We're rolling. Sehaj, co-founder of Avantis, welcome. Thanks so much, Peter. I want to begin with a uh hot take that you recently shared on Twitter. And then maybe we can use that as jumping off point to talk about what you're doing at Avantis. But recently you shared that you shared this on April 14. Where did all the experimentation from DeFi 1.0 days ago? Remember all the excitement around new DeFi Legos, new economics, new ways to trade? That's what we're aiming to bring back with zero fee perpetuals. It's time to make on-chain leverage fun again with Avantis. So maybe let's talk about that because I think it shared, I think that tweet gives us a good sense as to kind of how you see the market, where we are currently in DeFi. And then we can get into Avantis. Yeah, definitely Peter. So I think at a high level, if you look at the evolution of DeFi, it's a very nascent space. ah 2018 is when it started. 2020 is when DeFi Summer took off. That's what I referred to as DeFi 1.0. That was the era of a lot of experimentation, excitement, net new primitives. So spot trading with Uniswap, lending with Aave. Those were like net new things that brought so much capital, billions of dollars into the space of real world utility and economic value. Then DeFi 2.0 came around in 2022 and 2023, where there was a lot of further experimentation and improvements on 1.0 with stuff like OM, RBV2, Uniswap V3, a lot of cool stuff happening, burps becoming a big part of the game. That's when we started about this as well to bring perpetuals to real world assets. But then DeFi 3.0, which is like this era, is all about like financial nihilism, right? Just like mean coin trading, nothing else matters. It only matters if I make money. Crypto is a casino. know, since everything is already built out, like the DeFi 1.0 and 2.0, we can afford to say, and live in 3.0. So my tweet was like just a jab at 3.0. That like we've not really invented net new stuff. We've been kind of recycling capital from VCs to builders to communities. by mostly forking projects. And what we're trying to do, what we've always tried to do with Avanthas is build either for net new assets or build net new primitives in one terminal. That's the high level. I know that was a long, take, but that's the high level. No, that's great. I was early to yearn back in DeFi 1.0 and then very active in the Olympus DAO community. I've always been surprised why protocol-owned liquidity never really took off past Olympus. There's so much potential. What do you think? What are your thoughts on that? Yeah, mean, protocol on liquidity implies that you're supplying liquidity for your own token and then your own token like over time on average goes down in value. so DeFi treasuries don't want to be taking the risk of like pairing the stables with a, with a volatile asset that may go down in value, like in turn making them a more, more valuable owner of that volatile asset um because of how LPing works. Right. um So I think that's the primary reason it doesn't work out. Yeah, it's really too bad, man. It was so fun during those days as an early Omi. Yeah, it was was a blast. So. just doesn't exist today, man. It might exist if you flip a meme coin and make a profit, but what are the odds of that? Like 5%, 2 %? It's worse. It's way worse than an actual casino. Yeah. Well, let's get into Avantis because, you know, both you and I both said, man, that was a blast. But I'm not getting that sense now anymore for DeFi. And I think your tweet definitely shares that sentiment. Let's talk about Avantis and how Avantis is going to help us kind of, you know, maybe unlock some new primitives and some new use cases that will bring that excitement back. Yeah, definitely. So I think there's two aspects to this. One is that part of bringing the excitement back is giving on-chain capital alpha and edge that they don't have currently. Any tools or protocols or any data that gives on-chain capital and edge is exciting because on-chain is all about alpha. um And so from our perspective, the biggest unlock is how do you bring real-world assets on-chain in a way that gives alpha? to traders and LPs and not in a way that you can just hold it. Like if I had to hold a US T-bill, I can do that with insurance in Robinhood or my bank account, right in the US. Why would I be on chain and like try to hold a US treasury T-bill? Simply for composability, that doesn't make too much sense. So our vision was let's not tokenize assets anymore. That's overdone. Let's synthetically bring assets on chain via oracles and via an AMM. And what that can unlock is fast, quick trading on macro assets on one side, powered by fully on-chain LPs on the other side. And so since inception, we've done about a billion dollars in volume on real world assets alone and 4.5 billion across crypto and real world assets. Some of these assets people don't even have access to in their jurisdictions. Stuff like trading gold or crude oil or dollar yen or in Turkey, for example, the Turkish lira. Those assets only exist on-chain in a meaningful way. on Avanthas. So the first thing we're doing