Flexy: Seamless Cross Chain Asset Transfer

GM GM folks. Welcome to what's gonna be another great DevNTell. So if you didn't know, DevNTell is a 30-minute podcast for builders and hackers to showcase something they've built or are passionate about. So whether you are from a high-profile web3 startup, a weekend hacker, or anything in between, this is your opportunity and platform to showcase what you've built with the web3 community. And today, I'm ecstatic to welcome Django, who's the CEO of Flexy. If you didn't know, Flexy is a state-of-the-art bridge with the fastest transaction time and the lowest fees. So if you stick around for today's show, you'll learn all about Flexy and how it's an important tool for the DeFi ecosystem, especially for builders and developers. Alright, let's get into it.

GM GM, welcome to the show Django, pleasure to have you on.

Thank you for having me. Good to be here.

Yeah. Uh, yeah, I guess, um, before we get into all of the awesome stuff you have planned for us, um, perhaps would you like to give a brief introduction about yourself?

Yeah, for sure. Uh, I'm Django, my real name is Parker in the real world. Um, I've been in web3 for the past few years, prior to that I was a data analyst. Um, but then fell in love with crypto in general in 2021 and then I found my way deeper into crypto through like MEV bots and auditing. And spent my last three years as a web3 auditor, helping to secure protocols and just find bugs, and just like help out the space. And that's kind of what I'm still doing these days, but over the last year I've started building something called Flexy, which I'm happy to share with you today.

Awesome, awesome. So I guess, um, was there something that, um, kind of stood out to you during your time as an auditor that inspired you to create Flexy? Or was it just like, oh, I see an opportunity here, I want to fix something.

Yeah, absolutely. So the use case behind Flexy actually previously was called something called GasBot. Um, the entire issue was that as an auditor, for those who might not know, um, we compete in audit contests sometimes. So you can, you have a couple routes, you can either audit for a client directly or you can perform, do something like an audit contest, which basically is an anonymous way to submit bugs. And if you find bugs, you get paid for it in USDC. And myself and other auditors were having the issue of getting paid in USDC to various wallets. So a lot of people want to stay anonymous, and they didn't have any MATIC um on Polygon for to move around the Polygon USDC. And it's like, what do you do? Do you transfer some MATIC to your wallet? But then your wallets are connected and you're not anonymous. So I created something called GasBot, which was basically a service to allow someone to sign an off-chain signature, um which we can get into more of the details about that, and that's kind of the backbone of Flexy. Um, basically it would take $1 of USDC from them, send them MATIC, and then they can do whatever they want and stay anonymous. Um, so yeah, it was kind of a tool built for auditors at that point and myself, I used it all the time just because I was always running into that issue and then yeah, we've evolved to Flexy.

Awesome. Yeah, these are usually how these things start up is like you have this pain point and it's like there's no tool out there for me so I'm just going to build it. That's awesome. Um, yeah, I guess, um, without further ado, did you want to get into the content?

Yeah, for sure. Um, so I will share my screen here.

And folks, uh while Parker is going through uh his slides, if you have any questions, please please feel free um to post them in the comments and we will bring them up as we go. All right.

So you should be able to see my uh little presentation here. Can you see that Narb? Yes sir, you're good to go. All right. So uh again, I'm Django, my real name's Parker. Um, I go by Django in the space because uh as an auditor I was doing something called bug bounties and you know, they're basically where you find live bugs and you submit those bugs and um it's called bug hunting basically. And I'm like, oh what would, what's a bounty hunter good name? And I'm like Django, Django on-chain, that just fits so perfectly. So that's why I go by Django. It is perfect. Yeah, it's so perfect. Yeah, and it's funny cuz like it's almost like my real name now cuz everyone calls me Django, I forget oh yeah, I'm really Parker. Um, but so I built Flexy. Flexy has been live for about a year now. Um, again like I said in its previous form it was called GasBot. We actually just transitioned to Flexy over the last few months. GasBot was only delivering gas, so it was using that um gasless transactions to deliver gas. Flexy now delivers gas and all ERC-20s that we support. Um, so it's a full cross-chain bridge um with some bells and whistles that I'm going to get into in this presentation and um a lot of stuff geared towards developers. So um anyone who's a developer here might like to uh learn more about Flexy.

