# Rise of DeFi Omni Dapps — Kenny White | Shell Protocol

- Channel: [ETH Belgrade Community](https://streameth.org/eth-belgrade-community)
- Date: 2024-10-07
- Duration: 14:31
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-qSKegM4JgbY
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSKegM4JgbY

## Description

Recording from ETH Belgrade x Ethereum Slovenia Meetup in Ljubljana

## Transcript

super deps and the future of D5 what's up everyone um my name is Kenny and can't operate their remote oh never mind we got to start my presentation so uh I think I kind of remember my first slide which is an intro slide uh which is um oh perfect here it is uh so yeah I think um I'll start out with a little bit about me uh my name is ky like I said I'm from Hawaii it was quite a long trip to get from Honolulu to luiana and I'm really really glad I did you guys live in a beautiful city uh we spent the day walk around the old town and yeah it's superb so you guys are lovely hosts this is an amazing venue and I'm really excited to be here um my background is in economics and um I'm the founder of K Labs which is the company that's building shell protocol uh one thing we do in economics is we like to look at how Industries change their shape in terms of what companies are doing what over time and so that's kind of what I'm going to look at today so in specifically I'm going to look at the shape of how smart contracts and decentralized applications or daps are related to each other so we spent a uh last two presenters gave some really excellent presentations about what's happening at the the core protocol level what's happening at the the smart contract level for def5 and I want to talk a little bit about the interplay between like the user interface and the smart contracts and the first step is I think to define a couple of terms the first term I want to Define is um aoap aoap is basically uh where for each underlying smart contract protocol you have one user interface so we have our is this is this a pointer laser pointer doesn't matter so we have our user Alice um and if she wants to interact with a specific smart contract protocol this one that one she goes to a specific front end or dab so map is basically one front end for each underlying smart contract protocol the next term I want to Define is an omnid dap initially uh I was calling these super daps then Peter was like super DS come on man that sounds like a cartoon you got to pick a better word so I'm workshopping omnid so that's why in the um in in the meet up it says super dap and that's why for now on to call it omn dap so please if you really hate omn dap come tell me after this I need that feedback if you love omy dap also come tell me this if you prefer super dap also let me know anyway the substances uh instead of having one user interface per smart contract protocol we have uh one user interface that spends to multiple smart contract protocols so that's an omap and the next thing I want to talk about is where did defi start so defi started like back in the early days say 2019 we really only had Mono daps which is one interface per smart contract and the protocols that were around then that are still very very relevant today include Unis swap compound and open SE and in all those cases there's really just a front end UI for the smart contracts and not that user experience was ignored back then but really the emphasis was just getting something to work in prod because the technology was so new and so raw and basically like end users were secondary and user interface was like a a wrapper for the intering smart contract protocols so where is Define now so right now we're kind of in between a mono dap and an omnid dap um uh Paradigm so we have we still have like mono daps if you go curve or a they're basically like wrappers from the underly smart contracts but we also have uh emerging omns like defi saver and zerion so defy saer lets you manage multiple lending pool uh positions um zerion is kind a little more complicated lets you do a lot of different things all bundled together the main idea is uh they try to bundle like features um for multiple protocols into one interface and even protocols like un Swap and openc that start out as mono daps are gradually evolving kind of more into the omnid direction so for example like Unis swap purchased an nft exchange and if you go to the Unis swap app you can buy nfts as well as swapping tokens uh openc um through their C for smart contract lets you buy and sell nfts uh using not just eth which is kind of the main asset that nfts are listed in but also using um stable coins and pretty much any token you want and so what's happening under the hood for openc is that any time you buy an nft with a different asset other than eth is you're bundling together an a swapping through an amm to get the token the user wants and bundling together The nft Exchange so that's where defi is right now where is it going to be in the future well in in short more Omid daps fewer monod daps and this is just a continuation of the last four years of def's evolution and one day I contend that omnid daps are going to be the default at least for a vast majority of users certainly for any mainstream adoption it's going to be all omns not maps and to me this is fairly clear that this trend is happening and it's clear that there's no reason why this trend would stop but the really interesting question is like why is this trend why does this trend exist in the first place why are we transitioning from a monod Dap Paradigm to an omap Paradigm and basically it's like why that's the same question asking why are omnid daps better than mods so I think the short answer is basically um it's a better user experience but let's think about why and first I want to go back and look at these diagrams so let's think of about the use case where Alice our user wants to sell her nft but she doesn't want to get eth she wants to get tether so in a map framework she has