JB Carthy: 0:01

Welcome to Helios Horizons, E episode 9. Today we're talking to Cooper Emmons, B business Development at Injective, and Helix about the evolution of DeFi. How are you today, C ooper? Great to have you here. Maybe a little introduction about yourself, if it's in order.

Cooper Emmons: 0:19

Yeah, totally. Really appreciate you guys having me on on the Helios side of things as well as JB. You've been awesome setting the tempo across the board. No puns or jokes intended there. But yeah I'm Cooper. I've been working in the business side of the Web3 and DeFi world now for about four to five years. I oversee a lot of the different business development and partnerships at Injective Labs and that spans a lot of different verticals as we are a layer one blockchain built for finance, but we also build proof of product in that of both Helix and Mido and wearing hats in both of those projects as well. So you know super excited to get into kind of how you know finance has evolved over. You know the past probably four years since I've been involved, but you know, more generally, just super excited to discuss a lot of the big things that are coming and we're working on on the Injective side of things and why we think that you know finance can come. You know on chain and tokenized.

JB Carthy: 1:27

You know a DeFi world moving forward no, man, I can't wait to hear about all these things, all the things you guys have going on. I think you guys have built a reputation as relentless shippers and just relentlessly executing, shipping new products and shipping upgrades. But maybe before we get into that, man, I was having a little browse through, maybe, your LinkedIn and was checking out from Miami or went to the University of Miami and maybe giving us a little bit of background about your journey, about how you even got to this point

Cooper Emmons: 1:58

Yeah, that's funny stuff.

Cooper Emmons: 1:59

No, totally. So that's played a big role. So I initially was a college athlete. It didn't end up being for me. I wanted to go to a business school. I studied corporate finance for a summer and a half-ish at London School of Economics and realized that I wanted to definitely do something business school related, but needed to be in the States just due to family and those types of things. And, with that being the case, I ended up at the University of Miami studying economics and finance. And while doing that, I'd always been crypto curious. I'd always owned Bitcoin since very, very young stages of my life.

Cooper Emmons: 2:40

And, all that being the case, I kind of was living in Miami during the time of the FTX and Solana, you know, initial bull run, which happened really in kind of 2020. And while being there, I was able to, you know, head down, you know just a couple minutes and see kind of some of the bigger you know biggest kind of team shipping and biggest movers and shakers across the industry, and that led to some awesome opportunities which led to me kind of joining and contributing to projects across the salon ecosystem, namely one which was a collateralized deposition. But, moreover, why I was so interested and kind of more towards the theme of the evolution of DeFi. In that vein, in that topic, the biggest thing that excited me was I'd worked at the largest Forex brokerage in, I guess, the world but in New York City, and at that time there, essentially, is a broker and the broker has a phone or a computer or essentially kind of an electric, you know essentially a trading system. It's all automated. But at the end of the day there's five banks on one side of the phone it's either buying or selling an instrument and there's five you know buyers or sellers on the other side and these are incredibly large banks, Right, and the guy in the middle is making the price. And I'd really understood how an order book worked, right, and that's how the New York Stock Exchange works, it's how Binance works, etc.

Cooper Emmons: 4:10

But when I had seen kind of this meme coin phenomenon take over and take part, I was very interested by the fact that these tokens that were worth hundreds of millions of dollars in FDV or in market cap were at that point not listed on Coinbase, which was what I was familiar with. They're not listed on any of the exchanges. And I took a look into it and I found out that there's this thing called Uniswap and there's an automated market maker and it utilizes an X times Y equals K curve and I found that incredibly fascinating. And I still think to this day, the concept of an AMM for very long tail assets, for very exotic types of assets and for being able to price those things and put a price on those things is very underutilized in the real world. So I guess that strikes up.

Cooper Emmons: 4:59

The theme that I'm most excited and you know come to be working on the Injective Lab side of things is that we're really working to build as many products that essentially are powered by different forms of blockchain technology and new digital finance in different ways and shapes and forms, but we want to really impact the actual retail user or everyday user and bring a quality and decentralization to those types of those products moving forward, because we got an interesting finance world ahead. But anyway, that's a quick introduction

JB Carthy: 5:36

No man, thank you. I remember actually, I think, what you're touching on there in terms of like D eFi, encountering DeFi blowing your mind. I definitely remember, maybe, or the pain of trying to send money internationally, like, let's say, even like 10 years ago and before revolution or before some of these maybe, and money apps that make it a bit easier now to transfer money internationally, and western union fees, bank fees, rates, and I think the concept of DeFi, the concept of like permissionless and low cost transfer of money on a global scale, is just it's mind blowing where it's going from. And then, like I think we take it for granted to maybe permissionlessly access markets and users, to very easily get access to opportunities that previously weren't as available to them. Like you know, it wasn't very easy to trade Forex, to trade commodities, to trade stocks, to trade tokens. 10 years ago there were a lot more barriers to entry. So I think, like you were saying, it's a very exciting DeFi r evolution ahead of us. I was actually chatting to someone today and when you were saying you've been into bitcoin really early since really early, and you were talking about you have a little bit of background in economics and finance from your college and you'll probably be interested in this or have an opinion on it. But she is a statistician and her husband does charity work in Africa. And immediately I was like, are you a doctor, or is he a doctor going over to Africa doing some charity work? And she said no, he's an economist. And I was like, okay, what does an economist do in terms of charity work in Africa? And she was talking about, like how the economist talks to farmers in Kenya about trying to create their own barter, their own money systems in their communities, as they have no access to money systems. Like they don't have, like, passports, they can't get bank accounts, there's no money infrastructure in their community. And I actually was just like, does he ever think about trying to educate them with Bitcoin?

