Hey everybody, welcome back to the show. Today we have on the show Trantor, the head of Etherex. Trantor, welcome. Thank you, great to be here. For those that haven't heard of Etherex, please tell us a little bit about it. Yeah, sure. So, Etherex is the leading decentralized exchange on Linea, so for the Linea ecosystem. And we really use the X33 tokenomics, which is sort of the upgrade to ve(3,3) that many people have heard of, to provide essentially a full Metadex experience for the Linea ecosystem. So, I know we'll dive into all that good stuff, but yeah, it's it. We are the largest DEX on Linea by a long shot. And if you're looking at metrics on things like DEXScreener Greener or your favorite DeFi app, you'll notice that... 85 and 95 percent of all volume is coming on Etherex. So happy to explain all that to everybody today and to talk through what we do. Yeah, let's definitely get into that. Tell us, of all, I actually haven't uh spoken with any applications that are built on the Linea ecosystem. And so this is the first. But obviously, I've heard about it, but know very little about it. And so during the call or during this episode, we'd love to hear about it. maybe we can start with why you chose the Linea ecosystem. That's a good question. And I think I can even answer a little bit more. maybe the joke whenever I do these panels is I always have a spicy take on something. And not because I say stuff that's too much out of school, but I'll try to say it as honestly as possible. One of the reasons you don't know many builders on Lydia is because Lydia really died after a short period of time. So Lydia launched uh a couple of years ago now with great technology and a lot of fanfare. Had a lot of interest across DeFi and was really growing. And then really just faded. uh from there. Faded down to the point where at some stages, know, the peak quiet, uh we were looking at no more than between four and eight million a day in total volume on the chain, which is basically an indication of a dead chain. And so you didn't know too many builders because a lot of the big players hadn't come. So we weren't seeing Aave, we weren't seeing Euler, we weren't seeing Morpho, we weren't seeing some of the bigger DEXScreener's, etc. And so at that stage, I think that's one of the reasons why Linea has sort of been on people's radars and then disappeared off their radars at the same time. So for us, we originally uh joined the Linea ecosystem as part of our strategy in what is called the Kingdom series of DEXs, uh basically just after Linea launched. And at that stage, we were the Nile. So those of you who have heard of the Nile DEX as part of an Egyptian theme, we had launched with more of the classic VE NFT structure. that Ramsey's really built out on top of. So the leading V33 technologies. And we're competing there along with everybody else, but then along with the rest of the ecosystem, most of the projects in Linea were really bleeding value continuously as user interest just died away. uh But we can get to the next part of the bullish story. And forgive me if I just keep talking because I get too excited. The next sort of big part for us was uh understanding that Linea was waking up and getting ready to go. And lot of that had to do with consensus, Joe Lubin personally, and the Ethereum story, which again, I'm happy to talk to, uh maybe straight after this part. what we had learned as the kingdom was that foundation alignment and using the proper meta DEX play, in other words, aligning your key DEX with the foundation, with the chain itself, is the surefire way to scale the ecosystem. And so in partnership with Linea, ah we rebranded to Etherex, which has a long history as well as a name. to launch the DEXScreener. We also use the upgraded X3-3 tokenomics, which basically takes a lot of friction, much better for users, to launch Etherex. So for us, it was why we launched here. One, we believe in the tech and the long-term storyline of Linea and consensus. It's going to be here for multiple cycles, unlike most chains. So it's a long-term view, which is good. And then also because we knew we had that foundation alignment, which after many years in the trenches, we've come to realize is the key component to building a successful application. in particular when comes to DEXs, because you can have effective alignments uh and healthy liquidity. So that's why we're sort of building here, because we know about that alignment, and we believe in the bull case uh of Linea mobility. Got it. Now during that time, mean, it sounds like there's you kind of went through a journey of there's some things weren't as sure and there was some kind of it was a bumpy road. What was going through your mind at that during that time around Etherex or before it was even called Etherex and what you know, should you continue doing this? Like tell us kind of what was going on in your mind. Great question. think every builder within the ecosystem was wondering the same thing, which is why some builders left. that's, there are, don't get me wrong, there are the hardcore groups who've stuck around in some fantastic communities in Linea. And I'll give them a shout out later on as required. But a lot of builders and a lot of deep capital just left the Linea ecosystem because it was just so quiet. There was no new activity happening. And from us, from a DEX perspective, we were looking at, okay, Obviously, we're here to support volumes, but if the volumes are so low, then our users aren't, you know, they're not profiting, the system isn't working. How do we continue? For us, we have a number of DEXs on uh different chains, and the focus essentially just had to move to some of the other chains until we could work out what the plan moving forward was. What that has meant is, I think if you're bullish on ecosystem, is that we weren't just here waiting to suckle on the teat of Linea consensus. Really, we're more about now we build and we get things moving. and we were still iterating and building either on Linea or alternatively on other chains. And so for those of you who are familiar with Sonic, example, Shadow on Sonic really pioneered the new X3D3 economics and is the largest X there, in particular by volume. And that is the same team, same group, same technology. So for those of you who know that technology, it's the same here with us with a couple of revisions to really just continue to evolve the model, but a highly effective model and we continue to build and continue to learn. That's kind of how we went through that process. And that's, again, why we're very confident that we didn't sit idly just hoping for things to turn around. We really built and kept building. Well, it sounds like you really owned your fate and you decided to push forward. No, that's great. So organizationally, so you've mentioned Joe Lubin and Consensus and then maybe help us understand the organization behind Linea. There's Kingdom, tell us about that and how Consensus and, yeah, go ahead. It can be a little bit confusing for people because it's a corporate structure. So I know Coinbase is as well. And so there's a corporate entity that deals with base. So for those of you who are familiar