230: Oliver Chalk – ETH Mining Experiment; Gateway to Full-Scale BTC Basis Trading

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It was early 2017 Oliver was nearing the end of his high school years when he discovered Ethereum. or perhaps more accurately, had strapped together six GPUs for the purpose of mining Ethereum. Although the mining rig was only a mild success, it did plant the seed for what would become Proxima Capital, the crypto-focused trading firm Oliver co-founded in 2019. Our interview starts out going through Oliver's path to now, which I think is rather impressive.

This includes mining, writing a decentralized exchange, writing his first arbitrage program, tax headaches when it comes to crypto, meeting his co-founder, and making a play on scale. Then approximately around the halfway point, Oliver does a brilliant job of explaining his firm's basis trade. This is a market neutral strategy which derives an edge from the market structure of cryptocurrencies.

So if you're only listening for the trading insights and not so much the story, then you may like to jump forward to roughly the 35-minute mark. And with that being said, let's get to it. Coming to you from Cayman Islands, here is Oliver Chalk. Where did you start out in crypto? Like how did you first get into this?

My absolute first exposure to crypto was Bitcoin in I believe twenty thirteen. I just found it online. I was like trying to look for I guess I w I was young, so I was I was thirteen at the time, looking for like get rich quick. um kind of things. Not not cr straight up just throw your money in and become a millionaire, but the like how do you like sell books online and stuff to make money. And in that sort of circles, Bitcoin was a thing that I came across.

Um at the time didn't have access to any sort of card information. So I had to ask my parents to buy Bitcoin and uh that didn't eventuate. So, you know, I sort of missed out on hundred dollar bitcoins. But I probably only would have been able to afford like two of them. So then fast forward to when I was uh seventeen, still in high school, uh me and some mates had some sort of old GPUs lying around.

And so we bought a motherboard to I guess strap them to and start mining crypto. And we did that just off of, you know, solar electricity um in one of our w in one of the sort of friends' households. Um that wasn't super competitive, so eventually we ended up

just selling uh the miners to some, I guess, bigger shops and um, you know, cutting our losses. I mean we we sort of broke even. But at the end of it I was like, okay, well I've got this Ethereum. Either I'm going to be selling it uh back to AUD

or I'm going to be holding it slash doing something else with it. So that's when I sort of dove headfirst into Ethereum in particular and figuring out, you know, what are smart contracts, how do you write your own? Is it a a valid sort of technology or is it just, you know, hot air? And and so I fell down the rabbit hole and I can go in further, but I think that's when I sort of would consider myself to have gotten gotten into crypto is start of twenty seventeen with that mining of Ethereum.

Okay, so you were mining Ethereum, not Bitcoin. What year was this? This was this was early uh twenty seventeen. So this was when um GPU mining was the dominant form of Ethereum mining. I mean it's still a form of Ethereum mining, but you ha now have ASICs and at this point mining Bitcoin on anything but sort of a hyper optimized

uh ASIC chip was um completely non-viable. So yeah, the only sort of consumer mining available was GPU mining at this point in time. And even then, you know, you sort of had a lot of disadvantages with much higher power rates. uh poorer sort of ventilation and all of that. So it wasn't you know, being a hobbyist miner is is really non-viable um to start off with because it's all about

hitting, you know, economies of scale, right? Having a a a full warehouse that's sort of passively cooled with, you know, three cent power and all that good stuff, uh, which we did not have. Um so yeah, it was an unsuccessful venture into hobbyist mining, I would say.

Even still, I mean, to hear that you went down that path at such a young age is is pretty impressive. I mean, how did you have any idea what you were actually doing? I mean I I was always like a geek and a tech head. Um I'd written some of my own sites um for like school projects and uh business ideas.

a lot of the business ideas were more just, you know, WordPress things for stuff I wanted to sell online. So it was really a tool that allowed me to be um, you know, somewhat entrepreneurial. But then for school projects, you know, I would make like a a server where you could you could, you know, log into a website and watch videos, uh basically get paid to watch ads. And and so that was sort of

kind of an analogue to some of the the crypto, you know, self ownership and um you know web three vision. So yeah, I always always had a passion uh for for programming uh but never really got anywhere with it at school just due to the lack of like curriculum there. And so when I when I found crypto that was sort of an outlet that sort of also aligned, you know, with my personal values

um around, you know, I guess I would consider myself a bit of a libertarian, so I just didn't like having other people tell me what to do. And so when it was this scene where it's like, here's a clean slate, do whatever you want to do was quite appealing to me at that time. So yeah, I saw it as an outlet. to, you know, express my ideas and and build software in a sort of, you know, very um, you know, cutting edge manner.

And you said that you were using GPUs to mine, uh, which is not competitive enough, especially by today's standard. Um, and was it ASIC or ASIC's chips uh is sort of what's really needed nowadays. Yep. What are they?

Uh I don't know the full acronym anymore, but it the the IC stands for integrated circuit and it's basically um a CPU is a is fundamentally a a bunch of chips and they all or the sort of central logic unit, basically um what it does is you can perform one of let's say two hundred operations and the simple ones are add

subtract, multiply, etcetera. But then you have, you know, fancy ones like take these ten numbers and multiply each number by these other ten numbers and you use that for like, you know, graphics and stuff. And so

you know, CPUs are fundamentally limited in that you basically want to be able to do everything, right? One minute you're computing, you know, uh your Facebook feed, the next you're playing a video game and commute you know, computing the scoreboard. And so your chip fundamentally cannot specialize into any one of those functions. It needs to be able to do everything and every user um has a different use for the computer.

And and so this is obviously a limiting factor if you wanna go really fast. And so what ASICs do is they strip out all of the unnecessary stuff. Like an ASIC chip, in of itself, you can't add it ask it to add two numbers. All you can do is give it

a bunch of input data and ask it to hash the resulting um output. And so they're basically chips that do one thing and one thing only, and that's the uh sort of Bitcoin SHA two five six hash. And so in doing that they can basically one, make the chip a lot cheaper'cause you don't waste, um

you know, uh resources building all of these unnecessary operations. And two, they can make it much more energy efficient because CPU spend a lot of time, you know, supporting all of these operations and and sort of choosing between which one to use. The C uh the ASIC just pulls all of that out. It says

you only do one single operation and we're gonna try and make it as energy efficient and as fast as possible. And when you make the design space that simple, you know, uh humans can get pretty creative in how they make it, you know, extremely efficient. And so, you know, an ASIC would be

you know, uh I guess a million times more um power efficient than than a normal CPU, although I don't have that number actually formally researched. But that's roughly, you know, the level of competitive advantage that you gain. And so anything Uh that isn't an ASIC in Bitcoin is is completely non viable nowadays. Yeah, right. That's uh that's super interesting. Now, even though this was, as you called it, um sort of somewhat unsuccessful, this uh mining venture.