JB Carthy: 7:40

I was like thinking, ok, statistician, economist, economist, surely like they have some idea about, maybe, the value it could bring?

JB Carthy: 7:46

And she was just like god, no, it's a scam, it's not like the dollar, it's worth nothing.

JB Carthy: 7:52

Um, and then I was just like in my own mind like the dollar is being debased, like money supply up like 30 or 40 percent since 2020, um, and you're telling me that like permissionless, verifiably scarce global reserve currency that like holds governments accountable because they can no longer trap people in their native currencies that are debasing and trap them in the national banking systems, can't let them out, make sure they're like in there and pumping that value back into their own economy without being able to transfer it in a global scale.

JB Carthy: 8:23

And then, until now, this is like a fantastic opportunity and they're just saying it's a scam. And then I was like, okay, we'll come back to this discussion like 10 years. And then she started trying to show me like cbdc's and like how they're going to change things and I was like, right, we'll definitely come back to this in 10 years, and but I think we're still so early about like the, the idea of where people or the power of bitcoin, the power of decentralized, decentralized finance and the power of like permissionless ability to store and transfer value globally and yeah, I thought it'd be an interesting story to share with you, but like messages were still early, you know no, totally, I couldn't agree with you anymore.

Cooper Emmons: 9:04

I mean, I remember one of the biggest things I'd studied that definitely left an impact on me was surrounding, kind of the concept of a lot of the you know farmers in India. And essentially right, I believe, and I know nothing about India, but I believe there's some form of monsoon season there and essentially the farmers are heavily reliant on that monsoon season to grow crops and in the case that there is a drought they're kind of screwed right. And there's these things that exist in finance called forwards and futures right and essentially right, y ou can sell y You know future or previous, you know harvests of your product and essentially lock in rates to ensure you know if there's a drought. Right, or some form of insurance to hedge against the fact that if there's a drought you won't have enough crops to sell. So, with that being the case, I couldn't agree more right. Those are the types of products, um, and those are the types of things that aren't available, um, in those types of emerging markets that that I'm super excited that this type, these types of of of products and you know solutions can, can take care

JB Carthy: 10:19

Um, if there was someone hedging hedging against the drought in D ubai they would have made a lot of money when we were over there a few weeks ago.

Cooper Emmons: 10:26

Isn't that the case? Wow, yep exactly.

JB Carthy: 10:30

How did you guys get on over there? Did you just get to your events that you were trying to get to and get to maybe spread the word and meet and network people and get around o kay in the end.

Cooper Emmons: 10:40

Yeah, so it was actually only me from our team there. We travel very light on our end, um, but the first 48 hours were hellish. I ended up with, the founder of, two founders I'd never met in my life, the founder of H ive M mapper and the founder of S pindle, and somebody from the F ranklin T empleton vc team and the four of us who had barely known the guy in franklin templeton. The four of us ended spending like eight hours together finding our way to to the M arina area. So it was quite a story that I'll never forget. But then the rest of the week was was very good. Honestly, I was very happy and surprised by, you know, the amount of of talent that was there and kind of, you know, very bull market vibes, but it was a good one.

JB Carthy: 11:29

I was actually meant to fly back on the W wednesday and I ended up just having to stay to the S saturday because, l ike, the flights were just so chaotic. But no, it was. It was a great experience, definitely one that I'll say I'll never, ever forget, and I can say I was there during one of the most unique weather events ever, like in D ubai, and definitely, without a doubt maybe like chatting a little bit more about I injective and moving on to maybe how the evolution of DeFi has brought us to this point. A and I was just thinking, or maybe doing a little bit of thinking, before this space today, and I was thinking about the evolution of DeFi, if we want to call it like 1.0, where there were a lot of working products and built on ethereum, but maybe things like speed, things like cost and things like the user experience for limit we're big limiters and to maybe and the advancement of it, and then we talk maybe the next phase being like 2.0, where maybe interoperability, costs, speeds are getting much, much better and have been getting much, much better over the last few years and, thanks to the advancements, like we were talking about, in layer one technology, like you guys are bringing forward an injective on other blockchains, learning from maybe things that happen in the space, like early on, things like hacks, things like smart contract exploits and the space becoming a lot more robust, reliable, and I think now, arguably, we're getting to like what you might call like 3.0 and as the space starts to mature and we start to see institutional adoption and enter the space in the form of BTC and ETH ETFs coming, digital asset funds and even talk of a lot of these kind of institutions getting on-chain in the form of either setting up their own infrastructure or really heavily maybe using some of the infrastructure that is already brought on-chain.

JB Carthy: 13:16

How do you see this landscape at the moment and where does Injective fit in it?

