Abstract
The discussion focuses on the challenges and opportunities within the Real-World Assets (RWA) space in decentralized finance (DeFi). Key participants from Polytrade, OpenEden, and Aurus discuss the importance of standardization, cross-chain interoperability, and liquidity aggregation as crucial elements for scaling RWAs. They emphasize the need for a customer-focused approach, the complexities of multi-chain deployment, and the importance of collaborative efforts within the industry to solve these issues.
Highlights
- Regulatory and Interoperability Challenges: These are seen as the primary barriers to scaling the RWA sector. The lack of standardized processes and cross-chain solutions makes it difficult to create a unified market.
- Importance of Standardization: The conversation stressed the need for standardized tokenization practices across different asset classes to facilitate broader adoption and interoperability.
- Liquidity Aggregation: Addressing fragmented liquidity across chains was identified as a critical issue, with various solutions proposed, including automated systems and potential alliances among RWA-focused projects.
- Customer-Centric Focus: Ivan highlighted the necessity of returning to fundamental business practices, focusing on customer needs, and ensuring that the technology serves to solve real-world problems rather than just being a technical showcase.
- Multi-Chain Deployment: Both OpenEden and Aurus shared their experiences deploying across multiple chains, with Polytrade discussing their approach to automating these processes to increase efficiency.
Recap
JohnnyDefi: 01:47 – 01:49 Testing. Hi, can everyone hear me?
Milind: 01:51 – 01:53 Hey, Johnny, we can.
JohnnyDefi: 01:53 – 01:55 Have you. Yeah, funny. New mainland.
Milind: 01:57 – 01:58 APG or beyond. Good.
Piyush: 01:59 – 02:02 Hey, hey. All good. Thank you. How are you?
JohnnyDefi: 02:02 – 02:05 Yeah, always good. Guys. Kill.
Piyush: 02:07 – 02:11 Did wait for more people to join. Resume in two minutes.
Ashish: 02:14 – 02:16 Hey, Johnny, are you?
JohnnyDefi: 02:20 – 02:20 Yeah, very well.
Ashish: 02:22 – 02:33 Good. Thank God for gold yesterday. What had happened when, hey, yesterday, what had happened with all the markets everywhere going anywhere they wanted.
JohnnyDefi: 02:34 – 02:39 A man except for gold. I mean, it’s sold off. It’s still sold off there, right?
Ashish: 02:42 – 02:42 Just.
JohnnyDefi: 02:42 – 02:43 Obviously less drastically.
Ashish: 02:45 – 02:48 That’s the reason you need gold in your portfolio.
Ivan: 02:48 – 02:50 Risk management.
JohnnyDefi: 02:50 – 02:54 This is it. We’ll talk about. This is it. I’m sure we’ll talk about it today, right?
Ivan: 02:56 – 03:00 Absolutely. I have one solid reason why I want more gold in my.
Ashish: 03:00 – 03:10 Portfolio. Yeah, yeah, because yesterday I was figuring out what is the one way ticket back home and how much will that cost me? Do I have money to go back.
Ivan: 03:10 – 03:10 Home?
JohnnyDefi: 03:14 – 03:47 Yeah, man. I mean, listen, I, it was interesting. I mean, I was glued to the, I don’t have been glued to Twitter was the best thing for my nerves yesterday. But nonetheless, right. And just kind of socials and certain people you follow, looking at what was going out and playing out in the markets. I mean, people, someone made a very good point. You know, everything sells off, right, in a crash like that, you know, gold, bonds, everything. Right. It’s just how much of it.
Ashish: 03:50 – 04:05 You know? Absolutely. I think there were like multiple factors, I think, but it’s good. We’re recovering. I think it’s all good. Hopefully, everything will be back to normal. You laughing about it? You have to be.
Piyush: 04:05 – 04:06 Optimistic, bro.
Ivan: 04:06 – 04:11 Look where we are. We have to be optimistic. No.
JohnnyDefi: 04:11 – 04:12 We do. I mean.
Milind: 04:15 – 04:17 Up only now. Up.
Ivan: 04:17 – 04:17 Only.
JohnnyDefi: 04:18 – 04:25 I think it’s a much bigger conversation, right? Everything back to normal is probably like one of those quotes you put in inverted brackets.
Ashish: 04:27 – 04:29 What is normal for web 3? What.
Ivan: 04:29 – 04:30 Is normal?
JohnnyDefi: 04:32 – 04:37 Is $40 trillion of debt normal? I.
Ashish: 04:37 – 04:42 Don’t know. Perfect. We can kick off. I think we have enough people, Milind and Piyush, do you guys wanna kick off?
Milind: 04:46 – 04:53 Yeah, yeah, yeah, let’s kick off. I think we have Jeremy as well from OpenEden. Jeremy, are you on?
Ivan: 04:56 – 05:01 Hey, hi guys. Not Jeremy here, but Ivan. Yes.
Milind: 05:02 – 05:59 Yeah, Ivan, nice to have you. And are we waiting for anyone else? Yeah, we good to go, but. Oh, sir. Okay. So thank you all for joining. This is going to be the first kickoff space for a series we’re doing called RWA IRL. We’re going to be doing these spaces with builders, investors, infra providers in the RWA space every Tuesday and Friday at 6 PM GST. And the real idea here is, you know, as Polytrade, we kind of work with a lot of people across the RWA industry and we want to really talk about specifics related to the challenges and why and how RWAs can really become the $16 trillion asset class that we think it should be. So I’m gonna just open this up for speakers to introduce themselves quickly get into the conversation. Let’s start with Ivan from OpenEden and then we can go to Johnny and defi.
Ivan: 06:00 – 06:33 Sure. Yeah, thanks so much for having us guys. Yeah, guys, my name is Ivan. I’m from OpenEden. OpenEden is the world’s first tokenized T-bill product to receive a rating from Moody’s. And we’ve also recently just become Asia’s largest issuer of tokenized T-bills. And I believe we’re there, I think 4th or 5th by TVL. We’re currently deployed on Ethereum, Arbitrum, and most recently XRPL. Yeah, happy to take any questions about what we do and how we’re different.