Did you get to a point where you were still mining um, you know, several Ethereum each day or like sort of what what sort of success did you see? Oh, this is this is going back a little bit, but so we had six GPUs, uh, which was a nightmare to get um functional because the average User does not strap six GPUs to their computer. So a lot of like things just started breaking down when we did that. So we put six GPUs on this motherboard.

um using like risers, which are basically little um, you know, PCIe lanes, which is the connector from your GPU to your CPU. And so we basically had a motherboard with two GPUs on the motherboard and four just wired in in in quite a bootleg fashion. So we would have spent, I believe, from memory about two hundred dollars on each of the GPUs. So let's call that twelve hundred.

Aussie and, you know, the mother boy would have been two hundred, so about fourteen hundred. And we ran that for about six months and with the depreciation across that time and the power bill and everything, we about broke even. Um, so w there wasn't much more than, you know, across six months about two or three Ethereum in it for us. So this was not the days where you would basically turn your computer on

and get multiple coins um a day. This was yeah, this was when it was well and truly an industry already. So we weren't early to the game by any fashion. In fact, you know, this was a period where there were actually global shortages of GPUs and and part of the edge was actually getting access. So, you know, I remember

uh basically I I would go into a shop and buy two GPUs, which was the per customer limit, because it's like you don't really need more than that for personal computing at any point. And then my mum would walk in five minutes later and get two and then my mate would go in five minutes later and get two and then we'd walk away with six and so that was fundamentally, you know, um a little bit sketchy and and and not a um

a sort of scalable operation unless you had a lot lots of friends. So yeah, we we were we weren't early to the game. So we broke even and we I think in the end we pulled out about three Ethereum, sold the hardware, and you know my cut of the Ethereum is when I sort of use that as a guess pro uh prompt to research the space. Yeah, man, that's uh that's such a cool story.

Um, fill the gap for me. I know there's a little bit that happened between this point of your um mining venture Between then and when you actually started uh your firm Proxima, um what took place uh in between there?

Mining happened in twenty seventeen, uh early twenty seventeen, and then towards the end, um that's where we we wound it down and uh sold the miners and and sort of recuperated most of our our cash, but had a lot of exposure to crypto now. Um at the end of twenty eighteen, that's when I had finished my I guess second last year of high school, so year eleven.

That's when I I I chose to um well, I a I mean I didn't really have a choice to drop out because I didn't have an alternative to do to high school. So I was enrolled for my final year. But during that, I guess, summer break I went over to Switzerland, um, where my mom's uh side of the family is from and did an internship at a family friends, you know, IT company. So I was there for three weeks.

uh you know, learning how to program in a team and realizing that, you know, my little hacking on the side for little websites was quite a way off. you know, what real software engineers were doing. And so that was quite exciting. Uh during that three those three weeks, I uh received a job offer. And I...

Uh startup in the space that was looking to basically enable fund management on-chain. And so there were some open questions like, okay, well, if you're going to manage funds on chain, you know, how do you prevent people just copy trading you and and and not paying you a performance fee. And so these had some, you know, um reasonably interesting ideas for how to use, you know, shielding and and and sort of zero knowledge proofs to hide that.

Um, as as it turned out, that was a bit ambitious'cause a lot of that tech had was you know, was still on a white paper and was not production grade. Um but I was there for four four months until you know, because of a disagreement with the founder, myself and two other members left. But, you know, by that point I had managed to, you know, uh delay my final year of high school.

for at least a year'cause I'd missed the first four months and I I was in a foreign country when my parents couldn't force me to go back into school or something. So I had about eight months to figure out what I wanted to do and and during that time, you know, tried a failed start up where we basically uh attempted me and the two others that had left

to create a margin trading platform. And this was you know before uh any of the real decentralized exchanges that we have today existed. And so we tried to create uh leveraged trading before the industry had even really solved

actual trading and so that may have been a timing problem for us and and that startup also uh didn't go anywhere. But at the end of it I sort of came out the other side with an with a better understanding and basically saying, well, we need to get fundamental trading right first.

And so that's when I um co founded a project I'm still uh involved in which was called VexChange which You know, at the time I had attempted to create a a a version of Uniswap uh up front, but what had happened is before I got the chance to write a line of code, um I opened my newsletter, my um Ethereum Foundation funding grant newsletter.

uh and saw that Uniswap themselves had received a hundred thousand dollar grant uh and had basically done exactly what I was going to do. So that sort of killed the idea before it took off. But at the end of it, I was able to use their source code because it was uh licensed in such a fashion and I was able to use their source code to sort of kick start, you know, a side business, uh which was basically deploying that source code with an admin fee.

on on a competing blockchain. So we weren't really competing with each other directly because we serve different markets, but I was using um his name was Hayden uh the founder of uh Uniswap. I was using his code to sort of uh get exposure to that space and that's where I sort of ended.

twenty eighteen is, you know, well I had um a a a reasonable stint at a startup for four months where I got paid and and sort of did okay. And then I had a an eight month unsuccessful margin trading stint but end of the year with this um you know, being uh one of the two co founders in this decentralized exchange, which um required pretty limited maintenance once once we launched it. And so that that sort of just kept running on the side um at the end of the year.

Okay. And I think at some point during uh this period you also wrote your first arbitrage programme?

Yeah, so at the end of twenty eighteen the the den the decentralized exchange launched. And so what we found was pretty quickly that one, there was a lot of, you know, traction and adoption'cause it was sort of the first mover and people had pent up uh demand for this sort of thing in the V chain ecosystem. But what we

sort of saw is that people would add liquidity and then other people would perform trades uh without any sort of real regard for what the wider market was doing. So it was quite isolated. And, you know, if if you've done arbitrage before that immediately sort of should send off sort of, you know, warning signals. It's like, okay, well, this market is is dislocated from the rest of the market.

you know, that represents one an opportunity a and two a problem, right? There were users that when the price had already moved, you know, one or two percent above the market average, would continue to buy and push the price. Even further. And in order to try and I guess limit the harm that they could do to themselves. And you know, as one of the co-founders and sort of I guess business owner.

