how many people work now in the Mars protocol. I would say there is around 15, between 15 and 20, contributors, and most of them are full-time. The team, of course, is engineering heavy. It's Dev-heavy. Most of the contributors are Engineers. So, you know, we have a couple of front-end Engineers, we have smart contract engineers, and then, and then also another bunch of back engineers. And then we have UX, UX designer, Community managers. How Mars protocol was born. Sure, so Mars protocol goes back to the days of Tera, the Tera blockchain. It originally launched on Tera the end of 2021, beginning of 2022. And this is, and then so at that point, it very quickly reached $300 million in TDL. Back then, it was just a money market, like just lending and borrowing. Simply UI had some version of leverage farming back then. Yeah, then Tera collapsed. You know, get back together. We, what was the next best, you know, thing for us to do. And we kind of realigned on the

vision of Mars and we so we we went full circle we like should we launch on on L2 so lot of projects on Tera decided to launch on player 2os right on ethereum and then move out of Cosmos we we actually decided to stay in Cosmos because we we were very bullish the op pieces and we stay bullish the PES we still are to this point and we decided really that looked at what was the long-term fishal Mars and we decided that we really realized that the long-term vision of Mars essentially is to build to be essentially the best place in crypto to trade on Leverage in in5 and our goal essentially is to kind of replicate the centralized exchange experience you got some funds from osmosis yes or not no we did not get some fun Moses uh we had a um a recent proposal where where we aligned with actually with Neutron the train Neutron and we decided to do an alignment where essentially we would uh like a token Swap and we get some funding essentially not they will get a percentage

percentage of Mars. Sorry, a quantity of Mars tokens. That's a specific amount of time and and they would essentially us tables to be able to S like kind of like expend our our project product on on neutral blockchain. Yeah, we are present on both osis and neutral. Could we say that Mars protocol well funded or no? I would say Mar protocol is well funded as as defi projects. We we have you know, we have pretty much the runway of a general defi project does. We're we're funded to the extent that we think it's sufficient for us to to run good operations to the the near future. Basically, if I'm not mistaken, your project is more than a y old. What are you satisfied with and what are you very dissatisfied with? Let's start with the dissatisfied. Um, is there anything that I'm very dissatisfied with? I wouldn't say very dissatisfied, but I do think that we we made some decisions at the beginning. We decided to launch Mars H as our own chain and was

was we had this idea that Mars could have different outposts in multiple different you know chains, and then and the Hub could act as this orchestration layer for protocol fees and revenue. And and that was a decision that we made launch our own like our own chain and have our own token own orang chain. I would say that that wasn't in respect that wasn't a good decision because really to actually achieve the vision that we have, which is really to build a really really Deep Reach feature Rich product that you know like that has that that has capabilities of essential exchange and more, you really need to go deep in one shape, right, right, and then you can go rontal but you know like AV do, for example, but you won't really be able to go too deep in your product, your product, and we have a vision to go really deep in your product, so this whole idea of the Mars chain, I think it was was a bad idea, and it's easy to judge now, but so I think that's we're addressing that uh.

we're retiring it, and we're essentially moving our governance to da da on Neutron, where we can essentially U build our vision, our product fully there. That's dissatisfied. I'm very satisfied with the team. It's exceptionally good. I think it's one of the best teams in, I would even venture to say, crypto, in my opinion. Very talented, hard workers. And then we just, we heads down, we don't talk a lot. We just basically, and you'll see in the upcoming months what we'll be able. I used to use the first interface, but for me now it's really complicated, so I stopped to use it. And can you explain why did you make some changes in Mars protocol, like UX changes? Yeah, first of all, I would like actually to get a more detailed session with you and understand a little bit about what, what you know, like where you stop. Right when I used to work with Mars protocol, I just click some button, and it's like, it's no problem, it's so easy. But then I need to

create an account then second account then I don't know and interface was a little bit complicated for me. Do you know that I need to connect my wallet then create an account? I so don't like to do it. I because I use a lot of wallets, you know. I have Kepler, but I have maybe five or six accounts, and I forget which account I use in Mars protocol. So it's complicated for me. Now I would say that the version one, which is where you're referring to, which is the really simple money market UI, we still have that. We have it both on Neutron, and we have it on a mive. If you go on the website, you open the app, you'll see on the right a little like kind of chain-like icon you can click on, and you can take you to the version one, which is basically one you're referring to, the simple money market functionality. In terms of like complexity, I hear you. It's the functionality of the V2, which is

