Interview: flowie, ChainCatcher
Guest: Darryl, Initiator of the Unamano project
With the upcoming upgrade in Shanghai, the LSD track is one of the most voluptuous tracks in the first half of this year. After staking service providers such as Lido, SSV, and Rocket Pool led the rise, there are also LSD+DeFi matryoshka protocols such as Frax Finance rising rapidly. The LSD protocol must not only provide Liquidity, but also provide users with high staking returns.
In the process of pursuing high returns, many users have gradually deviated from the original intention of pledging to pursue stable returns, and many high-leverage and high-risk behaviors have occurred . Darryl, the initiator of the Unamano project, believes that "when one of the nodes fails, it may trigger bursts of thunderstorms. Users need to pay attention to risk control while pursuing benefits."
At the same time, although Shanghai's upgrade has driven a short-term recovery in the encryption market, in Darryl's view, the market will still be under a bear market for a long period of time before new technological innovations appear, and users' investment behavior will be conservative. Sometimes some income models that guarantee no loss of principal will have certain advantages.
Therefore, the first phase of Unamano, which was established in 2022, will focus on the principle of non-destructive pledge to help users maximize profits. Unamano has set up two income pools. income; the second is the donation pool. Unamano has introduced well-known project parties such as dYdX, Ape Coin, and Nabox to go online on the platform. Pledge users can use the income obtained in the stable pledge income pool to replace more potential project parties. In order to obtain greater benefits, the APR (annual interest rate) provided by the donation pool project can reach 600%-50386%.
For the project side, the support of resources such as funds and communities can be obtained by launching Unamano. The original intention of Unamano is to help some high-quality projects in the Ethereum community to get good development support.
After the completion of the first phase, Unamano's second phase will focus on launching a re-pledging solution to help early platform projects solve the security issues of the trust layer at a lower cost. Unamano's positioning is to become the "Eigenlayer" in the Asia-Pacific region.
In addition to Unamano's differentiated positioning, ChainCatcher recently interviewed Darryl, the initiator of the Unamano project. He shared the trends that deserve attention in the LSD track before and after the upgrade in Shanghai, as well as the innovations and risks behind the recent re-staking narrative that has attracted much attention.
1. ChainCatcher: Briefly introduce how you personally got involved in Web3, and why did you choose to make efforts in the pledge track?
Darryl: I entered Web3 around 2016. I was the product partner of the public chain project NULS at the beginning. NULS has been listed on major exchanges such as Huobi, OKX, and Huobi. After that, I also participated in the entrepreneurship of related exchanges and wallet projects.
Why do you want to do the LSD track this time? A coincidence is that NULS is also a POS mechanism. We have done a project called POCM on NULS. POCM is very similar to what we are doing at Unamano. It also donates the proceeds generated by pledge to the project party to replace the project tokens. , the effect is not bad, and the two projects that have been launched recently have pledged several million dollars .
But after all, NULS is still relatively small compared to Ethereum, so when we learned about the Ethereum-to-POS mechanism, we have been planning how to transfer this model to Ethereum. At present, the Ethereum community also needs a capable A public utility incubation platform that gives early-stage projects opportunities.
Secondly, the LSD track will definitely usher in a big wave of reshuffle during the conversion of Ethereum to POS, including the recent Shanghai upgrade, which is also our opportunity.
2. ChainCatcher: What is the background of Unamano’s core team? What was the original intention of Unamano?
Darryl: Many members of the Unamano team are early participants in the Ethereum community, participated in early crowdfunding, and participated in important decision-making votes in the Ethereum community many times.
Unamano members initially found that there are many digital public products dedicated to the long-term development of the Ethereum community but there is no clear profit motive at the moment, making it difficult to secure the survival funds of these products, so they wanted to propose a safe and risk-free way to fund The development of ecological projects within these communities.
It just so happens that the transformation of Ethereum’s POS provides an opportunity. Under the POS mechanism, community users can generate interest by pledging their ETH , thus giving these projects a stable source of income. Therefore, team members spontaneously established Unamano (Spanish: echar una mano a alguiene char una mano a alguien means extending a hand to help someone when they are in trouble).
