Making DeFi Available to Everyone with DeFi Dad
May 21, 2021Share this article:
Host: Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the Unstoppable podcast. I am your host, Diana Chen, and I am here today with our special guest, DeFi Dad. He is the Chief DeFi officer at Zapper, and the host of Yield TV, amongst many other things I will talk to him about. So hey, DeFi Dad. Welcome, thanks so much for being here.
DeFi Dad: Hi Diana. Hey, thanks for having me. It's an honor to be on the podcast.
Host: Very happy to have you here. I know, I know some people refer to you just as Dad. I hope it's okay if I don't call you Dad and I just call you DeFi Dad.
DeFi Dad: Yeah, yeah.
Host: So before we dive into Zapper and Yield TV, and all the things you're involved in, I want to know a little bit more about your crypto and DeFi journey. So take me back, all the way to when you first heard about crypto. When was that, how did you hear about it, what piqued your interest and then, how did you eventually start learning about DeFi?
DeFi Dad: Yes. So my crypto journey goes back to 2017. So I, I have—I've not been in this space very long. Based on like, where I started, I always kind of feel like I'm still a newcomer, but it's been what, three or four years now. So in mid-2017, now that was the height of, of another bull market and I had some friends at work. I, I was working in San Francisco at a very typical sort of, tech start-up, and number of my friends had said, man, you should check out Ethereum. You would like, love this. To, to which I of course said, what did you just say? And they, and they were like, yeah, Ethereum. And I was like, is that like an element? Like what, what is Ethereum? That is—that—is that—that's a real world? And I remember I watched a video by the telic [phonetic] at the time, which I then made it seem even weirder to me because it was just the telic trying to explain the world computer. And me listening to all of it, not really knowing Bitcoin very well, other than knowing it was like, a digital currency and nothing else. And so, I had just had my first child—our first child was about a year old. So during that like, mid to latter half of 2017, I would spend a lot of time like most mums and dads putting my kid to sleep. And I would basically be in there every night rocking him to sleep. And after I discovered Ethereum, you know, I, I started to listen to podcasts, I stated to—it was Laura Shin's unchained podcast that really got me hooked. And I started reading the Bitcoin White Paper, the Ethereum Whitepaper, whatever color of paper it was. I stopped coming out of my kids' room after like, you know, 20 minutes. I would be in there for literally four or five hours. He would just sleep on me as a baby, and I would listen, listen to podcast and read, and I think it was by October. I mean, I had been doing this now for, for weeks. I bought my first small bit of Bitcoin and then I heard on the Unchained Podcast, Laura Shin mentioned that there was this conference called Ethereal that was going to happen in San Francisco. So I skipped work, bought a ticket, spent a whole day sort of being in and off, like, all the crazy Sci-fi-like ideas that were being built on Ethereum. And I, I was hooked. I mean, I basically then spent the next six to nine months applying for jobs. I actually—at the time, I was like, I don't think I'm being generous like, Laura Shin had such a big impact on me. Like, part of the reason I got into crypto was because I, I met Laura at the conference, and she was very welcoming and warm. You know, I basically said, I listened to your podcast and I love it, and just really appreciate what you do. And she kept in touch with me and, and was like, very, very helpful about recommending places to look for jobs. And I eventually, after like, stalking ConsenSys', I got them to hire me as a project manager, and kind of just like a marketer. So I worked the next two years from July, 2018 all the way through the summer of 2020, and most of my time there, I, I worked across lots of different DeFi teams or really, it was mostly Ethereum. Just base teams at the time that were incubated. And I was working as kind of like a mercenary marketer, like hopping team to team, but sometime in the middle of my—going into my second year, the Ethereal conference. So now we've come full circle. The thing that really convinced me to leap into the space suddenly had a gap on the team. They needed someone who wanted to work on programming, which I love. I was like, so this is all about storytelling. This person gets to craft the narrative of these conferences and you know, no disrespect to my colleagues there at the time, but I thought we were missing the mark. Like, I thought we were not going after the right narratives that decentralized finance was just starting to get bigger. I thought that the conference did not reflect in Ethereum's centric line-up anymore. And this was in the heart of the bear market. So I, I think I wielded some influence then for the next like, year and a-half there like, I, I got to spend all my time meeting founders in, in Ethereum and DeFi, and trying to come up with like, what's the story that's going to inspire the next generation of founders on Ethereum. And so anyways, this leads to today because sometime in the summer of 2019, as I was putting together the, the next line-up, I started trying different DeFi applications. So I was booking you know, like, a Robert Lesnar [phonetic] to come speak at Ethereal, and because my background had been working in software, and I would normally like, demo software to potential clients, or I would work with customer support to like, implement someone who was buying software. I, I started playing with it, and the skillset that I had, you know, which was essentially like selling, - -, consulting on like, how software can you know, solve your next problem. I, I am—I suddenly realized this skillset that was valuable for the first time in several years. Like I no longer had to be a developer to contribute anything. And I, I started posting on Twitter about it. I basically like, shared my experience of like, on lending, on Compound, I'm earning about 20%. This is nuts because you can put in a dollar, or you can put in a $1,000,000, and you're earning the same amount. And then I tried PoolTogether, and then I tried TokenSets, and then I tried Zerion. And then, I—on and on and on and on, and eventually, I started making videos, and I, I think like, I don't know—the rest is history. Like, going into the DeFi summer in 2020, started making lots of videos and lots of tutorials, and that led me to realize I, I wanted to move on from ConsenSys' and work fulltime on a DeFi team and, and—Zapper. I had been—I had fallen in love with the Zapper product and so Zapper was kind enough to hire me in the summer of 2020.
Host: I think your story is so cool because you really dove right on in and got plugged in with the community, which I think is one of the best ways to get involved. And you were also working at a fulltime job when you first got into this space and really took advantage of the—you know, the podcasting and learning as on the road, learning while you're doing other things like putting the baby to sleep and things like that. And I think that's a great example for a lot of people who are hearing about NFTs for the first time and getting into this space through NFTs and wanting to learn more about other things in the space like DeFi, and not having the time to. Well, you know, like, a great way to do it is just to get some podcast on your - - DEX and cycle through those while you're at the gym, while you're taking a walk outside, putting the kids to bed, doing whatever and, I, I think you can actually learn a lot that way. So I think that's a great example. And several people who are just getting into the space, what—how would you explain DeFi to them in sort of like, a short, one-minute clip in a way that gets them excited about it and wanting to learn more?