Cooper Emmons: 13:22

Yeah, great question, I will say that. And this can lead into I injective side of things like the biggest unlock that I've seen over the past four years has been like I just remember just even two years ago, like less, it was impossible to move assets across chains and now it's seemingly right. You have worm Wormhole, you have Layer Zero, you have Axelar, you have Hyperlane, the list goes on IBC you have all these different types of interoperability protocols that make quote-unquote DeFi significantly more seamless than it once was, and the velocity of change and innovation is incredible. And that's really what excites me to see kind of you know what could come next relative to that. So we've seen, for instance, right, a lot of listings of like solana based meme coins on injective. And you know the initial point and the only the initial reason that the founders of injective built the, the initial project now we're talking five, six years ago, way, way, way, way before me was essentially ERC-20 assets on Injective. You pay a ton of gas fees, you have to pay im permanent loss and take on slippage and all these things that are not so optimal, all these things that are not so optimal, and they essentially created Injective to be this fully decentralized exchange similar to a Binance, but fully trustless, fully on-chain and utilizing something called frequent batch auctions, which allows for you to even match all on-chain. So you're not matching in the cloud, something like Google Cloud or something other, with a centralized kind of server. So, with all that being the case, I think that this is kind of coming to fruition of what Injective was initially built for. Now it's really this layer, one platform that can power all different types of finance-based applications and beyond We've seen all different types of applications really flourish. But, chatting more specifically into that and back to the initial point of wormhole-based assets really driving a lot of traction on Injective, we're seeing assets from all different types of chains come over and be utilized as, like you know, the primary finance hub for trading, for lending, for borrowing, for you know binary options, for options, you know actual options, european options, american options we're seeing come out and several other use cases. So you know Now to answer the follow-on question, which is, you know, where do we see kind of real institutional interest coming on board? And that's kind of in this real world asset space. And the real world asset space is a term that's super overplayed. I'm not a huge fan of it, but I'm a huge fan of what it's trying to accomplish. Right, trying to accomplish is essentially bringing real financial products and then utilizing the real composability of what blockchains can deliver, and combining those two things. And we're working on some very exciting developments across the board with some of the top issuers, some of the top teams that are thinking about these problems and working on these problems, and we have some exciting announcements coming soon in terms of partnerships and teams that'll be deploying and all those, all that sort of thing. Um, but you know, I think that the biggest kind of what what's holding people back the most currently is still a lot of the ux and and a lot of those things. Um, you know that that that don't make the product experience incredibly seamless and retail being able to onboard very seamlessly. So those are things like abstraction, the generalized abstraction of different parts of crypto wallets and making that so much more seamless. We were also working on that in various ways. And the last thing I'll say on the RWA side of things is we were the first team that I'm aware of that just in January, launched something called the Permission Module, which allows assets to be fully permissioned. So all these types of financial institutions. They want to utilize this technology. However, there's no world in which you can really be fully decentralized and fully y ou know I can send my token to anywhere with no permission, so we're very excited to have a permission module that allows for developers to take, you know, some great standards out of the box and enable their tokens in a permission manner, namely both assets and markets. So you know you can permission who you send to and as well as permission who can trade within a certain market, and I think that's pretty exciting from our end as well I think there are like almost too many points to dive into there.

JB Carthy: 18:15

It's just like incredible levels of development and advancement and from injective in terms of like what they're bringing forward, to the DeFi space, and I think exactly what you touched on a couple of the key challenges, I injective are addressing them with a lot of conviction, with a lot of quality, providing really robust solutions in terms of, first of all, the user experience. If we look at like, let's say, things like the Ionic Bridge, making it easier than ever to bridge, to bridge assets, cross-chain and huge advancements. I remember, like whatever three, four years ago, when I was just getting started, like you were talking about, bridging was an arduous process, very, very difficult to figure out how to bridge. But, like you were saying, all the great solutions, Axelar, W ormhole, En tangle, all these, all these interoperability bridging solutions are coming forward. They're making the flow of liquidity and the unification of liquidity a lot easier than ever before and I think, touching on from the user experience, they're almost intertwined. But the unification of liquidity and allowing it to transfer easier cross-chain across the space, allowing products to seek out users and find that liquidity that they need for innovative DeFi protocols to function, is also a big advancement and a thing that's going to drive DeFi forward and drive maybe the volumes, the activity of DeFi on magnitudes of or bring forward a lot more activity, trading activity, volume on chain, all these sorts of things. But I think if we're talking about user experience, it's a nice little segway into recently I injective or H helix and or both launched H helix 2.0 some massive advancements there I've been, I was playing around with it, made a video there on twitter and last week about it like was just so impressed and if you want to touch on a few of those things and just um how you guys are improving the, are optimizing the trading experience even more.