the one you're referring to, which is more conf specific. If you create an account, uh, it's a step function more difficult, right, to um, no more difficult. That's way more functionality than the V1. The V1 is just the money market. You lend and you borrow, and that's it, right? It's like Java experience is very simple. It's clean, and that's all it does, right? But B2 is much more than that. You can do a lot more things. It's just this first vision of embedment of like the centralized exchange that experience in G. But given all that said, I do agree with you that there is some complexity there that we are working on, and we realize that it, you know, like we, we should simplify. So things like you mentioned, like I need to create an account, credit account. Yeah, you need to create a credit account, but it doesn't necessarily mean you have to do it yourself, like it can be abstracted away from you, right? You're essentially, you, you, you log on to it, and you, you do

whatever you want to do, you want to trade. You trade, you want to deposit to L some methods, you can do all that, and it will essentially mint the account for you in the background as your first operation, right? And at that point, if you don't, if you want to use that account, don't want to use other accounts or more complex functionality, you don't have to. It's fine, you won't even know there, right? But if you, once you, it's minted and it's there, you'll see that basically you'll be able to do the same things you can do now, but more things, right? Because I would say there's many more fun, much more functionality in this version. To basically, I already make news about Cosmos ecosystem already two years, and the main problem what I see now that devs, they don't speak on language users. So please make more video how to use your platform. It's very important for me, for example, because I can Define the difference between V1 and V2. Or maybe you already made it, maybe

already you already have some tutorial video tutorial how to use your V2, and what advantage uh V2 has. Yeah, so first of all great feedback. We do have tutorials and videos L them in TR with you, but think that we will be making definitely more videos in tutorials, um, especially with things that are with Mars with our launch from Neutron with our P2 launch for Neutron that, and we will also try to simplify the ux. That's what we've been working on where essentially the account is stract their away gets mitted automatically like you mentioned, yeah, and then also like another thing you want to do is to make it very simple to transer liquidity liquidity on boarding from other chains. You coming from ethereum, we want to be able to integrate cctp, which basically on our UI you can just deposit usdc Bri essentially seamlessly from any other chain, right. This stuff we're actually working on simplifying the ux and making it, you know, making it more

accessible right and videos is a big component so yes, I agree with you, and we are working on that. We are coming launch. What is the problem for devs do it do it more often? I'm not talking about you. I'm talking about all Market because it pay the in the S, you know, always to understand how the site working. Why other devs just don't do video tutorials? Can you explain me? There's a couple reasons. It's one is because this is a space where people are really, really focused on just shipping, and it's just this mentality of like, oh, I need to work on the next feirt, you know, if I'm not working on next feir, I'm not working on new things, and I'm doing videos, I'm wasting time. This is kind of like the mentality that some of these people have, right? Many does don't come from, example, from web too, right, where UX is a big thing, and they don't come from that type of mentality, right, um, and so, like, they're not used to, they don't even know.

what who UX is right. And so I think um, I would say that you need to do better UX not just in Cosmos. I think in crypto in general, I think it's pretty bad. I do agree with you that it's important to have videos and to have explanations on how to use things and all that. The other thing I'll add is like a lot of these products are very complicated. And so like I think people just assume that you know like you'll eventually you're already somewhat of a sophisticated user if you're using the product right. I think they assume that. Look at Pendle for example, it's pretty complicated but they have a lot of money, a lot of users. I think that's they incorrectly assume that. But I think there is an awareness that the UX is bad and we need to do a much better job like you mentioned. And I think that's where we're going. So we're going there. How many people visit Mars every day?

where can I check detailed statistic on Mars. Okay, good, good question. So, unfortunately, I don't have the statistic on people that on daily active users in Mars for simple reasons because we we do all the front end. But for legal reasons, we we don't really track daily active users. But what I can tell you, I can tell can tell you a bunch of things. I can tell you the number of uh active wallets, a unique unique active Wallets on on Mars. I can tell you both on osmosis and neutron and total. So, I'll just give you the total number though, the total number of unique active wallets as of like last week. It's almost 12,000 unique active wallets. They 11,700, you know, it means that they have some collateral in Mar, right? They're not empty, um, they have some collateral, right. So not necessarily they're doing, they're taking daily actions, but they have collateral. So they're earning some interest or you know, they some assets and all that. We get the statistic from.