Milind: 06:42 – 06:42 Yeah, go ahead, Johnny.
JohnnyDefi: 06:43 – 07:33 Yeah, nice. No worries. I’ll just jump in there. So my name is Johnny. I come from Aurus. I’m the defi lead and, you know, kind of head up institutional markets there, which can range from many different things depending on the day. And on a day like yesterday, yeah, was the all hands on deck. But what we do at Aurus is in one sentence, I think, we bring trusted physical gold and physical silver of the highest quality on chain to be used across, you know, defi and other markets. So you know where that infrastructure provider that sits between the precious metals market. We have refinery partners, we have distribution partners, guys like Polytrade who are in the chats and we connect all the dots between these two industries.
Milind: 07:36 – 07:43 Johnny, one quick question. What’s going on with your profile picture? It seems really interesting. Could you give us a line about that? It’s a.
JohnnyDefi: 07:44 – 09:09 Good question, and I’m glad it’s come up eventually. I changed all my social kind of profiles to this. Sure. It says Gold Diggers. So I guess that is me, right? I’m always searching for liquidity like we all are always, you know, looking for new gold providers, gold supplies. Ultimately, I guess I am a bit of a gold digger. But really the background to it is we, you know, we we actually at Aurus we build some tech products as well, you know, which help kind of user onboarding, but also, you know, streamlining treasury management for businesses who want to use gold and silver and access to defi, etc. And one of those is a dashboard we’re going to launch. So you can actually create digital collectibles and back them with some, you know, with a $1 value or, you know, tokenized value of gold or silver. And this was one of the test NFTs or collectibles that we did in our first kind of, you know, you know, four NFTs we mentioned and backed it with 1 gram of gold. So you can actually go find it on OpenSea now. So that’s just a bit of the background behind it.
Milind: 09:11 – 09:46 Yeah, that’s super interesting. I didn’t know what would lead into a product plug, but there you go. So we have, I think, defi for Frax on from Ondo was also an investor. Are you able to speak maybe just request, you know, request for speaker again? And when you have you on board and have you reduction in the, as we go along, quickly, Piyush, would you want to talk about Polytrade real quick and the team here from Polytrade.
Piyush: 09:48 – 11:15 Yeah. So again, you know, thanks everyone for, you know, attending these spaces. It’s kind of a special journey we are starting together because as Milind mentioned, you know, we have a lot of pressing issues which we want to kind of bring to the light and probably a lot of pressing questions you would hear from him today, which could help us navigate in the
right direction. But just to, just a quick intro from our side, Polytrade, again, you know, we don’t need any introduction. We are in this space for three and a half years from single asset tokenization moved into an aggregated marketplace model working with 50+ partners today across 11 chains, constantly expanding into the ecosystem, hoping that soon, and soon, you know, most of the asset classes are readily available for users to buy, especially secondary trading options, working with couple of dApp providers who are ready to build lending protocols on top of us. So all in all, our RWA ecosystem is just coming together. In another 8 to 10 days, you will see another beautiful feature coming out that will help further strengthen the RWA ecosystem together. But myself, founder and CEO, Polytrade, I have Ashish here, who is the chief product officer, and of course, Milind or Mills, he is the chief strategy officer looking after partnerships and capital raise. So yeah, let’s dive in. Milind, super excited for this.
Milind: 11:17 – 12:08 Amazing. Thank you, Piyush. And just before we get started with questions, a quick reminder. Everyone here, please retweet, quote tweet, comment, put your questions in the comments. We’ll take them up at the end of the space and let’s dive right into it. So as Piyush said, you know, projections for RWAs are massive. I think BCG said we should be nearing $16 trillion in tokenized assets by 2030. That’s a long way off, right? And when we compare this to some kind of adoption that’s come in and crypto defi, even, you know, deep in and stuff like that, I think RWAs are still to really shine. So a really high level question here. What do we think are like the very high level challenges that you’re facing in RWAs these days? And how do we actually hit this $16 trillion number?
JohnnyDefi: 12:13 – 12:14 Who’s that question for?
Milind: 12:16 – 12:17 You can go ahead, Johnny.
JohnnyDefi: 12:18 – 13:53 Okay. I mean, just, I don’t know if you address someone, I’ll, yeah, I’ll put my hand up. I think immediately what springs to mind is regulations. The interconnection of that liquidity to create almost a homogeneous market because you can’t onboard $16 trillion, right? If you know there’s pockets of liquidity all over the place and you need to bridge from one place to another. And you know this one needs a certain wallet and that one needs a certain this and this kind of a contract. And you know, this real world asset, you know, is only regulated for these kinds of users in this country. And oh, it doesn’t work on that chain. Do you see what I mean? There’s quite a lot of, I think, separation currently. So I think, you know, once, once we can, once we can, you know, solve for those issues. And I mean, I don’t have the solution, but I think it will come in time. I think those are probably three of the kind of, you know, critical, you know, hurdles or challenges, right? So ahead of us to kind of onboard that, you know, that trillion dollar number that you mention.
Milind: 13:58 – 14:25 That’s really interesting. I think we kind of agree with your assessment there, Johnny. I’m just gonna double click on the interoperability that you mentioned, right? Why would you, I mean, what do you think is kind of a hurdle for us to really make this one homogeneous ecosystem, like you said, right? Is it just having like a standard, you know, having all of us talk in the same language?
