Larry Smoove from Drake Exchange, welcome. Appreciate it. Thank you for having me. So tell us about Drake Exchange. Like what is it and how is it differentiated from other perp exchanges? It's a great question, especially with all the hype pun intended, really bad joke around perp dexes right now. Yeah, it's a great question. We get asked it quite a lot and there's a few different ways to look at it. You can either compare it directly to say, hype liquid. And that sounds like from an architecture standpoint, it's fairly similar. Obviously we have some differences that are custom for Monad, but... We really look at it more from the perspective of every L1 needs that sort of clearing house, that central exchange. And it's much easier and it's undemonstrated. It's much easier to start with perps and then add spot and things like that later. um So Drake is really built to be that central pillar clearing house or whatever you want to call it of Monad where our architecture allows us to. create different kinds of structured products, whether it's hedging products or hedging strategies that are tokenized or different basis yield strategies that are also tokenized and composable. The ways will allow people to tap into our liquidity, utilize that. Also just the, we have what we're calling a universal asset margin, which essentially allows you to use Staked Monad, BTC, ETH. whatever you want at the same time as collateral. So you can be very flexible with the positions you want to open, not to sell your collateral if you want to open a position or borrow against it. You can also create really interesting and fun and unique strategies like you can build a mini Ethena within Drake just using this. For example, take any one of the Stake Monad tokens to pause this collateral. If there's a positive funding rate, you just open a short on it the same value as your collateral and then you're collecting yield on both the stake mon and the short from that or not the short you're the funding rate premium so it's it creates a really new sort of platform for people to build on top of I was big as like I love that goes as a kid so I just see this as like a nice Lego set that and I can buy other sets and add on top and keep building and it just creates something more cohesive and robust as time goes on so That's our vision for Drake and it's custom built for Monad to kind of support Monad to plug into all the other ecosystem projects and just be that base layer that people can tap into for liquidity. I love the analogy of the Lego builder. um And like with a master builder, you know, they can like envision like the city and how all the pieces work together. I wonder about like the initial customer segment or the initial kind of the trader persona that you're going after, because it sounds like a lot of em these instruments inside of Drake can become really complicated. And a lot of people don't know, for example, like Like what is a Delta neutral strategy? Like they have no idea what to do there, but they're interested. And so what kinds of things might you have in terms of like guiding and coaching or educating? m Yeah, of course. And it's something we hear a lot from people. They want to do these strategies and they hear the yield that they can earn. heal. They just, find them interesting. They're exciting, but it takes some tactical know-how, some automation and just some time, unless you want to be spent that you're just glued to your screen. Yeah. You have to do things kind of right. So we're really kind of breaking down those barriers and creating these, all these more strategy faults that take this, like for example, that funding rate strategy, and it does it all for you. You just need to deposit USDC and then you get FR USDC in return, which is just a token that tracks the value for deposit. oh hopefully we'd go up in time, kind of like JLP for Jupiter, HLP. So that's also composable. So can take your FRUSTC, go put it on the lending market or against it. And so that just takes away all the hassle from the user and allows them to have more flexibility, more capital efficiency with their funds as well. So we're targeting people who really... They want the yield, they have the money, they just don't either at the time, know, maybe the technical expertise, or just they don't, they just don't want to do it. But whatever the reason is, we will make a platform that enables this. And as it grows, there'll be more and more strategies added. At the start, it's just going to be funding rate strategy and then the normal, know, market making vault strategy or strategy vault. But apart from that, we did build out like the core feature set. with very advanced traders in mind. So it mimics the feature set of a centralized exchange quite a lot, just in the way that the margin is calculated. um And Resonable is actually fantastic for helping with these sorts of different margin calculations. So that's great. Yeah, we have little features just like a collateral swap, which I don't think anyone's really done yet in DeFi. And essentially, if you have a trade open with BTC, it's collateral. BTC starts dumping. As it's going down, your liquidation price is changing. You're getting close to being liquidated. You can just swap out of your BTC to either DUSDC, USDT without closing out your position. So then your liquidation price maybe is, it improves. So. All those little features are things that I don't really expect retail traders to use, but maybe like a smaller market maker that's running their own shop, they're more tailored for them. But on the surface, we're just making it very easy to use for anyone. have USTC, have some, any flavor of the steak from that to open, it's gonna be something for you there. um There's plenty of perp taxes, there's plenty of places to actually trade, but. offering users an experience on top of that. That simplifies their life, takes away the hassle, the stress. That's where we think there's a lot of value. And it sounds like it. mean, for, you know, I'm probably the quintessential like uh retail trader. I love trading on perp's taxes, but I know nothing. so hearing about the vaults that you're creating and how, you know, it could be like a one-stop shop. If I want to follow some strategy, then I just deposit into a vault and everything happens behind the scenes for me. That's huge. That's huge for, you know, user experience and also stickiness. I mean, if I have my capital and Drake and it's doing all these things on my behalf, I'm not going to move it out of there. And it sounds like you guys have built something like really, really exciting and really excited for when you guys, ah you