Welcome back to the Block by Block show, where we go deep with the founders, builders and minds shaping the next wave of crypto adoption. Today's guest is Dom Ryder, the founder of Alvara, protocol pushing the boundaries of DeFi innovation. Dom's been driving the vision, product strategy and community growth for Alvara. And he's no stranger to sharing sharp opinions and where crypto is headed. So Dom, let's start with the origin story of Alvara. Let's start from the beginning, like why you... How did Alvara come about and what was the original key insight that made you want to build it? Yeah, thanks for having me. Sharp opinions, I like that. It does tend to be true. So the original, we've to go back quite some, over a decade, I reckon. So I... Started out before crypto as a junior stockbroker on what was supposed to be my gap year before I was to go on study sociology at the University of Bristol But on my gap year, I joined a junior derivatives brokerage in London as a commission only uh Cold-cooler basically 250 cold cools a day and that just got me proper hooked know, the commission only environment, killing what you eat, the constant stress and dopamine just plugged into my ADHD like nothing else. And so I didn't take up my place at university. Instead, I took my Chartered Institute of Securities and Investments exams. And then by the time I left there, I was a senior derivatives trader and head of desk. I then joined FTSE 100 wealth manager called St. James's Place as associate partner. And then after that, I joined a traditional venture capital. uh So what always very much annoyed me about, and one common symptom of ADHD is justice sensitivity. If you remember anyone in your school who... to ADHD whenever they would react like you know badly generally but if they were sort of falsely accused of doing something wrong or they were you know perceived as the victim of some sort of injustice then the reaction was quite severe and so when I would give my contributions and investment meetings I would always give fairly good ones, which would always in London in particular get the next question from the investment team, which was what school did you go to, where did you study? And then when I said that I was state educated, when I said that I ah didn't go to university, uh they would never consider my opinions the same again. ah and that sort of nepotism and particularly sort of classism and private school mentality is quite rife in London. But even sort of applying to investment banks, uh any sort of large uh sort of company where you didn't, know, basically if you had like an automatic filtering on site recruitment. you would get filtered out as soon as you didn't tick the box that said that you had a degree. And so that pissed me off because they would happily hire, you know, a 21 year old spotty, you know, just after teenager who went to the right school with zero experience, but me with 10 years at, you know, senior financial positions, I couldn't even get a look in. And so Alvara and the ERC 7621, is basically a reaction to that. The 7621 allows for a fully decentralized uh sort of asset management token standard where anyone can come onto the platform, anybody can manage a fund, anyone can mint a fund, all of this is minted to their wallet and it allows for the opportunity of a true meritocracy where your uh merits stand alone. You don't have to worry about CFA's, IMC's or anything else, you actually can just truly perform. And so this is what I missed in my opportunity for in traditional finance. And so that's where Alvaro comes from, essentially. So it sounds like you develop a chip in your shoulder a little bit and that kind of drove, you know, maybe wanting to change the, I don't know, the financial system or at least the approach to finance. Does that sound about right? Yeah, absolutely. Basically it all big. It was all big one big tantrum. ah I've met with many founders now, you know, hosting this podcast. And um I can say that, you know, from my experience, almost every single one of them has some kind of chip on their shoulder or something to prove that has driven them to become an entrepreneur and build something. And so your story definitely resonates. Let's talk about the specifics of Alvara. I mean, there's many DeFi protocols. so in this pod, I want to go into the detail of like, what is Alvara? How is it different from, you know, what most people kind of associate with DeFi um and who the target audience is? Because I think that's probably one of the key differentiators of Alvara is like who its target audience is. Maybe we can start with there. um Tell us about it. so there's quite a lot of protocols that have produced crypto indexes, even going back to 2020 with index co-op. But indexes are effectively passive vehicles. Whereas what we're building allows for full discretionary changes. So active management, which means that you're not just following a sector. You actually have a individual who is running this or an AI agent, which some people are building on top. And so that's the key differentiator is that everybody was building, you know, some some of our competitors like Index Co-op, Enzyme Finance, were building for indexes. However, that is not the predominant assets under management of the traditional financial industry. Most funds are active where the holdings aren't just kept the