So without further ado, um what is Flexy? So on the surface, Flexy is just an ultra low-cost, as fast as can be cross-chain bridge that we built for both crypto natives, people who have used bridges and have been in DeFi for a while, and also people who are completely new to crypto. We made it so that it's completely foolproof and that it just doesn't take as many clicks and crypto knowledge to understand how to bridge cuz personally I remember when I first used my first dApps and my first bridges, I didn't know what I was doing. I didn't understand about token approvals, I didn't understand anything. So we built our bridge to be as easy as possible. Um, and the really cool thing about Flexy is we built it so that it can be integrated directly into any dApp um in as few steps and as like little dev time as possible, and I'll get into that as well. And why we built Flexy. Uh, I kind of talked about this already, but um well firstly I just didn't like bridges. Back in 2021, 2022, I had a lot of trouble with bridges. Um, it just seems like that space was a little bit lacking um and I just wanted to build something that worked a little bit better. And I also wanted to kind of build something where users didn't need to, let's say you got to a new dApp um on a new chain that you just found and you want to use that dApp, you don't have any gas. I didn't like the flow of having to leave that dApp and find a bridge and connect my wallet to that bridge interface, perform all the bridging and wait for my transactions and then eventually come back to the dApp. It took like 30 minutes and it just didn't make sense. So I wanted to build something that dApps could bring into their own dApp and allow users to stay there and do everything they need, get their funds on their chain and continue using their dApp. So that was kind of the impetus behind that. Also with the whole gasless thing I already talked about.

Um, so the things that make us different. Like I said, zero knowledge required to use our interface. This is a little picture of our interface. As you'll notice, everything is in USD to make it super easy. So you don't need to know that ETH is like $2500 right now, um and you don't need input .001 ETH. Instead, you put everything in USD. So whether it's USDC, whether it's ETH, whether it's some random token, you just put in hey I want to send $30 and uh you'll see in the destination you can choose the destination chain, you choose the destination token and it shows you how much you receive in USD. After the gas fees that are required to, you know, send a transaction on the source chain and relay that transaction on the destination chain, it shows you exactly what you're going to receive. Um, and I personally like this. I built it this way because uh in traditional bridges it's a little bit more um like uh not transparent. You basically send $30 worth of funds but you also send extra gas to cover the destination charges and you might not know actually how much you're paying. It all just kind of adds up in the background, you got to be really diligent to know, so I built it this way just so everything is as clear as possible.

Um, and the real the real thing that makes us different is our gasless transactions. So like I stated earlier, we use something called EIP-2612 and that is an EIP that allows you to sign an off-chain signature to grant allowance to our Flexy contract. And the reason you want to do that is because it saves you the hassle of sending an approval transaction and a bridge transaction uh on a bridge interface. So all you have to do is sign one off-chain signature, we pick that up, Flexy picks that up and we send the source transaction and destination transaction. So we kind of remove the need to send your transaction and wait for it to confirm and then send another transaction wait for it to confirm. We just ask you for one one signature and uh do everything you need. This also is uh like adds a benefit of like in my example, I only had one token in my wallet across all the chains. I didn't have any gas anywhere. Um, so you can get gas without needing gas and that's kind of what we've evolved from but that's you know, one of the main use cases for us still. Just people need gas on a chain and they only have a token then no problem.

Um, so we also uh I guess uh another feature that uh really makes us uh pretty great is that we use 1inch on the back end. So all of our swaps are uh routed through 1inch so we're happy to um provide the absolute best swap rate so in case you need to um receive some sort of uh token that doesn't have like too much liquidity or something, you can just make sure um you can rest assured that we're going to swap through uh basically the best path to get you as much value as possible.

