Nikita Ovchinnik, co-founder of BarterSwap, welcome. Hello Peter, thanks for having me. um You've been in this space for a while. You and I first met during DeFi summer, which was such an exciting time. I'm curious, what's your experience been like since then? Are you just as excited about crypto as you were back then? Yes, you know, I joined crypto in 2017 and I feel like we still haven't fulfilled all our goals and we are still very early and I am a big DeFi Marxist. So in my opinion, DeFi has a tremendous potential and you know, I used to work at Oneinch. I used to join like DeFi community in early 2020 full time and I'm still committed to this market mission in particular. I think The best unlocks are yet to happen and we're still very early. That's, love the optimism there. um I remember when you and I first met, were at One Inch. You were one of the early members. And One Inch was such an innovative product. I believe it was, um the founders started it at ETH New York, um which I was at. Yeah, I was at. And I remember they won, they won the... um Yeah, they did the demo and I remember all of us gasping thinking, holy cow, wow, why didn't anyone else think of this before? You know, it's so, in hindsight, everything seems so simple. ah I wonder what do you think are some things right now that when we look back a few years from now, we'll think, that was so simple, why didn't anyone think of that sooner? Well, I mean, if you look at the already we can say that maybe hyper liquid play and play around perpetuals and futures was definitely a niche that everyone's kind of been waiting for a while to succeed. finally, it's, know, catching up to support metrics and the swaps and just, just on chain trading. uh So that's one of those, I guess, AI agents, you know, building oh helpful tools for people and real users to monitor and do some simple actions with their portfolio, uh asset management. I guess this is another one of those things. And if you look at some recent DeFi uh lending market updates, for example, what Fluid or what Euler does with with their platforms. I think it would be the way how lending uh matures and then moves towards a broader liquidity layer where liquidity can be used for swaps or for other activity. I think it's another one of those examples. And stable coins. Yeah, we cannot miss. uh They've been growing massively already, but I think it's still a fraction of what stable coin like market will achieve in just a few more years. You know, as you as you're answering, I'm thinking back on my time and I've missed so many things that that seems so obvious now like hyper liquid. I completely miss hyper liquid. I didn't even know about hyper liquid until much, much later. And stable coins, I remember. I don't know if you remember this, but almost every trade was either with BTC or ETH. then and then. all of a sudden, like USDT became the, you know, became the counterparty of or the counter, the the swap of choice to buy other assets. And I remember thinking like, when did this happen? Like, what was the point at which people started using USDT versus ETH to buy other assets? And I can't think of a time I just remember talking to friends telling me that, yeah, they just use USDT to buy something and I And I thought, why would you do that? I just use ETH. um But now it's just so obvious. uh But yeah, I'm just lamenting it all the times where I've missed these big macro moves that, for some reason, other people see, but I miss. So OK. Same, you know, I miss hyperliquid, you know, completely. am not, whenever I trade, I always lose money. So I am trying to be more on the hodler side, on the builder side and not, you know, flip assets or meme coins and stuff like that. So yeah, I mean, the market is so big now, you know, there are so many other niches like, I don't know, deep in. and many others, that it's hard to keep track of everything exciting, what's happening in there. You know, speaking of exciting, are you've started a new project. um We'd love to learn about it. Tell us about barter swap. Right. So, you know, I was a third employee after the two co-founders at Oneinch and I left during summer 2022, relocated to Chile. I live in Santiago. That's why you can see the beautiful mountain behind me, potentially, if you're looking at the video. And yeah, I was still, you know, eyeing, defying, analyzing where I see the biggest unlocks and what can... happened to accelerate DeFi adoption, DeFi growth. And the topic of Intents was really hot in 2023. And Oneinch was launching Oneinch Fusion. CarveSwap was kind of the first implementation. Anoma published a lot of research, a lot of different researchers of how we should move from declarative paradigm and transactions. to kind of more flexible intents and solvers would be those, know, parties that fulfill intents. So uh yeah, intent is something very simple. Like I want to buy ease at the best price available right now. And then, you know, multiple solvers provide you a quote and whoever wins an auction, provide the best kind of result, get a chance to execute the transaction and create this or fulfill an order for the user. uh So there were like a lot of hype and a lot of theoretical use cases. And we thought, okay, maybe