Orβ¦ view in a thread on π
We couldnβt attend Stable Summit 2024, but we watched every video that was posted online so you donβt have toβ¦ but you should anyway!
DeFi remains the killer use case for crypto, and stablecoins remain the cornerstone of DeFi. The amount of innovation in stablecoins is fascinating, as shown by the breadth of topics and the size of the conference.
Not every video appears to have made it online. Attendees of the conference suggest the debate between Marc Zeller and Paul Frambot was allegedly a highlight, but this video doesnβt appear to have [yet] been posted.
Therefore, we point you to the shoe-leather reporting of Leviathan News:
For homebody desk jockeys lacking a time machine, the best you can do is to browse their video library.
We watched through every video and picked out at least one nifty takeaway from each. In some cases it was the main thesis for the talk, in some cases it was a random aside that made us think. Hopefully they can serve as the gateway drug to get you hooked on the conference. Enjoy!
Cryptodollars and the Hierarchy of Money
SΓ©bastien Derivaux
The first speech of the day, which was heavily cited by others, had a lot of subsequent speeches quoting the concept of βHierarchy of Money" β essentially pointing out that in TradFi they donβt have to worry about, say, Euros having different prices depending on whether they are stored in a different bankβ¦ ie BNP-Euro versus ING-Euros.
In DeFi, we donβt have this βsingleness of moneyβ that allows things to move fungibly. This leads to observers confusing secondary and primary prices β when USDC depegged, the primary price remained $1 (the price it could be redeemed at directly), while the secondary price suffered.
Certainly a recommended talk. They provided one interesting health benchmark: stablecoins rarely see 20% net outflow over 30 day periods.
Yield Bearing Stablecoins And Their Implications On Market Structure
Martin Carrica
Discussing the efficient frontier of yield-bearing stablecoins, Carrica categorizes the three major use cases for stablecoins:
Speculation on crypto prices, by far the majority use cases
Escaping inflation in developing countries, a notable chunk of usage but not the primary use case
Superior money, true for anybody who has sent a wire transfer, but very small % of usage
His talk highlights a few possible use cases for onchain yield-bearing stablecoins, such as reinsurance and forex.
Navigating the Synthetic Dollar: USDe Risks, Design, and Opportunities
Guy Young
The origin story of Ethena is a good listen for anybody unfamiliar with the background. We were familiar with Ethenaβs overall design, but didnβt realize the pains they took in their architecture to hold the lionβs share of customer funds onchain, a consequence of FTX fallout.
Stablecoins: The Future of DeFi Lending and Borrowing
Panel
Walter Li (moderator, Gauntlet)
Michael Lewellen (OpenZeppelin)
Paul Frambot (Morpho)
Emilio Frangella (Avara)
Sam MacPherson (Phoenix Labs / Spark Protocol)
The first of several star-studded panels is good listen with far more takeaways than we can cover here. The panel covered that speculative leverage for trading crypto is the dominant use case, but speculation is approaching its limits of what it can do for adoption. Broad agreement on the panel that decentralized stablecoins have trouble scaling.
At a full hour, itβs a good listen, given most other talks were around 15 minutes.
Censorship Resistant Dollars: A New Frontier for Foreign Policy
Panel
Michael Svoboda (CEO, Liquity)
Niklas Kunkel (Co-Founder, Chronicle Labs)
Ermin Nurovic (dHedge)
Kirk Hutchison, (Founder, Ethereum Credit Guild)
Nate (Founder, Token Dynamics - moderator)
With so many other talks talking about the importance of bringing TradFi into DeFi, it was particularly nice to see a panel bringing this back to cryptoβs origins in decentralization and highlighting risks of overexposure to US policy.
One interesting shower thought from the end (38:07), where Michael points out that even if the market may not care about censorship resistance, but perhaps governments adopting overly onerous regulations will ultimately push protocols into finally caring about this concept, as the βgrey areaβ shrinks and innovation thrives?
Why Are User-Set Rates a Game Changer for Borrowing?
Michael Svoboda
A great talk from Michael Svoboda on Liquityβs upcoming BOLD stablecoin. He uses the speech to drop a consultant-friendly 2x2 matrix breaking down lending protocols in terms of rate flow and how rates are set, pictured above in meme form.
The Truth about Stablecoin Repegs and the Factors that Influence Them
Benjamin, QiDAO
Mining the arduous, drawn out efforts to repeg $MAI for a good conference talk, Ben dives into the causes of depegs and bad debt before discussing successful techniques of protocols that did repeg, such as:
QiDAO (quiet treasury burn to clear bad debt)
Angle (socialized debt via PSM)
Inverse (repegged $DOLA first to build confidence)
Applications for Restaking in Decentralised Stablecoins
Ethan Lippman
A good talk where the biggest takeaway from my sake was learning about the existence of Ebisu, and its $ebUSD CDP stablecoin powered by restaking. A good reminder for why speakers should always plug their product when given these opportunities.
Fireside Chat: Michael Egorov
Moderated by DeFi Dave
In his first public interview since the liquidation crisis, Curve founder Michael Egorov stuck to a variety of technical topics:
Points and their effect on directing liquidity (unexpected)
The disappearing importance of basepools amidst the factory (expected)
Rate discrepancies on Llama Lend (unexpected)
He mentions items on the Curve roadmap, in addition to more studies, is to automatically incentivize supply sinks to spur $crvUSD growth. Big picture, he sees DeFi reaching trillions in TVL. Heβs convinced that DeFi is technically capable of replacing the existing financial system, although the path to get there may be convoluted.
