easiest way for us is to decentralize governance over the d5 sdk so different sdk is becoming a more and more important piece of the xerian stack so um essentially pretty much any

balance that you see um on the protocol is fetched through the d5 sdk so this this is what we call read adapters uh and yeah just for the ones who don't know about the d5 is the gate let me just take a step back here so the default sdk is the smart contract layer that we've built that allows you to first fetch all the balances from across different d5 protocols as well as execute all multiple different actions across different protocols and whatever is the only thing that is needed for the d5 sdk to work with the new protocol

is this adapter and it can be built by either us and we have will build most of the adapters i would say um by this point but we're starting to get more and more protocols building the adapters themselves and uh thank you guys for for doing that if anyone is listening from the protocol side so this is really helpful helping us because we just you know we we look at the pull request and we click um to push it and now we have this new support for the new protocol that we have we haven't really even researched so

essentially this allows us to mix and match all the different transactions through the same smart contract layer and we are already routing the one-inch trades through the d5 sdk and we'll add uni swap trades and sushi trades through that layer two so that means that pretty much any transaction that is uh involving the trade on zirin will go through this layer and it will be as cheap as going through the native smart contracts so that is like the big benefit um and we'll continue to do to

kind of unify the interaction layer through the define sdk on xero which will allow us to essentially see all the transactions that are generated by the zeroing ui and hence uh understand how we can distribute the governance over the adapters within the defines decay and the fees that if we potentially take them on the d5k level so that is like the simplest path uh to token that we see at the moment um but we're actually i think we're just lacking the tools at the

moment in terms of the decentralizing control over github for for instance so that would be of course ideal but it's it's not we're definitely not there yet so imagine having a token token holder is controlling what kind of code is running on the back end and this would be amazing uh so if we if we can't have like the team that was rewarded by the token holders in a sense and like just shares the part of the profit goals to the team that maintains the back-end system that allows you to find the best uh trade so yeah all of that is just a

distant future that is a bit hard to envision right now i think but it's uh it's going to be there at some point so you were talking about the the defy sdk and um this might be my naiveness about um technical level details but we have a question from the youtube about uh whether or not xerion uses uh the graph uh in in uh the the protocol does what you were talking about about querying data using the the d5 sdk again that this might be naive but does does

that have to do with something similar to the graph and do you guys use the graph in your back end we so we that's a good question first of all and we currently do not use the graph and we have we have built the system which is pretty much similar to what the graph has but it's more tailored towards the defy use case um so the graph is kind of like the the one backhand trying to fit at all so they allow you to essentially extract logs from different smart contracts and

you can build the back end based on the graph and query the data using the graph but um stuff like cross associating between protocols and building your own things on top of the graph is becoming harder so it's essentially a lot of customization needed in order to create an interface like syrian so we have so we we actually started the zero back in the infrastructure long long before the graph was published like um public and so that means that you know we have built pretty much

the same or sometimes even more than the graph has allowing us to do a lot of stuff that other interfaces cannot do this this middleware piece is like absolutely necessary for the kind of stuff that you're doing are there other so you've got the graph you've got your d5 sdks are there other kind of middleware layers um out there that are i don't know if competing is the right word but like um yeah what's the what's the what's the middleware layer look like for somebody who's trying to build something on d5

right now um there are actually not many um so defense decay is is the smart contract solution to that but deep sdk is not um does not fully solve the problem because it only allows you to fetch let's say balances on you know stake balances or deposits in multiple protocols but there are a lot of things like you know asset prices or historical portfolio performance so stuff like that and matching that with pricing is is more complicated i think

in a way dune analytics is similar so they allow you to query a bunch of data and like use sql to extract whatever data you you want but it's definitely not real time as you probably know um so i think at the moment there are not many alternatives to what we have as an api um probably i think the closest one uh alchemy has some form of an api for like querying balances but it's definitely not as t5 focused as what we have i want some people who maybe are less technical

