Molten Swap Aggregation: Interview w/ Krunal @ Unidex Exchange

In this conversation, Krunal Amin from Unidex discusses how they save users money in DeFi by providing a unified trading experience. They offer aggregation services for DEXs and meta aggregators, as well as intent-based trading. Unidex is also building their own L2 solution called Molten, which aims to provide fast and low-cost transactions. The team is focused on continuous development and has plans to launch an order book exchange and introduce new custom pool types. They are also rebranding their token and implementing a new tokenomics model. The conversation covers various topics related to the development and adoption of Web3 technologies. It explores the concept of separate networks for different applications, the advice for technical people in Web3, entry points to creating your own project, balancing the roles of CEO and principal engineer, and user metrics and growth.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/redcandleclub
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@redcandleclub

Dan Kazenoff: @DanKazenoff
Lawrence: @crypto_sieve

DISCLAIMER: This is not financial, tax, or legal advice. Hosts and guests may hold some of the assets discussed on the show.

Transcript

Krunal: 0:00

I definitely think web three has like interesting entry points to creating your own project or company even. And there's a lot of routes you can take this, you know, DeFi Llama, for example, they've created their own semi anonymous and, you know, completely open source ecosystem. With their own payrolls, their own everything that exists with that, which is just some guy committing to his project and enough people liked it and wanted to help them out. And you know that's a good example of completely open source development and still forming company off of that without reaching out to venture capitals and things of that sort.

Lawrence: 0:50

welcome to the red candle club today. We have Kunal from Unidex an exchange and aggregation on on the Ethereum ecosystem and just a quick disclaimer here. Some of the hosts on the show may hold Unidex. This is not investment advice. Please do your research and consult a financial professional before. With that, I will open the floor up to Cranal to discuss his project, Unidex. And just before

Dan: 1:17

you get into that, I just want to say your headphones are just like absolute monsters.

Krunal: 1:23

Yeah, yeah, yeah, they're, they're, they're pretty big, but it, when you're, you know, doing long coding sessions for like 16 hours a day, you kind of, it's either you got a good speaker set up or you have like a couple, you know,

Dan: 1:37

And you can wear those for like really long periods of time.

Krunal: 1:41

Oh yeah. It's, it's like super comfortable. You won't, you won't even notice that they're on. Oh, amazing. And the noise canceling is pretty good too. That's awesome. Yeah. But yeah, my name is Kornel from the Unidex projects. And our bottom line is basically to make sure that you're saving as much money as possible for pretty much anything you're doing in DeFi. We started this three years ago, or a little bit more than three years possibly now with that same goal in mind I basically started you know, farming the sushi swap launch way back whenever that first started and I needed like a way to like. Track this position, sell it at a good rate as well. Do things like limit orders and that stuff didn't really exist at the time. And if you did, you had to open up like seven tabs just to do something pretty basic, that's centralization, which is all for it. And you know, the same UI component even. And I thought that was like a market opportunity to basically say, Hey, I know a lot of other people are having this problem as well. They don't want to open five different tabs to do normal trading activities. And so that's when I made a small CLI tool to basically help manage my position. But people were like, Hey, make this onto a front end thing. Like, you know, people can manage this in the UI. And you know, try to see if other people want it and other people liked it. We had a limit order solution as well. One of the first for Uniswap and also one of the first like meta aggregators as well, we weren't really calling them meta aggregators back then. But we had a a place where you can swap against you know, one inch pair swap and some of the other guys at that best rate. We've just been building out the product ever since we do aggregation since 2021 meta aggregations since 2021 as well. We're touching into a few other things like 10 phase swaps as well. We're building our own L2 network as well. We call that the molten network. And we're seeing what else is in store for us, you know, moving forward, things like a mobile app, our own order book exchange as well. Things like that. That's

Dan: 3:46

very cool. Yes, there's a lot definitely new impact there. When you said that you are kind of like a meta aggregator, could you kind of explain a little bit? What that means, and I'm curious if when you also mentioned like trading, are you talking about just kind of raw trading across tokens or are you talking about like other kinds of

Krunal: 4:06

primitives as well? Yeah, so for those not familiar with the meta aggregator, basically we have just a normal DEX like Uniswap, right? They're going to get you the best rate within their own LPs that are hosted on their own platform. Thanks a lot. Bye. What an aggregator's job would do is try to reach out to a lot of these different single sources, like Uniswap, SushiSwap, and so forth. And try to split that efficiently as possible. Now a meta aggregator's job is going to be seeing which one of these aggregators is doing the job the best way or the most efficient way. Places like 1inchPairSwap, they all have different, you know, algorithms to split up that order. Our job is to make sure to present you with who's going to give you that most return. Thank you. Out of the aggregators that are present. And recently we've even taken this a step further by aggregating other mega aggregators, like Cal swap, Kyber swap, and so forth. So we really give you a nice, you know, sky scanner of like pretty much everything that's out there and just present you simply with the best rates. And you can go and change that if you want, but we'll get our bottom lines to make sure that you're always served the best rate. Oh, and then there's also the part two of the question. Yeah in terms of trading, we like, we do this aggregation on pretty much anything, like I mentioned, perhaps even general swaps, but we can extend that to any of the sources that we have integrated. We can borrow some of their features that are existent, like for example, CalSwap and Enso Finance, these two aggregators, they actually let you buy things like LP tokens and or yield positions even. So they simplify the whole buy token, stake it, lend it, borrow it. Deposit into your reborrow whole complex process into one transaction. So if you wanted to, you know, get in and out of a yield market or, you know, buy a yield position, that's something that you can't do on Uniswap. By integrating these other protocols, these other aggregators, you can now do this on our interface as well, simply by just pasting the contract address. That's assigned to that position. Same thing with perps. If there's another platform that offers something like a pre launch market like recently we've been aggregating hyper liquid and they've launched some pre net pre launch markets, like actually stark net an hour ago. So if they launch something. Like the StarkNet token, we can also aggregate that for our users, and now they can also trade something. And then we also try to build our own solutions, like we've built custom ETFs for you to trade in long and short, like the What's it called? The L2 index, the, the, the perp index, which is a collection of perp tokens. Kind of like the S and P, but specific to DeFi, things like that. So we try to get our hands as far as possible. Give users most flexibility.

