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Welcome to the Chain Stories podcast, the podcast that celebrates disruptors who defy convention. Here, we dive into the bold stories of trailblazers who turned audacious ideas into billion dollar ventures.

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Welcome to another ChainStories Podcast. Algebra.Finance. Our guest is Vlad, the CEO, founder of this project. Before we get started, I would like to place a disclaimer that we have invested and are running a syndicate for this project. If you want to know more information, please see down below the description. Thank you. And I hope you enjoy another episode. All right, ladies and gentlemen, today we have a very special guest, Vlad from Algebra.Finance. Algebra.Finance has been in the path of building an automated market maker for a couple of years, and then it's been quite of a story. Vlad, would you like to do as a brief intro about what you've been up to in the last three, four years in the crypto space, and how you got involved with Algebra? Sure. Hi Tony, hi Erick. And hello, everyone. My name is Vladimir. I am co founder of Algebra Finance, and I have just back from our deployment for Berachain. Bera was launched recently. And of course, there are some DEXs already, which are based on Algebra. I want to be there. So we have just released one of them called Bula. So that's just an example how our technology works. So we backed many DEXs on market. And right now more and more DEXs use our technology to be launched. Moving back to Tony question about myself, about our story. I've studied math mostly. So I'm a mathematician and then PhD in computer science. And then I worked nine years for Motorola. If you remember, like phone called Razr, it was very like narrow. It's one of the device which I work on. And after Google acquired Motorola, I decided to do something by myself. I was really tired of making decisions in such a big company. I would say it almost impossible to put any initiative on because so many levels you need to talk to and so on. It was great from a process perspective to study how to develop products, study what is research, but it's really hard to change anything in such organizations, unfortunately. And then I founded my own company, which was based on software development. We have just two of us, myself and partner who was, really great developer and he still a great developer. And from two people, we grow to 50 people and work with a great companies like Disney. We developed CRM for them to manage all the content all around the world. And then, 2017 crypto come into my life and I could say that everything was changed during that time. Fully 100 percent crypto native and our goal since the beginning to develop a product inside of crypto. So we never touch something like fiat to crypto, real stuff, RWA. So we decided to be 100 percent inside. To improve this ecosystem from the center, not to touch like all around. So we really like what is this and we're really happy that we could continue to be inside of the space without going out. So that's our main focus, when we decide to move to this area. Was it part of your original vision to go in and do a DEX and what did you have in mind at the time? Did it stroke you, okay, I want to go deep into centralized finance or why did you pick this path? I believe there are only maybe three ways how you can make money in crypto. Number one is of course trading. So buy something, wait until pump sell, I believe 90%. Then mining and staking. So sounds good because you could buy hardware, start helping protocols or stake your tokens to support a protocol somehow to make governance all the stuff. And the third model, which I really like is lending indexes. When you could put money in one part of one group of the users as a second part of the users could use this money for all needs. And somehow they could benefit each other. And I believe it's really great. So it's really hard to find such models in a real world. And even encrypted, to be honest, so it's unfortunately there are not so many ways how you could make money encrypted in an honest way without like extra risk or without buying hardware and so on. DEXes extremely good. It's not like 100 percent good right now, but we believe that in the future it could be really big and business model extremely good. And for me to go from corporate life and being in this hierarchy and everything is so structured and now you're preparing to go and launch a Dex. Did you have the team? Did you know how to start or was something that you're like, maybe I shouldn't do this. Maybe I should go back. I have my job at Motorola. I can just book another company. Yeah. Great question. I was really tired of companies like Motorola. Of course, when you work like for nine years, you plan your future based on your previous experience. Okay. You can find like Microsoft and Google and I can try for one year. If it's not, good, okay let's switch back to big organization. And so this decision was not so hard. So it was like experiment and it was quite successful. And thanks to experience with software development we got some experience. So how to hire right people, where to hire them, how to educate them, and of course, some connections there. As for Algebra, we are extremely lucky that we found some people. So first of all, my co founder, Alexandra, she's responsible for marketing and all stuff around. Adam, our great head of partnerships, our developers, who are mathematicians. When we start thinking about Algebra, like a concept, we start thinking how we could benefit from our experience, from our knowledge. Because if you don't have a knowledge in AI, and there are so many people who are already working on this one, how you could outperform them, why you should do it. And we believe that it's our core expertise, like algorithms, how to make complicated stuff. And that's why we have choose DEXes and work on