Cooper Emmons: 20:18

100%. So the biggest piece there was, you know, as noted, right UX is the biggest aspect and you know I thought, and many of our other team members have thought, that we could do a whole lot better surrounding you know, essentially the experience of utilizing a decentralized exchange and you know how, when you click things, things feel and how they're so much more simple. So we spent two or three months really working on a full new redesign and integrating all the different features from you know, allowing you to easily, you know, utilize, leverage and place trades and cancel orders and add and remove margin and place, you know, take profit, stop loss. All those different types of things are huge advancements. And then with that, we launched the first ever real world asset per markets. So what are those? Those are currently the pound, the GBP, the British pound and USDT per market, as well as the Euro USDT per market, and we're utilizing Pyth price feeds there to essentially allow for users to trade Forex within a perp for the first time, fully on chain, with some really strong liquidity actually, and we've seen some great volumes over the past couple of months and like a couple of days rather. And why is that so exciting? It's so exciting because there's over I think you know, like, close to you know several billion dollars worth of volume on a daily basis in pound to usdt and euro to usdt swap volume. I don't know that, I don't have the numbers in front of me, are off the top of my head, but, like, the volume is incredible and there's significant FX risk there, right? So with that FX risk, you know, if you don't, you don't want to hold the pound or hold the euro for whatever reason, or you want to hold it as opposed to holding the dollar, you can hedge out your exposure with a perp, and we've seen a lot of institutional interest around that. I'm in work setting to really do a campaign to support those types of things in the coming weeks. So that's thing one. And then thing two is right, like Forex is, by volume, the largest, the most traded asset on the face of the planet, and allowing users, for the first time, to do it in a fully decentralized way, fully on chain with usdt, we think is is a really big online for H helix as as a platform

JB Carthy: 22:56

And you guys also had, am I right, the J japanese Y yen and one of the first place you could trade the J japanese yen, introduced a few months ago. So I think that V volan upgrade and those integrations with the real world assets, is really starting to come to fruition now, really starting to see the fruits of it. With these markets that you're introducing? I t's probably too early to tell in some instances, like you know, the euro only introduced a few days . Um B, but with the introduction of J the japanese yen, and was there any noticeable, maybe geographical, interest from that area and in the blockchain itself, or did it have any impact?

Cooper Emmons: 23:43

Yeah, on a high level it's a great question like like how did the blockchain play into adding B those kind ut per markets? Is that the question?

JB Carthy: 23:54

So when you added maybe the J japanese yen market, did you notice um any sort of like increase in popularity in A asia for I injective?

Cooper Emmons: 24:06

Yeah, great question. So so I'm still working very closely with with the stablecoin standard team, who is the issuer of that um, and you know, essentially you need native issuance to provide great UX and the the kind of that was a ER erC20 wrapped asset and I think we could provide a much better experience on that UX side of things, on the tech side of things moving forward. So that's where that thing currently stands and we did see quite a bit of growth in demand and volume there, with somewhat liquidity, but that was a spot asset. We're super excited about these new pound and euro perps and we're excited about them because they give the full experience end to end of kind of a native derivative, fully on chain right, so you can trade options or you can do all different crazy things with FX. But a crypto perp is a product that people understand and now you're using a product that people understand and putting it onto a TradFi product that people also understand. Is the pound going to deviate? Is it going to go up in value, down in value relative to the dollar? Now you can trade that within the derivative that people understand, which is a perpetual contract that never expires.

Cooper Emmons: 25:19

I'm personally a believer and I think a lot of people are believers that I work with that. You know traditional finance, which pushes trillions upon trillions of dollars right a day, a week, a year, et cetera, across all these different instruments. They do not have perpetual futures that do not expire. Don't get me wrong. The biggest product that's traded across all of TradFi are perpetuals, right, but those perpetuals are all dated. So crypto is quite unique in this product that it has and the concept that everyone's familiar with it and everyone knows how to utilize it, and I think that the UX of it is significantly better.

Cooper Emmons: 25:57

So bundling in a lot of these different TradFi type of instruments is very interesting for us and we think we could find some success with it.

JB Carthy: 26:06

I think, like you were touching on there, like having assets that people are familiar with on chain, that is going to make it a lot easier for people to have a reason to get on chain. They, like everyone, like you were saying understands the pound, understands the euro, understands their native currencies. And interacting with the markets, with Forex, like you were saying, being one of the most popular markets to trade or asset types in the world to trade can only have a positive impact. How much of an impact do you think the real world asset narrative is going to have in, maybe driving usage and adoption of the space? Do you think, like it really is, going to bring forward new ways of adoption, usage and users on chain?

Cooper Emmons: 26:51

Yeah, I mean we, we do. We do think it is right because, you know, I think a lot of these exchanges that people are using right are, are never going to move away from the you know, it's not to call out anything, any aspects of them but the USDCs and USDTs the world, when a lot of these real world assets that are giving you T-bill yield or even, you know, more bespoke and exotic yield and exotic products fully on chain, are much more interesting, right? So you know, that's why I'm super excited about, you know, margining perpetuals with different types of real-world assets that are yield-bearing and creating more exotic financial primitives with this composable DeFi environment at a high level. So I'm excited to see a tokenized fund where you can trade a Bitcoin perp and earn 5% to pay back some of that funding. That's an exciting product that might take people off of centralized exchanges.

JB Carthy: 27:49

No, I appreciate that insight. Another thing that I was just looking through some of the things you guys had accomplished so much stuff over the last month or two. Another thing that caught my eye was obviously the Arbitrum in EVM and Injective very have a very versatile VM environment, obviously have the inEVM. They have the Solana VM, compatible with cosmos as well. B ut obviously, maybe how is this multi-vm environment, h How important is this for the growth of I injective and maybe the wider cosmos space as a whole?

