Finn 0:42 Hello and welcome to The Ether. Today's Friday, December 31st 2021. This is the White Whale Community Update Call. Let's take a listen. White Whale 0:51 Okay everyone, sorry for the delay. I'm just gonna go ahead and get started with the call. We were going to have somebody else moderate, but I will just go ahead and do it. Thank you all for joining us on our Community Update Call. I just want to open by saying I appreciate everybody's initial response and reaction to our announcement regarding the KuCoin situation. It's been a very tough week for the team and for me personally, so I appreciate all the initial support on that. And thank you, thank you for that. So we are going to get to that, we are going to talk about it, and I'm going to answer any questions that you guys may have. But we also do have a lot of other stuff to go over, a lot of other announcements, and things to discuss, and positive things, to be frank. But we will get to that during the call. All right, I'm going to turn it over to one of our team members who will open up the call. bobloblaw 1:59 Hi everyone, and welcome to the community call, I'm Bob Loblaw, intern at White Whale. I'll be moderating today. I'm joined by Sebastian, our founder and CEO, CyberHoward, our CTO, and 0xFable, our COO, both of whom are our lead devs. After the first iteration of our community call, we've decided to give the community a little more structure. We will start with a quick intro on the protocol for anyone new, so please bear with us, veterans, we'll keep it short. And then we'll go over the many announcements that happened over the last two weeks, then reveal any alpha we have, and then open up to Q&A. Initially, please keep the first questions about the announcements and then the alpha, and then we'll open it up to any general questions. And then before we get started, a quick disclaimer, certain information in this Twitter Space may include forward looking statements and information relating to White Whale that is based on the beliefs of the team, and that's based on information currently available to us, which is often subject to risks, uncertainties and changes. So basically, a lot of things that can be said in this call can be changed and are based on our opinions. It's just a disclaimer. And also nothing we say is a financial advice. And without further ado, here is our founder Sebastian with the intro. White Whale 3:29 Thank you, sir. Yeah, and just so you guys know, I will be reading from notes and commenting on them as I go. We will publish these notes of the call afterwards. So they will be available publicly. I'm not sure if the guy who records is on this call, but there is somebody from... I believe he's from GT Capital that records these and publishes them. If he is we will share that link, but the notes to the call will be published. I'm going to try to blast through all our announcements and alpha fairly quickly. I know it's New Year's Eve, and I know that we all have questions and want to get to the KuCoin issue. So I will try to keep it moving, blast through this stuff quickly. And then we will get to all of your questions. Alright, the introduction. For those of you who are joining and did not know what we do. And for those of you who do please bear with me. I'll keep this intro short. White Whale is an arbitrage platform built on Terra. Our primary mission is to decentralize the enforcement of the UST peg by empowering retail investors to participate in arbitrage and other complex automated trading strategies. Through a simple user interface, we will make the entire ecosystem more secure, robust and efficient. We'll be hosting these community calls every other Friday at this time for the foreseeable future. These biweekly calls are structured time for community feedback and a great way to get all the updates in a condensed manner, we understand most people cannot follow the constant newsfeed. White Whale 5:03 Okay some opening remarks. Our Bootswap IDO event was inspired and designed from watching previous launches on Terra get consumed by bots, and have manufactured initial pumps only to bleed for the following months. We saw the community fatigued from these launches and decided to try something different. In the same way, we are also taking a different approach to our tokenomics inflation and value capture. Another glaring issue we see among projects on Terra and in the broader DeFi space is there are projects with great tokenomics and no fundamentals, and projects with amazing fundamentals and pour tokenomics, and I would point to Anchor and Mirror as examples. But very few excel at both. So our goal for White Whale is to build a platform with both strong fundamentals and strong tokenomics And where the excellence and profitability of the platform translates directly to, and is captured by the token. Therefore, we are building an arbitrage platform on the principles of sound tokenomics, low inflation and sustainable economic models. In doing this, we believe we are laying the foundation for a strong engine for long term sustainable growth. And White Whale will become a pillar platform not just in the Terra ecosystem but the DeFi world. White Whale 6:16 Okay, on to the announcements. An update on the Treasury, the Treasury is currently yielding approximately $7,700 per day that that is the equivalent of 40,000 WHALE. That's the average daily over the last seven days. This is $4,400 in swap fees and $3,300 in UST interest. Obviously the swap fees will vary depending on volume, but that's the seven day average. The swap fees directly equate to buy pressure on the WHALE token. The Bootswap NFT. Airdrop NFTs have been airdropped to everyone who participated in our Bootswap IDO event. On these NFTs, the metadata is unique. The images are not unique, there are three separate images based on how many WHALE tokens you purchased in the event. We are currently developing ways to view your NFT certificate more easily. We recognize that it's a challenge to view them now, guys. We are probably going to have something on our front end, which is an easy way to view them. But we're currently working on that. These NFTs weren't meant for resale, they were meant to commemorate the IDO event. However we are in discussions with marketplaces, if for some reason you guys want to trade them, you'll be able to trade them, and