Dan: 7:05

That's awesome. How do you kind of know what to prioritize on? I'm curious from like the team standpoint clearly there's so many features that are amazing to be building on. In the DeFi space, but I guess as far as your team's bandwidth and yeah, I'm curious how you decide on all that and like how you decide what to pursue

Krunal: 7:30

next. Yeah. So we basically look at our current products, what we have offered, and we look at, Hey, what are some pain points that even exist that, you know, if we can't get it from an outside aggregator, how can we fill in the gap that exists on another platform? And our own needs. So for example, one, one example we can give is for the, the perp aggregator, we saw that it was a big problem with using multiple collateral options. And, you know, let's say gains network, they would only be supporting, you know, the die token to be traded with, but something like GMX does support using die, USDC, ETH, but not that many people use die. Well, if you went in an aggregated position and you only have ETH, some way you're going to need to swap that ETH into die. That's where our swap aggregator blends in perfectly because you need to swap that die. Or that ETH into DAI at the best rates to be able to fill an order onto gains network as well. So we basically just look at, hey, what are perf aggregators and what are their problems? I can't do this simple step. Let's fix that. Same thing with our molten chain. We saw that our, our protocol common problem with all of them was that. The settlement speeds are too slow to even match centralized exchanges. You can have like a one click trading wallet. A lot of protocols are coming out with something like this, but there's still that delayed on chain settlement of about five seconds. And how do we solve that? Create an L2 that makes, you know, MEV impossible. So that all per protocols deployed on that network have instant. So we basically just look for inefficiencies in the market, directly tackle those issues.

Dan: 9:15

Okay. Interesting. Making MEV impossible. So yeah, I guess maybe we could kind of dive into molten. Yeah, I think, I think that I'm, I'm not too familiar on that. Maybe now would be a good time if you wanted to give like an overview of. Yeah, where you're at with Molten and kind of what you hope to achieve when you build that.

Krunal: 9:37

Yeah, so we actually started this concept about a year ago. We were originally going with the Cosmos SDK, but we saw the capabilities of the OP stack about a year ago. And what other like indie devs were like building. And we saw, Hey, this is a super flexible stack to work with. So that's when we actually started making our work on the, the multi network there in building a, a per protocol app chain at the time. It was only really going to be for our protocol. And other protocols like hyper liquid and things of that sort, they have their own chain dedicated to their protocol as well. But we saw that, Hey, we can actually build a really cool network dedicated specifically for you know, any type of protocol deployed on this network. Cause we have, we see this common issue that all of them have. Why not solve it for everybody? Not just limited to ourselves, especially as an aggregator. So the breakdown of Bolton is that it's an L2 that uses Celestio underneath as well. So that the gas fees are super cheap. So that gets you really close to the centralized exchange feeling that you're not concerned about gas fees. It's an L2, so things are fast, so it's also fast like a centralized exchange. We prevent MEV by looking at the order of transactions, and the sequencer is always going to prioritize any Oracle update first over anything else. This Type of, you know, rule won't be applied on something like Arbitrum and Optimism because that's a form of MEV that's a lot more centralized, but we call this a form of Honest MEV in the same way that, you know, things like MEV Boost, you pay a specific miner tip to order transactions in a specific way. In this case, we're basically saying Oracle transactions are always going to be honest because they're updating the price feeds for everybody in the network. Therefore we're going to be processing any Oracle transactions first before any sort of, you know, front running or anything that somebody might be doing to damage a protocols LP. Or you know, front run somebody's trade in the order book or anything like that. And by doing that, we can solve a lot of issues. Pro Protocols, they don't need to create a centralized backend. So basically, read an incoming trade request, wait five seconds to make sure the oracles are updated. Then send another transaction to settle it. If you use any sort of protocol on Arbitrum, you might have even noticed like GMX, it takes like eight seconds to have a trade finalized. Quinta, I believe takes 10 seconds before you can even close the position. Some protocols do things like minimum position timers, like you can't close the trade until like five minutes have passed all these different ways to prevent, you know, Oracle MEV that might possibly happen. On our molten chain, because sequencers are preventing that sort of MVV from happening in the first place, they can directly call the contracts on chain. Don't need to run any centralized, you know, back end. Don't need to use this compromise of waiting 5 seconds, waiting 5 minutes before you can close. It's all protected. And you have those cheap gas fees, instant trade settlements. And now the transactions are also finalized instantly as well. Basically at the whole centralized exchange field without the centralized execution.

Dan: 12:49

Wow. Okay. Very cool. I had to follow up on that and I want to give Lawrence a chance to jump in, but so, so who are you using for the oracles at the moment?

Krunal: 12:59

Well, so that's the thing. So we have two, two approaches to this one, the sequencer itself, every single block that does get created, it's also updating all the price feeds that we have. So basically anything that we want to. You know, track a price for or any sort of data point. It's not necessarily just going to be price feeds. We can also feed the sequencer data like, for example, any order book theft data on Binance because we know a lot of perpdexes use the order book liquidity on something like Binance. Like Gains Network does this, for example. We can also stream that data in But without having to make gains network do this on a 15 minute basis, they can have it per block and have it be live and fresh data as well. So we have our own sequencer. That's publishing this data every single block, but if chain link or pith network, whatever it may be, if they're going to come and deploy on our network, they can also get their Oracle contracts and their executors whitelisted. So that the sequencer knows, Hey, it's this transaction, this protocol, this one's going in first before all the other ones, or it's going to be placed at the top of the block header before any of the other ones. So it doesn't matter who gets deployed at any point from now in the future. They're going to be, they're going to have their oracles be protected. And then also we have our own ticking Oracle every block that gets posted to update that data as well.

