Eco, The Stablecoin Liquidity Layer

GM, GM. Welcome to what's going to be another great episode of DevNTell. So if you didn't know, DevNTell is a 30-minute podcast held every Friday, allowing founders, hackers, and anyone in between to come on the show and showcase their product. And today, I'm excited to welcome Shahrukh Rao, who's product lead at Eco. If you didn't know, Eco is a stablecoin liquidity layer designed for on-chain applications and protocols. So if you stick around for today's episode, you'll see Shahrukh give us an overview of the protocol, its features, and how you can get started using it today. All right, let's get going. But first, a word from our sponsors.

GM, GM. Welcome, Shahrukh. A pleasure to have you on the show, man.

GM. Thank you so much for having me.

Yeah, my pleasure, my pleasure. Uh, yeah, so today is going to be a really great episode. I mean, they're all great episodes, but particularly this one, because we're going to be getting into stablecoins. And stablecoins have gotten some pretty good spotlight as of late. So it's going to be a very intriguing episode for everyone to kind of deep dive into them and what Eco is offering. But before we get into that, would love to kind of get an introduction from yourself as well as the folks who are watching who might not be familiar.

Awesome. Yeah. Again, thank you so much for having me. My name is Shahrukh. I'm product lead at Eco. Really excited to be here.

Awesome, awesome. And yeah, I guess, kind of want to deep dive a little bit on your background. Like, how did you find yourself in technology? Like, have you always been in the tech sector? Were you in web2 and came to web3? Like, what's the story there?

Yeah, I mean, great question. So my story, and I think a lot of the people who work at Eco, their backgrounds are very diverse. So my story is the same. I was actually working... I wasn't interested in... I knew about blockchain technologies, but they weren't really that interesting, like, very early on, like 2013, 2014. But I never really understood the importance of them until I immigrated to Canada. So I was born in Pakistan, but then I immigrated to Canada for my university. And I think money is such an invisible concept. Like, it's like the air you breathe. You don't really notice it except for a few places where you really start to notice it. And I think as an immigrant, when you go from a country like Pakistan to Canada, you're like, well, I understood money, but I never saw the impact of it. Because in Pakistan, like, a hundred Pakistani rupees equals to one dollar. So you're a millionaire in Pakistan, you're like, oh, well, life's going really well. And then you come and immigrate to Canada, you're like 100x poorer just because geography changed. And I'm like, how did that happen? Like, I thought my dad was a millionaire, but now in Canada, I'm not even a thousand-aire. And then it became the student struggle. So that's where I really started to notice money. Where I started to notice crypto really was because getting money in those days from like Pakistan to Canada was so hard. Like, a bank wire takes three days. But if you're a student and you're still learning your finances, if you run out of money, you're like, oh my god, mom, send me $200. Mom can't just send you $200. Like, it'll take three days and if it's a Friday and you want to go out, that's not happening. So it'll happen until the next week and that really impacts the student. And so there was a situation where I had to pay my university fees and the deadline was coming up. And I was trying to get a wire in for like the last three weeks and for one reason or another, it kept getting bounced. And I had to pay, otherwise I would have been dropped from the semester. So I was like, what do I do with the third time that it got returned? I remember, hey, Bitcoin. Like, my friends like, oh yeah, we can probably like do that. So what I did was I told my mom to send to my friend in Pakistan who found some local Bitcoin dealer, sent, gave him the money. That guy sent it to me in five minutes. I sold it for Canadian dollars and I had money in my account in like 20. And for that, for me, was a lightbulb moment where I'm like, here I am in the modern banking system trying to get a wire for three weeks and with this magic internet money, within 20 minutes, I have the money. And the best part was it was because Bitcoin in Pakistan, there was an arbitrage there. So I actually ended up with more money than I had even sent in the first place. So those two lightbulb moments for me changed my trajectory where I was like, okay, not only can is this money fast, if I take advantage of these opportunities, I can actually start doing arbitrage. So I got really interested in like crypto then. And I was like, well, it beats working at 7-Eleven. So I'll just start doing this for money. And I just started like market making. That's where my interest in crypto really started.