the royalties will go straight to our Treasury in LUNA. So it'll be another revenue source of LUNA for our treasury. We recently opened up our Telegram chat channel, there is a link that will be published on these notes if you want to join they're. LPing is now available with only swap fees as rewards as we are zero emissions protocol. We are currently working on adding the APR to our own front end, for now you can see it on Coinhall. The unassigned WHALE tokens leftover from the seed, private, and advisor rounds totaling 48,276,000 tokens, nearly 5% of the total supply, has been burned. We will post the transaction hash with these notes. White Whale is now live on CoinGecko and CoinMarketCap, total supply and max supply issues have been fixed. I think we're still working on getting them the correct circulating supply and market cap. The five year inflation projections of our token have been released on this graphic which can be viewed on Twitter and the announcements section of our Discord. You can see our five year inflation numbers. We're making every effort to keep inflation low and disciplined. We believe this is reflected in these projections. White Whale 8:49 Okay, the StarTerra decision and the StarTerra update. So in September, we announced at TeFi Alpha that we would host IDO events on both Pylon and StarTerra. This was before the LBP on Terra was a thing. When we looked into the LBP, we determined it was a fairer, better way for us personally, to distribute tokens, and we made the decision to go big with the Bootswap IDO, still intending to do a small StarTerra event in the future. The success of the Bootswap changed the calculus for us in a number of ways. For example, now we own our own liquidity pool. We don't require LP emissions, and we also felt that through the Bootswap, we distributed enough tokens that further IDO events were no longer necessary. Okay. After the event, after the boot swap, we attempted to put together a small STT event with the StarTerra team, even though we didn't need any more IDOs. We don't need any more ITOs guys, we don't need them. This was an attempt to keep our word to the community. Okay. Upon reaching terms, both teams agreed to present the proposal to their communities. Upon mention of a StarTerra IDO on Twitter, we received severe pushback from the community. This wasn't just in price action. I was honestly shocked and astonished by the feedback, the comments that I received just from the tweets. I think we underestimated how divided the community is on this issue, and how controversial an issue it is. Okay. So currently, we do not have any plans to host an IDO on StarTerra based on the community feedback. We don't feel an on-chain vote is necessary at this time, as it was quite clear that the community sentiment was against it. However, once our governance is up, anyone is free to initiate a campaign and push for an on-chain vote for a StarTerra event if they wish. If the community wants one, they can have one, but we're not going to plan and move forward with any STT event at this time. We have been accused multiple times of not keeping our word, to this we say that it's kind of the contrary. We tried to keep our word, but this is crypto and things can change quite quickly. If the calculus changes on something and it no longer makes sense, then we would be doing a disservice to our community to go ahead and do it anyways. We are very careful in our announcements not to make hard commits, and to always include the caveat that things are subject to change. And we will be even more careful to do this in the future. Bottom line is, guys, we want to be agile and adaptable, not rigid. Okay. White Whale 11:30 That being said, there were 200 million WHALE tokens allocated to public presale and community IDO events, 50 million were used on Pylon and 100 million were used for the Bootswap. That leaves 50 million additional tokens left unassigned for public presale events. So once our governance is up and running, which will be soon, and a fair voting process has been proven. The community will decide what to do with these tokens. Okay. That will be one of the first issues that we address as a community. We could do another IDO, if that's what the community wants, on StarTerra or elsewhere. They can be reassigned to something else, like bonds, for example, they could be airdropped they could be burned, or any combination thereof. We look forward to a thoughtful discussion and governance process to sort this out. White Whale 12:23 Okay, KuCoin. We released an official statement earlier today regarding the KuCoin listing incident. In short, we were rugged out of listing fees by a group of fake KuCoin agents in an elaborate scam. 2.51 million WHALE tokens were sent to the scammers as well as 50,000 USDT. We have purchased the equivalent amount of WHALE on the open market and taking it out of circulating supply to remedy the financial effects of the incident and ensure the community is not affected by the dilution. We will make more comments on this and answer any questions regarding this at the end of the call. Okay, here is the alpha. So governance, our initial governance contracts are complete, they're currently being tested. We plan on launching them on mainnet in the coming days. These contracts are derived from the Anchor governance contracts with a few minor tweaks. Our long term governance model is still being developed. We are basing it off the Sushi Curve model it will include a liquid token as well as locking options. Alright, airdrop and plans for the airdrop. Once our governance contract is tested and live, one of the first proposals will be to determine what to do with the airdrop allocation. There are 30 million tokens allocated for a genesis airdrop. Community members are encouraged to discuss the airdrop issue in Telegram and Discord. The team will present a proposal for the airdrop to be released once our main governance goes live and be based on rewarding governance stakers according to their number of stake tokens and lockup period. Basically, we're talking about a simplified version of Astroport's Lockdrop. Instead, we are rewarding gov staking and locking instead of liquidity locking. We'll present this plan, the committee will decide if it's vote worthy, and we can hold a vote on it. If the community members come up with a better