is defi dead that is a tricky question if you hold eat or BTC and you believe they will go up in a five 10 year time period it's better for you to borrow against your e or BTC instead of selling your eat and BTC and then buying the property with cash maybe people are a bit fed up with a meme coins maybe it's time for something better what would you say to people who are a little bit Jaded by the the crypto space right now um I've been working with the token.com team for almost a year now and I want to share their new product with you all if you've traded or owned any token.com token drop your wallet address in the comments for a chance to win up to $500 I'll pick five lucky winners join the token community on telegram follow them on Twitter Instagram and Tik Tok And subscribe on YouTube to join in more competitions to win and earn token awesome today we're here with altitude Finance uh we're super excited to talk uh about them and kind of the Resurgence of of real products and defi but I want to start off with a a bit of a tricky question um is defi dead why or why not that is a tricky question um yeah I mean I mean I I think kind of depends in which Echo Chambers you you are um I mean I tend to hang out in kind of the mo the the ethereum ecosystem um and uh there I think definitely the vibe is that eat is De uh so does that make defi on ethereum Deb um I don't know uh I I personally believe that kind of my my long longterm vision is that um uh that all assets all valuable Assets in the world will be tokenized um and so I think uh defi um defi plays a very important role in that right so defi allows you to tokenize allows you to borrow against it allows you to all kinds of great things so in that sense I don't think defi is that I think defi is just getting started yeah and really I was surprised I forget exactly what I I tweeted but I tweeted a couple days ago about something to do with pump fun and and meme coins and I was surprised to hear so many comments that were like so anti- meme anti- pump fun because obviously pump fun has been this massive narrative and I remember I actually tweeted in the spring against kind of meme coins and everyone like you know I got a lot of hate for that so to see that kind of flip of sentiment against pump uh pump fun and kind of like the meme coin game um I think is is an interesting turning point in the cycle and and it could be uh could be promising for for kind of like the Resurgence of the def defi ecosystems yeah maybe people are a bit fed up with the meme coins maybe it's time for something better uh let's let's hope so let's hope so uh cool um so you've got a really interesting product I think uh IT addresses a need that I actually personally have a unique kind of personal relationship too but I'll let you explain your product yourself uh what is Altitude what do you guys do um so we are a loan Optimizer um on the ethereum blockchain and so we optimize collateralized borrowing um and we do that in two ways we find the cheapest lending provider um and then we um we optimize the uh unused um credit line of the user so let's say you borrow 30% loan value then we borrow an additional 30% on your behalf we generate uh yield with that and then we use that to reduce your interest okay so I want to break this down to kind of the simplest level and I think maybe perhaps starting with like the way a conventional lending platform works is is the best way to do it and then we can kind of elaborate on the differences so that's basically like a a traditional lending Vault would be I deposit 100 usdc or 100 you know eth into a vault and then I can borrow up to a percentage of that and if the price of that asset Falls I'm liquidated and that position no longer exists otherwise I have the original position in the vault and then I have the the money that I can take and do other things with is that the case yeah yeah 100% so then what are the specific optimizations altitude makes yeah so the biggest optimization is that U let's say you've deposited $100 worth of eat and then you borrowed $20 worth of eat uh sorry you you borrow 20 20 uh $20 usdc um then um what what what happens is that $20 of usdc it just it keeps a curing interest so the $20 will become more overtime right as you'd expect um what altitude does is that it looks at that position and it borrows an additional $40 on your behalf um it dep deploys that into yield Farm at a much higher rate than what we're borrowing it at and it uses the interest it generates in those yield Farms to pay to reduce your original loan so then uh that that $20 will actually go down over time so it's kind of a in a way it's a self-re repaying loan yeah yeah exactly exactly yeah okay yeah so again I think the reason kind of conventional uh lending platforms work the way they do is because they're really trying to kind of eliminate risk from the ecosystem you guys are optimizing for another dimension which is the ability to be Capital efficient uh but this introduces a new component of risk and that's the the element of depositing into another protocol and uh earning yield on on those assets uh how do you mitigate this risk and um why is it an an optimization that you guys see as as kind of healthy For The Landing ecosystem yeah yeah gotcha yeah so I think what we're trying to solve is that um is kind of the balance between the risk of liquidation and the capital inefficiency so if you're if you want to kind of if you want to get the most out of your Capital you could uh dep deposit it into a lending platform and then you could borrow at a let's say quite