Moderator: Blair Zhu, Brand Director, Mint Ventures

Guest: Splinter, Head of Development of BendDAO

Interview time: November 1, 2022

Link to the original English text of the interview:WEB3 Founders Real Talk with BendDAO Recap

Interview video:WEB3 Founders Real Talk with BendDAO

Interview audio:WEB3 Founders Real Talk with BendDAO

Blair: Hello everyone! Welcome to the Web3 Founders Real Talk column. I'm Blair, and today our guest is Splinter, who is the development director of BendDAO. He will talk to us about some of his insights on Web3. Welcome to Splinter!

Splinter: Hi Blair, thanks for the invitation.

Blair: Could you briefly introduce yourself and the basic situation of BendDAO?

Splinter: Of course my friends call me Splinter, and I am currently in charge of product prototypes in Europe. Like UI, UX are all done by me, and I am also the person in charge of the development of our platform.

I have been deeply involved in this field for more than 20 years. As a post-80s generation, it can be said that the digital revolution has grown up with me since its birth. When I was still in the Web2 field, I did development and design, and I have also worked in various industries, such as technology, finance, social networking, culture, telecommunications and other fields. Later, I learned about the encryption circle, and after several months of in-depth investigation and study on its historical origin and trend development, such as Layer1 technology and protocols built on Layer1, etc.

Later, I gradually became an investor and a user. My mind was full of everything about blockchain and what it could bring to the future, so I started to meet colleagues who were also interested in blockchain. , met friends from all over the world in 2016, and joined my first blockchain start-up around 17 years ago. It was also at that time that I completely left the Web2 field and officially entered Web3. In the past few years, my team and I have been focusing on decentralized finance. BendDAO is the latest result of our more than a year of research. It has been online and running for about July, and it may not be more than now 7 months.

The main goal of BendDAO is to provide liquidity for some blue-chip NFT holders. It is also the first decentralized point-to-pool NFT-based liquidity protocol. NFT holders can quickly lend out by pledging their blue-chip NFT Ethereum. At the same time, Ethereum lenders or Ethereum depositors provide liquidity and earn passive income through the liquidity provided. For borrowers, there is no repayment date, and they can repay at any time. As for the interest, it changes with each new block calculation. This is the main logic of BendDAO. But on top of that, we're also constantly developing new features for borrowers and lenders.

Blair: Great, thank you very much for sharing basic information about yourself and BendDAO. Then let's get into today's topic, as you just mentioned, it can be seen that you are really fascinated by the blockchain and Web3. At the same time, I also saw the sparks of the collision between DeFi and NFT, which I think provides a lot of possibilities for the growth of liquidity, and BendDAO is definitely a typical example of this process.

As far as I know, it will be launched in 2021, as the first decentralized point-to-pool NFT liquidity agreement, so what motivates you and your team to create it? And why did you firmly believe in blue-chip projects from the beginning?

Splinter: Well, we've all been through the ICO boom, the initial coin offering. The reason why we participated in so many ICOs is because we feel that this will give us the opportunity to make a lot of profits later. In these ICOs, we learned about GAS (miner's fee). At that time, we were going through the battle of GAS. You have to Increase your GWEI during each transaction, if you really want to get the corresponding tokens, then more and more GAS battles happened later, such as CryptoKitties, when the NFT of this project led to the Ethereum network It is completely blocked, so that all transactions cannot be completed smoothly, it can be said to be completely stagnant. This state lasted for a while, when everyone was casting NFTs, and then NFTs became popular.