to First sell it on open C then she gets her eth then she goes to Unis swap to trade her eth for say usdc and then she goes to curve to trade her usdc for tether so that means she has to go to three different protocols open three different tabs on our browser just to do a very simple thing now in an omnid dap Paradigm she can list her nft on cport for tether and then under the hood when a user comes to buy it that user's eth is going to be swapped on un swap for for usdc and then it'll be routed through curve for tether so we just took like what used to be three different applications and we turn it into like one application well we not not not we basically the openc team they're very smart they did a great job um and so it it's it's pretty easy to see when you really think about it why ons are better for end users which is basically it's way less effort way less points of friction you can automate the important steps and you can create a user experience that's far more intuitive so what are the challenges of building Omid daps I think there's like four layers uh in this text app at at the bottom you can say there's a smart contract composability which is in order to build an omy it's not just you got to integrate multiple smart contracts into one interface as we saw from the previous example of selling e or sorry selling your nft for tether you have to compose automically multiple smart contracts and that's not it's not a super hard problem but it's also not an easy problem uh the second thing is you got to index a lot of onchain data the more smart contracts you bring into your application the more you got to index the more situational awareness your app needs to be able to provide to users uh also order routing is not trivial so just just simple like swap aggregation is not super easy just going from a usdc to eth or going from eth to more esoteric token like a lot of logic has to be built in order to find the like most efficient path through that network uh both when you think about price impact which is basically another way of saying like where the most liquidity lies on on which pairs on which dexes and then also on the gas cost side because like each swap isn't free from a gas standpoint so it's not a trivial optimization problem and then when you throw in like a whole bunch of different D5 protocols and smart contracts it can potentially get even more comp complicated so this is it's not it's not a simple problem either and the last problem uh which in my opinion I think this is if not the hardest I think it's the one that the least amount of work has been done I think a lot of work has been done on Smart contract composability on indexing on order outing but when it comes to the user interface the uiux I think very little work has been done on building a true Omni app like user experience and I think the reason is well partially because where we started right like we we were just happy getting like something working and so we built an interface that was pretty much a wrapper around the smart contracts and it didn't really make sense to try and build an on the app in the first place because like these other like three things weren't really mature and so now that these three things are starting to become more and more mature and more and more robust this is like the last step um and so what does this mean for Builders uh first of all if you're building a mono app you're going to be an increasing disadvantage second of all uh if you want to build a smart contract protocol look to partner with ons so if you want to attract users to your platform find a way to integrate your smart contracts with someone that has like multiple uh already has an existing user base and already has like a bunch of features B together on the other hand if you are looking to build a d a front end for users you should be looking at integrating multiple smart contracts bundling together their features into like a seamless user experience which brings me to um sh protocol which is what I'm working on and uh basically we are a smart contract platform that's able to compose a bunch of different protocols all across Defi and we're building currently a frontend application um that's hopefully going to make the omn app user experience a lot easier a lot cleaner um anyway rather than explain to you how it works let me just I'll just show you like like a quick demo this is from from figma so um it's not in live in production yet but soon will be in a couple about a month or so so in this uh example basically what we're seeing well if it loads is we're looking at what what the user experience is going to be like if you want to migrate your token say from a Unis swap pool to a curve pool does this computer have Wi-Fi anyway basically what what do you what is it what's the user experience like migrating from a Unis swap pool to a curve pool So currently if you want to do this you got to withdraw all of your Unis swap tokens on the Unis swap app and if the trading and if the tokens are different from from what you were lping in Unis swap versus what you want LP in curve then you got to go and do a whole bunch of swaps and then you got to go to the curb app there's no Wii oh there's no Wi-fi well you guys will just have to imagine uh what it's like um see if we can go back okay well basically imagine so this is like the user starting out with their Unis swap tokens what Happ next the video will not load so yeah yeah no no I'm just gonna just gonna describe it verbally sorry guys and then the user goes and changes their usdc input or output token to uh CR LP CRV so their curve token and then it's basically the same as doing a swap after that um come find me my laptop has a Wi-Fi I can show you the video if you if you're really dying to see it and um oh it's working what do you know the demo gods have um Smiled On Me today so that's the idea and uh yeah thank you guys very much for your time and uh I'll see you guys in the mingling [Applause] session St