[00:21:10] Adam Bavosa: Okay. Remember you can always ask questions in the development channel. Michael and the OpenZeppelin team are hanging out there all the time. So if you have questions about what they’re working on or questions about updates, you can ask them there.
[00:21:40] Adam Bavosa: All right. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you so much, Michael. We’re adding one more speaker to today’s call. We have the folks from AlphaGrowth here. We have Brian and Sharp.
[00:21:55] AlphaGrowth: Cool. Thanks Adam. A while ago AlphaGrowth Brian from AlphaGrowth, founder of AlphaGrowth. We basically help connect protocols and chains. Most recently, we have helped the Kava ecosystem bring over a hundred different dApps, go multi chain from various chains throughout the blockchain industry.
[00:22:18] AlphaGrowth: And in our adventure to help Kava bring more protocols to their chain we got in touch with Compound. Understood what, a compound was doing and saw that the grants program, we went through a discovery session around the grants program and found that there was things that we could potentially create more impact for compound in terms of growth, in terms of growing TVL user base market pools.
[00:22:46] AlphaGrowth: And what I’ll, what I will say is that every single chain we talked to are, we’re talking about 70 different chains. There’s another 30 to 40 chains launching. Over the course of the next year, and they all want compound, right? So if you look from that category that, the work that Oakland Zeppelin is doing and Gauntlet’s doing around, how do we, how do you process that?
[00:23:08] AlphaGrowth: How do you manage risk? How do you understand what is the infrastructure involved? That’s what we’ve been doing for chains to bring protocols to chains. For the last two years, right? So we’ve helped out near we’ve helped that Aurora right now we’re engaged with Zeta Chain Fuse, Kava we’ve, helped out Mantle in the past with a couple different introductions.
[00:23:31] AlphaGrowth: And so we’re, our job is to like ease that burden. So we put up a discussion and potentially pushing it out as a proposal. on to help manage that process and push that process forward. So instead of hoping for inbound for grants or inbound for chains to put up proposals, do a risk management analysis, do a chain analysis on exactly which chains are viable for the compound protocol.
[00:24:00] AlphaGrowth: Analyze which markets and token markets are available for the for the protocol and then have an outbound approach and start to attract at first the chains with, the most TVL, the most attention, the most kind of brand around them that are also like viable and instead of waiting for change to inbound and be confused about the process, we can help be stewards in pushing forward and communicating the different infrastructure needs.
[00:24:29] AlphaGrowth: The different risk management needs on either their core token or other local assets on the chain to help drive compound growth across a multi chain process. This is pretty much all we do is connect protocols to chains. So getting into the nitty gritty details, understanding whether they have the right RPC infrastructure the sub graphs, the indexers, multi sigs.
[00:24:54] AlphaGrowth: How do you bootstrap liquidity on the said pools, making sure that there’s a negotiation arrangement between the chain and their currency to provide initial liquidity loans or liquidity incentives out of the gate helping work with the different teams at Gauntlet, OpenZeppelin to understand the scoring possibility if the risk is too high and then if the risk is too high, then, maybe the chain needs to bring more liquidity as incentive to de risk or an insurance fund or something like that.
[00:25:20] AlphaGrowth: Yeah. And crying, trying to make the process more outbound instead of asking for somebody from the BD team of Arbitra or somebody from the BD team of a CK sink to come in. And then fill out a proposal. Making it a process a little bit faster, a little bit more transparent, and then helping the process move smoother.
[00:25:45] AlphaGrowth: And that would be our goal, that would be our number one priority goal is, more chains, more pools, more markets. Making sure that they’re, the risk is, the risk reward scenario is there. And then the secondary KPI, our goal is we have over 2, 800 projects. On the alpha growth platform right now and developers looking for grants and looking for things to build and so helping supply a little bit of growth around the different needs for the RFPs for the grants program.