Wow. Yeah, that's quite a powerful story. And I think a lot of people I would assume in North America don't realize how hard it is to get your foot in the door in the financial system like outside of that continent. Like, we've heard like countless stories of people just having, for whatever reason, the hardest time just like accessing their money or like in your case, you wanted to pay your tuition, you couldn't get your money to pay the tuition. So it's like crypto to the rescue.

Yeah, exactly. I mean, it's so you notice them in such few places, but when you notice it, it's so important. Like, it's the when you get rugged at the most critical juncture, like damn, I didn't know the system was so fragile that I just didn't in even it was they never thought about my case. And I think that's basically the difference between centralized and decentralized systems where it works for like the 98% of the population and in 98% of the cases. But there's like 2% where it really breaks apart. And I think over time you've seen with decentralized system that 98% is getting lower and lower. Like, it works less and less for fewer and fewer people and like more and more people are like stuck on that outlier. And that's why crypto is so good, right? Because it kind of evens that playing field.

Yeah, 100%. 100%. And I suppose this new found love for crypto like after realizing its power and all that, was or is Eco your first stop in crypto or were you working at another company before Eco?

Yeah, so actually before Eco, I was working on my own startup. Like, I'm fascinated... my background is in psychology. So I'm fascinated with like the intersection of psychology and AI, but that conversation is for maybe another podcast. But I was actually not... I was all... I loved the space, I loved the mission, but I wasn't really interested in like joining a company. My plan was to keep working on my startup and I used to moonlight as a PM for different crypto projects. And in those days, you know, this is like 2015, 2016, like when you say crypto project, I'm trying to be very generous here. It's like four people in Discord, you come online and you're like, nobody speaks the same language, everybody's like trying to figure this out. And my first... and the projects that I used to work at was Bitcoin adjacent projects. So like, I was a Bitcoin maximalist. So I was like, I hate everything else, Bitcoin's the answer, and then I started to build on Bitcoin. So I actually was working at a project called... my most recent one before Eco was a project called TradeLayer, which was trying to build derivative, a DEX on Bitcoin. Now, that seems easy because we're used to Ethereum land and EVM, but building a DEX properly, a non-custodial DEX on Bitcoin is so hard. You literally have to fork the Bitcoin node and then build your application on top of it. And starting an application takes like 12 hours. Like, this is this was the reality. And so my maximalism was starting to get watered down where I'm like, well I love Bitcoin but you can't build on it for for anything except by sacrificing custody. So that was one. And at the same time, I think what really drove my passion is that I was a victim of the QuadrigaCX hack. So most of my financial money... I got really lucky in crypto. I thought I'd never needed money again and this would be enough to like work on my startup. But with QuadrigaCX, the the hack that happened and then... well, they say hack, but yeah, let's just leave it at that. But but yeah, most of my money was on-chain because I used to do arbitrage professionally and most of my money was in that exchange. And that made me realize that as a space, what I saw, the trajectory, was that as a space we were espousing like crypto and non-custodiality but the applications were all custodial. Right? It's like, make a trustless system, but then entrust these random guys on the internet with all your money. How will it end well? Like, it will never end well. So those two things I think left a deep impact for me where I was like, I really want to back... if I can do one thing in crypto, I will bring the advent of self-custodial applications. Like, if I can contribute to that meaningfully, I think it's a that lesson from Quadriga is a lesson well well learned. And so now those were the two reasons but I was still working on my startup and then one of the founders of Eco just tweeted randomly because I always used to be on crypto Twitter. They were like, well we're trying to build this company. I'm like, this is the most ambitious, wonderful, and risky thing that I've ever seen and it fits right it checks all my boxes. So I just reached out to him on Twitter and I was like, hey, you know, I have this experience, I've been and I just and it all started from there. And then that was where my journey of Eco started and ever since then it's I think been three years. I've been even more and more excited every day about the work we do at Eco.

