Josh Rogers on Minterest's long-term DeFi yield platform

0:01i'm ashton addison from block west capital for investmentpitch media in the Crypto Coin Show and today on blockchain interviews we have josh rogers the ceo and founder of mintrest josh welcome to the show and thank you so much for taking the time to come on thanks ashley absolutely great to be here yeah i'm really excited to dive into minterist and such a unique

0:21platform at i think the perfect time coming into the industry but before we dive into the details i'd love to kick it off by just hearing a little bit about your background josh and block blockchain finance and how you came to start interest sure look it's a bit of a journey i suppose i have what i could call is a competitive advantage in startups and

0:41that is i'm older than everybody else so i really started my career back in the mid 90s when ip telcos were kicking off i got involved in content platforms in the early 2000s i was involved in building out the world's first micro billing engine for content we did the world's first monetization of content for big brother two so that's how far back that goes and then got

1:01involved there fairly heavily in marketplaces in the northeast did a lot of work in asia and then i was a founding investor for freelancer which obviously has become the largest freelancing platform in the world and then i was also a founding director founding shareholder and the mentor for seven years for australia's largest cafe app called hey you i

1:22mentored the ceo rebecca campbell really from inception all the way through to her exit i've done a lot of that work i love doing it you know i'm always you know advising or mentoring you know a few startups and the reason i love doing that apart from the difference it makes is because it also keeps me sharp and i really looked at blockchain fairly closely in

1:432017. i was really excited about the technology but i couldn't get through i couldn't kind of get over the fence so to speak in terms of the depth you know there are all these white papers that i was reading that were talking about what they were going to do and not what they were actually going to do raising vast amounts of money on a four-page document

2:01and for me i really couldn't see any depth in the value creation process that was occurring then and that has for me now completely changed so i you know i'm someone who specializes i suppose you could say in architecting digital platforms i'm always fascinated by value capture mechanisms and when you look at you know all the flourishing token models that

2:24are occurring now and the value capture mechanisms that occur in blockchain it's just extraordinary and to me it's always been extremely you know like like just massively interesting so and then i really got involved in blockchain in 2019 i came out to estonia on a semi holiday and you know i'm based in estonia now the whole team is based here and i'm an

2:47australian and you know obviously you don't come to estonia for the weather but we you know when i arrived here i was just really taken aback by the caliber and quality of blockchain talent that is already based here but also the caliber of blockchain talent you could hire in from places like belarus or ukraine or even russia who really were wanting to have sort

3:09of a you know a career inside of europe and you know that really piqued my interest and really how much came about was you know like like i spent a lot of time pouring over you know dabs and also white papers looking for you know like use cases that i could see that had real long-term benefit and you know and sort of last year may last year obviously which is when

3:36compound you know went public with its token launch that's when it really peaked my interest and the thing that really stuck out for me was i really saw the liquidity mining architecture come in from interest with so sorry for compound where they give away tokens to the borrower and the lender to stimulate you know initial users i saw that as a real breakthrough but

3:59you know when you start drilling down into these models i could also see that there were things that were missing then there was a real space that was possible and available that hadn't yet been considered and that's really where my interest grew out of definitely great background josh and very exciting diverse background prior to blockchain and yeah i know what

4:19you mean when you see blockchain at the surface as an entrepreneur and you're like hey we really need to create something of value and deliver it and not just have you know is same as the dot-com bubble where there's there are companies trying to take shortcuts and make a quick buck and to see once you see past that you can really see there is a lot of value being

4:38produced and as you mentioned with compound i think that's a great business model and i think interesting is a great business model as well yeah look when you look at the layer ones that have been built out now you know you're looking at things like polka dot al goran solana and even even with ethereum 2.0 coming the value correct actually occurring now

4:58is so extraordinary and you know i kind of have this fairly very positive long-term view on the whole blockchain sector and i suppose one of the advantages of being a bit older than everyone else is that you know i asked people when was the last tech crash and i saw i was involved i was around when the last tech crash was and that was in 2000

5:19and the reason that we haven't had one since is not because we haven't had you know prices over inflated it's just basically that the value creation that's been coming behind even what over inflated prices is so significant that it just never collapses and that trend is still continuing today in traditional startups and you know from my perspective i think

5:40that we're really at the you know we're in the we're we're at the sort of the 2000s you could say of in blockchain we're in that same part of the cycle early on where you're seeing enormous values starting to be created and people can argue about you know value and whether prices are over-inflated but when you take a 10-year view you know i think it's a really