the smart contracts. So basically, we have like a script that we run internally query the smart contracts, uh, to see the positions, the total number of accounts, and know the ones that have positions. And then we, we find unique ones. So we run these scripts by wearing the smart contracts directly, the state of the smart contract, basically, right where can you find it. We are working right now on a stats on a stats page, uh, that we're going to display on Mars. It might take a month or two before we can release it on our UI on our app. We'll, it, it will have this information and more, right? We also have like fees generated and all that, a total trading volume and all that. I'm working on that. Meanwhile, every two weeks, we publish on our Twitter feed. So I, I encourage people to follow Mar protocol on Twitter, uh, we publish this information. What do you think your project needs to do to become more popular? Good question, uh, first of all, we definitely need to launch Mars are essentially like what we believe is really the kind of like the end State.

and game kind of like product which we that which includes essentially the ability to do the things that you can do on a centralized exchange right with the same Capital efficiency so right now on Mars protocol what can you do. You can do spot trading, you can do margin trading, you can do lending, you can do borrowing, and you can do lever lping or leverage BS right, and all under one credit account with basically one LT right where any asset in your account, any token, any allp right, share connect CL right. So this is kind of like the capital efficiency that you only see on Central exchanges, and then and you don't really see much of this so we have that with our new the Primitive that we built which is the credit account. So we're adding the missing piece, the missing link to this is pers. So we're launch so we're adding that, we're working on perss right now. We SED on testnet, we plan to launch essentially this full product where you have per positions you can take say on on the credit account uh.

which are cross margined in the same way that they are on dydx. For example, but on top of that, any apps that in your account connect as collateral. So they're also cross collateralized, which means I could actually deposit in my account Bitcoin. For example, wbtc or nbtc or whatever it is. And then I can take a short, a short per position using that as collateral, right? And my pnl will settle in stables in USC. This type of product doesn't exist in Cosmos. There's very few similar Capital efficient product on layer 2os on ethereum. But the way we're doing it, essentially, it will be essentially unique in all Define crypto. Um, that's what we believe is the end state product, right? And we're planning to launch that on Neutron in the next months. So in July, I don't know if you guys have been following. There's the drop launch on Neutron drop is an LSP protocol, which you know, which essentially is part of the LI Li Alliance. We will be launching alongside

with drop our Mars V2 with essentially other features that we have on mostes right now plus lever lping with asort p. And it's going to be really interesting because you can do all sorts of interesting strategies using LSD draw. But then in August we will launch essentially perks as well so um that is you know that I think is the end State product and that is like what we're planning to like have out in next few months. You just told me about short-term plans what about plans for long time for example for 2025 there's so we're actually launching also in in the short term and I'll link to the long term we're launching essentially also a uh a vault building functionality on top of Mars building protocol where essentially any person can come in and build their own third party Vault basically. And the way we work it'll be kind of like it'll be kind of like a special account where you can create these vaults and you can trade assets right so positive to these.

vaults people can withdraw very similar to the hyper liquid vaults. If you're familiar with them, the only difference though is that hyper liquid essentially is only per mostly right on Mars. Essentially, I can create this Vault. For example, I can create like a basis trade Vault, right? And then people just deposit their assets in there, and I can trade for them, and I get a fee, basically off of that, right? So these third party vaults are essentially beautiful money Lego that is going to be built on Mars. And then we're hoping we'll be able to attract quite a bit of attention there. And then users kind of like think like an ATF, like ETF, right? ETFs are essentially just kind of like. So in the midterm is to expand that functionality, keep making it more rich, getting user there, to build vaults and all that. Then there is essentially talk of an earned product similar to. I don't want to say the name because it brings like kind of like trauma, but similar to Anchor where essentially so Mars will have all these

opportunity. All these delta-neutral opportunities, right, that are going to be available pretty much only on Mars because of the way that the credit is built. Where you can essentially HED out price exposure, right, so you'll be able to do things like basis trade. You'll be able to do like lever lping delta neutral. You'll be able to do lever lending. The point is, there's a lot of yield opportunities in Mars that are stable. But, so one thing that this won't be necessarily us building, but some other team can come and build, kind of like an earn product, which, you know, very simple UI, you know, you can also come from Ethereum, and you deposit into theer product, and you get a stable APR, like, I don't know, 15%, something like that, right, which is based on the underlying delta-neutral fall of Mars. We're probably not going to build this, is going to build that, but it's going to be built over March, that's one thing, but the other thing is really expanding Mars.