with the base ecosystem, the broader speaking, think of consensus as, know, as the large, you the big company, they have an offshoot slash supporting arm on the relationship there is less clear to me. then guess someone from SharpLink could tell you, but there's clearly the SharpLink s-bet relationship, as personified by Joe Lubin and George Shalom in their partnership with SharpLink. So that's digital asset treasury. So we'll park that part for the moment. Within consensus, they've got a suite of products. In Fura, which are a big infrastructure sort of project, really backbone, you've got Metamask, clearly, has another large piece to it, and then you've got Linea. So those become the three big elements of... of the consensus ecosystem. Whereas last year, they weren't necessarily working so well together, this year as things come, as things are really working and sort of melding forward, uh Joe Lubin is more involved directly and the company is able to really take a stand and really lead for Ethereum, those three elements, in particular Metamask and Linea, are really coming to the fore as key components of consensus. So Linea, think of that as a direct offshoot of consensus. and is the primary L2 that supports the broader consensus vision. And then Metamask, uh clearly the most popular wallet, plenty of developments going on there. And in particular, in the last sort of a few months, they're uh pushing forward to maintain their edge as the best wallet out there. And so the partnership there is what's being built on now to move forward. So consider Consensus, the big company. They've got the infrastructure within Fuhrer, and then they've got these two products which work very closely together. are now also being supported by SharpLink and Espet and the speculation there. So hopefully that answers it ah because there is the corporate entity that is and then there's the L2 that works directly with Yeah, I know the Metamask folks. I know Taylor pretty well. We go back to 2016, I think. She's like an OG. I don't know if you know Taylor. Yeah, no, she's great. That's cool. Let's get into Etherex. Tell us kind of like the, what was the gap? you know, when you first thought of Etherex, you and the team, like what was the gap that you were, that you identified? that you wanted to fill. Sure. So Linea has an entirety of consensus, right? I think anybody who's bullish on Ethereum or knows the Ethereum story knows about consensus. you probably, whether you know the tech or not, you might understand the difference between optimistic roll-ups and zero-knowledge proofs or the ZK-AVM stack. Vitalik is clearly leaning into that ZK-AVM stack. And mean, if Joe Lubin is also pushing it and spent however many millions of dollars they've spent over the years perfecting this technology because it's hard. uh That is really the sort of the the broader or the biggest sort of story, right? But what's key for Linea is that they had these products But they didn't have a means of scaling and they didn't have a means of sort of growing the ecosystem So whereas other ecosystems might simply say we're just gonna throw some rewards on a Merkel front end to support Uniswap or we're gonna just simply bribe LPs What we sort of looked at was to say hey look We know how the Metadex can be the primary engine that supports the growth of an entire ecosystem. And we use things like Aerodrome as a base case for that. And again, know, Alexandra is one of the advisors to the kingdom to our parents in the group. And so we know very well how that process sort of played out and how effective that can be. The key thing was, as I talked about before, we had that foundation alignment that, you know, that shared belief that we could use the Metadex to do this. And so, Etherex became the primary means to scale Linea. So, if you want to grow your transactions per second, you want to grow your use case, you want to get more people to come into DeFi, then the DEX, i.e. Etherex in this instance, is the key to doing that. And so, that was the key thing we wanted to fill. Now, as part of that, there's different ways to do it. And you'll see there's always incentives that go into different coins, etc., to incentivize trading. There's all sorts of different programs. But... The base case, the absolute crux of the whole thing is that the foundation needs to make money, needs to profit from all the volume that's been generated on this chain. You can't have a system where it's just hoping or just not getting enough of it. Obviously, they get the sequence of fees, but all the rest of the fees and volume that are happening with the different coins, they need a means of collecting that. And they need a means of incentivizing productive liquidity. In other words, not just mean coins that aren't going to last more than one cycle, things like how do you get USDC ETH? How do you get USDT ETH? How do you build MUSD? How do get all these, you know, these important sort of uh tokens that need depth? How do you incentivize them so that traders want to come and start farming on those important assets? And I know, again, it's a long way to talk to this, but what we wanted to fill the gap we want to fill is to make sure that we can say, okay, USDC ETH is an important asset. We need that to have liquidity and it needs to be profitable for people to farm. How do we do that? And the answer is you have foundation alignment where the foundation controls vote power themselves. In other words, the foundation can direct where emissions go and can decide what to incentivize to grow. Now I'll talk about a little bit more about that because that might sound a bit confusing, but the gap we were seeking to fill was to enable them at the cheapest way possible to make it the most profitable for traders, most profitable for LPs and for token holders. to fully scale the ecosystem in such a way that has long-term value. And that was the gap we were seeking to fill, and we were doing the Metadex play to do that. And I can break down that Metadex play in just a second, but that was the gap we wanted to fill, which is why that foundation alignment is so important for us and for really any means of any large foundation looking to scale. Now on the foundation alignment, it kind of hearkens back a little bit to kind of like the vote escrow days where you can direct where the emissions and where the, really where the benefits go. that how the alignment works? Okay. it's exactly right. because and in this instance, Linea owns 25 % scaling up to almost, you know, little below 30 % now of the vote power. So what you remember in the old voters grow is that they would vote to direct emissions, right? Our model is a little bit more advanced because you now have a state model instead. So X-REX and then REX33. I'll come back those in a tick. But that state model essentially means you can actually now value your lock position. you can leverage against it and you can also sell your lock position without having to go to a third party market. And that's the problem that aerodrome holders have, right? Or below holders or any number of other BNFDs. You can't sell your position, right? And then if you look at a curve, you back in the day, you