Ep. 724 DeFi Lending Is Changing Fast — Spark’s CEO Explains the Future of On-Chain Lending

[SPEAKER_01]: All right, everybody, welcome back to another episode of the crypto 101 podcast. [SPEAKER_01]: I'm your co-host, Bryce, as always, joined by my good buddy across the country, Brennan Veman, Brennan, how are you doing, dude? [SPEAKER_01]: Good to see you. [SPEAKER_00]: Good to see you, the dynamic duo is back here. [SPEAKER_00]: I know a lot of the people out in the crypto 101 verse have been wonderin' and asking, and so it's good to have you back in, what a podcast.

[SPEAKER_00]: You know, we're just getting back into it again together, but really a electric podcast that we're going to have here today, perfect time to have them on, lock going on out here in the space, especially in DeFi. [SPEAKER_00]: So I'm pretty stoked. [SPEAKER_00]: I'm doing good. [SPEAKER_00]: I like I like what you did there. [SPEAKER_01]: It's electric because we've got the co-founder of Spark, Mr. Sam McPherson joining us today.

[SPEAKER_01]: Sam, thank you for joining the show and how are you doing? [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, thanks so much for having me. [SPEAKER_03]: I'm doing great. [SPEAKER_03]: Can't complain. [SPEAKER_01]: love it. [SPEAKER_01]: Well, we really appreciate you joining the show and we want to just dive straight into it. [SPEAKER_01]: This episode is going to cover all things defy, lending.

[SPEAKER_01]: We'll probably talk a little bit about the broader sky ecosystem and how these, you know, the stars are developing. [SPEAKER_01]: But first, let's just touch base, you know, briefly on your background and how you kind of got into crypto, what drew you to crypto, why are you building in this space?

[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, you could [SPEAKER_01]: AI, all these different industries, why crypto? [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, so I got into crypto. [SPEAKER_03]: I think like a lot of people as like a hobbyist investor at first, like for me I came in at the 2017 ICO cycle. [SPEAKER_03]: I got some, I was aware about Bitcoin before, but Ethereum smart contracts is me, my trade is a programmer, so this is kind of what really hooked me.

[SPEAKER_03]: And so just looking around for projects that would interest me and I stumbled across Maker in early 2018. [SPEAKER_03]: And from there, yeah, just kind of learning about the space over a couple years. [SPEAKER_03]: But eventually, I culminated into me joining as part of the core engineering team on what was Maker Dow at the time. [SPEAKER_03]: There's been since a rebrand to sky, but this is the original brand maker. [SPEAKER_03]: So I worked there for two years as an engineer.

[SPEAKER_03]: And then as part of this process, like there was a governance vote in 2022 to restructure the governance rebrandous sky all these types of changes that were coming. [SPEAKER_03]: So as part of this, we decided at one point me and various colleagues and other teams to launch spark, you know, then on title, but initially it was to launch a lending market and then. [SPEAKER_03]: This is kind of a grown since 2023 when we launched into spark of what it is today.

[SPEAKER_01]: I love it. [SPEAKER_01]: And if you think about spark at a high level, how would you classify it? [SPEAKER_01]: What is it and who's it for? [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, so Spark is a defy native lending protocol. [SPEAKER_03]: So users are able to deposit their stablecoins. [SPEAKER_03]: So it could be USDT, USDC, USDS. [SPEAKER_03]: They can deposit and do our product called Spark Savings.

[SPEAKER_03]: And then Spark operates one of the most sophisticated at-scale yield generation algorithms in the space. [SPEAKER_03]: And it's able to generate yield from, [SPEAKER_03]: defy loans, perpetual futures funding rates, RWA is basically rebalances between all these yield programs and such that it delivers the what we consider the best risk adjusted rate in the space to stablecoin users.

[SPEAKER_01]: And so it's not just for institutions, but anybody could [SPEAKER_01]: on on maybe the the real world asset side and the the lending side it's more institutions but on the baro side it's more retail is that's kind of how I understand is that accurate

[SPEAKER_03]: Yes, so for the deposit side, so for those users who are depositing stablecoins, this is open to everybody. [SPEAKER_03]: So we have depositors all the way from retail to institutions. [SPEAKER_03]: On the lending side, there's also some variety, but primarily, this skews more towards institutional.

[SPEAKER_03]: So we'll do loans within our internal crypto lending market called Sparkland, which is a defy lending market where users can [SPEAKER_03]: put up their Bitcoin or their eat into the smart contract and basically take out a loan in stable coins against their crypto collateral. [SPEAKER_03]: We also do institutional lending through anchor digital bank.

[SPEAKER_03]: This is more like OTC loans where at fixed rate loans where we will [SPEAKER_03]: issue a loan to a borer and then anchorage as a qualified custodian will custody the collateral and facilitate the loan. [SPEAKER_03]: But this will, these are quite large loans, usually on the order of like hundreds of millions of dollars. [SPEAKER_03]: So it's more at the institutional scale.

[SPEAKER_03]: And then we also do lending through our more recent product that we launched called Spark Prime, which is a CD5 Prime brokerage. [SPEAKER_03]: So this again is more at the institutional side. [SPEAKER_03]: Delta neutral hedge funds will borrow from us there. [SPEAKER_03]: and then go do things like basis trade to generate yield, which then comes back into the Spark ecosystem, which then goes back to Spark savings depositors. [SPEAKER_00]: I've got a question for you.

[SPEAKER_00]: What is it like being a quote unquote star, right? [SPEAKER_00]: That's what we call the sub-dials inside of the new sky ecosystem. [SPEAKER_00]: What's it like being a star inside of the sky ecosystem? [SPEAKER_00]: And why did you decide to do that as opposed to just doing all of this on your own outside of that separate from that? [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I'm curious.

