Interview with Mike Schneider | stablecoins.wtf | scio.xyz | azero.domains
Interview with Mike Schneider | stablecoin.wtf | scio.xyz | azero.domains
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Interview with Mike Schneider
- DezentralizedFinance.com sat down with Mike Schneider, co-founder of stablecoins.wtf to discuss the latest developments & updates from stablecoins.wtf, the future of the stablecoin industry and what else he is up to these days.
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One place to track all the stablecoins quotes & developments - stablecoins.wtf
- About stablecoins.wtf: The purpose of this website is to educate degens about stablecoins. We accumulate quantitative live-data of major stablecoins in a single dashboard. And we aim to make the data understandable by everyone by providing additional educational content.
- Don´t miss any Liquidity Pool (LPs) insights. Get involved in DeFi & NFTs & Web3 and LPs for free!
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Question: Kindly introduce yourself and describe your crypto journey and share the moment/reasons why you founded stablecoins.wtf?
- Mike:
- With a strong interest in the financial system and markets in general, I stumbled across Bitcoin sometime in 2016. I remember being one of those persons drawing the “new internet” comparison quite often. Through trading and engaging with the wider crypto community, I have learned to appreciate the wider crypto culture. Last year, I decided to not only invest and trade, but also be involved in the development of this new technology. Working for a venture studio gave me the opportunity to conceptualize and kick off projects in the fields of Defi, governance, metaverse and auditing.
- More recently, I joined a great friend and now co-founder in attending hackathons in the Ethereum ecosystem. One of them was also the birth of stablecoins.wtf. Shortly before, almost all of us were crashed by the UST/LUNA death spiral and its effect on the crypto markets. Many people asked themselves, how could something like this be prevented? We did the same and came up with one of the most obvious solutions, more education.
- Different stablecoins use different mechanisms & architectures to achieve price stability. All of those approaches have trade-offs that bear different risks. By explaining and categorizing those mechanisms and the associated risks of the specific stablecoins, we want to bring transparency & comparability into the world of stablecoins.
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Question: Describe the stablecoin.wtf use case and share more details about your vision.
- Mike:
- The dashboard is a great way to track the key quantitative metrics on stablecoins such as live and historic data on price, volume, market cap or velocity. We are in touch with many Defi degens which are extensively using a variety of protocols for yield farming. Since delta-neutral strategies based on stablecoins have become quite popular, the dashboard is a great tool to also inform on smaller and more niche stablecoins.
- The vision for the dashboard is to create the go-to resource for the ecosystem for stablecoin data, risk analysis and education. In terms of data, we explore the track and integration of data points such as the collateralization ratio, amount of bad debt, and average volatility.
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In general, we are interested in everything that makes it easier to measure risk. - Another thing we are considering right now is the development of a risk framework that takes into account all the qualitative and quantitative data to create a common denominator for the risk of stablecoins.
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Question: Share your view on the stable coin market and the latest volatility.
- Mike:
- The stablecoin market has developed an increasing dynamic. More and more experiments with variations and new approaches are receiving attention recently. Large blue chip Defi-protocols have started to introduce their own stablecoins. This is a strategic move to increase protocol revenue by gaining market share in the stablecoin lending market. The demand for stablecoins in Defi is big. However, bootstrapping a new crypto-backed stablecoin in the current market conditions is a challenge, even for big protocols such as Aave or Curve. It will be interesting to see if and how fast they can get traction.
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Question: What new exciting stable coin projects are following at the moment?
- Mike:
- One of the new exciting stablecoin projects to follow is definitely Gyroscope. Although its still in development, the research team behind is proposing a combination of interesting concepts. The stablecoin will be backed 1:1 by a basket of protocol-owned crypto assets. Most of these assets will be as well all typed of stablecoins. To ensure price stability under adversarial market conditions, the protocol introduces multiple levels of defense. Thereby, the architecture focuses not only on balancing the actual reserve of the stablecoin, but also on the market expectations and game theoretical behavior of Gyroscope stakeholders.
