Block by Block: A Show on Web3 Growth Marketing

[Podcast] Altan Tutar: How MoreMarkets Is Turning Idle Crypto In VERY Large Markets Into Passive Yield

• Peter Abilla

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Summary

Altan, co-founder and CEO of MoreMarkets, shares the story behind building a platform designed to unlock yield from top crypto assets that typically sit idle outside of DeFi. He explains how MoreMarkets is removing barriers for users of non-smart contract assets like XRP and how the team is bridging gaps between traditional holders and modern DeFi opportunities. The conversation explores user adoption, community response, key partnerships, and why crypto is shifting from modular to vertically integrated systems.


Takeaways

•Altan comes from an engineering background, bringing a builder’s mindset into crypto

•Idle crypto assets like XRP represent untapped potential in DeFi

•MoreMarkets makes it easy to earn yield on assets that normally don’t work with smart contracts

•The XRP community has shown strong support for the platform’s mission

•Education is key for onboarding users who are new to DeFi

•Strategic partnerships with exchanges and institutions will drive long-term growth

•Crypto is evolving from modular frameworks to vertically integrated experiences

•MoreMarkets launched on July 2 with plans to expand access and functionality

•User experience is critical for adoption in complex crypto environments

•Cross-chain solutions could dramatically increase participation in DeFi


Timeline

(00:00) Introduction to MoreMarkets and Altan’s background

(02:52) How MoreMarkets started and the core idea behind it

(05:25) Looking at DeFi usage data and identifying gaps

(07:55) Why non-smart contract assets are left out of DeFi

(11:03) Reactions from the community and the need for better education

(13:29) Why integrations and partnerships are essential

(16:22) The broader shift in crypto architecture toward vertical integration

(19:10) What’s next for MoreMarkets and how users can get involved

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See other Episodes Here. And thank you to all our crypto and blockchain guests.