Cooper Emmons: 28:22

Yeah, it's been super huge for us and it's been really, really big for us, and the reason is is because 99% of the developer mindshare is outside of a Cosmos base and the Cosmos base but they're on EVM-based chains Ethereum, P polygon, A avalanche the list goes on, as well as on Solana right, and those developers now, for the first time, can join and utilize our ecosystem and our interoperability and we're super excited about where that's going and all the new developer mindshare they can attract and really bring in under the hood, into our environment to deploy their applications. So I think it's really just the start there.

JB Carthy: 29:02

No, and I think think if we were, from what we were touching on earlier, maybe talking about like the evolution of DeFi from maybe the first 1.0 working product speed, cost, experience not so good 2.0, interoperability, cost, speeds a lot better and then 3.0, like we were just talking about and then if we talk about maybe this multi-vm environment and that I injective is building, and then if we link that back to being able to be more compatible with E thereum, and obviously E ethereum wasn't built necessarily with scalability in mind. It was built with like proof of concept. No one knew really or could predict how big it was going to become and but it was forced to scale with growth and obviously the method they've chosen for scaling is l2 and l2 development and other chains have built with the problems that had scaling in mind and they've already fixed for them and such as yourselves, and but they've struggled, not you guys, but to capture the volumes of liquidity. But do you see, like the tides, like E ethereum I was looking on DeFi Llama today. I think it's something like 107 billion of TVL on DeFi it's either 137 or 107, c Can't remember exactly which, but Ethereum still has maybe, I think, 65 billion of TVL and do you think or see the tide shifting significantly at any moment to maybe more scalable layer ones, or do you still see like the L2 race continuing?

Cooper Emmons: 30:32

Yeah, it's a great question. I'm personally of the opinion that right now, we're at the stage where everybody's like, oh, let's tokenize these assets, and all these real world asset issuers are coming out. However, there's no point or value add of tokenizing an asset if there's no underlying use case of the tokenized asset, and that's the stage we're at right, none of these things are integrated anywhere. None of these things are really serving incredible use cases yet across the board. So why am I pumped? I'm specifically very pumped because Injective is the perfect place for being the WordPress for finance to plug all these different types of real world assets in, to give them utility, because that's the whole reason they were tokenized in the first place r ight. T To use them as a form of collateral to trade a perp, one. T to use them and plug them into a lending protocol, two. Right, like those are two very straightforward use cases. That really makes sense. That you know Injective and our entire ecosystem can enable.

JB Carthy: 31:36

No, definitely. So you maybe think that these multi-VM environments for Injective, like, being able to link in with the likes of Arbitrum and being able to link in with the likes of Solana and be able to integrate with the products and the applications built, is just going to have almost all roads lead to I injective effect. As, in like, it's going to be able to cater to obviously large numbers of users due to, like, the speed and the low gas cost fees and obviously the environment's going to mean that, like any product, most products, no matter where they're built, are going to be able to utilize the power of Injective.

Cooper Emmons: 32:12

Yeah, that is what I'd like to think. Yes, you hit the nail on the head. You could start doing it here.

JB Carthy: 32:18

A man can dream.

Cooper Emmons: 32:20

I know right, You're setting the tempo.

JB Carthy: 32:22

It's going to be beautiful. It's going to be beautiful, I think, actually, on what you were saying about, like the, the core reason of defy existing, as in like being able to provide peer-to-peer finance, or like being able to provide financial services peer-to-peer uh without necessarily value being heavily extracted and permissioned by intermediaries, like obviously the traditional financial system we know, like banks and banks are the main one and payment providers all these sorts of things. And I think one of the interesting things is how will the impact of, like we were touching on earlier, this path for institutions to enter the space, how will it impact, let's say, on-chain activity with things like lending protocols, borrowing protocols, in terms of will it open up new waves of liquidity? Do you think Will they get more involved, from simply just beyond trading assets to coming on-chain and getting involved in the provision of liquidity to some of these other derivatives as well, if that makes sense?

Cooper Emmons: 33:23

Totally so. The whole point right of DeFi this word that, I think, is a very poor brand, which is sad for for all of us, it's a little bit a lot of us do for a living, and work on for a living the whole point of it was to enable better, like to create a better financial system that works, and it, you know, is always very interesting to me that the only assets that are being used in these systems are digital assets, right, and like layer one, tokens, right. Like the point of these systems and the point of these protocols that are being built is to power real world use cases, and that would be, in some case, some form of tokenized real world asset, right? Maybe it's a house, maybe it's a car, maybe it's a you know, a T-bill product, whatever it is. So, to answer your question, I think where you really get the 100x moment is once people realize I didn't create this thing to slap in some digital asset that was probably worthless under the hood anyway. I created an actual protocol that could create a better solution than what exists externally.

Cooper Emmons: 34:37

What are some examples of this? You touched on it earlier before here on the call, and that's like stable coins. Stable coins have proved right. You go to a lot of these different places in Turkey and Dubai and a lot of different places across the world and they want to take stable coin for payment right, because it's a better solution to what exists today. And that is my opinion, is why all these things should be built at their core initially and where the 100X moment for all these systems will take place. So our approach is to really work as closely as we can with all of these issuers and have them really issue and deploy these different types of assets into our ecosystem such that we can power them with really fitting solutions.