DeFi Dad: Yeah. So Decentralized Finance, it—it's just—it's rebuilding what is the traditional financial services world, which is mostly likely like, banking services. You know, most of us have a banking account, most of us have a savings account. That account today, unfortunately, pays very pitiful rates. Normally less than like, 0.05. What's different with DeFi is, you take out all of the—you take out all of the middle men and overhead that you know, really is what powers traditional finance and you replace it with software. So DeFi is automated money software, and different than Bitcoin. You know, Bitcoin is meant to be like, a store of value. At this point, at least, it's meant to be a store of value. You could say, Ether is another store of value. It's also a medium of exchange, but what happens in DeFi is, you have lending and borrowing, and trading, and insurance, and options, and every other basic parallel to the traditional finance world, but it requires none of the people that power that traditional world. It's all about creating a flywheel, that is automated software. So it—it's—it will be very similar to like, replacing the U.S. Postal Service with e-mail. DeFi is e-mail for your money, and it's about saving you time, it's about saving you money, it's about making your money that much more efficient. And that—that's really—that's the future. That's why people talk about it like it's the internet of money. I mean, it's—and it's most like, like simplest use case, I—just recently in the past year, we bought our first home. It took almost 45 days to go through a process of submitting all these paperwork, working with probably about ten different people to get approved and to ultimately sign paperwork that says, we own the home. Something like, we signed literally a mountain of papers in the end. In DeFi, I can open up a loan in minutes. The difference is, the DeFi loans that I open up, they—they're not fixed rates normally. They're normally variable rates and, and we're not at the point where we can borrow more than the amount of money that we're willing to deposit and put up as collateral. That's, that's really—that's the thing that has to happen next in DeFi in order to actually replace the mortgage industry, but anyways, that's DeFi in a nutshell.
Host: Yeah. So all of that sounds really great. So what do you see as being some of the biggest challenges or biggest barriers that are preventing the mainstream from getting into DeFi?
DeFi Dad: Okay. So there's, there's a number of challenges. One of the most obvious is wallets. So when you put your money into Bank of America, Bank of America shows you on their website—they show that—let's pretend you have $1,000 in your bank account. You actually have a credit of $1,000. They have an internal ledger and they, they can loan out, I think it's up to like 90% of the money they have. So there's lots of people that benefit from the money that you deposit there, but in DeFi, in DeFi you're, you're talking about one ledger that is—it—it's a settlement layer that exists across the entire world, and we're all able to deposit and withdraw from that and send value back and forth between one another. And one of the challenges is this wallet. The, the wallet in crypto, in most cases, makes you 100% responsible for your own wealth. And, and so, if I have a mobile wallet like Argent or Dharma, or Trust Wallet, there's a seed phrase everyone you know, has had to write down a seed phrase, unless you use Argent, which they don't have them. And now, if you lose that seed phrase, there is no one that can save you. Like, your money is gone forever. So just the wallet experience, the, the, the fact that like, you can actually lose all of your money, that it is—it's truly like holding $1,000 under your mattress, except I think it's, it's much easier to store crypto currencies in your mobile wallets versus keeping a bunch of cash under your mattress. There's that. There is—I mean, one of the things that we're solving for at Zapper is, we're just trying to make DeFi easy for, for everyone. And what's hard about it is, there are often a lot of steps involved. So there's a complexity to DeFi. If you want to participate in a Yield Farming program, you have to know that you need to go provide liquidity and then, go stake some token, and then collect the rewards. Really, what we're trying to do at Zapper is consolidate all of these steps and give you a few clicks. You know, it should feel like your banking experience on Bank of America where you're just clicking around and a bunch of magic is happening under the hood. And in DeFi, if we want to take advantage of all of these, these new automated, you know, money software, we've got to make it easier for someone to access that. So if you go to zapper.fi, you can track your, your whole portfolio. You can also enter all sorts of sophisticated investment opportunities in DeFi, but Zapa allows you to do that in a few clicks. And then I'd say the last thing is, yes, we covered wallets, just the general ease or complexity of DeFi. You know, the last one actually is, is pretty obvious. So Ethereum is the mainland for, for DeFi right now. We've started to see DeFi grow on other blockchains like Binance Smart Chain, it has been the largest Polygon which often gets mistaken as a Layer-2, but it's actually another blockchain so that's, that's another side chain of Ethereum. And then, we have layer—Layer-2s that are coming. The, the issue right now is that, the, the demand for BlockSpace on Ethereum has become so overwhelming. There's—there is so much growth that happened with DeFi. There's so much demand for people to participate in Decentralized Finance that we're, we're all competing. When we try to transact on Ethereum, think about it as like, there's only so much room in the party, and it comes down to how much are you willing to be at that party, and the cost of being at the party has become very, very, high. That cost is called gas or we call them you know, like a transaction fee. And so, you know, when I started lending the compound in the summer of 2019, I was paying like, maybe a dollar, maybe $0.50 to deposit. Now, I mean, it could cost $30 just to deposit some money. So what we've done is we've boxed out a lot of people in the world who desperately need a censorship resistant form of peer-to-peer finance. And, and we've box them out because of the cost and so, I'm, I'm very excited for Layer-2 Solutions like Optimism and Arbitrum, and, and others that you know—zkSync is another one that really are going to help us to get to the point where we start paying a few cents per transaction on Ethereum.
Host: Yeah, 100%. So let's dive a little bit more—a little bit deeper into Zapper. So again, it's zapper.fi. I'm actually on zapper.fi right now. I see my wallets connected, I, I can see the—whatever's in my wallet and then I can see my NFTs, and then there's all these features at the top; there's Exchange, Pool farm, Bridge, which is a new one. So I want to just dive into each of these and break it down for people who may be unfamiliar with what some of these terms are, or what some, some of these concepts are and things that you can do on Zapper. So the first one, Exchange, this one is probably the most straightforward. I see you can exchange one crypto currency for another. And do you want to talk about like, what are the different types of cryptos that are on here, like, are the main ones Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, all of these? Are all of these available on Zapper, or what are the special ones that people can exchange on Zapper?