Altan, co-founder and CEO of MoreMarkets. Welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. Now you guys are doing something quite interesting. It's something I've heard before, or people have talked about, you know, this, you know, idle assets from other chains and other, you know, in the top, you know, 50 of coin market cap, but they don't participate in DeFi. And so I'm really glad to see that that's kind of what your guys are focused on at MoreMarkets. Before we get into it, tell us about your journey in crypto. You were an engineer at Near. I believe maybe tell us a little bit about that and what led to you leaving to join work to create more markets. Yeah, as you said, I'm Altan, one of the founders of MoreMarkets. Maybe I'll start with how I came to crypto. I grew up in Turkey, and that's why the name is different and you don't see it as much. Turkey is interesting. ton of crypto in Turkey. I've interviewed lots of founders from there, Orkun from Citria, uh many others. good. Yeah, I know Orkun and Emin, AVEX founder is also Turkish. She was a professor at Cornell. But anyway, going back to the story, when you're growing turkey, there's certain things you see. And one of the most important things is Turkish lira devalued a lot. So when I was growing up in 2009, one dollar was something around like 118 or 119 Turkish lira. And then when you look at the graph, you see that it's like full on drop, right? So a lot of people look into different ways to store wealth. And obviously this is gold, right? When you talk to your grandparents, your mom, your dad, gold is something that everybody wants to buy. And even kind of funny that you, when you go to weddings, you buy gold for people. So you go to a merchant and you can buy gold. And Bitcoin just started to... When I looked at Bitcoin when I was in high school, this is like, oh, this is interesting. So it could be something like that. So that's my background. I studied computer science and mathematics in the United States. Actually, I did my master's in AI at Imperial College London and starting at Nier after being a, I won a hackathon in 2022 and Nier team reached out to me and said, you should come to the foundation team and be a partner engineer. So partner engineer means. You are the one, you can code obviously, but you should also go and talk about the product and tell people about the technology in a more simplistic way so that business development team can quote unquote sell the product. So that was my journey to Nier. And what we did at Nier was we were building this technology core data availability, which is a basic smart contract that um any rollups can um sort of send data to. Um, and we, we were a really good team. we liked each other and, um, that's why we, decided to sort of, uh, I personally decided to, Hey, I should start a company. And, um it was, we started to spin off with that team. So we were four people, um, leaving near, and then now we're nine to 10 people. So, um, yeah. Are you guys, is more markets, is data availability still one of the key, um I guess the key primitives you guys are building with more markets or has that changed or pivoted? It's changed. uh I talk about pivots quite often and I did that. I talked about this with a friend. um Yeah, we pivoted because and it was, it's really hard to do pivots in crypto when you come up with a narrative. But when we looked into it, the infrastructure and data availability doesn't generate any revenue, although it's great piece of tech that we created on here. So we were like, rather, you know, looked at top 20 assets and said, Hey, like these are It's a very large market, just thinking from fundamentals. And even if you can unlock like 1 % as a protocol, you're capturing a lot of value. that was the, yeah, that was the kind of thinking around it, but it was the original team that built the A, but spin out to do something else. What's your view on DA and other change? know, Eigenlayer is doing something in the space and of course, Celestia. And there's a lot of debate on whether or not it will actually capture any value since, you know, based on current data, there's a lot of usage of DA, but not a lot of revenue. And apparently, you know, that's the revenue toggle. They can just turn that on and earn more, but then really nobody knows if usage will go down, if price goes up. or cost goes up. What's your view on DA in general as a category? It's a commodity. It's kind of like railroads and I almost view it as kind of bridges. You know, they exist between different chains and you can, but the fees are trending to zero because there's always a new project that can come in and say, I'm going to offer for a cheaper price, right? So then you get into a competition between different chains and almost driving to zero. um That was the main sort of thinking around pivoting actually, because it's You can build a good product. had like a couple of different roll ups using us, but it's really hard to generate revenue. when you look at the quote unquote fundamental season, um it's not one of those projects that will, that will shine. uh Predominantly DeFi has been um sort of leading the way with revenue generation and protocols. Let's get into more markets. um Tell us your thesis, how you guys came up with the key insight that led to