Oracles & Censorship Resistance in Stablecoin Protocols
Brenda Loya
In DeFi, if a protocol makes a mistake (or not) the regulators come knocking. If the government makes a mistake, they just shrug and ignore it. Ticking through a list of such mistakes, was interesting to learn that women could not legally receive a business loan without a male cosigner as recently as 1988.
LPDFi, A New Vertical that Can Empower CDPs
Mahomed Madieev
Discussing the concept of LPDFi, the sharp-dressed Madieev highlighted the growth of yield optimizers since FTX. In the discussion he dropped an interesting factoid: liquid staking/restaking protocols were the 3rd fastest growing sector in this time.
Redemption based vs Market based Oracle price feed for stablecoins
Matt Gurbiel
Tackling the tricky oracle problem in DeFi, Gurbiel presents the pros/cons of using pure market prices versus ratios derived from onchain contracts. His proposed approach, screenshotted above, uses a hybrid of the two. He suggests that TWAP may well become a standard in the future.
Incentivising On-Chain Liquidity for Stablecoins
Panel
Kirk Hutchison, (Founder, Ethereum Credit Guild - Moderator)
Alessandro Buser (CTO, Dialectic)
Figue (CEO, Paladin)
Cyrille Brière (Community Booster, f(x) Protocol)
Martin Krung, (BD/Partnerships, Curve)
Another great panel and recommended listen for fans of longform content. Thereβs a lot of great discussion, plenty of agreements and even some friendly disagreements.
Figue, a gigabrain we recently hosted on a Llama Party, had many sharp thoughts, but one weβll highlight is his thoughts on the best structure for onchain liquidity (19:30) a Curve pool for primary liquidity (most resilient in depegs,) paired with at least one other pool (ie concentrated liquidity) for redundancy.
Leveraging ZK Technology for On-Chain Orderbooks & Complex Margin Systems in the Options Market
DOPP
The use of onchain options was mostly underdiscussed at the conference, so the talk from DOPP on onchain options was interesting. In particular we want to highlight their discussion of how to bring a popular TradFi strategy can be relevant in DeFi: using a zero coupon bond to speculate while keeping initial capital safe.
Unlocking Regulated Use Cases for Privacy: Preserving Stablecoins
Ghazi Ben Amor
In a presentation detailing the many practical uses of privacy in stablecoins, one of the interesting takeaways we had is how many of these use cases are particular to large TradFi players. In the end, maybe privacy will win out simply because industry demands it, not retail?
Oracles, Raising the Standard
Niklas Kunkel
The second presentation on oracles had a good discussion of validator sets, and went into the details of how they are reducing gas costs by 80% using Schnorr signatures (shown above). The most interesting factoid to emerge⦠Maker spent $6.5MM on gas costs writing oracle data!
The Future of Real World Assets on Blockchain: Synthetic Solutions
Stephan Rust
Truflation a company that writes actual inflation data to the blockchain by tracking 20MM items with at least three sources, dropped plenty of interesting facts. For one, most of their clients are corporations β meaning blockchain has found real world adoption in a manner of speaking. Also notable is simply the numbers they came up with: inflation was actually 37.25% in the UK and 25.35% in the US.
Challenging the Status Quo: Diversifying the Stablecoin Ecosystem
Jasper Driessens
Lots of good data on how to break up the βduopolyβ of the stablecoin ecosystem. 49% of all DEX swaps included USDT or USDC, and combined USDC and Tether make up 96% of the ecosystem.
Banking 3.0: Powering Global Payments with Stablecoins
Deep Shah
Chatting about the features of new Gnosis Pay card shows off what a potentially killer service it can be. Realtime settlements using Visa, cashback/rewards programs⦠all going well beyond the sort of features for which stablecoin useres have been clamoring.
But the unfortunate takeawayβ¦ you wouldnβt be able to find it in the USA.
Expanding the Ecosystem for Non-USD Stablecoins
Panel
Santiago Rodriguez, (CEO, Minteo)
Julian Nesk (Treasury Manager, Karpatkey)
Markus Franke, (Co-Founder, Mento Labs)
Christian Duffus (CEO, FONBNK)
Discussing the laggard status of non-USD stablecoins, Rodriguez categorizes the main usage of stablecoins, which are:
Cross-border payments
Trading
Holding USD (inflation)
On- and Off-ramps
However, most of these involve USD-denominated stablecoins, hence the trouble in kickstarting non-USD stablecoin usage
Mobile Stack: "Onboarding the next billion Web3 users"
Silas Boyd-Wickizer
The rise in mobile usage globally, particularly the developing world, is an opportunity for web3. A factoid dropped in this presentation is that the percent of users trying to access web3 apps on mobile has increased to 50%, but only 8 of the top 100 apps actually have a native experience.
Creating a Unified Liquidity Layer Across Web3
Jonathan Lim
Armed with reams of data on the effects of CCTP on Circleβs USDC, it would be tough to pick just a single interesting factoid from a sea of data, but one interesting chart (that mirrors a chart in Ethenaβs talk) shows off how uptick is swifter as time passes, a sign of adoption and/or network effects.
Thatβs all thatβs been posted so far, but we reserve the right to edit and update this if more get posted! Disclaimers!