On Monday 14th November 2022, Amulet appeared on the Monday Monkey spotlight, a Twitter Space to the MonkeDAO community allowing projects to showcase what they are doing to a brand new audience.
We’ve cut the audio and created this recap blog for your reference. Below is the audio and the transcript (for just Amulet’s appearance) is also below.
Audio:
Transcript:
Benny – MonkeDao
Next, though we do have amulet protocol. How are y’all doing today?
Rupert – Amulet
We really good. Thank you very much for having us on the on the show tonight. It’s great to be here.
Benny – MonkeDao
Yeah, we’d love to have you. We would love to hear your monkey story and what amulets all about.
Rupert – Amulet
So we’re super new to MonkeDao. Yeah, but I’ll give you a little bit of background on, you know, when I first came across it. So we started as a project back at breakpoint last year, that was literally our first day. And a whole bunch of the people that we were talking to all have their PFPs as, as the monkeys, right? And I was super intrigued by this. And then I found out the price of them at the time, which was just like, yeah, exorbitant top of the market. Right. So everybody, the monkeys were crazy costs back then. And I always wanted a monkey. And then as the the price of soul came down, but the obviously the monkey prices still maintained. We were able to acquire one earlier on this year. And really join the, during the community and we met a whole bunch of different monkeys. At this year’s breakpoint, you guys, you guys had 12 parties? Like it was only it was only two days long. Like they started three days. How did you fit into our bodies? That’s the MonkeDao way right? So yeah, so we yeah, we required a little monkey, which I don’t have it was by my PFP right now. It’s just got Amulet logo in there, but we’ll share it later. And yeah, we were able to join the community and then speaking to you guys, you know, we we wanted to we’re obviously a bit of a different project went on NFT project, we are a DeFi cover protocol here to protect everybody with inside web3, which is obviously a bit of an apt subject at the moment, given what’s happened in the marketplace. And before we get too much further, I wanted to like express my sorrow to anybody here that might have been hit in the last weeks. You know, calamities, I don’t think we’re out the woods just yet. But hopefully, there is a light at the end of the tunnel. And if you haven’t been through a crypto winter before I have, it’s not particularly fun. But there is always a light at the end of the tunnel when we come back much, much stronger than we did before. And so Solana is a incredibly impressive network to to build on. Not only is it obviously one of the better chains out there, in my opinion of which is very slightly biassed. But it’s also the way that we organise ourselves. So we just came off a call with with Rajan and Toly who are the cofounders of Solana But anybody that didn’t know that, and they are, you know, getting the the defi community together to say like, how are we going to do this? How are we going to fix this? How are we going to grow stronger and better next year. And it’s that sort of organisation that you just don’t get on on other communities and other chains and I think it’s almost been driven a little bit by the NFT communities, I want to say, because we we see on a device other things like how well you guys organise each other. And so we’ve taken to that. Anyway, I’ve done a lot of waffling about other stuff that not really talked about amulet, so we, right now we are a smart contract cover critical. So if you are investing inside the space on Raydium, or Tulip, or any of the other kind of DeFi protocols that we cover, you can take out smart contract risk, because as soon as you put your capital into somebody else’s platform, it is at huge risk of being stolen and $12 billion last year was stolen from the industry this year. I think we’re a little bit over about three and a half billion I would need to fact check that but I think it’s it’s there are there abouts. And as an industry, we actually don’t make a huge amount of capital. So last year, I think revenue of the industry was about 24 billion. So about 50% We lost to hacks and people really trying to hurt space. I myself have been defrauded of all of my NFTS at one stage, which was pretty, pretty painful. Thankfully, there was no monkeys in my wallet at the time. But, you know, it’s the sorts of issues in the industry that we are here to come and fix. So right now we’re doing smart contract, risk insurance. We’re looking at doing a NFT risk cover in the future, and there are many other products as well as GameFi as well, actually a big kind of shout out to Gakko and RocketDogs, because they are two awesome projects. And @overcryptocal I can see you’re you’re listening in on this, you really need to check out the Gakko, Gakko website. It is awesome. We need to, we need to take some of that, that input as well. So yeah, that’s a bit on Amulet Benny
Benny – MonkeDao
Perfect overview I do want to say, you know, it’s awesome to hear that you, you know, started your project last breakpoint, you saw a bunch of monkeys around. I unfortunately, wasn’t there. I wasn’t in the crypto space quite yet. But it’s awesome to have you, you know, coming on the show right after break point with a monkey yourself. So it’s, it’s great to see things go full circle. And, you know, I think you bring up a great point that you know, times are at times are tough, this last few weeks have been have been definitely very difficult for a lot of people. But for me, whenever I’m feeling a little bit down about the space, I always just think about all of the incredible builders and insane products and projects that we have in the space. And I get a little assurance therapy, as you know, I might not be the most web3 DeFi savvy individual, but I know others are. And if they’re choosing Solana to build then, you know, there has to be someone has to be doing something right here.