[SPEAKER_00]: You guys were really one of the big first players just at four and say, hey, we want to kind of lead this space. [SPEAKER_00]: We want to be the first, one of the first, if not de-first, star or sub-dow.

[SPEAKER_00]: Can you walk us through that? [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, so maybe it's helpful to understand the relationship between spark and sky. [SPEAKER_03]: So in the beginning, when like Maker was issuing die, the stable coin that it since become USDS, the governance was really something that was, there was a lot of issues with, in that Maker was operating under like, you know, a monolithic down.

[SPEAKER_03]: So there's token holders who hold the NKR token and then they can vote to pass proposals. [SPEAKER_03]: but in us kind of like doing this at scale for between 2021 to 2022, it really started hitting a lot of growing pains and like it was basically grinding to a halt and became like the process which just wasn't working at all.

[SPEAKER_03]: So this was recognized and as part of the restructuring to sky, there was a governance restructuring so that [SPEAKER_03]: Instead of having all the decision-making within one organization or one structure, this is called the Dow, it was decided to split it out into sub-dows or AK stars that you're referring to, such that decision-making could be scale.

[SPEAKER_03]: So the idea is that SKY kind of, it sits as like a very unappanginated rules maker, so it basically sets the rules of the road for everybody, and then the stars within the ecosystem, there's multiple of them, spark as the first, [SPEAKER_03]: but there are others. [SPEAKER_03]: All of them compete to allocate the balance sheet of sky deployed into various opportunities, following the sky brisk framework.

[SPEAKER_03]: And in this sense, you now have decision-making that can be done by smaller groups that maybe don't necessarily agree with each other, but the free market is kind of what keeps the system in check. [SPEAKER_03]: And then you may have spark-making good decisions and so therefore we will make money and grow sparkle grown and be successful. [SPEAKER_03]: maybe another star is like making decisions that aren't particularly good.

[SPEAKER_03]: They lose money, they're wasting money, and then they will shrink. [SPEAKER_03]: But the system is a whole, you know, remains competitive because the decision making can still be fairly agile. [SPEAKER_03]: So this was the reason for the restructuring and for my perspective, uh, [SPEAKER_03]: You know, I'm not super into governance. [SPEAKER_03]: I'm a very like product sky.

[SPEAKER_03]: So when I was existing in the previous structure in Maker, I was just kind of wanted to build stuff. [SPEAKER_03]: Like, you know, Sparkline was the first product that we launched at Spark. [SPEAKER_03]: I just wanted to do that originally in Maker. [SPEAKER_03]: But the political process was just completely untenable. [SPEAKER_03]: So there was this like this, you know, happy coincidence of the restructuring the governance.

[SPEAKER_03]: I saw this opportunity where we could, [SPEAKER_03]: You know, really go off on our own and start doing the products that we really want to build out under a government structure that, you know, just facilitate this type of growth and creativity. [SPEAKER_03]: So that's kind of how this all all came together.

[SPEAKER_01]: Absolutely. [SPEAKER_01]: And I think, you know, core component that, you know, spark is, you know, comprised of is this borrow and lend kind of like a bank, but it's not a bank. [SPEAKER_01]: You work with some banks, but can you kind of help in our mind? [SPEAKER_01]: I don't know if it's a comparing contrast between spark and like a traditional bank, or if you could kind of let us know where that [SPEAKER_01]: and something that's actually a bank.

[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, so I mean, there's definitely a lot of similarities, but I would not classify these things as banks. [SPEAKER_03]: You know, these are permissionless on chain protocols. [SPEAKER_03]: So just to be clear about that upfront, but a lot of the underlying mechanics are there's a lot of similarities. [SPEAKER_03]: So like banks, yes, their job is to take into posits and then issue loans. [SPEAKER_03]: Well, maintaining liquidity constraints so that users can always withdraw.

[SPEAKER_03]: Lending protocols are very similar in that taking in user deposits in, say, spark saving. [SPEAKER_03]: So, again, users depositing. [SPEAKER_03]: They want to earn a yield on their U.S.D.C. [SPEAKER_03]: OSTTUS. [SPEAKER_03]: So, they can deposit with us. [SPEAKER_03]: We'll go out and do the hard work of finding borrowers and connecting with these borrowers. [SPEAKER_03]: Issuing the loans, managing the liquidity. [SPEAKER_03]: such that depositors can always get out.

[SPEAKER_03]: Well, they're still earning a decent yield. [SPEAKER_03]: This is kind of the more or less the job. [SPEAKER_03]: And then there's a lot of details about how you facilitate these loans. [SPEAKER_03]: Are they through something like Sparkland, which is on chain, and variable rates, or is it more like institutional loans through Anchorage, maybe they want use custodians rather than going on chain?

[SPEAKER_03]: Really, it's just catering to all these different use cases and dealing with the end borrower. [SPEAKER_03]: But yeah, fundamentally, the construction is very similar. [SPEAKER_03]: I will say, though, with the on-chain lending that we do, you know, unlike banks which kind of keep a quite a tight capital reserve on the order of usually 10% cash reserve. [SPEAKER_03]: Within the sky ecosystem, the goal is to maintain at least 25% cash reserve.

[SPEAKER_03]: And so this is to make sure that these issues of liquidity like basically never come up. [SPEAKER_03]: There's like it's never going to be a concern because there's just so much access to liquidity that users can always get in and out whenever they want. [SPEAKER_03]: This is extremely important because when the liquidity dries up, you know, people, this is effectively a bank run. [SPEAKER_03]: And, you know, people get, like it just causes panic in the market.