same. And if they are kept the same, they're at least rebalanced. And so... What we've built is a product that the industry could actually use in the fact that people can still have passive if they so wish, but we actually empower an individual to mint a business, manage a business, and even sell a business all within one platform. where everybody earns fees from their assets under management, they can build reputation, they can build trust, and this allows for a level of scalability which just isn't matched across our competitor landscape because every single 7621, whenever... any external individual contributes Ethereum to that, they get minted an ERC-20 LP token, which represents their overall portion of that 7621. And so if all of your contributors have a ERC-20 representation, you as a manager can add liquidity, you can build staking, you can build governance, can build and innovate anything that you can innovate on top of a normal ERC-20, you can build on top of your 7621. which means that you have the ability for hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of individual sub-dows and sub-protocols all built on top of our bottom layer infrastructure. So the scalability is unmatched. In terms of the last question about who the target is, we want to effectively cater for all. We provide the factory contract to allow anyone to mint one of these to their wallet so that they don't need to have the money to hire a dev or be able to code themselves. So that allows us to have access and reach to absolutely anybody. But at the same time, we understand, if you're a traditional institution, you're not going to mind paying a few thousand for a developer to code this for you. And so just like how OpenSea... ah recognizes any 721 or 1155, it doesn't matter if you mint it through OpenSeal or not, we recognize any 7621. So we provide the infrastructure to onboard sort of absolutely anybody, but we will recognize it whether it's minted through us or off platform as well. So you've mentioned the ERC7621 uh many times. Maybe take us back to what that is and its role in the Alvara ecosystem. Why is that important? Because I don't think most people are familiar with that token standard. No, there wouldn't be. It was brand new because we invented it. So the 7621 aims to be the go-to token standard for on-chain crypto asset management. Because right now you do have all of these competitors building all different things. you just can't compare them. I don't mean you can't compare them like we're so much better. I mean that you have one person doing it one way and another person doing it another way and therefore there's no way to aggregate all of these together. Like an ERC-20, you've got CMC, CoinMarketCap, you've got CoinGecko and there should be a token standard where you can compare apples and apples because otherwise you're always comparing apples and pears and you're never getting a representative example because that leads to you know individuals who will if the data is not consistent then you rely on the ah institution or the businesses interpretation of that data. As in they can always say, well, ours hasn't got that performance because this is the way that Alvara represents the data. We actually represent the data like this. in fact, you know, it basically removes the need for interpretation. And it also means that, you know, when Disney came on and did an NFT collection, when Pepsi did an NFT collection, they use the ERC 721. because the 721 is the NFT and the NFT is a 721 it is synonymous you know they are not even differentiated it's just the go-to token standard for NFTs and so what we're aiming to get is that go-to token standard for on-chain crypto asset management because essentially you know, anyone who believes in this industry, the fact that share certificates are a thing shows that, you know, tokenized stocks and all of the announcements we've had recently with sort of Robinhood and everything, shows that that is the way that we're going. And if we can be the authors of the go-to token standard. uh the go-to aggregator for this token standard and the creators of it, then our first move of advantage is akin to OpenSea also having invented the NFT at the same time. Okay, so maybe take us through Alvara. uh What is the typical customer journey? Maybe tell us about the characteristics of the actual customer that would use Alvara versus another DeFi protocol. Yeah, I mean could, can share my screen and run through the demo live with you if that works. So for video that would be great. um We'll have issues with the audio version. fair enough, it not record our audio over the screen share? it'll record audio, but you know, if you're listening to it, you can't see what you're doing. So, but that's fine. We can, maybe if you can talk through it, that would be okay. Yeah, sure. me load up the side tabs. So effectively we provide and we are building the infrastructure to allow anybody to create their own and manage their own crypto asset portfolio. So Alvaro here. So people come onto the platform, they can add an icon, let's say that you want to design yourself a logo. You can put that in and uh let's put just some random chart here. So we can call this the block. demo BD and this is a gaming and metaverse 7621. There we go. Next, I can go on and I can uh put in some mana, put in some sand, let's put in some