Dan: 14:21

Okay, so if I'm not mistaken, then it's basically Unidex is running its own sequencer, which is grabbing, like, the Oracle information and basically posting that on chain for the time being. But I guess down the line, you're open to maybe perhaps like decentralizing that or outsourcing it to something like Chainlink or Pyth.

Krunal: 14:41

Yeah, I think both solutions are perfect to just have in general. Because like every, every network has a sequencer, like Optimism has a trade sequencer as well. The only difference that we're doing is Saying that, Hey, as you're making the block and processing those at the same time, get the latest prices from whatever exchange API is to update the Oracle prices and just include a transaction that says, Hey, update these at the same time. And that's the same thing that will be happening when we onboard partners like change as well. We would basically also be moving their Oracle updates up to the front as well. Just like we're creating one ourselves. Awesome.

Lawrence: 15:27

Okay yeah, so I, I would say like, kind of like leaning more into molten here. So I guess what is the current way that you guys are collecting fees at the moment? Or how is the, how are you guys making money essentially? Like, how is the platform making money? And then what would be. The new way, I guess, like if everyone, you know, people were using molten, what different collection or like, I guess you know, how do you, how are you guys making money on the molten infrastructure as well? And how does that flow into, you know, the token

Dan: 15:57

and,

Krunal: 15:57

and et cetera? Yeah, so when the molten network is launched, we obviously have things like sequencer revenue that comes out of getting gas fees on the network. And that's, that's a pretty standard thing. Gas gets collected, sequencer collects some, you know, some of that gas money. To then post that data onto networks like Celestia and stuff and things like that. But in terms of like the general protocols that are launched on the network itself. For our swap aggregator, we actually don't charge any extra fees whatsoever. So if you're concerned about having the best rates, this is basically the best place to do that. We're never going to charge a fee. We only collect positive slippage and that's how we make our revenue. So if there is some sort of positive slippage that does occur and for those that aren't familiar, I can give a quick example, let's say a trading ETH to USDC, let's say that rate is one ETH to a hundred USDC, right? If you sign off on that transaction and you're happy with that rate, so you create the transaction, right? If that rate changes in, let's say, the next minute, that transaction doesn't get mined until like a minute, but now the rate is 1, 004, 1, 005, your positive slippage is 4 to 5 USDC, but you signed for 100 USDC. So that four to five USDC aggregators will take that as extra profit. You still get exactly what you signed for but they're able to collect some revenue and a lot of aggregators take different ways to disperse that revenue. Some aggregators like cowswap will return some of that back to you and then collect some of that as a fee. Places like 1inch collect the entire positive slippage, give 50 percent to 1inch, give 50 percent to the referral that made the trade, so that would be us as Unidex. Paraswap doesn't even take any amount, they just give 50 percent back to the trader, 50 percent back to the team that did the transaction. And that's b Abide by their rules. We'll never add a fee on top there on top of the aggregation itself. We do have our own individual aggregator, like out of the 17 sources we have our own individual in house aggregator and that's deployed on a few networks that don't have one, like Manta for example, and we have like a small fee there. But we are, we, we don't have any bias for routing. So, you know, if one inch gets deployed there, there are a better rates. If they don't charge a fee, we're not going to force you to go to us. We're just going to route through one inch on our URL. So it's per aggregator specific basis, perp side of things. So we collect a fee off of any any trade that goes in and out. Same thing with aggregation. We pass in a referral, so we're not going to charge an extra fee on top. So just in the same way that an influencer could say, Hey, trade on GMX. When you use our interface, it's saying, Hey, trade on GMX through Unidex. And we collect the referral fee for giving GMX volume to our interface without charging fee on top. In fact, you get a discount on top of that as well. So it's cheaper to trade through GMX through Unidex. Even if it's only routing through GMX, just because we always pass a 15 percent discount because of a referral tier that we have. Always cheaper to use Unidex even if it's swaps or perps, doesn't really matter. You're always going to get a better rate, whether it be through aggregation or through our discount partner codes that we have.

Lawrence: 19:10

Excellent. I did not know that about the referral tier. That's pretty interesting stuff. Okay, let's see. So I guess okay, so you already went into some of the differences between like Unidex and GMX. I

Dan: 19:24

guess,

Lawrence: 19:25

Like the roadmap for Unidex, like what's the next kind of thing that you're focused on working on and kind of like, what's, what's, what's coming up in 2024 that you guys are looking forward to

Dan: 19:35

releasing?

Krunal: 19:36

Yeah, well, so right now we're a lot more focused on getting the token migration that we have migrating from the Unidex Molten token that can even be a discussion itself, but What's it called? Getting the multi chain up and running. We expect that to be finished by Q1. We basically signed off on the last few changes that we want to have shipped for the initial beta launch of that network into its mainnet because right now it's a test time and you can also use this right now actually as well. But right now we're in testnet, expected to have that mainnet launched by the end of Q1. We also finished up our last few touches on the, the perp side of things, on anything for last UI UX changes. We have a nice beta channel where we post a lot of updates, get some feedback. And we basically signed off on those last few changes that we want before that's basically starting to have mass marketing on that again. And so now that we have all those things out of the way, by the end of Q1, we're looking at some other new things that we have on the way, for example, our order book exchange that we've like, we haven't really talked too much about that, but we are having our own order book built specifically on the molten network as well just because it works very closely with the Oracle set up sets that works over there. So we have our own order book exchange lets us list a lot more new different types of products, just like hyper liquid is able to do as well. Charge much lower fees for our users and things of that sort. Outside of that, we also have, you know, new custom pool types. We have this unique pool set up for our LP for perps where basically any sort of market maker can come in, create a private LP that our traders can tap into and also stream their own direct pricing quotes, their own risk profile, and their own tradable assets. So let's say that. You know, like let's say some market maker wants to create a market for a pre launch token in just that pre launch token. They can spin up a custom LP that taps into the Unidex protocol that works in the same way that a GMX LP would work, but they have their own customizable protocols risk parameters inside that. We think of it as a protocol that lives inside the protocol itself. We have docs, it's a pretty complex process but that's, I think that's the simplest way you can explain it, a protocol that lives inside another one. Cowswap is a good example, it works similarly. You put a tray through, Cowswap protocol sends it to different solvers that can do it, and the different solvers have different strategies to fill that order. Same, same deal.