JohnnyDefi: 14:27 – 16:09 I think so. I think it could be. I like where you went with, is it, is there a standard? So perhaps it needs to be like a, you know, a standard in terms of, yeah, there’s too many chains for me to be completely honest with you. I like this, this just, there’s just far too many. What are we gonna do with them all? We do, we need them. Firstly say, and I think most of you probably agree, there’s way too many. Secondly, yes, I think we can create a standard. I think if the industry can work together more then and almost create a council of sorts or a, I don’t know, you know, just a regular sounding board where, you know, industry leaders can discuss these things and say, well, what are all the hurdles we’re all facing? How do we unite all the liquidity we’re all trying to onboard? How do we kind of, you know, get that cross platform movement of our users, you know, using each other’s products easily? What is the secret formula here, right? Is it using three of the main chains, right, where most of the liquidity is now and actually just focus on those that work now. Let’s build those out. Let’s really just use those. And I just go chasing the next shiny thing. I think there’s chains that work well enough now already. And then, yes, a standard for, you know, probably gonna be around KYC for certain real world assets in that, but definitely perhaps an alliance of sorts, right, where people can, you know, come to the table and discuss these things. So yeah, I actually do agree with your point.
Milind: 16:12 – 16:29 Yeah, I can probably be an RWA standard alliance, Johnny, to give you another plug there. Yeah, I wanna bring in Ashish and Ivan. Guys, your thoughts on interoperability and the need of maybe a standard and the amount of chains that are out there right now.
Ivan: 16:32 – 18:37 Yeah, I think the lack of standards in terms of what, okay, I guess it is a little bit complicated as to what we mean by standards, right? Because it really depends on what you’re tokenizing and how you tokenize it. So even if the underlying asset is the same, which in many cases it’s not, how you tokenize an asset also matters just as much as what you tokenize. Yeah, so I think there needs to be some level of harmonization around how these things are tokenized. I think broadly speaking, there is more or less, we have good sort of equivalents in traditional finance, right? Whether it’s commodities or whether it’s your regular securities like equities or fixed income. So I, I don’t, I’m not sure we need, necessarily need to reinvent some of these standards. We just need to comply with them, which is a big part of the reason why we got the Moody’s rating in the first place. A lot of people were like, oh, well, you know, you’re a defi project, right? Like, why do you need to comply with TradFi standards? Well, because it’s a good practice and we don’t see the need to reinvent the wheel, right? Some of these things exist for a reason and the same logic just carries on in defi. And then the other thing, I guess, I would say that’s a little bit of a spicy take is that I don’t think we’re focused enough on the application layer. I don’t think we’re focused enough on actually the good old fundamentals of customer acquisition, like understanding what the use cases are, understanding what customer’s pain points are and then building solutions to that. I think it’s been too easy to get rich in crypto, get rich too quickly in crypto, selling hopes and dreams and particularly infra. But nobody’s actually really put in a lot of the effort to acquire customers, understand their needs in it for a particular use case for tokenized assets and then kind of really go after that pain point, right? Yeah, so I, maybe that’s a bit of my hot take, right? I think we just need to focus on fundamentals all over again.
Milind: 18:40 – 18:46 Yeah, I hear you on creating demand, and there may be challenges there as well. Ashish, wanna come in?
Ashish: 18:48 – 20:49 Yeah, sure. I think I have a more, I have a review from a little bit of the technical side, right? I think when we talk about standardization, I think taking a piece from Ivan, I don’t think there will be one standard for all. I don’t think we will be in that place because like he said perfectly, that every asset needs to be tokenized in their own way. But I do feel that we can come into a picture where a type of asset is standardized across the system, right? Let’s say, for example, how a t-bill is standardized versus how a house is standardized. What are the parameters around that story? And how do we put this data on chain? I think that’s a place where we will see a lot of folks coming together. So yeah, standardization is very important, but I feel it will be more categorically done than industry wise. And on the chain side, I think, I think we will have 100 more chains, right? And I will tell you where I come from because blockchain is basically a database, right? And over a period of time, I take this as an execution layer. And I believe that we will see a lot of app chains come into the picture. The problem statement here is that how do we create these app chains or these systems interoperable with each other? How do we bring in a more holistic view where liquidity from one chain or data from one chain can seamlessly interact with the other side of the world. I
think that’s a problem statement to solve. But in the future, I feel we have not even seen 30% of the chains out of there, right? I think we will see the number of L2s increase by 10x by this bull run and everybody will have their own execution reason. Obviously, we will see Ethereum, at least for EVMs, as the endpoint to be the settlement layer. But yeah, that’s my take on standards and how actions are gonna work.
Milind: 20:52 – 21:29 Yeah, yeah, that’s very interesting. And I think we’re seeing some of that play out. I wanna kind of double click on something that Ivan said earlier, which is about how they tokenize. And then he also mentioned the credit rating, right? And you know that we’ve done a brilliant job of that. And then Ashish, you mentioned data, right, and getting this data on chain inside NFT metadata. So Ivan, you know, if you could maybe dive deeper on what you meant when you said how the tokenization happens and then how do you think that should kind of be presented on chain? Is there.