proposal, we're happy to entertain a vote on that as well. But this will be one of the first issues that we decide together as a community. White Whale 14:26 Okay, our liquidity pool. We have some updates regarding our liquidity pool. So another issue is what to do with our liquidity pool. This is another issue that will need to be decided via on-chain voting. Basically, we need to decide whether or not to migrate it to Astroport or stay on TerraSwap. Now initially, you may think, "Well, why in the world would you stay on TerraSwap?" Well on TerraSwap we earn 33% more swap fees than if we were to migrate it to Astroport because of their swap fee model and their percentages. So this is something that we will Need to go over. Right now we're watching how the volumes play out on both exchanges. And we're monitoring the situation. Okay, now here is some alpha and we want to present our plan to you that we were pretty excited about. So once our UST vault is live... This is alpha regarding our liquidity pool. Once our UST vault is live, our plan is to migrate our pool to a vUST-WHALE trading pair. Okay, so basically, what that means is that the trading pair that our liquidity would be, would be vUSD and WHALE. So we would deposit the UST into our vault, into our UST vault, and then make that the trading pair, the base pair of the pool. Now this will have several benefits, okay. First, it will supercharge buy pressure on WHALE tokens. We're talking about a minimum of 5,000 UST per day of additional buy pressure, which will increase as the pool increases. Okay. Then you can also LP the token, while simultaneously depositing into the arb vault earning ANC rewards, arb yield, protecting the peg and earning LP swap fees. So basically, you could deposit UST into our UST vaults, and then use the vUST to LP the token. So it's lots of birds with one stone. Okay. Also, vUST is designed to spike in crash scenarios, meaning crashes would accelerate the buy pressure on WHALE token. Also, this would serve as more capital serving as a holder of last resort, or peg protection in any scenario. And we will write a proxy contract so that you can still trade in and out of WHALE from naked UST easily. Okay, so we wanted to introduce this idea to the community so you guys could start getting your minds around it and talking about it. But this is our plan for the liquidity pool is to migrate to a vUST-WHALE trading pair, whether or not it's on Astroport or TerraSwap. White Whale 17:06 Okay, update on audit timeline. So there's really no changes for the timeline of the audit or the release of the vaults. The audit should be complete in the next couple of weeks. We've not heard any feedback from the auditor, which is good news. They have told us if there was anything abnormal or very wrong, they would tell us, so no news is good news. We are beginning our second audit with Oak Security next week. This audit will have a much shorter timeline. But we're going to release the UST vault as soon as the first audit is complete. We're still shooting for mid to late January. You can follow the progress of our CertiK audit on the CertiK website. Just go to their website and search for "whale". Okay, update on bot performance. So due to some formula updates, our peg, our bot speed was improved significantly in the past week. Up to this point, we're still getting frontrun quite a bit by faster bots. But we're looking forward to the next round of volatility to stress the performance of our bots at their current speed. The bottom line is we're still not satisfied with the speed of our bots. However, we are making significant progress and we are getting there. We know where we need to get, and we're making significant progress towards that. On another note, the current bot that we're using for peg arb is written in Python, we have decided to rewrite that bot in Go as it will increase the speed even more. So we're in the process of doing that. In the meantime, the Python bot will do the job of securing the peg and should be competitive in hitting trades. However, there are limitations to Python, so we're going to rewrite the bot in Go. White Whale 18:47 Okay, those are our updates. Quick concluding remarks, as you can see, it has been a very eventful two weeks, and we have quite a bit going on. It is unfortunate that we fell victim to a listing scam and suffered the loss of tokens. However, we want to emphasize that in the big picture this is a small blip on the radar and does not affect the fundamentals or long term prospects of the project. We humbly apologize for the error in judgment. And we are more focused and excited than ever to continue building this project. The White Whale team is very bullish about our project, especially in the long term, and we are more focused than ever. On the same note, we are also getting sick of our own drama. Between StarTerra and IDOs and listing scams, we understand and want to reiterate that these are all non-essential to the fundamentals of the project. And in the long term, they're insignificant. We are quite eager to put these things behind us, put our heads down and focus on building our platform. Alright, those are the updates, that is the end of the scheduled call. So now we can begin a time of Q&A, which will be moderated by our intern. bobloblaw 20:00 Feel free to request, anyone. We also have our devs if you want to fire technical questions at them. Welcome, ₿ONΞS. ₿ONΞS, you're on, you're muted. ₿ONΞS 20:10 Hey, everybody. Thanks for having me up here. Thank you so much for the transparency with everything going on. I know that was a big... I know a lot of us holders had a lot of big questions regarding the whole KuCoin thing. Regarding that in going forward, I did during the call a little bit late, did you guys say that you guys were going to list on KuCoin at any point? Or is that all completely just postponed or put to the wayside for the time being? White Whale 20:14 Sure. Yeah. And that's a good question. So it's always been on our roadmap to not only list with KuCoin, but to partner with them. So, KuCoin is significant for us because it still has the largest volume of UST, right. And we want to protect the peg everywhere UST has liquidity. So it's always kind of... KuCoin's kind of always been on our radar. Now this incident, one of the positives is, it has opened the doors to the