axi, we can put in some Smooth Love Potion which is Axie's Subtoken. So what are you doing right here? Well, maybe describe the this this notion of a basket Yeah. So essentially you can, um, after you've added your icon, after you've added your ticker that you would like and the name of your 7621, you can paste any contract address or search any tokens. Um, and Populate what you would like in your 7621 and in your basket. So I've added those tokens that I've listed because I've named this one a gaming and metaverse basket. I then set the weightings so 5 % as a minimum is in the Alvara token. That's because we're providing the factory contract to allow people to use this. Like I mentioned, know, people can code it themselves. We're fully for that. We'll still recognize it. ah It's just a stipulation so it's not not a fee. It's just for those people who are Well, you'd hope people using the platform are bullish enough to put 5 % in anyway uh Let me fill this up to a hundred percent this final one as 30. this basket represents an index of all of these tokens that are metaverse tokens. Well, an index in the sense that this is a starting portfolio. So as the manager, I can change these weightings and allocations at will. And that's different to our... uh competition which do only allow for the exact same thing in all of these. So this means that the manager actually has an incentive to manage and it's not just relying on the brand or Alvara to produce these indexes for people to buy them. We allow for people to actually build fully on top of us. So I've just sent this off to Sepolia, which takes a little time to index. So whilst it's doing that, I can show you our leaderboard. So this is where we rank for those who aren't. watching the video, is where we rank every individual, so we've got our top gainers, and this is basically a marketplace for individuals to look at who is on the platform, how are they performing, what is their volume, everything you would expect from a of leaderboard and asset management hub, essentially. So it feels like uh Alvara, its target audience are essentially money managers, but anyone can become a money manager. Yeah, we, um so ourselves, we do not run any baskets. We have no custody. As I can show you here on the earlier test net that you can see here, every single, uh every single transaction is asset backed, which means that effectively people are building spot. ETFs but actively managed so it's in everyone's best interest in the fact that the tokens that you actually purchase We're not just giving you a representation of that You actually are holding those tokens within your 7621 So your favorite protocols will actually be getting by pressure from that Because everything is collateralized within this 7621 and swapped all within it the 7.621 acts like an interface to allow the manager to change the weightings. However, do not have access to the actual Ethereum stored for safety reasons. So the only way that anybody can access the Ethereum within the 7.621 is if they hold the corresponding LP tokens. So just like how Uniswap B2 functioned, where you have erc20 uni v2 LP tokens, every single 7621 has its erc20 LP equivalent because this is what allows the manager to build a full protocol and subDAO on top of this if they so wish because they know exactly who their holders are because every single one has the LP token. So I can show you on this one that we just minted that's only got one holder right now because obviously I just created it and I'm the only person in that but I can only withdraw what I put in. The actual 7621 itself as an interface swaps everything within it so that you don't have the manager able to just grab that Ethereum and leg it. Interesting. So we, I think the step we missed was the actual funding of buying the assets in the basket. um But that needs to happen still, or did it already happen? So when I minted the 7621, I minted it with one Sepolia ETH as the manager. But if I click on any of these on the leaderboard, I can contribute to any of these. Here you can see I'm just typing in point two, clicking a few buttons and contributing and then I will, um hang on, I'm on the, was sharing the wrong screen there, but essentially you can click through the leaderboard, click on any 7621, click on contribute, and then you will be a holder of that 7621 and therefore also a holder of the LP token. So here's the transaction where I just contributed to this other basket. Once I index this. Interesting. it's a polio being very slow, but yeah, you can see on this here that every single one has the holdings, it has the slippage tolerance that can be changed and everything like that. So it's like a marketplace for managers. Yeah, here you go, you can see the point to if that I added and it swaps to this. let's talk about the other side of the market now. So I go on the leaderboard and then what I see is the performance of each of these money managers. And let's say I want to contribute uh one ETH into a money manager. I like the basket, I like their performance. Is that kind of the demand side of what you're doing or what Alvara is trying to do? Yeah, exactly. We're providing the marketplace to allow for anyone to contribute to anybody else's 7621, whether that be contributing to an institution or contributing to a retail user who's managing it. It's a pure meritocracy where