to really bring that excitement back, as you said, is bringing macro assets on chain in a scalable, meaningful way, in a way that traders can make the most of it with high leverage. And then on-chain LPs can passively power it and be the market maker. Also, that's the core goal of DeFi, democratized market making. And the second thing we're doing is just build net new primitives for leverage. So the announcement we made last week, We went live with a very interesting product called ZFP, zero fee leverage, zero fee perpetuals. ZFP puts the alpha back into the hands of traders big time because you pay no fees on opening. So your collateral does not erode, right? When you open the trade, you pay no fees to borrow or hold a position. So there's zero funding rates and you pay no fees on closing. If you lose, you only pay if you win. So it's very trader aligned because as you know, 90 % of perp traders lose money. And that's not, it's kind of programmed into leverage and fees. It's not, it's like mathematically programmed that they'll lose. And we don't want that. We want people to win and come back to the platform and trade more and get more alpha and share their profits with us. So that's kind of the goal with zero fee per bet rules, which we launched last week and is seeing an uptake in traction now, but definitely we want to get this in the hands of more people. Let's maybe let's back up a little bit. So real world assets as a category has there's been a lot of talk about it lately, but it's still pretty ah not a lot of crypto folks really understand it. And so maybe walk us through the process on event is how how a real world asset is issued. You know, you mentioned you mentioned a couple assets, maybe pick an asset and how that's actually issued on chain. so that it becomes tradable by traders. Yeah, on Avantis, we have a much simpler process. So there is no tokenization. There's no physical asset that's backing the gold that you're buying on Avantis. You're simply entering synthetically a contract which says you can enter the price of gold if you're going long. For example, you're buying gold with leverage. You can enter the price of gold at say $3,000. If the price of gold goes to 3,100, you can close it then and whatever profits you make are yours. If it goes down to 2,900, then whatever losses exist are also yours. So it's a synthetic representation of a perpetual contract in a real world asset, um which is done by using oracles like BITS, which is decentralized, and by using the Avanthus AMM, which is also a USTC based AMM that powers all trading activity on our exchange. And so the short answer is that we just use a BITS oracle. We parameterize our AMM. for new fees and kind of new parameters like how much liquidity we have to give to this asset. And then we go live by listing that asset and then traders can trade that asset ah and market makers can obviously supply liquidity for that asset. Got it. So in the issuance process, there is no actual tokenization of the real world asset. Got it, got it. ah So that's an interesting approach uh relative to other real world asset uh projects that I've spoken with that do attempt to tokenize. I met with uh Providence, which is another real world asset project, and they're tokenizing uh life insurance right now. Yeah. And, uh but really the process for them is just getting a bunch of paper uh digitally and then putting it on chain, which is kind of a, really it's a factory process is what it is. It's just a manufacturing process. um But there's no trading going on there. Whereas, with Avantis, it's like there's trading, there's actual participation from traders, which is fun. um Tell us what stages Avantis is at right now. I believe it's in... It's not public yet, correct? Yeah, we've been public for one year now on Mainnet. uh It's just that when we release this new feature, specifically ah zero fee perpetuals, that's in public beta because we're always like trading on it and we're still not finalized oh all the parameters there. But Avantis has been live on base Mainnet since February of last year. So we've been live for about one year and two months now. We've done about 4.5 billion in volume on Mainnet. given back about $3 million in fees to our liquidity providers. We've done at an all time high, we were doing about like $100 million a day in volume. Now we're kind of doing about 20 to 30 million a day in this market. And we've served about 30,000 traders and 20,000 liquidity providers so far. That's amazing. That's amazing. ah I apologize for that. What I was reading was the private beta for the Perpetuals product. But the platform's been live for over a year. That's amazing. Exactly. Yeah. So fairly bad yesterday. We've done a of ah contract upgrades as well. So, so far things have gone pretty smoothly. That's great. What's your experience been like on bass and the bass ecosystem? Yeah, BASE is a very vibrant ecosystem. think a big reason for us to build on BASE was like long-term alignment. I think they were one of our first investors in the seed round, the BASE Ecosystem Fund. We were one of