Michal Cymbalisty on Domination Finance's market cap tracking

0:00i'm ashton addison from block west capital for investmentpitch media and the Crypto Coin Show and today on blockchain interviews we have michael symbalisti the founder of domination finance michael welcome to the show thanks so much for taking the time to come on hey ashton thanks so much for having me i'm really glad to be here yeah i'm super excited about our

0:20discussions today and about the domination in the markets it's a really interesting cycle that i think a lot of people need to know more about and i would love to kick off our conversation together by first of all hearing a little bit about your background in the blockchain blockchain space and how that led into starting domination finance

0:39yeah and most definitely so i'm 24 years old and two years off graduating college so my crypto journey started with one of our co-founders adrian when we were hanging out we were really good friends before we were co-founders and you know obviously i got to experience the 2017 boron which was really exciting and after getting that thrill as like a

0:56junior in college i never really turned back from the space so after graduating i spent a year at exodus wallet where the early seasons of domination finance kind of started appearing when i actually came to new york and was able to meet the uma team before they were even live on mainnet the possibilities of their protocol got us really excited and i think from a broad

1:17aspect we always saw that the trading of bitcoin dominance was something that was lacking regardless of what people's sentiments are i think you know for define crypto to really evolve we want you know formal tools that people can trade and use as portfolio hatches as they see fit so those were kind of the early seedings of my time in crypto and how down dom nation finance got legs

1:39very cool michael and yeah i'm glad that you stuck to it through 2017 and i think you know that's the best time to be working on cool applications and platforms like this is through the bear market and then when the time is right all of a sudden it kicks off and right now there's a lot of interest specifically with the domination i remember looking back at

2:00domination bitcoin domination before it's like if it's going down you're going into altcoins but i never actually thought of actually trading the domination itself so that's pretty cool and i would love for you to explain just a little bit more about you know the thesis behind domination finance and what it can do yeah totally you know a lot of our

2:20team was an early stage venture before actually doing domination finance and not even crypto native so i think the crux of why we even wanted to build this was you really want to listen to the market and just build for what exists so as we were browsing twitter and you know reading forums like it was a metric you saw so often and like you mentioned for some reason it was just never

2:39directly directly tradable and we really wanted to make that a key point but you know from a real basic level we don't really care if bitcoin's trading at you know 10 thousand or a hundred thousand we're interested in what percent of the crypto pipe bitcoin has so obviously when market in market upturns it's not as exciting obviously you're gonna get your

2:59two and three x's a lot faster on volatile assets but when we have movements in the market like we experienced this morning it's a really cool hedge that lets you know investors actually get some upside even when the market may be read in us dollar terms definitely and you know for those people that are invested in bitcoin they're looking at ethereum they haven't really dove

3:19into altcoins and they may not understand fully you know what is trading bitcoin dominance can you just elaborate on that a little bit more yeah definitely so you know it's almost like betting on how much of the pie a certain coin is gonna eat so you know if your average investor let's say has only bitcoin exposure a really really good hedge for example in a

3:42portfolio like that would be shorting bitcoin dominance because if all coins outperform bitcoin you have your bitcoin spot holdings and now you have your hedge that in case the broader market starts to outperform bitcoin you still capture some of that upside and vice versa if you're an investor that's really into ethereum but doesn't hold bitcoin you could you know have a long

4:01position open on bitcoin dominance on our exchange and that's going to kind of be the counter acting bet in case bitcoin does outperform the broader market definitely and yeah i completely agree it's great to have those hedges and it's great to also you know just be more familiar with the dominance to sort of understand you know the other coins and that you know they

4:20do relate to bitcoin the market sort of moves together but they can also move apart where bitcoin is flowing into other alt coins and then they're flowing back and i think understanding that cycle helps you get a clearer picture of the market overall yeah i think that's a really good point you know a lot of prominent people on twitter like pentoshi for example have

4:41made kind of a killing and counteracted you know a lot of sentiment by being like bitcoin dominance is actually a really accurate thing to chart i mean you can do technical analysis on anything that has a chart and like you said the rotation of capital is really important and i think just people being aware of these dynamics can really help you know make for a more

5:01sophisticated portfolio and ultimately lower risk while maximizing upside across the board definitely so can we talk a little bit more about the platform itself i know you've been working on it for quite a while now what stage is it exactly at right now are there people trading you know is it a tokenization of the dominance itself or how does it actually

5:21work in the platform yes so we are actually live right now and a quick breakdown of how it works to actually bring money into the ecosystem users initially need to mint both what we what are called long and short tokens which is a smart contract template from uma so effectively usdc is locked up as collateral and with the bitcoin dominance pair we'll use that as

5:45an example for each 100 usdc you get one tokenized bitcoin dominance long token and one tokenized bitcoin dominant short token after those are minted users can either add them to liquidity post we're plugged in the unit swap on ethereum so very simple process you know 50 50 ratio of the tokenized dominance index and usdc and then or you can actually sell

6:08it you know if you want to minimize that exposure and then eventually you can buy it back and reunite for collateral but from a high level that's kind of how it actually works if then you know let me know if i could declare it yeah i know that makes sense you know you're tokenizing and you're getting one on each side and then you're also able to add liquidity and you know

6:28it's not it's not as easy as just going to an exchange and buying bitcoin that's that's for sure there's an extra small bit of extra understanding so but obviously there's a need for this in the market as well can you talk about you know you're live have you seen a lot of traction right away a lot of interest are you also trying to market it out or have you seen