would then have to use some type of wrapper. So whether that was, you know, if you had a, a for X or a curve, um, CVX position, which weren't voting positions, or then you had CVX, which was a voting position, but was another token. So there was, you know, derivatives and wrappers and all of them taking fees everywhere all that kind of stuff all of that is gone now to a system that is primarily based on Very similar to vote escrow. It still is that you stake and you still vote and direct those emissions And I think this is the key component Hopefully for your listeners what we worked out is you can you can bribe the token You can do all this other stuff with it The token needs to have value that emissions token must be valuable because if that's valuable then users want to come and farm it And that creates the flywheel. So that's the key part is that the token itself must have value. We don't want a situation where the token dumps to zero. The token needs to be the value component that enables people to invest in the ecosystem. And that's what we built with the Metadex. So that's what Rex holders, know, the Etherex token, that's what Rex holders benefit from is because there's positive buy pressure on the token every week ah to really grow the ecosystem. Now creating a flywheel like that is not trivial. um How did you guys, you and the team kind of brainstorm that and kind of just map it out? Because this is, I've had this question with many projects and it's, creating a flywheel like that is actually really hard. um Without having to play like, uh know, ponzanomic games, like creating a good sustainable flywheel that's like based on some level of revenue is tough. Yeah, I think it's a really good question. whereas, Coinbase, their example is famous, right? Because everybody can see how much profit helping Viero is and that returns like between 30 and 40 % to their voters. What they were able to do is pump many, many millions in buy pressure because of the fees they could use from Coinbase over the top. So they went basically from a much lower baseline up to higher because they had that buy pressure. from Coinbase themselves utilizing their centralized exchange revenue. For us, the flywheel is far more built into the ecosystem from the start. So by us having an initial allocation go through to Linea, they're able to use the fees that they earn and generate to then buy more REX tokens. So I'll break it down a little bit. So let's say, for example, if fees on the DEX in the week are $1 million, you can expect that Linea will be receiving Maybe they both ultimately remember they don't, but something like 220 to 250,000 USDC with the tokens. They can then use that every week and do, although it's up to them. Of course, I want to highlight that to then buy the token directly off the market. So that creates the first part of the pressure because Linea wants to own more of their own ecosystem. So they're using the fees that they've collected to then buy back into more of their own ecosystem. The second part to the flywheel, and this is why 3.3 used to be such a big thing. But then, course, when 33 doesn't work, it all goes downhill. Right. The difference here is that we have the wrapper, like as in the the wrapped token itself, Rex 33. That is the liquid version of the token, right? What you would know from you before we were in the past. Rex 33 every week votes optimally and then uses all of its revenue, like everything it's collected to buy more Rex on the market and lock it as well. And it does a little bit of arbitrage between buying more X, three, three, but you get my point, right? So you've now got at least a 25 % position owned by Linea, at least 25, just between 25 and 30 at the moment, that votes every week, uses its revenue to buy REX tokens off the market. You've then got REX33, which is where most users have their liquidity, that does the same thing. So that buys additional off the market again. And the last part to that is what can you do with your REX33, of course, because that continues to promote the utility of having this thing, is you can now basically lend it out. So you can lend it on Euler, you can lend it on... a number of different lending markets in borrow against it. So that's a key component of Rex 3.3 is its composability. And we can talk about that after but that's that's kind of the first step of the flow. I would just add the flywheel has to have it has to work if people believe that the ecosystem is going to grow, right? Like you can't just say, either X, you're awesome. Go and do it. Here's no funding, right? That's not going to work. The funding that was done through Linea was ignition. there ignite campaign. So they had the Linea TGE very recently, quite successful, know, sitting between 1.6 billion TBL, sorry, value at the moment, sorry, market cap, I should say, for the token. And then you've got, so that injected a lot of liquidity to the market. We've also got ignition, which is providing, again, additional rewards to those who want to deposit on Aave or to certain LPs to, again, grow the ecosystem. you need that, you you do need the injection of capital, of people to come in. But then that's what enables the flywheel to kickstart. And then when people start to see those outsized returns happening on the Rex tokens and their LPs, then they're more incentivized to come in. So again, a long answer to the question there, I think hopefully that explains it how the flywheel was designed. What I wanted to highlight there is that while you've got 25 % owned by the ecosystem and a huge Rex 3.3, which is like 37 % of all voters right now are in Rex 3.3, you've got more than 50 % already of... of all the voting recs is actively buying more recs every week, which means the lock rates are just out of control. The emissions are here, lock rates are at or above or very close to every week. that flywheel is really kicking in. Now, let's talk about naming really quick. So when you say Rex33, you're referring to, I think it's the prisoner's dilemma where 33 means you're, you know, in a game, the players of the game are holding versus if it's 99 where, you know, the players in the game are, you know, they're all selling. Is that where it comes from? It does and so it's the older model obviously with OM and then solidly. So solidly is the old original BNFT 3.3 model and what that introduced was a bit of friction right so it forced the users to have more 3.3 unlike say OM for example because it was hard to get out of your BNFT and so everybody was incentivized to hold and then by holding and locking and voting you didn't want to miss out on the rewards and so you kept doing the same right in the version of 3.3. For the Rex token, it works slightly differently. So what we removed was the need for the VNFT and instead have Rex 3-3, which you mint from your state Rex. So the only way that negative 9-9 can happen is if people are willing to take in particular now a 50 % haircut or more on their Rex 3-3 position in order to exit that way and then dump the liquid Rex. Highly unlikely to do that. In particular, when you have positive biopressure on the Rex token and the Rex 3-3 token itself. So I guess it's a little bit