Rupert – Amulet
Yeah, for sure. I mean, there’s like a whole bunch of like, really good reasons why to choose this chain over over other than I went over a couple before that. People I don’t think ordinarily see from the outside, they see like, you know, fast transaction speeds, and all that kind of cool technical stuff. But the, you know, what they don’t see is actually the communities they don’t see the builders working so hard, together with each other. I mean, I literally Yeah, this weekend, when stuff was going sideways, I watched the teams fork and recode the whole of projects here in which might not mean anything to this kind of community, but it’s a pretty big component of how Solana and how money on Solana works. And because it was compromised, in the FTX, you know, stuff that was was happening, you know, the defy community clubbed together there were like four or five different dev teams that just said, Okay, we’re gonna take this on, and they just fold the code made it work and got everybody else up and running over the weekend unless there’s nothing else like more satisfying to see like groups from all over the world like just collaborating and doing stuff for the for the better of everybody in the whole industry. So that’s that’s really exciting. I just touching back on back of brake pads and I mentioned that the monkey said 12 parties did you manage to see the Amulet booth or the Amulet car driving around town?
Benny – MonkeDao
I might have missed it I was all over the place and I was trying to catch you know, and with us we’ve had a lot of monkey Monday projects come up and come on to the show and then show up at break points. I was trying to catch everyone but I might have missed you guys.
Rupert – Amulet
But the big shout out to my Singaporean monkeys they that they caught a lot of our branding around breakpoint we went we went back this year because it was kind of big coming out party and yeah we got a lot of love from the monkeys in town
Benny – MonkeDao
That’s great to be here is definitely we have a we had a lot of events the MonkeDao team that set up those Ira events have been killing it I’m personally not on there. But you know it’s great to see I do want to get into amulet protocol. I personally am not someone that is very deeply in defy I don’t know that much. Honestly, hammer usually handles you know a lot of these in depth questions. He’s the DeFi expert on this show. So if some of these questions are off the mark or not too in depth, I apologise in advance. But you were talking about smart contract covers and taking out smart contract risk and Rick insurance. Can you explain a little bit more what that means and why people would want to do that?
Rupert – Amulet
Yeah, so I mean, particularly if you take, just take a protocol like radio, right, and a lot of people have used Raydium to confer assets and, you know, invest into different tokens and whatnot. And the in particular, when you stake your soul or any other asset on radium, there is a risk that it will be hacked and stolen. And so what smart contract cover does, is it looks at those smart contracts. We actually audit these smart contracts internally as a team, we looked at what the other auditors have said about them and we create a risk rating and a premium about that. So if you take out a smart contract A cover risk policy with us. If that smart contract was to be hacked in the future, which many of which have been in the past, your your money would be safe, or at least to the, to the value that you put in your cover policy.
Benny – MonkeDao
And definitely sounds interesting if any one else, any defi heads are in this space as they want to come up and ask questions, feel free to request. So when you take out, you know, these risk covers, are you paying a premium, you know, every week or every month that you have this whole stake to insure it in case it gets hacked, or so on?
Rupert – Amulet
Yeah, so this is a like the best thing about building your protocol as you can decide these, these kind of rules around that. And so you can actually, at the moment, the maximum amount of duration you can take it out for is three months. But you can extend that, at the end over two months, you can always take out another three months, but you can take out about a day, by the week, you can decide how much you want to get covered. It’s entirely up to you. And this is the, you know, where we’re putting cover back into the hands of the user to say like, this is your responsibility. This is like, if you want to take out this cover, you know, you tell us how much cover you want, how long we want it on it for this is the price of it.
Benny – MonkeDao
Yeah, I think this service is super important. Because I mean, I can’t imagine there being anything more, you know, heart wrenching or crushing London having soul staked or having, you know, it’s like getting wallet drained and right, you you have assets, and then you just wake up one morning and they’re gone.
Rupert – Amulet
Yeah. And of course, like, you know, we saw that happen with FTX. I mean, obviously, that’s, that’s not a smart contract hack that was, you know, some bad people doing some bad things, and they screwed over a whole bunch of people because of it. But you know, that they’re, you know, one of the products that we do want to bring out in the future is an exchange risk. And that’s because of the the amount of demand that we’ve been asked in the last few days, like, Can you can you take out an exchange risk policy with you can we do this on Binance, Can we do it on Coinbase? Can we do it on all these other protocols that are out exchanges that are out there. And so we will be delivering products like that in the future, we’re built as like a base layer. So you can build any single product on top any insurance product you like. And it’s all about how much capital is staked into us as a protocol. And that’s the, you know, the core of our system. So when you stake into us, you get a share of those premiums that we sell. But the risk is is obviously that, you know, if those protocols do get hacked in the future, there can be an impact to your yield, and your potentially some of your initial state capital that you put on the platform as well.
