0/ As we kick off 2021, I’d like to unpack the story of @SushiSwap and @UniswapProtocol and build on the theme of how cultural differences can explain why both ultimately succeeded, despite being direct competitors with virtually identical products.
1/ Recognizing that both could thrive with their own strategies, I draw a comparison between @SushiSwap and @binance, and @UniswapProtocol and @coinbase from various angles, including the form of the product, the frequency of iteration, and the interaction with the public.
2/ Over the past year, I spent a lot of time trying to understand differences in opinion across Eastern and Western cultures. While the view could often be stereotypical, the attempt to understand user behavior and product design via a cultural lens could be more or less valuable
3/ One opinion I long held about DeFi was that despite the global liquidity, protocols often benefit from having access to the regional business development relationships and operating in line with local user behaviors.
4/ Admittedly, the users of Sushiswap and Uniswap are quite spread out around the world. Stiil, the distribution of the supporters of each shows a certain cultural divergence, inevitably due to the difference of product and operation style that Sushiswap and Uniswap choose.
5/ Also attaching the "part I" article as a reference:
Thought it was fun. I had a lot of thoughts as I listened to it
1/ The discussion about privacy tokens $XMR, and related $ZEC, was interesting. There's def doubt re: if adding a layer 2 to an existing L1 with good governance would work (i.e. privacy is feature not a product). IMHO this may be valid but maybe we could think a bit differently
2/ ...In the Uncommon Core EP.13 where SZ mentioned that we needed sth better than Ethereum alone for institutions to participate in on-chain trading. I very much agree to it. So maybe what we need is a swap with ZK features?
0/ I recently published this episode in Mandarin but seemed like @FTX_Official really got some community members who wanted to learn about our chat. So I thought it'd be interesting to try one of those paid online audio transcribing AI service out
1/ FTX has achieved a ton this year, and they only started their business 1.5 years ago. They started the year of 2020 by closing the equity financing round strongly, and began to expand aggressively in different regions around the world, despite it was a team of only ~50 people
2/ She discussed the core culture of @FTX_Official, and how everyone operated around those principles. She shared how they were able to capture various market opportunities and got to where they were today. We would also learn about FTX's strategies on retails and institutions.
0/ As the mainnet of @perpprotocol is going live in two weeks, we invited Yenwen Feng @tempofeng, the founder of Perpetual Protocol to be on the 5th episode of 51%. This episode is in Mandarin. Available on Apple Podcast, Ximalaya, and @AudiusProject.
1/ In this episode, we first talked about Yenwen's history as a serial entrepreneur. We discussed why he wanted to work on decentralized perpetual swap product, and how he got inspiration of the product design. We specifically dived deep into the vAMM design of perpetual protocol
2/ Through our discussion on their choice of Eth L2 scaling solution, Yenwen expressed his thoughts about the L2 space. We also reviewed Perp's widely applauded public sales via the Balancer LBP, as he compared that choice with some other available options at the time.
0/ Today (Nov 24, 2020) is the day that the Yearn Community Proposal for moving the treasury KP3R-ETH to Alpha Homora went effective. It is a good day to have this conversation with @tascha_panpan at @AlphaFinanceLab as the 4th episode of 51%.
1/ In this episode, we talked about Alpha Finance Lab's vision and why the team started the project. We discussed quite extensively on Alpha Homora, the first product within the product suite of Alpha, especially on how they plan to grow from where they are now.
2/ We also covered their latest Trading Volume Liquidity Mining, on why they designed the program this way.
The conversation also included the cross-community engagement effort, Alpha's involvement with Binance Smart Chain, and the upcoming perpetual swap product.