building more markets. Yeah, yeah, I mean, it could be a more thesis too, because it's more. um But I'm an engineer, so we come from fundamental thinking. um So we looked at almost like top 20 assets and looked at Bitcoin, looked at XRP, looked at Doge. And really, when you start to look into the numbers, um on chain, DeFi and usage of these assets are pretty minimal. um And this started with Bitcoin, BTC FI, I know you talked to Citra folks. um So the usage, if you look at Bitcoin, um almost like TVL divided by market cap is barely 1%. um And when you look at XRP and Doge, XRP is like 0.05%. And these assets have like large holder basis. They are, you Bitcoin has its own holder base, XRP has its army that's quite different, and Doge has people that actually hold them, but they either use them on centralized exchanges, so they just hold them on centralized exchanges, or they use products like Nexo, and those are like earning products that exist, that used to sort of like lend these assets off chain. uh So what we came up with is like, okay, look, so you have a large market, which is large tan look, come from traditional venture and there's not enough products serving this sort of category. uh So we were like, hmm, okay. So we have at least varied engineers that has cross-chain expertise. We can quickly, just like Legos sort of add up these solutions and you know, cross-chain infrastructure has improved. have like. like, for now, layer zero, more full. And... all the other intact networks. Now they're very sophisticated now. So it is time to kind of like almost piece everything up and build a product that um looks like a centralized exchange slash like a Revolute product in the front end. And you can come in with your XRP just with one click, put your XRP in and earn yield. And at the background, we take it to DeFi. Or we take it to something like Athena does, like a basis trade that, you know, because you're long the asset, can short the asset on the perps and generate yield. um So that's kind of the story. It was coming from looking at top five or top 10 assets and really deep diving in and seeing like where skills fit. yeah, our team has a very strong sort of protocol design and cross-stranded structure. um expertise. So we decided to go with that. You know, it's a key insight that I've heard others talk about, you know, but they talk about it kind of loosely. What I think you have done, um and you shared this in your December 11th uh tweet, you shared a table that showed kind of the top five underutilized assets, and you use a metric called a DeFi utilization rate. which I believe is in, what's the numerator and denominator on that? Yeah, so numerator would be TVL um and then denominator would be the market cap of the, let's say, FTV for those assets, right? Because actually Bitcoin is still not fully done. um So in this, oh the example you shared with Doge, TVL is 8.31 million. And then, but the market cap is 58 billion. And so the utilization rate of that is a DeFi utilization rate, 0.03%, which is an indication that there's hardly any products serving that specific category, the Doge market. And that's a really great insight. And you've quantified it. which I don't think others have done that I've seen, but people have talked about it. um And so you come up with this key insight. Okay, so there's these assets that don't have a lot of products serving them. They don't participate in DeFi, then what? Yeah, so then the idea, I mean, the reason why those assets don't have any native yield is because like, look, like Bitcoin started as a non-smart contract chain and XRP had heard of smart contract chains at the time, Vitalik interned at Ripple before starting Ethereum. And, you know, David Schwartz talks about it, the CEO of Ripple Labs. You know, they make a conscious decision. Look, we're not going to get into this smart contract stuff. It's pretty complicated. We're just going to do, you know, payment network and just just going to do fees. And Doge is actually just a fork of Bitcoin, right? It is an asset. Like it is a blockchain that can't do smart contract logic. So this is the reason why, like, I guess the DeFi hasn't improved. And the other other insight that's quite interesting, you know, there has been wrapped Bitcoin. um There has been wrapping of these assets, know, like there's even kind of funny Tezos is an old project and em you know, there's like 700 million wrapped Tezos exists somewhere. I think they have an L2 that they just wrapped it. um But the bad part is like, it's very hard for people to go in and use these bridges. Like if you're an XRP holder, you know, you may be used an exchange, you you bought your XRP. But then you're just like, same with Bitcoin too, but you don't want to deal with like, okay, I'm going to go to a bridge front end. I'm going to connect the, let's say XRP wallet, go bridge it to, let's say I'm going to give the example of Flare because they had a big announcement on XRP. And then, you you go there and then you kind of have to find, have to understand what restaking is. You have to understand what AMMs are. You have to understand what the lending is and all that sort of complicated stuff. And you have to know their front ends and go and deposit there. Average user is not going to do that. I think um DeFi