Dan: 22:03

Excellent

Lawrence: 22:03

okay, so there's a lot

Dan: 22:04

there.

Lawrence: 22:06

I just, just wondering how big is the team because you, you, you guys ship, you know, a lot of stuff, so I just, I just gotta know, this is a lot of stuff you guys are doing. So just curious, how big is the team

Dan: 22:16

right now

Krunal: 22:16

in, in terms of devs? We have five devs on board. My, myself included being in that process. Six in total for, for biz dev. And then in terms of graphic design, that's more of like, just like contract basis. Like, Hey, we need this done, you know, it's done. But we are looking to expand the team just cause, you know, I've explained a lot of different things that we're doing and we definitely don't want to bite off more than we can chew. So we're just going to get a lot more people, especially on the marketing side, because we don't have anybody dedicated to that. And we, we have all these different products. We want people to start using them. So that's something that we really want to get onboarded. And then. As well as some extra, like, developers on hand to, you know, make sure each one of these products have the dedicated attention that they need. Yeah,

Dan: 23:02

that's great. That's definitely a thing I've noticed where it feels like there's, there's a kind of an imbalance sometimes in crypto projects with the marketing where sometimes the most technical and advanced products in crypto, like don't have maybe a ton of marketing, but then there's like random meme coins and just shit coins that people have, like. Absurd amounts of marketing. So I think like find that balance, like I've noticed is it's definitely like a challenge. I think it's like, yeah, no, but it's definitely very important. I'm excited to see like merging the two worlds for like a great product. I'm also curious, like as far as like the founding of the protocol, like did you, were you like a solo founder or did you already know some of your teammates?

Krunal: 23:49

I, I have known some of the developers that are on the team, like some that I've even been to high school and college and even after that as well. But it was just like a solo solution. Like I explained, I was. Just messing with the SushiSwap launch and I thought I need a way to like actually manage this especially coming from a centralized exchange You have all those tools right away. It's like, okay I need to manage this better that we just kind of built it as like a tool Evolved as like a front end thing and I was like, okay Well, if I'm gonna build this into like a front end application, let me get some extra help And the people that I've got for that extra help has basically stuck with us all the way through

Dan: 24:31

That's very cool. Has it been surprising, I guess? Because, yeah, I mean, it sounds like you have a computer science background. Is that, is that true?

Krunal: 24:42

Yeah, yeah, I do. Yeah, I have a degree in computer science. It's yeah, it is a little bit surprising to, See that journey especially when you also look at statistics of things like, you know, how, how often startups fail and we were, you know, just like a kind of a startup place, you know, some trades on top of Uniswap but I think the one thing is that we weren't willing to give up on making new stuff. You know, we, we've seen other limit order solutions that popped up, like whenever we started our own venture there as well. But they, you know, it usually dies out because they lack the creativity or, you know, the product was built. Let's make a new token for some reason. I don't know, something like that. Or let's do another, you know, token sale of a totally different, you know, flavor of the month, you know, type of thing. We just kind of stuck with, Hey, let's just keep building trading tools. You know, let's do perp aggregation, let's do meta aggregation. Let's do a custom pairs. Why not? Let's make an L2 that makes the protocol better. We just kept building on top of the thing and now it's this, you know, giant collection of different you know, products and sort of product suite, if anything and we're just like kind of sticking with that and just going to keep building what we have.

Dan: 26:00

That's great. Yeah, I mean I guess I had another question sort of looping back to what you were saying earlier. I'm I heard you mentioned something about like intense. And I'm curious if you can kind of go into like what, what your vision is for what intent flow might look like for a user of a Unidex.

Krunal: 26:22

Yeah, so we actually already have our own intent based protocol for swaps. We released like, I guess you can even say just a beta of it earlier of last year. And right now we have the, the, the protocol kind of like put in an ice box until we get some more developers on board to help us take care of something like that. But we have a not only do we aggregate other intent based protocols, cowswap finance, conveyor, and all these other guys are included into that. But we had our own individual aggregator that we can tap into. The whole idea with that was we saw the whole cowswap model of. Broadcasting a transaction of X to Y and letting people compete to fill that at the best rate. What we were particularly interested in was the whole order batching process and how we can actually plug that into our cross chain perp aggregator. So what we built was a shared order book between chains, and these solvers are able to bridge instantly between these different networks and fill orders cross chain this way. And what you have in theory then is you have a user, let's say, on Optimism that wants to exchange their one ETH to, let's say, 2, 500 USDC. And the best way to do that is looking at the order book that's a similar once trade on Optimism, Arbitrum, Polygon. Phantom, whatever network it may be and looking, having those solvers communicate with each other and say, Hey, I have 2, 500 years to see on Arbitrum. Let's take these two orders, bridge them together and have those two swaps using a, something like a layer zero bridge or, you know, a P2P trustless bridge between each other. And what you have is actual unified cost chain liquidity, not in the sense of something that you see with, with some of the other lending protocols, like Radiant or something, it's like actually more so one LP that exists between all different you know, chains. It's not bridging one chain to another. It's, everything is abstracted away. You create that order, you're getting the best rate from any matching order on the list. Whatever chain it is that you're filling that's how we see Intents. Like an actual true cross chain experience, not just restricted to the same chain. Right,

Dan: 28:41

right. Yeah, because I guess Intents, it's kind of like a huge concept of like you could have maybe the most easy to process example is just like that Dex aggregator. Whereas, yeah, I think like the vision for Intents would be. Yeah, I mean, I think cross chain transactions are like, I think that's like, when you're really getting into significant. Like hyperscale UX growth or it's just like, yeah, there's so much fragmentation right now, crosswise train. So I think that's like a very cool innovation there. So yeah, that's, that's definitely exciting.