DeFi Dad: Yes. So today's Zapper supports Ethereum, and it also has some partial support for Binance Smart Chain and Polygon. So really, the main use case is, anyone who has DeFi assets invested, or DeFi investments or just tokens, you just—let's say you're holding some Ether or a stable coin like DAI, USDC, if you go to zapper.fi, all you do is, you can paste in your wallet address or you can connect it with whatever wallet you use, and now you can see a real time balance of where all of your money is. Whether you have tokens, whether you have collateral because you're borrowing, how much debt you have, yield farms, liquidity pools, it's all there. That is the most popular product. That is a product that I, I, I would say if, if anyone could ever bring together enough data across all the different DeFi applications, I think that Zapper dash—dashboard is like, a top three application. Then there is—the Exchange is for swapping. It is a DEX aggregator. It is only for Ethereum. You can also do it on Binance Smart Chain as well if you flip the network to BSC. So those—that, that is like a Google search engine for the best trade in terms of the rate and in terms of reducing slippage. So you, you should—let's pretend that I want to trade on Ethereum, and I know that Uni-Swap is, is the world's biggest automated market maker decentralized exchange. You don't go there. You don't go to shop for your flight at United and American Airlines and Southwest Airlines. You go to an aggregator. That's what a DEX aggregator is, so go to zapper.fi/exchange. The next tab is our pool tab. So there's 1500 liquidity provisions there. Those are—just think of it this way, most of DeFi revolves around enabling there to be enough liquidity for us to trade in and out of different tokens, enabling us to do all sorts of other magical things like borrowing and lending and so on. So if liquidity is one of the most important underlined like, success factors in DeFi, then, being able to provide liquidity and earn rewards for that is going to be a very important core function in DeFi. So anyways, we have 1500+ LPs. You can start with any token as long as it's on Ethereum, and you can enter with that token and well, swap it out into the right proportions and after that, you're now holding a part of a liquidity pool to allow people to trade and you're earning rewards on top of your tokens. The last part which I think is probably the most—I think the most popular part of Zapper, outside of our dashboard is, there's Zapper.fi/farm. So we have—I think we have about 600 farms there and now, very soon have a 1000 or more. In DeFi, there are endless programs that allow you to help Bootstrap liquidity. So you, you provide liquidity, and then—think of it this way, you'll—you then deposit the proof that you are providing liquidity because you're signaling hey, I'm, I'm providing liquidity and I want to get paid for doing that. And so they'll have programs where you continually earn rewards for that. And it—this is, this is the story that's come out of DeFi in the last few years. You know, there's programs where you can earn 100% on your stable coins. There's programs where people have earned thousands of percentage in terms of APY, providing liquidity, and then, staking liquidity provision in the farm. And then anyways, the last part of it is, is our Bridge. We believe that DeFi will probably remain a hub on, on Ethereum, but with all of the different inoperability and bridges being built, we wanted to enable users to be able to transfer their assets from Ethereum to Polygon, to Binance Smart Chain, to other chains like Phantom. There's also some other ones that we haven't hooked up yet, but the, the idea is, one day, we'll probably see investors moving money across these different chains and we want that to be easy to do and that's why we put that into the Zapper Bridge.
Host: On it. Thank you for breaking all of that down. So when you think about your user base right now, would you say that it's still mostly crypto natives, or would you say that, you know, with DeFi summer or last summer, and just more and more people getting into DeFi, that you're starting to see more and more of the mainstream in your user base?
DeFi Dad: Yes. So there's two different users that, that I know are key to Zapper—I mean, two different users are key to all of DeFi. One is, anyone, whether you're new or advanced, you need to know where your money is, you need to know how much of your money you have. Like, can you imagine if you had your money in E*TRADE and Robinhood, and Chase Bank, and you couldn't figure out how much you had. You had to like, keep it in a notebook. Like, that is actually how DeFi was functioning for some time. We were just keeping tabs open and looking and being like, oh yeah, I got 20 bucks in Compound and $100 here. So Zapper dashboard is very important to help you know where your money is at all times on chain, across as many waters you want. The other part of our user base though are, I would say more sophisticated investors that want to become market makers, or I call them Liquidity Providers. There are those who want to participate in yield farms. Now, you don't have to be super advanced to do that, and that—that's our goal at Zapper. We're putting all these tools in one place. Tools that you know, used to exist across multiple platforms. You had to like, basically know how to navigate a lot of steps and a lot of different websites to participate. By putting it all in one place and reducing it to a few clicks, we think that the future is opening up more access to more people to be able to participate. So yeah, I'd say the, the other half of it is still a fairly sophisticated user base, but we're actually—we're trying to over time, shift the—those that are the beginners using just the dashboard. We're trying to introduce them to hey, there's all these other opportunities. If you hold XYZ token, did you know that you can lend it here, did you know that you can provide it as liquidity and a pool here and earn 100%? We think basic—it's not meant to be like a recommendation engine, but I'm almost want to call like, a discovery platform for DeFi.
Host: Yeah, for sure. I love seeing all these crypto and DeFi platforms you know, shifting their messaging and their education to cater more towards the mainstream because I think ultimately, that the goal is to get everybody on DeFi and so, we need to start right now reaching out to the mainstream with that message. So where do you see DeFi being in a year from now, or what are some trends that you see in DeFi in the next year?
DeFi Dad: Good question. One of those trends is, we are going to start to see transaction cost go down. So this is—this has been a great problem for, for, you know, the point of thinking back to two to three years ago when the markets were unravelling from 2017. I think many of us had a moment of realization that wow, the expectations of what we're building are so beyond where we actually are at this point, and now, everyone is figuring that out. And so we have this crazy bull run which I was, I was only a newcomer at the time and you know, I did what everyone did. I bought some tokens and I was probably under water for the next like, two to three years straight, but what happened then in the middle of that bear market is that, DeFi grew, and DeFi grows from 500 million in the summer of 2019 to a billion by I think, it was the end of January, 2020 to, I think it was 20 billion by the end of December, 2020 to now, I think over 50 billion. I, I, I don't even check it. I used to like—it used to be something I looked at daily, but like, the numbers are so wild. And so, yeah, I, I think that we're now at that place where there's been so much demand to participate in DeFi that it created this urgency for us to scale Ethereum, to provide solutions that will allow us to transact at lower cost. So what Ethereum is working on now, there are multiple teams with different approaches to what I called Layer-2 Solutions, and you know, you're in Chicago so like, it's like the L. You know, everyone that lives in Chicago—it's a very busy place. What happens if all of us walked along the streets every day? It would get busier and busier and busier. Now, if you, if you think about the fact that the route that we take, what if that cost money, like, what if it was a bidding war of who's willing to pay the most money to be able to walk on the main thoroughfares in Chicago? Layer-2 is when you introduce the L, which is an elevated train if anyone doesn't know Chicago. You introduce the, the L, and so L2 Solutions allows us to batch transactions, and for the average user to pay a fraction of what they would have paid otherwise. And there's already Layer-2 Solutions that are live, you can trade on Loopring, which is a, a DEX. It costs a fraction of a penny per trade, though same trades would cost 30, $50 on Uni-Swap. And, and soon we're going to get to this point where Optimism is, is one major one that's going live, that has Synthetix on it. I believe it's—oh, I'm sorry. And also, Uni-Swap. Uni-Swap is going to go live on at this summer, so we're going to see Uni-Swap go live and Synthetix this summer. Now, the number one DEX or automated market maker, Uni-Swap, that is going to be live on L2. Suddenly, everyone's going to be trading for a fraction of a penny. So that's going to be a, a sort of watershed moment for the DeFi space this year. I think another trend is—that's already been taken place is, as much as I would rather trust my assets on Ethereum, because of the, the security in decentralization gives me a greater assurance that I'll be able to claim my assets. That someone isn't going to like, box me out of the Ethereum network versus something like BSC, or any other sort of like, side chain. But I think Multichain, that's a box that's been opened and it's not going to shut. So we're going to continue to see DeFi grow and flourish on other chains other than Ethereum, but I think Ethereum is going to remain like, the epicenter of all of this like it's—it has—I mean, I, I don't know how much is on BSC as of today, but you know, I've—it's—all was at one point, Ethereum was like, you know, 50 billion and BSC was less like 5 billion, but anyways, they—they've made a lot of strides in terms of adding more builders on their chain. So there's, there's that. I'd say, maybe the last thing is just the, the DeFi user experience will continue to get better. I think we have some of the best designers in the world in terms of Fintech. I think Fintech will just become DeFi like, if you're building in Fintech, and you're building an application and it's not on Ethereum or it's not DeFi, I, I think you're only going to get laughed out of the room because why would—why would anyone want to compete with DeFi where there's less regulatory risk, there's a global audience that you can cater to. So you're not—-when you work on Fintech, you're working within a lot of strict regulations that are very antiquated that you know, really like, were created for our world before the internet. And so DeFi, I think, is going to continue to flourish there. My one fear with that is, even though I just said like, you can build, I think with a little less concern for regulation, I mean, the truth is, most teams in DeFi exist under some sort of regulator. And so that—that's another part of the story that, it's a less positive part of the story I think we're going to start to see. I don't know, more interest from regulators and possibly some fears that grow amongst the community about like, how are we going to prevent regulators from clamping down on DeFi innovations that are happening halfway around the world, completely out of their jurisdiction, so. Yeah, I think—
Host: —Yeah, 100%. No, first of all, I love that analogy you used of the L, I'm going to steal that and start using that too to explain gas - - to people. I love that. And then also…if we're thinking long term then, like if all goes well, like, however you define well…if all goes well, where do you see DeFi being in 10 years? Let's say it's the year 2030, what is the DeFi eco system, how are people interacting with it?