you truly... can rise to the top just based on the merits of your own performance. doesn't matter if you have a CFA, doesn't matter if you have an IMC, a degree, a Masters, a PhD, if you have the best performance you will show up at the top of the leaderboard and you will benefit from having that exposure. So there's no glass ceilings with Alvara. That is very, very interesting. uh So I have a number of relatives that are money managers. And one of them right now is, you he manages a bunch of 401ks. I don't know if you have 401ks in London or in, it's very common in the US, right? And what he is doing, um he's actually buying out other money managers that are retiring. And so he's kind of forming kind of a roll up, I guess, of a bunch of accounts. He's bringing them into his own house. I wonder, I guess I'm thinking ahead. I envisioned this leaderboard with hundreds of money managers. Some of them are very professionalized. Some are amateur. But it's equalized based on just merit. How are these things performing? um But at some point, if you become a decently sized money manager with a lot of assets under management, you may want to acquire others. Have you thought about what that might look like uh within the Alvara system? Have you even thought about that? so at the beginning when I mentioned that you can mint a fund, manage a fund and even sell the fund, you can sell the rights to manage your 7621 on the platform. So that's not going to be eh a feature on the V1, which is due August 14th, but that is in the V2. that's coming down the line. So it's something we're already thinking about to allow people that, you know, full business cycle. You know, let's say that somebody does build an index and let's say that they add, you know, Animoca brands, 2020 investments with liquid tokens. And let's say that that gets a hundred eith of contributions. That is still passive, obviously, because it's a 2020 tranche. It's not going to need active management. And so people can actually sell the rights to that if it has managed to build AUM just from being a popular sector. Let's say it was gaming or metaverse or the DeFi. People can. exit which is obviously not a term that tends to be used much in crypto businesses. The secondary market for this things is not something that's currently to my knowledge sort of built into any other protocol. Yeah, this is really, really interesting. I actually don't know of any other DeFi protocol that functions the way Alvara does, where you become your own money manager and creating a basket and then allowing others to contribute into that basket. This is actually really, really unique. Where is Alvara in terms of like main net, test net? Can users use it now? So it's a public testnet so anyone can play around with it and get ready ahead of our mainnet launch which is scheduled for just over a month today on the 14th of August. people can get familiar with the platform, just need some foliar EIF and... And then, yeah, just over a month left and then we will be ready to launch the mainnet and people can start minting, adding and uh contributing to baskets or their own. Yeah, let's talk about the assets available. it, uh I guess any crypto asset is available right now? Or are you, okay, on any chain? no, not on any chain. That's gonna come later because the problem that we have, well, uh it's a problem that's born of a good thing because we are fully asset backing these. Obviously when we're building some sort of a Oracle slash bridging system because we want we need to have the actual spot assets stored somewhere. so whether that be, right now we're on Ethereum and Avalanche. So let's say that somebody adds, you know, what's wrapped B and B. Let's say there's not an Ethereum version of that. There probably is, but for the sake of this example. What we don't want to do is just give them a representation token which doesn't have any value because obviously it doesn't have any value and therefore the Ethereum is not really buying anything that's going to move in price and therefore if BNV outperforms Ethereum then it's going to mess up the whole weightings of the basket. And so what we're looking at is a oracle-based system which allows for the representation token still, however it purchases on the uh non-Ethereum chain the asset they have specified because then the asset is still owned, albeit not directly by the Ethereum ERC7621, but it is still bought and it is still kept and stored separately and come the time that they would want to exit. any price increase or depreciation is effectively still given back. that's the way that we're looking at it at present. um yeah, we had to be, there were two different things for this really. So we had to be led by TVL. Our aim is to become the biggest at what we do and therefore, the trade off between fees versus liquidity, we had to go with liquidity because Ethereum is the home of DeFi. And so therefore, if we were to launch just solely on another chain, then... oh we may have cheaper fees for people managing, however what we don't have is enough depth because we need to attract institutions and the depth and the LP pools in terms of size is unparalleled to EVE. EVE wins every single time. So it's something that we are working on because people will want, you know, non-Ethereum and Avalanche assets. It's just, yeah, one thing at a time. We've got to