different and I'm happy to, when your users want to look at tokenomics later, it's genius. But REC33 is a VNFT that you can sell and use and is still part of that business dilemma of 3.3 and it has the positive buy pressure every week. So not being in a staking position actually means you're worse off than those who are just the pure speculators, which is kind of gets down to that true 3.3 capabilities. You don't want to just be a holder as a speculator. You'd rather be in the the liquid voting version of the same thing. And the more that's in that, more buy pressure there is each week. So it creates that 3-3 by design. Got it. um So on the the Etherex website, Etherex is being positioned as the Metadex powering liquidity on Linnea. Tell us what Metadex is because that's not a very common term. That's true. And it's, again, made famous by the guys from aerodrome. think MetaDex is what you want it to be because it's undefinable. But really what the key to it is, I like to think of it like this. If you want to invest in an ecosystem, like you want to invest in its fees and volume, then you want to be involved in the meta, like that story, right? And the DEXScreener that does that is us, right? So think of like you want the Linea story, you believe in you Joe Shalom and Joe Lubin bring in more value to Linea or to things happening, then you believe in the meta, narrative, and this is the DEX that does that. And it does it by essentially, you are investing in the future volatility of the token, because without a doubt, if there's nobody trading on Linea, if nobody comes to Linea and nobody's there, and there's no money flows, nothing, then REX by definition won't have any like, you know, there'll be no fees, there'll be no volume, right? And that's the problem for all DEXs. So the Metadex is part of the narrative. It's the storyline of that ecosystem. And so for us, the Metadex is, although a little bit of an outdated term in some ways, to us, it's the storyline DEX. So if you believe in a storyline of Linea, the only way to invest in it, to be honest, is either by Ethereum or by the Rex token or Rex 3.3 and invest in a future fees that this place is going to be generating. And I think when you look at all the catalysts coming in, it makes sense. I think that's why the meta-next maybe it's a misleading term, but hopefully by calling it the narrative that makes it a little bit easier to to sort of visualize what we're trying to get across there. No, mean with product naming, it's more art than science. And I think MetaDex is good because it's actually, people are familiar with the word meta and then in crypto people are familiar with the word dex and so it's memorable. um yeah. Well, they're getting to naming if I can do one quick one. Etherex itself is the original, right? So like back in 2014, 2015, before Ethereum was like, you mainly it was launched, they were talking about how do we do a decentralized exchange. And the very first next name was going to be Etherex. So that was the plan. And it was a big thing being done by a bunch of people and that consensus was heavily involved. So when it came time to naming the DEXScreener, Joe Lubin was the one who named it essentially with us and said, what do want to call it? He said, well, Etherex. Let's get back to the truth of where this all started. And so that's why Etherex has the name that it does. And then the rex, course, is the fun part of that because it jumps out of it. Etherex, sounds like a rex, but that's why it's called that. So absolute OG from one of the absolute OGs in Ethereum and in crypto, uh Joe Lubin himself as named it. So that's why it is what it is. So there you go. I thought I'd give you that little aside on that. No, that's really good history. I'm reminded of Ether Delta. I don't know if you were a user of Ether Delta, but it was absolutely terrible. People would fat finger things all the time, and I fat fingered things all the time. But yeah, that's another story. So for someone brand new to Etherex, how do you want them to think about it? Is it an AMM? Is it an order book? Is it a hybrid? And what do they do? Like, how do they get involved? Excuse me. uh You mentioned composability. Tell us about the ecosystem. Like, what can they do when they get involved with Etherex? Like, what else could they do in the broader ecosystem? Maybe take us through that journey. I to cut to the chase, every user should go through the same process when they get to Etherex. We're at AMM, we're not in the order book, so it's an AMM, and it's got a focus on two pools very similar to Uniswap. So V2 pools and then CL pools or V3 pools. V2 and V3. Those pools, well, in particular the V3, which is almost all the volume goes through the Concentrate Liquidity pools. If you want to farm in those pools, i.e. if you want to earn REX tokens, You need to be on your game, you need to have a knowledge of basically how seal works concentrated liquidity works, because you're competing against other farmers. If you're happy to take a wider range, you can do that. And I would suggest that everyone plays around with it. But what happens is, after time, everyone realizes that, man, I just keep losing out to these professional farmers, these guys who know what they're doing. And this is what happens to most retail users, right, is they keep missing out on the best returns. But the way our model is designed is you don't miss out because you get to collect the fees. So I guess if you're a user, think of it like this. In Uniswap, everyone is competing to get those fees. With us, people are competing to get the emissions that you as a voter will emit to them. So you actually create a partnership between the token holders and the OPs. So if you're not comfortable in how to deposit, for example, into a concentrated liquidity pool, be that on some volatile assets or any number of assets, if you're not comfortable how to do that. The easiest way to earn the fees is to simply buy REX lock it into x REX or just simply buy REX 3.3 and it does it for you. So you automatically part of the ecosystem. You're already part of that meta that brought a narrative. So, know, NFA always, but like if you want to, like I meant it when I said the meta, the narrative for Linea is ether X itself and the ether X uh ecosystem, like the, the REX token, which is the emissions token, but know, extra extra vote and rex 33, which auto votes for you is the best way to do it. It's kind of like that, you know, there's the curve, right? So like, I should just buy rex 33. I wanted to come like really complicated CL and earn rex to lock it myself versus just buy rex 33. And then between the bell curve thing they show you with the smooth brain and the genius. To be honest with you, you will end up at you'll end up at rex 33. Because unless you're a professional farmer, you'll end up there. It's just the easiest way to do it. And then you can leave it to the larger capital allocators. And I would say if you're bullish that you think Espet Capital is coming, and you think that there's a lot of Ethereum coming and a lot of other deep liquidity coming, then it's going to be very hard to compete with those professional market makers and