maybe zoned out a little bit when we were talking about apis and sdks that sort of thing i i want you guys to realize how important what um like sdks and these apis actually are because this is the type of stuff that got built out during the last two years of the bull market that essentially needed to be built out bear market excuse me um that needed to be built out in order to enable something like zerion today and now it's built and other apps can essentially use that same scaffolding like we have some of

the highways in place that we didn't have back in 2017 2018 so it's got to make building a lot faster this cycle and i think like it well i i'd actually like your thoughts on that um so andre from wi-fi recently put out a post saying like uh some i figured the title is like billion d5 sucks right part two yeah okay what's your experience building in d5 does it suck um

i would say no um i think i think the biggest reason is that we don't have a token yeah okay and he he in his post he is complaining quite a lot about the token specifically of how token came into his life and the pretty much made a big mess there and this is like a one worry that we have about the token of course is that this does slow down the process so when when you're the sole decision maker in in the whole thing it's allow it's allowing you to move much faster

and that's why like you know building does not suck because you only making whatever you like in a sense but over a long time of course it's better to have multiple people who are responsible for the decision and involved in decision making so i think it's it's kind of natural that he's saying that um yeah our experience i think fundraising in my in my experience sucks but uh everything about building is great you have jenny i was curious how zurion

measures its um growth and its success right so you might look at a d5 protocol like uniswap and measure it by trading volume right that's something aidan adams puts out quite frequently you might look at something like like maker and compound and measure total locked value assets under management that sort of thing for xerion is it number of users is it number of wallets like a wallet being like almost like a d5 bank account is it assets inside of the platform how do you measure growth and success and how what

has the trajectory been like yeah so we actually use multiple different metrics and kpis that we find important i think the the one that is the easiest to track is the number of users um and that will measure by how many people connected their wallets so we would identify the user as someone who connected at least one bullet to the zero in ui and that the trajectory of that metric is uh almost parabolic i would say uh obviously like over the summer we had a

bunch of new people coming into the d5 with the yield farming craze and they needed tools to watch the portfolios now it is another bull market and it's more of the crypto side less of on the defy side but at the same time people are now discovering all these new different assets so they are you know sharing zero links to different assets just like they would use you know coin gecko or coin market cap but this time they can start buying them right away from the same experience so you see the price performance and you can buy it right away so i think this is helping us quite

a bit in terms of funneling the traffic into the product um and yeah in like in december we had over 50 3 000 people using us across three platforms so we find that and this is probably like a very underestimation in terms of the number because a lot of people use ad blockers and stuff so we don't know the actual number uh and it's uh by looking at the comparing the on-chain volume with actual analytics that we have we see that the

discrepancy is up to 50 so it might be that you know it's it's the number is much much bigger than that but overall yeah we're pretty happy with this growth in terms of the users and we're hopeful that in the next year it's gonna you know continue to be the case um but other metrics that are more interesting in our view is the market share that we started to measure recently and we do that by looking at the on-chain data so we with each protocol all the data is public which is great so you can start

looking at how many users interacted with a particular protocol and how many of these users were using zero in a given month so say we we identify users and by users i mean wallets in this case so wallets that interact let's say with four different protocols in a given months and among these users we have over 40 percent so we call them you know power defy users and these are like among power defined users about 40 percent user in uh every

month so that is uh like one metric that we look at we also look at we call them active device users uh who use at least two protocols and uh among these we have over 20 something i don't remember the exact number um yeah percent so that is what we look at and of course the transaction volume is kind of like the recent thing we started looking at since the release of the trading the full trading experience um in the late september um but yeah that

that's the three things that we're keeping our our eyes on so you have guinea um we have we have crypto banks like coinbase where like that's kind of where people get started when they are trying to like get into the world of crypto and they want to keep that familiarity it's like oh yeah i know how to operate coinbase it kind of works like my wells fargo and i think that's using crypto in like the 2d sense right like the relatively unimaginative sense and i think like xerion is like a new sort of like crypto bank account