we should like, you know, a small team, were trying out things, were looking at stable coins as well. And yeah, we built a simple implementation of our solver. And within the first couple of months, we became very dominant on cowswap. So, you know, we launched in March, 2023, and we achieved 1 billion volume by end of June. And we were 40 % of all the cow swap metrics in terms of liquidity. So we were 40 % of the volume, 40 % of the transactions. And we thought, OK, maybe we can evolve it into something bigger. And our idea was very simple. Imagine if I want to sell one piece and maybe you want to buy one piece. There is no way for our orders to meet unless both of us use cowswap and you know, only coincidence or once, hence the name cowswap can only happen on cow platform, but they were not widely accessible across other venues. And we thought we can do cross-protocol coincidence or once. So if we are solver on UniswapX and we are solver on cowswap, we can match, you know, incoming orders against each other and create like a better price for the user because you know if I want to sell one this and you want to buy one this and we uh you know we and someone matches those orders that's like an equilibrium price. So we were really excited about this concept and that's why our name barter you know like barter economy when you exchange like goods for goods without intermediaries and yeah we published a research and then we raised our seed round and We are still committed. We have now a new narrative, slightly evolved a little bit from what I've just described. But yes, this is our journey. We launched the solver on Cowswap, started generating, you know, his income and become pretty dominant and yeah, like still building in DeFi. Let's talk about that. You mentioned the new narrative. um How are you positioning barter swap in a really crowded DeFi market? Yeah. So we spent a lot of time on R &D and in order to make those cool cross-protocol coincidence of one straight, we would need to talk and convince a lot of teams like Uniswap, Cowswap uh in order to change the way the auctions work and maybe like increase lengths and create this window of opportunity where we can match orders against each other. But it's... like really hard, you everyone has their own agenda and pipeline of work. And we've been researching what can we do? And we came up with a new narrative that calls that we called superposition. So superposition by barter is our upcoming product. So we believe that, you know, users have a lot of liquidity in their wallets that is lying dormant idle and no one is, you know, using it. And at the same time, this liquidity can generate yield. And one of the ideas, so the user would give us allowance to use their tokens oh on their behalf. And we would kind of, I would probably say market make and the liquidity. And we would route our existing order flow from Cowswap, UniswapX, Paraswap Delta, and other venues where we are present as a solver. We would route not. to AMMs, but to use wallets. And initially, we are still competing with market makers. And market makers on chain are very efficient because they are cheaper in terms of gas. When Wintermute uses their own wallet to market make and uh just provide a firm quote on asset, it's a lot cheaper in terms of gas than Uniswap, Balancer, Curve, or other AMMs. and it creates a big competitive advantage for them. So we thought, why don't we allow users to do the same and we will provide like an algorithms and infrastructure and yeah, users give us an allowance to use their assets and we would market make and they would always like in a simple case of stable coin swap, uh users would whitelist maybe four stable coin assets that they're comfortable with like USDC, USDT, DAI.$10 and then we would you know route the liquidity and it they would always receive one cent or like a few dollars more that they had in their wallet in the past so it would be like 1000 USD C evolving to 1001 USD T and Yes, I would earn passive income while providing liquidity in DeFi and this liquidity will not be publicly available So there won't be any toxic flow because our solver system is the only one that's going to use it for retail order flow. Something like that. It probably sounds a little bit complex. I still need to work on my pitching and just explaining this narrative. But yeah. The who the target audience be for this. imagine it's people that are they they're already familiar with DeFi about swapping about maybe tell us about that. If you could describe the target audience for barter swap. So we are targeting sophisticated users. used to say that they're familiar with bridges that know what liquidity mining or yield farming is, who are not afraid to provide liquidity to protocols, who understand the risks and pros and cons. And we want to unlock something new for them. we would be able to turn any wallet into an AMM equivalent. Hmm. the assets in wallet, they become liquid and they become part of the broader liquidity network in DeFi, but at the same time, they're still fully available for users. So if they ever want to stop it or use this money in their wallet for something else, they can do it at any point of time. That's why superposition, the shredding