users, which is like 10,000 users will do it ah if there's an end game for them. But uh that was kind of the inside of like, okay, so if we're going to serve this market, it needs to be very, very simple. It needs to almost look like Revolut, which is a well-known app in Europe. And people just come in and deposit. And m if they really want to learn about it more, how we generate yield, sure, like uh let them come in and understand. That's kind of division of more markets is to make sure that it is almost abstracted. And for all these non-smart contract chains, you should be able to generate yield, not crazy amount of numbers, like I think some projects, but like 20, 25 % APY. Like we want to make it a sustainable sort of four or 5 % yield that comes across from DeFi and sort of some sort of CDF sources. Yeah. So how are you doing the, I fully get the, make it simple, make it very kind of, you know, down to earth, relatable to normal people that want to earn some level of yield on their idle assets, especially assets that are in the, you know, top 10 or top 20 that don't have much opportunity for yield. um So if I'm a, maybe walk me through, like if I were, if I own XRP and then I went to more markets, um Did on the back end, how did you have did you have to integrate the XRP chain or and Like what does that work look like and as a consumer with XRP and I and I deposit it to more markets like it tell me like what happens then Yeah, so the first one, that is correct. um So we use this technology called MPC. MPC is uh just to simplify what it is. It's sort of like certain number of nodes that hold a key share that sign a transaction for you. So let's say those like, just like blockchain validators, know, they come in, there are institutions that hold that buy the stake and validate the chain. um MPCs do the same way where you just give the certain key shares to let's say Let's say fire blocks right fire blocks actually uses this technology. We use that from from near protocol Because we know how it works So that can spin up that can almost like create an XRP account for us where people can deposit the the funds so they can see it on their front end and that's multi-party computation. And so you share a piece of the private key with a couple of different parties. OK. it's your wallet plus an MPC network. So MPC network has, let's say like for now 30 nodes, let's say Altan's institution, Peter's institution and others come in and do some sort of like cryptographic scheme to sign on the network. Yeah, it's pretty common. Like if you use Fireblocks, like for example, I use it for some of our tokens that we hold, you know, it is a bunch of people coming in and signing. um It's a better version of multi-sig in a way. um it's very institutional kind of focused and it's a very consumer friendly product, but really built for institutions. Yeah, in the background it's full on institutions like Anchorage have their own stuff. It's pretty secure and secure is like billions of maybe close to trillions of assets. So what happens is people come in, there's two paths where we can generate yield. Depends on the, I guess this is the supply side. So you as a user, came in, you sign in with your wallet or Google uh X and any accounts that you can generate, we can just generate accounts for you that you hold in your uh Gmail, uh or you just come in with what is called Zomod Wallet and XRP, but really can extend to any wallets from any chain. You sign up, you deposit your XRP from Exchange or uh somewhere else that you have, or eventually we'll have like on-ramp off-ramps that you come in and buy it directly on the app. You just deposit. That's as simple as that. We don't want to complicate the experience. And on the backend, um what we do is There's obviously off-chain yield sources and on-chain yield sources. On-chain is what I call demand centers. uh Traditionally, they have been Ethereum and Solana, but for the XRP case, example, Flare has been pushing a lot of work there. So it could be just Flare that has like a restating protocol or like any lending platform that can pair up with a stable coin. And we can just deposit there and borrow a stable coin and, um you know, generate yield. almost like more markets becomes, if you understand DeFi, becomes like a curator of that asset. um And off-chain is, um it's usually like basis trades. XRP has a pretty large open interest in a lot of different cases. So just by having, let's say long XRP because we hold XRP, we can short XRP on perp dexes and collect what we call funding rates. So funding rate is a balancing mechanism for prepdex is to make sure that the long positions match the short positions. So there's two paths to kind of generate, but the main goal is like, even if we do the basis trade, we'll tell you how the transparency works, how, where we hold the keys or like the old account or the assets and, you know, exchanges, you go to Binance today, they're not, if you use their own product, they don't tell you how the yield is generated. That's really, really fascinating. m And it's such a product, I think, with a very large, with a ton of need, right? I'm curious, as you've, you if you've created support for these assets, these idle assets with really, really large market caps, um how have the, tell us about the community