Ivan: 21:30 – 25:06 Oh, I think we can do it. I don’t, yeah, I don’t know if it actually can be presented on chain. Like what Ashish said, like really makes sense. Like a lot of this, a lot of these standards are asset specific. So think of it like real estate. Think of it like commodities. And even within commodities, right, like their certain standards around gold, certain standards around silver. And if you wanna tokenize diamonds, for example, you’ve got like the GIA. So there are all these asset specific standards that already exist. I think there are ways to bring them on chain. For example, if you could imagine with, let’s say, precious stones, right, you could get a GIA certification and you could push that on chain. It’s possible. Now, what the use cases and like how you tie that to the real world asset, that’s a little bit more challenging. I guess in the case of, let’s say for us, right, we tokenize T-bills, right? So short dated US Treasury bills. And a lot of people also do the same thing. It’s the same underlying asset, right? We’re all buying short dated US Treasury bills. But the question is like how we move that asset off chain, on chain looks very different. So let me give you an example. So for one, it’s the legal structure of the product. The most common way to do it is that you have a fund or like a bond fund of all these like short dated US Treasury bills. And then you have that in a bankruptcy remote structure and then you tokenize the fund, right, so that the tokens represent units of that fund. So when somebody mints a T-bill token, let’s say, right, we’re actually going out and buying like the equivalent dollar value of a T-bill and adding it to that fund. I have seen products that are structured as loan agreements. So you give me your USDC, and I promise this represents a T-bill. As unsecure as that sounds, that does at one point, at least that did exist at one point by a very large issuer, which you shall not name, right? But if you look at the legal docs that they put out there, it’s structured as a loan agreement, a corporate loan, right? Which is bizarre to say the least. So that’s one example. And that doesn’t even begin to touch the on-chain stuff. Right? It’s the underlying legal structure of the product. And then there’s also how you move that token and how you, like, so for example, a lot of the tokenized T-bills, they’re wrappers on top of wrappers. So for example, like let’s say BlackRock has a fund and then let’s say Securities tokenizes that fund. And someone like Ondo kind of creates a wrapper around that BlackRock token like Dodo, right? So you have already three layers of fees. So if you look at the Dune dashboard by Stakedhouse Financial, you’ll see that T-bill by OpenEden has about 20 to 30 bps more net yield to holders over 180 day period, but the same thing. So how can we deliver higher yield despite tokenizing what is ostensibly the same underlying asset? Well, that’s because how we structure it has less fees. So it’s a bit complicated to push all of that on chain because a lot of the way that this tokenized asset is, for lack of a better word, cooked matters and a lot of it happens off chain. And I’m not sure you can necessarily represent that very well on chain.
Milind: 25:14 – 25:18 Yeah, that is, I think, an important take there. Johnny, sorry, go ahead.
JohnnyDefi: 25:19 – 25:28 I was just gonna say that sounds a lot like traditional finance to me. Fees upon fees, right?
Ivan: 25:29 – 26:56 Yeah, that’s right. And there are some products on in the space that are basically stacking layers of middlemen and then bringing that tokenized asset on chain. Now, okay, I mean, like to be fair, a lot of people will say, oh, what’s the difference of 20-30 bps, right? That’s 0.2, 0.3% doesn’t matter if it’s a retail facing product. But T-bills typically are not for retail investors. T-bills are usually bought at large quantities, like in the billions by hedge funds like Berkshire, by, yeah, like buy side firms and yeah, corporate treasuries that pension funds, right. And so the 20 to 30 bps on billions of dollars worth of cash starts to look like a lot of money because it is, right? So I think it’s kind of challenging to say like, should we have a universal standard for tokenizing some of these things? Because even in traditional finance, we do not, right? A lot of things are structured very differently even though it’s ostensibly the same underlying asset or the same asset class like fixed income, like equities, like government securities. But the net yield to token holders, for example, not all bond funds have the same fee structure, right? Not all ETFs are just infrastructure. Some are more expensive, some are cheaper, some are more efficient, some are less efficient. So I’m not sure we can resolve that in defi, but I think it can be more transparent on defi.
Milind: 27:03 – 28:07 Yeah, there are some tough talk on how we’re layering fees into this. Ivan, I just wanna, you know, push this question back to you because you did mention there’s a lot going under the surface off chain. And to Johnny’s earlier point about interoperability, right, unless we can get some of this on chain, how do we really create, for example, at Point Zero, we’re trying to create a collateralized lending market on top of RWAs, right? And for lenders or even for buyers, we’re purchasing and probably need to consider what they’re buying. Hearing that data and getting those USPs on chain is incredibly important, right? Because otherwise we’re gonna have so much supply, it’s gonna be very hard for people to wade through these critical points that they need to know, right? In terms of structure, is it, you know, is there a fund versus a corporate loan, what are the fees? So what can we do there to get this data on chain and truly make it interoperable where a lending partner or a buyer can really understand these nuances of RWAs?
Ivan: 28:09 – 28:41 Okay, you want to know my hot take is if everything at the corporate level is on chain. So that means if all the payments, all the payment flows, like all your accounts receivable, accounts payable, for example, is on chain, you could imagine a world where then if you, if that corporation that issues a debt security, for example, then the debt covenant itself is a smart contract, right? But that’s a long shot cuz everything about that company’s finances has to be on chain first.
Milind: 28:42 – 28:54 So you’re saying you need to go bottoms up. Actually, the payments infrastructure needs to be built first, then the accounting infrastructure, and then finally we can get into financing and that, right. Yeah, because that is a long way off.
Ivan: 28:54 – 28:56 It’s a long way off.
Milind: 29:02 – 29:33 I just stay with this point just a little longer. Maybe I’m just gonna bring in Piyush and Ashish, you know, Ivan mentioned so many points about, you know, the way they have structured Treasury bills and we as Polytrade have kind of a duty to make it easy for both these players, right, lenders as well as users to be able to see that clearly, how do we navigate this space, how do we get data from across chain that users can really use and make a considered decision.