At that time, we once again found that the transaction miner fees on Opensea, Looksrare and other trading platforms are very expensive, but these platforms have considerable NFT transaction volume and traffic, which is much higher than that of the Uniswap platform, so we bought There are a lot of NFTs, such as some OG Crypto Punks, BoredApe, Azukis and some others, etc., all of which have a large community behind them. At the time we didn't really understand why someone would pay such a high price for these NFTs, because at the time we only saw them as "little pictures" (JPEG) that were hyped, but of course we wanted to participate, because who wouldn't want to participate What about hot spots? These NFTs are all over the place, going viral on social media, mainly on Twitter and Telegram, and a few on private Discord channels, so for a while we tried to sell some of these NFTs to make some profit , put them on Opensea for sale, but we waited and waited for weeks or even months before we sold one, so we had an idea at that time: why is there no such thing as AAVE? The product not only allows users to borrow quickly by depositing ERC20 tokens as collateral, but also uses NFT as collateral to borrow. After all, the value of these NFTs is measured by the floor price. The price trend of NFT is very similar to that of ERC20. So we started to study all the related protocols, and then we invented or developed the BendDAO protocol.

Now we are trying to bring this unique product to the whole industry. As for why we firmly believe in NFT as you just asked, it is because I see NFT as modern art, which has a great influence on culture, and it will be different. People from cultural backgrounds gather together, whether it is finance, IT, art, games, culture, etc., as we know, all human art is being collected, so it is not limited to famous paintings, sculptures, and cars. Ah, watches, land, buildings, but also photos, different tools and artefacts, etc. It's like owning a piece of history, and the older it is, the more valuable it becomes over time.

So, for example, when Picasso was still alive, it might cost a few hundred dollars to buy a pair of his paintings, but now its value is as high as 100,000 or even millions of dollars, and as time goes by, its transaction price is getting higher and higher, so I firmly believe that NFT is the same as it. Its value will be raised by its cultural attributes over time, and you can easily verify its authenticity. You are the real holder, which makes it Even better. At the same time, I guess that soon, but not now, NFT will become especially important. Because it has a lot of practicality, let's not forget the first metaverse (innovation) that is still going on, you can make NFT work in the virtual world, such as making avatars or building artwork in games, used as Costumes, they call this the "skin" in the game, and I think these will all come together one day. So I'm really happy to be a part of it and looking forward to the future.

Blair: Wow, really impressive. Indeed, I think NFT has indeed allowed more and more people to enter this industry and see the beauty of this industry.

We also heard that BendDAO has made a lot of progress, such as collateral pending orders, the purchase of NFT through down payment and Ape pledge will also be launched soon, right? So what kind of work style does BendDAO have in order to produce uninterrupted output? Because from what you said, I feel that BendDAO has always had a good momentum and has launched a lot of products. Even in the current market environment, it is actually not very good.

Splinter: Indeed, our daily style of doing things...in fact, I don’t want to say it. I think everyone is a “workaholic” type, and everyone manages their private life and work well, so we can continue to add new ones. functions and some additional products, and optimize the interface for BendDAO. As you mentioned before, we also introduced a down payment method for NFT, which means that users can get For a complete NFT, they can only deposit a part of the price of the pending order, and then quickly get a loan for the remaining amount. They can quickly get the ownership of the NFT, and then they need a certain amount of time to repay the remaining balance. After we deploy buy orders, you can not only get the NFT at the price of the pending order, but also offer a reasonable low price for the seller. As long as he accepts it, the price for you to buy this NFT will become cheaper again. One of the strengths of BendDAO I would like to introduce to you: you can still use your NFT to participate in airdrops or perform other functions, even if it is locked in our agreement and becomes collateral. So currently we have two major upgrades, two big things, one is open APIs and SDKs, we still want to provide these interfaces for other projects and developers, they just need to integrate BendDAO into their own platforms or use these powerful tools for developing new projects. Of course, you can also take advantage of the liquidity of BendDAO, so we look forward to sharing this with you soon.

Then the second big thing, as you mentioned just now, is Ape pledge. We all know that YogaLabs and Horizon are about to launch this feature, Ape will be bound to BoredApe, including Mutant Apes, and even add a fourth pool to Bored Kennels Apes, so there will be four pools, one for ApeCoin pledge pool, one for BoredApe, one for Mutant Apes, and a fourth for all of them together. What we are doing is developing a protocol that allows our users to pledge with others, so that our borrowers will use their mortgaged NFT instead of the original NFT to pledge, which improves security to a certain extent , At the same time, it also strengthens the practicality. They don't need ApeCoin at all, but use other ApeCoin holders to pledge, and then share the corresponding rewards received. For example, I have a BoredApe as a loan collateral, but I don’t have ApeCoin, so I go to any pool to place an order and set the corresponding pledge conditions to see if I can find the required NFT, but there are ApeCoin and those who want to mortgage his tokens, reach an agreement with him to pledge together and share rewards, that's it.