6:03really exciting time it's a really interesting time to be now definitely and i think you have to take that long-term view because we are so early and it's sort of like with the internet you know looking at it in early 90s and thinking what's going to happen in five years it's like well what's going to happen in 25 years you know and that's where we're

6:21at now so i you know i would love josh to jump back into interest and talk a little bit more about you know the unique solutions that your team is delivering into the cryptocurrency space and why you think it's best right now so you can give us a quick overview on you know what is mint all about well interest is a protocol that's really designed to bring about what we

6:44regard as fair finance for all and it does that through you know a number of key in a number of key ways the first one is the way that we capture value so you know in protocols you have there are numerous ways that protocols capture value there's interest income there's liquidation fees which are earned by external third-party liquidators and there's flashlight fees

7:06what we've done is that we've built an on-chain smart contracting auto liquidation process that doesn't require external third-party liquidators and what that means is that income which is normally lost from the protocol the protocol catches plus it captures all of the interest rate income or what's called the interest rate differential which is the

7:26difference between what lenders receive and borrowers pay and also it captures flashlights and flashlight fees and what it does is the protocol distributes that value capture to the users of the protocol and it does that by an automatic buyback mechanism where it goes out on market and automatically buys back the mnt token and then it distributes the mnt token from that

7:51is actually earned back to the users of the protocol and we do that in a way where we reward users for participating in protocol governance and we reward users for their long-term participation so we actually have a loyalty benefit being built in you know ashton at an architectural level it's what's called a switching cost but extensively we're rewarding users who participate in

8:14In staking their tokens in the protocol long term and that means that we're rewarding users for their long term participation in the governance of the protocol so that what's what's unique about it is the way that it captures value the fact that it captures all of the value of the protocol that it generates and that then distributes that value back to its users

8:35now the reason that really does matter is because of the benefits to liquidity mining so when you have a protocol like pinterest where we're giving users both borrowers and lenders tokens for their participation when the protocol is out there each you know on a regular basis buying back its own token what it's doing is supporting token price

8:57now you know the reason that's valuable is because that increases the value of liquidity mining to users of the protocol and it means that the liquidity mining aspect of the protocol increases over time and becomes an ever greater attractant for further tbl so the more tbl the protocol earns you know the greater the value it's able

9:20to capture because the more borrowing that occurs the more that occurs the greater the actual online on market purchases that occur of its own token which obviously is price supporting and the more it does that the more tbl it attracts because that's actually what is the what is a very very powerful attractant for users to participate so in a snapshot tbl supports token

9:41value and token value supports tbl and so mintrest has this self-reinforcing flywheel effect it's a very very powerful network effect and it's designed in a specific way to really out compete out from the existing sector peers yeah it's amazing it's like i want to say it's the vicious cycle but it's like a positive a positive cycle well that's that's that's actually what we

10:08well you know that's really interesting tension and the reason it's done that way because we think that's actually the fairest way to actually design a protocol where the benefits that the value of any digital platform and blockchains digital is a digital platform is created by its users and the value of any lending protocol is actually generated by the users who

10:32participate in that protocol and so interest is built inside of a philosophy that those users should be the beneficiaries of that value definitely i completely agree josh and i would love to you know get a better glimpse of where exactly you and your team are at right now i know you've been working on this for a while is everything that we've been talking about that's all live and

10:53all the customers are using it right now no we're not at that point yet we're actually we just come in health belfast just quite recently you know there's a lot of news that's actually coming we'll probably be launching you know well we're definitely seeking to launch in the near future we're looking at this point and locking down on polkadot we're speaking with

11:14with both moonbeam and with plasma about whether or not we actually part of them as our parachain partners there's a bit of a history in terms of how we got to this point ashton you know you know we actually we actually built an interest out in substrate and then we've actually elected to move to a solidity smart contracting platform you know we've got a team that decoded

11:33both substrate and solidity so there's enormous capability in our team and we made that decision for key strategic reasons you know it gave us the most flexibility in terms of where we actually do launch and you know originally building out of the substrate you know we were looking to be very much polka dot focused we intend to stay very much with polka dot community

11:57And partner with one of their with one of their you know smart contracting platforms which is moon beam or a star which is previously pleasant yes okay you're going to know yeah and like i say you know that decision that's been the right decision to make for this part of the parliament of the protocols for this part of the cycle

12:22the protocol for sure definitely and having a substrate you know with polka dot ecosystem as well as the solidity contracts i'm curious on mintre's view on blockchain and protocol interoperability and managing you know d5 across the blockchain ecosystem through multiple protocols yeah look it's an emerging it's an emerging puzzle to solve you know