DeFi Dad: Yeah. Okay. So there is…is it Jim Bianco? I'm probably mispronouncing it. Yeah, Jim Bianco is like a well-known and traditional finance. He was recently on Kimmy Russo's podcast for The Defiant. And so I'm calling this out because I'm, kind of, just like repeating what he said. Because I really liked it. Traditional finance has no idea what's coming and DeFi is…it's not just going to be competitive, it is absolutely going to demolish traditional finance. After what I just went through, opening up a mortgage…and I feel like I'm apart of very, like privileged group of people, that fact that we were able to buy. The fact that we were able to save enough money. After what I just went through, opening up a mortgage—and I feel like I'm a part of a very, like, privileged group of people, the fact that we are able to buy, the fact that we are able to save enough money. The fact that we have wages that continue to grow year by year versus many people who, you know, haven't gotten a raise in 30 years. You know, feel pretty lucky. But I can tell you, going through that process, is complete and utter bullshit. The entire way that traditional finance goes about KYC'ing customers, it is discriminatory, it leaves you in a place where you have no sort of privacy. You have to reveal every transaction, you know, ever in your life. When I went through my own process, I mean, I was being questioned about a Verizon phone bill from over five years ago where they over charged me and I wasn't notified for 30 days after. And I paid it still, but because it was quote on quote, here late, here I am, I'm someone again, like I would say I'm very highly qualified person to open up a mortgage. And I had the banks, you know, breathing down my neck about it. All I could think about is, how does the average person do it? Like I don't understand how people are able to be able to open up a line of credit, to be able to, you know, be accepted for a loan that they desperately need. Banks love to loan to people who don't need money. All of that gets flipped on it's head in DeFi. Today, DeFi I do think—I think it is a bit of a—it's a playground still. It's like a—you know, it a digital money playground. And I'm not going to pretend like—DeFi is not banking the unbanked yet. But we're on that path. Once we get to layer two's that are thriving with applications moving to layer two, now you're talking about people being able to move their money whenever they want. Without any permission for a fraction of a penny, 24/7/365 without KYC. I mean, it's like asking someone who's been using E-mail, how would you like to go back to writing letters? It would make no sense. And that to me is 10 years from now. Yeah, I think that the banks are going to be absolutely swallowed. Will they still exist? Of course. Will people continue to use traditional financial services. I don't think that they're actually going to die off. But, like, I think the bigger question is—so, like, I admire Coin Base. And I'm very—I've been super excited and happy for them to have this moment of going public. I think Coin Base is even going to be in jeopardy 10 years from now. But they have—Coin Base is smart, they've made strategic investments in lots of DeFi. They clearly are thinking and Pivoting about how can we continue to grow and help people to be able to be more financially free? In world where Crypto becomes—Crypto becomes, like, the default form of payment. Anyways, that's the future. 10 years from now, I mean, we'll still have nay-sayers about Aferian and Bitcoin and DeFi. But, like, those people will look like, you know, the nut jobs that are, like, screaming in the middle of the street about nothing. So—
Host: Yeah. I totally hear you on the mortgage front and I have a bunch of friends that are just starting to pay off all their student debt right now. And apparently, once you get rid of all your student debt, that somehow drops your credit score?
DeFi Dad: Yip.
Host: Because it's like they want you to have debt and loans and things like that. This makes zero sense whatsoever. You should be rewarded for, you know, getting rid of your debt and making payments and things like that. But, like you said, it's the—the KYC process, it's so unknown to a lot of people. And maybe it doesn't make sense to a lot of people. And this is—we're just talking about, you know, pretty privileged people like you and me right now. We're not even talking about the ways that underprivileged communities. And you know, a lot of—if you go deep into how the system is and all the inherent bias and racism in the system. And how that effects certain communities with their financial and banking needs. I mean, you can really go down the rabbit hole there and talk about why everybody needs DeFi. So going back to Zapper real quick, anything exciting coming up for Zapper in the rest of 2021? Any new features or products that you can share with our listeners?
DeFi Dad: Absolutely. There are—there's a number of features. If you use Zapper, there's a number of features that we've been wanting to release for some time. One that is coming sooner is a mobile app. So you'll be able to just use Zapper the way you do on your laptop or on your mobile phone. But more of the dedicated IOS or Android App. Another thing is we will have a historical performance chart. So a really big missing piece that we've been planning and just haven't been able to get out yet is the ability to see a snapshot of your portfolio, you know, based on all the endless factors overtime. You know, there's a lot of yield farms where, you know, your yield farm depends on how much you own of it. And it depends on, lets say the APY of that pool. And it depends on the price of the reward token you were earning. So it's actually a very complex question to say, at this moment in time, how much was my portfolio worth? So that's something else we really want to solve. I think Zapper is going to—a year from now, like, people will talk about how gamified it is. Like we're looking to really create an experience that, you know, has you talking about, like the numbers that you're putting up. Like, what's the performance of your portfolio, what's the average APY? How often do you check into your dashboard? There's all sorts of ways that we want to start to reward users for just using Zapper. And I'd say another part of it is just, like, there's a firehose of integrations. Like every new protocol in DeFi, we need to implement it. And it's a lot of manual work that we're doing now. We are working very hard on a plan to open that up. So in the future, we'll no longer have teams submitting proposals, like, please add XYZ protocol. It'll be there so that they can add it themselves. And that to me is—that will be huge, you know. Like we want Zapper portfolio to be up to date, we want as many farms as possible, and LP's that you can participate in. A core team of 10 people is never going to be 100's of 1000's of DeFi investors or millions of DeFi investors. So, you know, we're, kind of, following the path of every other team. Like, you know, we're looking for ways to, you know, either become an open source protocol or to follow the Ethos of open source software and make everything easily available for you to plug into and to, you know, take advantage of Zapper.