Amazing. Yeah, that's such an awesome story and yeah, I mean, it's like it seems the role and and place placement like fit like a glove. So it's excellent you ended up where you did. And yeah, I think this is a perfect segue to kind of get into what Eco is all about. So I would say, I would ask, what is Eco? If you had to give a elevator pitch.

I mean, it's it's a loaded question to ask a PM what is the product because we might spend like all day here. That's literally my job to even ask myself this question multiple times a day. Uh, but okay, let's try to be succinct here. What is Eco? I would say, a TLDR elevator pitch, is the Eco is a protocol that enables stablecoin abstraction. Now, that means abstracting stablecoins across chains and then abstracting stablecoins across asset types. Both those things are core focuses for Eco. And we do this with the tagline that we are in the pursuit of a one-click send, stable send. And that pursuit has been basically the core thing that Eco's been working on since the last couple of years.

Awesome. Yeah, I guess you want to get into what you mean by one-click send? It seems like a a magic button somebody presses and uh get magic internet money.

Yeah, I mean, yeah, yeah, yeah, let's dig in. So it's so think about like you're using Amazon or Stripe or like the conventional payment applications. Right? Like, I think with if you want to talk about an an in a new system, right? Like, the only way to replace the old system, not if it's like 1x better, 2x better, it has to be marginally it can't be marginally better, it has to be exponentially better. Right? So the base case in web2 technology is the understanding that people go through one-click checkouts, right? Like, Stripe is one-click payment, Amazon has one-click checkout. And you notice in finance, a lot of the web applications have invested a lot of technology to lower the friction of steps for you to for them to take your money. Right? And because that is what they found is leads to better conversions. And so you have this idea where like you had all the big players have done this research. And on the other hand, you have crypto where me I had ran into the situations where I was doing like a podcast with Uniswap and I was telling them about the situation. I think this is going to become a meme, but I had this situation where I had $150. But this $150 in my MetaMask, I had USDC on Ethereum, I had USDT on Ethereum, I had EUSDT EUSDT on Ethereum, I had USDC on Optimism, but I also had the bridged USDC on Optimism, bridged to the native bridge because I was an early user. And then I had USDC on Base, but I also had the bridged USDC on Base. And then I had USDT on Optimism, I did not have USDT on Base, I had OUSDT. And then Polygon is the same thing, and I ran out of fingers. My $150 were spread across 12 different stablecoins and I wanted to send that to my other wallet, like in one transfer. I'm like, let me just get it on one chain because I need to use this money. And the number of steps, I think I counted it, it's like more than 40 steps to do all of them. Think about it. You're bridging, you're swapping, approving, and by the end of it, it's like I wanted to cry. I'm like, this is not okay. Uh, and that has been I think like the fundamental problem that stablecoins are going to face because as stablecoin technologies go forward, right? Like, you see the trend in even the US where they're increasingly making it easy for private entities to issue stablecoins. Apply that trend so that every company is going to be bringing in with their own like stablecoin flavor. Apply that to multiple chains, apply that to multiple assets. Now you have a big problem. And if you expect grandma to click 40 buttons, yeah, crypto's not going to work. So at Eco, our job is to build the technology that takes this from a 40-click process into a one-click experience.

Awesome. Yeah, so it seems like you really um you really solving this sort of like fragmentation problem um where like you have all this money spread, it's the same money technically, it's just on a different chain. So why shouldn't you be able to use it in one shot and not have to like go through the 40-50 steps you say. And when you're doing those swaps, right, that costs gas, so you're actually losing money when you're doing that.