aggressive loan to value like let's say 40 50% then it that's that you're relatively protected against liquidation because you can you can sustain like a 30% drop um and you have enough Capital to play with now um what we're doing is if you borrow with altitude and let's say you borrow instead of at 50 you borrow at 30% loan to value you've even you've even further reduced the risk of you getting liquidated yourself um but now it's less Capital efficient so you're kind of trading one for the other so you're you're adding on a little bit of risk I'm I'm not going to deny that um what we try and do to minimize that the risk the risk is that we only deploy in uh in protocols where we've done our due diligence um so we only deploy into into uh Blue Chip uh protocols that have been around for a long time so we've got integration with Pendle we've got an integration with curve and we've got an integration with the moro volts um so those are a few of the examples uh there's a whole another there's a whole other sector of the the industry which is kind of like under collateralized lending you guys obviously aren't quite at that point but you are less collateralized than uh Blue Chips to kind of M or you en enable uh yeah Superior Capital efficiency to kind of like more Blue Chip protocols um why did you guys not go to this you know if you're solving this problem around Capital efficiency why would you not move directly to the under collateralization route why do you prefer to optimize kind of the the traditional lending model yeah yeah yeah it's a great question so um I think they they are they're both kind of borrowing but they're they're fundamentally different types of borrowing so um uh over collateralized borrowing uh you don't need a trust relationship uh with the with the borrower um the borrower provides more Capital uh than he than he borrows so you know that your your loan is always saved there's always the at the point of liquidation um the the loan kind of is is is repaid um so you don't need to trust the the the borrower under collateralization um is uh you you need to trust the borrower uh and you can do a lot of research to verify this you can uh you can obviously look at income statements balance sheets um all those kind of things to to gain more trust that that borrower will pay his loan back um but ultimately there's a trust element um and so we decided to kind of focus on a pure kind of defi Innovation um so not not kind of not having to trust the borrower but optimize the current uh over collateralized Lending do you think under collateralized platforms have the potential to be successful or in a kind of like adversarial onchain environment is it is it kind of something that you don't see as as particularly viable long term um I think unrealized credit is a massive massive Market um and I think there's a lot of benefits of uh getting that on chain uh instead of uh just leaving it to trafi so I think it will it will be very I think it's a very big Market um so I think both types of of of borrowing cater to a different type of borrowing need and so I think I think both of them can be really powerful right um so I mentioned that I have kind of a a unique relationship to this product specifically and it's because I live uh or I spend most of my time in Mexico and I'm curious about purchasing real estate in Mexico at the same time I hold all these crypto assets right so I have long thought about the best way to uh earn yield and not sell my crypto that I imagine will appreciate immensely in coming years and be able to purchase uh real estate in my case in Mexican pesos so uh why should I as a as a borrower use a platform like yours yeah like it depends on what your alternative is right so what in this Cas like if like what would you what what would be your alternative to borrowing through altitud that's a great question well I have kind of a couple things that I face the first one is uh a loan there are loan providers that Target to foreigners who live in Mexico the problem with this is like interest rates are maybe 9 10 11 12 or 13% so very very high loans the other possibility I have is kind of like borrowing or buying something in cash which is something despite it not being very Capital efficient efficient I've still considered because it is it just simplifies the process I don't have to kind of manage all these things yeah yeah okay gotcha and in the first example are you are you taking is that a mortgage against kind of salary or is that also or is it also against assets I uh I mean I think there's they they vet you as a borrower but they also have uh you know a claim against the property itself yeah yeah okay gotcha gotcha yeah so I think I think um in the SEC in the second example that you gave just buying cash um it depends on your outlook on your assets right if you if you are if you own assets that you think will appreciate over time um then it would be financially beneficial to you to hold on to those assets um and and borrow against it um and so if you if you hold eat or a BTC and you believe they will go up in a five 10 year time period um then it's better for you to uh to borrow against your e or BTC um instead of selling your EB BTC and and and then buying the property with cash um so that's kind of that's the main benefit that you get if you use if if you borrow against your BTC or eat you don't have to sell it and you you you you get the appreciation now with eat you also get the staking rate so so it actually appreciates 3% per year or you get more eat around 3% per year um and then if you use