Blair: I think it must be a lot of work, and this feature is also very unique, no one has seen it before. Then I want to say that it can be seen that you are indeed a group of workaholics.

So in this process, are there any challenges or resistance that must be overcome or confronted? Especially in the current bear market situation, the project party may encounter more challenges, so are there any suggestions or points that can be shared with other practitioners?

Splinter: Sure, we've had challenges all the time, but so far, I can say we've overcome them, and I'm really happy about that.

But there is one or the biggest challenge that has made us popular for several weeks. Everyone is talking about us, but they are all negative, and there are very few positive ones. Some people even deliberately spread false information. Those more influential accounts said We threatened the market, we threatened the NFT market, BendDAO is the scourge and so on. What happened? At that time, the NFT market suddenly fell, not only bearish on the price of ERC20 tokens, but also caused all NFT floor prices to drop precipitously, of course, including all NFT blue chips supported in BendDAO. Since we use all NFT floor prices to calculate the health factor of our user loans, the number of loans compared with the floor price is not 30 or 40% of what we borrowed, but suddenly rises to 80/90%, so Our emergency mechanism triggered the loan to enter the auction stage. All NFT borrowers must repay part of the remaining balance to keep their NFT ownership. This panic began to spread rapidly, and unfortunately all lenders also began to withdraw from our pool. Take their deposits, so we had no liquidity at that time.

As you can imagine, we were having sleepless nights. Working with our community 24/7 to find a solution, everyone was panicked and scared. We didn't sleep at all, but as a DAO, I think we handled it well, we communicated with the community, they voted to lower the liquidation threshold, extend the liquidation cycle window, and then after the voting ended, we implemented the voting results and saved A lot of NFT loans were not liquidated, and the news spread that the lenders regained our trust and started depositing Ethereum in our pool again. Because after all, our annual interest rate and BendDAO agreement are still very attractive compared to other pledge providers.

So I believe that in the future we will still solve various problems and challenges as we do now, listen to the voices of the community and users, closely connect with them, follow the correct path, make plans and implement them for further development, set or adjust protocol parameters for better Benefits to all participants in the ecosystem Whether it is a borrower, lender, liquidator or pledger, everyone can benefit.

We are ready for the bull market, and we are also ready for the marketing strategy. We hope to expand our influence, let more people notice BendDAO, attract more users, and bring more liquidity. Our vision is to let BendDAO and other Project integration, or we want to make BendDAO "irreplaceable", we continue to develop APIs and SDKs interfaces, and open source our code to allow other projects to integrate our solutions into them, just like X2Y2, you can Using BendDAO's method of paying the first payment to purchase NFT through X2Y2, I believe we will add more projects and use these projects as collateral, and continue to innovate and improve, so our team is keeping up with the market trend and does not want to Miss any airdrops for blue-chip NFT holders, like now we focus on ApeCoin staking.

We need to be extremely agile, building new tools, releasing new product features quickly and maintaining a constant dialogue with our community, which I think we've been doing very well, and that's how the DAO works.

Blair: Yes, it's great to see that you really resolved the previous liquidity crisis, and you have been doing well. I think it must be difficult, because many people may have doubts about you at the time, but I think this is also the beauty of entrepreneurship, because you encounter difficulties and try to solve them, and sometimes you have to endure the pain and endure it You will find that it is okay.

So my next question is about how to capture the right market insights to develop a product that can really change the rules of the game and really meet the needs of users? Because we have also seen that builders in some industries can only make small waves after launching their own products, so how to do things right?

Splinter: Yeah, honestly I don't know either, because I think it's just trust and community support.