Host: Yeah. And you guys are really doing a very good job with educating the public on concepts around DeFi too. And one thing that you guys have is Yield TV which you are the host of. And this is part of Zapper. This is separate from your YT channel, DeFi Dad, You Tube channel. So tell us a little bit more about Yield TV is, how you got the idea for it, like why did you decide to start it? And then how is different from your DeFi dad You Tube channel?
DeFi Dad: Yeah, yeah. So I think I got hired on the team because of the educational content I was putting out which did include Zapper. And like, with the role that you have with Unstoppable Domains. You know, I think that when you teach people, they feel a certain sort of loyalty to you. Like there is, you can sit there and talk your ear off about, you know, I think that this token is worth so much money, but if you teach somebody, let's say how to use a protocol to earn 50 percent on stable coins. Well, now they're much more interested because people like to learn. And so I think Yield TV—like, around the time I joined, I was just thinking of like all right, like, what do I do well that fits with a model of growing or user base? Let's start doing live content. And so with Yield TV it's been a lot of interviews, but more recently we've pivoted a few times already. We pivoted into DeFi class. So every Monday I was doing a DeFi class where we would teach, like, how to become and LP. How to Migrate your funds from Ethereum to polygon or how to get started Yield Farming. So if you go to TV.Zapper.DeFi, look up the playlist DeFi class, I think those are great livestreams to watch. We do lots of screen sharing. I'd say it's probably the most standout thing about Yield TV is we just do—screen sharing is just 50 percent of the show and it's with founders in most cases. So It's, kind of, interesting because you're, like, learning how to do different things in DeFi, but you're learning from the founders who built it. And then I would say, like, the next iteration of that is—so just launched today, Zapper Learn. So that's at learn.zapper.fi and that is housing blog post on DeFi basics on like, you know, what is an ERC 20 token to tutorials, you know. Tutorials, you know, tutorials on, like how to participate in a Yield Farm. To how to set up a crypto wallet. And then the other part of it is gas post by people who want to talk about different DeFi or Yield opportunities. So Anthony Sosano from Eth Hub and the Daily Gwei. Just wrote our first one. And so yeah, to sum it up, without me rambling too much more, I think Zapper has been a great place for me because this is what I wanted to focus on anyways. And Zapper is this amazing onramp for both new and advanced DeFi investors. And it's a tool for the advanced DeFi investor. But at the same time, like, we're going to bring more people into our space without mass education. So, you know, I think the team—I think, like, our mission is to make DeFi easy and accessible for everyone. And God forbid, but if the team was like, yo man, we're letting you go tomorrow, I would probably be doing the same work. So, you know, it's a good feeling. Like you go to sleep at night saying, like, I'm definitely not—I'm definitely not going to live with any regrets years from now. I think like, I think DeFi is like a once a lifetime opportunity to work on. And Zapper has been just such an incredible place to push that. The team ships faster than any team in DeFi. I've learned so much about design from our Co-Founder Seb. Our other Co-founder Suhail is a wizard in terms of the ideas he comes up with for Zaps, which are like De-Fi short cuts. So he keeps thinking about how to make it easier for people to click a button and participate in De-Fi. And so, you know, the team never—I'll put it this way—people are messaging all throughout the night. And it's not because we are like miserable workaholics, it's just because we're like, hey man, did you see that new DeFi - - that went up? Hey, like we should add this or hey, what do you think about this idea I had? So it's—yeah, it's a really special place.
Host: I love that. I think what your building—Zapper, is exactly what I'm trying to build on Unstoppable, but more from a Web-three angel. And you're doing the DeFi side. So everything you just said resonated 100 percent with me and exactly, like, what I'm doing and my goals and vision and things like that. We should definitely collab. We'll have to talk after the podcast about collaborating because I think what we're doing is, like, super aligned. All right. So another thing I wanted to talk to you about is you also invest in a bunch of Crypto and DeFi projects. You're an advisor for a bunch of projects. Can you talk about some of those projects and like, how do you choose which projects to work on? You know, before we started recording, you were saying you've been in this space now for a few years. And over the last few years you've learned a lot about which founders to invest in and which projects to invest in. So give us a little bit of insight into, like, how do you decide which projects to invest in. Like what do you see as being promising for the future?
DeFi Dad: Yeah. I mean, I've got to say, like, interviewing founders is like one of the best ways to start to come up with thesis about who you want to invest in and what ideas I think are the best ideas in DeFi. So most of my investments are—they are the same tokens that anyone could trade on a decentralized exchange. So most of my portfolio are liquid tokens that anyone has access to, which I put that out because it's I think very special in DeFi that like, a lot of us have the same opportunities. Because of the nature of just tokens get created and they're immediately available as soon as someone's brave enough to provide liquidity on Uni-Swap. So, you know, some of those, like, I mean, I don't think I was super early to it, but yeah, like, I got into Curve really early. Because I thought it was nuts you could earn 20 percent on stable coins. So that was the Spring of 2020, before Compound Launched their token and kind of created this whole DeFi summer of exciting Yield Farming. I also—I feel like—luckily now, in 2019 I started staking in Synthetics. I thought it was a really cool idea. Synthetics is a platform where you can gain exposure to anything from like silver and oil to Tesla Stock, to the NK Index, to—you can trade, obviously Ether, but you can gain exposure to non-Ethereum tokens like Bitcoin or, you know, B&B. And so I was like wow, this is, kind of, like decentralized BitMex. And BitMex was thriving at that time too. You know, since then it's had a little bit of downfall because of regulators I think. Or whatever they've gone through. But yeah, so synthetics, I saw the light on that. Aave—so Aave's a good example of one where I knew about EthLend back when I got started. I couldn't understand the idea. Then two years later, they re-launched as Aave. And I interviewed Stani sometime I think in mid-2020. And I was like wow, like, these guys like really, like, believe in the mission and like seem to be very marketing savvy, but they're building, like, awesome products. And so there's an example of one where like, just listening to the founder I was like, you know what, I'd rather go down with the sky, you know, being the altruistic believer and builder that he is. I'd rather go down on a ship with Stani than, you know, win with someone who I don't actually believe in. So those are a number of more public projects. Also, Uni-Swap of course, like Uni-Swap, Sushi Swap. I have a pretty diversified, DeFi portfolio in terms of those. I would say more recently, I've made some very small angel investments, just been a new experience. So I like to invest in ideas that don't fit the mold of those more obvious, public tokens that—the tokens that are already liquid that I can easily gain access to. So, like, I'm either an advisor or I'm an early investor to a number of projects like the Ethereum push notification service just launched their token. So that is a project that enables you to—you can build a channel and the channel is—it's just like a Telegram group. So you built channel. Let's say it's Aave and then I subscribe to it and I connect my Ethereum wallet. Now, if I have a loan on Aave and let's say it's close to being liquidated, I receive a real time notification through the Ethereum push notification service channel that says hey, like, so and so at this wallet. So I preserve my privacy. I've never doxed myself, no name, no e-mail, just my wallet. It will tell me, hey, your loan is possibly going to be liquidated if you don’t maintain it better. That's huge. To me, like being able to connect wallets to protocol teams were—like, the Ethereum push notification service is one of the most interesting projects that—I met them a year ago. They didn't have any investors at the time and I was like, this project is so insane because it answers one of the biggest problems we have in DeFi. Everyone uses indirect lines of communication like Telegram, Twitter, Discord, medium, whatever, social media. The Ethereum Push Notification Service now allows me to create a direct line of communication to say, hey, so and so, there is a hack going on, do not deposit funds into this protocol. Hey, so and so, we have a new product. Here it is. Hey, there's a token migration, please swap your token or else it will be worthless in 48 hours. All these things happen through social media right now, or through discord. And it's a nightmare. People are losing lots of money because it doesn't exist. So that's one of my favorite charged particles you had on recently. You can basically deposit value into an NFT. So it's a wild idea that I think like the NFT space, the fact that you can take a token and you can say hey, I'm going to charge up this painting with one ether. Now the painting, the digital crypto painting has one ether in it. So it's worth at least one ether. Even if you think it's shit. It's worth one ether. And I think that's, that's really valuable. And then the other one I think I'm most proud of, along with the others is I'm an advisor to the defiant. I have believed in what Kami is doing since I met her in early 2019. I think she's one of the like boldest, most admirable people that I've, I've met. She's just—she's an incredible founder. And she is—she's operates with a lot of integrity which I think is something else like—all of the investments I've made. There's a few others that just—that I haven't mentioned, but all the investments I've made, I make investments in people that I think operate with a lot of integrity, that are truthful, that would rather tell the truth, and like suffer the consequences than hide it, and it's been a great experience so far. I sleep well at night because I think, again, I'd rather be making mistakes and maybe failing with people I believe in, and then to go down saying, well, I never really liked that person anyway and thought they didn't—they didn't know what they were doing, so.
