DeFi Vaults with Enzyme (formerly Melon) Founder Mona Elisa

Video Index
0:00 Welcome
1:58 What Problem do you Solve?
9:57 What about rogue fund managers?
15:20 Investor Relations in DeFi
17:28 Traction numbers
19:37 What is the SECRET to Enzyme?
22:13 Where do you get your motivation from? (best answer)
31:42 Big idea: Alternative Financial System
33:52 Upcoming Roadmap
36:06 Why Sulu?
38:24 Pocket Picks: Paraswap Unslashed
42:08 Loopring, Optimism Ethereum
45:40 Gas prices on Ethereum

What is Enzyme (formerly Melon and MelonPort)
So enzyme, for those of you who don’t know is a protocol that enables anyone to build a vault in DeFi a vault, which is able to trade assets, lend earn interest, farm, or deposit into AMM pools.

The idea, eventually, the end goal is we want to have integrations across the whole of the DeFi space.

And we want to be able to hold any kind of asset within an enzyme vault, the protocol also takes care of the accounting. So you can basically calculate on a pretty much live basis, what the value of the assets within the vault are, how they’re changing, you have full transparency over what the vault manager is doing. And at the same time, everything that’s happening in the vault that you have potentially deposited into, is completely non-custodial, which means that if at any point, you disagree with what the vault manager is doing the strategy, you can just exit because you are the custodian of those assets at all time. So it’s pretty beautiful.

And the problem that I faced, you mentioned that I did start my career at Goldman, I then moved to hedge funds after that, and I was a long short equity portfolio manager. But the part of my career that I don’t talk about very much, is when I tried to launch my own hedge fund. And discovered for the first time in my life, what a nightmare it is for small to medium sized managers who love investing to launch in the world of traditional finance. And long story short, it wasn’t for lack of trying, it wasn’t for a lack of the hours. And it wasn’t for, a lack of luck, I had a lot of luck, I had maybe $30 million raised within a couple of months. But my god, the fact that people think $30 million is a small fund and traditional finance is very telling about what the industry, barriers to entry are.

So the problem I’m trying to solve, or that I, the problem that I set out to solve is I want to lower the barriers to entry in finance, I want anyone to be able to invest because they love investing because they’re good at investing because they can prove that they’re good at investing without having to be born into kind of a fortune or without having to, be endorsed by a Goldman Sachs or an Invesco or whatever. So we’re looking to make it simple, easy, cheap, for talented investors in crypto to launch a track record on chain and to be able to monetize their talent if they’re good at what they do, and the other kind of user that we serve, is the the people who might end up depositing in some of these strategies, because they discover you because of the transparency that blockchain offers, because of the the trust that blockchain contracts help establish between financial participants. And basically, depositors can participate in some of the DeFi upside, without having to bear all the gas costs on their own, but instead sharing the gas costs with a group of people who have similar ideas about how to monetize the DeFi space. So one of the problems that is very topical right now is high gas prices, a lot of small players in the DeFi space want to be able to deposit, for example, a couple of 100 bucks into Compound (COMP) are out there to earn some interest. But maybe they can’t, because to do that, they’re also paying a couple of 100 bucks of gas in order to do to farm the rewards that they get from depositing into these protocols. And so a lot of these protocols offer enhanced yields because of farming opportunities. And those farming opportunities at the moment, are very expensive. If you’re a small player to compete, that to help you compound the yield. So, so we’re looking to basically serve talented crypto investors, defy investors, and we’re looking to help them monetize their talent. And we’re also looking to serve the small depositor who maybe can’t afford all the transaction costs, but wants to participate in the upside. And also doesn’t have the time because DeFi is a full time job right now staying on top of all the opportunities is extremely time consuming, especially if you have a full time job.


Disclaimer
Information is provided for general educational purposes only. This presentation is not an offer to sell securities or a solicitation of offers to buy securities. Nothing contained herein constitutes investment or other advice nor is it to be relied on in making an investment decision. For more important information, please see disclaimer
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Author: miko