build to a certain V1, get that out of the way, and then move on to the next, otherwise you end up being one of these protocols that never goes live because they're always adding new stuff before even shipping the old. Yeah. You mentioned you want to attract institutions. Tell us more about that. Because I was under the impression that it's money managers primarily, but turns out anyone can become a money manager. um But the market is really wide open. uh You mentioned institutions. I can also see DAOs and foundations de-risking through Alvara. because a lot of these foundations have, know, they're, it's quite risky because they hold primarily, their treasures are primarily in the token. And so they probably want to de-risk a little bit. And I can see Alvara being a solution to that. Another area that makes a lot of sense for me is for VCs. So let's say for example, again, not to pick on Animoca brands, but any VC, especially in crypto, 90 % of their investments fail. That is just the venture game. Mm-hmm. crypto or traditional if you're going for sort of early stage tech, whether that's blockchain tech or normal tech, you know, that 10 % success rate, that's doing well. However, in crypto, you have a very separate behavioral paradigm where unfortunately, because you are in an industry that doesn't actually all the time reward utility doesn't always reward good behavior. You end up having a lot of undiscovered and assets which VCs fully backed believing in the product and almost certainly still believe in the product. But because of how fickle and junior our industry is, everyone likes to buy low and sell high until it's time to buy low. Because of that. you may have out of that 90 % failed or by failed, I mean in this sense for a VC, written off the book, dusted, gone down by like 95%, half of those may still be pushing. On their socials, still trying to get that price discovery, still trying to make something, still building, and they are getting kicked out, kicked down, stomped on by the market. And so suddenly if you are an Amoku you have your All-Stars basket where you have your sandboxes, your mocha verses, but then you have your value basket. And so you as VC can put your money where your mouth is and say, we still believe these are the ones. And so by doing that, they are getting real buys and real flows into those tokens of theirs that they are underwater on through no fault of their own. through no fault of the team's own and they are giving them that price discovery, depending on how much they're getting, but they're giving exposure and that doesn't cost them anything to do at all. In fact, they actually get money from them, both the protocol and uh the VC because they're earning a management fee from this. That's also a nice string to their bow. You know, if you can say as a VC, you know, not only would I like to invest a quarter of a million into your private round, but I also have a 7621 liquid fund, which I will then make you a 10 % holder within and it's got a thousand Ethereum in it. You you know, you've got a hundred eith of buy pressure as soon as you're live as well. So. That's where I see a very obvious use case because I really don't see the downside. Who loses in that scenario? The team gets new buyers, the team gets exposure, the VC brings back their underwater investments. Users get to see who these VCs are still believing in and still backing, get exposure to the fact that they are down in the dumps and they are value. Because you know, the VC is not going to just recommend, you know, they still have their reputation to stake. So you know that even though these value ones are, you know, have dropped and because they've dropped, no one wants to buy them. But that does not mean in crypto that they're not a good product. It means that they're not trendy right now because everyone in crypto is ADHD and they're constantly distracted and you're, you In normal world, if you see a scam, you report it, it gets taken down or goes away. In crypto, they're your competition. uh So I see that as very easy win for everybody. uh I can see liquid funds being very interested in this, foundations, de-risking their treasuries. eh Tell us about the go-to-market. What is your plan for go-to-market? You mentioned that you're in private test net right now. um When you move towards a public test net and then main net eventually, tell us your go-to-market. And what's the plan there? So we brought on board a well-known agency who are going to be managing a lot of this called Hype. uh And alongside that, you do have the normal. I mean, I'm always a very big believer in nobody wants to, if anybody knows they've been marketed to, the chances of them actually buying that product are very slim. It's about your touch points. It's them feeling clever. ah People do not buy stuff because someone tells them it's a good thing to buy. Because if someone is telling them it's a good thing to buy, then they know that the word's already out. People need to find something that makes them feel in the know. And so, obviously, if I... know, reveal the ideas of how we can do that, then that sort of ruins it. But I've always found in my experience, you know, I've always been in sales, you know, 250 protocols a day, commission only. So, you know, I'm somewhat of a scientist myself. And I just always found that... Psychology is such a