algorithms, on ideas and so on. So that's how we decide to outperform all the other competitors. I think that makes a lot of sense. And I know you founded Algebra right in 2021 after Uniswap V3 launched, right? Yes, uniswap V3 yes. What were some of the biggest challenges when you launched as a DEX? It's a great story. When I remember this one, I'm feeling not so good, to be honest. So it was started in 2021, we start analyze how Uniswap v3 was designed and try to find a way how we create a better technology than Uniswap v3. And we found two ideas. One of this is dynamic fees. It's every swap, we find the best fees, which suite which best for traders and liquidity providers, because everyone's they contradicts each other. Liquidity providers wants great fee and traders want low fees because for trading is required. How to find golden mean between all that. So dynamic fees. answer this question. And the second one was built in farming, it's really hard to implement farming, mechanic because there are so many positions, different price ranges constantly changing. By the way, still Uniswap version 3 doesn't have farming built in. Pancake swap, by the way, took our model at some moment, from algebra, but nevermind. And we launched a DEX on Polygon without technology and nothing happens. And it was really surprised. So we are 100 percent sure in our technology. We have some partners, Polygon supported us, but nobody came to us to trade. Nobody came to us to provide liquidity. I know it was, there was like 5 million TVL, right? Yeah, it was the ATH, but it's nothing when you have QuickSwap and Uniswap as the competitors. When they have 40 million, 100 million, 5 million, it's not enough. But 5 million, yes. And it was a great lesson for us. Even if you have great technology, it's not enough. So you need to work on brand awareness, build trust. Maybe not just one year, it maybe could be several years. And it was very bad times for us because like we were really excited. We really excited how we launched. Everything was fine. So no issues, but it just didn't work. And then we start to brainstorm how we can change it. And thanks to our marketing, we start comment, Twitter account of our competitors, like QuickSwap for example they said, okay, we have great APR. And we comment that, okay, your APR is great, but if you can see on Algebra, APR is 10 times bigger, even TVL is small. And the same is the same. At some moment, we get some attention and they start talking to us, how they could utilize our technology inside of their product. And after some time, we have come to agreement to launch a QuickSwap version 3 fully Algebra inside, but with their brand user database marketing, all the stuff from Quickswap, and it was really great success. It was number one DEXs on Polygon. I still believe that's number one from user database. But from TVL was the second place after Uniswap. And that's just an example how your technology could perform if you choose the right brand and build trust. So that was a great lesson for us. And after this, it started growing. More and more DEXes has come to us say, guys we need your technology. We want to repeat the success of QuickSwap. Right now we have 52 DEXs, which is fully based on Algebra. So during the three years, I see in the beginning, so it's a great expansion of the market. Amazing. I was going to say so that pivot happened due to marketing and in accidents in going from a DEX to a AM engine when you license tech to QuickSwap because tech was so good, right? And today you're processing over 50 plus DEXs is run on Algebra, and I believe it's 80 percent plus of all EVM DEX trading volume or around those numbers. Yesterday it was, we have 210 million TVL and 260 million of daily volume. So we process about up to 8 percent of all EVM trading volume through our smart contracts at the moment. Yeah. That makes sense. And I know at a certain point diving into the token launch, there was a token and there's something that Algebra team realized that this token couldn't unify all the ecosystem together. Could you expand a bit more in this? When we launched Algebra as a DEX, we designed our tokenomics as we never even considered that we should move to B2B or like B Protocol for 52 DEXs. Thanks to our early adopters and our OGs, they supported us, but everyone understands that's now this tokenomics could not be used for the future. Just for example, like about 50 percent of initial supply was live after TGE. So it's just not sustainable. And a lot of tokens were planned to liquidity mining. You remember the model when you want to attract liquidity, you want to give the tokens for free because people provide liquidity and get some bonus from the team. So that's, there are still a lot of tokens which plan to be used for this activity, but there's no activities like this anymore because we're a B2B protocol. So I could say it was just designed for the DEX and not for protocol, that's why we right now switch off our token as a DEX. And now we are under preparation for token as a protocol and with all other future steps and so on. So that's what's going on. Will this new unified token be tied to direct revenue sharing? And is it also multi chain and is there any, is backed by trading fees or liquidity incentives? Yeah, great question. Two main utilities for our unified token. Number one it's great. We generate revenue. So we are self sustainable and we generate revenue for our future holders. 