Host: Yeah, and we've actually had all three of those founders from the three companies you just listed. So we had Kami Russo [phonetic] on 1st, she was Episode 19, from the Defiant, and then we had Hash Rajat [phonetic] from EPNS on Episode 30, and then Ben Lakoff most recently from Charged Particles was Episode 38. So definitely go back. You can you can get the full story on all three of those companies and really understand why DeFi Dad decided to invest in these companies if you go back and listen to those episodes. So last thing DeFi Dad, looking back on all of your experiences working with all these early DeFi companies and users, what are some of the biggest lessons you've learned whether it's what DeFi users want, how to be successful in the DeFi space as a company, and I think that also involves looking back in history and looking at things that have gone wrong in the past and things that are bad with our current financial system and remembering that and being cognizant of it so that we don't make the same mistakes again. So any big lessons that you learned with either users or companies in the DeFi space that you can share with our listeners?
DeFi Dad: I can speak from a user standpoint. It almost kind of goes back to the question you just asked about, like certain investments. So one of the biggest risks in DeFi is, you are 100% in ownership of, of your decisions. Like you put money into something, you control it through your wallet, assuming that there isn't some sort of fraud going on where the team built a protocol and let's say they hold the administrative control to move funds which is commonly called a rug pool. You are normally 100% in control. So in DeFi, and this actually just happened to me, my first hack I experienced. It's like there's landmines everywhere. There are lots of people out there who are trying to exploit different DeFi protocols. So I can't even call it a hack. It's like they find a way to play by the rules, but to be able to basically, let's say drain money out of a DeFi protocol. So a lot of those relate back to Oracle failures. So they basically—they manipulate the price and then are able to do something to benefit from it and it leaves people with less of their own money and it leaves the person exploiting with more of it. I mean, there's straight up just bugs in code that allow them to, let's say, withdraw money that they shouldn't be able to withdraw. So my takeaway from that has been, I don't want to put my money or put more than 1 or 2% of my money into anything that I can't buy DeFi insurance for. So Nexus Insurance has been around since like July, 2019. They've got like, I think, 750 million active insurance right now. They call it protocol cover, but it's insurance essentially. And so I would tell anyone, if you intend to be in something for at least 30 days or more, like you're playing with fire to not buy insurance. It's like driving without car insurance. And I've had a lot of people that have argued with me about this that like, you're already taking a lot of risk. And when you pay—in most cases, it's 2.6% APR. So if I'm in something for 30 days, take 2.6% divided by 12, that's how much of whatever I put in that I need to pay to protect myself to know that nexus will pay me out. If there's an Oracle failure, financial incentive that's exploited. There's a bug in the code. I just think it's nuts to be risking so much wealth. If you are lucky enough to build any wealth, whatever amount of money that is to you, whether it's $100 or $100 million, why risk that when you know that you can get cover for it? So that's one of the most important things, and I guess it goes to risk management. I'd say the second point then is—so if you don't know what risk management is, I would like Google it and start to watch some videos about what it means. In most cases in DeFi, it's similar to trading. It's about—we call it sizing your position. So if I go in and I lend $1,000 to compound, seizing my position means I'm like putting in an amount of money that in this case, I'm willing to lose. If I go into compound and I don't have Nexus cover on it, then I could lose all $1,000 because there could be a bug. There could be some exploits even though Compound is one of the safest protocols. I think it's more battle tested. And so I think a lot about that. Recently, I lost some money in EasyFi. EasyFi is a Compound fork that exists on Polygon. The team, as far as I know, based on their report, it sounds like there was a lot of control to the funds that was being managed through a wallet that is not as safe. It wasn't a hardware wallet. And Anyways, long story short, it was like $75 million was stolen in their token. And the amount of—what I mean to say is this. I lost an amount of money where I was like, damn it, like, that sucks. I lost it. But my life is fine. I will go on. Like I never put in more money than I was willing to lose. Everyone says this. Don't put in more money than you're willing to lose, but people do it all the time. And I got to say, like, again, like I'm hopeful EasyFi is actually going to fork and they're doing a lot of work, I think, to try and compensate others and I hope it works out. I have actually been very impressed by the way the team has handled it despite the fact that it's definitely an inexcusable situation what happened, but I, I think—I felt proud in that moment of like, all right, I lost some money, but I followed my own rule which was don't put in more than I'm willing to lose. So just think about that. I can play with more money if I'm willing to buy cover. I have way more money in Aave, but I buy cover from Nexus. So if anything happens in Aave, I'm good. Nexus will pay me out and I don't have to worry about that. So the was—we covered risk management, insurance. I'd say another thing is just, it's kind of goes back to Zapper and why I’m at Zapper. Just do everything to abstract away the complexity of finance. Finance is what is complex. DeFi is a mirror—it is a—it is a mirror of traditional finance, but it's peer-to-peer, it's faster, it gives you more control, it's more capital efficient, it's powered by software, but at the end of the day, the average person might not know what collateral is. And so there is—there's a lot of challenges for us to try to dumb it down and make it like banking. I do think the banking industry has done a great job of dumbing down finance and tricking the average retail person into putting their money into the bank for absolutely nothing and being screwed by those banks over and over and over again. Now, in DeFi, I'm not advocating that we, we don't have to copy the practices of I think taking advantage of people who are less financially literate, but there's something to be said about the fact that they've made it look easier to participate in. So the last point that I guess that goes with that is, I think financial literacy is one of the biggest issues in the world at this point and I can say that—I had a podcast recently with - -, what is his name? It's Tyrone. I'm like screwing up his last name. I want to make sure I don't screw this up. Tyrone Ross. That's it. - - Tyrone V. Ross, Jr. He's got a great show podcast through CoinDesk, but he focuses a lot on communities that have been historically left behind by the banking industry. And my worst fear with DeFi is that we just pick up where they left off. We're like, hey, everyone, we created magical internet money software. And now it's only possible for those of us who were lucky enough to be more technologically literate or whatever—had some leg up—there's a lot of people too who, if you got money from mom and dad, of course, of course you're able to invest without worrying and DeFi. You got some trust fund. It's much easier to risk and amount of money that you got from a rich parent than it is for someone who's like, I have—I have to pay bills to feed my children. I'm barely making rent, and you guys are telling me that I have to pay $100 in transaction fees. That's rough. So I'm really—I've been really inspired by him and lots of other people like Andreas Antonopoulos. They’ve really pushed hard on, like, how do we educate everyone? And that's why I think we try to do everything we can to be publicly available through learn.zapper.fi, through TV.zapper.fi, and then through my YouTube DeFiDad.com. It's all about making it available for anyone who has an internet connection at least. I can't help people that are not on the internet yet, but that's definitely something in the future. I'm thinking, how do we reach that many more people on the ground who don't even have an internet connection yet?
