Pangolin is Launching on Hedera! CEO Justin Trollip and King Solomon - Hedera Corner (Part 1)

This interview was originally published by Genfinity.

—

King Solomon interviews Pangolin as part of the Hedera Corner in the LightHouse by Genfinity! Brought to you by LightHouse Report sponsor Hedera Hashgraph and in collaboration with our partner and Hedera wallet provider HashPack.

Transcription

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍What is up, everybody? Solomon here. I hope you guys are all having a fantastic day. As you guys know, within Genfinity, in collaboration with HashPack, we are nailing out multiple interviews across the Hedera Hashgraph ecosystem. And today, certainly a pleasure to have Justin Trollip, who is the self-imposed chief herder, or the CEO and PM of Pangolin. What is up, Justin? How are you doing today?

Pangolin - Justin Trollip – CEO
‍Yeah, very well, yeah, great to be here, thanks for having me.

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍Definitely, um, to give everybody a background, I mean, on the side of Pangolin, what you, what you guys have is that you guys are a multi-chain decentralized digital assets exchange through advanced tooling, deep liquidity, and smooth onboarding. A Pangolin offering, uh, easy swaps and tools for both projects and creators. I like, um, for you to kind of give your, um, your background of Pangolin, your background of yourself, and kind of how you came into web 3 and maybe just kind of, uh, a brief overview of what Pangolin represents from, uh, from a value standpoint to the to the DeFi community as a whole.

Pangolin - Justin Trollip – CEO
‍Yeah, sure, um, so, so in terms of myself, um, so I come from, you know, kind of traditional finance. I started off as, you know, kind of like a management accountant working for Richmond, uh, luxury goods brand, um, it does Montblanc, Cartier, all of those wonderful brands, um, and then I kind of quickly got bored of, uh, that, and I always wanted to be in IT, so I jumped into solution architecture with Microsoft, uh, building enterprise solutions, uh, you know, the thing with that is that technology, even though it's widely adopted, is very, um, you know, it's based on old standards, it's very frustrating, there's not a lot of innovation, um, so I quickly reported that, started a startup, so successfully exited, and it always been interested in blockchain technology, um, when Bitcoin first came out, um, you know, I reminded, obviously, like most people did, but like, there was no real business, uh, way to get into developing applications, right, so, um, Ethereum came around, and then I was like, okay, cool, now there's an opportunity where you know Apple this could actually build something on top of these protocols, and then you know, slowly got into it, and then in about, was it 2020. Just before the bull run started kicking off, DeFi summer kicked off, you know, really with synthetics, and then with Sushi doing the vampire type on UniSwap, and I was looking at a way to kind of come into the market, you know, and then I discovered Avalanche with the consensus mechanism, and at that stage, Avalanche had no EV, they had no, like, no real DeFi landscape, and Ava Labs actually released Pangolin as an internal, internal project, um, and it was complete fair launch. So what that means is there was no token set aside for VCs, no insider tokens, no team allocation, but it was 95 LPa, five percent airdrop, and at that stage, I was working on a zero knowledge project, um, on the EVM, uh, and Everlast approached me, and said, you know, would you be interested in taking over Pangolin? I said, yeah, I'd be interested, and then there was a community vote. Uh, so what happened with the community vote was, you know, obviously, you submit a vote on chain, and then everyone, all the PNG holders, get to vote shooting, and I was voted in together with two other core contributors, uh, and we've, you know, kind of taken Pangolin from there. So, in terms of what Pangolin brings, I mean, I think that's very much part of our ethos that we're community driven, uh, you know, it's part of the Genesis story. It's, it's, you know, obviously, you know, there's some pros and cons of every decision you make. Being community driven means sometimes we have to fight something a lot harder, uh, to do things, um, you know, um, and that can be challenging, right? So, like, especially in the early days, you know, we got bogged down a lot about voting and things like that, and sometimes I've made certain decision making slower. So, we, we've had a kind of straddle of this pragmatic middle ground where, we're community driven, we really care about the community, we really want to contribute that. I think that's also a key thing for us. It's like, you know, when we go to an ecosystem, we always like to immerse ourselves in that ecosystem and find out what's missing, um, as an example. Yeah, so, uh, yeah, I mean, that's kind of, yeah.