70 percent of our profit will go to incentivization of our stakers. So it will be a stake. It will be number one and revenue sharing by using stake mechanic. The second one, it's a governance. And when I talk about governance, a lot of people say, Oh, man, governance again, we know it's just for utility. No, it's not just for utility. We need a governance because we are multi chain and there are so many DEXs already. Depend on us on our decisions and I could say even crypto depend on us if I could say this one. So because if we do something wrong or choose another wrong direction, all our DEXs which is based on us and most of these DEXs does do not have even good tech resources to continue development to support this one. So they're fully on Algebra side and we need to make sure that we react on needs of protocols needs on the market. And that's why we need to make decision all together with our, community and with our partners who use our code and who use our technology like every day. So some just examples if any DEXs want to get like exclusive rights for some chain or. They want to be a number one DEXs on it, for example, Bera chain, they need to initiate a voting process and to get enough votes from our stakers to accept this proposal. And we see that there will be two ways how our stakers could benefit number one stakers and the second one incentives from our clients, partners, external protocols which wants to make some decisions so if you want that people vote for your decisions incentivize them and we expect that our stakers will get some tokens from new teams, from new DEXs, new protocols, which wants to support since the beginning, something like this. I've heard, or I read somewhere that was like a 30 percent APY projected. Not sure if you've heard, but that's pretty exciting. Yeah. So let's see. So I can't say any commitments here. Awesome. Yeah regarding some of the problems that Algebra can solve in DeFi. I know there's a lot of inefficiency in liquidity, or even DEX upgrades require liquidity migration and there's liquidity fragmentation. Is this something that you think Algebra can go in and really tackling? Yeah, it's every time when we start doing something, we are asking what is the problem, right? We believe there are three, maybe two big problems at the moment on DEX. Number one, they are not efficient enough. If you provide liquidity to I don't know, Pancake, Uniswap even Algebra, it will be not guaranteed that you will get some profit, unfortunately. A lot of cases when you can get losses, because of LVR or implement loss, so that's an issue. The second one, DEXs before they could not be upgraded in time. There are a huge amount of ideas in DeFi every day, but, Uniswap v3 was released three years ago and just v4 was released like one week ago. So three years, no innovation from the main player in the world index space. How is it possible? So you may think that we did a lot like staking mechanics, crosschain protocols, new kind of bridges, intents, all the stuff. But was not updated for three years. So that's wrong. So we need to make it more effective and we need to be more fast and more flexible. That's two big problems we solved by our new version called Integral. Right now, I believe it's about 25 DEXs already use this technology. It's quite similar to Uniswap V4, but it was launched one year and a half ago. That's why there are a lot of players already in this ecosystem. Every pool right now could be customized. And behavior of the pool could be customized as this, how we could get much more better results for both parties, for traders and liquidity providers. Why this? Just an example for Ethereum and Arbitrum, for example. So on Arbitrum there are so small block time, and that's why there are a lot of small trades, and also gas is cheap. On mainnet, for example, there are like big trades, because it's more ability to arbitrage, because time between blocks is much more bigger, so on Binance the price could be changed during this time significantly. It means that all the pools should be designed differently. So you want to get more money on small trades or you want more focus be on big trades. So it depends not only on the pair. It also depends on blockchain, what kind of pair you launched. Maybe it's meme coin. You should be also design pool in different way. So integral gives you ability to customize pool behavior, and there are already some teams who joined us to develop special plugins or hooks. If we talk about Uniswap before to make it much more effective than before. So that's really a big step in this market at the moment. Does Integral also support multi chain? What chain, sorry? Does every chain right now support Integral? Yeah, so if we deploy Integral yes, so that's on every chain you could utilize this technology, EVM chain at the moment. We start moving to Solana so we expect that maybe like in four months from now. So the next big step is Solana ecosystem looking forward to it, by the way. And what's like the most successful plugin that you see people using now that can generate like real revenue back for the projects that are like launching or even the creators that are then setting up the pools. It's hard to ask for like your 100%. So it really depends on what exactly you want to do. So for example, there are some plugins which designed especially for our new projects. So right now you could design all plugin for example, you want to launch a meme and you could program how it could behave depends on all types of markets. So liquidity could be locked you can set a different fee levels depending on the volume. You could incentivize liquidity providers, to provide more liquidity because they get low fees, for example. So completely new scenarios, which are not possible before. As for general answer, I would say that it's a plugin, which gives you a fee discount if you trade more. So like on centralized exchanges. So if you trade more, you get low fees for the next trade. The same for decentralized exchanges for Algebra DEXs right now. If you trade more, you will get fee discount on next trades. By the way, it was done by a previous team. It's ZK pre processing team, our partners and also shareholders of Algebra, so working with them on this plugin. Yeah, I think that one's interesting. I think, what we've seen where there's been criticisms of models like from PumpFun that is very extractive. Whereas you have like other, like newer launch pads that are instead taking