big part of crypto, like honestly, like people have no idea. And people also have no idea about how much content is born pay for. From your news publications, your coin telegraphs, your coin desk, to your block works, to literally, if you are not a top free token, and there's a YouTuber talking about you who's well known, like, I think people presume that even like a top 50 token, that's probably organic. But like literally, like if you're not Ethereum Solana, or like Bitcoin, maybe Doge, maybe Avalanche, like even like those, it's just you're more than likely that's being born painful. Even your polka dots are having to do it. Your polygons are having to do it. And think people realize the extent to which, but that's, know, as a protocol that's marketing, you that's not necessarily a bad thing because That's what drives awareness is no one likes to feel like a fool. And people do feel like a fool if they buy something because someone told them to and then they found out that that person was paid to do it. It's all about that balance. again, weighing that towards you don't want to deceive people. but at the same time you've got to find a way to make them feel special. Yeah, I don't even know that answers the question, but that's my little rant or info segment on the sort of marketing that I see that works and what doesn't. Because it's not enough now to just have a bunch of influencers because no one trusts them. Like they siphon through, you know. community. the people who used to have pool in 2020, 2021, no one listens to them anymore. those people don't have, you know, it's your like sort of micro KOLs and your sort of community groups and your like trading channel, the ones that now are popular. But like the moon call if he ever was talks about anything There is no one who is thinking. Oh wow covering that out the kindness of this heart uh yeah, I'm not thinking of influencers necessarily. I'm thinking of really, it's, you you're building a two-sided market. You need money managers to create a basket, create baskets of assets. And then they need to market to some kind of audience that will then contribute to their basket. And so what does that look like, you know, as you think about go to market, because as these money managers come on the Alvara platform, your responsibility changes a little bit because you want them to be successful. And so I imagine to some degree you're going to be helping them get contributions to their baskets or something systematic like that is my guess. mean, we have to be, uh, we have to be careful in, it's like any, uh picking winners, but... Yeah, like connections in the background, introduction, stuff like that. You know, a lot will depend on the level of because we are the full permissionless platform, anybody can mint a 7621. And so if people don't submit third party KYC, with their 7621, there'll be a label on it that says, do not contribute to this as, well, basically because they could be anybody. Because we need to have that there because inevitably, you know, even though. people will see that massive risk warning at the top, people will click, you know, click out of it, people will click accept, people will contribute. They'll do all of those things, but they'll still blame us if it goes wrong. And so we do need to be careful, you know, in that regard, but all roads lead back to Alvara, you know, we are there. We're not service provider. uh We are decentralized infrastructure and the managers of that. uh We need to be attracting, you know... hard workers and entrepreneurs, business owners and people who know what it takes to build it. And there's an amount of support that we can provide for that because we are providing a network. When I was at my stock brokers, no one was paying me a salary, but I was trading under their license. And so they took some of my fees. Yeah. Obviously with Albright it's a much smaller amount than that and it's very different but ah the go to market for us very much is the phrase, I'm not sure if there's an American version but in the UK we say look after the pennies and the pounds look after themselves and that's the idea with having the factory contract and having that 7621 easily minable by absolutely anyone is that there's two roads to Rome. Number one is that 7621 becomes a go-to token standard for on-chain asset management and naturally we have that first mover advantage as the first aggregator and the inventor. And the other way is through the platform itself and populating it. And so those will allow us to link the success between two different avenues. And so our job as the foundation and the team of developers deploying and maintaining this platform is to deal with the institutions and do the work on sort of uh attracting the pounds because the factory contract means that people can create as many of these as they want. The same person could start a gaming basket, Metaverse basket, a DeFi basket. Someone can have 10 of these if they're all indexes. Well, they could have 10 active ones if they have the time. And so what we need to be spending our time on that route to market is taken care of, is that we've built it in a way that makes it very, easy for people to be able to do all of this themselves. But obviously we need to concentrate on getting those bigger, more recognisable names in order to give people that little hug that they