Um, and with that since we're talking to a lot of developers here the question is can you use Flexy in your dApp? The answer is yes. And how long does it take? It only takes 5 minutes. Um, it is truly easy to bring Flexy into your dApp. We created firstly our bridge, our bridge interface on flexy.tech and then we boiled it down to an awesome NPM package that you can install and just import directly into your code and it's going to work out of the box with your uh with whatever dApp you have. So um this really does help your users get the tokens and gas that they need to use your dApp and just kind of removes one layer of uh of friction for them. Um, and yeah that that's really who we're catering to now. Just devs with dApps who want to just add a little bit of functionality and take the load off their users.

And uh widget customization like the Flexy widget. It can be customized to basically look and act however you want it to um because you spend a lot of time making your your websites and your dApps look a certain way and uh it's nice that Flexy can match that that theming um with custom fonts and colors. We also have like a really easy light mode dark mode switch which um a lot of integrating dApps tend to just you know go with a dark mode and kind of not have to customize too much and just it fits their dApp pretty well. We also offer multiple render modes. So um basically our bridge interface, you can just show as like you know like a a page with that bridge interface or you can make it pop open with a button which is my favorite um and I can show these in our our demo um but I kind of like it because you can just have a button that you know let's say you have a dApp and you have a token um you can just have this button that says hey buy this token um and it opens up your widget integration that uh is locked down to that token and just lets users funnel into that token really easily. You see a lot of dApps these days that they say you know buy my token and they link externally to Uniswap or they link somewhere else um and just that flow doesn't work that well because it would you know it's great to retain users um if you can.

Like I just hinted at, so number four here, uh you can also pre-select the chains and tokens that you want your Flexy widget to deliver. Um, that's really helpful because if you are a dApp on let's say the new Scroll chain, uh you don't really want your bridge to deliver anything else. You don't really need to deliver to Base for example. So you can pre-select your chain, single chain or multiple chain if you're a multi-chain dApp and you can select one or more tokens. This is really helpful because it just kind of funnels the user into only what they need. And for example if you're like a lending protocol that uh you know um allows users to supply USDC, USDT other stables, you can just choose those so there's no extra fluff with your bridge integration. Um, we spend a lot of time making our widget as uh compatible with as many web3 libraries as possible. So if you use Ethers, if you use Web3-React, um Wagmi uh everything will just work and we have examples for how to integrate using all those web3 libraries. And then another really cool thing, um is that so I I don't think I touched on this too much, Flexy is an ultra cheap bridge. Uh we built it kind of for the people. Um, actually our our stablecoin bridges are completely free, subtracting the cost it takes to relay for gas. They're completely free. So if you want to send like a thousand dollars of USDC from Base to Arbitrum, it's uh you don't incur any fees um. This is uh yeah we just wanted to make it super cheap and super fast and just have something that people like to use when they're bridging. But if you do integrate Flexy and you want to make a little bit money, a little bit of money from it, you kind of want it to be an extra revenue stream, we have a custom fee setting and you can set your fees to be like 1% of the bridge volume. Um, we just leave that open to the integrator cuz uh some people like to to set that but what we see is most people with their dApps want to just offer like a really cool service for their users and they leave that fee setting as as zero.

Um, so the way to get started, uh you can check out our docs. You can go to flexy.tech and find our docs there, but specifically here's the URL. You go to the 'For Developers' section and the 'Installation' and it walks you through just starting with the NPM install and just walking you through the customization. But uh I'm going to take you through a demo right now. And if you just want to talk to me in general, you can hit me up on Telegram. I'm @django_flexy and I can talk you through steps and um and just help you out with whatever you need.

So uh with that, I will take you over to my VS Code here. Uh Narb can you see this?

Uh, could you zoom in maybe like one or two times? Yeah. How's that? Uh yeah that's good. Yep, perfect.

