Lodge AMA with Thomas Mattimore, Head of Platform at Reserve
This article is a summary of the AMA between the Reserve Community and Thomas Mattimore, Head of Platform at Reserve in our Telegram Group, on April 21 2023.
Question 1 — You are Head of Platform at Reserve, what does that mean, how does your job look like each day?
Thomas | Reserve
My background is in product management so I spend a lot of time with engineering team helping to prioritize, figure out tradeoffs, and figure out exactly what to build.
My mission is the protocol team’s mission: Increase adoption of & expand access to sustainable, inflation proof, stable currency.
I lead the team and split my time between product/engineering, growth, DeFI strategy, and various administrative things to ensure the trains run on time.
Question 2—
We’ve collected a lot of questions about RPay — so before we continue, can you explain the difference between Rpay and Reserve’s RToken platform, how is this structured within Reserve? Do you communicate and plan together how to grow RTokens, or is Rpay focused solely on the app and your team on the Rtoken growth?
Thomas | Reserve
Definitely — The two teams are building complementary products (protocol+Rpay) that both fit together to work towards the mission. We definitely coordinate quite a bit, but in many ways operate as two separate companies.
RPay focused on the app and protocol team is focused on the protocol and growing the ecosystem. Protocol enables anyone to launch RTokens, which we believe are fairly novel products… and RPay is a way for people around LATAM (and hopefully the world!) to access those products.
We communicate quite a bit, but have different short term goals/priorities/etc.
Question 3—
What are RTokens, and what is the utility of RSR? How would you describe Reserve in a few sentences?
Thomas | Reserve
Reserve’s mission is to increase adoption of & expand access to sustainable, inflation proof, stable currency. One team is building a protocol that allows anyone to permissionlessly launch, manage, and govern a decentralized, yield bearing, stable currency. Another team is focused on expanding access to stable currencies in places they are most needed and they can have the largest impact. That has been LATAM for the last few years!
The protocol is a platform that enables anyone to launch an asset backed currency. That ABC, if you will, is 1:1 backed by collateral deployed in DeFI that generates yield, has overcolallaterization from governance, monitors for defaults and can self-heal if necessary, and can split the yield among various parties.
RSR is the governance token that can be used on each ABC launched on the platform. If an RSR holder chooses to stake on a particular RToken/ABC, then they can participate in basket and revenue allocation, are the first capital at risk in case of a default, and in return can be eligible for a portion of the yield generated by the backing collateral.
Question 4—
Reserve does not deploy its own RTokens, why is that? Based on your conversations with potential deployers — what are the biggest barriers stopping them from pulling the trigger? (And what can the community do to help?)
Thomas | Reserve
Decentralization is an important piece of the puzzle to us. We believe it helps us achieve the “stable” part of currency in the long term. So we are focused on getting variety of folks and parties from around the world involved. Since we made that announcement, its been so fun to see all the ideas generated outside of “what the Reserve team can think of”.
Also, portfolio design and basket allocation is a really really hard problem! We don’t think we can look in the mirror and honestly say that we know the answer to “how every person in the world should preserve their wealth and grow it over time”. This is a huge part of why we built the protocol as a *platform* that allows anyone to permissionlessly experiment. We believe iteration and experimentation is important piece of discovery… so we tried to lower the barrier of entry to experimentation as much as possible.
Based on conversations with deployers so far, we’re getting lots of feedback on how to make the platform easier to use, especially when deploying new RTokens. So little things like improving the UX, making it easier to tweak governance parameters, etc. Also, explaining *how* and *why* to set various parameters to ensure the RToken behaves as expected.
We added lots of flexibility to the protocol when designing because flexibility and adaptability is important to sustain as a product over time. BUT, it does make it a bit challenging to think about all the various scenarios and game theory on how to prevent attacks.
We’ve been nailing down a “deployer guide” to help folks think about things like governance parameters, trading parameters, etc. Because the protocol automates lots of the decision making, important to ensure people understand what actions it will take in various situations! Autonomous and decentralized monetary policy is very very cool 😏
Question 5—
What is your advice for potential RToken deployers, what kind of RToken would you like to see someone create and what support can Reserve team provide in promoting them and growing them? What kind of plugins can we expect to become available soon?