reception, like the XRP community, for example, which is, you know, at least on crypto Twitter, they're rabid, right? tons of support for Ripple and XRP. ah What has their reaction been to the MoreMarkets product and support for the XRP token? Yeah, it's been great. we had a lot of users, waitlist users coming in. Actually, in 48 hours, we had like 30,000 signups when we announced it in March. And the way I guess XRP community works is, you know, it's something different. XRP is not the same as ETH and it's way more passionate. They really believe in the XRP asset versus I think ETH and Bitcoin are very... There's almost like camps within Bitcoin and XRP and ETH that are, you know, they're clashing all the time and you can see that. XRP is all about, you know, mainstream and they rave about XRP getting used that are like a bang. So it's pretty different. So I would say though for DeFi, I see like almost like 28, 19 Ethereum where people have started to understand sort of like, what AMMs are, like lending protocols, but like it is growing there. Like it's, not as advanced as like Ethereum, but I can see that it's, it's the next wave, right? Like there's way more protocols coming in now, offering XRP yields and sort of that's how like people take it. Some people take it almost like, you know, it's your XRP. You should never put it somewhere. It should always stay in your wallet, but some people are like, well, I'm holding this for a while. So why not earn? burn? You know. four or 5 % on it. So that camp is still kind of figuring it out. But overall, I think people start to understand that being XRP used as a collateral means the supply goes down, which can have an impact on the price. So that's how kind of the XRP mindset works. What about the ADA community? I mean, these are all like really, really active communities, super big fans of their tokens. and the projects and you know, and they have their own leaders, right? You've got Charles at Cardano. um What's their reception been like? We haven't done as much marketing for ADA. The main focus has been XRP because I think it's the next biggest asset after Bitcoin. And you can play in Bitcoin too. But Bitcoin, as you said, there's too many projects. And BTCFY has been capped around 10 to 12 billion. So we saw that XRP as the next dark horse to run that after Bitcoin. So yeah, that's been the main... um focus. The other difference between ADA and XRP, ADA has liquid staking. um So there's staking and LSDs and so there's some native yield that people stake and just forget, but XRP doesn't have that. That's the second biggest asset that doesn't have um native yield. um I remember early DeFi, DeFi summer, right? um And I remember at the time thinking, um folks in the Cardano ecosystem and other non-EVM ecosystems looking at Ethereum people participating in DeFi, I wonder if they're jealous. I wonder if they feel left out. And now that more markets is now serving kind of that need. um now they have an opportunity to participate, but what might be missing is some education. And so how are you approaching educating the XRP community on like about DeFi, like the very basics of DeFi, how to participate, all of that stuff. Yeah, so the way we approach to this is like, you said, look, ETH is earning like 4-4%. I mean, I'm adding like 3 points something and then restaking guild that you can get, which is kind of like 4.5. Solana gets 7-8%. Like why not? You can't earn 4-5 % like ETH folks, right? So that's kind of, hey, like Ethan Solana has done it and now it's XRP time. Other thing I've, it is hard for me and I'm trying to learn myself is as an engineer, how to make sure that you can explain things more, um, more basic. Um, so like what is, um, and, and what I guess works in the Ripple community is to use examples, right? Like, Hey, this is, know, this is hidden role for you. So hidden role is a large acquisition that people have done. That's a prime brokerage. What if like more markets can become hidden role for you? So those kind of things, like, a pretty nice thing. And a lot of people like sort of see Ripple, for example, as the kind of the next iteration of banking system. So any sort of parallels you can create and to that people understand and be like, oh, that's interesting. But it is, I can tell you though, it's like, it is the difference between sort of ETH and Solana and XRP community is. even so the media always looks for something like a project that they can come in and they can farm and they can go do taxes to people, right? They just keep doing this. Which is like very profitable for people that do this all the time, but then people are more sophisticated, right? They have like more sophisticated ways that they farm protocols, they deploy their capital. It certainly doesn't happen, right? mean, therapy is very sort of passionate community that only like cares about So. that you should kind of carve that narrative. And it's something I find hard coming from sort of near Ethereum and Solana as a Solana user, right? So yeah. How do collaborations and partnerships work with, know, when you support an asset? So right now you guys are focused on supporting XRP. I imagine you probably have a roadmap and probably the roadmap follows this table that you shared in your December tweet. Do you work with the foundations