Yeah, 100%. Not only is it and you're not like you don't know the best exchange and the best DEX to hit and like the you're not a market maker. Like, what are you doing like clicking buttons like seven times and then the market slips because something depegs and you're stuck there. Or the bridge fails and now you're in Discord like questioning your life choices. But it should just be better than that.

Yeah, I 100% agree. Uh, and yeah, that that one-click um kind of mentality is like um like you being a product person, you know, like um going through a checkout, like once you go too many steps in a funnel, it you there's people who kind of just drop off. So um that that one-click power where like Amazon, you can just click a button you buy the whole thing. Like, it's a very, very um appealing um user experience uh feature. So um...

Yeah, and at Eco we're like, well, let's apply this for payments and then what if we just do a little bit better and why don't we apply this entire concept to on-chain actions. So at Eco we're like, yeah, payments are great, but what if every single action on-chain can be that one-click stable send. So when you because think about it when you're going to swapping on Uniswap, you don't really go to Uniswap and think I'm going to put 0.021 ETH and get like 500, 6,000 PEPE. You're like, I want $5 of PEPE coin, maybe it goes up, I'm just going to YOLO this money rather than get coffee. So I think next set of users and even ourselves, we take it for granted because we abstract it in our heads, but a lot of users just have a stablecoin denominated experience. And so let's just make the technology so that that act is that is true rather than you doing the mental gymnastics of like how much your ETH is worth in PEPE.

Indeed, indeed. Uh, and it seems like Eco has a few different products that enable that. Um, did you want to get into that?

Of course. Yeah. I mean, it is a hard problem. That's what I'll say to begin with. Like, it's it's not been easy. I think like when we made when we started building towards this, the first thing we realized was that we were trying to build on rollups and trying to make this unified experience across Ethereum. But bridges were so hard. Like, we at Eco are pretty well capitalized, we have great a great network, and we even went to bridges where we're like, let's just try building an app chain for payments and see what happens there. So we're like, okay, they were like, yeah, you can build an L3 on Base it'll cost you $200 a month. We're like, great, let's do that today. And then we're like, but they were like, oh but just one thing. The bridge is across or some other bridging provider that you have to ask for them to deploy on your bridge, otherwise you have to deal with this native bridge which takes seven days to withdraw. You're like, well a payment can't take seven days to withdraw. Like, I mean, we're trying to better the financial system, not make it worse. So I can't make a payment rollup where the payment takes seven days to pay someone. That's just not going to work. But they're like you need a bridge. I'm like, okay, let's go find bridges. And I won't name names, but it went from $200 a month to doing it on on Base running a rollup to six figures of just asking the bridging provider to deploy on you. Right? Because bridging providers have these gated systems that they have to have a good re their their lack of permissionless acts as a centralization bottleneck. So one of the things that our experience taught us was that well if we want a unified stablecoin experience, we got to make sure that the transfer system of stablecoins across chains is permissionless so that anyone can deploy it so we get this unified experience, we're not waiting on some some typeform to go through a funnel so we can get liquidity and that kind of experience. So that's what we did. And the first thing that we built is something we call Eco Routes. Eco Routes as far as I know is the first intent transfer protocol that's fully permissionless. So I can break this down, let me know how deep you want me to go. So I can talk about the difference between like a normal bridge and an intent bridge, talk about stable coin like what Eco specifically or I can keep it a little bit high level. I don't know how expert because it is DevNTell, but I don't know how how deep I should go. So you tell me.

Yeah, we're a developer crowd. So go as technical as you'd like.

