Episode 67: DeFi Derivatives with VEGA (VEGA) founder Barney Mannerings

MikoBits Blockchain NFT and DeFi show

What is VEGA?

I spent most of my career in the sort of traditional financial world-building trading systems and working with traders and got super excited when Bitcoin came along. And Ethereum, as well, and so did some mining and got in a very small way on the Ethereum presale, and I was really excited to kind of decentralized finance. So you know, before DeFi, was DeFi, I was excited by that idea. And I looked into the kind of doing some of the things that I'd done around building derivatives protocols.

What I realized very quickly was that Ethereum is an incredibly constrained environment, and effectively, with Ethereum DeFi, you currently trying to build these sophisticated products that need risk management and margins and all of that stuff on what is effectively like a kind of pocket calculator. And, and that just means that you make some really big trade-offs that in my view, and you know, our company's view, certainly means that DeFi derivatives on sort of built on a theorem are never going to be kind of accepted in the real world use cases because they won't be efficient enough in terms of capital, they won't be efficient enough in terms of pricing. And often, they may not even be able to offer the same features like the kind of traditional finance equivalents.

And so what we were looking to do when we created Vega was to create something that was effectively optimized for the ground up as kind of a scaling layer for derivatives. So you're building an application-specific chain that could optimize derivatives for the decentralized web. So providing a layer of Vega actually plugs into Ethereum and right now and future other blockchains like terror and polka dot and others. But you know, providing that derivatives layer, so you take the same assets, you know, your dye, your ether, your ERC 20s. But I'm able to kind of, you know, move them on to this supercharged trading layer, and start creating and trading derivatives without some of those constraints. And that's really what Vega provides.