The difference between Web3 and Web2 is decentralization, trustless and permissionless, because you can have anonymity as long as you want, there is no middleman to decide who to support and who to oppose, unlike banks or centralized exchanges, they can Control your money. Web3 is open source, and the protocol audit is clear and transparent. But the real logic is that nothing can change it, so it will just go according to plan, which is what I think is the most beautiful thing about it.

We also have the option of passive income, which is far higher than that provided by centralized banks. For example, this is actually very attractive to investors. In BendDAO, you can earn income even if you don’t have any NFT. You can deposit your Ethereum into the loan pool and earn income. You can also pledge BEND and NFT on Uniswap. Ethereum provides liquidity and makes profits from it. Then you can deposit them into BendDAO with liquidity pool tokens to earn extra interest. You can also lock your BEND for a long time, and veBEND can also give you votes right.

So I don't know whether our products are in line with the market, which is also difficult to measure, because many indicators need to be considered. However, I think BendDAO has the potential to adapt to the needs of the market. If it is not there yet, then we will not forget our original intention and continue to expand to realize this vision naturally. If I didn't have such a firm belief, then we might not even stay to influence or change the DeFi track, and it is impossible for me to sit here. So we keep going up and face it with a positive attitude. Doing our jobs and dreaming of someday realizing these ideas.

Blair: Hahaha it’s really interesting, so at first it’s like you just mentioned listening to the community, looking for what the community really needs, and then following the trend to listen to what they really need, just like you just said, Lowering the barriers to entry, attracting more users even if they don't have NFTs at all, trying to increase adoption, I think that's the answer.

So, what advice would you give to people who are trying to become Web3 entrepreneurs or just want to find a job in Web3? Is there any feasible way to share with them?

Splinter: I can share my opinion.

I think if you really want to make anything, you need to find a problem, because if you have a problem, most people probably do too. Then you connect with people who have the same vision as you, to find a solution to that problem, and then you start building your product, and your community is very important, I think this is the magic weapon. Of course, if you are completely a novice and don’t understand blockchain at all, then you will need a period of in-depth study. I think everyone has gone through this process: a lot of reading, research, and learning the history, trends, and trends of different blockchains. There are smart contracts and more.

Because we have been in the industry for 7 or 8 years, some other colleagues may have been longer, we can still learn a lot every day, we must keep pace and focus, how do you say that? "Trust the process."

Blair: Exactly, I think it was a difficult learning process, at least when I first started. I think this may be a challenge for everyone, because Web3 is more competitive than Web2, because this is an emerging industry, many new things happen every day, many new ideas are bred, many innovations, hype. So I agree 100% with what you said. You have to embrace those challenges, read as much as you can, do a lot of research. But very fortunately, now these can be found online, like: podcasts/websites, their learning materials are really good, so I think now is an excellent time for them to enter the industry, and those novices can learn More knowledge about.

Then let's move on to the next topic. We just talked a lot about the BendDAO product itself, such as how to deal with challenges.

Obviously, NFT-Fi is booming. We see that many entrepreneurs are still committed to deepening their projects in this field, such as Sodium and LalmaLend, but I think this track is still very early. Just before we talked about the topic of challenges, then BendDAO must have put in a lot of effort to overcome the previous credit crunch problem, so how will you manage the liquidation crisis in the future? Because we all know that we are still in the crypto winter, and it is very difficult for the market to rebound on a large scale, even for those blue-chip projects you know or those NFTs with a certain reputation.

Splinter: Of course, we thought about it a lot. I think the liquidation crisis behind it was actually a good test, and we learned a lot from it.

I would like to say that BendDAO's loan settlement and collateralized NFT may not be the same as the traditional leveraged ones you use on centralized trading platforms. On traditional centralized exchanges, when the price goes against you, you lose all your collateral. But in BendDAO, once your loan is auctioned, any user can bid for your loan, even yourself, as long as you use another wallet. So, you can still redeem it again in the auction, it doesn’t have to be a huge amount, you can save your loan by repaying it in part, and then extend your own time, it’s not like a traditional leveraged one, it’s not at all Liquidate all loans on warning. You can also sign up for our notification function. If the status of the health factor changes, you will receive our email. When your loan enters the auction stage, we will also notify you by email, so that you have time to deal with it. In theory Such. It’s even possible that if a well-known NFT goes to auction, its previous owner could end up profiting.