Ashish: 29:36 – 32:35 I think this has been a very pivotal problem statement while we were building Polytrade, right? I think we all have had multiple discussions on this, right? Every protocol is trying to execute in their own way, which was like a very problematic manner for us. So at least at Polytrade, maybe more for the crowd, but what we’ve done here is that we are reading every metadata that’s, or every state change that an asset does on from a protocol, right? So that’s one part that we do. I think it also, one thing that
we’ve realized is that a lot of data is missing from these metadata, right? Everybody just puts in some data. And I think like Ivan said, there is not enough transparency in tokenization yet. So what that does in turn is that it doesn’t allow us to truly build a secondary, decentralized secondary market on it. So a lot of assets that, let’s say, a lot of lenders that we’re talking to, their biggest problem is that they do not have enough data to like just open a pool and let people take money out of it, right? By just putting in some RWAs as collateral. And I think that is where we want to be tomorrow. I think the intent to create ERC 6,9,6,0 was that how we could create one system for and the lender to read out of where he could take any RWA asset as a collateral and build a secondary market on it. Till the time we do not bring this permissionless decentralized RWA lending into the ecosystem. And I’m not sure what all parameters we truly need to be there, but there are a few. We will not see exponential growth. We will always see hindrance, right? An example is Teller. So tomorrow, if you want a loan at Teller, there are some pieces that you can get a loan instantly on versus if you wanted on Aave or something like that. They take their own sweet time to actually approve that loan, right? They’ll put it in open markets, the other guy will ask you some questions and eventually they will give you that loan. Till the time we don’t standardize the system or bring all data on chain, we will obviously see these problems. And I see like ZK proofs as a very good solution to bring web 2 data to web 3 for at least the secondary markets, right? I don’t need to know that. I don’t need to know the full details, but I do need to know what I need to know, right? Let’s say, for example, a very basic number is this guy above 18, right? And some basic thoughts which can be proved through ZK. So I truly feel and we’re working on it also. Yeah, here’s some alpha, but like we’re figuring out how we can use ZK to even get more data at least from other people, other identity partners. And it’s a very interesting world. I think people have done some great job here.
Milind: 32:39 – 33:25 Amazing. Thank you, Ashish. Just quickly want to let everyone know, please do retweet this, quote tweet and let everyone know listening. Please post your comments. We’re gonna take those questions very soon. Just want to kind of bring in the second point that we’ve been kind of alluding to all this while is liquidity and cross chain liquidity. Maybe I will start with Piyush this time. Piyush, we’ve now, I think, are working with 11 chains. We have lots of stuff done on Polygon, on Ethereum. Arbitrum is coming up next. Base, what has our experience been and what have we been seeing on behalf of the protocols, right, that we are onboarding on these many chains?
Piyush: 33:27 – 36:10 I’m very interested. I’m just enjoying the conversation which is going on. But this is interesting that when we look at these cross chain, you know, liquidity and we are looking at 11 chains and, you know, as Ashish said, there are really hundred more chains which will be coming. How do we move these assets across chain will be one question which still needs to be solved because currently no bridging platforms beat Layer 0, Wormhole or anybody else has made these standards, you know, kind of cross chain compatibility or something like that. Like that’s one thing which is largely missing. But when it comes to liquidity, I think that’s probably is gonna be an easier problem to solve. End of the day, either you move the asset to different chains or you bring liquidity at one common place, right? Both ways, we are trying to solve the same problem. So you have somebody sitting on Polygon chain and there’s a lender sitting on Base, right? How do you match them? There could be two ways of solving this, you know, where, where, if we can say that, you know, the asset which is on Polygon chain could be bridged to Base, then, you know, it could be people can borrow and lend against it or other way around. We can say that what if there is a common centerpiece where both these players can come in and interact with each other in a fashion that, you know, they are on the same layer that could probably solve this problem. So again, you know, look at Polygon, which is coming up with this AG layer, and you have Optimism with Super Chain. And I’m sure pretty much many more players would be building on this kind of solution. They’re not really, they’re kind of abstract. In the simplest way, it’s a chain abstraction, right? You’re actually making all these dApps working at one layer, one place, where liquidity can flow freely between the dApps. User doesn’t have to worry about bridging the asset or bridging the liquidity to kind of do transactions. So my take is that, you know, going forward in around probably six to eight months or maybe a year, we would see a lot of these solutions coming out in the market where liquidity aggregation would take place, which is not really pulling liquidity at one place, but making sure that the flow of transactions between chains happen seamlessly without getting into the nuances of bridging and, you know, paying insane amount of gas fees and waiting for hours for the money to, you know, move there. So I’m pretty excited about this particular development happening in the coming days.
Milind: 36:12 – 36:23 Yeah, I think you also mentioned a really good point about assets moving and the need for assets to move because of interoperability of different apps on different chains. Ashish, coming in?
Ashish: 36:25 – 38:38 I’m sorry, I actually have a simpler view on this one. Maybe I’m just further layman, I think this is one thing that we should take from web 2, right? Let’s say, for example, we need liquidity aggregation, something like what PayPal does for web 2. So imagine if all banks had their own chains and you had to like bridge every time you wanted to buy something from an e-commerce. That is the worst experience. But if you see what PayPal or any payment network at the back of any e-commerce does is that I can use any credit card to pay the bill, right? And that’s what the future of shared liquidity is going to be. It doesn’t matter in which credit card or which debit card or how do you have that money, we will have a seamless system to actually do the payment. It will not matter that is it an international card, is it a domestic card, what points I’m getting or why am I using this card? The intent here is that it will be a seamless transaction, and that’s where the world is moving. A very good example of shared liquidity is Cosmos, right? Cosmos has done it beautifully. And I think that’s where all the Aglar and superchains are getting that inspiration from. Everybody is trying to create a system where you can actually move liquidity from one wallet to the other by just sending your money. Eventually, you will still need to do that. You will still have that transaction period. But that 20 minute, 30 minute period that you have where your money is cut from your account before it’s deposited to the next side. That’s what the experience needs to be thrown out of the system. I’m trusting or like, this is one irritating part for everybody, right? I cannot wait 30 minutes to confirm that he was that transaction done on that second page, right? And what if there is a pending transaction which is supposed to be, which is supposed to happen after that, right? What if you’re doing three transactions, three bridges together, but imagine the time period that’s it’s going to take. So we will eventually have shared liquidity. And this is how I feel some Aglar and people like that are going to be the PayPals of the future, hopefully.
JohnnyDefi: 38:41 – 39:29 Yeah, almost like a post settlement of the trades, right? You just got a front end where the trades happen, right? They’re matched, they go on chain. But then actual the settlement of the assets, whether it’s, you know, from Polygon to Base or whatever happens after the fact. But the experience is, you know, quite nice and streamlined and, you know, just, yeah, a pleasant experience for the user, right? Not having to worry about clicking the buttons to do the bridging and am I clicking the right buttons? Do you know what I mean? That actual dApp or platform providing that service could be the super app that everyone talks about, right? That actually does that aggregation regardless of what chain they’re, you know, aggregating to.