haircut that is dead and alive. And for us, the assets are of liquid and also accessible to users at all times. I see. How do you deal, so from a technical perspective, I'm curious about how you deal with liquidity fragmentation across multiple chains. Is that something that you guys, that BarterSwap deals with or are you focused on just like EVM chains for now? We are focused on EVM chains. We've been on Ethereum since the early days and it feels like the majority of innovations, technical innovations are happening here. However, the superposition approach allows us to expand beyond EVM chains. We are considering going and expanding to Solana ecosystem. just because the volumes and the user activity is all there and we can offer something new, empower the users with this passive liquidity and then re-enable it back to the market. uh yeah, right now the liquidity fragmentation, I would say, is pretty severe, but it's getting better and I think on the VM chains it will be solved relatively soon. Yeah, mean, liquidity fragmentation used to mean kind of EVM chains to non EVM chains, but now there's a lot of fragmentation within the EVM ecosystem with, you know, layer twos and roll ups and you have to bridge to all of these things. you know, philosophically, what's your view on that? um Do you feel that uh this is kind of a departure from barter swap? But I'm curious because it does affect kind of the architecture. How do you feel about a, do you feel like these layer twos and rollups are extractive to Ethereum layer one? I think so. mean, to some extent they are extractive and they are still in the spotlight. At the same time, you know, we feel that different chains serve different purposes in different ecosystems and there is room for all of them to thrive. Plus, you know, I've listened a lot to like some of recent podcasts of Justin Drake, Uma Roy and some other, you know. big Ethereum leaders. And in my opinion, narrative with many chains makes sense. in order to scale Ethereum, that's the only way forward. yeah, I sort of agree to their arguments. And yeah, like I'm pretty sure that users who are more institutional and maybe who are more into meme coin trading might use different L2s, and we will be happy to facilitate each one of them respectively on the chains where they prefer to exist. Yeah. How does barter swap deal with uh bridging? Let's say I'm on Ethereum layer one, but then the liquidity for the token that I want to buy or sell is on another chain. How do you deal with the bridging? So right now we are primarily focused on solving within one chain. we are like, our solar system is a mix of an aggregator, market maker and any V bot. Just like market maker, we provide our own liquidity just as an enemy, but we need to analyze the state of Ethereum chain extremely effectively. and find some arbitrage opportunities that we not capture ourselves, but we give back to users and we earn extra fees from uh platforms like Cowswap, for example, we as account tokens. And just as an aggregator, we often route to mainstream DEXs and liquidity sources. uh However, when we breach, Well, we played around a little bit with Acros and some other popular, like we are investigating the de-breach right now for being solvers there. So in order, yeah, like we use those platforms, it's kind of hard for us to read balance. And also the user behavior is much simpler when they breach. So they just usually want one asset or one. pool or specific token on a different chain. While when you're a solver on a single chain, you can do a lot more complex actions. You can aggregate liquidity in unique ways. It might be like if you arbitrage opportunities, you might tap into unique pools or access liquidations on other more for other venues. And that way, it creates a more complex environment where solvers like ours can thrive and provide very good exchange rates. So yeah, we are doing a little bit of bridging through across the bridge. It's not our prime sort of activity. uh Just because of how, uh I would say, simple it is, it's more of an inventory game rather than routing complex computations. Hmm, and you said inventory game Yeah, it's a game of inventory. Whoever has more liquidity available across different chains is usually the one that facilitates transactions. Got it. And that seems to be the unique selling proposition that barter swap has is it identifies because it's dealing directly with user wallets with permission. Then it's able to aggregate the and identify and then aggregate the liquidity. Is that correct? Got it. are not planning to be a market maker ourselves. We want to connect with broader DeFi community and empower user wallets with this, you know, like new capabilities for yield and earn and yeah. That's pretty exciting. I can see if I were a trader, that's quite exciting and gives me new opportunities as a trader to, rather than dealing with a typical DeFi protocol, now it's just in my wallet. Now my wallet becomes this uh this tool that I can use on my behalf to make more money. uh How are you dealing with user acquisition? um In the past, yield has been, I think, one of the main characteristics that moves the traders around. um How are you dealing with user acquisition? ah Yeah, it's