really the way you want to look at Mars is like it's kind of like this Marketplace between traders speculators that they come in and take all these bets on per with leverage and on the other the other hand it's just it's investors right people that just for example like me like they just want to go in and deposit into a vault and then get some stable APR that you know that that's that's pretty good so given that finish up really quick like it it really becomes really successful when you're when you can build things like detail p&l stats of trades right perament and all that like which really doesn't exist very well in defi so working on that kind of like backend data and then giving Traders tools where essentially they can like really see in detail like their positions their performance and all that it's something that we do 2025 launch trading competition 2025 and expand our to economics model where essentially give to to give utility to Mars stakers where by staking Mars

you'll be able to do things like get a fee reduction, get maybe rebates, as well as like maybe get access to strategies and yield strategies that are very limited in terms of caps, right? They fill up very fast, right? So if you stake Mars, you get access to those. This is very important to add more utility for your token. And I just saw on your Twitter account that Mars is going to make some burn. Yeah, can you tell me more about burning mechanism in Mars protocol? Mars just burned 300 million. So Mars used to have a total supply of a billion F supply and around 300 million circulating supply. Mars just burned 300 million of their F supply. So essentially, their max supply now is around 700 million. We reduced significantly our pretty much our total supply, which means the FTV is now closer pretty much to the market cap, which is kind of like the reason why we did that. And the really the main reason

there is because originally Mark was supposed to be like a Mars chain thing, and so we use we thought the community pool would, would use a lot of the funds of the community pool right to incentivize essentially to, to create inflation, incentivize you know, um and secur the chain right, but now we're moving to or retire and change there's no need for all those, so we decided to just get rid of that, uh how money for example Mars protocol and, uh for the last year and how much, how do you think you will end in this year, so Mar prot fees are not at this point are not really exciting, and the reason why they're not exciting is because they mostly come from borrow Revenue, so Mars really makes money by essentially by B by borrow Revenue, so like if you're borrowing Mars you're making some money and 10% of that goes to right, so clearly that game that makes sense when you have a lot of TV right, I can tell you roughly the number it's, it's around 600 M

$600,000, uh, total revenue that we've achieved so far, remembering that we launched pretty much in February of 2023. So far, we've reached around 600. I think their number is around 600. I don't from it's. I think it's around $600,000 in total fees due to borrow revenue. Right now, the thing, what becomes really attractive in Mars, essentially, is going to be when we launch purs in a. That will essentially, we expect the revenue to skyrocket. I want to say skyrocket, but expect the revenue to be significantly higher, and therefore fees are also to be significantly higher because that is a much more, uh, I would say much more of a volume game there than than a tbll borrow kind of like a. How are you going to compete with Lana or Helix? Why as a user, I will prefer to use your, uh, project than other. So I would say that different products. So let's talk about Lana. Lana is actually planning to launch also Neutron. So, so

we'll really be direct competitors on the same chain, but I would say they're different products. Um, so why would you use Mars compared to Le Anis? So, assuming that, um, you want to trade the same market. So first of all, you would go L to basically. I'm assuming it's from a Trader perspective, right? From a Trader perspective, you would essentially go trade per to trade perks. And but you would only be able to trade the market Market that are available on, right? First of all, how can we compete if we're listing markets that they're not listing? But assuming that both markets are available on both, you know, products, then you are going to be attracted as a Trader where you pay the least amount of fees to enter and exit a position and the least amount of fees to hold on to a position, right? So your funding rate, you're looking for lower funding rates and lower trading fees. So we're going to have both as on our trading fees are going be lower in Lana. On top of that, the volume that we can achieve is going