professional LP providers, liquidity providers. And if you can, then you should try, but you should also try to work out how do I work in partnership with them? And you do that by owning REC33, where you get their fees and they get your emissions. Simple as that. Is it a as a capital allocator? uh You know, there's various types, right? There's there's some that want to be more active and those that are more passive. It feels like a participant in Etherex uh in the Etherex ecosystem. You need to be active. Is that am I thinking about that wrong or? So, yes and no. If you are a CL provider, as in you're providing liquidity in a seal pool, I think it behoves you, or behooves you, think you say in the States, to be active. Because you can readjust your positions before they're extensively out of range, you'll experience too much IL, or realize loss once it happens. So I think in that instance, yes. If you're a capital allocator who's happy farming stables, you can provide a fairly wide LP on a number of stable points and you'll earn excellent percentages between... four and up to 12, sometimes 20 % if you're lucky on MUSD, for example. And so you can have quite attractive yields as a capital allocator there. The same can be said for CL positions on ETH pairs. So if you're looking at EZETH in particular from Renzo and or RAP Staked ETH from Lido and paired against ETH, you can set a fairly wide range and earn a comfortable six to eight percent. So in other words, better than your staking yield on two assets that are really relatively safe. So that is one big way to do it as a capital allocator, in particular, development capital. If however, you want to go on more volatile assets, yes, you need to be active. If you want to invest in ecosystem, like I said before, as a retail participant, you don't need to be so active. Because if you're xrex you do, you have to vote every week. That's the manual way of doing it. But x3, three, it auto votes for you, and it auto compounds for you. So all you have to do is buy it and hold it, you don't have to do anything else with it. So you hold your x3, three, and that's it, it's automatically doing it for you. So in that instance, you can be quite inactive, inactive, should say, inactive. and let those rewards sort of auto compound for you over time. And then as more of integrations come in, you can deposit it in Euler, borrow USDC against it, farm that a little bit if you want to, or use it to buy my paper dinner, whatever else you want to do. ah You know, borrow in USD and spend it on your MetaMask card, you know, to shamelessly shield the MetaMask card there. You can do any of those things, I guess. So I guess, to answer that question, it would be you can be as active as you want to in our ecosystem. You can either be heavily involved as an active farmer, and a dedicated voter or you can simply allocate, just simply get Registry 3 and have some wider positions and then be relatively passive as an investor. No, I think that's that's quite attractive and it meets the needs of all types of investors or participants, I should say. uh Let's talk about the ecosystem. You've mentioned Euler a couple of times and other other DeFi uh projects also. And these ecosystems typically just for the audience, they grow. uh know, capital bridges in into the ecosystem. So in this case, you know, from another ecosystem that's bridged into Linnea and then participate, you can participate on Etherex. But then what do you do after that? Because that's capital coming in, but in the broader ecosystem, how does uh Etherex work with other DeFi projects uh using composability? Yeah, question. So I mean, up until very recently, Astera was quite a large player in that department. But we won't go through that now. They've had to deal with some export issues at the moment. the oiler integration is vault curated by RE7. So again, very large firms there. And what you can do is you can grab your REX33, you can deposit in there and then borrow against it to then farm more on ETHREX if you like. If you're coming across just in Linea and want something very low risk, you can deposit into Aave. Aave has, I think, just under a billion in TVL on Linea at the moment. So significant inflows in the last little while. That's a lot of people who looking forward to the ignition campaign and how that's currently sort of playing out. I think the issue is happening now. And so that's another one you can clear deposit there. Go ahead. Yeah, maybe we can talk about the... um So as you're looking at different projects to work with, so let's pick Euler. um What is that business development kind of relationship start? um What do you guys talk about? How do you actually integrate? What does that conversation look like? Right around. Yes, that's good. That's the good stuff. That's what we do most of the time, right? So to be honest, it's a lot easier than it used to be because everybody likes Linea now and everybody wants to get involved in the Linea ecosystem. So business development is good. But basically what it looks like is ecosystems will have their plan for how they want to increase their liquidity. And let's say it's an E like an LIT, for example, they want deeper deposits. And so they'll look at having a lending market, they'll go to Aave and make sure that's set up. But then they'll come to us and talk about, we'd like to set up a So we will talk about what kind of pool to set up. They will talk about, is there an opportunity to go incentives? In particular, can they get support from Linus Voipower? And they'll also look at how do they provide incentives to get additional deposits in their LPs. So that's what most of the conversation is about. There are a lot of other integrations, of course, there's a lot of bridging protocols and other protocols who want access to the front end on InterX. our answer to that is no, we want to remain as clean index as possible. But we're happy to be integrated, we just won't put it on the front end. And then the other group you see a lot of is of course, new mean coin launches and new culture coins, all that type of stuff, who want to get involved as well. What that looks like, and this is, guess, a good one to talk through, is they will turn up and usually have a pocket full of dreams and not a whole lot of capital. And their goal is to grow their ecosystem using us right using our front end to get more visibility to their coin. For us, we don't do that straight away. So our system is essentially you can jump on but what you do is you don't get a gauge. Right? So you can set up your pool permissionlessly, you can have the Peter coin if you want to pair it against ETH, or I can have the tarantula coin. But until it's starting to generate volume and productive liquidity, like people really want this coin. The people who deposit in there will just get the fees. So they won't be part of the Rex flywheel that I talked about before. They won't be part of all that. They're still there. You can still trade it on our front end. There's no issues there. We'll support all that kind of stuff. But they won't be giving you emissions. When the volume picks up, that's when we start to look at them having a gauge and getting