real KuCoin team, to the actual KuCoin reps. They are grateful that we sort of brought this to their attention and exposed this group, and they're sympathetic to our situation. So, we are in the application process. And the thing about it is, though, it's all NDA-ed, so we can't say anything. But what I will say now is that, it is on our roadmap, it is something we're pursuing, and I believe eventually we will get there. But I wouldn't speculate on WHALE because of a KuCoin listing. It's a long term thing. ₿ONΞS 21:52 Yeah, thank you guys so much. I'm a big fan of the project. And, yeah, I hope you guys keep it up. bobloblaw 21:58 Siôn, you're up next. White Whale 22:01 Yeah, we can hear you. Siôn 22:02 Yeah. Cool. So this is more of a technical question for Howard. I've reached out on the community, and I think he knows who I am. Essentially, the technical question is, you're getting frontrunned by bots, which are doing basically analysis on the prices before they're actually released, because they're doing like machine learning. Is your bot at the moment, are they being reactive to what's happening? Or are they basically analyzing the activity and trying to proceed or preempt what's happening? That's kind of my technical question. White Whale 22:34 Howard, are you with us? bobloblaw 22:35 Maybe he's on mute. White Whale 22:36 Maybe he just stepped away. Let's return to that question. Let's move on. Siôn 22:40 Yeah, okay. I'll reach out on the Discord. White Whale 22:42 Oh, okay. And if he pops up, we'll return to that question. Siôn 22:46 Cool. All right. Happy New Year, guys. White Whale 22:48 Yep. 0xFable 22:48 I can quickly respond. Currently, there is no machine learning for prediction in our bots. But that's hopefully something we're going to work towards. Siôn 23:01 Okay, cool. Cheers, guys. White Whale 23:03 We just heard from Howard, he's having problems unmuting. There's an issue with his Twitter happening, so he's working on that. Any other questions? Nobody else, guys? I'll tell you what, I'll just take a minute and just share, just off the cuff a little bit about the whole situation. I've seen quite a bit in my day in crypto, and this was a very elaborate setup. They were using the names of KuCoin employees, of former KuCoin employees, their Twitters looked legit. They spoofed the kucoin.com email address, the domain. I don't even know how you do that. So it was quite a ride. We had several team members in a group Telegram chat with these guys. It was very detailed. If I had to guess and speculate, I would say that they were probably ex... If not ex KuCoin employees, ex exchange employees, like they did this... They did onboarding in the past, because they knew the process so well. That being said, I'm not making excuses. And I'm not, we take full responsibility, I take full responsibility. I was leading it, I was leading the deal. And, to be frank, I was moving too quickly. I have a lot going on, we have a lot going on as a team as far as development and rolling things out. And, I was just moving too fast. And a little bit more due diligence would have probably exposed it and avoided this, but that was my mistake and our mistake. So I want to apologize to the community, and hopefully our transparency in this matter will go a long way and continue to build trust and forge our relationship in these early days of the project, so we can just build and move forward together. This is a community project, right? So we want to lay it all out there, we want to be as transparent as possible. And we're all in this together, right? We're all in this together. So yeah, I apologize. And like I said, I'm happy to clarify or answer any other questions that you guys may have. The other thing too, that I'll bring up... Okay, we have some requested. So let's take some questions. bobloblaw 25:41 Cephii, you're up. Cephii 25:42 Hey, guys, sorry to hear about the scam, those things can be pretty elaborate, actually. Very hard to tell who you're talking to. And verifying folks, and this is kind of the general trust problem, but on the note of the bot speeds. What would you say are the, maybe, features that perhaps are making competitors bots faster? And what are the kinds of things that might be needed to be done to sort of achieve pairity? Does that have to do with some of the computing power involved? Or a purely a code base issue? Or what are the kinds of things you're thinking of? Cephii 25:54 Did we ever get Howard sorted out? Because he would be the guy to answer that. Did we ever get his speaker on? Howard, you with us? Alright, let's circle back to that one as well. I apologize, guys. We're trying to get... There something wrong with his Twitter, we're trying to get it working. But I do want to address the bot situation, but he's the person to do that. So we'll come back to that one as well. And I apologize, Cephii. bobloblaw 26:55 Alright, shzamm, the floor is yours. shzamm 26:58 Oh, hey, guys, thanks for taking my question. I noticed during the KuCoin incident KuCoin actually listed a WHALE token, I believe it was on the same day. I'm just wondering what your thoughts, are there any worries or confusion around that conflict as we try to build this brand of the token, and the token name? Thanks. White Whale 27:19 Yeah, so that was another thing that kind of compounded the confusion and obfuscation. And the scammers kind of leverage that, and they said, "We're currently listening another whale token, here's the process. Here's what we normally do in these situations, blah, blah, blah..." So they kind of leveraged that, to even legitimize themselves even more and make them seem like they were on top of things, and all this. So yeah, but definitely that... That certainly added and compounded the difficulty of the situation, for sure. White Whale 27:59 Alright, Jason, you're up. Jason 28:02 Thanks for taking the call... Or doing the call. Thanks for taking the question. So I had a quick question on... Definitely looking forward to the UST vault. And correct me if I'm wrong here but, that could be seen as sort of like an Anchor Earn plus, due to the arbitrage opportunities. And I guess that plus part of it will somewhat depend on how many people are in this pool, to divide the... Whatever alpha gets generated off of the arbs, but I'm curious what other, I guess, arbitrages or strategies are you