those creator fees and then giving them back to either the dev or the community. And then that's something that's enabled by hooks or plugins and makes like this liquidity smarter in terms of the routing of the feeds. So there's projects, there's entire business models being built on that. And then that might even be like another new narrative in terms of tokens that get back from their own fee, like the revenue generating model? Yeah, 100%. We have mentioned also multi chain and especially it really works for multi chain and even with the previous, so for example, we could give you discount if you trade on, Arbitrum if you hold enough tokens or you provide liquidity on BNB chain to another DEX, for example. Thanks to this ideas, we could also connect chains by this information from the plugin. So that's another example. So we could incentivize it much more effectively on cross chain basis. What about anti sniping or MEV protection? Do you see plugins that can help assist with those? Yeah, great question. For MEV, the main idea of plugins regarding MEV and also from getting some extra revenue from blockchain, not to give it to miners or people who is responsible for nodes, is to make an auction inside of a DEX. There are several ideas, but in general, if you want to make a trade, you are ready to pay more for this trade. So to make an auction between arbiters every time. So right now they are setting a fee to flash bots, for example, and say, guys, I want to buy this block. But we could design a plugin to move this auction to AMM site. And even if you, win, who doesn't care, so we have our own auction inside, and who will pay more, they will get ability to make the first swap in a block. And what is interesting is that we get this all the revenue and move back to liquidity providers. So now liquidity providers are just like, I would say, static role. So you provide liquidity and someone make money on your liquidity because of arbitrage, pay extra money to math, flashbots and so on, but you are just get nothing in this case, you will get, I believe, 90%, even to 100 percent of arbitrage revenue because, arbitrage are happy to pay to get at least, I don't know, 1 percent of revenue. That's a great example of how we can move, revenue from blockchain level to program level. So that's a great example of a plugin. Early on, you mentioned that Algebra had over 50 plus DEXs. And I know that Quickswap runs on Algebra, Camelot, TINA, which is the second largest BNB DEX, and even the second largest on Arbitrum with Camelot. And also you're expanding to Ton. What is the reason behind that so many DEXs are coming to Algebra? And is there any plans to go into the Solana ecosystem? Yeah, great question. Previously they choose Algebra because, they could not fork Uniswap v3. If you want to create some kind of liquidity, you have to fork something or develop something, right? So that's another case. And Uniswap you could not fork because it was closed by the license. And that's why we believed they work with Algebra, but then when license from Uniswap become free, they continue to use Algebra. It was really a great move for us because we demonstrated and proved that our technology is better because it's more flexible. And right now everyone could fork Uniswap v3, constraint liquidity, but people and companies continue to choose Algebra, because it's much more flexible and it's already proved effectiveness in comparison with Uniswap v3. As for other chains, what is our dream? You remember the times when it was a lot of manufacturers from Nokia, Microsoft, I don't know, some Chinese guys, and everyone create own operational system inside of phone. And you as a developer, or you as a protocol have to choose what you will do. And spend a lot of time to move your technology across among all this platforms. And was really a big problem for the developer. I know this one and then Android came and everyone starts using this one because it's great core level for mobile phones and it's open ability for game developers for Instagram, Facebook. So you don't need to create a special version for every platform you just created. All the phones could use this one. The same way we are doing in Algebra. So we build base level, the best on the market level for the DEXs. You can use our level, you could customize this one. And it's important that all the protocols, which is already integrated with at least one DEX from Algebra will get access to all of them. When you use our technology, you automatically integrate with 1inch, OpenOcean, Jumper exchange, Rubik, everything, Yield Aggregators, liquidity managers, and all the stuff. And what is even more important that DEXs start contribute to each other. So some ideas which we have developed by Camelot could be easily used by TINA or by Quickswap and another way. So we remove the competition between like operational system to another level. So right now we expect that, progress in DEXs will be much more faster because we remove for base competition on a low level. And right now they find a great scenarios, how the access could extract much more value for liquidity providers. And we expect this ecosystem will grow much more faster than last two years. Correct me if I am wrong, and I think this could be a great analogy to where we stand as an industry. But is this the same when we had Nokia with Symbian and Motorola with their system? And then it came Google with Android and completely disrupted the market. Right, 100%. So let's remove segmentation between the technology because it doesn't make any sense. All of them are mostly the same and they are not flexible before. Right now we have flexible technology, which could be customized. If you don't want to repeat like Camelot, you can easily change it, but core level will be the same. It means that all the protocols around could be supported easy way. Cool. I was here reading some of the statistics and for our listeners, for context, Algebra