Lawrence: 29:20

Just real quick, just for, for like the audience and also just for me, because I, I just don't know what intense based trading is, you know, you want to give like an explain, like I'm five on what intense trading is, like what that, what that means.

Krunal: 29:36

So, yeah, so I, I think the simplest way I can explain it is by also using just like one of the, the word itself. The whole concept is that let's say a user wants to do something on chain, right? They have the intent to do something. Normally they would go to something like, would it be like Uniswap or one inch saying that, Hey, I'm going to change my one ETH, tell me what I can output right now for that one ETH and they just hit place market order. Intent based trade would be something like. I have one ETH, and I want somebody to tell me what's the best rate that I can fill, or this is just my action and somebody needs to fulfill this action for me. So I'm gonna give out one ETH, and I want somebody to give me the most amount of use to see possible. Like, you know, whatever that might be. I might not have an immediate port available, a lot of protocols will give that just to give a minimum guarantee. But it's more of the intent that I have one ETH and I want you one. I mean, I don't want one USDC. I want USDC. Somebody give me the most amount of amounts possible here. And that's mostly how it's being used right now. In different, you know, people are going to compete to fill that person's order. And the game theory here is that the more greedy you are, the less chance that you have here to fill this person's order. And so everybody's going to compete to make sure that they offer the minimum amount, you know, the most best free market rate possible to, to, you know, fill that intent. Got it. Okay.

Dan: 31:05

That makes a

Lawrence: 31:05

lot of sense. Definitely feels like an engineer came up with that name, though,

Dan: 31:11

intent based trading. Yeah, just saying,

Lawrence: 31:14

Let's see. So again, I wanted to go back into the molten, like the rebrands, because that seems kind of interesting on how just that whole mechanism is unfolding. So how, you know, what, what is the process of like, you know, you, you know, it's one thing to rebrand and just change the name of something, but you're also changing the token. So

Dan: 31:33

do I have that right? Yeah. So what does that

Lawrence: 31:36

process look

Dan: 31:36

like for you guys? And I guess. What

Lawrence: 31:39

time frame, you know, what, which quarter are you looking to roll that out and, and how's that going to be communicated, et

Krunal: 31:45

cetera. Yeah. So we actually had a vote on this. We put a proposal out with all the things that come with that rebrand and all the changes. We thought that this might be the best time to do this, especially as we look into the future where we're launching this L2. We definitely want to decentralize that sequencer because that's a big trust issue as well with some of these L2s. We have all these solvers for our intent based protocol. We want to find some way to incentivize them to, you know, fill rates on our protocol. And then we have our own LPs, all these different things. I think the current token model doesn't allow that to scale. It was built with the idea of being that, you know, Uniswap toolkit or just that meta aggregator. When we didn't have our own LPs, it just touched outside platforms. But now that we have our own in house protocols, it's I think we, we needed to have something that's changed or at least give that flexibility. And that's when we put the Molten proposal out, where we basically said, Hey, let's rebrand ourselves from just Unidex to the Molten token, which is a product suite of a perf aggregator, you know, swap aggregator. And the multi network and there's a few things that come with that change as well that allows us to incentivize these, these different product suites that we have even just outside integrations as well, if that's necessary in the way that still preserves what we have right now, basically what we have is every two months. Folders are going to be able to vote for an inflation budget. Just like ETH is constantly inflationary there's just some that's offset by transaction fee burning. We took a different approach instead of having a constant amount every year or about a constant amount every year that's put into circulation. Every two months, holders are voting for what they want to put out into circulation every two months. So that, let's say in two months, we, you know, let's say we mince 50, 000 molten tokens, whatever USD worth that may be we use that for incentives, onboarding people to the protocol. And for whatever reason, let's say that, you know, maybe it wasn't as good as a expenditure that we thought it may be. The community didn't feel the effects that it needed, or maybe it was a huge success, and now the protocol is self sustaining. We don't need to solve a chicken or the egg problem. For any of these three reasons, or any more that may come up, the next two months, holders can just decide, no inflation that month. Nothing needs to be put into circulation. There's no stimulus that's needed. We're operating in a self sustainable model right now. So let's just not have any inflation and then we're also introducing a few other things like a, a burn model as well. So that's just like ETH offsets inflation by burning fees that are transacted network. We also take our collected fees and then burn the molten token to offset that inflation and any future inflation that may come the future as well. And so that's like a pretty big change than what we have right now, where it's just some, you know revenue sharing. But now we're having both of those two things. And in terms of rollouts we're actually going to be rolling that out by next week. And I'm not sure when this will go live, but this is going to be about the, the 27th through like the 24th of February. So you can expect to see that migration starting. No deadline for that migration. We're not going to do something weird like that. We have three months, you can just migrate whenever you want at whatever point in the future. To that new token, it's going to hold the same value after all. It's a one to one swap. And the, another few differences is like, we're using layer zero for bridging so that you can bridge instantly to like things like Solana, which is possible right now. Since it's layer zero, it's also instant makes a lot of arbitrage between LPs a lot more faster more profitable just improving the UX there a lot more and as well as giving us room to grow as a, as a protocol. Excellent.