specifically altitude if you can get to a loan to value where it's like so at the current market rates if you borrow at let's say 30% loan to value U then your your interest rate is zero um if you borrow at around 20% loan to value um your interest rate is minus 7% um so that means it will take like between nine and 10 years uh for that entire loan to be paid back so then after 10 years you have your house and you still have all your eat or b2c um that's obviously a much better scenario than if you just had your house um however it does it does uh require for Ean BTC to keep going up so that's the The View that you need to take personally do I think eat and or BTC or whatever collateral asset you want to use do I believe that assets going up in value if the answer is yes then financially it's more Savvy to borrow against it right if I you know were to pursue this route of borrowing on a on a def platform like altitude how would you recommend I think about loan to value uh and how how can I kind of like personally make this calculation around how much I should borrow relative to the assets I put in a specific protocol yeah yeah um so what you want is so so so there's two ways to think about it one one way is to think okay if e hits like this specific price level I'm very happy for my e to just be sold off and covered my loan and I'm done and I I walk away and that's fine um so that's one way of doing it saying like Okay I'm happy to lose my eat if it hits like a thousand for example um so then you calculate your loan to value based on that the other way is where you say Okay I I I want to withstand a 80% drop or a 90% drop um and you base your loan to value uh on on that um and when you when you when you when you when you look at like how the the the drop that you want to stain um you can also think about other assets that you have somewhere else um so you could take a loan and then maybe you've borrowed some maybe you have some you have some stock somewhere or you're yield farming with some stables and then you can basically make a quick calculation and say okay I'm borrowing this much this is how much liquid capital I have somewhere else I'm I'm therefore willing to take this loan this this kind of loan to value what we usually recommend people is to kind of go between like 20 30% loan to value um because that means you don't really have to care about the price of your collateral like you can sustain a big big drop um and uh and then you sleep out at night and that also gets you the maximum benefit of altitude because then we will bore more on your behalf and start to repay the loan so so how does that uh how does the yield generating component work so you mentioned you're borrowing on someone's behalf how much of the collateral are you utilizing and are you Levering up that collateral yeah so uh um so basically so we we borrow the remaining kind of borrow capacity so let's say you decide so one of our vaults is in is an eat for rep State e Vault rep State e usdc Vault that currently has a Target loan to value of 60% meaning that the vault as a whole will borrow at 60% so if you as a user come in and you borrow at 30% loow to Value then the Vault will borrow an additional 30% uh on your behalf um and at the current market rates uh that would you would pay pay that that kind of amount would acrew six 7% interest and we can deploy it at 12 13 14% interest um so the the the kind of the spread we make there uh that we we use that to reduce the interest on your loan when I think about kind of like the liquidation parameters there is it similar to like one of these typical lenders or um you know am I taking on the risk of of that additional borrow capacity yeah yeah so it's uh it's similar to the to to the to the other lending providers so we liquidate you we liquidate the user when they when the user hits 80% or we liquidate the wallet when the wallet hits 80% loan to value and there's a 5% liquidation uh fee um we are uh looking into that to see how we can make it how we can make more soft liquidations because liquidations is one of those things that like we don't really like obviously so the 30% that you borrow um you're responsible for that loan the the 30% we borrow on top we automatically rebalance as the price of e goes up or down so when the price of it goes down um we automatically pull the funds out of the yield form um and it's and it's used to pay back your loan so we always keep you at that 60% so obviously if the price of eat drops that 60% goes up a little bit because the because of the the balance and then we we instantly withdraw from the yield farm and pay it back um so and and then we basically do that until we are not borrowing anything on your behalf and from there on from there on it's your responsibility to look at look at the loan to value I think an important part um to to understand about this process is that like the loans are also Dynamic right so if I if eth were to drop 50% I can also you know provide additional Capital to make sure that my my starting Capital doesn't get liquidated so it's not like you know know it's not a static asset that I have to just kind of like observe I can I can manage my Capital effectively and and eliminate risk as as prices uh or or add risk as prices kind of increase or or decrease so that's important to know yeah that's a very good point we have we have depositors that basically deposit eat and and take a loan and then and then don't touch it for six months and we have other people that have literally interacted like 20 times with the Vault over over the space of three