Cool. I mean, the difference between normal bridges and intent bridges is that intents intent bridges are built on this declarative paradigm, right? Intent bridges are execution first, settlement later, where normal bridges are settlement first as you execute. So to give you an example, a difference between a layer zero bridge and let's say something like across is that a layer zero bridge, you have to define the discrete actions you have to take to trigger the bridge transaction, and then your money moves to the bridge contract and then gets relayed and then it settles on the other side. But an intent system like across, you lock up your funds on the source chain, you're just say what you want on the destination chain, someone goes and uses their own capital to do that action for you, then come back to the source chain and prove that they did it um so that you can actually get give them the reward and their money that they used up. The two patterns have are very subtle but they have huge impact. One of the biggest impact with intent bridges versus conventional bridging is the user is not exposed to the bridging risk. Right? So the user is not exposed to the computational path you take to achieve the outcome, because the user only pays if the outcome is achieved. That's very subtle but it leads to huge user experience benefits. First of all, it doesn't matter how many steps there are in the computational path to achieve the action, it's still going to be one action for the user because they're just defining the outcome. When a normal bridge you cannot. So Eco is an intent bridge in the sense that it does the same thing. You have funds on a source chain, define intent on what you want to happen on destination, you have an entity such as a solver who goes to fulfill that intent, and then it sends a message back to the source chain saying, hey, I did the thing, unlock my funds. Um, and Eco is, as far as I know, the only permissionless intent protocol in the sense that the technologies that we built um the system with very intentionally were designed to be technologies that were fully permissionless. Like, you do not need anyone's permission to deploy it. So these contracts are like three contracts you can deploy on a chain, you can use the message bridges which are permissionless, we made sure of that. Um, and you can just activate that on your chain, you can there's an open-source solver you can run yourself, and you as yourself if you're just passionate and interested can get bridging on your chain. And we wanted to make that true and we're so proud that it actually works.

So I'm I'm actually going to share my screen and walk you through basically. Can you see my screen?

Yep, I brought it up. Yep.

Cool. Awesome. So this is the Eco docs. Um, eco.com/docs, um if you guys want more details, definitely check it out. But I just wanted to zoom in on this high-level architecture which is like if you see the step one which is the declarative outcome definition, right? Like, so the user is like, hey, I want a transfer on let's say Base to Optimism. So the user just creates the intent, locks up their funds. The step two is that solver detects that intent and it just does the action. There is no message sent on creation from the source to destination. So that means it's cheaper than a message bridge. Uh sorry, than a normal non-intent bridge because you're not getting that message from source to destination you've cut that step because you're relying on this off-chain actor which is the solver. So that's step two, solver fulfills the intent. And then we use one of our message bridges in this diagram we're using Hyperlane, Hyperlane is one of our early partners. Um, and then through Hyperlane we send a message back to source and we're like, hey, we did the thing you wanted, here's the cryptographic proof of that, and then the contracts just give the solver the funds from the user marking the intent um fulfilled. So that that basically is um our end-to-end flow for our um intent system. And yeah, the contracts are fully open-source and you can see this in action in a web in a transfer in a bridge page that we've made called the Eco Portal, which is basically like our showcase of like this technology working. It's deployed to a bunch of chains you can check out the list here, but essentially if you go and check out a single intent I can go and show you a flow, but basically the trans this is the intent creation transaction. So if you see, this is a transfer going from Arbitrum to Base. If you look at the transaction, you'll see in the logs, there's this object that's created. It's it's this is the intent created event and this intent created event contains all the data for the intent to be for the outcome to be defined and for the intent to be considered fulfilled. Now, our protocol is pretty cool in the sense that you pass a bunch of in you you take all your intent data and you use interact with our contract and our contract gives you a vault address for your intent. And so this vault address for your intent is the one you just send a transfer to. So your gas cost is just a transfer on-chain. And then what happens is as a solver picks it up, solver goes and fulfills it. So the solver sees it, and you see like um a fulfillment from the solver and this if you check the logs here, you get this Hyperlane instant fulfillment which is like us on fulfillment sending a message back through Hyperlane on the source chain saying, hey, we did the thing you wanted, give us um give us some money, um give us the reward that you promised us. So and if and then once the proof once the message gets sent back to the source chain, you basically see this action which is batch withdraw. And this is where like I geek out a little bit because this tech is so cool. But remember where we when we created the intent, we sent the funds to a vault address so like my own vault address. Well we do this for a reason. So when you send the funds to that vault address the smart contract for the vault is not really deployed yet. It's we determined it using create2. So we know on deployment of your vault what the address is going to be. You just send it to there and then the cool part that happens is that when the proof happens, we do a single step where we create the contract, we prove the intent, we withdraw for you, and then we self-destruct the contract refunding you the gas cost of the creation. And that allows you to have a gas cost which is kind of pretty pretty pretty efficient and it actually scales and gets even cheaper the more try things that you're trying to withdraw at the same time. That's why we call it batch withdraw. And yeah, we're pretty proud of the tech, that's why I wanted to geek out a little bit, but yeah, that's that's basically how routes work.

