Turning Trading Fees Into a Treasury: DeFi Dave on United Founders Group

0:00 Welcome back to the Content Suite in Singapore. Today, I am joined by one of the best crypto podcasters in the game, DeFi Dave, growing up in the trenches and now working his way through Robinhood Chain. Before we start, Dave, do you want to give a quick intro about yourself? Yeah, of course. Hey, everybody. My name is DeFi Dave. I'm a builder, a commentator, and most importantly, a storyteller. I've been in crypto for over nine and a half years and contributed to a variety of DeFi projects, including Frax, [unclear] Redacted, most recently Cap. I had a few podcasts over the years. I'm sure some of your listeners are familiar with Flywheel. And I now do a podcast with DefiLlama guys. So I've just always had my ear to the ground. I love, you know, having my pulse on the trenches. And when UFG came up, it got me excited again. It felt like DeFi Summer reboot, honestly, with everything that was going on with Robinhood Chain. Like how UFG came about is so organic. It was incredibly emergent. Like somebody I knew from New York circles, not even crypto Twitter circles. He just replied guys to me. He's like, hey, Dave, check out my project. I looked into it. I asked him some questions. I went to Grok. And then once it clicked with me, oh shit, he built like a new novel, on-chain primitive that I haven't seen in ages. And so I naturally started writing about it.

1:11 People followed what I was writing and gave him some advice. And then I kind of just like, all right, this is what you need to do. And kind of just stepped into being CEO in a way. But at the UFG, United Founders Group, it's like everyone can be a founder. We want everybody to rise together. And, you know, that's our whole philosophy, this PvE philosophy that was in the beginning of crypto. We want to bring that back. Right. I mean, even the name itself talks so much about like this DAO-ification that we had. And I would say an early DeFi and what on-chain governance was supposed to be. Yeah, I think people were trying to do too much early on. People tried to have like voting. People had all these expectations and assumptions. But you know what we learned in the DAO era? No one wants to vote. You know, no one wants to do the work. Yeah. People's attention spans are too small. And they're only getting smaller and smaller. So- Governance is a job even if you pay them. Sometimes they won't do it.

2:00 Yeah. So you can only, you know, rule people by their incentives. They can only like trust the game theory. Like, hey, how are things going to work out? Which is why I was so excited about UFG. It's because we're so simple. And basically at UFG, every token that we launch is backed. We're a treasury management platform, basically. And UFG is the first use case of this treasury. So, you know, to give some context here, over the years, we've seen a ton of types of tokens launched. We've seen DAOs launched. We've seen meme coins, celebrity coins. And there's a lot of attention early on given to them. But when that attention fades, the token dies with it. They live and die by attention. And so, but there's no way to capture that attention early on and save it for later. So here at UFG, we built the immutable treasury, which you can think of as a battery. It stores the energy created from those like early trading fees that's directed in the treasury. So how UFG works is, you know, we launched on ponds a month ago. All the creator trading fees go into our treasury contract. And the UFG token is a claim on that contract. When you claim it, it burns the token. You get your pro rata share and there's a little exit fee out.

3:08 And that goes returned into the treasury. So you kind of think of this as an inverse [unclear] or inverse [unclear], where instead of inflation to grow, it's deflation. And, you know, everybody has a different strategy to do things. This is what we came up with. And, you know, we think this is a lot more sustainable for any token in any community to launch in the future because we don't want like people don't want to like manage things. They just want like they just want simplicity. And I think this is a great start to seed any community out there, both crypto and outside of crypto. Right. So it's really taking the concept of like show me the incentive and I'll show you the result. Exactly. Right. And the treasury is being used as a balance where people can kind of see expected value or take from it rather than having to buy a governance token that holds it. Exactly. Exactly. So UFG, we're backed by ETH. And you can think of, you know, the value of UFG as yes, there's a treasury. You know, there is almost 80 ETH that's accrued in a month.

3:59 It's all our, yep, I know. 80 ETH. 80 ETH just from treasury fees. That's pretty good. Actually, that's a lot more than I would have expected. Yeah. That's all from just trading streams of just UFG. That's all just from trading fees, right? Wow. Just from one token. Just from the UFG ETH pair. Wow. That's impressive. Yeah. Thank you. And you can think of it as in, you know, you got the trading fees or future revenue streams. And also I kind of view that premium as a social premium. It's kind of like in that way, it's a social token. It's like kind of like DeFi Dave social token because this thing wouldn't have existed. without the DeFi Dave brand in a way for me, like hopping on. So that's kind of like where the premium exists and like gives us a buffer as we develop these revenue streams. And so the revenue streams that we're developing are, we want to export the immutable treasury everywhere. So we call them sovereign treasuries where every token can have one. So we're working on integrations.

