I had an intuitive sense that the clouds gathering around CEXs’ ability to offer passive stablecoin yield, especially in the context of the CLARITY Act, could end up being positive for something like Ymax. This tweet seems to confirm that intuition.
I have already tested Ymax, and I liked it. My view is that this kind of product should eventually be integrated directly into non-custodial user wallets, in the same way wallets today integrate DeFi platforms for swaps. This could be a good direction for Agoric, because Ymax itself may not achieve broad adoption as a standalone application. Not because the product is bad, but because most users may simply never discover that it exists.
I would not want this to end the same way as Inter Protocol, where the community seemed to conclude that the collateralized product was not in demand. I did not agree with that conclusion. In my view, the real problem was distribution: how the product was presented to ordinary users, where it was promoted, and which assets it supported. Inter Protocol was known within a fairly narrow circle and was hardly known outside the Cosmos community. It also did not support the kind of liquid and resilient assets that could have made it more attractive to a broader market. So I would really like us not to repeat that situation.
For example, I have not yet found clear information on how feedback on Ymax is being collected. I noticed that around 300 users have interacted with it, but I did not receive any prompt to fill out a feedback form, post about the experience, share a tweet, or do anything similar. I posted about YMax on my own Twitter account, and the only person who seemed to notice was Zaki.
The main Agoric account blocked me a long time ago. I do not have a personal problem with that, but I do think this illustrates a broader issue: I would like to see more promotional activity around Ymax, more user engagement, more retweets of real user experiences, and generally a more active effort to surface the product beyond the existing Agoric circle.
My concern is simple: if Ymax remains something that only a small group of already-informed users know about, we may end up misreading the outcome again. Low adoption would not necessarily mean that the idea is weak. It may simply mean that the product was not distributed, explained, and embedded where users actually are.
FYI @dtribble