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍No, and I mean, I should say, so, you guys launched in February 2021, and, like you stated, incubated by Ava Labs, um, really to provide that, you know, that credible DEX automated market maker solution on Avalanche C chain, and then even within the first year, uh, after launch, I know you guys had 15 billion in trading volume, um, year one, um, and I think you were about to get into it, which, which I think is a really valuable thing when we're talking about decentralized exchanges. If you look at a network, by the way, for everybody listening to this, uh, Pangolin is launching on Hedera Hashgraph. This isn't going to be coming out to you guys until the first week of January, uh, but super excited now, you started getting, getting into like, what does the community need? So, there's a few other DEX’s like that have launched on Hedera, I would say, over the past handful of months, um, I think it was really smart when you said, let's look at the, let's look at trying to solve problems there. Do you look at these other DEX’s as competition, or is it more so co-opetion to try to build as much value for the network as possible, and try to, you know, plug and play some solutions where Pangolin can help?

Pangolin - Justin Trollip – CEO
‍Yeah, I think that's a nuanced question. So, I think it depends on, I mean, we always want to collaborate, um, you know, we always look to collaborate. We always think that, like, a rising tide lifts all ships, um, however, you know, certain it depends on other people, other projects' cultures, too, right? So, for example, you know, like, we've made projects in the past that were very anti-conflict competition, and, so, so within that, uh, kind of environment, it's very hard to cooperate because the lines of communication, it's not an option. We always want to collaborate, right? So, you know, we don't see you know, source and competition. We see them as important steps. A DEX needs actually more than one, like a blockchain use more than one DEX in the current place because you need the arbitrage volume, right? So you need that ability to kind of bring it the tokens into pig. I think that's going to slightly change over time. You see an oracle type DEX come into the ecosystem, which then kind of negates some of that long tail asset arbitration. But no, look, we want to make sure, like we look at like you, you go look at the Hedera Github and we can see Heli’s in there, and they're contributing back. You know, they're reviewing PRs, we're in there, we're reporting issues back to Hedera, so the more people developing on Hedera, the more people are reporting issues. You know, there's a common thing in software, right? So if you want to build a good software, you want to be adopted by as many people as possible because they can see all the cracks, all the things that need to be kind of fixed or improved upon, and I think the more people in this ecosystem, the better. And DEXES will go different routes. You know, some micro UniSwap V3 concentrated liquidity, some might go the Oracle DEX route, which is now becoming a bit more popular. So, so balancer, as an example, so what you'll see is you'll see this natural divergence, and they'll fill different gaps in the market.

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍100% Now when we talk a little bit about what you guys have done so far as far as kind of network onboarding, and I don't want to say just blockchain because obviously Hedera's a Hashgraph, but from a network standpoint, what is live right now within Pangolin? What is going to be live, you know, would you say in the near future, obviously Hedera, and then how does that interoperability look to you from like a DeFi standpoint moving forward, like through you know, and I know you can only speak for Pangolin and who you guys are building with right now and how you want to extend that out, but you know what networks are you with right now that you've integrated? What's coming very very soon, obviously Hedera, and how do you see kind of a meshing or convergence of value between these ecosystems as this as the DeFi ecosystem really does mature into the next kind of cycle?