the first DEXs they invested in back in the day in 2023. And so we've been with the ecosystem for a long time and it's really amazing to see how much they've grown. And like, we know it's still a sliver of the growth that we have yet to see because there's a lot of fundamental unlocks coming for the chain. Whether that's abstraction of smart accounts, whether that's gas abstraction, whether that's flash blocks, which will make the chain like 10x faster and be able to compete with the likes of Solana, whether that's kind of increasing gas so that, you know, the gas costs go down over time. oh I think there's a lot that has to figure out. It's a long-term journey, to be honest. But once they do, think we will obviously be the beneficiaries of it as a tailwind. So pretty exciting to build on BASE. think they definitely have lots of stuff to figure out from a technical and marketing and communications perspective. But I think they're one of the most organized L-do's I have seen in this BASE. um Thanks to Coinbase, obviously, formally incubating BASE. Back to Avantis, um if you were to specify the clear target segments, the target audience for Avantis, you know, other than, you know, I imagine if we're just to categorize traders as a big general category, that might be one, but if you were to pick maybe two or three other very specific target audiences, maybe we can talk about those. Yeah, so I mean, for every DeFi builder, the target audience is global traders and yield hunters on average, in general. But phase one is, let's look at the on-chain capital and latent on-chain demand for access to real world assets and macro alpha. And so that's our initial beachhead target market. So on-chain wallets that are active. across the EVM landscape, looking for yield or looking for opportunities to trade assets that are not just crypto native assets. um That itself is a massive market, right? We've yet to tap even like 5 % of that market in my view. um So there's a long way to grow, long way to go and long way to grow there itself. But I think if you extend that framework and like you abstract away the blockchain and you have social logins and you try to go mass market, I think a lot of countries like Turkey, people want to the lira there. The government won't let them. A lot of countries like India, people want to trade the INR there. It's already on a mantis, by the way, INR USD, uh the lira USD. Then you can like kind of get those citizens on chain just by saying, like, it doesn't matter if you're on the blockchain or not. Here's a social login. Here's a fee at OnRAMP. Go trade the lira. Go express your views on the INR. So I think that's the broader market we're going after, like people who genuinely want macro asset exposure, whether that's leveraged or not, that's a different story. And then of course, yield is yield, right? People are hunting for stablecoin yields all the time. And so if we do a good job on the demand side, the supply side is basically always there. supply will always chase the highest yield very efficiently. And how are you, uh I mean, it sounds like it's like the initial target audience is like crypto native people searching for yield. And how are you reaching and messaging this specific audience? Yeah, so we use Twitter as like a primary, I guess, GDM channel, Twitter and Discord obviously. I think a lot of our tight-knit community traders sit on Discord and then... Twitter as well, we do a lot of mass market announcements, content, et cetera. We also use Medium. We also do obviously a lot of one-on-one BD. We reach out to traders we think make sense across Twitter and personal channels, and then get them on-chain, like Forex traders especially, people who don't really touch crypto if they don't have to, and then educating them on why they should trade Forex on-chain and not off-chain. So primarily Twitter, Discord, Medium, and then outside of that, like one-on-one BD, phone calls, like Reach Out, lot of that stuff. um Now your background is at Pantera. You're a venture capitalist there. And I imagine you probably saw lots of deals, deal flow, and you had a good sense of kind of where the market is headed. uh I guess what based on your experience at Pantera is leading you to, like led you to Create Avantis. Did you see, as a VC, did you see kind of a gap in the market that led you to think You know, maybe now's the time for something like Avantis. Definitely, I think there's a big gap in the market. It still is actually, I'm still so bullish on it. There's a big gap in providing genuinely strong exposure to real world assets on chain in a meaningful way. So we've been building for that gap for a year and it's still so massive. So it makes me very excited as a builder. um That's the first thing. then secondly, I think my background before Pantera. is that of a finance guy, really. I was in banking, doing &A at Lazard. then prior to that, in Berkeley as well, I went to B-school. And so, I mean, I love cash flows and I love traditional businesses. Growing up, my dad was a traditional entrepreneur, manufacturing business. So I wanted to build