Lawrence: 35:43

It's almost like a, it's almost like a v2 kind of deal. I mean, you're basically like remaking the whole protocol. It sounds like you guys are just, you know, yeah,

Dan: 35:53

it's

Krunal: 35:53

a full upgrade. Yeah, yeah, I can definitely say that it's, it's something like that as well. It's more fitting to be like, this is like just a more modern approach or more modern upgrade to our more like, you know, older tokenomics. It kind of acts like Bitcoin in a sense that it's fixed supply and that's all it really is. Thanks. Create something scalable when you're competing with protocols that are launching new tokens, like, you know, left and right now point programs even as well.

Dan: 36:21

Right. Yes, as part

Lawrence: 36:23

of that inflation, it would, it would it be like would there be like staking tokens, for example, and

Dan: 36:28

getting some of that back? Or would it be like another form of

Krunal: 36:31

incentives or? Yeah, so we, we put out like this kind of like a guideline that's still like flexible holders are going to be actually deciding where that those reports are going. So it's kind of like a governmental process in which, you know. There's a budget that sets and then, you know, the committees decide, hey, where, which amounts goes to where and if it that's all finalized and it's sent off and it's used for those incentives. So we have what's a thirty three thirty three eleven eleven eleven split. So 33 percent we have outlined for any sort of trading rewards on the Petro protocol. So this is largely our biggest revenue generating product right now. That is going to be contributing a lot to the token burning as well. So we have a larger share dedicated to this. And so let's say, you know, 10, 000 molten is minted in circulation. 33 percent of that is going to be going. In those two months to trading words, another 33 percent is for LP rewards for that protocol as well. So more than you know, about two thirds of this is going to be going towards the largest share of what's going to be how offsetting this inflation. Then we have the smaller 11 percent that also added to 33%. We have some going towards token liquidity, like, you know incentives. So to help incentivize people, like liquidity of Bolton, we have 11 percent going out for grants, if those are awarded. And then another 11 percent going towards like any sort of marketing expenses that we can use to help, you know make, you know, the most usage out of the inflation that's now put into circulation, all the trading rewards and things of that sort, any sort of expenses that might come with that, like ad campaigns, we can use 11 percent of that to help finance some of that as well. And I think one of the greater things about this is, for, for two things, one, like I said, if these are not, you know, something that's like that didn't work out as well in those two months, or it was, it worked out really well, holders can vote the next month and learn from either mistakes or successes of those previous two months. And then, as well, during those two months, if there are any unused, you know, tokens, those will, can just be burnt immediately. So if we mince, let's say 50, 000, and we're only using 10, 000, because let's say the first week of those incentives really set things off and we're doing so much fees and we don't need to do all these insane incentives that we could just put those on pause because now it's self sustainable and we only needed to use 10 percent of the 50 K that we put out in circulation. So it's super controlled. It's in the control of holders as well, not the team about how much they want to, you know really put into circulation monetary policies in their hands. Excellent.

Dan: 39:22

All right, go ahead, Dan exciting. Yeah, I mean definitely sounds like a huge upgrade. Sounds like you guys are gonna be very busy this year. Yeah, maybe this is kind of like a general opinion sort of thing on the tech side as far as like D. A. Like data availability. I'm, I'm still learning a lot about this space right now. I know we have like Celestia, obviously, and then we have Eigendier, which is being built. I think there's Mantle as well, there's Polygon of Veil. Do you have any opinions on, like, how you see this space evolving? Or do you, do you perhaps even see a role for Unidex to be like a DA aggregator of sorts where like, you're trying to get the lowest fee for the data and you're kind of automatically like, I don't know, is that something you could foresee at some point being like a thing, or do you already have out of the gate? Like, Oh no, like one of these is never going to work for

Krunal: 40:19

us. I think a DA aggregator, it sounds interesting. It's just definitely not our expertise. We definitely stick to anything that we can stick to trading. And seeing, look, you know, how we can improve that experience there. I think we have the gas fees low enough already as it is. And so that's solving one of the pain points that we can solve and like what our expertise is for there. But I am like super interested on the tech side of these things. So I have done a lot of like, you know, looking into a lot of these different protocols for their DA layer. And it's, it's, it's very interesting. I think we're going to see a lot more of these. I also have always held the thesis that like not only L2s are definitely the way that we should be scaling things. But also I think a lot of the ecosystem is going to be a lot of app chains, we're going to see a lot of app chains coming out not necessarily like married to like a specific thing like Cosmos or the OP stack. I mean, we use the stack as well. But I don't think that needs to be the only solution. I don't think it's also the best solution for every specific protocol as an app chain. And so I think Polygon has their aggregation layer or their Polygon CDK as they call it. We have the OP stack, the Arbitrum Orbit stack, the Cosmos ecosystem has always been doing something like this. A lot more chains are going to be building their own. Different you know, application layer, and they're going to be wanting to use cheap data availability in maxing their, their chain to fit their level of security. I think near DA is also another one that's they've pivoted their chain to be a data availability layer as well. And so we can even see the return of them possibly. And there's also other chains that are acting as a data availability layer for Bitcoin. You see a lot of now new Bitcoin DeFi stuff as well. So I think there's a lot of potential out there in the ecosystem. I myself see basically everything being its own AppChain. And then we'll see the rise of cross chain messaging bridges like Layer0, Synapse, Axler, any of the other ones, Wormhole, that are out there. To make it abstracted away, so you don't know that you're using an application layer and a lot of people doubt me on this, but if you've ever used hyper liquid before, like 99 percent of people don't realize they're using like three networks at once. And that's one of the amazing things about proof that everything will eventually move into their own application layer with their own separate data availability and everything of that sort. To give like light on the hyper liquid example, you connect on Arbitron, but when you place that trade, it's bridging funds into hyper liquid and signing a transaction on hyper liquid L1, which is built on the Cosmos ecosystem, which is also using their own data availability there. And when you close that trade and you have those funds back into your wallet, it's bridging out of hyper liquid L1 back to your wallet. You don't even know that you're using a hyper liquid chain. Doing that same thing with that The options protocol that from Ribbon Finance, I forgot what they're called. Lyra Finance as well, same thing, also using their own chain. Most people connect their wallet and they think they're still using optimism, but no, it's bridging from optimism into the Lyra chain. And they don't even realize it. So the thesis has already been proven. This is going to be the case.