JB Carthy: 35:27

I certainly think that will be the 100x moment, like when is going to be the intersection and between the digital and the physical? When will all the when will all this digital infrastructure that we're building really kind of transcend the digital space and start to have, like like your touch on there and like a really tangible impact in the real world? I can think of some other, some other examples as well, like, let's say, the housing market. Like when you're, when you're buying or selling a house, there's just so many intermediaries that need to be taken care of. You got the legal side, you got the real estate side, you've got, like other fees that need to be paid and to various people that and it's just the way it's done, because they control, like the path, the paths of value and transfer, and you can't legally engage in the in like buying a house, selling a house, unless you engage with all these intermediaries. What happens when smart contracts take the place of all the intermediaries? And when buying or selling a house, the value goes directly from buyer to seller. You can buy or sell. It's not only tokenization of real world assets, but it's tokenized like representation of ownership of real world assets on chain. And when will be the moment when own like the, the holding like an nft or holding like a digital asset represents real life ownership? I don't know the answer to it, but it's certainly like an interesting question to ponder and there's definitely lots of different conflicts of interest at play. You know there's l ots of different pieces trying to get their piece of the pie. Let's say, when I was chatting about the real estate agent, you've got the, the real estate agent, you've got the and fees you have to pay in terms of like, maybe taxes and things like that. There's lots of people trying to hang on to their piece, their intermediaries trying to hang on to their piece of the pie. What's the point when smart contracts will just be allowed to be introduced as a naturally more efficient way of allowing people to transfer value and transfer real world, actual ownership of real world assets on chain? I think that would be another like massive 100x moment, and I'm not sure when that will come because there's obviously a lot of hurdles in the way of that, but it's certainly like an interesting thing to think about.

Cooper Emmons: 37:47

Without a doubt, couldn't agree and I think that you know a lot of the primitives in tech that's being built can enable those things you know already, so really pumped for it.

JB Carthy: 37:54

I think earlier you were touching on Mito and Mito's super interesting to me. The concept of I'm a bit of a trader myself a bad one, but I still like to try. God loves a trier. But the concept of letting an automated trading vault earn yield for me and not lose my money certainly sounds far more appealing than losing my money myself. But Mito has been something that's been interesting to me and looking at the vault, talking about the automated trading, how they can earn users yield, how they leverage the liquidity of Helix to generate yield for users through trading activity on the back end. Could you touch a little bit more about M ito and what it is, the potential of it? Does that make sense?

Cooper Emmons: 38:43

Yeah, totally, totally so. Mito, the name comes interestingly from mitochondria and the concept is the powerhouse of the cell and essentially right, we have 15 plus institutional grade liquidity providers the biggest names you can think of in the trading space integrated and trading on Injective currently, and that's awesome. They can provide liquidity towards things like Bitcoin, ETH, spot, perp all these different large cap assets. However, if you want to come and launch your token, you're required to go get an institutional-grade liquidity provider to then begin providing liquidity for you, and there's a huge hurdle there in onboarding and the costs associated with it, et cetera. Of both worlds where Mito can essentially serve as this pool that can post orders on a central limit order book, provide liquidity to a prospective market and allow for people to utilize all the benefits of Helix, which are advanced order types, trading bots. The list goes on, and essentially you can think of Mito as a pool that provides liquidity towards that order book. So that's why we were super pumped about the launch of Mito, and we have several additional features that are within it. Right, we have the launchpad, which we've seen three successful launchpads already. We're excited for some upcoming in the future as well. That's one thing. The next is the concept of something that you guys have probably seen in the next two weeks Can't leave too much out is the concept of something that you guys will probably see in the next two weeks can't leave too much out, but the concept of anyone being able to come and really create their own vault so that should be super exciting. And then, lastly, really the point of it again is to power liquidity for assets that don't have that institutional liquidity backing you know great liquidity backing and really bring fully transparent um strategies and trading strategies on soon. So I think we have a lot of exciting updates coming to M mito in in the coming month and coming this week. S o just stay tuned to that twitter and and you know you guys will, you'll see very soon.

JB Carthy: 40:59

I'm I'm very interested to hear more about, like people being able to trade or people being willing to pump in is definitely like much needed and much needed and what will be a valuable um concept and will be hugely valuable to the growth and maybe the bootstrapping of different projects on injective and, let's say, with mito. If you could touch on maybe the constant product market maker strategy which is maybe the core strategy behind the vault, if you want to give a explain like on five, how would the, how do the vaults generate yield? If that makes sense.

Cooper Emmons: 41:48

Yeah, yeah, great question. So currently they're generating yield from essentially like vanilla market making, right, so they're placing orders. Let's say you know, the CPMM algorithm says that the price is $1, right, so they're placing orders. Let's say, the CPMM algorithm says that the price is $1. So they're placing a sell order at $1.01 and a buy order at $0.99, and they're making all of those essentially P&L for providing that market-making service and earning that spread across the board. So that's why we're so pumped about the yield generation aspect as well. But CPMM on a high level is very similar in some senses to an AMM and I think that we're super excited for what can come and what is to come on the side of things with M mita um. So there are a lot of other strategies in the works that that you know h Hopefully folks will see soon

JB Carthy: 42:54

no for sure, and thanks for explaining that. Um, I think we're coming towards the end of the space and we're going to have maybe one or two more questions a little bit of time, if any of the, if any of the audience here want to hop in, want to ask a few things concepts, when we talk about H helix and maybe. I was looking on twitter the other day and I saw I iggy A azalea's meme coin, $M OTHER listed up 500% in the last week and who needs B bitcoin. But what is your opinion maybe on meme coins in increasing, maybe, awareness and usage of blockchain? Do you see them as like a net positive or net negative for the space?