[SPEAKER_03]: So, part of the stuff that we've been doing within, you know, spark is ensuring these highly liquid products so that you always can feel like you can get in and out whenever you want. [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, totally. [SPEAKER_01]: And so, you know, folks will go, you know, mom and pop random people, anybody kind of with an internet connection that meets the jurisdictional requirements could go to spark savings and generate

[SPEAKER_01]: Effective federal funds rate or, you know, what's kind of that rate is kind of like the first question and is it variable and then y'all take the The money and then go look for Partners or borrowers and then I imagine there's some kind of underwriting process because it's not just like free for all like hey anybody could take this money. [SPEAKER_01]: There's like You know a big process so that you guys don't get stuck with bad debt.

[SPEAKER_01]: So what's that whole process look like that that [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, exactly. [SPEAKER_03]: Um, so the, like first about the yield, so on USDC, the yield is I think 3.65% right now and on USDT, we're generating 3%. [SPEAKER_03]: So it varies a little bit on the stablecoins. [SPEAKER_03]: Right now current market conditions are quite bearish, so it's going to be about so far, maybe a little bit less.

[SPEAKER_03]: But during bullish conditions, these rates can go up quite a bit, so more like generating maybe even [SPEAKER_03]: four or five percent and this yield is coming from boroughs and the other side usually they're going like leverage long on crypto assets like Bitcoin or ETH. [SPEAKER_03]: But the other thing you touch on is like it's very important which is which is the risk framework you can't just go into whatever you want as you say.

[SPEAKER_03]: There is a particular set of collateral, and in fact, the spark takes as taken a quite conservative look on the collateral that we accept.

[SPEAKER_03]: We prefer to, you know, just look at maybe a handful of four or five assets that we think are... [SPEAKER_03]: scalable, you know, surrounding Bitcoin and ethusually, or like a, like a liquid staking token version of that, just like kind of a minimal set, because you know, there's lots of tail arrest that can present themselves by having too wide an array of collateral selection.

[SPEAKER_03]: You basically have all these dependencies that you may or may not be aware about, you know, basically, like, [SPEAKER_03]: being aware of all the details of every single collateral that you want for where we have 50 different collateral can be it's quite a challenging process.

[SPEAKER_03]: So going with a smaller scope has been one of the things that we think of has really differentiated ourselves and you know especially after the recent market conditions that happened it goes to show that having this minimal collateral so that can be quite important. [SPEAKER_03]: And so we've seen a lot of growth in our internal lending market, Sparkland, basically doubled in size since last week.

[SPEAKER_03]: A lot of people coming in precisely because of our quite conservative risk management process. [SPEAKER_03]: But I mean, for a risk management, like we could talk about this of the tight podcast to be honest, there is a lot of things involved with risk management. [SPEAKER_03]: It is like a job you have to dedicate yourself to to make sure that depositors are protected. [SPEAKER_03]: Within Spark, we back all of our deposits with USDS, which is the third largest stablecoin.

[SPEAKER_03]: Now, just higher than 11 billion in total deposits. [SPEAKER_03]: So that also contains with it insurance. [SPEAKER_03]: So not only do you have that balance sheet, providing a lot of safety for depositors, you also have five layers of insurance that's backing this, going all the way from the star level, who takes first loss. [SPEAKER_03]: to, you know, a junior risk capital vault that will be opened up to the public.

[SPEAKER_03]: This is a higher yield vault for those who want to hire you, but are willing to take more risk. [SPEAKER_03]: There'll be first on the hook before it goes back to USDS depositors and then spark savings sits on top of the USDS. [SPEAKER_03]: So there is, like, we really want this to be [SPEAKER_03]: You know, a quite safe sort of the best safe yield opportunity in the space.

[SPEAKER_03]: You still get a yield that's pretty good, but you're not taking like you're basically as senior in the stack of risk is possible to make sure that there are no loss of events. [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_01]: No, that's incredible to think about just like, you know, having the the balance sheet of sky and the U.S. D.S. [SPEAKER_01]: as something that can help insulate these borrow lend pools.

[SPEAKER_01]: And I want to put a cap on this, the borrowers stuff in one second here, but I will allude to a conversation that will have here in just a few moments about how [SPEAKER_01]: the kelp down and the avae debacle led to a lot of deposit flight from their model to you guys because you had the only pool that Heather kind of stayed pegged at throughout this whole collapse. [SPEAKER_01]: I'm curious about how you guys managed that but real quick to put a point on the borrowers.

[SPEAKER_01]: So you're never taking this money and going out to like the [SPEAKER_01]: businesses, like random businesses or private equity or private credit and you know per are you right and then underwriting these businesses and saying okay over the course of the next you know five years or three years you guys could generate you know a greater yield and how is that work or is it just strictly borrowers who want to go long or short crypto.

[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, so for us at Spark, like we're very focused on crypto back loans primarily, so this could be like the internal lending market, the anchorage loans, or the CD5 Prime brokerage, which has more exposure to centralized exchanges, stuff like that. [SPEAKER_03]: But it's still like within the crypto realm. [SPEAKER_03]: I think what you're talking about is more like the real-world asset side. [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, like what sky is doing?

[SPEAKER_01]: There, you know, they're, you know, going out and lending money to like businesses. [SPEAKER_01]: And putting those shares on change. [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, so there are other stars that I'm more focused on this, like Grove and Obex. [SPEAKER_03]: I'm sure you maybe seen some announcements from them. [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, so this is kind of the beauty of the star system is that, you know, we can just dedicate ourselves more to the crypto side.