really tough. We've announced a superposition and we received tremendous feedback from other teams and founders and projects we are already acquainted with. At the same time, the broader DeFi community is kind of not there or much harder to reach than before. I think the user attention is extremely fragmented right now. A lot of people are probably... trading or engaging with DEXs on Solana or other chains. So yeah, user acquisition is really hard. We plan to approach it through EOAT, just in good old fashion, because we've analyzed how much liquidity and providers, LPs, are making on uh Uniswap. curve and other venues and we can offer competitive yield without any kind of incentives, without like talking emissions. yeah, so I think this could be a good driver and motivational factor for many users. And it can create an interesting dynamic within our protocol because we analyze and... the liquidity landscape and a lot of liquidity is lying dormant, of like not being actively used. While for us, we care about velocity of assets because we want to make sure that any tokens we receive are being actively traded, generate good yield. So we don't need like billions of TVL, but maybe like just tens of millions across mainstream pairs. And we anticipate some kind of competition when our system goes live and the users uh see that it's, you know, it's generating the yield as promised and it's secure and stable. And yeah, it can create an interesting dynamic in terms of how can we choose between different liquidity providers and users. If we can introduce some kind of loyalty programs and whoever is more committed to the system is getting like routed more often to now we're still working on those you know games but but we will see how it will work out yeah The way you're talking makes me think that maybe these users are very yield sensitive. um How do you deal with situations where uh yield becomes the primary characteristic for user acquisition, but there are some users that regardless of yield, they're just more loyal to one protocol? um or they might feel one protocol is safer than another and the risk adjusted returns aren't worth it. And so how do you deal with various users that look at safety, that look at convenience, and then that also look at yield? Yeah, I mean, we are trying to go right now after users who are more risk tolerant, who understand that the project is at the very early stage. And no one has done before what we are trying to complete. So it's like a new DeFi primitive. yeah, I think those users, if uh everything works out, they evolve. from more yield-oriented parties into loyal followers. And if you look at Hyperliquid example, I think it's one of the best that's been in DeFi recently. Hyperliquid managed to build uh amazing community from scratch without VC funding and without big investments. And they just have very good communication channel with their community. People openly say what they want. and what would benefit the project and them as stakeholders and the team delivers. So yeah, we'd really love to live up to this model and do something similar. Did did barters pop raise raise any funds at the beginning or it sounds like you didn't. we raised three million around. It was led by Maven 11. We have a lot of good investors like DCG, for example, and others, a number of angels. Yeah, well, for us, was, I think we are in a more, you know, like we are competing with old DeFi names and raising money from trusted party adds a lot of credibility and the increased perception of the team's technical skills and capabilities again. yeah, for us, race was very important. Despite the race, are fully self-sustainable. I believe we've earned through solving more money that we have spent from the round itself. So yeah, we have... uh sustainable or revenue flow. Yeah, I was going to say, you mentioned that you had over a billion dollars in trades in the first few months or something like that, which is, I imagine your fees are very, very healthy and uh can sustain the team, which is really great. And congratulations on that. Thank you. I wouldn't say they are like super sustainable. It's probably hard to scale this particular solving model into a real business. Like if we benchmark our revenue against like block builders, example, block builders earn a lot more, at least they did in the past historically, than what we earn. However, if we, you know, use our own liquidity and this is what we are planning to do with introduction of superposition. And if we have more users and more volume on chain, uh we can evolve into a protocol that is fully self-sustainable. Earlier you mentioned that uh barge swap introduces a new kind of DeFi primitive. Can we talk about that and what category would that be? Or have you named that category yet? No, no, we haven't named it yet. I guess it's a wallet as a liquidity source or something like that. we feel like AMMs, they are pretty good. They are efficient. They fulfill their role. But in the long run, liquidity has to become more competitive, more efficient. And AMMs are vulnerable to toxic flow and like uh LVR loss versus rebalance and against a lot of things. And it's kind of impossible to solve them because a lot of them are built on the core