Pangolin - Justin Trollip – CEO
‍Yeah, so currently, we're live on Avalanche and Songbirds. Songbird is a canary network of Flare. Um, we will be a souffle launches the tge on the 9th of January. Uh, we'll be live, I think the next day pretty much on Flare. Uh, we've also got uh Nia will be live on, and then, um, yeah, obviously, Hedera, uh, so, so these are the networks, what we see what's live. I mean, we actually are live on the Hedera testnet system, so one of our contracts are deployed already. If you go to, we have like a Dev site called dev.pangolin.exchange. Uh, you go there today, you can play with pretty much everything that's about 90% done. So, what that means is we've got that AMM there, which is just based upon the XY equals cave, uh, automated market formula. We've got uh farming, uh, so what farming means is you can become a liquidity provider. You can provide both sides of the token, and then earn real rewards for being a liquidity provider. We have staking, um, one other thing that that is quite unique to us where I don't think, well, I don't think I've seen it anyways, we have a piece called sunshine and rainbows. And really what happens in DeFi is with the governance tokens they used for emissions or up to kind of bootstrap liquidity to bring people in, um, what's happened is obviously because of this mechanism, you know, those tokens often get sold pretty rapidly in the in the secondary markets. So what happened is on Ethereum a concept called veto economics emerged, which was to allow more utility from a voting perspective. What that means is then, uh, veto economics though introduced some interesting externalities which we didn't like, broadband things like concentration of tokens in a very small, uh, percentage of people. So we've introduced sunshine and rainbows, which really kind of permeates throughout the entire DEX. So when you become a liquidity provider, the way your rewards are calculated are based upon on how loyal you are. So, if you know say Solomon comes in and he's provided LP for like a week, and I've been there for like two months, I'm gonna earn significantly more rewards than you because I've left my capital there. And we've designed this to kind of uh combat the mercenary capital nature of crypto. And that's live too, uh, we have governance contracts, which is unchained governance. However, the UI probably won't be ready for go live, but the contracts are live, and we just got to wrap the UI around it. And what that means is we'll have governance, which will allow token holders to vote on key decisions, um, you know whether that's treasury funding, whether that's, you know, us upgrading to UniSwap V3 models, uh, you know, there'll probably be a bunch of things to be voted on.

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍I think that's really smart. That was one of the issues that I've always kind of thought, you know, regarding DAO's, you know, in and of themselves, where it's you know, if you get down into decentralization when it's based on governance, and if governance can be bought based on how much you hold, it's, I really like the kind of incentivizing good actors based on their actual actions within an ecosystem, how long they've been there. I think it's, I think it's brilliant. So, um, you touched on it briefly, um, with the on-chain governance aspect, uh, and so for those of, for those that may not know, I mean, you guys operate a sub-DAO model within any of the ecosystems that you've built out with. Can you explain that sub-DAO model a little bit as far as what that's going to represent within the Hedera ecosystem?

Pangolin - Justin Trollip – CEO
‍Yeah, definitely. So, you know, we see it like, so, so currently within in blockchain, Hashgraph, within all these technologies, there's no kind of like it's not interconnected, right? So what often happens is you have bridges, but bridges are kind of like, you know, that they're an early stage of the technology. As we've seen, they get hacked, you know, there's, you can only do token transfers. There's no like real interoperability where you have messaging and kind of mature stuff. So what that means is, you know, while we wait for the technology to catch up, we want to be competitive in the local ecosystems, and we want to immerse ourselves in those local ecosystems. So what that means is we compare often to SushiSwap, the way that this issue and cross chain is they kind of went cross-chain, they relied on grants from you know, the ecosystem, and when those grants or liquidity incentives, right or not, since you kind of left, right? And they took all that capital back to Ethereum, and we don't really like that model. We think it's quite ex, you know, yeah, uh, I don't want to be too disparaging, but we learned a lot from that. So what we want to do is we want to obviously uh be competitive, we want to hire from within the community. So we have a new token on Hedera, and we have, you know, with that token, we can then hire people that are going to be focused purely on Hedera, that are going to really just immerse themselves, that they know the ecosystem, we know what we know, and you get economies of scale, right? So you know, the technology is with Hedera it's slightly different because we had a tweak it a fair bit at this stage, um, but you do get these economies of scale that we've learned from other chains and other places that we can then kind of expand into Hedera rewards.