[SPEAKER_03]: This is our expertise where, you know, like I'm an ex smart contract developer. [SPEAKER_03]: Like this is where we feel at home. [SPEAKER_03]: And the other teams that are maybe more, you know, private credit, traditional finance expertise, they can focus on more that side of the opportunities they're available. [SPEAKER_03]: So it's really like a dividing conquer strategy. [SPEAKER_03]: But yeah, sky as a whole is already deployed into real world assets.

[SPEAKER_03]: Mainly treasury bills right now. [SPEAKER_03]: Some exposure to triple a CLO's. [SPEAKER_03]: But yeah, I think private credit is also something that's going to be increasingly a part of the space. [SPEAKER_03]: And really, I mean, it's not going to be that differentiated from the way traditional finance works as like, triified continues to come on chain.

[SPEAKER_03]: like the benefits of settlement time, transparency, everything that the blockchain can offer, it's just a huge efficiency improvement over the way to try to find our only work. [SPEAKER_03]: So I'm not saying it's going to happen tomorrow, but I'm a big believer everything's going to be tokenized. [SPEAKER_03]: And you know, all the banks will be, you know, 10, 15 years, you will be largely transacting on blockchain rails.

[SPEAKER_01]: And once there are so many tokenized RWAs, do you imagine spark lending against those or touching them in some capacity, once you have tokenized ETFs, tokenized businesses and all that kind of stuff, and tokenized T-bills and all this stuff is happening, but where might that kind of touch your business? [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, for sure. [SPEAKER_03]: I think there's all these distinctions because it's kind of like early on, you know, for his crypto, what is an RWA?

[SPEAKER_03]: I think even you talked to people in the industry, what is in RWA is not always like unanimous about what even is that? [SPEAKER_03]: So I think these things are going to be less about like, you know, what is the technology that is connecting, you know, as an ETF? [SPEAKER_03]: is it like an on-chain asset, like it's just going to be, it's going to all just converge to just like, you know, finance in general and, you know, our competencies will evolve along with this.

[SPEAKER_00]: You know of it. [SPEAKER_00]: I was just talking, you know, briefly before this, I was talking to Chainlinks Chief Business Officer, Johann Eid, and he was very bullish on tokenization as a whole, and he was talking to us about he's like, we help a lot of these people connect this and make it possible, and he thinks it has a really bright future, but one of the, I guess this will fit into our next point, but he was like, one of the big focuses right now is security.

[SPEAKER_00]: security is the name of the game and he says that's somewhat holding these people back from what it could be. [SPEAKER_00]: He said it's partially security, but also partially just creating the demand where these tokenized assets are better than their traditional counter parts. [SPEAKER_00]: But yeah, I mean, as we'll probably talk about here in just a second, it sounds like, you know, security really is a big point, but would you say you guys share kind of the same vision on that?

[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, for sure. [SPEAKER_03]: I mean security, especially now, with all of these hats happening lately, really has taken this center stage. [SPEAKER_03]: I'll say though, like, if you're following best practices in the space, there is actually like relatively good practices that can like keep you safe from these types of hacks. [SPEAKER_03]: And like Skype in the beginning has been following a lot of these best practices. [SPEAKER_03]: Like, make you not a target by a huge amount.

[SPEAKER_03]: So if you have multi-sick that I have no time loss that are basically custody and assets, this is quite a dangerous setup and makes you a target of, you know, the DPRK, which is primarily the state actor that's involved here.

[SPEAKER_03]: Um, so there are techniques that we've known about for a while to mitigate these risks and really it's just a matter of everybody in the industry needs to more seriously be following these best practices like, you know, if you take the case of the kelp balance in the last week, uh, [SPEAKER_03]: you know, there was a number of issues there like they were using a one of one ddn.

[SPEAKER_03]: They were, you know, didn't have rate limits on the bridge, you know, all they was also didn't have rate limits. [SPEAKER_03]: So there's a number of things that could have been done. [SPEAKER_03]: These are just kind of basic best practices.

[SPEAKER_03]: And so I think we all just kind of need to level up so that these incidents don't happen, because even though like Spark was an effective directly, those space gets affected when, you know, people see these things and [SPEAKER_03]: It's not really good for anyone and so I'm an optimist by nature. [SPEAKER_03]: I'm hopeful that we take this as a very serious learning experience and we need to mature as a space to get triad file adoption.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I definitely want to, you know, start to chip away here at, you know, breaking down what happened with this, and particularly how you guys were navigating it. [SPEAKER_01]: But kind of for our listeners, the way I understand it is that, you know, somebody kind of hacked kelp down and counterfeited a lot of there, uh, liquid-staking token, and then went to AvA and was like, hey, I got, you know, $300 million of those liquid-staking token, let me take

[SPEAKER_01]: stuff, and I just gave away, you know, $300 million of non-counterfeit stuff, then the hackers ran away with it, and Avay gets stuck with the bad debt, and then, you know, people are kind of on the hook for that, A is that an accurate sort of representation, simplification of kind of what happened, and then B, you know, you know, how did you guys, or how does your model make sure stuff like that doesn't happen?

[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, so I think that's a fairly accurate representation of what happened.

[SPEAKER_03]: So for us, there's a couple of points that we make sure our internal lending market spark languages are similar model to Avay, but we have a number of differences that I think are quite important this regard. [SPEAKER_03]: So first and foremost, collateral onboarding. [SPEAKER_03]: We keep a very restricted set of like high trust, high scale collateral, and occasionally we'll add a few more, but we keep them in like very restricted mode.

[SPEAKER_03]: So right away, we never onboarded the countdown version of if into like a high leverage. [SPEAKER_03]: mode into the market. [SPEAKER_03]: So this is one of the mistakes I would say. [SPEAKER_03]: All they did is allowing this kind of collateral to be at billions in size in their market in the first place. [SPEAKER_03]: So for us, we never had this kind of exposure. [SPEAKER_03]: We also offboarded this collateral back in January.