[00:26:19] AlphaGrowth: We, that would be our unique value proposition is going more outbound helping the grants program with outbound. And I think the last part of the proposal would be education materials around and content distribution around the new pools and the new chain launches. So effectively, when a new chain launches, creating up with a a go to chain plan to go to market plan for that specific chain getting content created, having both the chain and the assets on the chain.
[00:26:53] AlphaGrowth: Do AMAs, do educational resources, potentially getting other promotional materials to push out that is discussing the viability of the new markets that are now available. And that’s what we put together. So this is our bread and butter. This is what we’ve been doing for the last two years. We’ve done it for, we’ve gotten.
[00:27:13] AlphaGrowth: Over 150 projects grants. We’re now working with 10 different chains and they all want Compound. We just have to figure out a way to process them in the most strategic order for risk based returns and the amount of TVL and attention that Compound deserves. So that’s why we put our proposal and discussion up there.
[00:27:33] AlphaGrowth: Please feel free to ask questions, engage, and excited to hear feedback.
[00:27:43] Adam Bavosa: Fantastic. Thank you so much, Brian. We have a link to the proposal, which Brian was talking about in the development channel. Really happy to see firms competing for resources from the doubt to expand upon Business development for the protocol. I think that decentralized systems have this issue where they’re like, isn’t it really a face and having these firms that work with the protocol directly that can provide that human communication to, network and make sure that integrations can happen is very important.
[00:28:19] Adam Bavosa: You can check out those two forum posts on the forums. I got the links in the development channel so you can compare the proposals from the two firms that spoke in today’s call and make your choice on which one you want to support. Provide your feedback there so they can both proceed with I guess their governance proposal that they talked about in their Threats.
[00:28:42] Adam Bavosa: Does anybody have any questions or comments for alpha growth?
[00:28:47] AlphaGrowth: So I’ll throw out there like good feedback is cool, but like bad feedback is even better, right? Because we want to figure out what the community wants. So please, if you have concerns, issues, anything like this nature, please let us know.
[00:29:04] AlphaGrowth: Yeah,
[00:29:05] Kevin Cheng: I do have a question. Basically, I guess the main bottleneck for, deploying on new chains or getting new markets up is actually. On the engineering side so I’m just taking a look at the the form post doesn’t look like you guys have anyone on the developer side. I’m curious where, those resources would come from because like just talking to other teams doesn’t really get us onto other chains, right?
[00:29:33] Kevin Cheng: There needs to be heavily heavy investment on the engineering
[00:29:36] AlphaGrowth: side for that to happen. Yeah, great question. What I would say is going through the process and kind of conversations working with Kava. It’s understood that, Kava doesn’t want to potentially launch Compound themselves.
[00:29:50] AlphaGrowth: What they do is they hire a third party engineer. And right now, Kava does not necessarily have the, all the infrastructure that Infura and Chainlink Oracle’s available to launch. So what they do is they have a third party engineer launch it for them on their behalf, they pay this third party engineer to do that, we work with them.
[00:30:11] AlphaGrowth: That’s just one example. So we would have to go out to the different chains, figure out what the cross chain messaging is going to be for the governance support. If it’s, wormhole, if it’s layer zero. Figure out which is easily available, do the analysis chain by chain to figure out who has this infrastructure embedded, who wants this and who’s willing to put forward the engineering resources to launch the contracts in an easier way from their side and then get approval from the governance.
[00:30:43] AlphaGrowth: To launch right after the risk assessment and what I would imagine is that the chains themselves are launching the contracts with approval from the compound Dow, making sure everything is aligned so it would limit the amount of resources that the compound labs would have to expend to do this.
[00:31:07] AlphaGrowth: Does that help clear stuff?
[00:31:11] Alastor: Yeah. Sorry about that. Yeah,
[00:31:15] Kevin Cheng: that kind of clears up, at least the understanding is Alpha Growth wouldn’t have the engineering resources, it’s on the
[00:31:23] AlphaGrowth: The chain, the chains team right, to figure that out. We have partners that we can pull in, and we could just use the partner that helped launch the Uniswap contracts for Kava, like we can pull that team in.