emissions and then being part of the product ecosystem. So I guess what I'm saying there is that highly extractive liquidity that's just seeking to farm us based on chip coins is not something we do. And we prevent that by not allocating, not whitelisting the token and not allocating the gauge, which are the two sort of key parts. that's kind of the main stuff. And then the rest of BD, to be honest with you, is convincing the big players to come across the Linea. And that's an easy sell too, because almost everyone you can think of in DeFi is actively coming across. I can't talk about all of them, but they're all either coming across or looking at coming to Linea because... the ZKEVM narrative is the narrative. That's what Vitalik is talking about. That's what's being spoken about at every one of these major conferences and will happen at DevConnect. And I'm sure it's happening in London right now. Everyone's talking Linea in ZKEVM and the tech stack. So that's again, so it's an easier BD, a business development cell that has been in the past. We'll get into ZKVM for sure. You you mentioned that at one point, not a lot of projects were coming across to go to the Linea ecosystem, but now like everyone wants to. And I guess maybe give us a contrast of like at that point, like how that felt and like how it feels now where you're probably overwhelmed with lots of business development kind of discussions. It's a good problem to have, I'm saying. a great problem to have, right? So I think it went from being, and this is from a business, it goes from being like, Trent, I need you to focus on these three other things as well, to hey, focus on one. And I guess that that moment before something happens shakes your belief in an ecosystem because the road to being one of the biggest L2s out there is littered with the dead of some of these terrible L2s out there. Mm-hmm. experienced scroll, you we were part of the scroll as the kingdom was a part of the scroll sort of, you know, launch and fiasco, we've had the dex is that just were just part of ecosystems that just never grew. And so there's that doubt that seeps in there when things aren't happening. But I think the thing that meant that, you know, no matter what else we were focusing on, but also I was focused on Linea was always a big part of it was the consensus storyline. Because it's just it was just an unbreakable narrative. It's just like There's no way consensus is going to zero. And Linea is their ecosystem. So I guess that gave us just that little bit of hope, even when things were looking pretty lousy, ah to stick with it. And as I said, we were building another ecosystem so that we were able to come back in. And now the things are really moving on. ah It's an exciting time, but it's really heads down because Linea has a lot of things in the pipeline, and it's building up some good narrative. But it's only delivered on two of them so far. So it's delivered on Etherex, us, and obviously I control our destiny in that department, which is good. And it's delivered on the Linea TGE. So that's happening too. There are other campaigns like Ignition that's happening, but that's just points at the moment. Native staking is coming. You've got so many of the bullish things, mask token, DIN token, all these other great things that are coming out in the next little while, but only two have happened so far. So all the rest of that bull narrative is still to come, which is exciting. But it's also one of those things where, you know... making sure the market doesn't lose sight of who we are becomes a big part of what's happening because sometimes the market has a five minute attention span. And, you know, it's too busy watching the big whales get liquidated on hyper liquid and arguing about order books that is about, you know, longer term ecosystem growth. So I guess that's, that's what we're looking at now is reminding the market that hey, you know, this is a real ecosystem that's going to be here. If you want to invest for long term in Ethereum, this is the place. So that's, that's really how our emotion is shifted to that. rather than the begging part is to come along. Yeah. I asked that question because I was in a similar position. I was at Harmony with, I led growth at Harmony at one point. Harmony at one point was kind of a big deal, but not so much anymore. But I remember I joined Harmony and we were the quintessential dead chain. Like there were no applications being built on us. And so my goal was, we need to get applications. We need to like meet the needs of developers and we need to grow this thing. And it was actually a really, really hard thing to grow an ecosystem, but we got very lucky and it took one application to take off and it literally created a fire. And that application, they're still around, but they're not a really big deal anymore. was DeFi kingdoms. And it was really just... DeFi Kingdoms was like a dex, but it was kind of skinned as a game. it was gamified. was actually really fun. um But that created a fire. And we noticed on our bridge, like so much capital was being bridged over so that people could participate on DeFi Kingdoms. And it actually took us by surprise. Because when we met with the DeFi Kingdoms team, it didn't seem like a big deal to us. But it... turned out to be a massive deal. so was like we had over... Yeah, it was crazy. was also really good timing. We had over a billion dollars bridged uh to Harmony from these other ecosystems. um And then everyone was contacting us. Sushi contacted us, Uniswap contacted us. Like all of a sudden it was like, wow, like this is really, really cool. um To contrast that prior to, know, DeFi Kingdoms, was just, it was really kind of, it was just an uphill battle. And so it really just takes kind of one thing and it just takes off and it's like slow, slow, slow. And then all of a sudden it's like really, really fast. Yeah. It's, it sounds like that's where you guys are now. Well, it's a good point. You actually I'm reflecting on that a little bit. So we've had this discussion to you that what is the other app, you know, because hyper liquids be a game in person a big and the prediction markets are big and some of them are coming across in various things. But maybe I don't know, like, I like to think that ether X can be the app to be honest with you, because it can be the place but people will then say, What do I do there? And the answer is, well, you provide liquidity and farm, right? So it comes back to what are people chasing and you know, There's an element back then, as you said, I think, people were games and gamified experiences. ah We go for the DeFi kingdoms. Are they chasing yields now? I think quite a few people are. There's a lot more professionals chasing yield. So I think that will become something for serious people, and Etherex becomes a place for that. But who knows? Maybe there's another killer app. Maybe it's the next token. Maybe it's the master token, right? That's going to be the next big catalyst that really gets people going. So yeah, it's exciting, right? Yeah, yeah, for sure. been asking about the mass token forever. So it's finally, it's, it's, know, I guess we'll see. I'll tell you something