Dan: 43:36

Yeah, I fully agree. I mean just from the user perspective it's very. Difficult for the average person who's not just a super crazy hardcore degen to know, like, just bridging everything is very difficult and it's time intensive. So I think, yeah, having these, these aggregation layers maybe we'll even see like some protocol MNA continue in the space and we'll kind of see the number of players diminish into these larger monopolies or conglomerates, but. I think that is the inevitability, just as far as getting user adoption I at least would like to see that, where I don't even know what, like, the chain is on the backend, but I just know that the interface I'm using is, like, working.

Krunal: 44:23

And I think that's, like, peak adoption, too. User doesn't even realize what's happening in the background. Yeah.

Dan: 44:31

Yeah, no, it's, it's very interesting. Yeah. And then I just had like a couple other kind of going back to maybe the team side and then any other things that Lawrence had, but what would you say, like you, as far as like advice you could give to maybe technical people in the space, or maybe people listening to podcasts that are technical either in web two or. Are in web three, like maybe they have an itch to solve a problem, but they're kind of scared. They're feeling some trepidation on the actual, like company formation process, or they're, they have a lot of fears. What would you say you would advise them to do if they're in that

Krunal: 45:10

position? I definitely think web three has like interesting entry points to creating your own project or company even. And there's a lot of routes you can take this, you know, DeFi Llama, for example, they've created their own semi anonymous and, you know, completely open source ecosystem. With their own payrolls, their own everything that exists with that, which is just some guy committing to his project and enough people liked it and wanted to help them out. And you know that's a good example of completely open source development and still forming company off of that without reaching out to venture capitals and things of that sort. Operating exclusively off of donations, which can also open the door to Building fee generating products without taking a fee like we do, right? Like referrals. And I think that's like powerful in itself. There's also other ways that you can go for rent, reaching out to venture capitals that if you have an idea, I promise you they will listen. It may be hard. They seem like they don't also care. I think it really just matters about who you talk to. And where you talk to them as well. If you just cold DM them, maybe you might not get somewhere, unless you're like super persistent on Twitter or something. As long as you're contributing something to them, they might be able to, you know, respond to you and listen to your idea, fund your project as like an angel. There's a lot of events that are out. ETH Denver is something that we're going to at the end of this month. And that's like a good spot to, to meet with different angels, different PCs, market makers, or even just outside projects or people like yourself that may be wanting to start a project. And there's some way that you guys can collaborate and create a bigger project. And so there's a lot of free resources that are out there. That's the way that we started as well. Going to things like ETH Denver and getting the word out over there. And of course you can also create your own token as well out of this. Delivering the product versus usually the go to strategy. And then creating like a token retroactive launch from that. Which can be one way that you can acquire some sort of funding. There's a lot of different ways out there, but I think my, my, the best way that I think that people should go about this is doing one of two things. It's going to be going to these events and seeing how much people you can talk to grow your network there. They're free. The plane ticket won't be free of course, but you know if you're already wanting to take a trip to, let's say Denver, go to ETH Denver while you're there, you can meet with some angels there or some other projects get involved. Even a lot of projects have won at packathons, so you can win money out of the same time. Building out that projects and angels will fund you right then and there. Let's say you win first place, you're getting funded because there's a reason why you want first place anyway. Or even if you don't make it, you know, you still got eyes on you. And then the second way would be something like what DeFi loans. I think if you create a completely open source ecosystem, you can obviously protect your code with things like, like the Uniswap license that they have the BSL license to protect your work from copycats. But if you just put that out there, be transparent and just start shipping things, you know, there's going to be somebody that's going to use it. And if you don't have any users, because let's say, you know, maybe it's not a product market fit. Find two things. If it's solving a problem for you, it's likely solving a problem for somebody else. That's how we started Unity. This is a problem. We saw it. We fixed it. People started using it because of that. So yeah, just, just keep your head high. Just keep shipping and people will, you know, eventually take notice one way or another.

Dan: 48:55

Yeah, yeah, I completely agree. Yeah, I mean, I, I think, yeah, the hackathon point is really cool. I've been to a few of the ETH Global ones and they're really great for just meeting people. I mean, the discord, once you're in, you're joining this huge discord channel and there's, yeah, I mean, thousands of people that are looking to build stuff. And they also have like asynchronous hackathons that are online and right now there's like Circuit Breaker that's going on, which is like a ZK hackathon. But yeah, I mean, as long as you have the time and you can get the, you know, just start shipping stuff, then yeah, I mean, I think that's like step number

Krunal: 49:30

one. You can even find your starting team with your, right? Like your, your own starting hackathon team to use that as a stepstone into like, you know, your larger company.

Dan: 49:41

Absolutely, and yeah, we'll also be Lawrence. You're going to be in Denver. I won't be

Lawrence: 49:47

there. No, but we'll have some other members of our group there. I think Jimmy will be there. Dan, they're going to

Dan: 49:52

right? Yeah. Yeah, I will be there. Okay. Yeah, me. Yeah, no, it's definitely a meetup. I mean, you're gonna have a booth in the main stadium.

Krunal: 50:05

We won't. We had a booth last year just because we wanted to get the presents out. But right now we, I think we just have a lot of work. New chain, new token, new protocol, everything of that sort. So we have a lot of people that need to be doing a lot of work. If we had a booth, it would just be me. You know, like I said, we're a team of six. So it would just be me and maybe another team member helping there. That cuts our productivity a lot. Especially when you have to like stand there for like, you know, eight hours while that event is running, just saying, yeah, my name is, yeah so, so, yeah, we'll be walking around though.

