🎧 White Whale on Oracles, Interchain Arbitrage and Cosmos
Round Table Recap: Tuesday, March 7th
Russian DeFi
March 28, 2023
In this Round Table, White Whale and Sen from White Whale Protocol talk about their use of oracles and interchain protocols for reliable price feeds, as well as their favorite chains such as Ethereum and Cosmos.
They also discuss White Whale's focus on interoperability and reducing market inefficiencies through their permission-less smart contract platform.
The discussion ends with their plans for attracting new apps and expanding their protocol in 2023.
You can also give this episode a listen here
Panel
• Guests - Ponzi Ninja & Sen @SenComDev from @WhiteWhaleDefi,
• Host - Kadeem Clarke @Crypto_Clarke
Introduction
• The White Whale twitter handle is managed by ponzi ninja, a business dev at White Whale.
• Ponzi Ninja joined White Whale in August 2022.
• SenCom, is the CTO for White Whale and has worked in crypto for longer having vast experience in the space.
• SenCom admits he started crypto for the monetary gain, but has stuck for the tech and the people.
• Ponzi Ninja first heard of BTC in 2012 when his brother purchased BTC.
• Then in 2017 when it broke its ATH he started researching it himself and delving deeper.
Regarding Oracles and Interchain What Do You Use for Reliable Price Feeds?
• SenCom says it depends on what you’re trying to do with the data. If you’re trying to do trade or arbitrage, you just query the blockchain directly because it’s the fastest way to get reliable price feeds.
• However, he also mentions that if you’re trying to build a smart contract for a lending platform as an example, then you require oracles.
• He says that at White Whale they look at the nodes, mem pool and go from there.
🎧️ Our guests talk arbitrage basics & interchain arbitrage 👇️
Different Types of Chains
• SenCom talks about Ethereum and how its goal was to build the world computer and world settlement ledger, where every transaction is available on the Ethereum blockchain.
• He says people slowly realized that Ethereum doesn’t scale, and instead of using just Ethereum, people opted to produce multiple computers that interact with each other. He utilizes the example of everyone having different phones but that we can still communicate because we use the same internet.
• Sen mentions how there are multiple interoperability levels to chains and that, at the moment, we’re in the mid-90s era of the internet in correlation to the blockchain.
• He talks about how the monolithic blockchain is the idea of having one large super blockchain.
• The app-chain is creating applications on one blockchain and having it communicate with other blockchains.
• Sen does say that there are problems with multiple blockchains, such as security; however, there are also pros, such as flexibility.
🎧️ Audio clip on monolithic & app chains - the pros and cons 👇️
What Are Your Favourite Chains?
• Sen says Ethereum is his first in terms of reliability and size.
• He says Ethereum is the freely programmable smart contracts platform, and this is what he admires most about it.
• His second favorite is the one White Whale is built on: Cosmos.
• He says having app-chains that communicate with each other is specialized, and that’s the benefit of Cosmos.
• Sen educates the audience more on the Cosmos SDK and how you can build your blockchain with relative ease.
• He says these are sovereign individual blockchains with their own data sets and can also communicate with each other using IBC, which is an interoperability protocol.
• Sen emphasizes how it uses active work to connect Polkadot, Harmony, Ethereum, Near, and more with IBC, which means you can send your DOT tokens without using ETH bridges (as an example). It removes arbitrage opportunities, and that is why it's unique.
• Sen explains what arbitrage is in that, markets that are separate from each other have different market data and prices. Trading on one market and selling on another utilizes arbitrage to merge price feeds and fix disparities.
• These balance out market inefficiencies, utilizing arbitrage in a synchronized environment.
• He further mentions how interchain arbitrage is trying to balance out markets and prices between chains, e.g., pancake and Uniswap.
About White Whale
• White Whale started two years ago on Terra Classic, and back in the day, it was an application with 40-50M in TVL to defend the peg. (We know how that turned out, lol)
• In May, when Terra collapsed, the business model wasn’t viable anymore, and Sen says many other projects left with whatever money they could get.
• On the other hand, White Whale kept pushing, kept all employees, and soldiered on with the focus on interoperability between chains, Sen exclaims.
• Sen mentions that the one problem they noticed was that many of these chains have money markets, and as you get more chains, the liquidity starts to shed really thin as more chains are developed.
• He talks about the issues that as the blockchain grows, there will be increasingly more market inefficiencies from fraction illiquidity.
• He then mentions how White Whale looked to reduce this, developed one interface reducing the complexity, and built the protocol around efficiently locating liquidity to the required chains.
• Sen also announces that White Whale is live and recently launched their blockchain as a permission-less smart contract platform.
• They have satellite markets, which live on different chains meaning they have multiple DEXs on different chains.
• He specifies that they’re building the connection between them.
🎧️ Launching a permissionless blockchain 👇️
How Has Your Community Grown?
• Sen explains that the original community came from Terra, and many original people have left.
• He says that they also did an airdrop for the old whale community using their new token and new blockchain.
• He says that because they have an interchain protocol, they’re in a unique position where they’re not dependent on one set ecosystem.
• He says how from a risk management perspective, everything revolving around one blockchain is a great risk.
• He says they can scale horizontally and scale based off the various chains.
🎧️ Audio clip on building community in crypto projects 👇️
Plans for 2023
• Sen talks on how recently launching the smart contract chain and that attractive new apps will be a major part in White Whale’s evolution.
• He talks about how they also wish to collab and expand the protocol to new heights.
• He does, however, acknowledge that the overarching goal will be to connect the liquidity of the different satellite markets.
• He wants the process to be seamless for the investor.
• He finishes off by concluding that the crypto market will heavily depend on the macro geopolitical environment.