guys looking at in the roadmap? Because as I look at a lot of these other exchanges, with lower liquidity, it seems like if you had a bot, there would be opportunities cross-exchange, and, of course, for other assets as well. So curious if you could just shed a little light on what's coming? White Whale 28:58 Yeah. And that's an excellent question. So the UST vault and the point of the UST vault is basically it will have multiple strategies, and multiple kind of sources of revenue and profits. Right. So you're exactly right. And that is how we characterize it is basically Anchor plus, right? It's Anchor plus the arb yield, right. So obviously, the first one is the peg arb strategy, right? That's the first one, and that's the important thing, and that protects the peg. However, from what we're seeing, the peg is very well protected at this time, and that probably will not be the big revenue generator, right. So we also currently have a multi DEX arb strategy in the UST vault that will arbitrage UST among the different DEXes is on Terra. So we're talking about Loop, Astroport, and TerraSwap, right. Now we also feel like the flash loans, that will also be another source of revenue and source of profits. And then there's the liquidations that we're currently developing as well. And there will be several other strategies, UST based strategies, that will all sort of generate revenue and add yield on top of the Anchor yield. So that's the idea of the UST vault. Jason 30:23 Cool. Thank you. CyberHoward 30:24 Hey, can you hear me? White Whale 30:25 And we have Howard. CyberHoward 30:27 Oh my god, fucking Twitter's so buggy. Oh, man. So, I want to answer the bot related questions. So, the first question was like... It mentioned something about machine learning, which is not actually how we do our arb trades, or how arbitrage is done on blockchain. So in traditional finance, we have this quant trading firms that generate these massive data models of how the market behaves, and then they train some neural network on it, right, so machine learning on it, and then they deploy that on the trading bots, and then they see if they're making a profit or not. The reason why they do that is because they don't have, really a lot of information about... White Whale 31:28 I lost Howard. Can anybody hear him? bobloblaw 31:32 I can't either. White Whale 31:34 Okay. I think we lost him. He just requested again. Can you make him a speaker again? CyberHoward 31:41 So yeah, in short, we do have the required information, kind of. So we monitor the mempool. So the mempool is basically like a buffer of transactions, and then every six seconds, those transactions get processed and added to a block. And then you get the total blockchain. So if we get these mempool transactions, and we filter them out for all the transactions that interact with the TerraSwap LUNA-UST pool or whatever pool we want to arb, then we know what the state will be after each transaction. So once we see that there's a trade that creates some kind of arbitrage opportunity, we can send out transaction and includ it in the same block. So that's what all the arb-ers are doing right now on Terra. Our problem is that, first of all, getting the transaction data out of the node, like the mempool data is... There's a small delay in how we get that data because we're currently decoding all the transactions that hit the mempool while you only have to decode the transactions that are relevant to whatever you're trying to do. So that's one of the things, and then the main thing is just Python being slow, and not really being able to have concurrent processes for like, one process that fetches the data and updates some state, and then the other processes that check the states and check whether there's arbitrage to do natural trade. So I think that kind of answers both questions. Yeah. bobloblaw 33:44 Alright. 0auth, you're up. 0auth 33:46 So I wanted to ask a bit of a timeline question. Around the vaults. I know the UST vault is much anticipated. And I was wondering about the timeline with the LUNA vault. And on that note, according to the litepaper, the first arbitrage method would be the LUNA-bLUNA, is that still the aim of the LUNA vault? And is it launching alongside the UST vault or after? Because it was a bit unclear in the litepaper. Thank you. White Whale 34:22 Yeah. So the priority right now is to get the UST vault live as soon as possible. We're hoping to have audit results within the next couple of weeks, from CertiK. And you can track the progress on their website. But the standard process is, they'll come back and they'll say you need to fix this, this and this. So there will be some adjustments that need to be made on our end, and then we'll need to get that straightened out and then we can go live with the UST vault. The LUNA vault is not far behind. I think that Howard could probably speak to that better than I could. Howard, do you want to comment on that? CyberHoward 35:05 Yeah sure. So the cool thing about the way we're doing the other vaults is that, they just share the same kind of architecture. So once we have the LUNA vault deployed, it's very easy for us to add other vaults for other assets. And it's also very easy for us to kind of manage the strategy, add new aspects to the strategy, and refine the thing we want to do and getting some revenue on it. So, for example, with the new Astroport pools with the stable Curve... The Curve style pools, there won't be as much of a profit to be made between the bLUNA and the regular LUNA. So it would probably be better to take the unbonding period on the LUNA instead of trying to buy it, and then selling it at a lower price. So that's something that we're developing and the nice thing is that the architecture is completely ready to support whatever we want to do with it. So it's just a matter of having some imagination, looking through the data, simulating some stuff, and, seeing what fits best for that fault. And on the like timeline of things, the second audit we're doing with Oak is starting on the 7th, it's meant to take a shorter time than our first audit. So I don't know, like maybe mid February or something, like late February? I don't know. I don't know. But probably not as long as UST vault. CyberHoward 35:05 Yeah. So the LUNA vault is slated to be audited via Oak. They quoted us a two week audit