Host: Yeah. And somebody else that's great to call out in the space too, we had him on the podcast recently, is Isaiah Jackson, the author of Bitcoin and Black America. He's, he's great at championing everything that you just talked about too. All right. Well, the last segment we do on the podcast before we close out every time is called Explain your Tweet. This is where I dig through your Twitter account, pull out some cryptic or interesting tweets and give you a chance to explain it. I've just got a couple of fun ones here real quick. The first one is from April 16, 2021. And this is—unfortunately on the podcast, you can't see this but this is a picture of your daughter in this amazing outfit. You'll just have to go to DeFi_Dad on Twitter to see this but just as my little feature NFT artist. Oh, first of all, I think this outfit is amazing and I hope that she does become an NFT artist one day, but I was also going to ask you, have you tried telling her about NFTs and crypto and how did that go? And I can't—I'm horrible at guessing kids ages so I have no idea how old she is, but she's looks young. But I have talked to people with kids that are like nine, ten, into the teens, and they all told me that it's way easier to explain NFTs and crypto to their kids than it is to explain it to their friends, their peers that are their age.
DeFi Dad: Yeah, because my kids who are two and four, my daughter there's too and they, they don't watch a lot of it because I cannot stand YouTube for kids. And I think it's just like awful. It's literally going to put like a hole in their brain. It's so stupid. But they're used to knowing that they have Disney Plus and they know that I can pull up literally any movie imaginable. And so the fact that everything is digital to them, I think digital money will make complete sense to them. I have gotten them, I will say, like so—I haven't really tried to explain it to either of them yet, but I got them both a Piggy Bank and it has four separate chambers. One says invest, one says donate, one says save, and one says—I think it's like enjoy or—it's basically meant to be like 25% for fun. And yeah, I've started to—they do like little chores around the house. I mean, we were very imperfect about this. Like everyone, we—I don't want to make it like—we're not super strict on this but they do some chores and then we give them quarters at the end of the week. And as soon as—I would say like—so my son, thankfully he's four and he does not have a mobile phone. I don't want to give them phones because they'll, they'll never—they'll never do anything again if they have a phone. But yeah, like I'm thinking about paying them in like Ether eventually or paying them in Stable Coins. I guess the main takeaway from this is, I think that what I said about the financial literacy, it's a reflection of where I come from. I grew up in the Midwest, I grew up in a very middleclass family. I think I had a great childhood. I think my family would be very poor living in today's society with how much it costs to live. But then, we lived a wonderful life. My parents knew nothing about finance. We had a bank, we had the crappiest savings rate. I don't think they ever invested in the stock market. I'm pretty sure when I went off to college, I was subsidized by the federal government's programs and there was a killer alumni network where I went. So I basically went to college mostly for free because I was on the lowest end of the totem pole. And I did not trade a stock until I was like 27, 27, maybe 28, maybe like—so I guess what I mean to say is like, I got into DeFi because I was like, wow, all of this is so interesting what you can do with money. And then I've got to say like I've several times either embarrassed myself or just got checked myself like—I marvel at times that things you can do that already existed in the financial services world, but in DeFi, the fact that it's automated by software, it's fascinating to me and that's why we need to teach our kids how money works. It's really, really, really important or else basically, someone else is going to teach their kid or other people who already know how to use the system. They're going to use it and they're going to put their money to work. And your money is going to become more and more worthless, because inflation is about to destroy the US dollar, so.
Host: Yeah, I mean, I think that was a huge gap in education for our generation is we never really learned about financial stuff in school growing up, and hopefully they change that for the next generation because then you have all these kids coming out of college that are like, okay, now, I'm supposed to manage my own finances. Like, where did—where do you even begin with that? Nobody ever told me how to do that. What does that mean? I don't—I don't even know how to pay my phone bill.
DeFi Dad: Why are kids who are 18 years old being forced to choose a major and choose a college without someone saying, okay, so if you go to this college, it's going to cost this much money. Now if we forecast how much that will add up over four years, you're going to pay 200, $300,000. Okay. Your rate on your loan is expected to be let's say, 5%. Here's how much money you're going to have to pay off yearly in order to pay it off at that rate as the debt continues, the interest continues to compound. No one does that. I guarantee you, a lot of people would stop going into certain majors and saying, I'm just going to do this, which then would bring to light why do we need to pay people like teachers much more money that we've like, somehow, we've, we've denigrated the occupation of those who have some of the most important impact and influence in our life on our kids which are teachers. Their wages are not keeping up with tech. Why does some idiot tech bro make that much more money? I worked in San Francisco and I can tell you there's so many worthless idiots working in tech in San Francisco and they are being paid an unreasonable amount of money and they're being paid it in many cases because mom and dad worked in tech, and they push them along. And they said just do this. And then they said hey, it's okay, I've got a friend, my friend will—my friend is an investor in the company. That's one of the best ways to get in. He's an investor. He'll vouch for you. You get in and you start to climb that totem pole. It's bullshit. It's more bullshit from the legacy world. And I think one of the ways to beat it is to understand how money works, because once you realize it, you're like, hold on a sec., I'm paying people to basically move around my money and take a very small cut that actually adds up to a lot of money over time and eats away at the potential returns. Why am I doing this? I'll just use DeFi. I'd rather risk it off. I'd rather risk all the money in these different protocols. I can buy DeFi Insurance like DeFi Dad told me to. I can size my position. I can learn how these things work because I could make potentially a whole nether level of generational wealth in DeFi versus continue to be owned by a traditional finance system that rewards the rich for being rich and it punishes the poor for being poor, so.
