Building the Perfect Crypto Ecosystem in 2024 | Keone & Smokeythebera

there's a lot of people who like yell from rooftops and are like, look at my X or Y partnership. But I ultimately think that like the applications and the numbers and the users tend to tell the real story.

Have the virtuous cycle going. It won't necessarily always be going at the speed, you know, of at which like the Monad community or the Monad's repute grew, like right after a fundraise, for example. If you're doing the right things, if you have the right principles, then when you go through that boost, you are really able to take advantage of it.

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Yeah, thanks for having us.

Cheers, man. Always good to be here.

Yeah, I guess I should say welcome back. Um, okay, so there's a, uh, I actually want to do this a little differently than most of the pods you guys have been on. There are a lot of podcasts, uh, that you've both been on talking about the technical aspects of why, you know, Monad is better, or BearChain is better, and proof of liquidity and parallelization, all that kind of good stuff. And, uh, we can link those in the show notes. I don't want to talk about any of that, actually. I would like to talk about community building, um, ecosystem BD, uh, just the general development of like the L1, L2 ecosystem. Um, so I thought it'd be fun to start with a question about the other person, actually. So Smokey, I think I'll pick on you for this for this first one. How would you describe the Monad community relative to Bearchain?

Yeah, for sure, man. I think generally they seem like a pretty inviting and welcoming bunch. I think that there's like a pretty interesting focus or encouragement around like, it seems like content creation and like sort of like funky art and visuals. They've got like their own, you know, swath of mascots of various animals and like reptilian creatures among other things that would appear. So I think there's like a, there's a kind of fun vibe there that seems to have been built. It feels, I think, when I think about it in perspective to the Bear Chain community, a little bit more like, what's the right word? It feels a little bit more friendly to the point of like, hey, this is welcoming in a sense that can be seen as desirable by some and perhaps less by others if they're more like crunchy, jaded CT natives. I think that on the other hand, when I think about the Bear Chain community, there's definitely some folks who are pretty wagme and a little bit more like monodesk in that manner. And then I feel feel like there's a little bit heavier weighting towards like the edgelords or like the guys who are just perhaps a little bit more mentally ill. Um, that might be my, my initial impression. Um, and then I think that, uh, the other thing that I think about a bunch is like there seems to be a good lore being developed and like, you know, good, um, like, like good backstories existing within the various characters in those communities. And I think that they do a lot in terms of like, um, I'm not sure whether it's like Telegram-oriented or Discord-oriented, like missions or quests to like, you know, sort of engage in certain things and like help produce X or Y forms of content. Probably in, in, in combination with different strategic initiatives in the community. So it feels like a well-coordinated group.

Keoni, same question but inverse for you.

Yeah, I think that, um, the parachain communities, uh, also have a ton of respect for, uh, parachain community and what the team has done to help cultivate that. And then the contributions that the different individuals within the BearaChain community for sure have made to help, you know, really put the community on the map and really make the community kind of famous. I agree with that characterization. I think the branding of BearaChain seems to be a little bit more bear-oriented. That sounds really dumb to say, but just like there's, there's more of a single coherent theme of like, okay, bears and then honey and then I don't know what other things related to that. Um, so maybe it's like a little bit easier for people to riff off of like just other things that are related to bears. Um, whereas I think for the Monad community lore, it's maybe initially started a little bit more randomly with, uh, just a character that someone uploaded that then kind of like through community curation, like rose to the top and ended up taking up more and more mindshare. And then, so the, the lore is developed a little bit randomly and organically, but I don't, it's probably true for, for everything. So I don't know, but yeah, it's just there's more new characters being created within the Monad storyverse, let's say, in my view.

You know, a lot of what we talk about here is community and culture. How would you define that?

