The Physicist Who Revolutionized DeFi Looks Back On His Journey Onchain
Episode notes
Michael Egorov is the founder of Curve and Yield Basis. Curve is the automated market maker built for low-slippage stablecoin trading that's become one of DeFi's core liquidity layers since launching in 2020, and Yield Basis is Egorov's newer protocol for eliminating impermanent loss on Bitcoin liquidity pairs. On this episode of Fully Vested, he joins hosts Patrick Scott and DeFi Dave to trace the path from StableSwap to veCRV to Yield Basis, and the frustrations with banks, with Boeing's buybacks, with his own square-root exposure to Bitcoin, that led to each one.
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Michael speaks to how Curve's lock-and-distribute system removes three times more tokens from circulation than ‘buyback and burn,’ how the "gauge" in Curve's gauge system got its name from lab equipment he used as a physicist, and how Yield Basis applies compounding leverage to cancel out impermanent loss on Bitcoin. He also talks through what he'd build next, from a JavaScript-free crypto wallet to a system for stablecoin FX, and looks back on the 2020 DeFi Summer that helped inspire DefiLlama itself.
0:00 Intro
3:50 Michael's path: physics, Bitcoin, and building NuCypher
8:56 Launching Curve's StableSwap algorithm in 2020
13:27 Why Curve's DAO rejected one coin, one vote
15:57 The Boeing buyback disaster that shaped veCRV
20:23 Buybacks vs. locking: which actually removes more tokens
26:25 From Curve's crypto pools to Yield Basis
31:08 Repurposing math to cancel out impermanent loss
40:09 Scaling Yield Basis without breaking Curve USD's peg
44:03 What Michael would build next
48:50 DeFi Summer memories, and how DeFiLlama began
#DeFi #Stablecoin #Bitcoin