6:50organic growth with this kind of platform yeah so we just wanted to make sure we had it live when we had our funding announcement placed last week and we didn't really take a huge focus on fronting too much liquidity and usage from the get-go which is a focus we're really taking the next couple weeks is to bring in some really more larger players and ideally institutional

7:11capital that is really looking to park these sums so there can be apple liquidity on the platform i think right now you know we're not really incentivizing anything yet with any of our partners or any token rewards or anything like that so we're kind of letting the platform get some traction naturally but i think once we really start bringing in large money into these

7:28pools it becomes a lot easier to trade for the retail investor because you know as you mentioned the steps of the minting and the adding are a little more complicated so over the coming months of our huge developments is going to be really simplifying that process so you know average investors can come in and use a really simple ui to hit the green long

7:46or the red short button and you know acquire exposure in a matter of two clicks definitely i think that will be a huge advantage and you know for those early movers you talked about you can add liquidity are there rewards and incentives for people that are also adding liquidity and being early users of the protocol yeah so nothing explicitly just yet but

8:08that's definitely something we're going to be taking a focus on with some of our partners especially uma i think we really want to structure some sort of program where we incentivize the right action but at the same time i think from a development standpoint we want to simplify that process as well but that is surely something that's going to be coming in the coming months

8:26very exciting michael and i would love to talk more about uma as well i'm pretty sure that you know there's at least some people that haven't heard of uma they don't understand you know what is the technology that's underlying domination finance maybe you can talk more about that yeah definitely so you know the reason we're even built on them in the first

8:46place is i kind of like to dub them like a generalized community oracle what was really really unique with them and not other oracle solutions they actually through their governance process let you submit a custom price fee so all of our data is coming directly from coin gecko which is really cool and we just you know built a custom api internally push that through uma's governance

9:07process and then that became the source of truth which is a really really cool model and another thing uma does differently when i mentioned the minting there's actually no oracle oracle calls going on chain that's why you're kind of getting you know one lung and one short token for each 100 usdcf collateral i think that's a model that's a lot different from other oracles that tend

9:28to you know congest the networks a lot and be really you know push intensive uma really only looks for the price when there is the expiration or maturity date which is something that exists okay very interesting so from what i understand using the oracle process you're able to pull in the domination percentage and other price feeds from coin gecko yeah exactly which you know we think is

9:55a really cool aspect because i think broadly speaking they're really recognized as the source of truth and crypto right now so we never really wanted to be in the business of having our own methodology of bitcoin dominance why not you know leverage the site that has multiple tens of millions users every day and just let people trade that metric so we're really excited you know

10:18to have partnered with them for that and they are actually one of our small investor investors as well very cool michael and now the pro the product is live but i know that your team has a lot to do still as you continue to grow out i would love to hear some insights into the plans for the rest of 2021 and what you have in store with major releases as you

10:40continue to grow yeah definitely i think you know as i kind of touched on the really first initial focus is going to be bringing in some of this long-term larger institutionally geared capital to make sure the platform is actually really usable for a lot of people so that's step one from abroad you know broad strokes as well we are really really

11:00interested in branching across other l1s and l2s as an application that we think is pretty intuitive to use we see the future being multi-chain and we really want to hone in on that so that's going to be the tangential focus alongside breaking in you know a lot of this capital and of course as i kind of teased we're going to be structuring some incentivized programs to

11:21actually incentivize adding liquidity and trading and using the platform in different ways definitely and i would love to hear your take on d5 growing throughout 2022 and in the years to come you know any trends that you see and how domination is going to you know fit in with those trends to help with their growth yeah definitely you know i think it's

11:46been pretty obvious now after the last year or so it's kind of hard to refute that defy and you know decentralized applications are kind of going to be the crux of the future in crypto we saw so many cool things pop up over the last you know 12 to 15 months that inevitably it's here to stay and tbl is skyrocketing pushing 100 billion dollars so all we really want to be is you know

12:08an option for people to use in their portfolios i think ultimately the really cool thing about crypto is innovating is very simple and it's you know you can build and have these really unique tools that don't necessarily exist in traditional finance we want domination finance to be that spot in people's portfolios where they can come and you know flip the script and start

12:28focusing on market share instead of price and obviously bitcoin dominance is kind of the main metric but something we're really excited about for the future and what we want to hear from our community is these really really cool things that actually stretch outside of crypto coins so one thing we've obviously gotten is you know i think d5 dominance alone a lot of people have

12:48been interested in maybe nft dominance or like ftx dominance of centralized exchanges so those are some of the things that we're going to be going forward and ultimately i think with the growth of v5 we're going to be able to capitalize on and you know give traders and investors really unique tools in their portfolios definitely michael and i was thinking

13:06the same thing i know there's other dominance factors that could play a huge role in the future and i'm excited to see how domination finance incorporates that in beyond bitcoin so very exciting very promising for the viewers that are looking to learn more about this platform get involved with domination finance community and start using the platform

13:27testing it out what's the best way for them to get involved yeah you know you could give us a follow on twitter at domination phi we have the link out to our info page our exchange page and our discord so come try the application we felt that it's pretty intuitive to use we really wanted to make the colors vibrant so they tell you exactly what you need if you want a long it's

13:48big green and says long goes up right red short is the complete opposite but of course any questions reach out to our team and discord we'll be happy to chat you know and really like i mentioned we're really excited about our community getting more involved in the future definitely exciting i will leave all those links as well in the description box below all the best with domination

14:08finance moving forward michael and let's follow up in the near future yes absolutely thanks so much for having me ashton i really enjoyed this