Josh Neuroth on Ankr's Web 3 infrastructure and liquid staking

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 niroth the head of product at anchor josh welcome to the show and thank you for taking the time yeah ashley great to be here thank you for having anchor on the show myself too you're very welcome a lot to cover in

0:20the world of defy staking liquid staking ethereum moving on the markets what's going on let's cover it all but let's start with just an overview of what you're working on at anchor and you know how those solutions apply to the overall blockchain ecosystem and then we'll dive into all the details yeah so we have this kind of next generation of the internet forming and

0:44the web specifically with web 3 and that means there's new opportunities to build infrastructure to enable that space that's what we're doing at anchor we have like a suite of products and solutions that enable web 3 to essentially build out and expand as we have solutions for d5 with liquid staking and the amazing thing about what we're doing is that every use case every

1:08project every company that's trying to work in an ecosystem needs our products and services that we're offering incredible and maybe we can just talk about you know web3 people people are hearing about it and they have an idea of what's the difference but they're so just like the internet there's so many different faucets of what you could be going into and i know defy is a big

1:30thing but maybe you can talk about what are the main priorities and what are the second priorities or you know what are all of the branches that you're reaching out into yeah so i think web web 3 is definitely defined there's there's several definitions and this means different things to different people but i think the central ideas really want ownership

1:50But you know there's there's many kind of movements that have picked up steam lately like right to privacy right to ownership and as as we talk about web3 like a great comparison is i think we all are familiar that facebook is kind of the poster child of web 2. right it's a sharing media at the expense of your data web3 in contrast to that is

2:12really about owning your data being able to move it and having ownership of the system that you're contributing to as whether it's through your own work that you're doing or maybe it's through some data that you're providing or some service that you're performing for the website or whatever it is and that's exciting it's exciting to people we live in an age where it's

2:33harder and harder to buy housing around the world we see how we've seen inflation going up especially younger people are very excited about web3 because it gives them frankly the digital ownership in something digital ownership basically in an asset that can rise in value in a digital asset that can rise in value so it's getting a lot of traction i think i'm seeing kind of a

2:54multi-generational excitement about it but especially kind of gen z millennials are really looking to web 3 as the future definitely and i feel like that's just expanding in all faucets including defy staking just overall taking back control of your finances and nfts with ownership already being integrated into twitter and i did hear that instagram

3:17and i'm sure facebook and the rest of the meta platforms are going to start working on nfts and either innovate or die right yeah absolutely you know people i think there's almost a pushback of how how like public we've gotten with their lives you know the kind of you think about instagram you think about like selfies you think about food pictures you know a lot of people are starting to

3:40push back on that idea and like they want to use their avatar as a nfc they want to kind of show off their their digital ownership and i think this like we talk a lot about like anchor like what is going to what is this concept of the metaverse and i think it's not yet maybe there's games that we could associate with the metaverse or virtual worlds but

3:59ultimately it's more of a trend around our digital identity becoming more and more important right whether it's our ownership in an nft collection in assets or just an online reputation definitely has a lot to do with our success in our careers you know that all of that is kind of fueling this fire around like metaverse web3 and all that definitely and i feel like what's

4:25growing the most there's a lot of metaverse products that are in early stage coming out and i think people really don't don't see the full potential yet because it's not there yet it's still growing yeah we're very very early yeah definitely but one section that really has grown a little bit more because a lot of capital has been injected into it is defy and there's different ways

4:51you can do d5 some of them not as decentralized as others you know you think it's d5 but you're really just staking your coins with some central provider and they're having access to them and maybe you can't get them for a certain period of time or they're locked up and you don't even have access but there's also liquid staking as well where you do get some kind of

5:12coins collateral maybe not the exact thing that you put up for lending but maybe you can talk about how anchor fits in to that aspect and where you see that going absolutely so liquids taking very simply put is when you speak to a validator it's almost like you're making a security deposit right and i like to give this analogy for anyone that's

5:36rented an apartment or flat before you usually have to put a security deposit in to get that rental and that's the security deposit essentially locked up until you leave the building and your lease right and that's very similar with a proof of stake system where you stake assets you take ethereum for example to an eth2 validator and that deposit is locked up and right now it's kind of an

5:58unknown period like we don't know when the merger will happen and we can unlock those assets and so what liquid staking offers you is essentially a voucher in the form of another token that represents your staked deposit and that allows you to exit your position at any time right so for example if i stick with anchor on our liquid staking product back you know maybe it was a year ago