Thomas | Reserve
We released a couple plugins I’m super excited about this week:
- Compound V3 USDC
- Flux finance fTokens — which is essentially treasury yield onchain
- Convex/Curve pools for the MIM pool and eUSD pools
- ETH LSDs like rETH and stETH
We’re trying to focus on plugins that unblock conversations that have been in progress. For instance, LSDs that have oracles unblocked ETH+ from launching this week. And you can guess on what the other ones unblock soon 🙂
In terms of advice for deployers, think of the RToken like a product. What are the value props, competitive advantages, branding, growth plans, etc.
We can and are assisting on all the above.
TBD on next plugins. Will be dependent on what potential deployers are asking for. But we prioritize to unblock deployers while taking into consideration things like “ease of developing”, TVL, yield, safety, etc.
Question 6—
Do you expect any top 100 crypto protocol to make their RTokens? Any interesting potential partnerships happening behind the scenes? For example, any update on OHM — they tweeted about Reserve some time ago? Also, Reserve team mentioned a number of potential deployers they are speaking to and who are interested, even before mainnet — any update on these?
What new RTokens can we expect soon? Sandy is asking if there are any updates on possible flatcoins. Also, how would that work and what plugins would be needed to accomplish it?
Thomas | Reserve
I’m not going to share any specific information about partnerships or disclose private information that potential partners shared with us without their permission. At the end of the day, biz dev relies on trust and me sharing things here would be counterproductive.
BUT, I am excited to see larger DeFi protocols deploy Rtokens and use Rtokens (which is just as important!). Since eUSD was launched I believe two DAOs have allocated treasury to the eUSD pool on Curve which is awesome! PIE Dao publicly did it and I’m blanking on the other one.
A funny thing to remember is we are still very early in DeFi. I know I know… its a cliche. But DeFi protocols and DeFi users are still quite small compared to other industries! eUSD is already a top 25 stablecoin on Ethereum! Will today’s top ten be next years top ten? Who knows!
Question 7—
From your conversations with possible deployers, what are the trends that you have noticed the most so far?
What trends in terms of RTokens utility and collateral plugins have you noticed? Is there any particular need that emerged during the talks with possible RTokens deployers that today it is not possible to satisfy through plugins and if so, which plugins are we talking about?
Are you talking to potential deployers outside crypto? If Reserve’s ecosystem (Rpay+platform) can connect traditional finance and DeFi, are there any “web2” companies interested in using Reserve’s infrastructure to expand to the “web3” space?
Thomas | Reserve
Yield bearing is interesting to people, as is the selfhealing/fully redeemable part. One piece of friction we’ve noticed is gas costs… especially as jaredfromsubway is eating up blockspace. We’re exploring ways to reduce friction in minting process… actually have a really cool “zap” in testing now that will let people mint RTokens from a single token (like USDC) in the most gas efficient way possible…. all in a single transaction
We think traditional finance its a huge opportunity in long term. Short term we are focused on DeFi natives. But imo its unlikely that people directly use DeFi in the long term. It will be the backbone and security/settlement layer. But normal people will barely know its “powered by crypto”.
Use RPay as an example. Many users don’t know or care that its “crypto”. They care that they can safely access and use dollars.
Question 8—
What are your plans to raise awareness around the protocol/RSR and to make it more known in the industry? Not a lot of people in DeFi have heard about the name Reserve — if the DeFi community is your target audience?
Many people are asking if the Reserve investors (Peter Thiel, Sam Altman, Coinbase, and other), will be involved in raising awareness about the protocol and Rpay. One could imagine that if one of them would speak about it, it would jump-start Reserve’s awareness campaign and get a lot more people talking about and using both the Reserve’s platform and Rpay — sort of a social proof or proof of authority that the crypto space always requires since there is so much fraud around.