Dan: 50:39

That's great. I, yeah. Would you say the booth in general at these events, like, isn't like hugely, I don't know, like hugely helpful or I don't know, as, as like a sponsor or a vendor? Did you get like a lot of value out of it?

Krunal: 50:55

I, I think it was, I think one thing that it's interesting is that a lot of other, like for example, me, myself as a project owner or even part of the project, we're going out to all these other different booths as well. And something that's interesting is that, you know, if you have on your backdrop behind you, what you are, like, let's say you're trading, you know, firm or your decks lending protocol, that's like, you know, instance you know, ways to like snipe a partnership by just walking around and saying, Oh, that's an aggregator. Hey, we can integrate them. Let's go talk to them. So it's easy for. Other projects and other collaborators just find people partner with that you won't be able to find if, let's say. You know, like one inch was just walking around not having a booth and there's minimal chances you're going to cross paths, for example. So the booth is nice. Anybody can get quotes online, so it's not like it's a secret saying it, but they're, they're relatively cheap as well. Maybe not for like projects that are just starting out, like already established and like funded projects. They can definitely easily afford a booth. I think it's just more so about the time, your people speaking skills as well, things like that.

Dan: 52:10

Very cool. How do you find

Lawrence: 52:12

balancing, you know, being a CEO of a startup or a founder of a startup and also being like the principal engineer of that same startup? Like, how are you, how are you balancing that? I mean, is it like block off sections of the day to do it or is it just kind of random?

Krunal: 52:29

Yeah, I kind of just like work 24 7. I mean, if you like what you do, right, it's not that hard to just keep working. I mean, obviously I, I play like games on the side and stuff like that, do my hobbies like painting and stuff like that. I have these two cats that are still running around next to me to keep me busy as well. Keep me distracted whenever I do need a break off the screen. But since I already enjoy trading as it is and By extension, building trading products, seeing which ways that that can improve. It's not hard to work pretty long hours as well. Just, you know, I, I may be chronically online, just, you know, on the computer. But I think that's how most of this generation is anyway, so. This is kind of how, what we're used to.

Dan: 53:14

Yeah, just make sure you're getting sunlight at least a little bit. And then,

Krunal: 53:19

does the window next to me count? Does that? It is

Dan: 53:21

yeah, a little bit, but it gets pretty bright in there.

Krunal: 53:24

Yeah. It's

Dan: 53:27

awesome. Yeah, what are you gaming by the way? It's like

Krunal: 53:34

I mean, it's really mostly just what my friends are playing like on their PC So it's like something like Warzone or I forgot what's the we played Baldur's Gate recently and we finished in one of that Yeah, there's pretty much anything that my group

Dan: 53:52

Same here, pretty much. I haven't had this much time lately to be gaming, but I feel like I need to be gaming more. I feel like I need to kind of like disconnect a little more than I do. And yeah, gaming is like a great way to do that. Whereas like before, I was like starting to stop gaming because I like felt like I was being way too unproductive. Now it's like, maybe I could be more productive if I gamed

Krunal: 54:15

a bit. Yeah, you know. Oh, and also finding like a mix of like off computer hobbies, like, because it can get kind of like easy to like, you know, just kind of like do anything that's like on social media or something like that as it is. So finding like a balance outside of that. Like I make like resin art as well and stuff like keycaps, like shit like that. But just anything that's off the screen, giving yourself like a mental break, you know, go to the gym or something like that. I try to do that as well.

Dan: 54:47

Amazing. Awesome. Yeah, I think we're coming up on the hour mark. Yeah, Lawrence, do you have anything else you wanted to,

Lawrence: 54:56

I guess it's like a final, I guess topic is like, do you guys keep track of like user metrics? How

Dan: 55:01

many people are, are on the platform right now?

Lawrence: 55:05

The kind of growth you've been

Dan: 55:06

seeing,

Krunal: 55:07

Et cetera. Yeah, well, we don't have like any live data. Like we don't have Google analytics installed or anything like that just to preserve the privacy, but like just in terms of TX data and stuff like that and if it were like an error happens, like we get that like notification and stuff. And those are also public. So we have like two to three staff pages that you can check fine tuned to your, how complex. So we have our general stats page, which just shows. Our protocols performance only ours. We have the aggregation dashboard, which shows hours plus, you know, outside protocols that we aggregate into for both swaps and a whole bunch of pie charts and data of that sort around that. We're even going to up the complexity of that as well by introducing a lot more stuff like. How often is one inch the best rates off percentage or something like that, or the trade size of 10 K what's most likely to be the order on what chain and stuff like that. Data rich just so we can, you know, see how we need to improve the protocol, see what problems we can solve and put ourselves into. To improve that, um, in, in the general, our volume has been on an uptick, which is nice. Especially as we've been refining our user experience at better over time. So we're seeing that uptick, which is nice. And I think post molten launch, we're going to be seeing a lot more of that as well. So fingers crossed for making sure that, you know, keeps up.

Dan: 56:38

All right. I, I I think I've asked everything I've, I've wanted to ask. Yeah, that's it too. Yeah, this is a very insightful conversation. We got like really technical. I really liked that and yeah, I, I certainly learned a lot here. So yeah, overall really appreciate your time and joining us during the work day. And yeah, I think we'll definitely try to see you over at ETH

Krunal: 57:04

Denver. Yeah, yeah, for sure. Definitely interested in, you know, meeting up. Cool.

Dan: 57:10

Yeah, maybe we'll have another chat at some point once Molten's fully live and everything's up and running. But yeah, very, very cool.

Krunal: 57:18

All right. Yeah. Well, thanks for having me on guys.