that I'm seeing that might be helpful as you guys consider like how you really ecosystem. I'm seeing, know, perps dexes of course are very popular, right? But what I'm seeing is kind of verticalizing projects are verticalizing the perp dex. So it's a perpdex plus spot plus some element of lending. And so you're able to create a position where you ah borrow something and then do a perps trade and then pay it back right away. So it's like that kind of strategy is we've never really seen that because there is no perpdex that's vertically integrated like that yet. Mm. ah I know of several projects that are starting to do that. And so they're kind of verticalizing like in a stack, know, spot, perps, borrow, and other services too. And so it's gonna be very interesting uh as we see more of these. And as I think of Etherex, I wonder if there's an opportunity there with uh maybe with the emissions, maybe that can be part of your... uh capital base that you can use to invest or trade or something like that. mean, someone will come up with something. yeah, if I straight up for this, you can send me some of those contacts because it is always interesting to put this discussions but and without being silly, it's because because uh those positions can be used a number of ways, whether that whatever the token is they're using as the primary means to get into the perp or whatever else. All of those can be traded directly through us. Maybe some liquidations come through us as well, but in certain ways, certain pools collateralized in different ways. Rex 3.3 is used. The composability is endless when it comes to either extent of working with, I guess with the perpjects with anyone, right? So that's what we like about this system. yeah, I mean, A, hook me up afterwards and B, yes, I think that's the advantage of having Rex 3.3 is it's composable, is we can use it in a number of ways and it's an interest bearing, you yield generating token. So it has that advantage to it, which is always good for the DIGA Lego system. So yeah, but I'm interested to hear that because whether it's flying short, it's going to steal all the air out of the room with some exit or it's going to be something else, I guess we'll see. So yeah, I'm hoping it's why these other builders put me. We'll talk after. Yeah, sure. talk about ZK, and then I want to talk about community. I'm on the Etherex website, and looks like the events page is full of events. And so I'm curious about that and how you guys approach community, because you guys seem like a really fun community. But let's start with ZK. Tell us about the role of ZK in Etherex and Linia. Yeah, sure. So I mean, it's the fundamental stack of Linea. So I'll always, uh I will always allow someone from Linea to do it, because it's a complicated structure. And I even tried to watch some of the video a little while ago, and I think my wife fell asleep in the five minute video because it was far too technical. But and it's because I don't know what I know. But the key part to us on the ZK is that that is considered to be the future because it provides actual finality rather than the assumption of it. Right. So the difficult part now for the ZK piece is that it's finality is still being built in because there was a bit of technical backlog to catch up on, to catch up to where Ethereum really was right over the last little while. But the ZK-AVM stack that Linnie has built has pretty much caught up now and this sort of, know, petrol upgrade will be very soon, which means that it'll be, not only is it basically already fully composable with Ethereum, but things will be moving much faster and much more efficiently. What it means, and this is the part that um I think for those who wonder and worry about the ZK-AVM stack, the ZK-AVM stack is still growing and still getting better and is the future of Ethereum scaling. That's key, right? That's been told to us by many people and Vitalik himself, like if Ethereum Foundation is pushing and loving it, then that's a pretty good indication. But what it means at the moment is that a number of exchanges don't recognize the finality ah of ZK-AVM until I think it's like between four, up to four hours, sometimes four to six hours. Whereas optimistic roll-ups because of the way the market has been sort of sold. from business development case and led in many ways by Coinbase. They assume that everything is fine and they allow that sex-dedex arbitrage. That increases volume uh nowhere because market makers are able to then arbitrage between the two. And so for that reason, for the next couple of months, in fact less now, it's probably the next month and a half, ah the volumes between centralized exchanges and decentralized exchanges ah onto Linea is less, unless it's a specific token like the Linea token, than it otherwise could be. But as these upgrades happen in the next little while, and I'm talking like this year, like immediately, and we're already in October, right? As these upgrades happen and finality is increased, then you can start to see a lot more of that arbitrage happening between centralized exchanges and decentralized exchanges. So volumes are able to pick up significantly. Same can be said, though, for like, you know, if you look at Swift payments or you look at any others, ZKM provides actual finality, which is what they need to be able to move funds around. I guess an actual finality rather than the optimistic roll off. So again, it's a It's an ecosystem that has all the legs in the future. It just takes a little bit longer to build it correctly, which is what's being done by Linea now. it's at a head again, spearhead is really what consensus is doing. But again, for the technical stuff, I'll get Declan or Arthur to come on here and talk to you at a different time because they know certainly it's a labor of love for them to be building it. yes, it's a tech stack. I mostly get and we're glad to be part of the narrative really that's winning it up. ah I've met with lots of ZK projects and it feels like there's this movement now. ah ZK has been around for 30 some years, but it feels like now is the right time. I've met with lots of ZK projects and they're all approaching ZK in a different way. You've got one that are kind of focused on applications. You've got one that wants to be enshrined on the main chain. uh but available to all the applications on that chain is kind two different approaches. um And then you've got one that is kind of more modular and just has a different approach. And so it just feels like now is the right time. um What do you think? Well, I mean, yes, purely based on the business development that I'm saying. So that's that's why I say it's the right time. So and not based on anything else. Because, again, I speak to the guys from the new who've been building this. They're a bit more relaxed out there a bit more confident and where they're going to like, we've got to things are happening things that falling into place, we're about to catch up to everything else that needs to be done. And as I said, everybody wants to come across to Linea to get involved in what's happening here. And we're getting all that foundation support. So from a feelings perspective, It