Yield optimization, but with a real-world impact — that’s Popcorn DAO’s mission. Popcorn is a multi-chain regenerative yield-optimizing protocol with products that simultaneously fund nonprofits and social impact organizations. The Popcorn team is currently working on their Pop Vault protocol and opted to collaborate with Code4rena to audit their new code. For 7 days, Wardens are participating to win a share of the $90,500 USDC award pool.
We talked to Popcorn’s Co-Founder, Michael Kisselgof, to ask about the vision for their project, a hot take on why security is so important in the web3 space, and much more. Let’s dive in!
What are you building, and what sets it apart from similar offerings in the space?
Popcorn is building an on-chain, permissionless protocol called Pop Vaults where anyone can spin up a vault — an automated asset strategy that optimizes returns on user-deposited funds. This would be one of the first open infrastructure allowing for the modularization of vaults using a protocol-endorsed VaultFactory that ensures the safety of the strategy and its contracts. Vaults will be able to interact with a variety of protocols through the ERC4626-Wrapper and will also be stackable in design, meaning you will be able to build on top of other vaults. Pop Vaults will also provide specialized Module functionality for trading, leveraging, staking, and more. The protocol will dramatically reduce the required capital and time to market for any B2B enterprise looking to quickly expand its DeFi offering and allow anyone with little coding knowledge to mix and match both protocols and strategies to create sophisticated DeFi products within just a few clicks.
What’s your vision for your project? What are you building towards in the longer view?
Popcorn is a multi-chain ReFi yield-optimizing protocol with non-custodial and permissionless products that simultaneously fund public goods. The Pop Vault protocol will serve as the on-chain infrastructure providing modular tooling for both B2B enterprises and retail to easily create automated yield-generating asset strategies. Not only will the protocol allow Popcorn to dramatically scale up its product offering and create more revenue streams to fund public goods, but it will also serve as DeFi’s AWS equivalent offering scalable solutions for new protocols. Popcorn will do for the yield space what Uniswap did for AMMs.
What’s the most innovative idea in your project/protocol?
Vault development is capital-intensive and risky. A significant number of resources are required for research and building out infrastructure, with huge budgets allocated for auditing and risk mitigation. Not to mention an equivalent budget for frontend, marketing, and business development for a successful enterprise. Historically the process has been in-house, the opposite of open and permissionless.
Pop Vaults solves the above by providing common permissionless infrastructure and tooling for creating vaults. Anyone with some DeFi knowledge will be able to develop vaults quickly without the need to code. This opens the door to many more participants in DeFI and allows for even more collaboration between existing and new vault builders.
It takes courage to undergo a public audit by a swarm of anonymous security researchers. It also says a lot about how much you prioritize security. What advice would you give to those on the fence?
Web3 was built on the foundation of permissionless, decentralized software. Naturally, this requires security audits to ensure an ecosystem of trustworthy protocols for the community. Having public audits serves a dual purpose: it’s an opportunity to test and improve your code, and it also builds your ethos with the community by showing your commitment to building an authentic, open-source protocol. You should be excited to battle-prove your code without the risk.
Security has become an increasingly vital topic in Web3 and DeFi. How do you think the ecosystem needs to evolve in order to rise to the challenge?
There are a few things that should become more common:
- Frameworks/libraries or other systems to reuse safe and efficient code
- Automated and/or cheaper simple testing and auditing; would allow auditors to focus on important and more difficult aspects of audits
- Auditors should have more skin in the game; maybe a confidence stake in your audits which can recoup some losses for users
- Circuit breakers and disaster recovery plans
What gets you most excited about Web3?
Web3 is a movement that advocates a decentralized version of the Internet, one that embodies the first principles of blockchain. It corrects human error and corruption via trustless systems, Web3 breaks down walled gardens and solves the recurring failure of centralized systems. Let’s take the crypto market in 2022, or more specifically, CeFi. If 2022 could claim a new Chinese zodiac animal for crypto, I think the black swan would be most appropriate. Terra Luna’s collapse back in May 22’ triggered the beginning of the end of CeFi players FTX, Genesis, BlockFi, Celsius, and Voyager Digital, resulting in the current “crypto winter.” Not because the underlying technology was compromised, but because enormous losing wagers were made between centralized institutions, some of whom commit massive fraud and straight up stole funds, resulting in insolvency. This epic contagion had investors close their positions resulting in a bear market and loss of investor confidence. Once again, this was all a reminder of why decentralized technology was first introduced. DeFi eliminates the necessity of these centralize banking services and provides an alternative, open system to conduct finance. And thus to answer the question, DeFi is what excites Popcorn the most about Web3 for obvious reasons.
Complete the following sentence: “We wish more Web3 projects would…”
- Adhere to interface standards
- Fix their rounding issues
- Adhere to the first principles of blockchain
What Web3 project name do you wish you’d thought of first?
Popcorn, oh wait…
What do you geek out about, beyond Web3?
- BJJ
- Art
- Carbon Removal
- Music/music production/synthesizers
Learn more about Popcorn
- Website: https://www.popcorndao.finance/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/Popcorn_DAO
- Discord: https://t.co/9Mr1VSPSb9
Popcorn’s $90,500 USDC audit contest with Code4rena opened on January 31st, 2023, and will last 7 days. Details here.
The Ones in the Arena spotlights emerging and established DeFi projects and their founders, with an eye to celebrating and learning from them. The series’ name is inspired in part by Teddy Roosevelt’s famous quote, which has a central place in Code4rena’s philosophy.