months just to kind of borrow a little bit extra repay a little bit borrow a little bit borrow more borrow more borrow more repay repay um that's interesting you're talking about the your we're starting to talk about users a little bit and this is a question I'm I'm very curious about who are you building for is it uh an institution is it a defin native or is it maybe someone who's more curious about the the consumer end of things yeah yeah yeah yeah um so um our kind of our first target market is Crypton natives um and that's because we're like the founding team are Crypton natives so we basically built this for ourselves um we started thinking about this idea about four years ago um during def the defi summer um and this is exactly what we were doing back then so we had eat deposited it and then borrowed Stables uh from a and compound and then uh we deploy them into curve for for the the juicy 200% apys at the time um so we built this basically for ourselves and that so that's our first target market um we are um uh we are we are focused on kind of the consumer consumer side of things I know there's a project called alchemix that is uh in a similar vein and in this idea of self repaying loans how are you guys similar and different to to this protocol so alchemix has a as a a cool solution where they use their own stable coin to uh to basically borrow against um and um so you deposit your your e you dep and then you uh borrow uh synthetic eat their synthetic eat and then if you want you can sell that for usdc or for for any any kind of stable um we are uh much more MIM like we're mimicking more the traditional kind of borrowing experience where you deposit each you borrow usdc and then uh and then you're off to the races um so and you and as we as we talked about earlier you can kind of deposit more and and and borrow uh borrow more repay your loan so it's it's more um yeah it's more mimicking that specific experience um and then in the uh in kind of how the protocols operate um I believe alchemix is um is is kind of purely onchain so it's all smart contracts uh we use a lot of offchain uh automation to kind of to keep rebalancing the loan so as the price of e drops um we can we repay the loan and as the price of eat appreciates we can borrow more so in a scenario where eat goes up 20 30 40% um without the user having to do anything um you're actually earning more um because we keep your your loan at at the optimal position so it's a bit of a more kind of a dynamic approach yeah and more of a kind of a set and forget approach I think um so where uh where the user can just kind of they they take the they they put they take their loan and then they can they don't have to think about anything else um so we're earning the yield on their behalf we're we're kind of farming air drops on their behalf um they don't they don't need to worry about any of these things this all happens in the background all they see is their interest rate kind of and and and their loan and there and then if they're borrow at a 20% loan to value they they just they'll just see their interest rate keep keeps going down so how active is the management of the capital you manage you mentioned airdrop farming right now obviously you guys integrate with all kinds of yield providers are you kind of like more of a hedge fund or are you just kind of depositing into a yield uh a yield farm and and kind of hands off yeah um I guess I guess it's a little bit in between so we do our we keep up to date with the rates uh we do our due diligence and then uh based on that uh there's an allocation strategy how we kind of allocate the funds to the different Farms um so it's uh it's it's not completely passive it's not like we're day trading um kind of it's somewhere in the middle okay when you deposit into farms and when you're trying to generate these these yield on different strategies how do you evaluate the risk of of the protocols and how do you make sure your users are protected and isolated from that yeah yeah um so first of all we we only deploy in in Blue Chip protocols um and uh we look at we we kind of do our due diligence on all the underlying risks so we look at the Smart contract risks um have they been audited how many audits have they done has the entire codebase been audited by one auditor um those are some of the kind of a auditing questions then we look at the at kind of the stable coin asset if it's a different stable coin uh so we look at the Redemption mechanisms um we look at if there's a secondary market for the stable coin um because if there's a secondary market then we can set up our kind of alerting and and automatically pull out of uh pull out of pull funds out if the if the stable coin deegs um we uh so yeah we we look at kind of all the all the risks that are there we look at how they generate yield um so obviously there's now a few protocols out there that generate yield through the basis trade uh there's yields being generated in different ways so we look at how they generate yield then we usually try and speak with the team um we try uh we try and get a sense of uh of kind of of of of what the team what what kind of their vision is uh we try and look at their legal structure so we do a bunch of du diligence do you guys kind of view yourselves as like the next generation of borrowing or are you almost a layer that sits on top of existing borrowing uh that's kind of like more advanced and more sophisticated and and provides a better end experience for for the user um yeah we see ourselves as sitting on top of other borrowing protocols