Nice. And uh what's the what's the purpose of uh destructing the uh contract? Is it cheaper to just create a new one versus just...

Yeah, so there's a trick in Ethereum which is that if you um self-destruct the contract in the same transaction that you created it, you get some of the creation gas cost back. So it's actually a way to cheat where you don't pay for the gas cost for the contract creation which is a big overhead and yeah, it's like this little quirk of Ethereum. I actually want to give a shout out to one of our protocol engineers, Curiel. Um, he's actually the one that came up with this and his he is actually one of the developers that had to go to Ethereum community and ask them to stop um removing self-destruct from the Ethereum protocol because he was using it for this purpose. So I think because of him and a couple of other engineers that's why they didn't remove it yet. But yeah, then we were like if it's still there let's use it.

Yeah, yeah, definitely. And it's not cheating, you're just uh you're just playing playing the system, that's all. And uh so when a uh when the money goes into this vault and the um money is uh sent on the other end, um I imagine there's a um liquidity pool somewhere to enable that. Um, did you want to get into that?

Yeah, I mean, this is like I think the big problem with intent systems where like you would assume that there would be a liquidity pool, right? There's actually no liquidity pool. There's there's just solvers, and these solvers are entities that have off-chain capital, they're usually professional market makers. And that is actually kind of bad because think it works in the short term, right? Because you only have a couple of chains, you have a couple of solvers, they're all participating, but we're in rollup land where you have cheese chains coming on like every five minutes. Now at this point, the problem that you start to happen is that the number of people who are sophisticated enough to run solvers, right? Like, interact with these contracts, fulfill intents, and then the number and the number of people who have the legal compliance to take third party funds and actually fulfill intents, the overlap of those two sets is so small that you basically don't have a lot of actors in the system. So you have a very limited set of solvers. There's less than a hundred solvers that do like almost like more than 90% of intent volume in crypto today. And because you have only a hundred solvers, they can't move as fast as the blockchain the net the ecosystem, right? So you get to centralization bottlenecks. That's why these intent systems, which are so cool and even our intent system which is permissionless, can't really deploy as fast as the ecosystem is evolving because the actors in it, which is us and other solvers, cannot scale fast enough because we're only like two, three teams, like that's and that has been I think a fundamental problem in why you don't see these intent systems all over the place. And so one of the things that we've been working on is this idea of, hey, what if we can bring a liquidity pool into the mix here. So one of the things that we're working on which is pretty exciting is this idea of crowd liquidity. And crowd liquidity is the again, I think it's the first one as far as we know, but it is the first um on-chain no-collateral solver loan program.