Benny – MonkeDao
Yeah, that was actually my next question was the exchange risk? Because I mean, obviously, with everything going on, I think you guys probably have been receiving a tonne of requests around that. What exactly would that look like on your guys’s side? You know, I would imagine the amount of funds at risk or that you need to, you know, ensure for an exchange is is much higher and just different than then smart contract risk.
Rupert – Amulet
Yeah, you’re absolutely right. I mean, look, if we were to go and try and ensure by Nance right now, we were just too small, like we’re not big enough to to do the whole of finance. And they’ve actually got a number of different insurance mechanisms kind of already put in place, so to speak, you know, I can’t comment entirely on that subject. Because I, you know, they are still able to do exactly what FTX there, but seems like, then they’re not doing that as much anyway, the point is, if we were to do an entire exchange, that would be quite tricky for us, but to do it, what user by user, if you’ve got $1,000 locked up in an exchange and you want to be able to protect that, then that’s something that we could do in the future. And the ones we bring out the exchange risk product damage.
Benny – MonkeDao
That’s good to hear. I think that’s an incredible service that a lot of people would be interested in and utilising if someone did want to get involved in use you guys for for these smart contract risks. How did they get started? Do they go to your website? Do they reach out to you?
Rupert – Amulet
Yeah, so all the information is on amulet.org. That’s where the app is basically, you can actually buy the asset but I really encourage everybody to join our Discord server, which is discord.gg forward slash amulet protocol. We can get to it through the website as well. And really join in with the the community now. I said earlier that we’re not a an NFT project, but there was a little bit of a site, step because we do You have our own NFTs. They’re called the MetaBears, and there are a few of them in the community I can see watching now are Artem and Anna, I can see you’re sharing your your meta bears quite proudly there. It’s a new project that we’re doing. And essentially, meta bears are free. It just shows your commitment to Amulet and commitment to what we’re doing as a community. And the you know, the more you do for Amulet, the more you can collect your MetaBears and the more power they have in time with inside our little DeFi community. So we’re not we’re not fully there is like a rocket dogs project. But, you know, our meta bears are pretty cute. They’re pretty cool. And they’ve got some really awesome special powers that are coming out.
Benny – MonkeDao
That’s great to hear. I think it’s awesome that you guys already have established community that are here, you know, showing their support, I’d love to hear if you guys have any plans of releasing additional collections, or I know you mentioned, they’ll have some, some superpowers upcoming that you might want to speak a little bit about.
Rupert – Amulet
Yeah, so the, the beds themselves give you a discount on on premiums and that sort of stuff, they also get you additional rewards in the future. And there are three tiers of of bear and as the ball. The higher up tiers you get, the less there are and the ones that are coming out in the future, I don’t want to, to read it too much for people that might be listening. But there are some warrior bears coming out that have that are stronger protectors. So you can see where we’re going with the theme of this is that we start with metal bears, and then they they graduate into warrior bears where they actually start to protect the protocols. And that they’re very cute. They’ve got very cool little backgrounds, very cool, little piece of armour etc.
Benny – MonkeDao
That’s awesome. I love being you know, you guys just kind of incentivizing your community members to just continue to be involved in and get involved with you guys. But I think we are going to close out soon. I do have one last question, though, is what you’re building open source is a closed source, we do have a monkey grants programme that we have been reaching out to to open source products building on Solana.
Rupert – Amulet
So actually, it’s a bit of both. So certain parts of it are closed off at the moment. And that’s only so that when we get to the point where we’re comfortable to release them out, we make them open source because actually more protection is required in the industry rather than less we would love for people to build off our protocol.
Benny – MonkeDao
That’s awesome. Yeah, I mean, that that was my first thought was what you guys are building is going to going to be so useful. And it is so useful to so many individual members of the Solana community, I can imagine, you know, a lot of people wanting to build upon your products.
Rupert – Amulet
Yeah, absolutely. And like, we are just one player and obey what will be an enormous industry. But right now, it’s obviously quite condensed. But the, you know, we’re going to need a huge amount of support from a huge amount of cover protocols in the future. And so whilst we like to lead the charge and take everybody with us, everybody can build off our code.
Benny – MonkeDao
Awesome. That’s great to hear. I do want to thank you for coming up today. Do you have any closing statements any shoutouts you want to do before we end up the show?
Rupert – Amulet
No, I want to say a huge thank you to you and the MonkeDao community, for having us tonight, it’s obviously never the best time straight after everything that happened last week, but it is so inspiring to see that you guys are cracking on and the community is so strong, and supporting Solana and the defi community as well. It’s really, you know, it helps everybody say thank you to all of you guys. Let’s rock this into next year. And let’s get back onto those bull runs.
Benny – MonkeDao
Just there, we will be doing everything we can to continue to show support for the incredible builders we have in the space. I do want to thank everyone for coming in and listening in on this amazing monkey Monday spotlight. We’ll be back again next week, same time. I know we just had some daylight savings time so it might be a little bit different for some people. But definitely throw on those notifications and hope to see you again next week.