Interview PoolTogether Podcast with Hazard
Hazard joins Richard and Oops from the Pool Together Community Podcast to discuss his experience in crypto. Recorded on 24 Jun 2022.
From mathematician community copy-editor to CEO, Hazard explains MEV, arbitrage, working your way up in crypto, and trying to grow a team in the current market.
PoolTogether Community Podcast #26 with Hazard from Rook
Listen now (65 min) | From mathematician community copy-editor to CEO, Hazard explains MEV, arbitrage, working your way up in crypto, and trying to grow a team in the current market
Tim
"...the whole point — the reason we’re all here — is that we want to build a financial system in which there’s no actor who has some kind of systemic advantage over other participants in the marketplace." - hazard [28:22m]
"Payment for order flow itself is not broken. As a concept, it’s very sound. But it’s never been implemented in a fair way. It’s because it’s so easy to make it sound fair when it’s not." - hazard [29:45m]
"...payment for order flow: what is it? One of its properties is that it’s non-rivalrous. If I want to give you my orders, it doesn’t reduce the ability for anybody else to give you their orders and have value discovered. [...] It’s actually anti-rivalrous. The more people who give you their orders, the more value you can discover, and the more you can pay for that order flow. So it has a network effect. You want more people to use it. [...] It’s non-exclusionary, which means that anybody who... wants to use it… they don’t have to pay a fee or anything to use it." - hazard [30:22m]
"Payment for order flow should be a public good. It meets all the criteria to be a public good. But it’s never been implemented as a public good in traditional finance because they screw everything up. They are addicted to this private profit and to playing this con game with customers." - hazard [31:35m]
"This is a form of payment for order flow that traditional finance has never, ever thought about doing. Ever. The reason we can do it in DeFi is that we have all the tools to make this a trustless, automated process. […] This kind of infrastructure can benefit everyone." - hazard [34:25m]
"Our mission is sort of existential. If we don’t provide this infrastructure, it’ll be provided by a bunch of con men that come in and do it instead — centralize the network and... ruin the fun for everybody." - hazard [57:03m]
"We’ve seen this coming… about a year we’ve been building this. [...] There's a better way to do this, and it was invented here in DeFi." - hazard [1:00:00m]
"We built this to be a general purpose infrastructure. […] We have a generalized engine that allows this payment for order flow to happen. It can happen for trading; it can also happen for generic transactions that you make through your wallet to do anything. You could use it as an RPC endpoint, the same way that some people use Flashbots Protect." - hazard [1:00:00m]
"Ultimately the goal is to... make sure all of that MEV stays with these applications and these users. Whatever makes it into the consensus layer, to the miners — Flashbots is there to deal with that." - hazard [1:02:57m]