need to think, okay, this is all good. Yeah, the let's talk about fees really quick and then and then I have some questions around a couple of tweets that you sent out um So the money manager I'm guessing takes a fee and then Alvara takes a fee uh Which makes make sense. Tell us about that Yeah, so when people mint a basket, there's a half percent initial fee which is charged to the manager who creates it. There is 1 % AUM, so well AMC, annual management charge. So that is accrued monthly, so 1 % divided by 12 taken once a month paid to the manager. there is half percent on deposits and withdrawals from the baskets. So there is a, well, there's a, it's not so much a fee, but there's a way to use Alvara in order to attract additional attention and additional assets under management, which is we've taken the same sort of gauge weight governance style as Curve Finance, and we've applied that. to the 7621's LP token. like how Curve spurned the Curve wars where you had Convex, Yearn, Pickle Finance, BP Finance, StakeDAO, all of these aggregators trying to get as much VE Curve, Vote Escrow Curve as possible in order to send Curve to their LPs because if they got the largest LP pot, they'd earn the most fees. We've taken that exact same mechanic and applied it to the 7621's LP token, which means you as a manager the more Alvara you own and the longer you stake it for the more voting power you get the more voting power you have the more Alvara you can send to your contributors via us as the protocol which essentially gives you a yield for contributors to your basket so the more you have staked the longer you have it staked for the more yield your holders can earn, the more yield they earn, the more incentivized they are to give you money, the more money they give you, the more annual management charge you earn. And it's a cycle of, you know, it's a positive flywheel in the fact that let's say, because almost certainly the top performer on the leaderboard is going to be some absolute nutter who bought like 10 tokens just launched from Dextral's live pairs. And so institutions in order to attract. similar levels of capital, because they have risk adjusted returns. not trying, they're not to the moon. to as much of the moon as we can in a very conservative way. And so they have the ability to use their institutional capital in order to buy and stake Alvara to send that yield so that we are effectively paying a dividend on their 7621 to incentivize extra AUM. And so you can imagine sort of the effect this caused with the curve wars, but with the ability of thousands of institutions to compete in this way. is a very good mechanism because it maintains the meritocracy but it does allow for institutions to have this sort of cut through the noise effect uh when it comes to the yield that is given to their contributors. Yeah. Tell us about, uh so this week there was a big announcement yesterday with Phantom now supporting Hyperliquid. And there's kind of this movement of uh front end applications, know, tying into some backend service. um Do you envision uh like uh customer front ends into Alvara as the backend at some point? Yeah, we've definitely, we've spoken about like sort of, know, white labeling the platform, particularly when it comes to sort of, you know, institutions who need to have certain tick boxes, like, you know, accredited investor status, everything like that, and working with them and customizing everything from that end. I find it quite strange really in like crypto, how I mean it's good in a way but I also find it quite naive how like, phantom must know that they could have just built it themselves and they'd earn more money, more fees. Yeah, it seems strange to me because like, you know, people think that like JP Morgan is going to come on to like Ethereum and start using Arbe. Like absolutely not. Like they're not paying fees to anyone. They work in the monopolizing game. Like they'll build their own and they'll use their own and they'll crush Arbe. They're not going to be using decentralized financial lending for their... banking customers. it's anyone who believes that, sorry, but you are dreaming. Like I would love to live in that fairy tale world with you, but it doesn't make sense. Now that's not to say that you can't build the alternative financial system. There's a lot of merit in that. But you know, when I see people saying that, you know, institutions are going to use these debts. rather than just, you know, they're not going to pay fees for stuff that they can build in-house. Like they have trillions of dollars, like to think that they would not just build in our bay. And it would have made it very easy for them with the fact that we open source everything. you know, when I, you know, I see those sort of, guess like, you know, there's merits that can be played have been like, you know, Phantom probably thought hyper liquid is doing well. Their token is bigger than ours. Phantom did, did airdrop that token, didn't they? Um, yeah, so. Yeah, I was just curious about because Alvara is, I mean, it's a exceedingly useful product. can see how, I mean, it's very useful. But you know, in crypto, I can see like a front end being built on top of Alvara and that could be a very interesting kind of distribution channel for Alvara. And especially if wallets or like these super apps kind of build on top of