from their preliminary view of the code. So it's a much shorter timeframe. So yeah, he's probably right. So we're looking at, the best we could say is UST vault, mid to late January, and LUNA vault, hopefully mid to late February, something like that. bobloblaw 37:46 Morgan, you're up. Morgan McGuire 37:48 Oh, hey, sorry. Yeah, things went dark there. Yeah, thanks for taking this, just a quick one. You mentioned using Python and it being slow. I came late to this, sorry, if it was mentioned already, are there plans to switch to a faster language, Rust or anything like that? CyberHoward 38:08 Yeah. Yeah. So we're working on a Go implementation of the bot. Morgan McGuire 38:14 Cool, stoked, thanks. White Whale 38:16 Cephii, you're up again. Cephii 38:19 Quick feature requests that might be helpful, if you have your aUST system working, as far as UST deposit, it'd be nice to have a White Whale token, dollar cost averaging sort of buying button in there. So let's say I deposit 1,000 UST, and it just takes the Anchor yield and buys me White Whale token. So if that's a feasible thing that could be maybe added to the swap page. So instead of me just swapping, I could DCA into the token if I wanted more of it. CyberHoward 38:52 Yeah, I think that can be solved by just... There could be a platform that takes these yield generating tokens, like aUST, vUST, or whatever, and just DCA some asset with that. I think that's pretty easy to do. But yeah, we could do that. That's a cool idea. White Whale 39:18 Yeah, it is a good idea. And it's not something that I've thought of before, to be honest. bobloblaw 39:23 Alright, Juan, you're up. Juan Pablo Aranovich 39:25 Thanks for taking my question. So I wanted to ask you if there's any way to estimate an APY to the deposit under UST vault. White Whale 39:35 Yeah. So we get that question a lot. It's really hard to say and for a few reasons. One, our bots are still being developed and being optimized. And like I said, they're getting a lot faster and a lot better quickly, right. But they're still in process. They're running, they're working, they're doing their job, but they still need to be optimized. The second thing is that, it's entirely dependent on the volatility of the market, right. When the market shakes, that's when the bots go ham and trades are made, and there's a lot more yield. So it's a very hard question to answer. I do want to curb expectations. What we're probably going to see is, when we roll out, when we first launch, the yields are going to be pretty close to the Anchor yields, probably just slightly higher than the Anchor yields. However, I do believe that in the months after, as we refine the strategies, as we add additional strategies, as we open up the flash loans, I think the flash ones are going to be a great source of revenue, to be honest, and these different other sort of streams of yield, I believe we will see the yield in the UST vault grow over time. That's my expectation, and I want to make sure that's clear to the community, right. So we're going to be protecting the peg, right off the rip, we're going to be earning a little extra yield, but I think it will grow as we continue to add new arb strategies and optimize them. Mike 41:22 Sorry, I was just getting white noise. Thank you for taking the question. I saw some community members talking about launching tokens before the web app is deployed and usable. So I think it'd be helpful for you guys to kind of just explain why you thought it was necessary to have your IDO and get the tokens into the hands of the community members before the application goes live. White Whale 41:52 Yeah, and thank you for asking that because that does get mentioned a lot. And I was meaning to address it on the call. So the reason why we did the IDO, and we launched the token prior to the vaults being launched, one is, we sort of see the launch as a process, right, as kind of a launch sequence. And to be frank, it's easier for us and for me to manage the entire process when we're doing one thing at a time, right. So first, we did the Pylon pools, then we did the idea of Bootswap, and we did this while we're being audited, so they were kind of fillers, and it was basically a launch sequence, right. Now, we're talking about a matter of weeks, right, after, so the vaults launching a matter of weeks after the token launch, not months, not years. It's not like we're Cardano, right? It's not like it's a Cardano situation. However, I do recognize and appreciate that a lot of people are... They're holding their WHALE tokens, and they're like, "What can I do with these? Why did you guys launch your token without your product being launched?" So yeah, I mean, the simple answer is that it's a launch sequence. By spacing it out, and by sort of having phases, it's a bit easier to manage and roll out. We don't expect the process to take too long. So we're kind of pushing through the rest of the launch sequence, which includes the vaults and the full functionality of the protocol. Mike 43:31 I definitely, definitely agree to that. CyberHoward 43:35 One thing that I can't stress enough is that we could have launched this shit like, two months ago, right, like one month ago, maybe. But, we want to have the security of knowing that it's safe, right. We can add tests to all our contracts, we can have this massive test coverage, like, guys, you know that everyone wants to see that it's audited by an external firm. That's just... We can't launch without that. So, we're waiting on that. And, that's just life, you just have to have some patience, and then we can finally launch this stuff. White Whale 44:19 Yeah. And I think it was an efficiency thing too, while we're in the audit process. Because the Bootswap took some... That took some time and some dev power, we made some tweaks to the code, this stuff takes effort. So while we were in the audit process, we did other other phases of our launch sequence that we could do, rather than just sit and wait. So that was another reason as well, but it's coming soon, guys. It's coming soon, and I appreciate everybody's patience. Mike 44:53 No, I agree. And thank you guys for addressing it. And just to be fair, I work with Angel and we did the same exact thing for the same exact reasons. It's also helpful to get the coin into the people who believe in the protocol. So understanding