Get To Know Me - Butlerji

Butlerji is a founding member of the Structure enclave that we know today. Blessed with the soothing (or not so soothing) voice of a chipmunk and never one to back down from a challenge to innovate, Butlerji holds up the infrastructure of the Temple on his little 🐿️ shoulders as the first Master of Structure

The self-proclaimed Temple hacker and all-around nice guy led the development of the first smart contracts which shaped Temple into what it is today. He is a big advocate for the Temple and the unsung hero for implementing a lot of the underappreciated initiatives that have given a lot of value back to Templars.

Among them are:

• Behind the scenes work to maintain promised APY for FR and OC.
• Refunding templars for wasted gas during the OC    
• Re-enabling the AMM after exit queue issues
  
  Plus, if you hang around him long enough he may pull out something from his bag of idioms:

"...it's like revealing our secret herbs and spices but hiding the chicken..."

"...sweating like a priest in a playground..."

A true legend.

Tell us about your PFP or your discord name.

Juicy question! I believe great leaders follow the servant leadership model. Our reason for existence is to build and nurture a great team - to help others shine and sit back and bask in their glory - hence why I chose Butler.

Ji is an honorific - a bit archaic, but still used in North India (Many a teacher I’ve referred to as Guru Ji in my travels). I love the fact as peeps tag and rage at me, they are (even if unwittingly) doing so with respect and reverence :). Brings a smile to my face every time it happens. It’s also an ever present reminder I am a leader in this space, and I need to continuously step up to support, represent and build up my peeps. ButlerJi seemed to capture the above, while hitting that beautiful self-deprecating, always (kind-heartedly) trolling vibe that I love about the crypto community. A constant reminder of the tension to be in service to the team, while still leading and pushing the frontier.

I got my profile pic from deviant art. I even tried to buy it off the artist (100 mad points for anyone who can sort this out for me :p - 1st prize is for this to be an NFT on chain).

Background here is I vibe with the polytheist interpretation that multiple gods are a reflection of, or rather our way of describing the different paths to enlightenment/spiritual fulfillment. Hercules for example resonates with those who see their path as one of strength, and building upon strength.

For me, the Hindu god Krishna resonates as he espouses the virtues of play and cheekiness as a path to spiritual fulfillment. It’s how I like to approach life, with a mindset of playfulness. Even when you are fighting for your life. I like looking at it from the perspective of having fun/playing a game.

This seemed to fit perfectly with the crypto ethos (everything is a game, the deeper you go, the more you realize no one knows shit, and it’s all just a bunch of humans experimenting). Also, hey, I’m building temple, I may as well stay on brand and pick a deity as my PFP 😄

ABOUT ME

When and why did you first decide to get involved in crypto?

I’ve been dabbling in crypto for a while, mainly by buying assets on centralized exchanges. I really dove in head first during the DeFi revolution.

I distinctly remember sitting around, drinking a beer in the sun thinking about decentralization and finance, when it hit me like a freight train (hit me so hard I spilled my micro brew IPA!). My view is that the world moves towards capital efficiency, even if the timeline which it does so may vary.

There is no way over the long run we’ll justify paying for a bureaucracy when a few lines of code in an immutable smart contract achieves the same purpose. We don’t need the ASX now that we have DEXs, we don’t need banks with permissionless lending. Sure the tech isn’t quite where it need to be yet. But if world history has taught us anything, it’s just a matter of time until it will be.

It was as I was mopping up my IPA I decided decentralized protocols will be my life for the next 5 to 10 years. I’m strapping in for the long haul. Can’t wait to see where we take this bad boy!

Which person in crypto do you take the most inspiration from?

I got drawn into crypto mostly from an organization/decentralization angle to begin with. So my initial sources of inspiration in this area are distinctly outside of crypto.

The first real feelling I had for how decentralization could work was after reading Maverick. That is story of how Ricardo Semler re-imagined the process manufacturing, followed by reinventing organizational structure. Crypto naturally leans in this direction, and I take inspiration from those in crypto who boldly push these ideals.

In that vein, I still draw inspiration from the works and writing of Satoshi Nakamoto. They still heavily influence my own thinking, and I use it as a reminder on being bold with where and how we can push the state of the art.

Vitalik Buterin is another of the OGs I take inspiration from. Ethereum was a seismic shift to generalizing the blockchain to be a general purpose computer. Another example of bold ideas both pushing the state of technology and level of decentralization.

INVOLVEMENT WITH TEMPLEDAO

How did you start getting involved with TempleDAO?

I first got hit up by Lost and Decen to help clone Ohm on polygon :p. Up until this point I’d been hacking and contributing in the space, but hadn’t launched a brand new protocol from scratch (wrote the code, helped nurture a community, bring something to life from 0 to 1). I felt that was an important next step in my own education as both an entrepreneur and a student of the mad innovation happening on chain.