level, like blockchains are much slower than centralized servers and price and binance can move a hundred different, a hundred times before one block on Ethereum settles. So this lack and delay creates inefficiencies which cannot be solved on a blockchain, on a protocol infrastructure level. But what we are trying to do is what we will have access to users' liquidity and we will mix off-chain components with on-chain settlement. And we would allow liquidity in user wallets to be more competitive, especially against AMMs. uh Right now we are working with lot of AMMs. We are empowering them and routing our order flow to them. However, we see more and more pressure from RFQ providers, more market makers. Even in like Vintram, which would be a good example, they've built Bebop and Bebop is a DeFi protocol, a kind of front end that also allows Vintramute market maker to stream and other market makers to stream liquidity into DeFi and they like their market share went from I would say uh Like 5 % a year ago to over 20 % uh Now so, know like liquidity is becoming more and more competitive and traditional liquidity sources like AMMs They're vulnerable to MEV and toxic flow And yeah, we will be like an evolution of this AMM game when we go from tools and from AMMs to wallets. then like liquidity within wallets can become more more sophisticated. There can be like more different models built on top of it. We have a vision how to decentralize that. So I guess we are competing with uh AMMs, I would say, and we are trying to offer this new ideas that, uh you know, one wallet can be a pool itself and it will be extremely cheap and efficient to adjust the prices. It can be done off chain. And that's the way forward to make DeFi more efficient and reduce all those problems that we've had in the past. My question earlier about what are those things that we look back on and then think it was so obvious? Why didn't anyone think of that? Wallet as the liquidity source is I think going to be one of those things where it's such a powerful concept and so obvious when we talk about it. Why didn't anyone think of this? think Barterswap being the first in the category uh is a huge competitive advantage. um And to the point of competing with AMMs, it's kind of like a co-op petition because AMMs benefit from barter swap. um And it's also a huge improvement to the AMM model right now. So it's one of those things that maybe they see barter swap and they instead want to work with you versus compete. um And it certainly seems that way with some of the protocols that barter swap is working with right now. um When you're speaking with like Cal swaps and other protocols like that, how are you pitching barter swap to them? Or is it permissionless that you don't need to even speak with? I imagine you have to speak with the teams, but yeah, I'm curious. Yeah, it's thought of a little bit of both. I think it's more or less permissionless. The engagement is very straightforward and simple. We receive access to the order flow, and we need to follow certain rules. In the form of Cowswap, we had an opportunity to join a mutual bonding pool. However, now we've migrated to our own. It allows a little bit more. flexibility, but yeah, I would say it's pretty much permissionless. Yeah. Like, like when we features that we, we have this, you know, unique vision and we would add more like, like the platforms like cowswaps, they benefit the most over they have the more competitive the every auction is and the better. user rates are. And that's why PowerSwap has achieved this tremendous success. One year ago, they were much smaller than Uniswap and other traditional aggregators like 1-inch or 0x or PowerSwap. But within this one year, because of their model and a lot of solvers, they are currently the number one swap provider on Ethereum. and other L2s. yeah, I mean, when we talk with them, we show our attraction, our unique approach. And they're genuinely very happy to connect. So yeah. And I imagine their users uh benefit and if they're acting on behalf of their users, mean, this is just a good thing to do for them. Yeah, I love how, know, cowswap showcase is over right now because after every trade they showcase with whoever fulfilled a trade for you. uh Initially, we were jokingly calling ourselves an invisible hand of the market because, you know, we did over one billion volume on his mainnet and majority of people didn't even know they interacted with our smart contract and, you know, that we were the, you know, the counterparty for trades. uh Yeah. Yeah, I'm glad we do a lot of, you know, venues are now showcasing the solvers and a lot more, you know, research parties are engaging with us and discussing, you know, various topics related to like, you know, transactions, submissions, and other things. Yeah. Yeah, that's interesting you bring that up that the user didn't know that they were interacting with bar swap smart contracts. On the one hand, that's a good thing because the user, they have a job that they want done and they just want to get it done. If they have a swap they want accomplished, then that's all they care about. How it gets done, maybe to most people, it doesn't really matter to them. I think what's interesting, especially