and dip my toes in a space where I can see tangible traction. I love consumer products. I know that in crypto, the incentives are perverse. Infra will always be valued higher than dApps. um Even if the infrared itself generates much less revenue than the DAB itself that's building on that infra, I understand that. I understood that well before I started building Avantis. And as a builder, could have optimized for valuations and building the L1, L2 route and building infra that already has existed just under a different name or face. But I wanted to make something that people use and people actually touch and feel and they say, okay, wow, this made me money. Or like, I felt good using this platform. um So I wanted to build a consumer app where there's revenues and there's tangible traction and while solving a overhang and problem in this space, which is like a lack of access to real world assets. And it's not too late, right? You could always take the hyperliquid approach where you build a beachhead, an application that actual humans like to use, then grow from there into the Avantis chain. Okay. There's some plans there for sure. Yeah. it. Well, that sounds pretty exciting. Given that, what types of primitives are you, is Avantis the application kind of going to enable future builders, um you when they, uh you know, when you roll out Avantis chain or the chain, the layer one. Yeah, I think that's a very far in the future question because the first thing we need to do right is grow our TVL to like $100 million. And then from there, the TVL itself is the mode because the tap has all of these amazing, the Avanthe's tap has all of these amazing. demand-side primitives that is attracting so much supply-side capital, and that requires its own chain. So it's a path-dependent question. So no point answering that right now. So I'll answer what the path might look like to get there, which is that we build primitives that everyone wants to use. Base itself is becoming much faster and is becoming a chain where perps are actually very competitive. uh Right now, like Jupiter, Onsulana, Drift, Hyperliquid, they're doing super well on chain because they're fast as hell, right? Like they're really fast and they're on chain. Base can get there, I'm pretty sure. I'm very bullish on the team and that means we can get there. So the first thing is making Avanitas ultra fast, ultra secure, a place where high leverage traders feel like they are getting the best execution, the best fills. From there, it's our job to basically extend leverage to non-crypto assets and non-crypto events. What that means is real world prediction markets and then sports. Those are two markets we're looking at and kind of that's our vision, right? Being the premier leverage hub for real world assets and real world events. So real world assets, we're already doing that with dollar, yen, lira, gold, silver, crude oil. Real world events is like stuff like sports. non crypto and non macro correlated events, prediction markets, stuff like that. And so if we can build a one-stop shop leverage on base, then we can actually have a mode to build our own chain in the future. Maybe that's a base L3, maybe that's a OPL2, we're not sure yet. But to get there, the path dependence is that we ship the best product. The real world sports category is really interesting. How do you deal with the Oracle for real world events? Yeah, we'll build our own. That's the short answer. It doesn't exist. ah The kind of Oracle we need doesn't exist today, and we'll build our own. Is there more you could share on that? that seems to be, I mean, that could be a product on its own that others could utilize. Yeah, not much to share right now. Got it. Because I've worked with a couple of real world kind of event type projects. that's always been a question around, you know, how do you verify that someone actually won the fight, let's say, or a game. um And a product like that doesn't exist. Probably the closest thing is a prediction market. But that's not necessarily, that's not, you know, totally decentralized or verifiable. It's really just the news is what it is. That would be very interesting. I think that would unlock a lot of uh potentially new users for Avantis. Yeah, absolutely. think that would make a lot of sense for us as well. Just extending what we have already to new primitives. Yeah, let's talk about those primitives. You you're heads down building this product, getting users, making sure that it adds value to the current users. At the same time, you're building out this product um and primitives that will have future use for other developers that may choose to utilize the Avantis as part of their stack. What are some of those primitives? Yeah, I think from our perspective, like we want to make our LP token. Right now we have two tranches. We have a junior tranche, senior tranche. People can basically deposit into any tranche. But we want to make it a single composable vault so that all of the vault deposits can be taken outside of Avanthus now in the future, in the near future actually, in the next two months. We