[00:31:35] AlphaGrowth: But then the chain itself would be the one burdening the cost infrastructure there.
[00:31:44] AlphaGrowth: I do have a follow
[00:31:45] Kevin Cheng: up though, but I think Bernard had
[00:31:47] Alastor: something. Yeah, just on our end also to give our perspective on how we would do this on how this proposal originate originally came about was in, in collaboration with the wallpacer team who spun out of TrueFi. And has been contributing to other proposals or protocols as well.
[00:32:08] Alastor: And then secondly, we’re close with Equilibria team who are behind Venereal Perennial and I think have a history in contributing for Compound over, over a couple of years already. So on our end, it’s basically collaborating with high quality devs to take up the mantle.
[00:32:30] Alastor: And finding the gaps where we need to plug them in.
[00:32:37] Got
[00:32:38] Kevin Cheng: it. Cool. And just one more follow up, so this is more of a personal opinion. But from my point of view, I’m more interested in like integrations with. Other dApps, like getting other dApps to integrate into compound or getting, new collateral assets or new markets up for new types of barring use cases, rather than launching on new chains, just because in a couple more months, we’ll be on most of the major L2s already.
[00:33:04] Kevin Cheng: And The other chains that want Compound on, it benefits those chains more than it does for the Compound DAO. So that’s just a bit of feedback. I want to see more about what are some ideas of growing Compound outside of just launching a new
[00:33:17] AlphaGrowth: chain? Cool. Thank you for the feedback.
[00:33:22] AlphaGrowth: That’s rad. One of the concepts we have in there, there’s I think there’s only two or three lines in there is this concept of a embedded DeFi where there is a new type of kind of distribution mechanism in which Instead of having the user come to compound, but pushing compound as a potential and embedded application within the different assets and the websites and the apps of the different assets that compound supports.
[00:33:54] AlphaGrowth: And also obviously the assets in token projects, it added utility as soon as that they have a money market embedded with it. And there’s a, we’re tracking around 41, 000 different token projects now in our data. And so understanding the, one of the major portions is understanding the risk assessment from Gauntlet.
[00:34:18] AlphaGrowth: around which tokens would be viable as new markets on those chains. And, we can provide the data. Gauntlet has data. And once they hit a certain threshold, we would then aim to go after that particular asset and sit and come up with a deal for them to say, Hey, bootstrap liquidity, you’re already on this chain and we can create a new market for you.
[00:34:41] AlphaGrowth: On top of that, you can embed these money market contracts right into your existing app, right into your existing website. It’s not explicitly, but I think embedded DeFi. Is a future that would drastically help define general and user adoption as well as the growth and expansion of compound.
[00:35:05] AlphaGrowth: Cool.
[00:35:06] Kevin Cheng: Thank you for your answer. Sorry, I have one more follow up. Cause I’m looking at like the total costs or the initial proposed costs for this. It’s 18, 000 comp. That’s that’s pretty much like a million dollars for six months. For RFP based grant programs, right? You would expect most of those to go to fund the individual RFPs, right?
[00:35:28] Kevin Cheng: Because there’s no developer resources. You’re going outbound and you have to pay people to, take on these tasks. But it does look like this is getting all of these funds are being allocated to the to alpha growth. Can you just clarify, how the funds are being spent?
[00:35:45] Kevin Cheng: How do you get other people to actually build stuff
[00:35:49] AlphaGrowth: for Compound? Yeah, that’s great. So in terms of one of the, I’m going to be very, try to be a little bit political here. We analyzed the current grants program. We saw that their inbound deal flow was not sufficient to really bring. The high enough quality or an expansion of ideas, right?
[00:36:18] AlphaGrowth: I think there was a time where we were considering to go and compete directly against the current existing grants program and go within that methodology. But in, we decided to go more for after conversations with quest book and other people, we decided to go for more of a plurality approach and say, hey, there was going to be things that need to be built in this growth.
[00:36:43] AlphaGrowth: Strategic road map. So let’s take an approach that is more cooperative and, there’s things that we think will need built. We can deploy some grants for that or bring you and say, Hey, we need this grant deployed to build this particular use case and work with the quest book team on that on the multi chain aspect.