has processed over 77 billion plus in cumulative trading volume, 76 million plus in transactions and peak daily training volume at almost a billion dollars in a single day. Vlad, what is the future looking like? What are your plans with Algebra after these numbers? Yeah. Numbers quite big and feeling responsible for one billion per day, feeling a little bit nervous. So then what's next? First of all, we did a great move from a product to ecosystem. So before we did everything by ourselves. So like plugins, all the stuff, blah, blah, blah. So right now we have at least three, four or five companies which already contribute to technology. So the developer plugins, and I don't talk about DEXs. So DEXs also make own development, for the improvement. So right now we become ecosystem and that's a great challenge for us, how to grow a system, not a product. That's number one, that's goal for the next year, more focused on external relations and external developers then try to do everything by ourselves, except of maybe course site. The second challenge for us, it's called a liquidity layer. So what's the problem right now? For example, on some chains we have five the same technology, completely the same, but different brands. And all of them try to attract liquidity to their pools and spend resources. Money, liquidity, money, and token go down as usual. Instead of this one with our technology, we will provide them access to a liquidity layer. There is a place where all our DEXs and the future other DEXs could get a liquidity. For example, if you are Sushi Swap and someone wants to trade on your DEXs and that it's not enough liquidity in your pool, or maybe you don't have such pool, you could easily take this liquidity from liquidity layer and pay desired fee to other DEXs who put their liquidity to access to this liquidity layer. And that's quite new on the market. Because it has very interesting scenarios for the users also. Right now there are so many people who every day looks for a pair on different DEXs and move liquidity like, okay, a liquidity mining is ended, I need to move to the next DEXs, maybe new chain and so on. Instead, in the future, they will put their liquidity to liquidity layer. And let's say you could say that I would like to get 1% for every trade when my liquidity is used. And it means that all the DEXs, which is connected to liquidity layer every time with they need liquidity at 1%, they will pay you desired fee. And this is possible only in DeFi. So if you go to like traditional world, how you could put your money to all the banks, right? It's impossible. And this way we believe that's a revolution for the DEXs and for DeFi also, because your liquidity will work more than 100%. So maybe 100% because it could be used by the best protocol at the moment. And next day, it could be used by another protocol, which is the best at the moment. Of course, there are some security questions who you will be trust to use your liquidity or not, but at least fortunately, we have some trusted protocol already on the market, which you could to choose and get the best possible rate every day without carrying of more this liquidity. So that's about liquidity layer. Sounds like a very exciting future ahead. Yeah, anyone that's listening wants to get involved or partake, can they still invest in Algebra? Is there a way to get involved? So right now there is no way to support somehow, because we do not have any token on the market. So we have only a strategic route opening at the moment, which we have discussed with Tony and Erick and among our other contributors, our close partners, like Camelot and also Gmix supported us via Camelot and also Brevis, which I mentioned, and some other funds, WTG Capital and two others who supports us the beginning of this trip. We plan TGE later this year, but it really depends on the market situation and how our liquidity layer will go out. So a lot of stuff to do and looking forward to this one. All right. And to wrap it up, Vlad, a lot of founders usually listen to our podcasts and they're out there asking themselves, what could I have done better? Or maybe this or that, but if you had a time machine and could go back in time to when you started working on all these four years ago, what would you tell that version of yourself? I would say that please don't see short term in crypto and be focused on the technology and on big things except, I don't know, pump and dumps, I believe for everyone, it's really hard to continue work when you see that someone created PumpFun and it's huge project. And it spent, I don't know, maybe three months of development, four months of development, but you spent already maybe several years for building something. And I believe if I know this one, it will be much more better results as a moment, because unfortunately there are so many times when you, okay, let's stop doing this one. Let's try this one. So there is a lot of distractions and your attention gets pulled away instead of just being focused on delivering something that's here for the long run, right? You're right. When you're reading news about like new tokens, about new products we just launched and great success, it's really hard to continue your daily routine. If our listeners want to learn more about Algebra, where can they find that information? Yeah, please welcome to our Twitter. And also, since we are fully digitalized, you can find information about us in Dune Analytics, DefiLlama, also on our site you can see all our DEXs, daily volume, TVL, fees, and so on. We are fully transparent, and you are welcome to explore on chain data. And also great documentation, by the way, because we have so many integrations. So we have to create a great docs. So everything could be find on our site, algebra.finance. And you can read our news in Twitter. Awesome. Thanks, Vlad. It was great to have you. Thank you, Tony, thank you Erick.

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