want to make sure the vault token becomes composable. So Avanthus USDC itself becomes composable. with the rest of DeFi, with the rest of DeFi on base. So protocols like Pendle can integrate them for YTPT. Protocols like Moonwell can use them on their supply side as collateral for lending and get yield on it. So anything where we can boost yield for our LPs is always like a welcome change. That's the first and most, I guess, immediate thing. And in the future, we want builders to tap into the Avanthe's liquidity and the Avanthe's AMM and Oracle engine to just create new markets. So we can provide the Oracle, we can provide the liquidity. You guys decide how to parameterize it. You guys take the risk of that and the front end and we'll just be the liquidity layer, barring any of the leverage primitives that builders can build. So we already have seen people build, for example, a Telegram bot on Avanthus to trade perps. Or with zero fee perps launching, we're seeing a lot of SDK integrations for strategies. A lot of market makers are using it to do quick scalps at high leverage. We offer up to 250x, which is unheard of in this space. So those things are like... on the SDK and trading side. There's bots and there's the LP side, which is like us making it composable over time. And how are you handling, you mentioned business development earlier, uh but you did that in the context of reaching out to individual traders. But it also sounds like there's developers as another market that you're trying to reach and introducing them to the Avantis platform and the primitives that they could use as part of their own applications. How are you uh working that side of the market? Yeah, I think, as I said, from a path dependence perspective, it's much more important for us to get traders first and then developers will be like, wow, this is a crazy ecosystem. We want to actually tap into the liquidity here and build net new primitives on Avanthus. So I think from an internal focus perspective, that makes us focus more on the demand side than on the developer ecosystem or the supply side. And that makes sense. makes sense. um Let's talk about the community. What are some go-to-market strategies that you've seen work well for Avantis on the community side? And how are you dealing with community members that are current traders, but then there's also some community members that might not be traders, but they still want to be involved somehow? Yeah, absolutely. So I think the Avanthus community is very broad. So all of our partners, partner protocols, Pith, Superfarm, just to name a few others, all of their users are also technically Avanthus users. They're like LBing into Avanthus or they're like suppliers of Pith feeds. So when it comes to like XP and tokens, we definitely want to include them in the community. That's the first thing. And also like content creators in the Discord and things like that. So I think that's fairly important to do, very, important to include people who are not users, but also contributors to the protocol. uh The second thing is that the event this community is about 70,000 strong. So like we have about 50,000 wallets alone who have interacted with the platform. But then there's 20,000 additional wallets who are part of like partner protocols or content creators. All of them are part of the ecosystem. The critters about 50 K followers. This call is about 90,000 followers. um And only more recently have we started to focus more on engagement and activation on both those channels. And a very good way to do that is um we introduced this thing called XP Leaks. last quarter or like in Q4 of May 24. This is when Trump also got elected. So markets were anyway crazy. But then we introduced this really cool campaign that we'll be reintroducing in two weeks. It's called XP leagues. The idea came from like a lot of gamification that you pit traders against each other. And whoever trades the most organically is like going up leveling up in a league. And the leagues themselves are exponentially high in returns. So everybody like gets a notification when you're demoted, like when someone out creates you and you get a notification saying and were demoted to Bronze League. And then you're like, shit, I gotta get back up. And then you're like, you know, work your way up to gold, silver, and the rewards keep increasing exponentially. And so from our perspective, that was a lot of fun. Traders really enjoyed it because they got like one month in like a quarter where they could accumulate a lot of XP, but also have a lot of fun while doing that. like they could select your own mean profile picture, have a random username. So we had the funniest username and avatars and just this avatars trading against each other for XP. So I think in terms of innovative trading leaks, that's really helped out. Yeah, hopefully that helps. Was all of that inside of the Discord or was that a special platform where they could change their PFP and their username? Yeah. So that was on the, on the platform itself. Yeah. So you just go and there's like a username you always have, and