know, when Moenad launches Mainnet. um And yeah, just very, very excited about the go-to market. Let's jump into Redstone. You mentioned Redstone Bolt. Redstone in Jewel Lake loves working with you and with the Drake team. um Tell us how you guys are using Bolt in Drake. oh So there's a few different ways. um The first is like I mentioned the margin calculations. Since we're using assets that they're not just stable coins as your margin, those values go up and down. And if you're trade that as know, price of the asset you're trading is going up and down and the price of your collateral is going up and down, the value of those, that's a very dynamic liquidation price, especially if you have multiple positions. volatile assets all using volatile collateral, so that's just a lot of calculation so having very quick very trustworthy very consistent feeds for this Every little bit helps just so that the trader gets a better experience less chance of you know We can just you can trade without worrying about in liquidated as much like there won't be some crazy wick and you get stopped out like those milliseconds they really count and when it comes to this stuff so that's one of the ways another one is um if you do happen to get liquidated ah usually a lot of the value goes back to parties which doesn't go back it goes to parties outside of the protocol the ones that are actually facilitating liquidation um there's nothing inherently wrong with that but with Redstone Bolt and some other fantastic Mono projects, there's ways for the protocol to actually retain the value from these liquidations um called OEV and we think it's game changing. um And it provides a new revenue stream, it can help give some money back to the user that's liquidated to buffer the loss. There's a lot of benefit that comes from that. First off, just getting better price feeds. It's more accurate. You can enter a trade easier. You can exit a trade easier. Less risk of getting liquidated. It's just much easier for us to do calculations on the backend. And also, it can keep a lot of the value and revenue within the protocol and distribute it back to the users rather than leaking out towards different. There's nothing wrong with that, but if you can keep it within the protocol, within the users, that'd be ideal. So. We're really excited for you guys to be able to actually be able to utilize you guys. made that. It's going to be a good time. Yeah, you mentioned the OEV solution. I know you and we've talked about uh our OEV solution, which is called Atom. And that's exactly the kind of feedback we're hearing is there's nothing wrong with MEV, but if we can reduce or eliminate leakage altogether and keep the capital inside of the protocol, that's just great for our space. And I think the one thing that we get a lot em that we kind of get wrong in crypto a little bit is we view these protocols as like projects when honestly they're businesses. And I think if we think more along that, like, I think if we reframed our thinking and instead of projects, we are all business owners and these are all small businesses. We're trying to grow these businesses. It kind of changes the way we think about things. We become kind of more focused on revenue. user experience, that type of thing versus kind of like a, I don't know, more, you know, like theoretical thinking, we become more practical. Less in the clouds, more grounded. Yeah, and I like that. We need more of that. um So a question, if Redstone Bolt or our OEV solution, Atom, wasn't around, um what would Drake have to do to be able to implement the kinds of features that you want for your users? Oh, that's a really interesting question actually. There's a lot of great Oracle providers out there and we will, yeah, I think we'd have to just kind of aggregate a few different Oracles or build out our own really. Likely if we had all the time in the world, we'd just build out our own. But I know this is very complex and it takes a lot of engineering work. So it'd be tough to be honest. Thankfully there are other very quality Oracle providers out there and Drake's built so that we can kind of aggregate Oracle feeds as well just so that we're not reliant on one. It's just, you don't really ever want to have a central point of failure. So we can definitely be using some as a priority and have a different weighting but. Yeah, I think we just have to kind piece something together to really achieve the same outcome as what we get from just all in one package, Yeah. Tell us about your experience working with the team. Like, is it enjoyable? Are they responsive? Tell us all about that. Is there anything on here? The Redstone team, yeah. Oh, they've been great. super quick to respond. Really good guys. You can tell that they actually care about what they're doing. That makes a big difference. You can saw people are just, it's a job to them and they do a great job. They do good work, you know, but it's very different when someone's actually passionate about what they do and the value they bring. It's like Alex from Fastlane That's who will talk to you for 10 hours about MEV and what they're doing to fix it. it's like, don't know what you're saying half the time, but it's great. And I love the energy. I love the passion. I get the same vibe from you guys about the problems you're trying to solve and how you're going about it and innovating. It's exciting to work with you. That's awesome. Well, appreciate that. uh Tell us about your road to mainnet. I guess what can users expect on day one when Monad goes live? uh Anything that you can share would be great. Yeah, so whenever Moab launches, um we will be there, day one. Thankfully, we started development two-ish years ago, maybe a little more at that point, and maybe a few pivots along the way. yeah, we're really confident and excited about our day one launch. won't have every single feature right away. We still need to get some, need to get an independent audit on the Funding Rate Vault. So unfortunately that won't be live the first day, but pretty much everything else should be. We have a lot of different, really, I don't wanna say too much, but there's gonna be a lot of ways to. you get some extra value the first week if you're active and a lot of fun stuff, different opportunities to earn things from maybe Drake, maybe some other protocols. I can't say for certain, but all I know is that we will have very deep liquidity for Mon day one. So if you want to trade Mon, it's going to be the place to be. Awesome. Well, Redstone loves working with you and the Drake team and we're excited for your launch. Thanks so much. Yeah, of course. Thanks for having me.