to be significant different like they they are fully funded burs so I don't know if your audience here knows but like the way fully funded burs work is that I I provide liquidity to an LP, and they can only lent out that amount of liquidity for a purpose. So if they have $100,000 of liquidity, that LP for example on Adam, they can most lend out $100,000. The Traders can't take more than that. Roughly, it's roughly how it works. In our case, we're not like that. We are essentially we use a p&l vault type of mechanism Li synthetics, and so for us, we're not limited by we're limited essentially by the difference in open interest but in total open interest, which is kind of like a fraction of the liquidity involv. So to go back to simplify what I said is like they're really limited on how much they can they they can allow users positions to increase if they don't attract liquidity. We don't have the limit our our

positions essentially we have a limit, but it's theoretically much higher. So it's three things: fees, funding rate, and size of positions that you can take on that side of thing, on the trader kind of like optimization side of thing, on the basically um type of user also is different. Our user are probably going to be more sophisticated because essentially in Mars you can sort of do a lot of different things. In Lana, you can only take what it's isolated margin. So when you take one per position, you can't use it. You can't use the PNL thater position as collateral for other positions. They're completely isolated, right, which is extremely capital and efficient. On top of that, your the collateral that you're using in Lana is very specific to that per position. So basically, if you're taking an atom per position, you can only depos atom as FL right on bars. If you're taking an atom per position, first of all, you can open. You can cross collateralize it with any other prositions. On top of that, you any

collateral that's with listed on Mars. Cactus collateral can be used as collateral, so you can have BTC, you can have ETH, you can have Adam, you can all stay in your account, and you can use them as collateral. So he's way more capital inici if I'm not mistaken. Now you are working with neon and osmosis. So are you going to add new chains in the next future? No, we don't have a plan for that. I mean it's possible that we decide to do that, but we don't have a plan right now. The only plan that we have is to, as I said earlier, we have a vision of a really deep, deep, feature-rich product that can mimic the central exchange experience and can even go beyond that and be better. And really, we can't focus on other chains. We have to focus on the one chain and go deep in our product and get distracted. And we need to focus on the chain that we believe can partner in the best possible way with us.

enables us to do all the things that we need. Ultimately, the goal really is you come on Mars, and you don't even know that you're using Neutron. That is ultimately the goal. You come on Mars, you can come from like Ethereum, you can come from like Solana, you can come from like, you know, like exchange, you can come from even from directly on Mars through like a C-money, for example, right? Um, and you don't know at all what train you're using. You're just coming to Mars for the product because the product is awesome. That's the ultimate goal. So, and you can bridge even from Arbit from anywhere you want, right? So many projects create communities. Does Mars create a community? We have a community, and it's pretty active community. For you can look at our Discord, but I would say it's your question is probably a little more profound than that. Um, no, no, we really care about our community, and we try to be as active as possible in sharing updates as much as we can because also

legally, there's going limit to that right response to them when they have questions, you know, and effect everyone, everyone here to join our our telegram group. Uh, it's quite active, um, so yeah, so we do, we do have a community. Um, I believe a lot of people that in our community are really Cosmos users or come from the cosmos experience. What I'm trying to do and we're trying to do, we're trying to expand that to to attract essentially people coming from different chains, right, or even people that are not using chains into March, right, uh, because really, again, as I said, it's not about the chain, it's about the product. We're product person, right. We are on the chain that allows us to build the product that we want in the best possible way in the fast as possible. That's where ultimately like we want to expand our community in ATT track, again, I said, and we and we're working on it, we're working on, you know, like and you'll see a bunch of things coming when you use Mars for yourself, what features

do you use most of the time? I'm using Mars to leverage my back there, right? So what do I do? I use Mars to margin where essentially I take a leverage position on bitcoin. It's like two to three one leverage, and it doesn't wreck me because if I did the same thing with hers, it would wreck because the fun would just destroy me, right? Versus like I this like midterm view. So I use it to do margin trading for my blue chip views and then yield opportunities, which is like depositing specific in different type of like Cosmos assets right now that I believe good a and good fundamentals. I going to add debit card or credit card in your project like we are the we foundation and we just build a software for you know to get deployed on the Mars. So we don't necessarily have a plan of launching a credit card or debit card. However, there can be third parties that can come in and might want to sort of like do something like that. Some question from my chat. You can also check