4:47 We might have some sooner than you think. Yeah. With different launch pads. I think you mentioned that the pre current launch pad that you guys were working on is pawns on the chain. Love pawns. I think pawns started the current meta because how they structured the incentives with pawns with that 1% creator fee, 70% of that goes to creator. The other 30% buy and burn. Yeah. You know, least amount of extraction. In fact, it grows the pie for everyone. I think burns are incredibly powerful concepts. Right. And why they're powerful. It's because they put everybody on the same playing field. Like if someone has an edge, if these fees are being leaked somewhere to like a VC or something like team member or some bundler, like the token will go to zero because someone's going to take advantage. Right. But with burns, it puts everybody on the same level. It's like once a token's burned, it doesn't matter if you're the smallest holder or biggest holder, everybody benefits.

5:33 And that's the same with the immutable treasury, you can kind of think of it as a slow burn. And so when somebody claims from the treasury, that's a delayed burn, but everybody benefits. Right. Yeah. Tell me a little bit more about how you expect this model to grow, whether it's for yourself. You've mentioned that this model has worked for you as kind of like a DeFi Dave social coin. Yeah. Do you think it'll work for other social coins? Absolutely. Yeah. Who is your, I would say, target audience or like person that you would want to work with? That's a great question. I would love to work with any hyper online engaged internet community, whether they're in crypto or not in crypto. So we saw, you know, we've seen this like a few metas where like there's celebrity coins, but the tokens die because once the attention dies, the token dies with it. And maybe like, because attention comes and goes.

6:18 So I'd love to work with these like hyper online communities. Maybe like if you look on Twitter, there's like Teapot, there's like, you know, a lot of health communities, there's a lot of commentators, there's a lot of video creators. I think all of them could use this to help basically bootstrap their online community and basically on-chain presence. And most importantly, invite people in to contribute to it. Because you see, if you hold the token, you see this growing treasury, you're like, oh, wow, like what can I do to contribute to this treasury? I'm going to like go about and like, maybe I'll like come up with like my own revenue stream. Maybe I'll make an NFT collection. Maybe I'll make, but I'll do it for the benefit of the treasury. So I had this thesis about lore building is building communities. It's not from the top down where like the founder tells like, hey, like this is what the story is and what we need to do. No, it's from the bottom up. It's the community members co-creating, co-writing the story together.

7:06 I really consider UFG, United Founders Group, that's lore building technology. I can definitely see the vision. And if someone's building the next Trump token or even any kind of social celebrity token, this does seem a model where it will be less reflexive. And the token price isn't really just the product, right? Yeah, exactly. I, you know, the world on chain is very kinetic. The world, the modern digital world is very kinetic. Like you see tweets, impressions, you see burns, you see revenue streams, everyone's kind of, and like, if you slow down like one bit, it's like, it seems like a weak signal. It seems like it's over, but we know it's not. But with UFG, what we built with this immutable sovereign treasury, it's a slow burn. It's kind of like a fortress in the sea of chaos and just, you know, rapid information value movement. It protects value, it protects capital, and in a way, it saves it for later.

7:55 Are there any types of contributions or contributors that you've been surprised by, as well as types of contributions that you want in the future? Yeah. You know, I would love to see, there's a few ways to go about this. So, with the externally, with like sovereign treasuries, we talked about that. Like other people launch their tokens, and then like we help them launch it, and maybe a small sliver that goes to us. But also, internally, we want to build this DeFi Innovation Hub. We want to build the UFG Collective, where different people, you know, they come in with their strategies. Maybe they have an option strategy. Maybe they have a BTC strategy. Or maybe they have like some meme coin edge or something. But they come together, you know, and they're under the UFG banner. They run, you know, they run their strategy, send a little bit of a fee to us. They grow the pie.

8:40 We help them. They help us. And, you know, that's PvE. That's how we all grow together. And that's how we get out of this financial nihilism, like PvP world. Because I'm a bill, you know, what attracted me to be UFG is I want to believe in something to go. And like UFG is believe in something against tech. Right. I mean, the same thing as a foundation for this podcast. It's based on like Squad Wealth. I don't know if you're familiar, but it's basically, if we're all in the group chat and Discord, we might as well make money together and lift each other up. Rising Tide lifts all boats as kind of like the four thesis. On that note, I'm sure that UFG is talking a lot about tokens, a lot about trends, and you guys are investing together as well. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm very curious what you are currently interested, maybe trading, investing. Yeah. Where at Token, I'm sure you're talking to a lot of founders.