because we don't have our own liquidity um so at the moment for example the vault is financed through Moro um so so we we sit on top of other borrowing protocols and we try and uh kind of really simplify the experience for the user um so the user doesn't have to think about kind of moving his loan the user doesn't have to think about kind of claiming Rewards or any of those things we try and really simplify it for the user so it's almost there's almost like a a trafi uh comparison here where it's like I'm not actively managing my man managing my Capital I'm allowing someone who's more sophisticated to manage my capital and that ends up meaning that I don't have to kind of be worried about the daytoday and and I can benefit from from the upside yeah yeah yeah you can definitely see it like that and on the other side we're kind of pure defi where it's all smart contracts it's it's all non-custodial um and uh and it's all audited um and I um imagine that that's kind of where you guys are able to uh make a successful business model so tell me a little bit about how the protocol itself can can sustain itself and make money yeah yeah so um we uh take take a fee on the spread that we generate for the user um so that that's that's simply where we make where the protocol makes its money um so uh the the the extra money we earn for the user we take 25% of that so pretty similar to kind of like a uh other money management models is on the money you make you're you're taking a little bit okay interesting yeah and and and we deliberately chose to not charge any anything on on the rest so on the on the deposits uh or on on kind of when people borrow so when they deposit or borrow that's that's all kind of completely part of the part of what we do um and then we only make money on the spread if you look at a project like Unis swap or even a to some extent in a lot of ways the ultimate goal of these protocols is kind of to completely dentalized they are completely crystallized protocols that exist on chain and perhaps can operate with pretty minimal human intervention you guys are going to always have to work uh with like the latest yield strategies and and always find the best farms and be doing due diligence um I is this kind of part of the uh the design the intrinsic design of the protocol or is is this like a a flaw in the the decentralization of altitude yeah yeah yeah yeah for us this is a deliberate design um and so what we try to do is kind of almost like The Best of Both Worlds where um everything is fully transparent non-custodial uh it's all like the the team basically can't uh can't can't touch your funds and at the same time it's an actively managed position so yeah it does mean that there will always there always needs to be need to be people involved in managing managing kind of the managing everything now in theory you could start to decentralize every element of what we just discussed so in theory you could have strategists that uh set the strategies for different faults you could have a dow govern everything um and so uh in theory it could completely decentralize um but I I personally buy into the ethos of traction first decentralize later um as long as you have a vision to how how you can decentralize I'd like to talk a little bit more about that vision of the future so you guys have have a fully functioning product um well first let's talk about kind of like the existing yield products that people can use right now so how how how do you generate yield on people's money right now yeah so we currently have Integrations with uh with um morpo with curve convex um and Pendle and then as far as the the vaults themselves um so there's a bun the on the on the on the farming side um so we're integrated with uh the The Gauntlet F The Gauntlet fults on Moro Steakhouse vaults MV Capital vaults and then specifically the resolve vaults and the relent vaults M um and then on Pendle we integrated with the uh with the resolve one with the Athena uh Market um and on curve on curve it's more of a generic setup where we just uh where we've got a but like 15 or 20 pools that we could deploy into um um but yeah but on curve it's kind of almost like an ongoing um analysis of of like of of the pools how how the pools function okay what uh what's the future of the protocol look like how are you guys trying to improve the product and and perhaps expand into other products yeah gotcha so uh the biggest uh the biggest thing for us is uh for the last six months we've been uh Whit list only uh because we've been in private vaa uh because we really wanted to make sure kind of the product works the product is safe and everything kind of works as it should do um we survived kind of the two big volatility events so in the one in early August and early Feb earlier this month um so um those were pretty kind of pretty big things for us everything worked very smooth exactly how it's how it was designed um so that gives us now the confidence to kind of launch uh launch kind of a an open version um so we'll do that in in the next few weeks we'll launch an open version where you don't need to be WID listed uh in order to engage with the prod protocol um so that's a really big thing for us um and the second big thing is we're launching a BTC uh Vault where people can put their BTC in and then borrow staes is there any are there any constraints around capacity because theoretically the more money that we deposit in a specific Bol the more we're kind of like pulling from the yield of a specific Farm um are there capacity constraints to to how much yield can