I had I decided to build an arbitrage bot because, you know, some people were doing it manually but no one was doing it in an automated fashion. I was like, Okay, well I need to fix the the quality of the pricing on on my exchange, so let's go ahead and um

you know build this arbitrage bottle that will basically because we had uh a near one hundred percent overlap with a a centralized exchange called Ocean X. We were able to basically with with sort of two integrations ARB back and forth between those two markets um or two sets of markets and keep them in line and so the guarantee ended up becoming is that if you trade on on VEXCHANGE, you know, you'll pay a different fee schedule, but roughly speaking you should be able to access

you know, uh some of the liquidity on Ocean X, you know, proportional though to the capital that we had available. But generally speaking your starting price would be equal and then depending on your order size you may get some more slippage. But if you chunked it you'd be you'd be pretty good. It was very powerful because you know, a lot of users would use Vexchange as a way to sort of sell small amounts of like the rewards they had accrued in the in the previous week or so.

And, you know, it it was very frictionless, right? You would basically execute a single transaction on your mobile phone and you'd be done. Whereas, you know, if you wanted to go to a centralized exchange, that required multiple transactions of you moving the funds to the exchange, logging into the exchange, executing the trade, you know, settling the trade and then pulling the funds off the exchange. And and this was sort of a one-click

uh and done and so i it became quite popular and we were able to sort of bootstrap off the back off the back of existing liquidity, which I guess most exchanges do through the means of sort of arbitragers and market makers. And so we were that for Vexchange. Or I was that for VexChange um in the early early months and uh sort of all through twenty nineteen. Yeah, right. I had no idea about this part um o of your story. So is this exchange that you set up, is that still operating today?

Yeah. Um so w we basically launched in in January of twenty nineteen. So we had done sort of all of the work in the late um months of twenty eighteen, got it audited and then launched start of twenty nineteen. Um and because uh I guess DeFi applications don't really have a back end, or rather their back end is the smart contract that

sits um on chain and cannot be updated or broken unless it it it it has a sort of fundamental um, you know uh vulnerability. Because of this, we basically didn't have to touch um the smart contracts for the sort of two and a half years that they ran before we before we launched a V2. So the only real workload was around, you know, community management, education, and um the front end, which

my uh co-founder sort of was the one who who built the front end. And so he managed a lot of that through that two and a half year period where I was mainly

You know, doing the R bot, giving him advice and and then sort of, you know, the back end stuff which ha is what I had built was immutable. So even if I had ideas on how to improve it, there was nothing I could do short of deploying a new version. So yeah, for two and a half years that sort of sat in a nearly still state, just sort of accruing users and and and going through peaks and troughs in terms of activity, but always doing reasonable activity.

And then um, you know, about six months ago we w actually revisited and said, Okay, let's launch a version two You know, Uniswap themselves had done a V two by this point and in fact they were looking at a V three as well, so we were well behind the game.

But the V two, you know, sort of represented a significant improvement in the sort of code quality and and what could be achieved. So we we went through that and now the project has really come alive because we've uh gone through a A token launch, so if Exchange sort of has its own community that in the sort of coming months will be, I guess, expected to govern the future of it rather than, you know, myself and my co-founder Kenneth.

being the sole decision makers. So yeah, that that that was basically on almost on ice for two and a half years in the sort of spring back. Um

through community demand, we sort of kept getting messages like when are you going to, you know, um further the project? When are you going to launch a token? When are you going to, you know, do governance and and and do extra things and all these ideas that, you know, we hadn't been pushing ourselves. We sort of, you know, Got got pushed by the community and and now that project has really sort of come alive as about a team of five uh working on it um full time at the moment.

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So how did Proxima come about? Like I feel like this was probably inspired by the arbitrage programme. For sure. So um my my exposure to arbitrage, I mean, apart from some manual arbitrage uh in like the Aussie Bitcoin AUD markets when they're when they had a premium, although that was largely stifled by the fact that it took six months to open an account overseas during the twenty seventeen crypto boom. So it was hard to get real uh real good liquidity there.

But um in terms of yeah, my my experience in in algo trading and arbitrage was was limited to VEXCHANGE. And so, you know, halfway through twenty nineteen, after I'd been doing this ARB for about six months. I met my, you know, current Proxima co founder, uh, Bernie, who himself had done, you know, various forms of algo trading or uh software development in the traditional financial space. So you know, he had done mean reversion

you know, algorithms on on the S P five hundred and other markets that were very, very different to what I was targeting. So I was going for the extremely illiquid lower end of town and he was going for sort of high frequency, you know, super high volume. um end of town and we sort of you know merged our our collective understanding and sort of decided, yep, you know, the crypto markets represent a step change in innovation in financial markets.

um and a new opportunity to tap into and a lot of the old ideas will work but there'll also be a lot of new ideas and it's sort of something we both uh care a lot about and wanted to sort of focus on together. So Yeah, that's when we we we w came together and found a Proxima. I will say though, it wasn't immediately like day one we said, Yes, we were doing market making and let's just go a hundred percent. Day one was basically, well, we think market making will be

achievable and good and a and worth exploring. But we also want to explore mining. We came back to mining. And um that that worked a little bit better than the previous time, although We um we found our most success in doing a few OTC miner deals, which is basically you'd buy in bulk at a discount and then sell uh once those miners were closer to delivery. And, you know, fundamentally your risk was just the price movement.

during those two or three months you had to wait for delivery, but you would you would be looking at a sort of twenty to thirty percent price appreciation. And so if you had a hedging strategy on the on the Bitcoin price, um you could uh you could probably make that quite risk free. I'm sure it's become more efficient today, but in general the whole mining market is is very sort of OTC relationship based and highly inefficient. So we played in there for a bit.

But in terms of actually mining, none of that really became a huge success again because of the economies of scale problem. You know, we we this time we threw a bit more money out. We threw about a hundred and fifty thousand AUD and and while that represented, you know, sufficient money to do research and and optimize your purchase price and your PowerPoint, y it was never enough to actually, you know, set up anything sort of industrial scale. So we always had to rent

you know, facilities and and that put overhead on it. So yeah, we we ended up basically saying interesting space but not as attractive and we don't have a uh

uh competitive advantage that we do in in market making. So we focused on on Proxima, which was our market making and arbitrage efforts. And Using, I guess, our collective knowledge, we sort of developed a couple of strategies and then built a team um mainly out of previous employees of Bernie at his um software company in in the traditional financial space.

and some additional new people that have joined. So yeah, it was quite a I guess a smooth ride to rebuild that team'cause there's a lot of familiar faces there um and a lot of, you know, preexisting knowledge on how to build similar systems but in a different different market.