All right. So right now, let me go ahead and run this guy. This is a just a raw um ethers uh project so there's really nothing here. It's just React with ethers hooked up in the back end. Uh so in order to install Flexy, it's just uh yeah really only takes a few minutes. So the way you do it is you just do a simple yarn add @flexy.tech/widget. That's going to install our package in your project. Nice, nice and easy. Um, and then all you have is a couple of import statements. So firstly you import the styling, which makes everything look all nice and you import um Flexy from @flexy.tech/widget. And then all you have to do is throw it in your project. Uh I have some code here just to kind of connect the wallet, um if you have a dApp you probably have a connect button. Uh so it's just some conditional logic just to make sure that a wallet is connected. And uh all you need, this is actually extra that I'll walk through in a second, but all you need is just this line of code that says throw in a Flexy component and uh you need to pass in the signer data for with your web3 library. The reason for that is because if you do this step, um then the user doesn't have to connect their wallet multiple times. So they're already connecting to your dApp, uh you don't need an extra connect button. So if you just pass through the signer data directly from your dApp that already has it into the Flexy component, then um then it's just good to go. And getting the signer data differs based on which web3 library you're using, but uh you know this is the way to do it in Ethers, just to grab it from JSON RPC signer. Um and also we have examples for like I said the the other web3 libraries like we have an example in our demos repo for if you're a vanilla Uniswap fork or a vanilla PancakeSwap fork depending on whatever web3 library they use you can just check our our example. That can be the trickiest part just figuring out how to pass in that signer data.

And with that that's all you need to get uh Flexy up and running. So I'll take us over here and I'll load up what we have so far. Oh I should probably run it first. All right. So you'll see my connect button. I've already connected my wallet previously so I probably won't need to open up MetaMask here. Sometimes sometimes it gets a little bit silly with me, especially on demos. Huh my connect button, let me see what's going on here. Oh oh I think we're good.

And this is completely normal for demos.

Yeah it just has to, huh. I'm going to see what I I'm going to check my console real quick. I don't see anything here. Hmm. I think uh was there the the ending um uh the ending tag there of the component I think was commented out? Is it still commented out? Yes. Oh no never mind. Huh that's really funny. I might just go to uh my other my other demo that's already done? Always good to have a backup. Nice. Yeah. Yeah that's funny. Um should be the same here. All right. So let me just yarn dev this guy and see what this one shows. Connect button. Oh oh uh that's kind of silly guys I'm sorry. I'm on um I am on a uh a window without MetaMask, that's my issue. All right. Well I'm going to come back over here to a window with MetaMask. Uh I'm going to come back to localhost here. All right there we go. There's our Flexy button, well that was the silliest reason.

Um, let me come over here make sure my see what my props are here. All right so this is the same uh kind of view. Same thing, I'm just going to comment everything out. So this is the vanilla Flexy Flexy widget and it shows as this button. So this button is customizable to look however you want, this is just our default kind of purple button. But you can you know like I said have a button that says like buy token or get gas or something and when you click that it's going to reuse the um the wallet that's already connected and it's uh um sorry I'm having a little styling issue here. Um it's going to reuse the wallet that's already connected and uh basically scan the user wallet. So this is a feature that I really like about our Flexy integration. Um it scans the user wallet and shows them all their value across all their tokens across all their chains and you know in descending value. So if they want to use probably like you know the largest transfer they can just use that first token.

And um we have a couple props just to customize it however you want. So you can make it dark theme if you like just with a quick prop change to make it dark theme. Or you can um change the render mode to component, so this switches between having the button pop up or just the static component on the page. So now when I refresh and I just connect my wallet real quick then it's just the static uh the static bridge interface. But the uh the features that are really really cool um are locking down to a specific chain. So in your default Flexy integration you still allow your user to select whichever chain they want. And this chain uh the chain select also shows them how much gas they have on each chain just to help them out because we also have a feature for destination gas just to give them some gas if they're bridging tokens. Um but if again if you're only live on one chain such as let's say Base chain, you just pass in the chain ID of Base chain. Now their integration is locked down to Base. So when they come here they can only select our Base tokens. And even further than that you can pass in an array of tokens um or just a single token. In this example I'm passing in address zero which is basically just ETH so the native token of that chain. So now when they come here they open up Flexy, it's already locked down to Base ETH. So you can look at this as hey I want to send let's let's do um $10 of Optimism USDC, they can't select anything else so they're going to receive about 9.94 of Base ETH. And just to kind of show you this in action, um this is the gasless transaction, just one off-chain signature.