9:28 Yeah. What is exciting you in the market? Yeah, definitely a few things. Right now, it's privacy and Robinhood. So privacy, I've held Zcash since the beginning of the year. I saw the vision. I mean, it kind of clicked with me like, oh, private Bitcoin. It's like that simple. And I think the concept of identity is really important and growing in importance, and people are realizing that. And so I think things like Zcash and Monero will take advantage of that. And then with the Robinhood Eco, just because I've been working in it, I feel like Pons is the arrow of the Robinhood Eco. You know, like, you know, they were like the first ones really pushing it forward. You know, they've been building for years, like shout out Ozzy, like grinding nonstop. And their team is actually people from the trenches that have been trading, which is why.

10:14 Really? Yeah. Yeah. Which is why I think it's like a key part to their success. You know, I really like outside of UFG, I think Bundlecat's really cool. The Mosh guys, like creating this like AI agent swarm that market makes, like liquidity, because you know, I think like that's the AI crypto that I want to see. Yeah. We've had a lot of founders this week between Surf and GTE is pivoting really hard into AI agents on crypto now. Yeah. And I think that's definitely the future of how do you work with different agents and get the equivalent of a quant in your pocket, right? Yeah. Yeah. We'll just continue. Yeah. But at the end of the day, you could have like the coolest tech in the world. But if you don't have a soul to your community, if you don't have a buy-in from your community to believe in something, what good is it? And I think what we built at UFG is, you know, gives a seed for something that people to believe in and invites them to create stuff.

11:04 So, you know, we'd love to see every, in an ideal world, every token launches within an immutable sovereign treasury. And, you know, not every revenue stream has to go there. Like, you know, I understand, like give operations and expenses, but, you know, at least the trading fees, at least like give like a, like a seed to something, you know? Right. And like something I'm really looking forward to this week is the network state. And I feel like UFG is definitely a network state play in a certain regard, because as Balaji said, they need to have an integrated cryptocurrency in order to have a network state. Well, there's no better way to measure like the engagement of your potential network state or network union than something like UFG, like an immutable treasury from UFG. It's like, oh, wow, we like have this reserve and now it's backing our token for our network state. And this is like, it's really how like central banking started and country started.

11:49 Like think about like hundreds of years ago when like fiat was created. Fiat wasn't just paper money out of thin air. It was receipts for gold. It was like, it was paper backed by gold. In a way, this is like, that follows in that same spirit. And then you had the whole fiat world come out, come out of that. Right. I'm sure we're going to see a repeat of that. And, you know, I think UFG has a good chance of being a part of it. And I, yeah. Nice. Before we get into final messages to not only UFG holders, as well as people already in the community, I'm actually curious if we can spend a minute on Robinhood Chain that you deployed there. Yeah. You've been a part of Frax, Frax's launches chain. I believe you did cap, which was on MegaETH. Yeah. And Robinhood Chain is actually a lot more successful than I think I personally would have imagined.

12:35 They didn't have necessarily integrations to the original like Robinhood user base. Yeah. What do you think they might've done correctly? That's a great question. Yeah. Like how did they catch this lightning in a bottle? I think there's a couple of things that happened here. One is the timing of it. You know, I think the trenches are ready for something new. Yeah. Two is they had a brand new primitive. They had stock tokens. Now stock tokens are not something new. They've been around for a few years, but they were able to deploy so many that you could have builders go and create some really fun things with it. And the third thing is their neutrality. I think they had like a very soft hand. They didn't make anything and they were able to attract the best builders and a combination of like all these different things and this novelty of like all these stock tokens.

13:22 And also like it had a little bit of something for everyone. It's like, oh, if you wanted the trenches, you had your meme coins. Oh, if you wanted your farms, you had like your DeFi farms and stuff. So it kind of like brought like all the different classes together and you saw that initial excitement. Yeah, yes, it's gone down a little bit, but you know, it's fucking Robin Hood. Like they're here for the long term. Like I am sure they have more stuff like cooking under their sleep. Amazing. Well, I'm really glad that we got Dave on really working on the forefront of governance as well as like on chain, cool things happening in the trenches. Yeah. Before we wrap up, is there anything else that you want to tell the community as well as your holders? Yeah, I really appreciate you. Thanks for riding with me. If you want to keep up with anything, if you want to learn about it, you can follow us on Twitter at UFG DeFi.

14:07 Go to our website, ufg.finance. You can follow me at DeFi Dave. And yeah, just like feel free to message me. Like, you know, I'd love to talk to my community. I'd love to get your insights. And if I didn't get back to you, I promise I'll get back to you. I've been really busy this week. Nice. Thank you. Thank you very much. And that wraps up the content suite. Thank you, Dave. Thank you. Appreciate you. Yeah.