Thomas | Reserve
We are discussing with core DeFi folks all the time. Big focus of ours is building “social proof” by demonstrating that these things are useful.
For instance, if people in DeFi keep seeing eUSD as the highest yield on the Curve Finance page (homepage of DeFi for farmers), they’ll be wondering whats going on and go check it out.
That being said, we have continuous outreach and ongoing biz dev efforts. In fact, we have an open DeFi marketing/comms role that James is currently hiring 🙂
Regarding seed investors, maybe but not something we plan to rely on. Products and platforms win because they solve problems for people. Not because famous investors mention them. My suspicion is that crypto generally is going to focus more on product market fit and utility in coming years. That is definitely our focus right now.
Question 9—
Is it planned to offer the savings dollar in the Rpay app?
Thomas | Reserve
RPay and other apps are all good potential distribution methods for something like that. Will ultimately be RPay’s decision on that front but yield is something that everyone loves! They have variety of growth initiatives ongoing at the moment. Adding new RTokens will need to be prioritized among those
Question 10—
We are running out of time so I will bunch a few questions together.
1. Can you explain why Reserve holds CVX and how this can help RToken growth? Does Reserve intend to buy more CVX? Will this scale with the TVL of RTokens currently deployed?
2. How do you intend to grow the currently largest RToken, eUSD? It has a market cap of over $10 million, most of which seems to be due to RPay usage and some from Curve incentivized pools.
3. RSV had a market cap of $30 million, we assume part of this was Reserve’s treasury. Not all of it was swapped to eUSD, do you intend to do this?
4. Is Reserve reaching out or talking to some exchanges about providing eUSD pairs? Is this Reserve’s focus, integrating eUSD as a crypto trading pair?
Thomas | Reserve
1. Liquidity is important for RTokens. CVX allows us to leverage Curve and Convex community governance to incentivize deep liquidity of RTokens. We also hold StakeDAO’s sdCRV for the same reason actually! Always exploring ways to maximize our governance power there.
2. Yep, RPay, Curve, and Mobilecoin bridge are 3 largest users. Looking forward to seeing it get integrated in other places. Ultimately, up to those platforms to do it but we’re helping explain it to as many people as possible.
3. Yep — part was treasury. We hold the treasury in the best way to preserve/grow spending power (runway to reach our mission). We think RTokens could be a great way to preserve and grow spending power and actually already have some held in eUSD (same wallet as CVX/etc). Likely more treasury held in RTokens over time.
4. Circle tried really hard for a really hard time to get USDC trading pairs around the crypto exchange ecosystem. They found it challenging to unseat USDT there because trading liquidity is so sticky and believe it was de-prioritized to get USDC trading pairs around the world. I expect that won’t be the path to growth for RTokens. But maybe! Money is ultimately as useful as how and where it can be used. We’d love to see availability grow.
Question 11—
Are the rumors about eUSD and Signal true? 😉
Thomas | Reserve
Mobilecoin is the only blockchain currently integrated into Signal. eUSD is the only stablecoin on Mobilecoin’s blockchain.
I hope Signal chooses to integrate, but ultimately its up to them!
Question 12 —
What (Reserve-wise) keeps you awake at night? What is your worst fear? Can you give us a few problem statements that the community might be able to take away and brainstorm around?
What gives you most hope for the future of Reserve? Does the team have internal milestones how they track success? Where would you like to see the Reserve Protocol ecosystem by the end of this year in terms of TVL and number of deployers?
Thomas | Reserve
Mentioned my background is in product… I’m constantly worried about people not wanting the product. but its been exciting to see social proof grow and this helps me sleep easier.
Decentralization is critical for future but it can be really hard to achieve it, in the right ways, quickly. I struggle to balance the desire to move quickly with the need to move slowly in decentralized manner.
Our north star this year is TVL. We’ve got some hunches on which Rtokens and which use cases getting solved might be necessary to get there but ultimately up to the market to decide there. TVL number one thing I check on every day though.
I gotta run to a meeting! But thanks for having me all! 👋
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