it, that could be a very interesting distribution channel. And that was just kind of where my mind was at. Yeah, we've got like group chats on Telegram with like Metamask and stuff, uh but you know, man, do these guys move slow. I mean, Metamask, one game. And also it's always a game of, you know, push pull. ah It's like even with the ERC7621 itself, like there's two ways that... There's two ways that you become a token standard. You can submit the draft like we had and that gets you the official number. However, the drafts stay up there for, even the ERC-20 took like two years to become actually given. And so you can either drive it through quickly by the fact that people adopt and use it and therefore it becomes a no question. Or, because you can build it, you can submit a token standard. But if no one actually uses it, then like, Ethereum's not gonna get around to actually looking at it, approving it. The point is, they're called EIPs, Ethereum Improvement Proposals. So they need to see that it is an improvement, and how do you show them that by people using it, and they can see, yeah, I guess this is an improvement. And so that's what I see. sort of will drive it. And so because we're testnet currently, we're not mainnet, know, overnight people's attention shifts. Basically people need to see what's in it for me. And right now, with us being on testnet, you know, those conversations are hard to have because we don't have the, uh you know, the TVL power. to say, you know, we can say our testnet TBO is XYZ, but you know, that doesn't really mean anything. So we'll have a lot more weight to throw in terms of, you know, getting these integrations done once we want to be live in a month's time. Yeah. So final question. You tweeted recently, token launches are becoming theater. Tell us what you mean by that. I mean, look at pump.fun raising a billion. It's all just game theory. I find it fascinating. Like I was saying, it's psychology. everybody says they love to buy high and sell low, as soon as it's time, buy low, sell high, but as soon as it actually comes to it. And it's just fascinating to watch. And the real winners are the individuals who can play the game. And you have to play it so well. Because I see a lot of this stuff like, Pudgy Penguins have done some good marketing, but some of the stuff that they do, to me, is very obviously fake. uh where for example, I'll see a tweet of like. my god, this streamer got a five beef tip on abstract. It's like yeah, you obviously gave me it like You're not fooling anyone, but maybe that's just me. Maybe I'm just pessimistic guy, but like when I see that I think yeah, right What's it one of your users just gave that random streamer 12 grand did they? Just for fun and it didn't come from the marketing budget or any of your team an idea But I don't know do people see that and genuinely think wow, I'm gonna stream on abstract because that means I can do that or you know and that's where it's it's all you know yeah because but at the same time you know this fake it till you make it has been the cornerstone of crypto for so long Look at FTX and how much money they managed to raise and their whole accounting system was QuickBooks and they were like raised stupid valuations from like Sequoia and You know, nobody rewards good behavior in crypto. Everybody loves to chuck money at deviants. It's like, you know, when Free Arrow's capital bankrupted themselves and the whole market for like two years, they go and launch a token, a new one for like trading like derivatives of like, you know, literally like bankruptcy loans. Instantly, the token is at 300 million market cap. They literally went bankrupt and everybody knows and yet people just chuck money at these like scammers over and over again Like people just come back scam leave for a year come back scam again and every time people give them more money and then you see like I said about You know these vcs having so many underwater investments where the team is still trying still pushing but Yeah, I really wish the crypto would stop rewarding the very worst behavior. It's like, know, HTX, they listed Manta not before it pumped, not after it pumped, but when it was getting tons of volume because the insiders had dumped it by 90%, listing announced the next day. They charge like half a million to everyone else. But if you scam to the point that you have lots of volume because everyone's dumping because it's scam, you get a listing on HTX for free. And it's just, we'll stop attracting scammers when we stop like rewarding scammers. And I bet you anything that, know, punk.fund launch of one billion on the 12th, probably sells out in about 10 minutes, less maybe. because that's just, we just don't learn. Like some of us do, but most of us don't. Okay. Well, Dom, this has been really, really interesting. um think Alvara is a, I think takes DeFi to a whole different level um to, and I can definitely see, you know, users being very interested in participating in Alvara. um In the show notes, I'll share all of the URLs. um Any final words you'd like to share with the audience before we get off? ah I'd say yeah, just check out the Testnet platform which uh is live already on albara.xyz and we go live on mainnet on 14th of August so you'll be able to contribute, mint, manage your own 7.6.2 on them. Awesome. Thanks, Dom. Thanks for having me.