feels the same like I feel there's that narrative shift. But the problem with day to day is you don't, like in crypto, unless the price goes up parabolic, you don't feel shit. You're just waiting for stuff to happen. I think from a broader momentum perspective, yes, can I put my finger on when it's going to happen? I would say, I think similar to you, right? Like, I don't know, like it's the momentum is there, it's happening. What will be the catalyst? I don't know. Maybe it's, it could be, it could be the mass token for a while. It could be the in token. It could be the decentralized treasuries, sorry, the digital asset treasuries deploying on chain, could be any number of things that does it. And when I say the catalyst, mean, for retail to recognize that that's where we want to be. And potentially, you know, there'll be an institution doing the same thing. So I don't know what the catalyst is going to be, whether it comes to the retail or the Insto side, it's usually from, actually, it be from both, right? So yeah, I guess that's sort of my take to it. mean, does that sort of resonate with what you're seeing as well? Yeah, yeah. I'm seeing a lot of really great experimentation and one, I think one meta that I really, really appreciate is kind of a less of a focus on infrastructure and more on uh actual users, applications and users. um And I think that's super healthy for crypto in general. I think we have been way too focused on the infrastructure side and um and not so much on users, the user experience, and really applications. But I feel that shift is happening, and I think it's a really good one. Yeah, that's the first time. Let's shift to the community. So I'm on the events page and I'm seeing a Halloween bash here. um I'm seeing an e-sports. It feels like you guys are doing a lot in the community. Tell us kind of like your philosophy on that. Linea push, Linea push, a lot of community stuff to grow for ether X, the community is, it's a real mix, right? So our community has got a lot of eFrogs types in there and a lot of foxes in there and a few other sort of mean coins that are going around, because those communities have been going for a long while. And ether X became the thing they could hang their hat on and go, hold on, the ecosystem is working. We're good. And that could be part of it, right. But in terms of events, our approach from an Etherex perspective is more person to person in a way. So I'll do a weekly show, the Rex Weekly, and that's essentially where I just give my take and update some what's happening. So it's a direct sort of, you know, can speak to the CEO and understand what's happening. And then the community themselves are a real mix. There's some really, really intelligent DeFi players, you know, across the kingdom, but in particular Etherex, who really know deep on tokenomics. They understand best ways to farm, best ways for things to play out. and a really interesting community there. And I've also got meme coiners who just love to be involved. So you've got that real mix. Linea themselves, mean, they, know, Etherex is now a big part of it. And the community that they're trying to do, they're trying to have these fun activities and, you know, fun things that sort of build the engagement because it's a fun team. And the guys from Linea, I mean, nothing sounds less fun than talking about ZK AVM, but they have a good marketing element and a good team who push these things. ah And then, you know, we've recently hired a large marketing firm as well. They were helping us now and you can see some videos of things rolling out, you know, with the recs talking to people and, you know, talking about the digital asset treasury and really our new focus, which is to be the treasury standard for Ethereum. So that's all happening from only not only marketing, but also building out that community of, you know, all believers, whether they be meme pointers uh or serious DeFi types that bring everybody together. Yeah. Trentor, is there anything that you want to talk about that we haven't talked about yet? I think the bookcase for Linea and I'll give you the 30 second piece because it's something that I think the market can do it at once right and the market doubts consensus' ability maybe to pull it off. don't know. Maybe they doubt Linea's ability to pull it off. But if you look at the milestones that are coming up, and I don't control all these, so I'll just give you a tarantula's take on it. The ecosystem needed to set up infrastructure. I want to say infrastructure, don't mean the stuff we were talking about before, but it needed to have things in place. And Etherex was the thing in place to help capture the feed. That's it. Linea TGE, many years promised. That's been done now. Things are moving along as good. The big steps though that really are going to make Linea work, not only are it's technology, but also native staking, which means essentially any Ethereum that's on the chain is automatically staked on mainnet and is earning yield, which is then used in DeFi. on Linea. So we're significantly more yield in sustainable that is coming back. You've got the deployment of, and don't control this, digital asset treasuries coming across onto Linea. And then you've got the trust being shown by Swift in particular to use the Linea, ah the CKBM stack as well uh for all the cross border payments. With all of that sort of trust and capability happening, and then you look at bullish retail type events like the DIN token followed by the mask token. ah There's a lot of catalysts that are all bullish catalysts on the horizon for Linea. And Linea also happens to be part of a multi-cycle company that isn't going anywhere. I think that just puts a really good bookcase on it. And so at the moment, we sort of laugh that people are sleeping on the ecosystem because photos are earning 79%, 85 % yields on their REC33, fully composable token, double what you would be earning when you VE Arrow. And yet the... the market just I guess hasn't caught it yet or doesn't believe so you can take a look yourself. I encourage users to take a look and ask questions. It is more composable. And if you don't like the ecosystem, unlike with the arrow, we have to go on other markets. If you don't end up liking it, I have some other issue you can actually sell your position in Rex 3-3. If you're so inclined, because it's fully composable. So you're not locked into four years. You can do things like you should be able to identify and move your capital as you want to. So that's that is and the bullish thesis to me is is such an easy sell. I'm hoping at the end of this Peter that of course you will not be DMing us, we can talk about how you get more involved in the ecosystem because it is such an easy sell when I get the chance to go through it. So I do want to say thanks for your time and if you have any questions or anyone has any questions or wish to reach out to us on Discord. You got it. Well, Trentor, thank you so much. This has been a really great conversation and I will share all of the URLs and all of the show notes so that people can learn more about Etherex and participate. Thank you so much. Thanks very much. Thanks for your time.