Right, so a couple questions. I'm just curious to know how you actually came to meet your co founder, Bernie, and also the thought process on why Why you wanted to go down this path of bringing on more people, like getting other people involved, like why this wasn't something you could just um, you know, get up and running by yourself? Like what was the thought process behind that? Yeah, I mean the story of how I met Bernie uh was I guess

a pretty mundane one. Um so my dad played in a soccer team, uh in an over forties soccer team with a guy named Damien Grace. And Damien Grace was a former employee of Bernie's, and and my dad basically knew that he did something with hedge funds, is the way he put it. More accurately, Damien Grace uh worked on IT infrastructure for object trading, which was Bernie's uh well one the I guess the company Bernie co founded.

um previously and what they did was create um sort of standardized uh interfaces to traditional markets so futures and and options markets they created like a unified uh API uh that that you know banks and and and fund managers could use to to to um route orders. And so

My dad thought, you know, some translated that to be basically funds management, which is something I was interested in because I, you know, I was doing my at this point I was doing my own crypto investments and a little bit of ARB. And so I was, you know, relatively, you know, in that rabbit hole. And so my dad tried to set up um you know a a coffee um meeting with uh

grace, but it ended up ba he ended up ba basically pushing back and saying, Look, you know, I think giving your sons into crypto, just just talk to Bernie, my boss, right? Because he's he's gone completely off the deep end and is, you know, all in on crypto.

And so, you know, he he's worth talking to and, you know, I don't understand it. So, you know, he's gonna be a more interesting discussion. So, um, you know, basically the next day, um, Bernie called me on the phone. We spoke for like an hour and a half. And then the following day I drove out to Macquarie Park.

Uh, he was renting some office space at the Uni's incubator there. Well, I say renting, it was actually given to him for free because the uni had just set it up and wanted to get people in there. So he was arbitraging the rental markets out there, which was pretty cool.

Um, so yeah, I met him uh sort of mi around midday and it was meant to just be like a lunch meeting for a couple of hours, but it ended up being a lunch meeting for a couple of hours and a dinner meeting over pizza. So we spent something like eight hours eight hours straight just talking about market making uh mining and and and currencies and theses and all these exciting things. I was like, yeah, this is what I want to be doing. I don't want to go back.

uh to, you know, any form of structured education. I don't just want to get in the deep end. And so we sort of set out there and and we kicked off mining and we kicked off market making. and and once they had the proof and c of concept up and running for market making we said, Yeah, this is exciting enough, let's just go go in on this.

And I guess to answer the question why not just do it ourselves is is we since the start basically had um the position that look you you could try and find, you know, a small cut out in the market that you try and defend and and you use a lot of, you know, secret source and and and tricks to to get an advantage. But also there's just a vast number of assets and markets in the space. So

we'd rather build a you know a big team and go for a generic broad solution and connect to every market than try and you know be extra creative and and win on in a few c in a few key markets. So our approach has always been around, you know, heavy software engineering.

and and sort of very clean architecture to get us to the level of scale that we think we need to be truly profitable. And so yeah, it's been a it's been a play around scale, not so much in terms of capital, but in terms of technology, connections and um, you know, trading volumes and that sort of stuff. So that that always pushed us towards having a bigger team rather than a smaller one because we don't have a few key traders that pull in crazy P and L. We have a bunch of engineers

that, you know, spend each day optimizing the system and building new connections and and building new features. And so that, you know, aligned also more with, you know, Bernie's previous experience at at object trading. So it's quite easy to build out that large team. And and we're continuing to build it today. And up to this point in the story, you are in Australia, or Sydney more specifically, but I know that you've just recently

relocated to Cayman Islands. Um there's a couple reasons behind that. Um is that something you'd like to talk about? I think that's somewhat interesting.

I guess the the the precursor is that each person's uh situation is a little bit different and so this is not uh tax advice. But in terms of what we got down the line from our advisors was that if you want to run a a funds management business out of Australia and you're doing the I guess the sort of critical work, you're doing the decision making in Australia, then there's a a very non zero chance that that

activity will be classified as sort of an Australian sourced activity and even if you manage like foreign investors' money, um the ATO will be looking for withholding tax on that. So, you know, from that point of view, that that sort of one fundamental, I guess, realization led us to say, well you know, if we want to be an internationally competitive business, then we need to, you know, offshore our sort of key operations. And and I guess that's where Cayman Islands came in.

It was um, I guess one of the places in the world that would give me a work uh permit without having completed high school. So Originally we were looking at Singapore and it was like, Oh yeah, that seems like a good close location, nice time zone, clear regulatory structure.

And we got pretty far and we said, wait a second, I I haven't even finished. How am I going to get into Singapore? Do they have any programs for people like me? And and we we sort of didn't look too far before, you know, our one of our advisors said, Look, We can look into programs, but I know for sure um the Cayman Islands has a program where if you're um a technology company which we work

able to meet the c uh the criteria, then you can get a sort of fast tracked work permit because they're trying to build a bit of a tech scene over here. And so, you know, I said, okay, well, let's just go there. Um keep it simple. And uh I guess the the zero percent um income tax doesn't hurt either. Um, one of the most frustrating experiences in my life was uh trying to figure out my taxable income

on three thousand DeFi transactions that I'd made uh a year prior and then had to walk through with a forensic microscope and then realise, yeah, this is this is not the way. So yeah, I I enjoy the freedom of of of being able to not have to worry about the accounting implications of taking a punt, right? Like you you stop being a gambler as soon as everything everything you do causes you that much grief at June thirty. So I'm quite excited.

uh for that future where I can, you know, have a punt without crying in in front of my account books at uh a little bit later. So yeah, that that's also a nice personal benefit for myself.

Right. And and what is the model of Proxima? Is it to take on funds and manage funds of others, or is it more of a prop model? I mean originally we thought, Oh yeah, this will be prop and then as we explored the space a little bit further we'd like actually okay, well there's no prime brokerage and you know, most of the leverage you get is isolated to a particular venue and is is done on a collateralized basis. So there's no credit most of the time.