So it's asking you hey can you um give Flexy allowance to $10 of your uh of your Optimism USDC and you click confirm and it's going to pick up everything um and start to relay it. And then it's going to ask you if you want to switch back to your your original chain um just for the benefit of the integrating dApp. But you'll see if we look at these, um the inbound transaction it's already done. That was the whole bridge transaction. The inbound transaction takes your 10 USDC that you signed your allowance for and the outbound transaction uh sends you basically it starts with 9.95 swaps to WETH and then unwraps and sends you the ETH. So um so yeah that's how quickly you can add a um a Flexy bridge integration directly to your dApp and then basically now your dApp has this awesome cross-chain gasless bridge uh and only takes a few minutes. Um especially if you uh if you don't run into the issue of not having MetaMask on your browser it'll take you even less time.

Right on. Just case of the Fridays, it's all good. Absolutely. Uh yeah this is amaz- oh sorry yeah go ahead.

I was just going to say that that's pretty much all I got, that's the that's the whole gist and demo for Flexy.

Yeah, I was just going to say yeah this is really amazing. Uh I always appreciate um folks that are taking the next step to ensure like people who are using um web3 tech don't have to deal with all the the headaches that kind of come with it, at least the initial stages of it. Uh I I know I always have issues with bridges so it's awesome to see you guys are kind of abstracting all that um all the nuances away. Um a couple of questions for me and and crowd uh please feel free to to type up your questions and we'll bring them up here. Um when you say you um the gas fees are covered are they covered by you or or or somebody else on the Flexy side?

Ah, yeah that would be worth seeing I'll um present this again. Oh, excuse me I'm going to share my other screen. So when you come to Flexy and you start your your bridging, you connect your wallet, um so let's just do a USDC Optimism, so I'm sending $10 worth of Optimism to Base, let's say USDC to make it easy. USDC to USDC, you can see that you're only receiving 9.98 and the reason for that is because if you look at the Flexy charge info, um the gas to relay on Optimism is one cent and the gas to relay on Base is one cent. So total two cents and that's why we subtract. It's a little bit different if you're sending ETH, um because you're not signing an off-chain signature you're actually sending a transaction because there's no way to grant allowance to your own native token. And when you open up the little infographic you see there's only a gas cost on Base cuz you're you're paying the gas on Blast in this example. So gas is just covered through your your value transfer.

Awesome, yeah. Uh and I guess um you showed it it's really easy to kind of get set up. Um I think it was only like five lines of code when you import the import the component. Um what what kinds of interesting applications have you seen Flexy being adopted in? Or what kinds of different types of apps would you like to see it adopted? Oh yeah so currently we have uh most of our integrations are DEXes. Um that makes sense because they're are probably you know DEXes are just the most common DeFi app that you can find. Um but I think that Flexy has a really awesome use case for NFT minting sites. NFT's aren't as big anymore but um just helping users get the necessary ETH it's like you know NFTs are popping up on various chains. Let's say Scroll, you know they're trying to get an NFT presence, um it just helps users get Scroll ETH especially when they have for example like mainnet ETH and they just need to move it over real quick from from the minting page itself just reduce that friction. Um yeah honestly pretty much anywhere. another example would be on-chain gaming. Same kind of issue, they need to mint a player NFT to start their journey and then a lot of users are running into that just first barrier of like oh I want to play but I need like like one little you know little bit of ETH or little bit of gas and they can't start. Um so just making that easier on them is is definitely helpful.

Yeah definitely. Uh do you foresee um integrating a um uh off-chain ramp as well? Do you bring in like fiat um to the person's wallet or uh do you more so see like see yourself offloading that to some other uh libraries?

Yeah, that's a that's a really good question. Um it's been on our long-term roadmap for a while, uh but we've kind of pushed that a little bit because there's a lot of regulatory uh questions with that firstly. Um if we could uh leverage someone else doing that that would be ideal. Um our next step is to include support for non-EVM chains cuz we're only EVM currently. Uh plan on supporting Solana and Cosmos based chains and uh and yeah that that's really our our bigger milestone like that's coming up next.