be generated on a specific asset um I guess the the the capacity constraint would be the the total defi uh capacity um because ultimately what we do is um when when people borrow we pull funds out of uh The Lending protocols and we deploy them into the yield generating protocols um and so we would only be limited by how much those yield yield yield protocols could could could could basically could absorb um but it's a great question that's why um we we're very picky about which protocols we can deploy in because protocols that for example um earn their yield with the basis trade they've got uh a certain capacity which is which is a large enough capacity um in the past in kind of bearish conditions we've seen yields kind of contract and and it's harder to generate yield on chain you know I think some people have a bearish outl outlook on crypto right now uh is it possible that that affects the protocol um well so the cool thing is so we we have been building this for about three and a half four years so so uh during the bare Market we weren't live but we were in the market um and so what we saw in the market is that the the yields went came down yes but the borrowing rates also came down um and there was always a spread of like four five six% to be made so I remember the times on when when when you could borrow at like two and a half% again your rep State eat um so you borrow at two and a half and then deploy at like seven 8% and you're still making a nice spread um so I think I think um the and the beauty of the bare Market is people don't sell their collateral right um so they really don't want to sell it so if they need some liquidity what do they do they will take out a loan against their collateral so both bare market and boom Market has has it's different Dynamics but I think in both Market circumstances our protocol has has added value that's interesting I never knew that that like in bare markets there's more borrowing demand that's that's the case um I don't think that's necessarily more borrowing demand but if you because people are not leveraging up usually or not not as much as in during bull market so I don't think there's a lot of demand from uh from a from an aggregate point of view from a total market demand I don't think that total demand is bigger but I think from an individual use case where like okay okay um now I want to go on holiday or I want to buy a new car or I want to buy a house I'm I'm sitting on these assets I I think they're undervalued um how like I don't want to I definitely don't want to sell them I'm going to wait for another Bull Run so I'm going to borrow against them right plus theoretically it's a better deal to borrow at the bottom when my assets are going to increase tenfold than at the top when my assets are going to fall 90% so that's it this is this is true but this is always great in retrospect right I mean they always say like um um buy buyers are are are fearful um but that's usually the point where most people are actually fearful so it's quite hard to go against the market but yeah I I agree that's it's great to buy the bare markets right yeah interesting cool um as far as go to market you mentioned kind of uh this early white list how how have what how's the response been to the product and and how have people been interacting with uh with the vaults in in a way that in ways that you might have not expected previously tell us about that this process yeah yeah so we've got uh we've got about 50 users at the moment that are using the the protocol um and um yeah some of them have have borrowed large amounts of money to buy buy a car um others have borrowed smaller amounts of money to uh maybe put on a few Tri trades or or or or or or Gamble and a few meme coins um so people use people use it in in different ways when you think about the long-term future of the product uh and the protocol itself you talked a little bit about decentralization you talked a little bit about evolutions of products what are some of the things you're thinking about uh on the you know one to five year Horizon yeah yeah so one of the things that we're thinking about is is how do we make it easier for more people to interact um so it's it's um it's a relatively complicated concept um and um what what we what we see with users is that there's quite a big hurdle for them to try it and but once they've tried it uh they love it they're like wow this is amazing I I I I I see the power now I have I still have my asset and I have a self-repairing loan so I think um we we were getting through that with the crypto natives uh where people are playing with it what I would love to see is um kind of a broader audience that we could kind of get a broader audience bought into this um because every time I talk about this with people that are maybe they have some eat they have some BTC but they're not active in defi they're like oh wow this is amazing I want to do it um and then um yeah then you have to go through the steps of okay install your browser your browser wallet and then put some eat on there and then like and then you tend to lose uh kind of a large group of people so I think that would be really cool if we could open it up to a broader audience right uh do you know a lot uh there's been a very hot uh conversation around real world assets and we've been slowly seeing the adoption and uh and the the industry kind of adapting to real world assets coming on chain do you think that that's a space that you guys are curious about um or are you mostly sticking to like digitally native assets right now yeah yeah no 