So really this is actually quite capital intensive. If you want to trade on 200 different exchanges with let's say, you know, 50 markets uh per exchange. And we're talking then about something like um you know, ten thousand markets. Um Doing that requires you if you're doing spot trading, uh, futures is a slight exception sometimes. But if you're doing spot trading, that that means you have to fund ten thousand orders. And um if you're doing

semi decent volume per order, um, like a like a dedicated market maker style thing, that ends up being quite a lot of capital. And and not only that, like depending on your level of sophistication, you may have redundant capital as well. It's'cause you it's like, well

We trade, you know, chain link here, but we trade it on two pairs, BDC and USDT, but we have to fund, you know, the the 90th percentile demand, right? Like when some big guy comes along and wants to buy, you know, a hundred K of Chainlink. you know, unless we just wanna step out of the m the order book, we have to have a hundred K of chain links sitting there. So, you know, you you can optimize that with like margin trading platforms.

and various types of of leverage and lending, but fundamentally it's it's very capital intensive. If you compare that with traditional finance where you know, you're trading on exchanges but you're using the same broker and your broker does, you know, um, sort of nets out your position s and gives you, um, you know, cross asset or I guess um

It gives you cross-margin. Like if you're long and short on two different exchanges, that cancels out. The same is not true for crypto. So if you're long and short on two different exchanges in crypto, you've got to fund both of them and collateralise both and if one of them's losing you need to be moving money to keep that position above water. So it's far more capital intensive. And so given that we we went for the fund structure and it also allowed us the flexibility

to explore, you know, a wider range of strategies. Not every strategy needs to be ultra low time frame high return. We can have a few, you know, slower trades that are still decent, but, you know, are maybe more like public fund level than prop capital where you're really resource constrained and so you need to target that operon of return.

Okay, that is uh that will make sense, yeah. Let's get into the strategies a lot more. You talk about market making here, um, although I know arbitrage is a big part of what you do still, I don't know if you're sort of using those two terms uh interchangeably. Um, but can you speak to the arbitrage more. Like imagine I'm a complete Idiot. Um, say the world of c crypto is completely foreign to me. Explain the arbitrage trades in a way that I could understand.

Sure. Um just quickly on on market making versus arbitrage. I think i originally we thought, okay, we'll do market making and arbitrage. And we sort of said the and quite explicitly as two things, but it like you said, it's like i do you differentiate? And the answer is less and less so, right? Um they're they're both highly related and and at most it's a technicality about whether you were

um a maker or a taker, but it's fundamentally about trading at a better price than than you think is fair. So that's what both of those trades do. But strictly speaking to arbitrage the way it sort of manifests uh manifests for us is that we'll trade the same uh symbol. So, you know, a good example would be BTC against the US dollar is a is a popular symbol in the industry. And we'll trade that on a multitude of markets.

And so in having those connections to multiple markets and having a picture of multiple order books, you can sort of compute what the fair price or the global best bid and offer is. Um and once you know what the fair price of an asset is, um you're sort of free to quote rates that are worse than the fair price.

Um if you were to quote better, that would represent uh a p uh a theoretical loss for you, right, on that order. So it would always quote a rate that is w worse than what you think is is truly fair. And if someone is to fill that order while you're quoting it, you can then hopefully trade at the fair rate. And so that hopefully is where all of the uh I guess innovation complexity and edge is. And it l usually comes down to speed and sometimes also comes down to like sophistication and

and number of market views and and aggregation and other things. So if you want a concrete example, it would be like if we saw that Coinbase or LMAX or big exchange was trading at fifty thousand USD on the buy side and fifty thousand and one on the sell side. And if we went then to a smaller exchange and squoted

four nine hundred and ninety, i.e. ten dollars uh lower on the bid, and then five thousand and eleven, i.e. ten dollars above on the ask. If we were to get fueled on either and the markets did not move during that period of time. uh we would sort of make ten dollars per full Bitcoin traded, which, you know, as a as a percentage is is is very low, right? That's I guess twenty basis points, if my finger math is correct. So um

But, you know, if if if you do that as a spread, that's forty basis point spread, uh which is zero point four percent, which is, you know, if if if if you can trade through that, that's that's actually very attractive. So I guess the best way to describe it is um, you know finding the global price and then quoting rates that are worse. So kinda like what the people at the airports do when you get really bad uh currency rates except

In a competitive market, anyone is free to compete with you, so you don't have the same monopoly. So you must be a much more aggressive and competitive with your rates. And is a higher likelihood that you get picked off and and uh and are stuck quoting a rate that is no longer accurate because the market has moved out from under you.

Okay. And when you're talking about quoting on these different markets, I mean, which what type of markets or products are these? I know you s we're using the example here of BTC um and USDT. A are these the perpetual futures or what products are we talking about here?

we trade perpetuals and spot frequently, but in terms of I guess our core infrastructure or our you know what we like if you were to define what Proxima is, right now it's just a spot trading firm in terms of like our core core strategy that we deem to be Innovative.

Um and and the reason it's it's just spot is'cause we see that as like the first order of trading, right? So I mean I guess it's in the name, but if derivative is the derivative of a physical asset or an index Um in the cases where it's a derivative of a physical asset, i.e. Bitcoin and ETH,

even if that's an oxymoron because they're not really physical, in those cases it it serves you well to be able to trade that physical asset extremely efficiently. Because once you can do that, uh you can trade the perps extremely efficiently because you can lay off all that risk very cheaply.

Um but if you're if you're paying a huge fee or or spread or slippage to lay off risk, then any sort of market neutral trading on the perps or options that you do is going to be very difficult or unprofitable. So as a first order or as a first step, you need to trade spot very well or you need to find someone who does and partner with them, slash outsource to them, which we

you know, we had the view that we could do it better than anyone else, so we didn't even bother going with the outsource step. But, you know, if you were setting up a new firm, you'd probably start there and then maybe later build your own execution. So yeah, we see it as as as as critical to have

really good um, you know, physical slash spot trading to build all of your other strategies on top of because if you have an option strategy that requires you to hedge and you're you know you're bleeding out each time you trade spots Um it's not gonna work out for you because you're you're leaving too much money on the table um when you trade inefficiently. So yeah, as a first step, you have to get your spot.

um in order and then you can move on to higher order uh derivatives like uh perpetuals and few um and options. So what's an just so we don't lose anyone here, including myself, um, what is an example of a spot exchange? Like who would that be? Sure. Um so so a spot exchange, um, funnily enough, a l a lot of exchanges offer multiple. But uh Binance is the traditional most dominant spot exchange in crypto. Although that may

uh change in the future we'll see. Um and roughly what that means is when both the assets in the pair are a physical crypto, i.e. a crypto that you can withdraw off of the exchange, that's what a spot market is. So when you swap um, you know, 10 ETH for Bitcoin on a physical exchange,

you can then withdraw that bitcoin immediately. And that immediacy means that the person who traded with you must have had the Bitcoin unless there's some fractional reserve stuff going on, which is, you know, kind of um a taboo in the crypto world, uh fractionalization. So that's that's where the capital intensivity uh intensivity comes from. It's like you could have enough, you know, US dollars in your account to cover the risk of that trade.