Uh yeah awesome you mentioned that I was going to ask you about your roadmap next. So um I guess that's what that's what we got coming, uh looking forward to seeing that. Um and I guess um from your perspective um being in the web3 space quite a long time and especially being in the trenches doing the contract auditing, like what are what are some of the trends and developments in the space that are really exciting you today and um you think are going to be really prominent um going forward?

Hmm. That's a good question. I'm seeing I'm seeing a lot so I'm auditing a lot of contracts that are kind of the next seems like the next phase of DeFi. And it's kind of interesting to say this because DeFi up until this point has been kind of about like a permissionless nature and just you know money for everybody. Um and what I'm auditing these days are a much more permissioned take on that that kind of bridges the gap between CeFi and and DeFi and TradFi. It's really interesting cuz it doesn't necessarily vibe with me immediately like seeing all of the privileged actors that need to move your funds around and stuff, but I think that's kind of the next step towards mainstream adoption and just bringing in those big fish that aren't you know setting up a wallet and funding that wallet and doing all the DeFi stuff that we know and love. So yeah it's not necessarily exciting but I think that's where we're going. Um but one exciting thing from an auditing perspective is there's a uh contracts are being developed a lot more securely. I love saying this because uh we're seeing less hacks these days. Just it seems like there are way less of those big news pieces every month that are like oh hundreds of millions of dollars have been stolen and just from our perspective you see just a lot better practices being followed. Um so that's definitely a positive.

Yeah, yeah, I've definitely seen a reduction in those big headline stories. Uh do you think it's because um people are taking uh secure development more seriously or um are people just using more securely developed libraries?

Yeah, that's a good question. there are like many reasons. The securely developed libraries those libraries like OpenZeppelin or or Solady they're uh or Solmate they're so um they're so well-developed and like they've been iterated on so many times that those are just iron you know ironclad like bulletproof. Um also it just happens that um you know people have been developing long enough. I think back in 2021 people were just you know they just learned it last week you know and they're put you know contracts online and I think just the base average number of years that developers have been developing these contracts is higher you know. And they know what they're doing and also the idea of audits um I think has solidified in developers minds and projects minds that hey I need an audit. And there are really great options. I think you know back in 2021 2022 the standard was to get audits from a big traditional firm like the big guys, which isn't a bad step but it's an expensive step and might not yield the same results as going with a series of smaller auditors. Um you can get more bang for your buck through smaller auditors or audit competitions. Um and I'm a little biased there since I perform those but uh but yeah I just think there's just more uh I mean auditors we've leveled up too so there's it's kind of just like you know the full spectrum of everyone's just getting better in the space.

100%. And uh I love the sound of that. Um anything to make our web3 community a bit safer and avoid all the the negative headlines, I'm all for that. Um so that's excellent to see. And I guess um we're more or less out of time. Um just to reiterate for folks um who might have been catching us late, uh what's the best way for folks to get started with Flexy today? Um and uh how can they reach out if they need help?

Yeah, for sure. If you're just a user and you want to bridge cheaply and quickly go to flexy.tech/bridge and uh you can start your journey there. If you're a developer you definitely want to check out our our docs which I can link uh to you Narb. Um and basically it just just shows you how to install the widget and get up and running. And if you need any help two places to go, you can either come to our Discord which is in our X account. So go to our X account in the link and our Discord will be there and just join and ask me a question or hit me up on Telegram again I'll just throw that in the comments it's uh oh I got to connect something. Um I'm not connected, but it's @django_flexy and uh yeah just happy to to collab with any of you people and just talk through any issues.

Awesome, yeah. Uh and I just want to thank you again so much Django for for coming on. I really appreciate you taking the time out of your day to share Flexy with us and I'm really excited to see folks in developer down the web3 space start and continue to use it and uh push our crypto consumption beyond just our us nerds. Absolutely. Thank you so much for bringing me on this was a blast. My pleasure. Uh and with that I just want to wish everybody a very happy Friday, happy weekend and we will catch you all back here next week for another great episode of DevNTell. Right off. Cheers. Thank you. Bye.