12:49what's really interesting to me is the way that it has evolved in very very rapidly really over the last 12 months you know 12 months ago everyone was really seeing the solution as being simply bridging with wrapping you're now looking at substrate solutions that are coming or you know that are being developed or in consideration being developed

13:08Where people are trying to solve a key architectural problem called how do you have native token d5 in a cross chain you know universe that problem is not well there are there are people wanting to solve that and you know we think that could be part of mintra's future solving that out of neutral future is something that our team has

13:29capability for or capability to deliver but obviously it's it's also subject to governance by you know interests once it launches definitely yeah and it's it's definitely a pivotal point in d5 right now where all these different protocols are coming together and the amount locked into these protocols is continuing to explode i'm curious to hear you know your

13:54insights into what you think d5 might look like five years from now and where you seem interest fitting into that well i think the really interesting thing to crack is cross-chain noted is cross-chain d-phi using native tokens without rapping yeah you know and i think that's that there are some there are some people working on that

14:19sort of solution currently it looks like there will be some initial platforms looking to solve that problem maybe next year like like like a first like you know first iterations of solving those issues next year but that's really at a technical level that's got it that's what's going to be solved and then the other thing is how do we you know you know privacy is going to

14:40become a significant aspect of d5 platforms in coming years and it has to be if traditional enterprise or traditional finance is going to come into d5 but you know what we're really wanting to do is how do we get the traditional like mum and dad user in the street to actually use d fights something that the team is very passionate about it's really core focus for us as part

15:03of our long-term mission you know how does how do we empower the average user in the street to be able to ostensibly you know take advantage of d5 in a way that normal people can without having to go through what we all know is a fairly significant learning curve you know how do you how do you shorten learning curve how do you make d5 approachable for the average user how

15:27do you empower people globally you know with a new form of finance and that's really what excites us of interest it really does and so i'll be solving that in a way that is meaningful and transformative for me that's what that's what's really exciting about the whole t5 space definitely i'm looking forward to that and you know i used decentralized

15:50exchanges back before uniswap and the user interfaces were horrible and you know uniswap makes it easy but there still needs to add a functionality and there's a balance between that making it easy and having more functions so i'm excited to see how that plays out as well yeah it's a funny thing to consider because you know crypto just generally has a

16:11very very steep learning curve but one of the things we seem to also forget is that you know if you if you've never seen a smartphone before and we gave you a smartphone today it has a very steep learning curve and there's this iterative process that does occur over time and it's exactly what's occurred in the internet if you think about the internet and how

16:32people use computers today compared to how we did 25 years ago even before the internet was even mainstream there's this enormous sort of innate understanding in learning that it's just simply taken for granted because it becomes part of what we know and my expectation is that blockchain and d5 will become very much like that you know right now it's it's

16:56the general populace doesn't understand it's it's all very confusing there's a very kind of significant learning curve for them but i actually imagine over time it'll become infused right it's part of you know just general culture and to the extent that it's needed to be understood or known it will be and the reason why is because of the

17:17value it produces and that's what excites and so you know interest is designed as a long-term play you know the entire model is designed to you know to out-compete or take a very strong position in d5 along with sector peers and to do and to out compete not not next week but actually long term and to do so the benefit of its users

17:44and i mean d5 is only i mean what are we 18 months old if that and you know i do appreciate there are d5 projects you know prior to that but when you actually think about you know the boom in d5 it's really only just over a year old and we when you consider the stunning kind of response that the world has had just generally to it and we're only in the

18:09first 12 months you know at the end of the first 12 months the next five years are really exciting definitely very exciting interest is designed to definitely be a part of that and one of the advantages from interest is that you know often there's an advantage and not coming out first and one one of the reasons why is you

18:36have the advantage of sitting back and seeing what others got right and what they didn't and then being able to utilize that learning so you know we feel that interest is really very much in that position and look if you think about who that applies to it applies to people like google and facebook and you know all kind of organizations who who really came in that kind of

18:55second wave after what worked and what didn't work so we'd like to think that an interest is very much in that league great thanks so much josh and for the viewers that are looking to follow along with the updates from interest i know you guys have some big things coming out and just to get involved with the community as well what's the best way

19:16for people to learn more about interest definitely connect with this with on telegram you know with our mintus chat it's a community channel we've got an official announcements channel as well please connect through to us twitter's on twitter and like i say we will actually also have discord out coming out next month which we'll

19:35definitely announce with our community channel as well so we'd love to have as many people as possible connect through to us and that's where we'll be making all the official announcements sounds great i will leave all of those links in the description box below and i will be following along as well all the best with all these future updates with mintrest and let's follow up in the near

19:54future thanks so much ashton i really appreciate your time and great talking you