But if you don't have the actual physical asset to deliver, you won't be able to enter that trade. And so that prerequisite of having and paying the physical asset on Trade execution is what defines a spot exchange. And that's different from a futures exchange, which may delay settlement. until the expiry of the future, or perpetual will never settle and will instead lean towards economic incentives to keep the prices in line.

And fundamentally, you know, spot I guess is the uh most pure form of trading in that that's what people generally agree is the fair price of an asset. Okay. The perpetuals and futures uh same thing, right? Um so so perpetrals are basically um futures that settle every day in a way and get rolled. Um is is one sort of slightly naive way to look at it. So the way I'll use FTX as an example.

The way perpetual futures on FTX work is that every hour uh the price difference between the FTX perp market and the spot market, one twenty fourth of that will get paid out uh to whichever side is is is sort of I guess below or at a discount. So what what does that mean? Well, if the uh FTX perp is above the spot market, i.e. let's say The FTX perp is at a thousand dollars and the spot market is at nine hundred and ninety.

then anyone who is longing the perp will pay a funding rate to anyone who is shorting. And what this means is you can sell at$1,000 on the perp and buy back at$9.90 on spot to hedge. And you'll also get an interest rate for your trouble. And the reason the interest rate is important is because without it, there wouldn't be a strong economic guarantee that the prices would track each other.

So yeah, um I I guess perps and futures you can just say there's economic reasons why these assets should be worth one to one with spot and then th any differential can roughly be explained to either an interest rate that exists within the market or um some sort of cost of carry like uh oil futures where you actually have to store the oil and so they can go negative but

Um, in terms of crypto, there's no storage cost. So really it all just represents an interest rate. Uh because on perpetuals and futures you can get um far more leverage than you can on spot. Um and that's why they trip typically trade at a premium uh during bull markets'cause you know, people want to leverage up and and go long and so um, you know, spot is the I guess the most pure form of trading and the derivatives hope to emulate the price return of of spot, but they

cannot always guarantee it immediately. There may be some delay. Either a settlement process in expiring futures or an a an effective interest rate that encourages the price to return uh to the norm. Otherwise you'll be rewarded if it doesn't.

Okay. But most of the arbs or predominantly all the arbs which you're doing are in the spot market, is that correct? So yeah, this is where I guess at an interesting point in that what we consider to be our defining uh product is not the product that makes um delivers our current return. So at the moment, the best way to describe this is that we spend most of our money, like north of eighty percent at the moment.

building spot arbitrage and and getting that really right and engineering that really well. Uh but we make um more like well we make a hundred percent or let's say ninety nine percent of our money. uh from two types of trades. Uh one is the basis trade, which is is is often shorting the perps um and buying physical. And I and remember I said there was an interest rate slash reward.

If there's a price difference and and so that's what we capitalize on is the price difference and that interest rate. And and the other source of revenue is yield farming. So those two trades uh represent, roughly speaking, um yield uh sort of a yield bearing assets or or interest rate uh trading as sort of a couple ways to look at it.

And so those are relatively low tech. So the basis trade has technology and that's all around execution. So that's that strict R between one or or two or more venues. Uh but yield farming is very low tech in that um the way to differentiate a good and a bad yield farmer Is really around their due diligence process. And that may require an engineer to look at the smart contracts and sort of look at differences and look at risks.

But it doesn't really involve any like um, you know, runtime risk management systems. And so you don't have like liquidation points off. And and m often your your your risk is not in price movements but in in counterparty events. uh basically a smart contract getting exploited. So

that meant the barrier to entry for us was very low. And so that's where we make a lot of our return is in, you know, we think doing better due diligence than a lot of the other firms in the space because of the knowledge we have from being in the space. Um and then on the basis trade we invested um in basically building a very very narrow tech tool to just execute on this simple trade efficiently.

But we're not building a whole system around it. And in fact the the long term goal is to roll that trade into our core core um trading engine. But that that core trading engine currently makes something on order like on one percent. Of our of our attribution. And that's because we haven't yet scaled it in terms of funds and number of exchanges and number of pairs, but because we're still building it out. So it's very much RD.

that. But that that's, you know, what we deem to be our long term sustainable edge is if we can get that strategy and that trading engine off the ground, we'll be able to build all of our other strategies on top of it and and reap the rewards of of the tech investment we're currently uh undertaking. Right. Okay. So let's pick up on that basis trade. Just a few more questions around this because it's it's particularly interesting.

So you're trading the um perpetuals against the spot um around the funding rate or whenever that uh comes around. I think some exchanges I think you said before FTX is every hour. Is that what you said? Yeah, FTX is every hour button. What I think summer like eight hours. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah, that was that was the status quo when BitMEX was the leading market, so a lot of exchanges copied that.

So how are you actually executing these trades? Like, do you put these trades on, like buy one, short the other? uh right before that um sort of that clock ticks over, or is there, you know, some more nuance to it?

We mainly trade FTX. Uh well that's where the one we most think about, uh, in terms of designing our strategy. So that's every one hour and and that One hour usually smooths it sufficiently because the way the funding rate is calculated is you take the the average premium over the hour.