100% I think um I think real world assets are are very interesting to borrow against it's also something that uh um many more people are used to right so we're looking at for example tokenized gold uh that would be a really interesting one um I I would personally love it I don't to to do like a a tokenized S&P 500 or a NASDAQ and borrow against that um we're not there yet as a space I think or or at least I've seen the first kind of small steps I don't think it's very it's it's mainstream yet um but I think that could be really interesting that you have more uh the assets that that uh a lot of people are already holding um that you can borrow against those and and it's exactly the same Dynamics right I mean for me as a consumer it's a lot more compelling to me to borrow against the S&P 500 than eth because like these d n digital assets are kind of like intrinsically hyper volatile which makes borrowing a riskier prospect so borrowing against yeah less volatile assets the obviously the yield bearing asset has a has an attractive component to me but um that's like the scariest part if I were to borrow against my eth Holdings is you don't want to get liquidated on your on your eth Holdings or something so yeah it's a tricky tricky thing yeah I mean that would be super exciting if we can do that uh but there's a few steps in between that we have to take to to enable that but yeah that that that that's kind of the big dream what's your greatest ambition with the protocol if you were to step back in in 10 years and and look at what you've built you know what would you what would you deem success is it a tvl is it an amount of users yeah it's a good question um I mean ultimately ultimately you want to provide value to the users uh and the way that they express that they're getting value out of out of the protocol is by letting you manage their assets or having their Assets in your protocol um so I think uh kind of AUM tvl um I think or so assets under management or or total value locked I think that's a that's a great kind of proxy for how much impact you have as a financial uh Financial product um so if you look at kind of I don't know if you look at Facebook they've got billions of users um I think with a financial product um the best way that it's expressed is that that you have billions on management or tens of billions or hundreds of billions that's it that's really an ambitious goal right to say you know to even consider the fact that hundreds of billions of dollars could be uh borrowed against in or utilized in your protocol someday when when the the total crypto market cap you know is probably I think somewhere around 2 2.5 trillion dollars right now uh but uh it seems like despite you know four years of of building and a lot of it in difficult market conditions including now you're still optimistic what would you say to people who are a little bit by the the crypto space right now um I guess I'd say just kind of try and try and zoom out um because in the crypto space it's very easy to get kind of um uh to get sucked into the day-to-day uh or or the week to week in the price movements um if you zoom out and if you see where the crypto space has like has come from um and if you then zoom out and think like okay would the world would the financial World be a better place everything was tokenized I believe so so and I think from there um from there like if you zoom out far enough it's a direct line straight up and to the right um if you're if you zoom in on a on a daily or on a weekly basis um yeah it's it's it's messy um so I think that's what I would say like um take a take a little bit of a break uh zoom out switch off X for a while and then um and then come back with new energy well I think that's really the trickiest part of crypto right now is like yes if we zoom out on the on the broadest time frame then it's easy to see the bullishness and and the trend upwards however in the daytoday in in the the so-called trenches um there are kind of reasons to be pessimistic and and when you look at specifically a protocol like yours where it's focusing on the evolution you know the 1 to 10 instead of the 0 to one it's it's hard to see those incremental improvements right that 1% Improvement every day and user experience or uh generating a little more yield or being able to cut uh cost or decentralize a little bit more and it's hard to see that uh in the day-to-day and I think that's what's perhaps frustrating to people in crypto is people want it all now and they want it they want it fast and uh and it if you're not willing to look out on that long time frame it it becomes frustrating or or you know pessimist it it creates an a pessimistic Outlook but that's an awesome perspective and I and I really appreciate it throughout your founding Journey if you had to give one piece of advice to other Founders in the defi space or in the crypto space at large what would you say um make a product that people want um and that people once they use it that they love it um everything else will follow excellent I think that's a great note to wrap things up on uh we really appreciate your time here here today where can people check out your product and and what you have in the pipeline yeah um so kind of our main channel is X uh so go to x.com altitud Fiore um and then from there on there's links to our Discord to our telegram group uh and obviously our website altitude. fi phenomenal awesome thanks so much for your time and and uh we we look forward to seeing the progress of your product so awesome thanks a lot Jack appreciate it Back To Top