[00:37:03] AlphaGrowth: About one third of the comp in the proposal is for liquidity incentives and Marketing and understanding short term liquidity loans to get these pools bootstrapped, right? Either doing a token trade, figuring out what the liquidity incentive structure should be, how much token should the new chain bring, how much token should the new asset bring to get the ball started and rolling.
[00:37:32] AlphaGrowth: Obviously, most of these will be loans. Some of them will be setting up localized pools to bootstrap a localized pool on a new chain. So that if somebody is getting comp on the new chain, there’s a place to trade it without going multi chain and bridging. It’s, when you have Localized comp and enough liquidity in that space, you can start to do different style vaults, which become a lot more compounding and a lot more hedged structured products.
[00:38:01] AlphaGrowth: So you do need local comp liquidity on the chain, on the new chain, in a DEX, to do some of these other stuff. types of structured products. And then we had a budget line item in there for marketing, right? And one of the issues that, I’m in this space where I’m analyzing defy all the time.
[00:38:22] AlphaGrowth: We, until six months ago, was not really aware of all the advancements that were occurring in comfy three. And I think if somebody that’s in the business doing You know, supply and liquidity, doing pools, et cetera, et cetera. It doesn’t know about what’s going on with comp. There’s so many other defy users that don’t know what’s going on with comp.
[00:38:43] AlphaGrowth: And so that’s an issue, right? So we have to partner with the different assets. We have to partner with the different chains, but then also help distribute that communication, those educational materials, or if a vault or structure product is built building on top of comp because of new access to new assets or new access to new chains.
[00:39:03] AlphaGrowth: We then have to help with them with the materials so that the funding and TVL trickles down, right? You can build a product, you have to do the risk management and asset asset verification, risk assessment. Then you have to distribute to the larger audience that this is now available then to unlock some other structured products.
[00:39:29] AlphaGrowth: You have to and bootstrap liquidity. That is the reasons behind the cost structures, the line items. We would be employing six people to, to work on this. And right now we’re a nine person team. Three to four people would immediately go on this. We can start introducing chains and working through it as soon as it passes.
[00:39:54] AlphaGrowth: And we would probably adding two to three more resources to the project full time to effectively push comp out and start the conversations and structure that.
[00:40:08] AlphaGrowth: Okay,
[00:40:09] Kevin Cheng: got it. Yeah. Thanks for providing more clarity. I think yeah, I do have a bit more feedback, but I’ll probably just type it up in the forum just so like other people can also take a look in and respond there. And I also don’t want to drag out this meeting too long. But yeah, thanks for presenting and answering
[00:40:27] AlphaGrowth: my questions.
[00:40:28] AlphaGrowth: Thanks Kevin.
[00:40:34] Adam Bavosa: Yeah, so it sounds the plan for alpha, if alpha growth was to proceed with their proposal and get it approved by the community they would work together with. Questbook to have like a co effort of grants plus the bd efforts that alpha
[00:40:52] AlphaGrowth: growth provides Yeah, I would say a primarily focus on the bd and outbound efforts for new chains new markets And then things that need to be built along the way We would you know help find providers and push back to questbook.
[00:41:10] AlphaGrowth: Got it. Okay. Thank you for summarizing I guess just one comment like because
[00:41:17] Kevin Cheng: usually you pick either rfp or a quest broke look like platform where people submit requests. It’s weird that we’ll have both. I think that kind of,
[00:41:29] CommunityMember: Can I make a comment here? So I’m, I just wanted to give a little feedback here too, so it’s all good.
[00:41:37] CommunityMember: First, my first question is, with the 18, 000, does that mean you guys are then extending comp from that 18, 000 to the people who you’re giving grants? That’s how you’re thinking
[00:41:46] AlphaGrowth: it would work? So there’s going to be, if you look at the breakdown, there’s three sections.