That's a good question, man. I think it comes from a number of different aspects. On one hand, it is, you know, what is like the first thing that people think about when they think about like, you know, your brand or your chain, if you will. It's like, what is that instinctual feeling? I do think a lot of it is, you know, that oddly psychologically driven portion of it. It's like, oh, how does this, you know, brand or community or group make me feel? I think the culture is also sort of endemic to that in terms of like, okay, how does this make me feel and what does this make me want to do, right? Or what is broadly encouraged? Is it encouraged for people to, you know, hang out with each other to, you know, try to better each other? Is it encouraged for people to shitpost and like copypasta and like make memes and like fuck around and find out? Is it encouraged for people to, you know, like just be absolute, you know, violence on the internet? Like, what is that baseline? And I guess that, you know, the way that we think about a lot is how do you build a culture that feels authentic and real? And how do you build something where, you know, it can be approachable from a number of other audiences, but also like malleable over time, right? So I think that like, in many cases, we've tried to stay true to our roots or our origins of like, You know, we try to be fairly competent in the work that we do, but we also try not to be serious because I think that being overly serious is one of the biggest turnoffs. And I think that when I approach and then see a lot of these other L1 and L2 ecosystems of the past, there's been many times where they actually sort of like leave people with this feeling of like belittlement almost, right? Or it's like, you are not good enough to understand X or Y, you know, this is not a space for you, right? So I think that there is a degree of authenticity that comes along with like building effective community and culture. It's like, hey, we are not manipulating you. You guys to perform X or Y actions. We're not trying to farm you guys. We are going to try to build X or Y things that seem interesting as a whole, and we're going to try to build a culture of excellence around building cool shit while having a good time. Right. And I think that that has probably been how we think about culture and community the most. And then when it comes to community, I feel that's a series of little ripples where you sort of help plant seeds for a little while, but you don't actually want to have a heavy hand in that. You kind of just want to give people ideas or you kind of just want to talk about what an ideal end world might look like. And if people resonate with those ideas, and some of them might rise to the occasion and say, hey, we're going to go and run this, right? Like, for us, I think a lot of the stuff that is actually thought of as being done by the foundation for BearChain is actually just the product of a bunch of randoms in the community who've been around for a couple years and said, hey, I'm going to take matters into my own hands. Whether that is the app builders, whether that's stuff like the Honey Jar, which is like a community initiative that's evolving into like a super team-esque structure that's, you know, helping with a whole bunch of ecosystem work and grants and exposure for different projects and community resources, or whether that's even more targeted initiatives like the Bearabatties. I wish I could say that I played a role in helping manufacture any of these things, but in most cases, I just bounced around ideas with folks and said, "Hey, this sounds kind of cool," or, "This sounds pretty cursed. Maybe we don't do that," and try to provide guardrails. And then it just sort of turns into a set of organic interactions where people hopefully help each other and have a good time while doing so.

The counter to maybe the openness, Smokey, is one of the best ways to build a brand is to say who you're not for, I think, and to like almost make it exclusive at the beginning and it kind of compounds from there. So like, I think Anatoly and Raj did a really good job of this at Solana. It was like chewing glass and, and, you know, they would openly say, look, it's really fricking hard to build here. We don't want everyone. 9 out of 10 people aren't cut out to build on Solana. Now it's more open. Now that's not the message. But in the early days, that was the message. I'm curious how you guys think about like building for a really targeted set of people, and then eventually you have to open it up.

Yeah, I think that's, that's a good point. There is definitely a— I mean, there's a lot of ways to think about it. You could think of it as like bulking and cutting cycles. And so, you know, maybe there's some periods where the the right thing to do is to be more exclusive, to be— I see a lot of early communities now starting to, trying to start off by creating this air of exclusivity. Like, oh, we just opened our Discord for 10 minutes and anyone who got in is in, but now you can't get in. That kind of thing. I think there is a potential issue where now that everyone's trying to do that, it might not be nearly as effective. Um, and then also the actual experience in the Discord or in whatever, like, um, gated community— like, that it actually needs to be something that's valuable to people, otherwise it just, it will end up fizzling out. So I think that the idea of building community ultimately has to be about, um, Giving, like, trying to create an environment that the people enjoy being in and trying to offer value to the community members. And, you know, sometimes the, like, one, one requirement actually for the community being a pleasant place to be in is, um, is gating the entry in some way, mostly so that spammers don't get in and just send a bunch of GMs and ask a bunch of repetitive questions just to try to like farm engagement. And so that's, that's I think also increasingly becoming a problem for new projects in the space is like sort of filtering out the, the signal from the noise. Um, it's almost like the, um, I forgot what it's called, like the vanishing point or something. Um, a while ago I was— and this is a little bit of a tangent, but You know, like the, the, it's getting hard. It gets harder and harder for, um, just the thought that I had for crypto startups to like hire engineers over time, because over time more and more of the job applicants will be North Koreans. And so like to have to sort through that number of like, uh, potentially malicious people, it becomes a higher and higher burden over time. And kind of in the same way, like when you're building a community, It gets actually harder and harder over time because there are more and more bots that are gonna kind of like swarm and overwhelm you. And there's zero cost to the bot operators to run all these bots, so they're going to definitely swarm more and more. Um, and gating the community or having some level protection to make the community a pleasant environment, plus actually being very thoughtful about like what it is that people actually— you know, what benefit people are getting from being in the community— those two things together are really important for growing an early community.