themselves or is everything just permissionless and you just integrate as you have capacity? Yeah, you can integrate so like everything's permissionless. On the tech side, it's pretty easy and we have a strong team that can spin up stuff. like we, for Ripple, for example, we've done everything ourselves, um you know, pretty fast builders. um On the GTM side, um so you can think about them a couple of different ways. Obviously if the labs or the foundation supports you, that's perfect. m Ripple Labs is a large organization. I think they have like 900 to 1,000. So it's a bit different than talking to foundation that has like 20 people. um So the other way is obviously integrating with wallets. um Every ecosystem have their own wallets. Like if you go to Bitcoin and XRP, know, Ripple has like three, four different wallets for the XRP ledger. um And the main thing, which is the harder thing to do, but if you can convert, you probably get a lot of traction is exchanges. um So Uphold, which is an American exchange, has something around like seven billion XRP worth in dollars that hold in customer accounts. And then you can just go down the list like Binance, all the other ones have billions of XRP just sitting in wallets. So um that's another way to kind of go through. And obviously the institutions that hold XRP, so SBI holdings have a large you holding in Japan and, you know, they were early investors. um You can always find these kind of quote unquote large whales that you can work with and kind of serve their needs. So what I would say is kind of partnerships are always to do either to access the asset directly from the institution or it's to someone what people call is like B2B2C in traditional um startups is to work with an exchange that already has customers that you can just distribute through there. Yeah, it's quite different than working with like an Ethereum VPEP protocol. Yeah, working with exchanges, you do an integration with the exchange and then the customer then does whatever they need to do with their XRP and more markets? how does that work? Or is it white labeled through the exchange? Yeah, it would be wide through the exchange. people wouldn't come to the more markets front end, but instead they'll go to, let's say, Binance wallet. They deploy there. So Lombard has done this after like working on this for a while, but I guess that's the kind of next wave of indications. uh Yeah. What do you think about uh super apps like Infinex and others like it that are, know, Infinex just made an announcement yesterday with, they're working now with Near Intense and they now support uh swaps or switches within uh inside of Infinex for Bitcoin, Doge and XRP. I think using Near Intense. uh Is there uh a potential there for collaboration? where Infinix is very kind of customer, they want to be in front of the consumer, um but then on the back end, rather than having to build it themselves, like could they potentially work with more markets? Yeah, sure. Yeah, we know them quite well. Actually, of the engineers used to work with our CTO um at Nier. They're pretty close to the Nier team. And so as we are, um like Edie has been an angel investor and an advisor for me, personally has been a mentor for me. um So there is a integration path. how I would think about this is like, Infinex, from what I understand, has been more like focused on trading, right? So a lot of these decentralized decks, uh not, wouldn't say centralized exchange uh competitors that are fully on chain have been focused on users trying to trade. Like there's a Perpdex one, which is hyper liquid. There has been particle network and I guess, Infinix that are doing swaps and, uh, in a decentralized and, um, self custodial manner. What we try to do is earning, like fully, eventually like do, you know, XRP and other assets just to earn. That's the, that's kind of the front end, but I wouldn't shy away from integrating from with any sort of front end that can get us more users um in the background, even though, you know, that's as long as they end up in our vaults, right? So it doesn't really matter. Yeah, you know, I, the more I think about the crypto space, I mean, it's, you know, we, we speak sometimes in terms of like competition, but the truth is it's, it's, there's a, there's always a co-op petition integration path. And, um, and I think, you know, if we, if our goal is to grow the ecosystem, to grow the community, to grow the industry, um, you know, co-op petition is, is definitely the better, better path to, to go. Um, And I think with that lens, I'm seeing more and more opportunities, especially with projects that on the outside might be perceived as competitors. There's always a path to cooperate in some form or fashion that will grow together. And I guess I'm just sharing that kind of reflection because as I'm looking at projects and I speak with projects every day, I see them, and we talk about competitors of course, because that's part of the marketing discussion, right? I'm seeing more more co-op petition as an opportunity. And I think we would just be much better off as an industry if if we approached it like that, to grow the pie versus trying to eat each other's lunch right now. It's just too early. Yeah, yeah, we've done this when I was at Nier, you know, Nier is an L1 blockchain. We