Unamano hopes that Buliders in the Ethereum community can establish their own DAO through Project DAO on Unamano, and allow community members who hold ETH to pledge to the Mainnet through Project DAO to generate POS income and give these projects to support their projects. Early construction and innovative development.
3. ChainCatcher: Compared with the mainstream pledge agreements on the market, what is the difference of Unamano? Why set up two pledge pools?
Darryl: First, let’s talk about these two pledge pools. The first one is the pledge stable income pool . This pledge pool can be understood as the same as Lido. Users come in to pledge. We provide 32 ETH supply capacity, and then help users generate income.
The second pool is the donation pool (Project DAO), the core of which is how to increase the rate of return . Project DAO is a public infrastructure for Web3 builders driven by DAO. The protocol is based on "block rewards". A decentralized free and DAO-driven Ethereum pledge standard, as well as an ecosystem financing solution model, allows users to freely participate in pledge while also participating in the development of ecological public goods.
From a business point of view, the agreement itself is divided into three parts:
(1) Create a project DAO pool and inject early tokens
(2) Users generate block rewards by staking ETH .
(3) Users choose to receive ETH as a reward or choose to donate funds to ecological builders.
The system is based on a modular design and will be connected to more pledge-based applications in the future. For example, the team is considering introducing the method of pledge-casting NFT to make NFT a "guaranteed and loss-free" asset, and to bring NFT-related entrepreneurs an early stage. support.
The above is what we have to do in the first stage. In the second stage, we have to re-stake . We are from a technical team and are more optimistic about re-staking.
4. ChainCatcher: Recently, Eigenlayer, a re-staking protocol on Ethereum, released a Whitepaper, which aroused everyone's attention to the re-staking narrative. What innovations and risks did re-staking bring? What is Unamano's positioning?
Darryl: The re-staking that Eigenlayer is currently doing is actually very similar to the original intention of Ethereum in the early days. It is to modularize the entire product to solve the trust layer. The biggest highlight is that it can guarantee the security of nodes through Ethereum. Yu directly borrows the existing nodes of Ethereum to ensure the verification of the security layer, without the need for each project to build nodes separately.
At present, most projects, such as oracle machines, Layer2, side chains, etc., are actually reinventing the wheel. The project party needs to build its own interface, which on the one hand causes a waste of resources, and on the other hand requires the project party to A lot of funding and user support.
Of course, Eigenlayer's re-pledging model also has some risks: the choice of project parties is relatively narrow. Some project parties may trigger the punishment mechanism of Ethereum due to certain risks, resulting in the loss of node revenue, so Eigenlayer will choose safer and more stable projects.
Re-staking matches what we do, because the early projects of the platform need to use the trust layer protocol. For them, it is time-consuming and labor-intensive to build nodes by themselves.
In addition, we and Eigenlayer will have different market positioning, and Eigenlayer's customer base may be more inclined to some well-known top projects in the European and American markets. Unamano's own positioning is to gain a firm foothold in the Asia-Pacific region and become the "Eigenlayer" in the Asia-Pacific region, providing services for some longer-tail early and growth-stage projects.
5. ChainCatcher: At present, there are pledge pools of many well-known projects such as dYdX on the Unamano platform. Are these pledge returns provided by the project party or your team? Why is the return as high as 500% or even higher? What are the potential risks of staking?
Darryl: Some are provided by project parties, such as dYdX and Nabox, and some are activities launched by our team in the early stage.
The early income is indeed relatively high. The model behind it is that each block in the project pledge pool will generate multiple project tokens. If there are not many people participating in the pledge in the early pool, even if the user only pledges 0.01 ETH The token income in the pool can still be shared equally.
In the later period, with the increase of pledgers and more and more ETH pledge participation, the rate of return will drop, but there is no risk of principal loss. Because it is essentially a process of replacing project tokens with an Ethereum proceeds, and the main focus is lossless pledge mining. In addition to the fact that the rate of return will decline in the later period of staking, the biggest risk may be that the project fails, resulting in a loss of Ethereum staking income.