the protocol and not even having to use it yet, still wanting to be a part of that and a part of the protocol. It was a flawless launch, to be honest and excited to get those audits back and help keep the peg. White Whale 45:29 Yeah, thanks. I appreciate you saying that. And that brings... You bring up another valid point is that we also have important decisions to make as a community, right. So now that the tokens launched, and we're going to launch our governance, we can make these decisions together. So rather than us deciding what to do with 50 million extra presale tokens, we can decide as a community. And rather than us deciding how exactly to deploy the airdrop, if we deploy an airdrop, these things can now be decided by the token holders. So I think that is a plus as well, right? While we're rolling out the vaults, and developing and optimizing the vaults, the community can be making these important decisions together. bobloblaw 46:14 Awesome. Thanks, Mike. And I think... And Do met CyberHoward in Lisbon and maybe jokingly put some pressure to launch early. White Whale 46:25 That may or may not have happened. [chuckle] bobloblaw 46:28 Jason you're up. Jason 46:29 Hey, guys, one more question on the, I guess, the third party bots, when you guys open up the flash loans. Could you talk a little bit about the economics of that? How that accrues value back towards WHALE token owners? And then also if there's going to be any sort of feature of that where the coding illiterate people could bring logic, maybe as an arbitrage, but have some way of implementing it? Yeah, that's question. CyberHoward 46:57 That's an awesome question, because I've also been thinking about the same thing, because Cephii, here, my man, he's been talking about this grid bots for like weeks on end. And it would be cool to give people like him the opportunity to just make it a non-programmer style. You don't have to know how to code stuff, you just have to set the kind of strategy you want, and then you can launch your own vault with that, and just roll with it. That would be really cool. And the smart contracts that we have are actually pretty capable of going toward that goal and just giving people the freedom to make their own strategies, or to do whatever, but that's for after we actually launch our protocol. White Whale 48:06 Alright, Gamer, you're up. GamerGuv'nor 48:08 So I have a... First of all, thank you for making this call happen. So, when you guys launch on LUNA-bLUNA, I'm guessing that we're gonna be a bit of a competitor because I run my own bot. So I'm more than happy to hedge my success, because I do have a lot of WHALE tokens. But at the same time, I do have an open ended question for if you could maybe share with us on the optimization of your strategies and your bots? Maybe if you were to look at the OSI layer, all of them, where do you think you will get the most success knowing what you know right now? CyberHoward 48:46 What's an OSI layer? GamerGuv'nor 48:49 Well, I'm guessing that it's software that you've spoken to right now. But is there any network latency? And so on and so on, right? CyberHoward 48:58 Yeah. Yeah. So the network latency has been greatly reduced by our DevOps team. So we're basically running Kubernetes on AWS in their own private network. Compared to what we previously had was basically two VMs that were also on the same network, but it wasn't a hosted service. So that's one of the things. The biggest thing right now is probably still the actual bots and just optimizing the data fetching and the actual execution of the trade. And then one other thing that could probably make the difference is having a node close to the validators So, one thing that we are thinking about and that we are working on is partnering up with validators and actually getting a private connection to their validator nodes so that when we submit our transaction, if our transaction gets to a large portion of the validators first, then we do have a competitive advantage instead of just relying on the network effect of the nodes to transmit the transaction to all the validators, right. Because that could take multiple hops. GamerGuv'nor 49:03 Exactly. And that's sort of why I was leaning towards that question, because there's so many layers in the OSI layer. And usually, when you compare software... White Whale 50:44 I think we lost him. RIP. Want to move on to the next question? bobloblaw 50:49 Marty, you're up. marty schoffstall 50:50 Okay, now you're talking my language. So building out the infrastructure of Wall Street in the 90s, okay, for kind of latency issues, which is something that I did, you knew that you had these kind of like centralized clearing houses, right. And they were kind of in Manhattan, and then in New Jersey, and then duplicated in Florida, or whatever else. So, I'd like to hear the previous questioners, you know, kind of thinking about session layer if you believe that the chain is a session layer kind of thing, issues over, for lack of a term, the transport layer of what you're trying to get adjacent to the validators. The second question related to that, or just another abstraction of that is, how many validators do you think you need to be close to? So that's my noodle against the law. Thank you. CyberHoward 51:56 Yeah. So I don't know if I understood your first question. But for the second question, we don't know. Basically, we don't know. And we also don't know what the competition is doing. So I've also seen some Twitter posts of some... I think Cephii shared it, of like a group of validators, who created their own smart contract to do the LUNA-UST arbitrage, and they kind of ganged up, I think, to do it. So I honestly don't know how many validators we have to reach out to and try to get close to, but the active stat is like, 150 currently, I think. So. I don't know. But the more the better, would be my thought, because... marty schoffstall 52:50 Do you know of any cluster of validators? Is there like, one hosting location that has five or six? Or have you asked? CyberHoward 52:58 No, we haven't. We haven't yet. White Whale 53:01 So we have relationships with multiple validators. We have a few of them on our cap table. So that's kind of the low hanging fruit and where we're starting. But we're gonna have to go down that rabbit hole and kind of see... Do testing and see where