6:24and i'm trying to buy a house now or car need that i need that value back i can sell my liquid staking voucher to someone else which means i'm exiting my position through the sale and they're taking my position in that you know that state asset so this works really well for chains that have longer locking periods so for example ethereum where you know

6:46there's there's not like an automatic unlock or something like that incredible and yeah it's crazy to think that some people that using the fully decentralized method stake their ether in the smart contract for ethereum 2.0 with an unknown unlocked date who you know it just could just keep getting delayed for years and years and your capital is just locked in

7:08this smart contract until they say that it's launched yeah well you know what is when you did this early on the ethereum network was giving like extra rewards in the beginning and so i was just looking at some of the yields that some of the stakers getting they're like 20 30 apr right now of course it's kind of came down to like four point five

7:30five percent you know with like the merger closer to happening but there's definitely been some high yields i think i saw someone that staked 1080 and they already have got an estimated like three on that so it's pretty cool you know and the fact is it's truly defy you know anchor is not being a custodian of those assets like we are locking into a smart

7:50contract but those assets are still in their wallet technically right so that's different than what staking a coinbase would be where they're facilitating everything for you know it's like you don't have your private keys for those assets yes definitely and with this liquid staking are you is there a minimum are you targeting anybody whether it's advanced traders or

8:13just beginning crypto users that just want to stake a little amount yeah we definitely have a retail like we support retail i think what is it you can you can stick any minimum of ethereum on our product but liquid staking like if you think about it like the who's actually the right market for or the right i guess customer or persona that uses that it's

8:37definitely a product that we've seen a lot of interest from from institutions right with some of the larger deposits where they want the ability especially as an institution to unlock their capital at any point in the network and that's a feature that they care about a lot about you know maybe there's a new opportunity or other investors you know want them to go in another

8:56direction liquid staking is very important for them but i will say to answer your question on the retail side on the individual you know trainer side that often there's incentives in some of the liquidity pools that are out there and so as you're a retail investor you might want to maximize your earnings and maximize your yields by taking that liquid staking

9:19token and putting it in a liquidity pool and that's helping facilitate the sale of that right so you're earning extra rewards on that so we've seen you know some some liquidity pools kind of their incentives can go up and down based on what you know anchors offering what some of them are offering but we've seen people you know get double digit apr and above on

9:38those strategies yes and it's not without risk as well but i have seen those memes where you know you lock up some ether and they give you a token and then you're able to lock that in something else and then you get another token and you lock that in something else and it goes through this chain of eventually you're using riskier tokens getting higher apy

9:58but it is possible through decentralized finance to do that and have control of your funds as well yes yes now with anchor you mentioned ether but you also hinted at other assets are there what are the assets that you're able to stake on anchor yeah so to so today we support polygon maverick we support avalanche phantom and bnb from binance that's

10:23one binance has a tremendous yield on it you know traditionally just sticking to a validator you get 15 20 25 apr depending on the validator and then with our solution you can even maximize that more but what i'm most excited about is when we bring in the anchor token itself into this liquid staking and that's something you know we haven't given the community

10:45too much information about yet but that's going to be huge for us very cool and maybe you can hint at the obviously that's going to be a big part of growing the ecosystem out but moving forward throughout 2022 in the development roadmap that's probably one of the major things is there any tentative timeline on that or any other major updates that we haven't spoken about

11:09yeah so tokenomics is definitely like one of the most complex things about web3 is when you have a token you're integrating almost like an economy into your product like we talk a lot about economies on like the national level but in web 3 oftentimes you have like an economic system in your products it's not just like a user interface that you're using you got

11:30to get it right from the get go so you know something we're enabling this year in the next couple of months actually is staking on anchor token right and so as i said earlier when i described like what anchor does we have all these protocols projects they're building on anchor infrastructure right and in order to make that decentralized we need to make it a protocol and so

11:53we're bringing kind of the staking into like the computing the infrastructure side and rolling that out through the anchor token and so it's gonna have a long locking period several months now and then when you're gonna stake your anchor you're gonna get it issued a liquid token of anchor itself and there's going to be some you know amazing opportunities with that so you

12:15know it kind of brings our vision full circle interaction it's like we've been we're almost like four years old now and like our community has just been so patient with us like waiting for us but like each piece of the puzzle has kind of came and put in place and we've seen like this year in this last you know calendar year like our traffic grew like 20x like it's the