with the CalSwap situation is that CalSwap kind of owns the relationship with the end user. And at some point, I imagine barter swap is going to want to have a relationship with the end user. so rather than using CalSwap and then interacting with the barter swap smart contracts as a second layer from the user, I imagine... know, barter swap is going to want to have that first layer of relationship with the user. that, do you think about that or what are your thoughts? Yeah. Every time since we've started solving, we received this question from every single investor and just any parties that we talk with. uh Because that's a big topic. You want to have an user relationship and it's not possible, or at least there are not that many examples, especially for trading and DeFi market where... not having them help project to succeed or grow and become like very dominant in the space. And yeah, it adds an interesting layer of relationship because we are partners of Cowswap, we are partners of AMMs, but at the same time, we are competitors with them at the same time. Right, yeah, we think a lot and the superposition is what would allow us to improve our performance, our traction, improve the rates and gain more market share across all those venues. And at the same time, would unboard users directly into our depth, into our swap system. And eventually in the long run, we hope that users would see that, for example, we are facilitating, let's say 50 % of uh all trades on call swap. Maybe they can trade directly with us and then maybe they can, you know, save some gas just by interacting with our smart contracts natively. Yeah, you're 100 % spot on with this interesting dynamic and we've been thinking a lot about it. You know, I uh worked at Amazon in the early days and I remember the discussions that we were having because I was at Amazon before we had a full uh marketplace where anyone, any seller could sell items on Amazon. And at the time we had kind of specialty sellers like target.com and toysrus.com and these big stores, right? And then there was the discussion around what if we opened up the Amazon marketplace to anyone that wanted to sell items? And so we had to create a system that would allow small sellers and big sellers to be able to create inventory on Amazon and then ship their items to Amazon for Amazon to hold. And I remember there were discussions, uh especially at the high level with Toys R Us and Target. When they use the Amazon marketplace, their margins are a lot lower because they're having to pay Amazon a fee at multiple levels. They had to pay Amazon a fee to list their items. And then when they sell the item, then Amazon gets a cut. And then if they want Amazon to ship, to hold the item, then they have to pay holding costs to Amazon. And they also have to pay shipping costs to Amazon. And so I remember discussions with big, big uh sellers like Toys R Us and Target, at what point would it make more sense for Target.com to be selling their own items versus using the Amazon distribution? um many decided to leave Amazon. Toys R Us, for example, they started with Amazon, then they left, and then they created Toys R Us.com. then years later, they shut down because they just didn't have enough distribution like Amazon did. And so I'm thinking of this situation with barter swap with, and many others, by the way, within crypto, where it's like, there's, there's a few big players with tons of distribution and, uh, competing against that distribution or trying to incentivize that distribution to come to your protocol is a really, really hard job. And so, um, and so it's, it's, it's good that you're thinking about that, but it's also really tough problem. And we don't need to go into it, but I just wanted to share that situation from kind of the Web2 space, that it's a common problem. And I'm seeing it more and more, especially in crypto with multiple protocols that are stacked on top of each other. And everyone wants to have the relationship with the end user, but getting to the end user becomes a very difficult challenge. 100%. I remember back in 2020 when I just joined One-inch, there were multiple DeFi chats and they were incredibly active. Whenever anyone did an update, it was enough to ship a news there. You would have a ton of users who would be happy to try your DApp and provide the feedback and comment if it's good or what can be done better. Like right now, it's not the same. It's a very different game and users are much more sticky. And yeah, it's no longer zero to one. It's one to something else game where, you know, there are like a lot of different swap providers. There are a lot of different landings that exist already. There are like a lot of stable coins that proven, you know, to be sustainable and people are not actively like changing. changing favorites to new things. Yeah. And you remembered the vampire attack from sushi. I mean, that was exciting because that was, you know, people kind of frame that the vampire attack from Chef Nomi of sushi swap to Uniswap as uh an attack on liquidity, but it was actually an attack on users, right? It was, m but we, for some reason in crypto and DeFi, we kind of abstract things and we think in terms of like liquidity. but