it for example how secure is your smart contract in terms of hacks. So say that zero hacks so far, which doesn't mean that it's going to be like that always in the future, but we do take security and risk extremely seriously. It's really our number one thing, things that we think about all the time. In our minds, we have, I think we have really one of the top first team in DeFi, in my opinion. And you can actually see that from, like, take my word, look at the research they published. I share that um, the very innovative models that using risk. We've been called out by osmosis many times about being too conservative on the risk side of things, which I, I, I'm totally B with that. Whenever we have a new kind of like big release, we, we, we always AIT, we always go through like audits. We try to do like different independent Auditors. Sometimes, you know, it's only one, but we publish results of the audits. We take security really seriously. Do we want to be looked as the a of cosos right so why

do you go to a you go to a because you trust them, and you trust them because they have an excellent track record of very little hacks, and the hacks essentially they got they recovered really fast from, and they dress them really well, right? So that's why I think it's kind of like the way you want people look at Mars. Let's talk about IR drop. I got IR drop from Mars, and um, I mean I got pit token because I used to Mars protocol. I would like to know, did you come to the pit and say, let's give our users a drop, or just pit came to you and said, okay, I will send some pit to your users? Explain how does it work. So the way it work for pit specifically, um, I wasn't involved in that airdrop, but the way it worked, my understanding, I worked, is that they actually came to the project like us that, you know, have been heavily using them and were early adopters, and all that, and they, and we had conversation.

they were like, Look, we app through air drop to you and to your users, and so so we worked with them so that essentially they would be able to vary, I think the contracts, she essentially, you know, do all this and then use P and use Mars, and so that give you a fraction of because of that. So they came to us many projects, make IR drop, and do you plan to make IR drops in the future for providing liquidity to the Mars protocol, for example. I don't see us doing a Mars air drop the way other projects do it a lot of times it's, you know, the Boost liquidity that they do it like when they launch and all that. What I will say though is that they might be some projects that are going to be building on one of the things of Mars is that the Innovation is the credit account right you can essentially have the sub account and it's a money Lael you can build on top right so I see other projects coming to Mars and wanting to build on top of.

one so on top of our credit. I imagine that they've been interested, and I would also encourage them to do essentially airdrop. You know, basically some of their tokens to like Mars, right? Do you plan to integrate NFT into Mars protocol? For example, I have my collection. Can my holders get a better interest rate on their deposits? Just idea, yeah, it's a good question. So first of all, the credit accounts themselves are. So in a way, we already have it. So essentially, if you have a credit, if you have a credit account where you have some assets in there, you have like tokens and all that, and you don't want to like liquidate it, you can actually transfer your NFT to someone else, and they'll have basically your credit account, right? So the credit accounts in themselves are NFTs, but what you're referring to is kind of like NFTs, images and all that, that have specific features, right? We're talking, we're thinking about that. We're thinking about at this point, nothing is planned or

we're thinking about, you know, maybe NFTs that either inscriptions or NFTs, essentially, that, you know, um, can, you know, that can be collections that come from ours, and then you hold them, you get some special privilege. We're thinking about it. Thank you for your answers. The last question is, we have a huge Russian-speaking community. How can we help you? We are planning to launch a public test net for our perks functionality end of July, beginning of August, and that test, the way it's going to work, is that it's going to be incentivized. So, you come to Mars, you get to pass test Mars and pet if you find bugs. Any bug will have a bounty program where, essentially, we'll give you some Mars for that, depending on theia of the bug. And then, on top of that, we encourage you. We'll give you some, like, you know, course-like test that money big money. We encourage you to trade as heavy as possible there, and we will, essentially, the way we'll do it, we'll come up with the details of the

program soon, but we'll have like a leaderboard, essentially who made the most money in those two weeks that we had the public test. We will give them a certain amount of Mars. Who lost the most money, am yeah. So you can go both directions. Who got liquidated the most, we'll give them the most amount of Mars. We'll do something like that, right? That's fun and encourages people to heavily use Mars, just like stress test the hell out, find as many bugs as possible. Thanks a lot for the interview. I'm really excited what we came. Thank you so much. Really appreciate. So yeah, very excited. Thank you. Have a nice day.

Interview with Mars Protocol

Interview with Mars Protocol