[SPEAKER_03]: It was just not a, it wasn't generating that much business and you know, as I mentioned, like having all these collateral [SPEAKER_03]: but there's a lot of dependencies and so things can go wrong. [SPEAKER_03]: So, yeah, first of all, I'm going to say, keeping the collateral set small. [SPEAKER_03]: The second thing is the right limit. [SPEAKER_03]: So, Sparklin has right limits.

[SPEAKER_03]: So, even if there was this again, and Sparklin still had this collateral imported, the damage would be very likely nothing. [SPEAKER_03]: And potentially like maybe a marginal amount of debt that could easily be covered by the protocol. [SPEAKER_03]: So you kind of want to have this, like, don't allow yourself to be, you know, susceptible to these types of hacks. [SPEAKER_03]: But even if you do, you need to limit the damage. [SPEAKER_03]: And so Sparkland has rate limits.

[SPEAKER_03]: We do not allow 300 million to come in out of the blue and just, you know, take whatever you want. [SPEAKER_03]: That's not how it works. [SPEAKER_03]: You come in, you are a large user. [SPEAKER_03]: You have this reasonable to expect it will take a few hours. [SPEAKER_03]: or even days to wind up your position. [SPEAKER_03]: So it's Parkland. [SPEAKER_03]: We have a 12 hour cooldown. [SPEAKER_03]: We allow a little bit to come in, 12 hour cooldown.

[SPEAKER_03]: And so this gives us more than enough time to react. [SPEAKER_03]: We see something like this. [SPEAKER_03]: We would shut it down. [SPEAKER_03]: We have like emergency pause switches. [SPEAKER_03]: And so they basically were not a target at all because North Korea wouldn't be able to extract that much money out of a parkland in the first place.

[SPEAKER_03]: So yeah, those these things, we also have another [SPEAKER_03]: effects not related to this act in particular, but we have a triple redundant Oracle system. [SPEAKER_03]: So we don't use one single Oracle provider. [SPEAKER_03]: We have a user median between redstone, chain link, and chronicle. [SPEAKER_03]: So if any of the Oracle providers experience a hack or something like that, we can still have accurate price feeds because the other two will pick up the slack basically.

[SPEAKER_03]: So this is just outlining a few of the things that we do differently at Sparkland and this has kind of been our mantra from the beginning. [SPEAKER_03]: We're not, you know, trying to cater to like everything all at once. [SPEAKER_03]: We really want this like, you know, highly curated, small set of [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, that makes a ton of sense.

[SPEAKER_01]: And kind of a two-pronged question, have you ever, or has Spark ever had a similar scenario on a smaller scale, any kind of bad debt where people had to cover their losses or the junior tranche got wiped out or says there ever been sort of defaulting borrowers or any kind of thing like that? [SPEAKER_01]: And if so, what was the patch? [SPEAKER_01]: And if not, then we could just move on. [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, no, we haven't since long, that's awesome.

[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, it's been going pretty well. [SPEAKER_03]: I think we have a good track record. [SPEAKER_03]: And I think this is why we've seen a lot of the growth that we have just from, you know, we're all, we're paranoid though. [SPEAKER_03]: We're always trying to see what we can improve. [SPEAKER_03]: But yeah, I think we have a pretty good track record in this regard. [SPEAKER_01]: as Elon would say, only the paranoid survive.

[SPEAKER_01]: So keep up the paranoia, because that'll definitely pay its dividends. [SPEAKER_01]: And then one more question on the whole of a debacle. [SPEAKER_01]: What was this? [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, [SPEAKER_01]: I saw a lot of different numbers throughout the past week of how much in terms of inflows you received, whether it was flight from Awe in to spark, what are some quantifications that you could give us into, you know, and obviously the SPK token went bonkers this week on Monday.

[SPEAKER_01]: It was like two cents of the end of the week. [SPEAKER_01]: It was, I don't know, six cents or something. [SPEAKER_01]: So it was a 300% roughly move. [SPEAKER_01]: But what were some of the inflows that you saw TVL or any other [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, so for TVL we went from we were 1.9 billion on April 17th and then we peaked at 3.7 billion about a week later. [SPEAKER_03]: So doubled.

[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, we saw a number of like a lot of borrowers coming in like new borrowers who have never used Sparkland before. [SPEAKER_03]: That's a good measure. [SPEAKER_03]: So yeah, I mean it's it's been like fortunate for the lending market. [SPEAKER_03]: I'll say that like I don't think these types of events are are like good for anybody in the space. [SPEAKER_03]: I think like yeah largely like I'm glad actually that all of it was able to raise funds and make their users whole.

[SPEAKER_03]: I think that's great. [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, like these types of events are just put a chilling effect on the whole space and make make people reassess how how safe defy can be so Yeah, don't get me wrong. [SPEAKER_03]: I'm I'm definitely not rooting for these types of events, but yeah in the for it has been a decent amount of growth for Sparkling [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it definitely feels like to me.

[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, again, I've seen some very numbers between $400 and $600 million worth of hacks just this year alone in DeFi between drift and this one and a couple others.

[SPEAKER_01]: And so if we want to get to mainstream adoption and I want to kind of know, like, [SPEAKER_01]: what I guess what the end goal is with Spark like in order to go from crypto native users from from folks who are comfortable on chain to, you know, our parents or our, you know, ants and uncles who just want a really great effective, you know, high yield savings account or, you know, a place to, you know, get a nice loan from or anything like that.

[SPEAKER_01]: What does Spark need to look like or accomplish or who does they need to partner with in order to get to that mainstream end goal if that is even the main end goal? [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, I would say it's more about the perception of the space as the whole. [SPEAKER_03]: Like, as I mentioned, Spark is not at any bad dead event. [SPEAKER_03]: So, like, our track record is quite good, but people grew up in with the filing in general.