We're in that state of the market where like every cycle people come out and say we have too much info. Why do we need competing L1s? Why do we need other ecosystems? Why don't we just double down on what's existing? And obviously you guys disagree with that. I mean, you go on, you're building your own. How much of, how much of the builders that you're attracting are very mercenary-ish, like very profit-seeking. And one, do you care? Two, what can you do about that? And, and like, does it matter for you guys?

Right?

Yeah, good question, man. I think this actually ties in a little bit to what, to what Jano asked earlier in that, like, I think that in Tolyan Raj saying, hey, you guys are gonna have to eat glass, you guys are gonna have a horrible time here. I think that actually creates like a, like a high-pass filter, like a higher barrier for entry. And the best goal there really is to select, like self-select for the people who are going to be able to go the distance, right? Crypto is famously problematic in terms of incentives when it comes to long and short-termism, if you will, and probably weighs a lot heavier towards short-termism at the moment. I think that there are certain things that one can encourage within their messaging, within comms, and within incentive programs at the chain and mechanism level or the foundation level to do your best to avoid said mercenary counterparties, right? And there's a number of dead giveaways in many cases. But what you're really trying to create is on one hand, a degree of loyalty and allegiance, I think, and a willingness to take a concentrated bet. And on the other hand, I think a degree of vendor lock-in, as cursed as that might sound, but I don't think it's actually entirely inaccurate, right? You think about the slot in Web2, is there a way that one can increase switching costs? But is there a way that one can actually drive enough value to the protocols building around you to actually make that increasing switching cost, if you will, worthwhile for that protocol such that it's not an antagonistic relationship. And for us, I think that there's a couple of things that we do to ensure that we avoid mercenary builders. One is I think that we try to be very diligent in our processes when it comes to understanding the backgrounds and the previous work of folks that we're working with within the ecosystem. And I simply think that just doing a little bit of homework can reveal a lot of information on what people have or have not been involved in the past, which can definitely pay some dividends and avoid some grenades. I think on the other hand, we don't run any grant programs and we think that the vast majority of grant and incentive programs of that sort are quite toxic and more than anything attract these mercenary farmers and builders. And in the same way as Keone was talking about bots, there's a very similar sense of like, you know, bot builders of sorts who are just like, you know, spitting up really shitty UniV2 and AaveV3 forks at max speed to try to farm grants across every ecosystem without a developed, you know, set of primitives. So I think that You know, one of the easiest things that you can do is simply be very upfront in that messaging. And then also to have like a very, like, you know, rationally skeptical view on a lot of builders. I think that what that leads to at the end of it all is actually just a focus on net new applications, because I would say that the majority of mercenaries are not always building something that is net new. Certainly some are like very competent and they're saying, hey, I'm building something that you've never seen before, you know, pay me to come here and build this and we'll go to whoever bids the most for us. Um, but I do think that what actually happens at that point is that if you can, you know, help convince that person that maybe as opposed to taking a short-termist, more mercenary mindset on this, that there's an opportunity to really make it something generational or something that is, you know, category-defining, and to go along on it, then I think it is possible to turn mercenaries into missionaries. I think ideally you just find missionaries in the first place, right? But that's sort of been our internal thinking on this front.

Keone, would love to hear your thoughts on that. Also, Keone, I'd love to hear— you passed over this comment about, uh, trying to avoid hiring North Koreans, so would love like one second of commentary on that, but also would love your response to Santi's question.

Yeah, sure thing. Um, yeah, maybe just to explain that a little, a little bit further. Um, I think there's— yeah, this is a specific comment about You know, when you're hiring Solidity engineers, you know, there are definitely, there've been a number of notable incidents in the space where a team hired someone who was either anon or maybe they weren't anon, but like they portrayed themselves to be like, I don't know, in another country so they couldn't like turn on their camera, or they couldn't, couldn't travel in to interview. Um, and then there actually was like some sort of attack on the protocol months later after things launched. I think Munchables was like a good example of that. Um, and when I say North Korean, that's kind of like, uh, that's a maybe lazy phrase, but you know, just in general, like someone who is trying to infiltrate a company to like insert a backdoor in some way. Um, and I just think over time there's, there's sort of more and more of these resumes floating around or more and more automated submission of, of these resumes to job postings. Um, so it becomes harder and harder for folks to sift through all of that. There are definitely a lot of telltale signs. Um, in the past I've written about this on Twitter, you know, the how to spot a quote-unquote North Korean software developer applicant. So I think there are ways to like train oneself to like just have the right set of questions to ask. But it is definitely becoming a higher burden or like just more and more overhead for folks, especially hiring certain roles, especially Solidity engineers, to deal with.