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Furthermore, protocol-native stablecoins such as GHO from Aave and crvUSD from Curve Finance will shake the current stablecoin landscape.
- They will primarily compete with the leading crypto-backed stablecoins such as DAI, FRAX and LUSD. While Aave will introduce a multi-chain, multi-protocol design heavily focusing on growth, Curve is focusing on an increase in the efficiency of the stablecoin protocol including a new mechanism for liquidations. The next months will be exciting for sure!
- Don´t miss any Liquidity Pool (LPs) insights. Get involved in DeFi & NFTs & Web3 and LPs for free!
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Question: What is Scio and what other projects are you working on?
- Mike:
- Scio is our venture arm with which we provide consulting, advisory and small angel investments. We offer services in the fields of tokenomics & token design, smart contract & dApp development and also web3 business development. Further, we started providing investment due diligence for VCs who are exploring web3 investment opportunities.
- Started as a hackathon project at ETHWarsaw, our naming service for the Aleph Zero ecosystem azero.domains has gained quite a lot of traction and attention. We are currently working on pushing the project mainnet ready. This is an exciting challenge and we are experiencing great support by the Aleph Zero Foundation and the community.
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Question: Can you introduce your team to the readers? What relevant experience do they have?
- Mike:
- Dennis Zollmann, my co-founder, is an amazing fullstack developer with deep knowledge of smart contract development in Solidity and Rust. To the same time, he is probably the most product and user-focused developer I have came across so far. Further, we work together with amazing people across the different projects with work experience at MakerDAO, Curve Finance, Gitcoin and others.
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Question: Please share your mid- and long-term roadmap with our audience
- Mike:
- One goal is to push stablecoins.wtf into becoming the L2Beat for stablecoins and the go-to-ressource for stabelcoin information and education. Further, we are exploring to push Scio more into the direction of a venture & software studio building and pushing exciting products such as azero.domains in the crypto ecosystem.
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Question: What are you looking for at the moment (funding, talent, network, development, community building, etc.)?
- Mike:
- We are always looking to meet and explore partnerships with interesting people and projects. With everything that we do, we are somehow ecosystem & chain agnostic and so are always trying to connect to people across the whole spectrum of crypto. In terms of talent, we are currently looking for rust developers with experience in smart contracts and also a web3-focused social media & marketing manager. Happy to meet if you are interested!
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Question: What do you believe is the next big thing in the Crypto and Web3 space in 2023? What new networks and projects are you following?
- Mike:
- This is a tricky question since there is so much happening on all the different levels from the base layer over the protocol & applications layers towards the access layers. I am closely following the development of modular blockchain approaches which aim to separate the different functionalities of blockchains such as data availability, consensus and execution. At the same time, new “monolithic” blockchains such as Sui, Aptos or Aleph Zero are pushing the boundaries of scalability.
- This is exciting to see while also Ethereum will experience some really useful upgrades in the following months after the long-expected merge this week. Other than that, I am currently fascinated by on-chain identity systems. Especially the utilization of zero-knowledge proofs will open up many new use cases in this field.
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Question: How to get in contact with your team and your community?
- Mike:
- The best way is to contact any of us on Twitter. My handle is @mike1third and my co-founder one is @dennis_zoma 🙂
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DezentralizedFinance: Thank you for your time and the great talk, it was really fun. Hopefully, we can repeat the interview in the future.
- Mike:
- You are welcome, thank you for the great chat and stay safe.
- Find more valuable interviews at DezentralizedFinance.com in our category Interviews.
- RISK DISCLAIMER: All information presented above is meant for informational purposes only and should not be treated as financial, legal, or tax advice. This article’s content solely reflects the opinion of the writer, who is not a financial advisor. Do your own research before you purchase cryptocurrencies. Any cryptocurrency can go down in value, also to zero. Holding cryptocurrencies is very risky.
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