So I have never believed that the DeFi track will collapse. On the contrary, I think it will grow stronger and gain more adoption rates. More and more smart people are participating in it every day, and the user base continues to increase. Loved by the younger generation, love that it's a great investment opportunity, but also a lot of fun, so I feel like history is being written as we talk.

The goal of BendDAO is to become irreplaceable and lead the industry and market. We are transparent. You can track our daily and development process on deWork. We also invite Immunify, bug bounty hunters and hackers to help us discover product vulnerabilities. We follow the instructions of the community and BEND holders Commitments, giving rewards, they are all major components of our governance, so I think the tide of NFT and Web3 is so strong, we will continue to attract mass attention and become more and more popular.

Blair: Yeah, sounds like a solid plan. As you just mentioned, BendDAO has adjusted some parameters to release more liquidity. By lowering the liquidation threshold for mortgages, and even temporarily lowering them during the auction, this form will definitely strengthen loans to some extent confidence, but also the potential for a more hasty reckoning. So how to balance the interests of these stakeholders? Because in this field, you have to take care of multiple interests.

Splinter: Yeah, that's right, we don't know what's going to happen next, but rather than what we've been through before, and what we've learned from it, I'm sure we're not going to completely change the way we do things.

We monitor a lot of data, put a lot of effort into calculations, and even predict many possible situations. I am very confident that we will achieve our vision and roadmap, and one day we hope that all users who use BendDAO can benefit from it. If any user does not benefit from it, or there is a crisis situation, we will count the number and contact the community and token holders, try our best to find the best solution, and implement corresponding changes to solve the problem , as we have always done, we want to make products like AAVE and Binance, but in a way of combining the two. We will continue to expand and gather more projects, invent more and more useful tools, we will increase the liquidity we provide, continuously optimize and improve, and adjust day after day with the evolution of the blockchain.

So my answer is to go with the flow, but be prepared for everything.

Blair: Yeah, of course it's not easy to keep everyone happy in this circle, but it's nice to see you have such a comprehensive strategy, and listening to the community is always key.

I have one last question and probably the hardest. Although the market value of NFT is much higher than last year, the liquidity has not kept up. How do you view these challenges? Or maybe you see it as an opportunity? How do you see the future of NFT-Fi?

Splinter: Good question, I don't know either.

Our current total locked value is 70,000 Ethereum, more than 70,000. There are currently about 30,000 Ethereum that can be lent, and there are almost the same number of NFT collaterals. We currently support 8 types of blue-chip NFTs, and about 100,000 unique NFTs are used as collateral. The annualized return on deposits of Ethereum lenders is also very attractive. We only need to expand the popularity of the product, and you can still bid, and you may even get a very cost-effective NFT. We also offer rewards to the first bidder if the borrower repays his loan. So it's another interesting opportunity to take profit, we've managed to beat all the odds in the bear market and I believe we're slow but definitely coming into a healthy market environment like you mentioned.

We have the products that the NFT market needs very much. We will continue to work hard and widely publicize BendDAO. After all, we are still a very young start-up company, and growth will come naturally. So why can't BendDAO reach, for example, a market value of 100 million US dollars on a certain day? Therefore, NFTFi will definitely grow in the future, which is inevitable, and the same is true for BendDAO.

Blair: We'll wait until that day, we will. It's a very vivid story, and a very feasible solution.

Really excited to see that BendDAO is going well, I think you have a very clear ecological footprint, plus practical solutions to those challenges, dilemmas, and a coherent business line.

We would certainly like to see more explorations by BendDAO in the not-too-distant future! Thank you so much for sharing today and for your precious time

Splinter: My pleasure, my pleasure.

Blair: Thank you very much!