[SPEAKER_03]: And when they see these hacks, they eventually like, they associate it, even though we don't have any direct exposure to it. [SPEAKER_03]: So I think we need to sort out these these events and like they can't be happening this this frequently. [SPEAKER_03]: It's just it's just a non-starter. [SPEAKER_03]: So, you know, as I said before, we know how to deal with this. [SPEAKER_03]: There's been, you know, many, many protocols that are operating without issue for many, many years.

[SPEAKER_03]: It's just sometimes like, you know, there's a lot of protocols that they're right. [SPEAKER_03]: All you need is one to screw up with some configuration issue or something. [SPEAKER_03]: and to basically just have a bad incident like this.

[SPEAKER_03]: So I think we just need to level up in terms of the security of the space and everybody needs to be falling best practices and to be onboarded into a lending market, there should just be much more like the lending market needs to hold the asset as you were awarded a count for best practices for security. [SPEAKER_03]: But I think we'll get there. [SPEAKER_03]: I think if you look back 2021, the largest incidents [SPEAKER_03]: But now that's not the case.

[SPEAKER_03]: We actually have best practices with smart contracts. [SPEAKER_03]: And I'm a Voting for all smart contracts out there. [SPEAKER_03]: But the major protocols, I am have high high confidence in that they will not be hacked, knock and wood. [SPEAKER_03]: But they've been out there for a long time, lots of things, and TVL. [SPEAKER_03]: And we know how to do this now. [SPEAKER_03]: We have the auditing process is quite good. [SPEAKER_03]: We now have AI.

[SPEAKER_03]: AI can be used on the defensive as well as the offensive. [SPEAKER_03]: The eventually everything will just be formal verification largely by AI, I believe. [SPEAKER_03]: And so we're already most of the way there and with the contracts that are alive right now, I think it's quite good. [SPEAKER_03]: What we're seeing more now is like infrastructure, operational security hacks. [SPEAKER_03]: And again, like we know how to do this.

[SPEAKER_03]: AI, I think is accelerating the pace of attacks, but it's not like magic, it's just sort of allows like, you know, human beings to leverage themselves more, be more productive, you know, on the bad side of things as well as the good. [SPEAKER_03]: But we really, and I think this truly, even more broadly, than crypto. [SPEAKER_03]: Like, you saw the Methos announcement where it's like, they have thousands of security, critical security vulnerabilities in all software.

[SPEAKER_03]: I totally believe this is the case. [SPEAKER_03]: And like, we really just, you know, this is going to be a hard and painful short period of time. [SPEAKER_03]: But once we're out on the other side, I think all the systems are going to be much more hard and things will just be much more safer in general. [SPEAKER_03]: It's just kind of we have to, you know, we're being put through the ringer right now.

[SPEAKER_03]: But I think we will emerge on the other side in a much better [SPEAKER_00]: You know, you read my mind because I was about to bring up mythos. [SPEAKER_00]: I was going back and forth with some guys over here. [SPEAKER_00]: And when that mythos news came out for people who don't know and Thropic has this tool, this very, very advanced AI that they were using to discover cybersecurity threats. [SPEAKER_00]: And it was like so good. [SPEAKER_00]: It was basically deemed like,

[SPEAKER_00]: a threat to national security they're like this thing is so good it can point out all the flaws stuff that we didn't know existed all over the place and they're like we got to like restrict access and like a lot of government is a lot apparently broke out of its own sandbox like they had it like in this it's own like you know sanctioned off sandbox and offline network and like it came online and started like emailing people like how crazy is that how crazy is that that we have like

[SPEAKER_00]: Anyway, long story short, it got me thinking like, you know what, I mean, we're just scratching the surface of this stuff, right? [SPEAKER_00]: You know, we're only really a couple of years I would argue, even though AI's been around for a while, we're only a couple of years into this AI revolution. [SPEAKER_00]: But like, how do you think something like that changes the world of crypto security?

[SPEAKER_00]: Because it feels like if we're getting to a point where we have stuff that that's powerful, that is that powerful, we can make a lot of these issues a thing of the past.

[SPEAKER_01]: Um, we know how powerful it is because Trump went from black listing anthropic one week to a couple weeks after saying uh, okay, we could still use anthropic like he very rarely like backs down on, you know, on somebody like that, but he went full force and then said, oh, nobody in the government could use anthropic and like now people are saying, okay, well, they kind of back down a little bit on that people in the government are like partnering with anthropic again because it's just so freaking powerful.

[SPEAKER_01]: It's just a crazy situation, but yeah, the Brennan's point, how does that all come to bear on crypto security practically speaking? [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, is the burden on the protocol developers like yourselves or is it on the users or a little bit of both? [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, so I'll say, and maybe for people who are non-technical, like it looks like we're kind of going through this phase change where it's like, you know, nothing will be secure basically, right?

[SPEAKER_03]: Like we're just all screwed and everything's going to be hacked. [SPEAKER_03]: And I think although like crypto is kind of on the forefront because I think there's there's so much money at stake. [SPEAKER_03]: But there is like it's not like AI, it's getting something magic. [SPEAKER_03]: It follows the boss of physics, the rules of mathematics. [SPEAKER_03]: We know how to do crypto everywhere, we know how to do security.

[SPEAKER_03]: And so it's more just like, [SPEAKER_03]: like we have to do it for real and so some of the projects that maybe are not taking the most security for approaches, they're getting taken out with hacks but really like it's just a matter of we really need to take this seriously and like really level up our security but we know what to do the best practices are already out there and if protocols are following them [SPEAKER_03]: they will be fine.