there's like actual human beings behind that liquidity. And SushiSwap was trying to get those users to move over. um And I think for the most part, it was successful. was incredibly successful. And I don't remember at the time, but I think a lot of TVL moved over to Sushi from Uniswap. And I think some probably moved back because of customer loyalty. it's, know, the vampire attack, that was an exciting time during DeFi summer. yeah, mean Uniswap definitely felt threatened and I recall almost 50 % of TBL moved at one point in time and moreover Uniswap launched a token just like a few months after this attack happened because yes, that's what people wanted. Yeah, yeah. Let's shift to the, you mentioned community earlier. Let's talk about the barter swap community. um What are some strategies you're using to grow the community uh organically and how is that going? Yeah, we have a small, you know, small group of people that follow us. well, social networks are extremely important. know, crypto Twitter is number one place for everyone. We are trying to convert the users that we've received through our research and the different, you know, like just research writings that we've published. We are trying to convert them. to our users on Telegram, on Discord, and to engage more actively with them through different campaigns. We started publishing, we do weekly posts about most complex or most interesting routes that we did on chain that involve multiple different liquidity sources and how much money we've managed to save. for the user, so that receives a lot of love from community. But I would say our community is still really small. We have approximately around like 100 people in each one of those like chats. uh And they are committed, they very active, they provide great feedback, but it's not enough. And we are trying to, we believe when we go live, because right now only swap. element of our system is life, but when we will provide access to superposition and the wallet as a liquidity source, organically, word of mouth, people would tell their friends that they are generating yield. This looks really nice. This is a new way of doing things. They don't lose access to the... They don't just deposit in some kind of pool. They actually see every trade that touches their liquidity and how does it... work and what are their results. So, yeah, this is how we plan to approach it. We'll see how it works. It's an incredibly difficult task. again, like right now we managed only to amass like a hundred people who are early adopters, but yeah, we need to scale them to thousands and maybe even tens of thousands of users. You know, that's uh actually a debate uh in the, that's a very healthy debate in the crypto community, right? Because, you know, if you look at any community from any protocol, know, very, very small percentage are actual users. The rest are token holders. And if you have a hundred, but they're actual users of barter swap, that the value of each of those community members is tremendous. versus if you had 10,000 members but only 100 are actual users, but then the other 9,000 plus are token holders. There's value in each one, but the users are very, that's really, really special because they're users of your protocol. They create volume. They give you feedback so you can improve the product. They give you feedback on how you communicate. so that it helps you as you communicate and as you offer service. um And so the value is very different. And so as protocols, as they're growing, you want to first focus on the actual users. And then as you continue to grow and you have your TGE, or Token Generation Event, that invites other people to hold token holders that are not necessarily users, but they're still important. But they are you do have to treat them a little bit differently because they're primarily token holders and not users of the product. so it's, crypto is just weird that way um because there's essentially two different products. You've got barter swap the product and then eventually when you have a token generation event then your token becomes a product. um And so the holders of the token are gonna be different than the actual users of the barter swap, which is, and I think most people don't think like that. or they know that as a fact, but they don't want to admit it. um But that makes it also very difficult to grow community because now you have to segment your community into various segments and each one has their own needs and um they're all important, but it just kind of forces you to, some are users, some are developers, some are token holders. m I've had this conversation with so many people and it's a very big challenge for every protocol. Yeah, I think what you've just shared is a big alpha for many founders and, you know, crypto has so many aspects to it. And when you're building something, you all have to focus on a lot of like small things that sometimes you forget the big picture stuff. So yeah, thanks for that. And I mean, like that's great, great insight. Well, let's talk about your roadmap. ah You you mentioned superposition in the, guess in the next three, six, nine, 12 months, you know, tell us what, are some of the goals that you have for bar to swap and, you