have cooperated, we work with, I think it was 2023, that was Polygon Labs, know, Bindtrip, other L1s that we wanted to collaborate with. And one of the reasons why, guess, like going back to my Nier story, the reason why we pulled out DA at the time was like, look, like there's this L2 rush coming in. How do we position Nier to be more collaborative to what's going on rather than competitive? So we pull that in like a month at the time and be like, this is something that you can use Nier tech for and benefit you guys from just if you have one of cheaper alternative Tetherium DA. m So I think that's, yeah, this is becoming more common. you know, Infinex has actually been kind of driving that pretty nicely with, you know. with Bunch of Assets to Dad. Yeah, let's shift to a medium article you wrote recently. um That's, I think, probably not controversial, but at least the headline seems controversial and would love your take on it. Because I think uh it has influence in how you've built more markets or maybe how you view markets in general. You said crypto isn't modular anymore, it's vertical. And so that's kind of uh the antithesis to the modular kind of narrative that that Nick White and others are pushing. Tell us what you mean by that and how has that kind of influenced how you build, how you're building more markets. Yeah, I mean, this was my thinking around um sort of, there's ways to think about this differently. think people like modularity because, you know, ended up with a lot of, um quote unquote, specialized layers that can do certain things like the A and others. But when you look at them and look at their multiples and how they performed in the market, they didn't end up in the way that people expected. And there's tons of projects that launches L2s and DA projects. You know, they specifically serve one part of the stack, but it started to, and this is maybe controversial too, when you look at the successful projects of this cycle, they all are vertical. And what I mean is you look at Hyperliquid, which is a Perpdex, it could have launched in any blockchain. you could have worked on an ecosystem. They have, after building the perpdex, they started owning everything else. They owned a blockchain. They own even, you know, now they've building an ecosystem, but they first started to build an app that goes underneath and try to control sort of all of the stack to make sure that the Perpdex is very good. um And when you look at Athena, it's kind of the similar play where they've started with a application. they take assets and they run a basis trade and they give the yield back and they started to sort of build now, hey, now that we have the stable coin and we have all these products, let's maybe think about a blockchain where we can actually use USDE as a margin or like as the unit of account. And um they also said they're building a prepdex, so a prepdex that can use USDE. um So you start to see this kind of shift shift in how people think about the product. And this is not something new, right? Like when you look at Apple, when you look at, Apple's actually a very good example of vertical integration is to have a phone and they basically have the app store. integrate, obviously they have a platform, like I think they did a lot of apps and stuff, but Apple is the first thing that you see. And this is something that happens with Microsoft. the other sort of successful companies, uh, from the last year has that, right? But, um, yeah, it's kind of been an observation that Um, how successful projects, the cycle has been, I mean, whether there's a cycle or not, that's a different, uh, different conversation, but lately I've been seeing a lot of more products that builds a product and then starts to own down to stack. Yeah. And I think that design choice, it's really a design choice, right? And every design choice has trade-offs. And I've spoken with and have been involved in a lot of Ethereum layer two projects. I, you know, from the outside, it's really as if they were all, you know, in support of Ethereum. But once you're kind of on the inside, it's pretty clear that each of these layer twos don't really care about Ethereum. They care about their own chain. They care about growing their own ecosystem, their own users, their own applications on their own chain. so Ethereum almost takes a backseat because now they're viewing kind of the thing that they're building. They're becoming business owners and entrepreneurs. um And that's kind of what you want, right? Like if they're going to be building something and they're going to use Ethereum as building a layer two, and then Ethereum is kind of like on the back end, um you want them to be focused on growing their user base, their applications. Like that's actually the right thing. But the negative thing is Ethereum kind of loses out on some of that value. um And so that's kind of the horizontal approach, I guess. Now what some have termed as monolithic or the vertical approach is you're exactly right. know, Apple's like a c***. clear um kind of archetype of that. And the trade off there is you get, you have full control over the user experience, which is what actually users want. Like users want convenience. They want ease. They want, you know, safety. They want, they want all of that, right? Like