Cooper Emmons: 43:39

I can't say that I'm a domain expert on meme coins myself. However, I can say they're really changing the meta of this cycle, and what I mean by that is they're really people want to trade assets and they want to enjoy the excitement, and you know, a lot of the time, it's way easier to do that on a meme coin where you know the supply is all circulating, you know the liquidity is locked and you know that there's no, you know possibility for, you know founders or all different types of actors, vcs specifically VCs dumping on you at lower prices, and I think that that's why you know the pricing of meme coins provides such a better, straightforward use case for people. And then you have this whole community aspect as well that runs right side by side with it. So, with that being said, we've been doing some work behind the scenes. Expect to see a lot more of these types of listings on both Helix and Mito, and even potentially in the coming days. So take a look and follow the Helix app, twitter, and I think that, on a high level, we're seeing, in my opinion, a huge shift from my parents' generation where you were told to invest in only fundamentals, and now there's a huge aspect of also investing in some form of culture. Right, because if the cultural consensus says that there's a value surrounding something, there's a value surrounding something. Right, if you look at the, the prices of dogecoin, of shiba inu, you know, relative to these uh networks that have massive, massive, you know uses and use cases and revenue generation, you'll, you'll realize that, right, the social consensus at a high level, after all these years, is clearly valuable and I think that, at a high level, we're really changing to that mentality as humans and I think that's something that that's shifting on a daily basis that people should, you know, definitely stay aware of and do you think maybe that the meta, like we were talking about around meme coins and you're talking about like things like fully circulating supply, locked liquidity and obviously has a fully circulating supply and which is like great and it's a like very attractive to people looking to and purchase the token, then I suppose, like our whole the token as a store of value, in conjunction with the released Injective 3.0 tokenomics, makes it more deflationary than ever and more scarce than ever.

JB Carthy: 46:06

But do you think like this meta around the meme coins or more so, the things that make them attractive will force new projects to take a look at how they structure their tokenomics going forward and to have more of an emphasis on and not having huge, huge locked supplies if that makes sense.

Cooper Emmons: 46:27

I think people need to do the research. I think people need to look at, right, what's the circulation? You know, there's people don't understand the concept of a market cap versus an ftv and, like, people really need to do the research and understand those differences because they're immensely different, right? So so definitely do your own research and I definitely think that that meta is changing and really that that theme is changing as we move forward quite a bit.

JB Carthy: 46:52

And you know I was, I was speaking more. So do you think it will start to influence maybe when we talk about the more fundamental projects, and so layer ones that might launch in the future, may alter their, the way they approach their tokenomics because of this, if that makes sense?

Cooper Emmons: 47:10

Yeah, no, totally makes sense. I mean, I think I think for sure, right, I think that you have to bear witness, but I guess only time will tell, because you still see some of these low float high FTV tokens just continue to rip. So I think more people need to do the research, and if more people do the research, then I think that inevitably people will do these different types of things that we're noting and create, you know, create a much more safe consumer environment and user environment no, absolutely.

JB Carthy: 47:43

Um, I'm actually gonna ask anyone from the audience. If any of you guys want to request the mic, ask C cooper a question and ask me a question, and we're probably more likely to want to ask C cooper a question. And, yeah, feel free to request the mic. Pop up and look forward to hearing from you.

Cooper Emmons: 48:02

I disagree because JB is one of the best in the biz and probably one of the most knowledgeable, so he's the man on the other end of the line here.

JB Carthy: 48:11

I appreciate that man. I appreciate that it means a lot coming from you. I think, while we're waiting for someone maybe to come up, I see a couple of ninjas in the audience and I suppose community culture is strong on Injective. I see yourself repping the ninja. I see ODOT repping the ninja and I see Mirza. We had him on episode two of Helios Horizons. He was repping his ninja when he came on as well. And yeah, how important is, I saw you guys also maybe this week revamped the ninja ambassador program. How important is cultivating that really strong community atmosphere to you guys and how important has it been to the growth of I injective?

Cooper Emmons: 48:54

Without a doubt, great question. So, the ninja community is is super, super strong and the ambassador program is super strong, and definitely take a look at the revamp and a lot of the different bonuses that we're now giving users to really spread the word and go out there and grow the community. I think community first, always. I cannot emphasize enough how much community is important to us and everything we do at Injective and really building for the end user. So, again, our ambassador program is a big part of it. Go, take a look, you have the king that's leading it, Odot, here right now. He's the man and that's it from my end.

JB Carthy: 49:38

And do you think that maybe you guys having that willingness to maybe seemingly like take yourselves like slightly less seriously, rep your ninjas, has like endeared you as a community, made you more relatable and maybe has like helped establish an element of trust with the team, if that makes sense?

Cooper Emmons: 49:57

Yeah, I mean, I don't know to be totally honest with you, but potentially right, I mean a lot of our community members really enjoy the ninjas and a lot of the NFT communities. I mean I think we like to honor and be one for one. Right, there's no hierarchy. Everything's very flat leadership across our organization. We feel the same way across our entire ecosystem. Right, like every like you know, every, everybody can help, whether you're the smallest app or the largest app, we're here to help. So that's really what we take on is is the high level.