And you divide it by 24 because there's 24 hours in a day. And what that means is over a day, you expect to realize the premium in in funding. So if the premium's half a percent, you would get half a percent in a day. Um and that makes it quite uneconomical to sustain large premiums for a long period of time because you will pay a lot of funding if you're buying and pushing the premium up further. So We really focus on entry. So what is the current premium? And we s we rely on FTX's indexes to

reward us appropriately. So we're not looking at the funding rate as much as we're looking at what is the price differential between this and spot. Because if we can lock in a good price differential, let's say if we can sell at uh zero point three percent um above the spot markets on on the futures.

uh exchange or on FTX, what that means is if the funding rate were to immediately collapse and the premium went immediately to zero, we could then exit and realize that thirty basis points. However, if the premium you know, were to sustain itself, we would roughly expect to get thirty basis points over the next twenty four hours if the premium was around for that long, which would be rare, but if it was, that there's what we would expect. And so it's it's

by design, right, these contracts are supposed to be win no matter what, if you trade according to the premiums and you help make the market efficient. So because we are on the market making side of the contract We are Less likely to be affected by the premium movements because if we short at a premium and it immediately collapses, we can exit.

and and realize that differential as a as a straight up, you know, profit we take home. However, if we short at a at a point three percent premium and it suddenly skyrockets to one percent We can either load up more if we have free capital, but if we don't have free capital, then we can just sit on our hands. and and basically realize a higher funding rate. Yes.

strictly speaking, our position will be in a slight loss, but because of the way the contract is structured, you know, we can be confident that if we are long a hundred Ethereum and short a hundred physical Ethereum, then no matter what uh we will eventually be able to exit at a neutral price or close to neutral price, realize the premium, as well as any funding rate that came across during that time. So roughly speaking, if you can get a good entry

you rely on the exchange to pay you your dues and and we're pretty confident that we'll get paid from FTX. It's it's worked out reasonably well um so far. Okay. That's interesting because that's one of the things I was gonna ask you next is like how do you actually flatten this trade? So really you're waiting for those the spread, if you will, to come back into line before you then just hit market on each um leg of the trade.

Yeah. I mean w we will um because I guess this type of market making is quite sensitive to um slippage, we'll try and optimize the exit and entry and we'll favor um I guess we're I forgot what the term is that a lot of the Bitcoin is like, but we're not in a rush to do anything. So

When the premium collapses, we'll start exiting, but we'll try and minimize slippage and not just, you know, um push the market too fast. And so we'll, you know, we'll work limit orders and passive orders um at various locations. And and try and exit.

for whatever reason the premium bounces back, then we'll just sit on our hands again. Um or or even load up more. And so we'll be guided by what the what the premium is doing and we'll have the, I guess, belief that the funding rate will roughly follow Um, you know, there are some markets where the indexes are not as high quality and so we we're just careful of where we trade. If we if we if we're trading on a futures market where one of the physical markets is one we cannot access.

And fundamentally if that market were to hit a period of irrationality where for whatever the reason the price went um haywire there. we wouldn't be able to capitalize on that and we'd be stuck in a position where, you know, the index is either manipulated or inefficient and we can't bring it back into line ourselves because we aren't connected. So, you know, in order to manage that risk

we favor markets where we are connected to the spot venues as well. But again, generally speaking, there's a lot of other firms trying to ARB out um all the parts of crypto. So even if we ourselves aren't ARBing it,

we can generally rely on someone else doing it. Um so yeah, we'll we'll we'll basically we'll we'll we'll sort of react to uh the movements in the premiums ra and and when they do move um against us we will look to exit um efficiently and when they do move into an interesting position we'll try and enter again

relatively efficiently. And the you know, I guess the one time where that maybe changes is in sort of big market events, you may see the premiums spike or or or heavy discounts come around. And then you that's when you would maybe w quite maybe not pull out the market order, but you'll you'll start crossing and getting more aggressive because you just wanna do a lot of volume while the opportunities there'cause it's more temporary. But but in in in normal market operation premiums are

they're not highly volatile in the sense that uh you usually have, you know, a persistent premium for multiple hours. So you don't have to try and get the perfect order in. You know, you'll have thousands of orders that you execute over over that period of time. Right. Now you kinda touched on it there, but it brings up a good point.

How competitive are these sorts of opportunities? Because, you know, in traditional finance arbitrage and sort of easier trades or you know, you describe this as a low tech kind of trade.

You know, those opportunities normally don't last for too long. Um, they're normally very competitive to try and capture. You know, why do these opportunities exist? Uh how competitive is the space to actually be able to realize these opportunities and and how long do you think it's, you know, these opportunities are gonna last for? Yeah, so... I mean...

I would say obviously these opportunities are time limited in nature because, you know, if if they don't disappear, um, you know, then then Proximal will make sure they they disappear, right? If you give us enough time. So If we if I can guarantee that, then there's a lot of other firms that are trying to do the same and can roughly guarantee that as well.

and and there's no you know, doesn't matter who wins, the the end result will be that these disappear over time. I think the reason that hasn't yet happened today is that previous, you know, bull runs and and and uh you know I guess huge activity periods were largely retail driven, whereas this one is seems a little bit more institutional. And what that means is there were less firms that were coming in with the goal of of making a market and mainly just people coming in with the goal of

like taking a taking a a position, right? And there's sort of this tension between people who make the market um and those who want to just leverage up and and go long or short, uh because, you know, the ones that want to leverage up and go long or short create the opportunity and the ones that make the market sort of remove the opportunity.

And I think there was a historical imbalance that retail just had more capital than those that were trying to make a market. And obviously as time goes on, you know, the people that make a market and do it well will grow their capital via, you know, strict alpha and and potential also fundraising. Um but I think the reason interest rates have been and and it still are so high in crypto is that you don't have this cheap money that you do in the traditional system, right? Like

in the traditional system if you wanna like ARB the S P five hundred, like you're borrowing, you know, at the at you know at the central bank rate and you're doing it as a as a private bank. You're not you know individuals aren't using their, you know, their savings to go and ARB S P five hundred. But in crypto you see a lot of people using their, you know, their own cash to do these ARBs they're not getting

you know, this this free money or or close to free money handed to them. So it's a lot harder to fund all of these, you know, delta neutral positions if you have to use your own money to do so. And there's not that many banks that lend to crypto firms.

um in in serious size. And so I think there's just been a a lack of credit in the space because the you don't have at least I mean, definitely if you compare it to traditional finance, there's a lot less credit in crypto than in traditional finance and that's why you don't see this

In traditional finance is one, the firms that do this are very wealthy, so they can fund a lot of trades themselves. And the seriously large trades that are just interest rate plays are are funded off of, you know, cheap money and and not of, you know, primary holdings uh like it is in crypto.

And and it's only a matter of time before, you know, more banks play with crypto and the people in crypto who are doing this get wealthier and eventually, you know, this will trend to zero. But it's been around for a very long time and and I'm surprised it's it's still around in a way, but you know as long as, you know, w we we don't hold this um these trades as

static, right? We expect the P and L to deteriorate over time and and so continued innovation is the only way to um to to make this sustainable. Um and that's where it won't be a low tech trade like you said. It will trend towards uh the traditional financial experience of, you know, the person with the uh the the straightest uh microwave tower link wins.