[SPEAKER_03]: So yeah, and for whose responsibility is, I mean, it's the protocols in my view. [SPEAKER_03]: I mean, that's the users are depositing with the delegation of, you know, risk management, which includes security on your own part, as well as the collateral that you may be on boarding into your lending market or whatever else protocol you're running. [SPEAKER_03]: Um, but yeah, I mean even for me as a as a technical person. [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, it's good.

[SPEAKER_03]: It's a I is definitely leveling up. [SPEAKER_03]: I see the way things are going and so what this means is like a state actor like North Korea that's already, um, you know, involved and basically everything we assume. [SPEAKER_03]: They're watching everything. [SPEAKER_03]: They now, they can leverage their people who are working on this 10X or however much it is because they have AI agents that are trying to break into everything.

[SPEAKER_03]: And so when there's like vulnerabilities that are things out there that just haven't been exploited yet, this is like the thousand vulnerabilities that mythos found. [SPEAKER_03]: Those are already out there, right? [SPEAKER_03]: They would have been found eventually. [SPEAKER_03]: Maybe some of them are known to a lot of state actors and we just don't know about it yet. [SPEAKER_03]: So I think it's actually a good thing that we're discovering about it.

[SPEAKER_03]: Um, you know, it's one of those things is like, you just start aware of it before. [SPEAKER_03]: So you think everything's fine, but actually it's better to be aware of it and then patch them. [SPEAKER_03]: So like what's going to happen is all these things are going to be patch. [SPEAKER_03]: It's going to be a little bit of a cat and mouse between, you know, attackers and defenders.

[SPEAKER_03]: But ultimately, um, [SPEAKER_03]: I think where I'll end up is that software is just going to be extremely safe, especially as the cost of coding drops quite drastically, we can just do formal verification on a lot of these things. [SPEAKER_03]: And that's basically just mathematically proving that the code has no bugs. [SPEAKER_03]: So because code is so cheap, it's much more economical to do this type of stuff.

[SPEAKER_03]: And so the defensive will just win out in the long run, but it's just for kind of this intermediary phase.

[SPEAKER_03]: And we just kind of... [SPEAKER_01]: it's going to be quite a ride this is literally evolution like what doesn't kill you makes you stronger only the strong survive we're building open source out in the wild eat or be eaten I mean this is how in 25 years we we need this right for a world which will be overwritten by these super intelligent AI's we need to have this hardening phase.

[SPEAKER_01]: And so short term pain, long term gain, and in order for, you know, our entire financial ecosystem to thrive for another 100 years, it has to be built out in the open with severe, you know, testing. [SPEAKER_01]: And so this has been, you know, one of my thesis ever since I got into crypto is like, oh, man, Bitcoin, like anybody could audit the code at any time.

[SPEAKER_01]: Everybody knows what every account has, and like, the code is, [SPEAKER_01]: You know, of course, the developers are very smart, but they've reduced the code base, you know, to very something very simple anybody in the world with a raspberry pie, you know, little smart computer can can check and verify we don't need to trust that what they say is, you know, that they're good for the money that we actually have the verification. [SPEAKER_01]: So I'm such a big proponent of this.

[SPEAKER_01]: uh... defy or you know used to be called open-fi right because it's it's open-finance and uh... i think the whole mythos thing clearly clearly shows that you know where we're on the right path i think we're on the right side of history here building out in the wild but why we still have you sam

[SPEAKER_01]: I want to talk about the SPK token as much as we can because it's something that a lot of our listeners who are really excited about and full disclosure through our tower 18 hedge fun vehicles. [SPEAKER_01]: We have exposure to the SPK token. [SPEAKER_01]: We've been part of the journey with you guys here from the sidelines cheering you on. [SPEAKER_01]: So you know folks probably want to know [SPEAKER_01]: Well, you know, this is a pretty cool idea.

[SPEAKER_01]: How do these tokens work? [SPEAKER_01]: Why would I own a token? [SPEAKER_01]: What drives the fundamental value?

[SPEAKER_01]: And so I guess, you know, from a high level, you know, if people are out there and they're really smart and they're making these fundamental models of, you know, [SPEAKER_01]: price to earnings in DCFs and all that like what are the fundamental metrics that you guys really value that in theory should over time drive the price of the token just like a stock right you got earnings you got revenue you got all sorts of different stuff that in theory should lead the price of the token.

[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, so what we're primarily focused on at Spark is growing protocol revenue and so yeah exactly so like we have our internal lending market we have our allocation system called the spark liquidity layer.

[SPEAKER_03]: We have a number of products that are doing lending as well as we. [SPEAKER_03]: earn distributed rewards for distributing USDS the sky-stable coin into the broader ecosystem. [SPEAKER_03]: So we do have a financials tab in our it's data.spark.fi slash financials. [SPEAKER_03]: We, what does that start data.fi? [SPEAKER_03]: It's data.spark.fi. [SPEAKER_03]: And then there's like a top for financials. [SPEAKER_03]: So currently, yearly, net returns are 25 million.

[SPEAKER_03]: We have an opx of 18 million. [SPEAKER_03]: And so even in the bearish conditions of right now, there's a 7 million a year protocol surplus. [SPEAKER_03]: And during bull market conditions, this numbers are actually quite higher. [SPEAKER_03]: We peaked that around 80 million per year at about September when there was the peak of the bull market. [SPEAKER_03]: These things are a little bit cyclical, but even in bearish conditions, the protocol is still generating a surplus.