then you go on like leagues and then you can start competing basically. Did you look at extending that to um Twitter or other kind of more public platforms? Yeah, so we always marketed leagues on Twitter. And so we got a lot of flow from Twitter. But I think we didn't discover any Twitter-native ways to be inherently part of leagues. Or like FarCastro, for example, we didn't explore too much of that ecosystem, to be honest. But we've been just getting the flow from Twitter. And then once the people are on the platform, then they can see their stats and their profile pictures and whatnot. So yeah. I ask because there's kind of a growing trend of, you know, there's this idea of kind of founder led marketing and then there's team led marketing. And one way to kind of visually see, you know, the team led marketing pieces, everyone's using the same type of PFP. And, um and it actually, I've seen it work quite well, where it creates a lot of interest and curiosity. And, you know, if there's like a clear call to action, like, you know, follow you know, such and such handle or go to some such and such website and like learn more. Um, I've actually seen some conversions from, from that type of marketing. That's why I'm curious about the, you know, people change on the platform when people change their PFPs, you know, if there's a way to also help them or encourage them to also change their PFP on their public persona, that might be an interesting way of growing, uh, and getting new members onto the platform. Absolutely, that's a very cool idea. We should probably introduce like an NFT mint post this new XP league with Avantis native NFTs with our new mascot. So we're introducing a new mascot, like a cheetah, like an Avantis cheetah, because like you trade fast, you win, you like you hunt for alpha. So that's kind of our vibe. the cheetahs are people excited about the cheetah and we might do like an NFT drop with the cheetah. That's a pretty good idea actually. I'll scope this out a bit more. Yeah. um On the Cheetah Mascot, another tweet that you shared recently on April 9th, um it looks like you're doing some rebranding, is that correct, with the built by facility or maybe you can tell us a little bit about that. guys are our brand partners, Facilities is an awesome brand partner. We work with them to kind of understand how to reach out to our audiences and connect with them, at least on the brand and visual side of things. So very nice team, highly recommend. If even you want to reach out Peter for your own work or portfolio work, feel free to do so. I'm happy to make the connect. But all the brand visuals you see on a bank, all our major announcements are basically done by them. And we work very closely with them. We've been working closely with them since day one. So no rebranding going on, just like sharing their work and sharing the fact that we work with them and making sure they get the spotlight they deserve basically. That's cool. No, I think on the event aside, mean, it's very clean. It's very clear who the target audience is right from the homepage. I global markets, limitless leverage. I mean, that speaks to a very select audience. know, like a normal person would not know what you're talking about. And so you're clearly talking to someone who is a trader. um what global markets means and someone who knows what leverage means. Definitely. So it's a trader. Yeah. Yeah. No, that's really cool. And I think the cheetah idea is a really good one. And so the idea there is speed, right? Yes, speed and alpha and hunting. Yeah. Yeah. What else can you tell us about Avantis maybe in the next like, I don't know, the next couple of months? Like what the community can be excited about and how they can get involved. Absolutely. We're ending season two of XP on May 31st. That's our final season before we decentralized, announced the foundation and introduced the Avanthe's token. Right? So that's been already announced fairly, fairly official. So it's not net new on this podcast, but, you know, viewers should know that there's like a month and a half left to be involved. And this is just our first airdrop over the next four years. So very early and we are already, our heads already down. after the ZFP launch on what's next. And there's a lot of things that are coming up on the roadmap. So yeah, I think if you want to be part of the event, this community, like we are still early. It's been a year live on mainnet. We want to grow like 10, 20, 50 X from here along with base, kind of dominate the ecosystem and truly just enhance access for on-chain traders and help these two real world assets. So that's the alpha, that's the goal. If you want to get involved, it's super early still. And if you have any questions about the product or our vision, like I'm always open, my Twitter DMs are open. Awesome. Well, so Hedge, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us. I will make sure to share all of the relevant links in the notes so that anyone that wants to participate and become active in the Avantis community can. Amazing Peter, thanks so much. Appreciate that.