Host: I have made that exact same speech that you just did so many times. I agree 1,000%. And I think there are plenty of other people out there who are on the same page as us, and hopefully somebody does something to change—does some work towards changing the system. But anyway, all right. One more quick tweet to close this out. This is from—
DeFi Dad: One more quick one. That was supposed to be quick. You're like, what happened, I—
Host: Okay. This is—this is—okay. This is going to be a quick one for real though. This is just funny. This is from April 15. You said, “Am I the only one who sees Doge bulls as a Nickelback fans of crypto. You want to believe it's a joke, but it's not.” So a little harsh towards Nickelback but very true.
DeFi Dad: Yeah, yeah. If anyone is listening to this in the future. It's April 21st, 2021. And yeah, there's, there's a lot of friends and family who I told over the years to buy Bitcoin and Ether and other DeFi related tokens and it doesn't—it's, it's a kind of a—I don't like going down that path because it's like—it's like I told you so, but the reason I bring it up is, I've had a number of them come to me and say hey, I've seen this Dogecoin, I'm thinking about buying it. And I'm like, hold on. Wait a sec. So you bought Bitcoin at one relative in particular, you bought it at 15,000 in 2017, you sold it at 7,500 after it fell 50%. I told you that this can go the other way. You sold it then, told me you thought it was going to zero. Then you came back to me at $20,000 Bitcoin and said oh, I think it actually has upside but now it's too late, and now you want to buy Dogecoin and it's up 7,000%, fifth in market cap. I'm like, this is crazy the amount of people that are going to lose money. But anyways, that being said, I'm not a Doge hater. I personally don't hold it. I actually would recommend against holding it, but good for everyone that has made money off of it. And I love that the Dallas Mavericks and Mark Cuban allow it as a form of payment. I think it's hilarious. Like, Mark has a good sense of humor when it comes to that stuff, so.
Host: I think it's very funny as well. I just hope that people out there, the mainstream—the masses, understand that this is funny as well and don't take it too seriously. And just like quick tip for anybody who's totally new to the space listening to this is if there's no product behind a cryptocurrency, probably don't hedge your bets there.
DeFi Dad: It's Dogecoin, if anyone has never dug into it, it was created as a joke by someone meaning to sort of like mock the crypto industry and he was someone who's already into crypto. And it's been something that just existed for years and years. People buy, it the pumps, it dumps, but no one holds it with any sort of serious intent as an investor. But every, every so often, it comes roaring comes back as this crazy meme coin. Again, I normally have thought it was playful. Like a year ago, if you asked me about it, I would have said, oh it's funny. If you buy it, it's like a collectible and you can like tip people for zero transaction fees. But now that people are screaming about how they're a millionaire and there's people who are very arrogant about the fact that they've become wealthy from it, I'm like, you, you are absolutely going to get wrecked on this thing. That's how it works. The louder you yell and scream about how great you are, the more the market punishes you. And the fact that that's happening is a scary signal that this bull run might be coming to a top. but I'm still very bullish on crypto. I think we got plenty of room to run, so.
Host: For sure, yeah, I had bought like $20 of Doge back in the day because I have a dog and I love dogs and it was just funny and I used to like—I used to like shit post about it on Twitter all the time. But now that this has happened, and I'm seeing that, like, a lot of people are actually taking this very seriously. I'm like, oh shoot, I can't even like joke about this on Twitter anymore because people are actually taking this to heart and I don't want to negatively impact anybody's wallets like that.
DeFi Dad: Yeah, when people start yelling at you for warning others to—that's, that's like another warning sign. Like okay, I've got like, XYZ, 22-year-old screaming at me that I'm just jealous of their wealth, and I'm like, hey, I'm not that much older than you. And I'm totally happy for the fact that you suddenly are rich, but like you're only rich if it stays there or if you sell it, which I can tell you when things go up 7,000% in one year or seven—God, it's like 7,000% maybe in like 30 days or 90 days. I'm like, it's, it's scary. It's time to—if TikTok is screaming about it, that means you're ready to sell. But then again, I said that back in January, and it's gone up so much since then. So then, I've had a bunch of friends who are like, look men, you were wrong. And I'm like, you’re right. I was wrong then, but eventually, things do come down. If you were lucky enough to hold on to something went up that much in value, I'm not talking really about—I think Bitcoin, Ethereum, DeFi, these are these are backed by outrageous global communities and products that are being used by millions, if not billions in the near future, but something like that, it was meant to be a joke. Just be careful. It’s hold, hold it if you—if you want to. Maybe I'm wrong, maybe it goes up another 1,000% the next 30 days, but man like someone is going to lose a lot of money on Doge.
Host: Yeah, so in conclusion, everybody, Doge is a joke. Don't take it seriously.
DeFi Dad: We mean that in a nice way. We don't mean it in a mean way. It's like a fun joke, like a joke between all of us friends that we can laugh about.
Host: Exactly. Now, you're in—
DeFi Dad: [Interposing] your Doge. Be a millionaire on—be a millionaire in real life with it. and then you can absolutely talk about how funny it was when the price crashed. And you have sold out just before it crashed. That's a great story.
Host: There you go. There you go. All right. Well, DeFi Dad, before you go, tell people where they can find you on your Twitter plug, your YouTube channels as well, and then give people a quick summary, a quick reminder of all the cool things that they can do on Zapper.fi as soon as they go there and connect their wallet.
DeFi Dad: Yeah, so usual reminder, you can follow me at DeFi_Dad on Twitter. I like to post as often as possible about just, I think, very level headed tips on what I'm looking at in the DeFi markets, but like more importantly, how to actually use DeFi. And then make sure you follow zapper_fi. You can try zapper@zapper.fi, connect to your wallets, track your portfolio, trade, become a liquidity provider, yield farm. All sorts of fun there. And then please do subscribe to my YouTube channel which has been much less active the last three months. We've been doing a lot of great work at Zapper. I'm looking to do more of my own videos in the future again, but just whatever, for better or worse. Like I've been inundated with lots of awesome work and Zapper. So if you go to DeFiDad.com, there’s a list, playlist called DeFi for beginners. It's a combination of DeFi 101 explainer videos I created with the Defiant. It's a combination of DeFi tutorials I did on my YouTube channel. And it's a combination of DeFi classes that we did through Zapper's Yield TV. So that's all of—I think that's all my all my shelling.
Host: Amazing, amazing. We'll include all of that in the show notes. Thank you again, DeFi Dad for being here. I can't believe we're almost at an hour and a half in and I feel like we could just keep going but I really appreciate you taking the time. Thank you listeners for tuning in. Hopefully you learned something new about DeFi. I know you learned something new about DeFi from this episode and we'll be back again soon with another episode of the Unstoppable podcast.