6. ChainCatcher: Unamano also launched an open plan some time ago, and took out 32 ETH to attract more projects to open a pledge pool on the platform. Leaving incentives aside, what benefits can these pool building projects get through the Unamano pledge pool? Or what value can these pledge pools bring to them?
Darryl: Our original intention is to help some good projects in the Ethereum community get good development support. In the early stage, there are some incentive plans at the financial level, and in the later stage, it will help the project party solve some problems in the project operation process like Gitcoin.
For the project, there are two points of attraction. The first is financial support. We currently have 50,000 community users on our platform, mainly overseas community users. The project side can attract users to pledge by linking with our community in exchange for future earnings on Ethereum.
The second is the support of community traffic. When a user participates in the donation of a project, it is a recognition of the project. The entire pledge process is also a strong binding relationship with the project party, and will take the initiative to become an early seed user of the project party.
We hope that TVL will reach 300,000 ETH this year, and at the same time hope to introduce more than 50 outstanding projects in the ETH community. We are a decentralized platform. Project parties can independently apply to launch our platform. There are no special standards for project parties.
7. ChainCatcher: Is it convenient to disclose the TVL and number of users currently pledged on the Unamano platform? What are the short- and medium-term goals?
Darryl: Currently Unamano is still in the beta testing stage. The upper limit of the pledge of each project is set relatively low. We will release the official beta version after the audit. At present, 200 addresses have participated in the interaction of the official network, and the highest TVL is more than 50 ETH.
The APP is also being updated. In the first stage, we will launch a Liquidity mining pool and launch Uniswap. After the recent financing, we will also put the main funds on Uniswap for Liquidity; in the second stage, we will launch a product pledge pool; in the third stage, we may do projects Farms introduces some DeFi products to allow users who have mined project token income to further expand their income.
8. ChainCatcher: What is the biggest challenge encountered by Unamano in the process of the pledge agreement, or the part that is most likely to form a barrier?
Darryl: For us, the first and most core challenge is to be able to quickly guide developers in the Ethereum community to release their projects on the platform. Discovering high-quality projects is a long and energy-consuming process for us. Continuous investment is required.
Our current advantage is that we can help users strive for income while ensuring that there is no loss of principal. Our judgment for the later market is that it is unlikely to get out of the bear market in the short term. Although Shanghai's upgrade has brought about a wave of recovery, it will still be in a bear market stage in the future. At this stage, everyone is hoarding coins, because there are continuous crises in the industry, everyone has a high aversion to risk, and they are more inclined to a more conservative investment strategy. This can be seen from the current TVL of Ethereum that continues to rise.
9. ChainCatcher: Faced with the upcoming Shanghai upgrade, what suggestions do you have for stakers?
Darryl: In the process of pursuing income, we still need to pay attention to the control of risks. The original intention of everyone's pledge is to pursue stable returns, but now many pledges have become a high-leverage process. For example, there have been many repeated pledge agreements around increasing the rate of return.
In fact, the entire system of blockchain finance is similar to traditional finance in many ways, except that the methods of traditional finance have been moved to the chain. In the traditional world, banks sell three products: first, fixed-income products with fixed interest; second, principal-guaranteed wealth management products (fixed-income+), whose floating income is higher than the upper limit of traditional fixed-income products; third, stocks type fund. Capital-guaranteed wealth management products in the traditional world will first use deposits to buy very safe assets (government bonds, etc.) to make the first layer of income. On top of this income, the interest is used to invest in a highly leveraged income product, such as options, secondary market stock funds, bonds, etc.
But there is an important prerequisite for this, which is to find a safe source of income on the first layer . In the encryption industry, there has been a lack of an underlying asset that can bring safe and stable returns on a large scale. After the upgrade of Ethereum, the income from POS mining has become the real "national debt" of the entire industry - the real first risk-free super class of underlying assets, which can accommodate at least 100 billion US dollars.