know, how can the community get involved? Yeah, we've announced SuperPosition by the end of March. And we plan to release it next month, approximately by the end of June. We're going to have a life better for first users. And we'll see how the traction goes. The first version of SuperPosition is pretty centralized. Our routing system is the only one that's going to have access to it. And it would involve infinite approvals. uh which makes us a potential honeypot threat from the cyber security attacks and just a security concern for some of our partners. However, we are completing audits and so far everything looks great. We will launch the centralized version where we would limit how much money we hold and how much money we process and just... we'll see the general traction of the product. And then by the end of this year, we plan to release uh version two. Version two will probably be a lot more decentralized. we are talking with, we're trying to onboard good partners like an L2 or a base roll-up stack that would help us in building the infrastructure needed. Oracle providers, multiple Oracle providers, pre-confirmation teams that would allow us to confirm liquidity for later usage in the later blocks. So yeah, by the end of this year, we plan to release a more refined, sophisticated version of this wallet product. And then, yeah, so this is our roadmap. for the next six months. We are trying not to get a bit ahead of ourselves because a lot would depend on how much traction we manage to generate of how much volume we process on a daily basis. And the fees and the yield would also play a dramatic role. We did a lot of calculations and they look good from first glance, but uh reality might be different. uh Hmm. different for the better or for the worse. Both cases are possible. So this is our roadmap. Launch superposition, get some feedback, do this better, and see how everything scales up. And then release a more oh DeFi kind of native product that might be an upchain or an L2. Are you looking at uh roll up as a service providers like Gelato or Caldera as a partner? Potentially, yes, we are very open. We are talking with many teams and just showcasing them our use case, what we want to achieve, what kind of security guarantees we need, how we can run different validators in order to provide those quotes. So yeah, we are analyzing a lot of things. Yeah, we've interviewed a number of the roll up as service providers on this podcast we we've met with gelato alt layer conduit and others. um All great great companies or projects with the provide a good service to uh to protocols. um reach out for introductions after we wrap it up. Yeah. happy to do that. um Let's end with a couple of things that you've said on your uh ex account. You describe yourself as a chess player with a strategic mindset, but you're also a poet at heart. And so tell us about that because that's, on the one hand, you've, chess requires a lot of creativity, poetry requires a lot of creativity, but you're also very quantitative. um Tell us about the different angles there, being a poet and being a chess player seems to be divergent from each other, but with you, it seems like they're one and the same thing. Yeah, well, as I mentioned before, I live in Chile, Santiago, but I'm originally from uh Russian and Ukrainian uh descent. And my grandparents, they taught me how to play chess. And, you know, I think it's a big, big part of the culture for, you know, Russian speaking countries where you like learn this game since you're a kid and you play it with your... relatives and friends and yeah I play chess all my life I used to go to a club in my hometown which is actually a small city in Siberia uh like 200,000 people the population of it and yeah I love chess I play on chess.com I don't have a high Eloy it's like around 1400 uh And I'm a casual player, but I follow the tournaments, the big names and actually play a lot of chess on conferences with other founders and the team. it's a good way to network. I actually made like a lot of connections during my business development career in crypto over the chessboard. That's for sure. And poetry is another big, you know, guilty pleasure of mine, especially, you know, not just poetry about, you know, I would say like the nature or culture or like the beauty of the world, but more, you know, life poetry, poetry with meaning, with like motivational inspiring quotes and the thesis. I can recommend for our readers like I think Robert Frost wrote a few good poems like You know the road not taken and then you know, there is ever guessed and William Hanley that Wrote some some other poet I I don't know I'll check the podcast our link on YouTube and I'll post some of my favorite ones under it It will be my gift to our listeners Okay, that sounds really great. I appreciate that. Well, Nikita from barterswap.xyz, thank you so much and we're excited for what you guys have coming up. And for anyone, any listeners that are interested, go to barterswap.xyz to get involved. Yeah, thank you so much for having me. It's been a pleasure. are actively building our community and if we can be of help in any way, feel free to reach out and thank you, Peter. I really enjoyed this. Amazing, thank you.