most people just want to kind of do things. They want to do their thing. They have a job that needs to get done and then they want to move on with life. And It's like a hassle free experience and there's a very large market for that. And for some reason in crypto, we've kind of went the other way where we embraced complexity, we embraced jargon, we embraced every piece of hassle and annoyance as like something cool for some reason. And I'm really glad that we're going the other way now in realizing that none of this is good for growth. Like all of this are, it's actually friction is like bad for growth. And for some reason we've embraced friction. And so it's, pleased to hear everything you're saying. Yeah, we used to do it more as an industry. think it's become less, right? Like when you, if you were into 2020, 2021 time, like people talked about consensus algorithms, people compared consensus algorithms. This is a better consensus algorithm than that. You know, and, and when you look at crypto founders, they, especially like the blockchain founders, they all have some sort of academic degree, right? Like even, even this cycle is one of the most important probably. most high projects, Eigenlair, Eigenlair's founder, Shriram, is his professor, right? So like, this is the reason why kind of like people want light complexity, because if you are a professor, you know, this is what your art is, right? Your art is to create very complex structures and systems that can work on its own. um But I think that's changing. And you can see that with quote unquote market performance, right? Like the market performance, market tells you that like Hyperliquid or Athena that has users and um also has em sort of distribution can do better. And this is also a good example, but exchanges are still the most profitable businesses in crypto and they all own the user and they all have their L1 or L2 in some form or shape. em And one comment, Peter, you said, which is very important for Ethereum, Ethereum decided to go horizontal and they decided not to build their own L2 to scale the system, right? And then that ended up actually end up hurting Ethereum in many ways. m And now they're like, let's just go back to that L1, let's just solve that L1 issue. um So it is kind of like this testing period of let's go horizontal. Well, horizontal doesn't work. Let's go back and try to fix that L1 to make sure people come to that L1 to use that L1, which is interesting. Yeah. And I think, you know, we, we, many of us in crypto, we speak in abstract terms, but once you actually are involved in a project and you feel the pain of liquidity fragmentation, um then you realize, you know, like all of these L2s all over the place, maybe that wasn't such a good thing. And like, but you don't arrive at that conclusion until you actually feel the pain, you know? And so I think there's a lot to be said for, research and white papers and everything. But once you actually feel the pain as a user, then you realize, wow, that was a really bad experience. And then it really helps to, I think, inform. And I think we just need more users em using their own products versus talking about their products. Yeah, that's correct. Well, as we close here, tell us, uh I guess, what's next for more markets um and how folks can get involved. I know there's a wait list on the website for those that are interested to get early access. Tell us all about that. Yeah, so we just did our sort of new branding. We just changed the colors a little bit to look a bit more orange-ish, which is nice. We've been liking that. We are going to sort of revamp the website actually on the 12th, so it's tomorrow. Because we're recording on the 11th. And then we are launching the product on July 2nd. So we'll have customer deposits open, people can come in and um join um more markets and then start earning directly on the app. So that's the next milestone we're working as a team to deploy the protocol on a bunch of different chains um and make sure we're going through audits. We've done two audits, adding three more and really just launching the product in July 2nd, making sure that people that actually signed up to be a waitlist user, they now become users of more markets. So that's where we're focused on and the team is pretty excited about it. Are you going to have a cap for each user as they deposit for XRP deposits? how are you, guess, throttling the participation at first? Yeah, we'll probably cap it at a certain low number. Haven't decided what that would be yet. ah Cause we have some interest from obvious institutional clients that want to put XRP in and then just wanted to see kind of how much uh retail demand we can get and kind of mix those up and get a cap. got it. Well, Altan, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us. You guys are serving a clear need in the market. And I love highlighting projects that do that versus another me too type project. So thank you for taking the time. And I'll be sure to put all the URLs in the show notes so that people can learn more and participate and be part of the community. Thanks Peter.

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Peter Abilla

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Altan Tutar MoreMarkets

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