Ivan: 39:31 – 40:20 I find it funny that we’re reinventing a very old concept in traditional finance called the Clearing House. Is this like, I mean, like that’s literally how the first cross border payments happened in the days of like ships sailing from one continent to another to do spices trades, right? You had a clearing house, right? You had netting and clearing off ledger so that you didn’t actually have to physically move the gold and silver. And I think we’re rediscovering that across chains right now. We have, we need to have some sort of a cross chain clearing house, either that’s on a chain that natively supports that, like Osmosis, or you have to have some sort of a cross chain clearing house solutions that on top of whatever
Ethereum is trying to do.
Ashish: 40:22 – 40:32 I think we’re calling it sharing house. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think we’re calling it the optimistic rollup. Yeah, we’re just for, we’re optimistic that.
Ivan: 40:32 – 40:41 The other guy has it. It is netting and clearing. It’s just the same concept that we’re rediscovering 100 years later.
JohnnyDefi: 40:43 – 41:28 Certainly, right, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. I mean, so traditional finance is not like the big bad kind of can be seen as a big bad wolf. But, you know, there’s a lot of things that work there. I mean, if you look at what the Mastercard payment network and Visa and Swift and all of that, right? It’s the same concept, right? It’s cross border movement of money that, you know, is settling at a later moment in time. You know, but you get your nice login notification and, you know, clever little bells ringing on your phone saying, well, then you’ve paid John or you’ve paid Ashish or Piyush, right? Yet that only ever settles, right? You know, on the real network, maybe even at the end of the month, you know, it could be that much like a T plus 30.
Milind: 41:34 – 42:19 Yeah, I mean, it’s funny you mentioned Clearing House. I think internally we were talking about this and that name, you know, that connotation popped up quite a lot. So you’re absolutely bang on. We feel the same way here at Polytrade, but that’ll be a really beautiful future when all of this is abstracted away and we can just deal with RWAs directly and forget about, you know, what blockchain under it. Just to move on to kind of before we move on to actually the next segment, you know, both OpenEden and Aurus, I think you guys have deployed on more than one chain, if I’m not wrong. And I just wanna dive a little bit deeper into what that experience has been. What are the challenges on the builder side while you guys go multi chain and similarly for Polytrade as well.
Ivan: 42:24 – 43:20 So we’ve deployed across three chains, I guess, between Ethereum and Arbitrum, it’s quite trivial. Like there’s, I mean, all EVM compatible, I suppose, like ecosystems are quite easy to build on. The only, I guess, slightly more challenging one was the latest one that we recently announced, which is XRP Ledger. So that was involved a lot of work with the Ripple team because the XRP Ledger is not a smart contract based system. So instead of smart contracts, you have, I guess you can kind of think of it like accounts or wallets that have the ability to issue tokens, but it’s just a matter of working through the new development kit or whatever that language happens to be. Yeah, I guess it’s all about, is there an incentive for us to support a particular chain? And if there is, then we’ll put in the time and resources to do so.
JohnnyDefi: 43:23 – 46:09 Yeah, that makes sense. I think, you know, crypto communities are great and we love them and we’re every, we’re nothing without them, right? But that’s like, why did you launch on this chain? Why don’t you go to that chain? And it’s, you know, our kind of rule now is it’s demand based, right? Is there an opportunity there to grow? Is there demand coming from that side you can speak to many different dApps. You can speak to many different potential partners who are like, yeah, we’d love to work with your product, right? We’d love, you know, tokenized gold. We’d love T-Gold, you know, to create a lending product on our dApp, you know, we’re on Arbitrum. And you gotta look and say, okay, cool, you know, how many more of the potential dApps are there, right? Could we maybe get to the foundation level and, you know, get that kind of almost distributed trust from the foundation level for all other dApps, you know, to then start working with your products. I think demand would lead, you know, chain selection, but then also, I guess, depending on the amount of resources needed and time and does it make sense for your expansion strategy? I mean, we started off on Ethereum. We then went to Polygon, you know, a few years ago when it literally was one of the only, probably call it a side chain back then, right? L2s have now become kind of the catch phrase. But, and we would look at, you know, I think staying in the EVM kind of space, you know, we would look at Base, Arbitrum, definitely. So, you know, Polytrade and Aurus are thinking very much down the similar lines. I think the process is, yeah, you know, as OpenEden said, yeah, yeah, you know, what is the technical implementations on your smart contracts? Are they upgradable? How easy is it to do if you’re gonna work with an old kind of bridge system where you’ve got an escrow and mint structure. Do you wanna do that now or do you integrate something like, yeah, exactly. The interoperability solutions that are available. We like LayerZero or Wormhole, etc. Sure. Where you can actually do a burn and mint, which, you know, reduces the risk of having assets stuck in, you know, a single kind of contract which can be exploited. So yeah, I think it’s all of those. And then, you know, also getting your contracts audited again, just to make sure everything is in place and it’s double checked and triple checked and you don’t have any of those kind of schoolboy errors, as I call them, you know, that can crop up because you know, that can be a business killer. So yeah, that’s kind of the process we would take when looking, you know, at cross chain implementation.