So what this does is that imagine you have a bunch of these liquidity pools spread across all the chains, and you as a user you're like, hey, I want to earn some yield from this intent stuff that's going on. Like, every time money moves, I have some liquidity, I'm chain agnostic, you take my money, you use it to fulfill intents. So you give it to this liquidity pool, and what this liquidity pool does is that it gives this as a loan, a no-collateral loan, to be and I think no-collateral loans are very special in crypto because the game the name of the game is over-collateralized loans, so whenever you say no-collateral people start getting worried. Uh but your funds are safu because um no-collateral the way that we give no-collateral loans is that our pools have TEEs and other mechanisms that allow them to basically do a loan check on you. They so you see here in the diagram is let's say a user wants to create an intent and transfer some tokens. So what we do is we actually have a liquidity pool so the solver has in this example no money. The solver basically says, hey user, um I want to fulfill your intent, I don't have any money to fulfill this intent, let me just get a no-collateral solver loan from our crowd liquidity pool program. So what they do is they hit our crowd liquidity pools, they're like, hey I've got this intent coming up that I need to fulfill, and basically what the pool does is they checks the source chain to make sure the intent is exists, that you're not lying to it. It checks if the intent is profitable if the data is enough that it's going to make some money. And it checks to see on fulfillment on settlement, it'll get the money first, so it keeps most of the money and then pays you out your share. So all those three checks run. This is basically those checks that are happening. So when when the user creates the intent, at before we fulfill it, we do these three checks which is the creation check, profitability check, and then the intent settlement check. And if all those intents are valid uh those checks are valid, then we just give a no-collateral loan. Solver uses it to fulfill, settlement happens, pool gets paid, pool gives takes a small cut, gives the rest of the money to the solver. So this allows us in this technology, this is why I'm super super passionate about it, with this technology we'd be able to have a solvers that don't need to have the compliance overhead of having third party funds, they can just compete on execution. So now you've changed the game a little bit where you're not um letting these solvers act as king makers where whoever has the money gets to decide how execution happens, what you've done is created a fair system where if you um if you can compete even if you're from Bangladesh with $100 of gas or you're in Oxford with a million dollars, as long as you create the most efficient intent which has the lowest cost for the user and highest cost for like the pool holders, you should get the right to have this loan and fulfill that intent and compete in the intent marketplace. So our hope is with crowd liquidity, we can create next-generation solvers that don't require liquidity at all. And that's basically what the space like how we think about MEV, how we think about searchers, most searchers don't actually have their own liquidity. So when we think about these these block building operations and these cross-chain operations and what kind of persona are these sophisticated actors usually are, most of those sophisticated actors that power the dark forest, they don't come with their own liquidity. So it's kind of like bringing intent cross-chain intents back to its roots and removing the liquidity part from the from the from like the intent fulfillment um problem.

Interesting. Yeah, it certainly seems um there's lots of bells and whistles that that Eco's packed here to to kind of make um DeFi a little bit easier to use overall. Um, like what would you say is Eco's end game? Like, what's Eco's North Star in all this?

Yeah, okay, yeah, that's that's actually a very good question. One thing I will say though, with the uh with our crowd liquidity, although it's very um complex as a technology, what we've done is try to make it a little bit fun to draw attention to it. So this is like a site that we some of our PMs built. Like, so this is basically departmentofagri.com. You can basically buy a hat here and this hat is $100, but the but the money we take, we give it to crowd liquidity pools that then its solvers requests loans from, fulfill intents, and then every Friday the money the solvers earn, the pools earn, um your anybody who taps their hat every Friday at a random time gets all the yield from that week. And I think we for the last two weeks, like the last week yield was 600, $600 that got distributed to like 30 people and this week it was like about I think 50 people that got 800. So you almost get a cup of coffee and I think you're going to get make your money back. But this was our experiment at showing, maybe in a fun way, how this whole mechanism would work. So I'd highly advise you check out departmentofagri. This is the dashboard, here you can see kind of like the solver, so this is the payout that just went out today, it's about 800 bucks for 86 people I actually thought there'd be but fewer than that, average payout per per hat was about $9 and you can see here, these are all the intents that this solver, this hat solver fulfilled, using the liquidity it rented from the proceeds of the hats and then it distributed this funds back. So yeah, it's a really complex um concept, but I just wanted to put it out there that we have this really fun way of like kind of showing how it all works and we'll be writing a couple of blog posts um soon as well around this, so I'll be I'll share that to with you as well.