12:36adoption is surging in web three and that's something that is also personally i'm excited about because what's fascinating is the crypto market in general has kind of been like flatlining sideways right but everyone in this space is building right now there's a lot of innovation happenings everyone's been i was at eat denver a couple weeks ago sixteen thousand people in the

12:58theater community were there and you know i didn't even hear the price of ethereum even once that's right everyone's excited about the technology the layer two scaling solutions so i think we're in really good shape that's incredible josh and yeah you're right there's so much innovation going on i've seen it through the episodes on our show that people really

13:18don't care you know whether there's a little bit of volatility intraday because everyone's focused on the long-term vision and i'm sure that's the same with anchor and i'd love to get your insight into sort of the long-term vision for anchor and you know where you see the product and the ecosystem and d5 growing out as well you know five

13:41years from now or three years if that's too long because crypto a lot happens really quickly yeah yeah well i think i think in like web 2 we saw you know there's so many companies that enabled from the infrastructure side like the web 2 movement i think the one that's talked about the most is amazon web services which makes the lion's share of profit for amazon right

14:01and drives this trillion dollar evaluation and then we have like tools like heroku cloudflare we have twilio all these tools julio's the service that sends you a text message when you order an uber you get a text message on your phone like all these services are kind of behind the scenes like they're not that sexy they have good brands but not well-known brands to some can you know

14:23the average individual and i think what anchor's doing is that for web three or a key part of the infrastructure i see you know there's i'm very bullish in web 3 infrastructure in general we've seen venture capitalists pour a lot of money into this space i'd say like on the compute side probably our biggest competitors are in fiora and alchemy alchemy consensus with jones and

14:46fewer just got a seven billion valuation alchemy just got a 10 billion dollar evaluation and they don't have tokens but that's that's the private market violation where in some cases on many of the chains that we support we have more market share than they do so i think if anything like you know anchor we're pursuing more of this web three native decentralized vision which is

15:06harder to build but long term i definitely feel like our valuation should go up and if anything we're very undervalued right now that's great to know and yeah i you don't hear about those companies often but infera was in the news recently and i know that there's huge backers and the valuation is large but i feel like it's also going to grow

15:28exponentially and you know 10x and more in the near future here and so thank you for that like insight and i'm also curious just on defy itself and your opinions moving forward and with liquid staking do you think that will be the norm or do you think some other innovations to d5 will be the norm in a year or in a couple of years moving forward

15:51yeah so ultimately we're staking like the way that these these things go is that everything's going to trend toward a better user experience so what's better for the end user what's better for the end consumer or the staker right so liquid staking makes it very easy to use kind of validated basis is what it does it's like a one-click experience more or

16:12less where you authorize the metamask you lock it you pay a gas fee and then you're staking and so liquid staking improves that with you know the ability to exit your position what we've seen actually is a lot of interest and i think some of the wallet providers on liquid staking and the ability to kind of integrate directly to our smart contract and so i

16:33think what's going to happen is the user experience is going to trend towards the wallet providers and then they're going to facilitate it but use our infrastructure on the back end you know to stake to those validators so they don't have to run all those validators and build all the dev apps and all the you know technical know-how to do all the server-side stuff so that's how i

16:51see this going and i think from that perspective russian is kind of like in web three and most bullish kind of on we'll say like a three main i guess three main verticals you have your centralized exchanges which facilitate the on-ramp and off-ramp and crypto changing fiat and your regular currency into virtualized assets right then you have the infrastructure

17:17providers like anchor who are doing more and more in the space and then you have like these decentralized wallet providers like metamask tally wallet clover wallet clv you know there's many others and so on there's fanta the wallets are going to increasingly do more they're going to integrate more and just like kind of like what apple did with the iphone the

17:38wallets are going to kind of vertically integrate more and more other stuff so i think the centralized exchanges the industrial infrastructure companies and the wallet providers are really going to do like the line share the innovation in this space awesome thank you so much josh for all of the information i'm really looking forward to seeing how d5 continues to

17:57grow and how anker will be a part of it and for the people that want to learn more about liquid staking and anchor and everything that you're working on with infrastructure what is the best way for them to learn more and to get involved yeah so i think i found this on twitter were very very active on your twitter with like 160 000 followers on there

18:17just at amkr that's probably the best way to start from there you can find links to our discord our reddit community we're also very active awesome i will leave those links both in the description box below thank you so much josh for coming on to talk about anchor appreciate it all the best with everything moving forward and let's follow up in the near future

18:39sounds good thanks ashley