After the upgrade in Shanghai, the pledge rate is likely to double to more than 60 billion US dollars. After the encryption industry was upgraded in Shanghai, "national debt" appeared, which means that in the traditional world, almost all financial derivatives based on national debt can be done again in the encryption industry.
But so far, most of the methods of increasing leverage in traditional finance have not yet produced a stable product form on the chain. Relatively speaking, there are currently two types of leverage methods on the chain: Options trading and revolving loans. The former can be completely transparent on the chain; the latter can achieve higher annualized returns, but the protocol has risks that are difficult to control, such as a run on the leverage.
The same is true for the Matryoshka protocol in blockchain finance. There are many leveraged processes in the process of obtaining income. When one of the nodes has a problem, it may also trigger bursts of thunderstorms.
10. Under this wave of Shanghai upgrades, which projects do you think are underestimated in the pledge track?
Darryl: In the long run, I am more optimistic about Rocket, SSV, and EigenLayer .
First of all, Rocket is a decentralized active pool, and its potential in the future may be higher than that of Lido. Recently, Rocking Pool is also preparing to reduce their 16 ETH pledge threshold to 4 ETH, further reducing the pledge threshold.
After the SSV protocol came out, it greatly reduced the security risk when staking. At the same time, the emergence of heavy pledge protocols like EigenLayer will greatly enrich the pledge industry, similar to the phenomenon of previous DeFi protocols contending.
The needs of the LSD market are actually very simple, basically centering on two points of safety and income.
For example, SSV solves the problem of multi-party private key management in the pledge process, and EigenLayer, which solves the problem of trust layer and provides users with double pledge benefits, is also sought after.
11. ChainCatcher: In addition to the Shanghai upgrade, what other trends are worthy of attention on this year's LSD track?
Darryl: Pledging the track, Shanghai will be more exciting after the upgrade than before the upgrade.
The main purpose of the upgrade in Shanghai is to release Liquidity. Lido originally solved the Liquidity problem. When the Liquidity is released, the ETH in everyone’s hands will actually flow to various places, and more innovative models will appear to meet everyone’s needs. Pledge demand, the pledge track will present a state of contention.
Recently, many new ways of playing have been discovered, such as 0xAcid, a pledge agreement that combines compound assets + Real Yield.
Frax Finance, a mixed- Algorithmic Stablecoin protocol, launched the Ethereum Liquidity pledge product frxETH, which imaginatively casts frxETH "out of thin air" and deposits it in the Curve pool to reduce Convex bribery costs.
Therefore, the main focus of this year's LSD track is still after the upgrade, how everyone will recombine the LSD LP in their hands like Lego, and finally maximize the use of funds.
12. ChainCatcher: What do you think of the US SEC's "suppression" of pledges this time? Is it possible for the pledge to be securitized? What impact will this have on the pattern of the staking track?
Darryl: SEC regulation affects centralized pledge platforms. It is a good thing for us and decentralized platforms like Lido. After all, decentralization is not within the scope of supervision, but relies on contracts to complete the pledge process. The overall pledge demand still exists, so some users will flow from the centralized platform to the decentralized platform.
As for the possibility of pledge securitization, the possibility of securitization is not very high, because overseas control of encrypted assets is still relatively sensitive, especially after the FTX storm, banks that need to be involved in encrypted currency have suffered losses.
13. ChainCatcher: As mentioned earlier, you think this year will be in a bear market for a long time, so under what circumstances do you expect the market to turn from a bear market to a bull market?
Darryl: It is difficult to predict the specific time, but looking back at the emergence of every bull market in the past, there was a mainstream technological iteration and new gameplay behind it, which caused the market to continue to rise, such as public chains and DeFi.
This year, we are currently discussing Shanghai upgrades, storage and other existing topics. There is no new content on the entire track, so it can only bring about a small-scale recovery. The emergence of the next bull market still needs new and bigger ones. iteration occurs. For example, in the traditional Internet industry, after the narrative of the mobile Internet industry has gradually solidified, Internet companies are looking for new tracks, and the emergence of ChatGPT has triggered a new round of narrative.