[00:41:54] AlphaGrowth: There’s about 6, 000 comp that we see that we would need. And, this is negotiable and would gladly take feedback from the community on how to structure this differently, but getting it. That makes sense. Yeah. Getting a chain on board, when they launch, I imagine that the treasury of the chain will want to put a lot of liquidity into the initial pool, bootstrapping that liquidity into the pool with only their side of the their side of the pool or the market would, cause issues.
[00:42:28] AlphaGrowth: So effectively creating loans with the different chains, once a pool is created. And then also creating localized liquidity on that chain to trade comp as well is a big decision. Yeah,
[00:42:43] CommunityMember: The thing I’d like to point out is the outbound style, it takes power away from compound. So just thinking about systemizing this process, I do think you’re onto something as far as visibility for the grants program and expansion.
[00:42:58] CommunityMember: So maybe I don’t know other people will provide feedback in and that will be good, but consider some alternative strategies maybe some way of, this outbound thing is a little, it’s not very transparent, so it could be, just increasing the visibility of the inbound stuff and getting more people who you think would be great to submit proposals.
[00:43:25] CommunityMember: Or review the RFPs. So I just wanted to touch on that and appreciate your info. It’s all
[00:43:30] AlphaGrowth: good. Yeah, I appreciate that. To be really straightforward, most of the BD leads and the ecosystem leads at these chains, their job is to negotiate and cut checks, right? And so compound by not necessarily going outbound or having somebody to negotiate the half and making it fully inbound process.
[00:43:51] AlphaGrowth: Is missing out on a lot of different potential opportunities to expand to other chains into new markets, right? So going if you go to the head of an ecosystem They’re not proposal writers all the time, right? They’re not forum. So Maybe and within this process we would be helping them write the proposal that would match You know what gauntlet says in terms of risk assessment what opens a splint says in terms of risk assessment And what tokens would be on there and be able to negotiate that and potentially have an insurance fund or what types of grants or liquidity that they would be to make it more attractive.
[00:44:29] AlphaGrowth: They need help in that process, right? As well. So it’s synergistic getting compound to more markets and more chains. But also they, most of the time, what they do is they just write checks. Helping those two parties meet and speed up the business development process, it would be our job.
[00:44:50] AlphaGrowth: And that would be our KPIs. How many chains, how many new markets that we were able to bring in, negotiate and make it win for both sides.
[00:45:05] Alastor: Yeah. And I think on our end, just, as our approach is slightly different. And that’s also, a bit more, I would say light touch or lean in the regards of, okay, what we want to establish is basically the analytical fundamentals of which strategic directions to go at versus actually executing.
[00:45:29] Alastor: The outbound. So I think that’s a, it’s a big difference in terms of size and scope of our proposals and how they’re positioned.
[00:45:49] Adam Bavosa: All right. Thank you so much everyone for the discussions today. I think that might be all we have unless anybody has any other questions or comments for. some of today’s speakers. I know that there’s a lot of discussion today.
[00:46:05] Adam Bavosa: Okay, great. If anyone has any more thoughts or feedback or questions, please feel free to go over to the forums, www. comp. xyz, and reply thoughtfully to any of the forum threads related to today’s discussions. I posted links to them in the development channel.
[00:46:27] Adam Bavosa: Looks like Doe is trying to ask a question. Let’s
[00:46:41] Adam Bavosa: see, Doe, you can unmute your microphone.
[00:46:47] Adam Bavosa: We can’t hear you if you’re trying to speak.
[00:47:00] Adam Bavosa: Okay. Doe, why don’t you type up your replies in the forum threads? And give everyone feedback. That would be awesome. I’m going to, yeah, let’s wrap up today’s call. Thank you so much everyone for coming. Thank you for our speakers and also our thoughtful conversations. You can always ask questions in the development channel, or make a forum thread or reply at www.
[00:47:29] Adam Bavosa: comp. xyz. Thanks for coming today. We’ll reconvene again in two weeks at the same time, 9. 30 Pacific time. Thanks for coming. Enjoy the rest of your Wednesday.