JB Carthy: 50:31

And at H helios here we actually have a um, another, another like I'd say, more builder-orientated community event. But Lukas is in the audience here and he's really heading it up. He's our strategic development guy here at Helios. But we have a collabathon coming in September hoping to see some Injective builders. At that. We're heading over to Spain for 10 days in September and heading to a villa near Barcelona and at the end of it we're hoping to have like a great product to deploy on Injective. So there's some alpha from me, there's some alpha from us. Keep some eyes out for that, you know, and hopefully maybe yourself, C cooper, you might be over there, or at least some builders from the Injective team or community, like you know.

Cooper Emmons: 51:15

Totally totally.

JB Carthy: 51:20

Yeah, some of the details very interesting. No, we're going to be releasing and more about it over the next um, over the coming weeks, and inviting applications and a little bit more about the agenda, what we're hoping to accomplish. A lot of these things and Luk lucas is actually requesting so he's going to maybe talk a little bit more about it. What's up, Luk as? Good to hear from you, my friend.

Lukas Seel: 51:40

Hey, what's up? I mean, since you mentioned it, I'll come up and ask a question about it. What's up, Cooper? Great to hear from Super curious about your thoughts on basically the wider ecosystem. Obviously, C cosmos is a big ecosystem like interconnected ecosystem is a big ecosystem like interconnected ecosystem. But if you think of the whole of Web3, you mentioned Wormhole earlier and how it's benefited Injective and the Cosmos chains but how do you see this sort of cross-chain, inter-chain collaboration and the future of it and how important do you think it is for the growth of the whole space?

Cooper Emmons: 52:19

Totally, totally so great question. I mean we personally, so I can't say everyone feels like this, it's just my personal take. I think our team's personal take right. We want to be the chain for finance-based applications, so we want to support everything, right. But at the end of the day, we want to be able to take assets from any of these chains and provide utility for them on our chain in a more bespoke and unique way that other people cannot. So we imagine a world in which Ethereum assets can thrive and live on I injective the way they are today at a large scale and you can optimize and take advantage of our chain right. And then maybe there's a chain that does socialfi, social media really really well and you can optimize and take advantage of our chain right and you can optimize and go over to the social media chain with your assets and plug them in there. So that's the way. I think that's kind of like the ethos of what a multi-chain future looks like and I think that's what we're super pumped for. Thank, you.

JB Carthy: 53:23

And I think that's what we're super eEthereum for. Thank you, um. I think that is everything from everyone in the audience. There's so much stuff that we maybe didn't get the chance to touch on today, like I'm actually just scrolling through the I injective twitter. Like we had the Injera synthetic dollar, we had the recent B binance pay integration and we have gamefi platforms, socialfi platforms, launching exotic markets, bringing options and different varieties of options to injective. But it's just clear there's so much going on in the ecosystem and we didn't even get the chance to speak about the M miami sporting scene. Man, um, like you said, you're a college athlete, athlete, football, baseball. What was it that you used to play?

Cooper Emmons: 54:03

Totally yeah, I actually used to play lacrosse back in the day, but not many people probably know it. I stopped playing it pretty early on.

JB Carthy: 54:11

We have we have hurling over here, man so hurling is also kind of played with sticks.

Lukas Seel: 54:16

They don't have nets but similar enough, like you know, if you think Web3 is fringe try lacrosse.

Cooper Emmons: 54:24

There's a reason I got out of there. There's a reason I left. Don't worry. Don't you worry, because I couldn't agree more. That's hilarious, that's awesome. Absolute pleasure chatting with you guys. JB, thank you for setting the tempo yet again. Lukas really appreciate you guys. JB, thank you for setting the tempo yet again. Lucas, really appreciate you guys across the board. I'm super bullish in taking a look at this Helios Collabathon that's going on. I would love to work and I'm sure we're already part of this in any way w We can be and support it in any w Way. And you know again, you know so many questions that I'd love to hop on one of these and ask you, JB, about. You know you're you know such a great contributor to this product, but also many others from before, and would love to get through that in the future as well, because you know really one of a kind on your end as well no happy to hear from you anytime, man.

JB Carthy: 55:16

I appreciate it and very grateful for you taking the time to hop on. Genuinely, we really appreciate it. I'm sure everyone here appreciates it, and appreciates all the good work you do regularly. And, man, look forward to linking in the future, look forward to keeping in touch and hopefully, if the rain doesn't stop us, next time we're in the same city we're going to to link up, have a few beers or something.

Cooper Emmons: 55:38

Without a doubt, really looking forward to it. Appreciate everybody and chat soon guys, you know, ninjas up. Cheers now.

JB Carthy: 55:45

Bye, take it easy, my friend. So today, helios Horizons, episode 9, we had Cooper Emmons on discussing the evolution of DeFi. Incredible discussion. We chatted about how DeFi went from the early stages on Ethereum to where we are now with this super high speed, super low cost DeFi environment. Talked about how Injective are like pioneering at the edge of interoperability, how they're bringing all the assets together into one ecosystem and, yeah, I'm just creating like an incredible space where DeFi can really thrive going forward into the future. Thanks everyone for listening and talk soon.