it leads. GamerGuv'nor 53:21 Sorry, guys, I got cut off. Can I speak for a sec? bobloblaw 53:24 Sure. Go ahead. GamerGuv'nor 53:25 Thank you very much. So I was just going to lead up to a very short answer to not my own question, but I was hoping that... I'm sure you guys have better experts than myself. But I found myself botting Binance listings quite a lot. And what I noticed is that whether I was using Go or Python, the biggest win for me was pre-sending the highest latency, and the whole... Sending the highest latency request, and pre-sending it, simply because with Binance, the first 250 milliseconds or so are the most important, and everybody after that is basically buying that person's bags. Now, I have no idea whether you have been looking at that. And I do not know whether it may work for Terra, but at the same time, I think marty was speaking to that. When you set up infrastructure close to NASDAQ, you basically have a direct connection. And whatever you do to imitate that for Terra, do you think that, for one, would you be looking at that? And if possible, would you be running your own systems or would you be partnering? marty schoffstall 54:39 I tell you that's a tough question from an outsider's perspective. CyberHoward 54:42 Alright, what was the last part of that question? It got cut off for me. bobloblaw 54:46 I think it was partnering with validators or becoming our own. White Whale 54:51 Looks like he dropped off. I think he was more asking about the proximity, it was more the proximity... CyberHoward 54:56 But like, with the Binance... The problem is that with Binance you actually know when their trading starts, right? So, you know at a certain time, if you place an order right after they open the listing, then you can presend your message if you assume some delay of it getting there, right. But with arbitrage, you can't really do that. You can't predict when some whale will buy a shit ton of LUNA and jack the price of UST up or down or whatever. You cannot preemptively execute trades on just trying to trying to do that. You could do that, but you're actually paying something for it, right, you're paying for your transaction to be included in the block. And if it fails, you have to pay the transaction fee, it's not like you can spam messages to these nodes and just try to get lucky. It's not that simple. So the only thing you can do is just trying to reduce the latency between getting a transaction in the mempool of the node that you're working on, and then getting that transaction that interacts with the pool, like that information, to your logic that then decides whether there's an arbitrage opportunity or not. So there's... Only on that part, there's a lot you can do. You can go in to the actual code of the validation of the node itself, and try to only filter out the transactions that are relevant to you. And instead of querying your node for the information, you can turn it around to where your node informs your arbitrage bot of what's happening on chain, which is also faster. And there's a lot of stuff that you can think of, you can try out, and we're just getting started with that, but we're on the right track. That's what matters. marty schoffstall 57:18 So I agree that that's a different case. Very good point, that Binance is a different case. So my question, something along those lines as this, are you looking for periodicity in bot behavior? So instead of just looking at the mempool, in the context of frontrunning, are you looking at what the other bots are doing, and potentially frontrunning the bots, the other bots? That's kind of the question. bobloblaw 57:48 I can answer that a little bit. Yeah, that's something we're looking into, we're starting to track the other bot behavior. And hopefully, we can develop something to potentially frontrun them too. marty schoffstall 58:00 Okay, thank you very much. bobloblaw 58:01 Howard, do you have anything else to add to that? I think he's reconnecting right now. CyberHoward 58:06 The question was... bobloblaw 58:09 Tracking other bots, other bot behaviour. CyberHoward 58:12 Yeah. So I don't think that that's something that we could do. Since everyone's working on the same... There's no one trying to preemptively send transactions and... We're all working off of the same states, basically. We all got these transaction in, and if there's no opportunity or no arbitrage, then there's no one trading it. There aren't... I don't think there are, and someone would have to explain to me how they would be profitable, but I don't think there are any bots out there that do periodic transactions of some kind that aren't blatant opportunities out there that you can catch, basically. So, like, yeah, I don't know. White Whale 58:12 Alright, let's move on to Coleman. Coleman has a question. bobloblaw 59:17 Right, Coleman, you're up. White Whale 59:19 He requested to speak, I think you need to approve him as a speaker. All right. Anybody else have any other questions? We could take a couple more. It's quarter after two now. We want to make sure that everybody gets plenty of opportunity to go celebrate New Years. All right. If there's no other questions, I want to thank you guys, I want to thank all of you. As we said, we will be hosting these every other Friday at this time, and we could always... That's for the foreseeable future. We want to give regular updates. We want to communicate with you guys, just open up and let you know exactly where we're at and take your questions. So we plan on doing these every other Friday at this time. And we can always change the interval, after we get through our launch sequence and things get rolling, it may not be necessary to do them that often, or if there's a deluge of updates, we could do them even more often. So we will keep it flexible, but for now, we're planning on doing this every other Friday. So thank you guys all for listening. Thank you all again for the way you handled our announcement about the KuCoin. I really appreciate that. It's great to feel supported by this community. So thank you and everybody, happy New Year, and enjoy your New Years. And we'll talk to you guys again. Finn 1:00:42 Thanks for checking out another episode of The Ether. That was the White Whale Community Update Call recorded on Friday, December 31st 2021. For terraspaces.org, I'm Finn. Thanks for listening.