Early on this journey we were (thankfully) challenged pretty hard by Zeus and Jawz to actually innovate. Not one to back down from a challenge, we did 😄

Decen, Lost, Lux, with a few other early contributors (Luci comes to mind, I’m sure there were countless others) brainstormed on the mechanics we were after. We squared the circle on our first protocol being a community first low vol store of value.

I then got to hacking! A few medium posts and a bunch of code later, the Temple was born.

What is your role in TEMPLE and how do you see your role evolving?

My role was to write that precious code! I started mostly with the smart contracts and later we found great talent in the community to build the dApp out.

I was also providing leadership and technical direction for the team. Helping foster a great engineering organization as well.

Thankfully, with the likes of Aleks and Mirionic coming on board, I feel the ship is in safe hands from the delivery and leadership of the engineering team. My role is moving towards specification and laying out the coherent strategy and supporting the implementation of this next temple phase. My goal is to make temple the home of safe returns, where degens go to park their stables into a diversified farming portfolio.

What made you decide to become a founding member/get involved with temple in the first place?

I do things on feel and vibe. I got a good vibe from Decen and Lost, found some intellectual comradeship as we hacked on ideas together, so figured it’s as good a place as any to spend my time and energy on.

We have come a long way with many successes and hiccups, what makes you still believe in TEMPLE?

Firstly, we are still here, that’s mostly due to the fact our v1 mechanics worked. We have a low vol coin as we said we would. Ideally of course it would be low vol and pumping, but we can’t control the market.

Secondly, the problem of knowing what stables to diversify into, and how to best farm them hasn't gone away. If you want to live your financial life 100% on chain, a reality of our times is you need to be diversified across stables, that are all yielding in whatever the flavor of the day that is ‘safe’. Managing that is a full time job… ain't nobody got time for that!

Finally, the above problem isn’t some abstract problem for me, I feel it every day! I’m not just a hacker on a temple, I’m its ideal customer. No one (IMHO) has solved this problem to my satisfaction, and temple vaults are truly innovating in how they separate accounting from  the investment strategy.

What is the one thing you would do over in TEMPLE?

Honestly, nothing. I can’t say for certain that if we’d changed something, the result would have been better, the same or rekt! We have a strong treasury, and (IMHO) found a niche in fixing a problem people have that really resonates!

Where will TEMPLE be in 10 years time?

I’m not one to grasp at straws on things like this. Temple should exist while it solves a problem and fills a need. At the moment, I strongly believe it does. I’m in a privileged position to be building a product that I want to succeed both as a developer and as a user. I’m bullish this won’t change for a long time. 10 years is a long time however especially in crypto, so who knows!

CRYPTO IN GENERAL

What project do you think will be the next big thing (industry disruptor)?

It’s clear we aren’t yet capital efficient, the general weight of innovation seems to be in this direction Swap math going from uniV2 => curve => v3, over-collateralized loans to on chain credit checks and under collateralized loans and our brief flirt with zero collateral purely seignorage stable coins (ala UST) are all pushes in this direction.

IMHO the next big disruptor will provide an order of magnitude improvement in capital efficiency on chain for DeFi.

What’s your favourite project outside TEMPLE?

Balancer and Frax. Frax is pushing decentralization of money in exciting and interesting ways. Balancer rethinking some fundamental building blocks, that will lay the foundations on which the next wave of protocols will build upon.

LIFE OUTSIDE CRYPTO

What is your vision for temple's future?

A diversified degen wrapper over stables. This would truly fill the DeFi niche of having a ‘safe’ place to park ones capital, and pave the way for humans to keep 100% of their wealth on chain.

Favorite movie?

Shawshank redemption, Terminator 2, Pulp Fiction, Home Alone, Die Hard, Forest Gump have all left an impact on my life.

A more interesting question is what movie would I consider a guilty pleasure. Easily the Fast and the Furious franchise (up to when Paul Walker died. It’s been a long time but that still gets me in the feels every time!)

What book influenced you the most?

I love reading non fiction. Recently I’d say Maverick and Sapiens have left a huge impact.

Favorite way to spend a day off? Holidays?

Sitting in the sun, sipping beer or a good glass of wine, doodling whatever random stream of consciousness pops into my head in my journal.

What is the hill you will die on?

Probably none - I’m a big believer in having strong opinions loosely held 😄

Closing Questions

What is your message to the believers of TEMPLE who stuck by?

Thanks for the loyalty, thanks for believing in us. We are truly trying to build something useful to help ‘cross the chasm’, bringing more of the worlds wealth on chain by providing a safe, verifiable on chain diversified ‘term deposit’ on stables.

I’m looking forward to rounding out all the automation, decentralization via DAO Games and finishing off what we promised with vaults.

When we are done - Temple will truly be a place to stake and chill!

What is your message to non-believers who left or have yet to be convinced to join?

We’ve iterated and come a long way from our humble beginnings. Come check us out again - and if the problem we are solving resonates then make Temple your home for ‘safe’, where you can truly stake and chill 😄