Um but until until I mean another thing that's quite interesting is that there's like just so many assets, right? Um, because of the largely unregulated nature. It's like you wanna list a new asset in the in the old world, like you're gonna see that coming, you know, three months out.

In crypto that thing will show up tomorrow and you've got to be ready, otherwise there's money that you're leaving on the table. So I think that sort of rapid innovation that the lack of regulation has enabled means that it's harder to keep up and harder to keep the markets rational because in until you know you can bring and log along your your FPGAs and and hook them up to Uniswap, you know, you're gonna struggle to just

uh hyper efficiently arbit all out like you could in the in the old worlds. And, you know, anecdotally I I have heard of traditional financial firms not entering crypto for one reason or the other. And you also hear of of firms that have made it work, but it's not Um amazingly obvious. Like it is, you know, they they sometimes just come along with their algorithms and and then just write a new connection and expect it to work and then sometimes it doesn't work.

quite how they they envisioned. And so yeah, I think there's for whatever reason, it's taken longer than expected for the big players to to get involved. Oliver, I'd be very interested to hear more about the yield farming side of Proxima, but I think we might have to save that for another chat. Let me just ask you one last question before we wrap this up here.

And I know you're very focused on the couple trades that you're building out at the moment, but are there any new developments in crypto that have got you interested? Like is there anything on the horizon you're kind of looking into um yeah, what has you excited moving forward?

i actually, sadly, I think in the last bull run, the amount of as you could imagine, the amount of noise to signal has gone up in a very bad way, right? So Um a lot of the DeFi projects you see, uh the the approach is what works on Ethereum, let's copy paste it.

brand it to m my local chain and relaunch it. And so in terms of new ideas that are exciting and refreshing, there's not a huge amount that has really come out in the last six months or if there is, it's it's hard to find them because you have, you know, per new idea you'll have one hundred plus rehashings of an existing idea. So this may not be cutting edge but you know, I personally I am quite excited to see you know, where uh Ethereum can get when it actually delivers some of the

ever elusive and ever promised um technical upgrades they're talking about. So at a high level I think there's sort of two main upgrades. One is the moving from proof of work to proof of stake, which I think is is um necessarily to make the argument that these networks are going to be uh, you know, resistant uh to like a state attack and around for a hundred years is is you do need to have some form of proof of stake, I believe.

It's proof of work with its huge um, you know, amount of depreciation doesn't provide quite as nice a security model. And then uh the the ever promised sharding upgrade uh is is something that will be interesting to see because one thing you benefit from today in crypto is that everything is is is roughly speaking co located in the same

uh space of execution. So what what this means to an end user is that you can um guarantee that if you do a trade on Uniswap and then you sell it on a on another decentralized exchange, you can basically set up a rule that says if both of these execute then Everything is fine. If either of them fails, revert the transaction.

And that's something that like HFT would love, right? In in the old world, because the big the only risk, right? The biggest risk or or pretty much the only risk is is that in that you know, in those ten milliseconds where you're field on one venue and not on the other.

uh i is that somehow the price moves and you can't get out that legging risk and it doesn't exist in DeFi. So seeing if that property will be maintained through these upgrades is quite interesting.'Cause, you know, if if i fundamentally, I mean, if if Ethereum cannot raise its its sort of capacity, uh this whole space will have been

uh a failed project or or at least a a uh an alternative to Ethereum will be sorely needed. So yeah, I think that's that's sort of the maybe not exciting development that that I would have been able to speak to in the bear market with all the new projects that had come out there, but it's definitely the uh I guess the spaces

um, you know, challenge. It's like, okay, we have a lot of money and a lot of froth in the space, but can we actually make this, you know, have have a real impact on people's lives? And I'd say today it hasn't had a huge impact. beyond making a bunch of people very rich and a bunch of people very poor. Um but if you know, if you want this thing to actually replace the traditional financial system and have an everlasting impact.

then the technologies have to mature and and I think in the next one or two years there's some key um points of execution that depending how they go uh will will determine how successful the entire space is. Is there a timeline for when these uh couple changes you just mentioned here to the Ethereum network are expected to take place? with I guess all software engineering and especially like open source software engineering, our timelines are

uh very subjective. But the I guess officially um or as official as you can get in a in a decentralized uh project accepted timeline is that we will see, you know, proof of work deprecated and the I guess uh solidification of the Ethereum um issuance model occur quarter one of next year, so I guess within the next four months is is the stated target. and then the first step of of improving capacity, uh, the thing I referred to as sharding.

they are aiming for end of that same year. So twenty twenty two Q four. But, you know, I think the Q one target seems reasonable given the advanced s na uh state of that change. The um the Q four target we'll have to see. Uh'cause I'm I'm not in touch. But That's the that's the I guess the current accepted rough estimate.

Okay. Okay. Well, Oliver, I'm gonna let you go. I really appreciate you taking the time to uh speak with me. It's been uh really great. If someone wants to find out more about yourself, um, are you online anywhere? I know you don't have a great presence out there. Yeah. Well, first, thanks for bringing me on the podcast. Uh was left field. I wasn't expecting this, but it was very good. Um, it's my first one.

So in terms of I guess um reaching out, um probably the most accessible and I'll have to double check my privacy settings, but is is Twitter. Um and that would uh would be proficient oce so um o C E so Oceana so that was roughly speaking proficient was taken, which is just an English word.

And O C E is is where Australia belongs to. So that's the extension. Rather than going with numbers, I preferred some characters. So I threw that in there to get the username roughly that I wanted. But I'm sure, you know, that can be dropped in the show notes or something if if there's a Any spelling issues there. But yeah, I'll I'll I'll confirm that with you after. Okay, for sure. I will pop that in the show notes. And would you like to share the Proxima website?

Yeah, so the the current Proxima website is uh Proxima dot capital, uh with the classic crypto disclaimer that, you know, things move at light speed and websites don't. Uh so that one's about uh six to nine months old. So, you know, if anything, uh is of interest, definitely reach out via email to clarify uh what the state of play is because it may have it may have shifted since what was on the site. But yeah, proxima.capital, that's the site.

Excellent man. Well again I appreciate your time and uh hopefully we can reconnect at some point to maybe talk more about yield farming. But until then, uh take care. Oh, thank you mate and and good luck with the uh the market opens down there. You've reached the end of this episode of Chat with Traders, but rest assured there are more episodes. And zero. if you leave a race Chat with traders.