Ashish: 46:15 – 47:44 Yeah, I think at Polytrade, these two people that are just on this space, that’s Piyush and Milind are sitting peacefully, but they had given us nightmares about these chains, right? And I think for Polytrade, it’s very different, right? I think we’re not looking for liquidity, but we are looking for protocols that are deploying on other chains so that we can aggregate them beautifully, right? I think if you guys take a decision where you want to be on a chain, it’s our responsibility to get users to you guys in the best way possible. So we at Polytrade took a little bit of a different approach, right? Tomorrow, today, instead of deploying and going on each chain, spending like 10 days, we created an automated system here. And I think this is something which is very crucial to us today. If you wanna go on an EVM, it will take us like 48 hours to be there. If you want to onboard a protocol from any chain on any EVM on Polytrade, it’s gonna take us 5 minutes to onboard the protocol now. So our goal here was not to just deploy or just onboard, it was to create a system which automates and onboards and deploys as fast as possible. So tomorrow there is a new EVM with 50 protocols is gonna take us maximum of 24 hours to get that chain and all those protocols on Polytrade. So that’s where we are and that’s what our take towards multi chain and onboarding for all these verticals across networks was.
JohnnyDefi: 47:45 – 48:05 That’s amazing. That’s really amazing. I mean, what is the, is it kind of, I guess, having the wallet connectivity? You know, what are the kind of small details there that you you’ve automated that you know you would have been going through manually in the past?
Ashish: 48:08 – 49:53 Yeah, so I think it starts from at least from like when you say wallets, we’re not cross chain, we’re multi chain yet. So that’s the difference. So hence we need to deploy. So if you are on Polygon, you will still need to connect your Polygon wallet to interact with that ecosystem. Because again, we’re talking about multi chain, not cross chain. But what we automated here was that, so let’s say a deployment of all contracts to a particular chain, integration of our ecosystems, reading the blocks and that data of any asset that has been deployed. So when we onboard a protocol, we need to set up a job to read any activity that protocol or that asset does anywhere across that chain so that when we replicate and show that data on our system, it’s up to date, right? So let’s say, for example, if you have an asset which is on Polygon, it is listed on, let’s say, OpenSea and somebody buys it on OpenSea. Our systems set up jobs instantly, like I said, in five minutes to build it in such a way that if an asset is sold or if an asset is, let’s say, replicated or let’s say if there is a default on that asset, we will instantly know in our system and the system will behave accordingly of what it’s supposed to. So if there is a sale on OpenSea, you will see it directly reflect on Polytrade and everything around that story, right? So something like what OpenSea did way back, but they did it. They’ve just stopped, unfortunately, they’ve stopped innovating. But we deep dived into the space and our main goal was here to get the speed in, to get the transparency and make it very seamless
for our business and marketing team to just go blazing out and get everybody in together.
JohnnyDefi: 49:55 – 50:00 I can see why you had to automate it with all the moving parts, right? So yeah, good job, guys.
Milind: 50:02 – 50:06 Yeah, I think Piyush and I deserve all the credit for giving the nightmares. So.
Ashish: 50:10 – 50:18 Yeah, I would truly give them the credit. I would like the nightmare that I’ve had is the only reason we have made a super optimized.
Piyush: 50:20 – 51:30 For the benefit of future. We’ll keep our comments private. All right. But this is this really interesting conversation. I just love the energy in these spaces. And this is, I think, you know, Milind, the kind of questions you have prepared are also prepping us for the future. We actually all together, you know, we can see and we can probably dream about it and envision about it. I think this is a very good direction. And I hope that these spaces are not just for entertainment purposes. I mean, we all come out with solutions for the problems which we all are facing and why we are stuck at this small RWA adoption yet while so much is happening and so much chatter, and it just makes total sense that RWAs are to be tokenized and to be brought on chain. We, that’s inevitable. So that one problem statement, why nobody is coming or why institutions are still shying away, I think it’s our cumulative responsibility to solve it. But this is really good. I really like these spaces.
Milind: 51:32 – 51:39 And that’s why we’re gonna keep doing more of them twice a week. And hopefully we’ll keep up this quality. Johnny, sorry, you coming in with something.
JohnnyDefi: 51:40 – 52:15 No, just agreeing with Piyush. I think, you know, yeah, we’re in the space, right? So it is our responsibility to kind of work together to create solutions that makes it easier to onboard, whether it’s retail, you know, businesses or institutions. Cuz ultimately that’s where the, you know, $12 trillion sets $30 trillion, depending on what asset class you’re looking at. And I do love these spaces and it is a great energy in this one. And you know, yeah, really well prepared. I like the questions. Obviously, you’ve got the smartest guy in the room asking the questions today.
Milind: 52:18 – 52:51 Okay. My PFP is blushing for me. Thank you, Johnny, for that. I think, yeah, we’re close to the end of time here. So I won’t dive into anything else. I’ll just wanna give all speakers a chance to maybe give us their final thoughts on maybe RWA challenges, maybe what’s top of mind for them, and then how can the audience find them? How can they interact with their protocols? And just, you know, we will end there. Piyush, wanna go first?
Piyush: 52:53 – 52:55 Sorry, Milind, can you repeat again? I kind.
Milind: 52:55 – 53:07 Of missed it. Just final thoughts on the RWA landscape. What are top of mind challenges for you? And then how can people interact with Polytrade? Maybe the code giveaway that we have in store.