Awesome. So it's like you buy the hat and then every Friday there's like a button you press on the hat or something?

Yeah, I mean, yeah, so you buy the hat for a hundred bucks, right? We just take that money give it to the solver, and then on Friday you have 10 minutes. So you tap your hat because we've partnered with IYK, and when you tap your hat and then you get to if you tap in the 10 minutes, the that week's yield is yours. Um and so so if like 10 people tap, you get six like if it's 600 you get $60, if a hundred tap you get $6, if two people tap you get $300. So we found in the Telegram chat people are actively trying to get their friends and other people to not tap while simultaneously trying to be the only one that taps. It's a very interesting dynamic, it's been super fun so far. Yeah.

Wow. Wow. That sounds amazing. It's like game theory like in the physical world, really. It's like...

And it's very interesting to think about like what kind of this core technology that we've built, like almost we think of this like an agent for the hats community that's like doing work for the hats community. So we're very excited about like where how much further we can take that concept. Yeah, but that's basically Eco's end game, you know, like our our main focus, sorry to go on this tangent, I just wanted to show the hats I was so excited. But that's basically Eco's end game, right, the pursuit of one-click stable experiences. So we started with this problem where we had like 40 clicks to get to from like one place to another. Then we showed you like how the stuff that we're building with routes allow us to create this intent stuff. And then we showed you like how the liquidity can how we can make the scale the liquidity up to fulfill those intents. And our hope is, and we've got a couple of other things hopefully soon that we can share, which makes it truly that you are able to take that 40-click action into one-click, but you can also do it permissionlessly and you can do it in a network where there's fair and free markets and you get the best outcomes as a user. So that's basically what Eco's mission is. It goes back to like I think I I see so few companies in crypto working on like the OG thesis, right, which is the peer-to-peer payment, the and I think stablecoins is like almost almost very different because it's fiat, but it's also like I think the closest crypto is working right now to toward toward that original vision. So helping making that money movement easier is the mission of Eco, and that is why I'm super super excited to to work at Eco. Yeah.

Amazing. Amazing. And um yeah, we're we're coming coming to time. Um, and like final question is like how can people get started with Eco today?

Yeah, I mean, I'll point you to the docs again. I want to give a shout out to one of my engineers, Dirk, who actually wrote most of these um at crunch time who and then he had some choice words for me as he as all engineers do for PMs. But this is a doc that Dirk wrote. If you have any question first of all, feel free to reach out to @eco, tag me, tag @eco and let them know that I told you guys to tag to tag us, and we'd be happy to reach out and help you. But if you want to do it yourself, it should be pretty easy. eco.com/docs is a quick start. All you have to do is like install the SDK. There's like less than 20 lines of code to like how to create an intent, apply a quote, and then this is how you can use our SDK to publish the intent. So like couple of less than an hour for you to go from like start to finish to like create embed intent creations in your app and then just interact with our API that tells you which network and tokens and all that complicated stuff. So it becomes a really easy step for you. But if you get ever get stuck, feel free to reach out and we'd be happy to help.

Awesome. Uh yeah, looking forward to seeing what people uh start to build with Eco. Um, seems like a very promising uh product and uh yeah, the hat thing was awesome. Uh yeah, I I want to I'd love to see things like that. So wish more companies would do stuff like that.

I'll send you a hat. Yeah. Awesome. Thank you so much for having me Narb.

Yeah, my pleasure Shahrukh. Uh yeah, and um for folks who are have been watching us live today, um I'm dropping a link in the chat for you to claim your attendance badge um for doing just that. So if on-chain collectibles are your thing, uh definitely check that out, you'll have about an hour to claim that. Um and with that, I just want to wish everyone a very happy Friday, happy weekend wherever you may be, and we'll catch you back here for another great episode of DevNTell next week. All right. Have a good one. Cheers.