[SPEAKER_03]: That's pretty great. [SPEAKER_03]: And so the other thing was earlier this year, there was a proposal passed by SPK holders to initiate a buy buyback program. [SPEAKER_03]: So protocol returns will convert into value or cruel for the token. [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, we view this as a [SPEAKER_03]: Quite important to have a value of cruel mechanism. [SPEAKER_03]: We're not really interested in building mean coins. [SPEAKER_03]: There needs to be some fundamental mechanism there.

[SPEAKER_03]: So yeah, I think like overall the revenue metrics, So what we're, you know, growth of the protocol as well as [SPEAKER_03]: sustainable revenue for the long run. [SPEAKER_03]: This is what we're focused on, you know, just like any business. [SPEAKER_03]: And so, yeah, this is the argument I would make. [SPEAKER_03]: But in addition, like SBA holders, there's governance, you can vote on proposals. [SPEAKER_03]: Everything that is done goes through spark governance for approval.

[SPEAKER_03]: There's also staking, so you can stake your SBA and earn an extra return on it, as well as SBA, the plan is to eventually use it for securing [SPEAKER_03]: Oracle's are bridging basically like a a staking of the asset to ensure that basically vouching for the security of bridges and oracles. [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, makes a ton of sense and that's really, really good information.

[SPEAKER_01]: I encourage everybody to hit the pause button, rewind, you know, for a couple of minutes and take some flip and notes because that's what kind of assets that I'm really interested in owning exposure to.

[SPEAKER_01]: It's more these tokens that in these projects that are really focused on driving value, a cruel back to the token holder, it's something that [SPEAKER_01]: You know, the crypto ecosystem has really been in quite of a quandary and it sounds like you guys are really forward thinking along with sky and some of the other stars forward thinking on how to accrue value.

[SPEAKER_01]: And so I also think I saw something recently about a public company a couple of them, but one was called better. [SPEAKER_01]: And they were about home loans, and they were part of, I don't know if they were a star in it of themselves or if you guys are associated with better have you heard about this one?

[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, I did hear something about that, but I mean, the thing about the sky ecosystem is there there's a lot of people involved so I'm very familiar with what's going on spark and I have heard about the wider ecosystem of some of these initiatives, but that's the thing it's dividing conquer so we're not necessarily specialists on everything that's going on in sky.

[SPEAKER_03]: sky is more aware of like the whole balance sheet is a whole, but then there's other teams that are like more focused on this like real world asset type lending which is great because then they could have the expertise in that type of underwriting. [SPEAKER_01]: totally. [SPEAKER_01]: And it just goes to show like the legitimacy of the whole sky ecosystem. [SPEAKER_01]: Again, another full disclosure, you know, a lot of exposure to sky.

[SPEAKER_01]: And we think that this is just one of these assets and ecosystems that is really driving a lot of value. [SPEAKER_01]: And it's real tangible, you know, earnings. [SPEAKER_01]: I think we're recording this April 28th. [SPEAKER_01]: I believe tomorrow or the 30th of April sky is coming out with their Q1 financial report. [SPEAKER_01]: We're going to be slewhing through that.

[SPEAKER_01]: painting a very bright picture, lots of growth, lots of earnings, lots of value, and then yes, Sam, you know, we want to make sure that you've got the floor for any other stuff that you guys are working on. [SPEAKER_01]: In the future, that you want to talk about, that we might not have touched on, anything that excites you, anything that we should have asked, that we just totally flunked and failed to ask, how would you like to kind of put a point on our discussion today?

[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, I think we have a lot going on for the quarterly reports actually spark puts out a quarterly report as well. [SPEAKER_03]: I think we just put out a quarter one twenty twenty six one as well like just last week. [SPEAKER_03]: So you can look at that look through the financials. [SPEAKER_03]: Um, for yeah, growth, uh, we're very exciting. [SPEAKER_03]: We just cracked one billion in savings USTT, uh, so this is a market. [SPEAKER_03]: We're really looking to grow.

[SPEAKER_03]: Uh, we launched this at the in November of last year and it's already gone past the billions. [SPEAKER_03]: So this is, uh, providing a 3% yield at high liquidity. [SPEAKER_03]: So the vault is currently about 600 million in, uh, immediately available liquidity on one billion total deposits.

[SPEAKER_03]: So that's pretty exciting, and then the other pieces at the beginning of the year we launched Spark Prime, which is a CD-Fi Prime brokerage, this is going to be very important in the next bull market. [SPEAKER_03]: We think this will grow to several billions in size, basically providing lenders with a much safer access to perpetual future funding rates through things like the basis trade. [SPEAKER_01]: very cool. [SPEAKER_01]: Love it.

[SPEAKER_01]: Hey Sam, we greatly appreciate all the time that you were able to hear, uh, spend here with us today. [SPEAKER_01]: If people want to follow along on your journey, we'll put some links in the show notes and we'll do our own research. [SPEAKER_01]: But are there any of that you just wanted to highlight and shout out maybe your personal ex account or the company's website, anything like that? [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, we're quite active on the ex Twitter.

[SPEAKER_03]: So the company is spark.fi. [SPEAKER_03]: And I'm under Hexano. [SPEAKER_01]: Hexanot. [SPEAKER_01]: You got to follow Hexanot. [SPEAKER_01]: It's a good follow, a lot of good stuff coming out of your guys' corner of the world. [SPEAKER_01]: So everybody who was listening today, we hope you enjoyed come back same time, same place next week. [SPEAKER_01]: And Sam, we hope that we have you back on the show sometime, maybe Q2 for the checkup as well. [SPEAKER_01]: Or Q3, I should say.

[SPEAKER_01]: But until then, we'll talk to everybody soon. [SPEAKER_01]: We'll see you guys next week. [SPEAKER_01]: And thank you, Sam. [SPEAKER_03]: Cool. [SPEAKER_03]: Thanks for having me.