Piyush: 53:10 – 56:06 So I think one thing which we have all nicely covered is the broader problem statements. I love your, Ivan said in the beginning that, you know, distribution will also play a pivotal role because if somebody and you know, we have seen this again and again, web 2 smart chaps come to web 3 believing that there is this huge amount of liquidity sitting here and they could just come and, you know, find a new source of liquidity for or new source of users for their product. And they come and they get severely disappointed because there is no distribution channels here. So that is one thing which I believe somebody should come down and create an amazing distribution channel across web 3 and not only web 3. Why only restrict to web 3, right? We should start talking about onboarding web 2 users as well, because in tokenized form itself gives a lot of advantage, right? So we don’t need to just restrict it to web 3 users. We need to actually go out to web 2 users and tell them the benefit of buying a tokenized asset is just that their user journey should be simplified, maybe through fair checkouts, maybe through credit card payments, maybe go back to the roots of the way businesses are done, right? Why are we shying away from that? So that’s one thing which I think will bring a major change. Second is, I think the fragmented data part, which we have discussed that, you know, we need to bring homogeneity to the assets, to the various tokenization standards. Ashish mentioned it very nicely that each vertical within RWA is a mammoth, right? So there could be standardizations across verticals at least that will make sure that if there are five protocols or 50 protocols doing T-bills, all of them should be kind of, you know, on the same standard. They should all follow the same rules. They should all, you know, and again, Ivan has mentioned it beautifully, the structures. People were borrowing money in their SPVs with the guarantee that I will be using your money to buy T-bills. That’s not what we signed up for. We actually wanted you to buy T-bills for us. And my money should be used to mint a T-bill. And my money should be used to burn that T-bill. Why are you acting as a corporate in between? So these are some very basic key issues which should, would fix. It’s unfortunately still not been taken care of. So that’s my view. Polytrade will continue to evolve in this space. We have aggregated ourselves as a beautiful marketplace. I think it’s time where, you know, these problems to be discussed with our ecosystem players and cumulative solutions to be built on top. But interesting times and really excited about what’s coming next.
JohnnyDefi: 56:11 – 59:02 I’ll have a go. Thanks, everyone, for this space. It’s been great to be speaking here with all of you. And one point I think I’ll leave with is on liquidity, and it’s one that’s very close to my heart, you know, working very closely in defi and with partners like Polytrade, you know, with guys like Ondo who are not here at the moment. I love what OpenEden’s doing, you know, very familiar with their products. They’re doing it well. They’re doing it right. But you know, exactly that the fragmented liquidity, and that’s not necessarily only across chains, but also something where I believe if we all have more closer contact, we’re all businesses that are either raising funds, have raised funds, have a balance sheet of assets and we all want to use those assets to grow our businesses, right? And ultimately, a lot of those assets will go back into our own core products, right? So our own kind of native products to drive that liquidity too. But we also need to look after the diversification in the health of our own balance sheets. And I think ultimately, if we do that, and yes, I’m gonna just throw in the alliance that I’ve, I mentioned there earlier, Milind, which the Real World Asset Alliance is something which we came up with at Aurus because I think everyone can benefit from it. Everyone in this conversation or businesses in this real world asset space can actually manage their balance sheets and their treasuries well by holding things like T-bills, right from, if you needed, by holding things like T-Gold from Aurus, right, by holding a host of other real world assets they could get from Polytrade’s platform, right? And I’m pretty sure I could come up with some ideas with Piyush and, you know, Milind and Ashish over how we can, you know, acquire and aggregate these assets for all of these projects ourselves, right, in order for OpenEden and Polytrade to hold on our balance sheets. And ultimately, we would then facilitate deeper liquidity in all these assets as a result too, but also grow a more diversified and stable treasury for our own businesses as a result as well. So I feel there’s like, there’s a trick in there. It’s something we’re doing now. Come follow us, AurusOfficial. You can see our Twitter. We’re in there. Come to the Telegram group. But I think it’s something that, you know, I would love to have that conversation with every single real world asset founder out there. You know, I’m speaking to many at the moment, and it’s something that’s really close to my heart and I think can really solve, you know, one of these key issues around liquidity for all projects like ourselves in this space. Thanks, everyone.
Ivan: 59:05 – 01:00:44 Yeah, thank you so much for having us, guys. Like we really appreciate the conversations, the platform that you guys have provided for us. And thanks, everybody, for showing up and listening to us talk. I think the only thought that we wanna leave with people is go back to fundamentals, talk to customers, sell benefits, not features. Because at the end of the day, like how many of us can actually explain how TCP/IP works or how your smartphone works, right? Most people actually don’t care and we use these things every day
. They’re the things that power our email. They’re the things that power our smartphones, but all we care is that they deliver some sort of benefit to our lives, and that’s what the end users care about. And I think as a space, we need to collectively kind of, it’s easy to get lost in a lot of these discussions about, yes, okay, infrastructure is important, cross-chain liquidity is important, standards are important. But at the end of the day, we have to kind of refocus on what, who our customers are and like how we wanna solve problems for them because that’s how it all starts and that’s how it all will end. It starts with the customer need and it will end with us meeting that customer need. So I would like everybody to focus again, who are our users, what are their pain points, and how does tokenizing some of these assets solve their pain points? Yeah, thank you so much for being a part of this journey together with us. I look forward to doing more of these spaces with you and having these honest conversations about the space and what kind of challenges that need to be overcome. But I’m confident we’ll get there together.
Milind: 01:00:47 – 01:00:59 Absolutely. And we will do a focus space on that as well. I mean, I think it’s very pertinent to have that user-first kind of approach. And just quickly, how can the audience find you? What can they do? How can they engage?
Ivan: 01:01:01 – 01:01:24 Follow us on Twitter. And of course, if you’re a corporate treasury, our T-bills are only for accredited or institutional investors. So if you’re a corporate treasury or you know, a DAO Treasury or you’re a business that wants to basically hold T-bills for your cash management purposes, you can always check out our website or follow us on Twitter. That’s where we update most of our stuff.
Piyush: 01:01:28 – 01:01:42 Sorry, I forgot to add the code for these spaces, IRL. That’s the code for these spaces for people to go to Polytrade portal and, you know, claim some XP. If you’re listening to spaces. Thank you.
Milind: 01:01:45 – 01:02:16 Absolutely. You can head on over to portal.polytrade.app and put in IRL and you will get that XP. Ashish, sorry, you wanna say something? No? Okay. Okay. Yeah, so that’s gonna be a wrap. Thank you to our guests. Thanks, Ivan, Johnny, thank you, Piyush, Ashish, thank you, Milind, for putting this together. And thank you to the audience for being here. We will be back on Friday at 6 PM GST with the next episode of RWA IRL. And see you guys then.
Ivan: 01:02:18 – 01:02:22 See you. Thank you all. Thanks, everyone. See you.