Yeah, I guess back to Santi's question, like, who do you think of when you think of the ideal person to come build in Monad, Keone? Like, do you ever meet someone you're like, honestly, you should go build in like Solana or Bearer Chain or Movement or Sei or Avalanche or something else? Or are you like, look, we're come one, come all, come all?

Yeah, it's an interesting question. It's, it's very much come one, come all. I do think that I agree with Smokey's point about how, um, you know, a lot of the, the grant farming developers are sort of proposing to build something that's very similar to something that already exists. Um, and I think anyone that's trying to build something that's very unique, very differentiated, there's just no, there's no problem with that at all. It's just like, you know, there's, there's different spectrums of aggressiveness in terms of like how speculative of an application a team is, is willing to build. Like some people are very focused on things where the path to the story of like how this is going to be a very useful app is very easy to understand, like a very straight path. But it's also probably because it's more similar to like other things that have come before that have been successful. And then there are other ideas that are just more, much more inherently speculative in nature. And yeah, I think that I'm definitely excited about some of those more speculative ideas because I think that's what the space needs, is just a much broader, um, you know, diversity of, of, of efforts. And that's how we ultimately get apps that can cross the chasm to mass adoption.

Before we go a little, because I want to spend a whole section on like ecosystem and stuff like that, there's one thing I want to talk about before moving into that, which is founder brand building instead of just like the brand of Monad and the brand of parachain. How do you guys think about just your personal brand and like striking this balance between degen and professional? Like Keone, I feel like you, your brand, like you come across very like level-headed, cool-headed, balanced, savvy engineer. Like Smokey, you're a little more like degen, like fun, like memes, things like that. Like, how do you guys think about striking that balance?

Yeah, I guess I think about it a lot in terms of like, you know, how does it resonate with the broader brand, but also just how does it remain authentic? Like, I don't want to ever, you know, attempt to morph myself or my public image into something that is going to be misrepresentative of when people meet me IRL or when we end up chatting, etc. I think that it's been an interesting tool for us though, because I think a lot of people, especially going into this next little while, have very high expectations probably for both teams here. And I think that on the other hand, what's been kind of nice is that there's a lot of people that just sort of wrote off Bearachain from the start because they're just like, okay, there's a bunch of bears and these guys are anonymous and what the fuck is going on? This looks really stupid. And it has a name like parachain, which is meant to induce stupidity. So like, I think that there's very much a set of folks that, you know, thinks like, hey, if I talk to these guys, they're going to be clowns. And I don't mind that actually, because I think I'd much rather have that contrast or that cognitive dissonance and hopefully not come off as a clown when I chat with these folks. It's been an interesting recurring theme sometimes when we have a conversation with people that, you know, have only ever seen us online or perhaps who have like, you know, not just dug in too much. And on one hand, that can backfire spectacularly if that becomes the dominant narrative. On the other hand, it's something where I think that if enough people sort of see these network effects forming and keep on asking themselves, hey, like, why are all my friends who I respect and who I think are competent, you know, excited about or backing or building on parachain? Then I think it actually leads to a really interesting set of like, you know, what the fuck moments where people are like, I am confused by this and I am interested in this and therefore I wish to learn more. So I guess when I think about like founder brand, I I try to keep it as real as possible while also being responsible towards, you know, parachain as a whole, right? I'm not going to go off on unhinged tangents for no good reason, but I'm also not going to try to make myself seem like a suit when I'm relatively far from the such.

I've definitely had those interactions where people ask me, they know I'm an investor in like parachain, and they're like, there's very polarizing views, not so much for Monad, I think, but especially for Bear, Bear Chain, people are like, this is like the next Terra. How, you know, how, like, why is it that you're pushing it? Like, what do you like about it? I think in part it— people don't understand like proof of liquidity. And, you know, they— do you think that while I agree with, with everything you guys are saying, that sometimes you want to create like a high barrier to be self-selecting for people that are serious, people that are committed. On the other hand, it, it may present like a roadblock in attracting other investors or attracting where people might just rule you out. And, you know, it is a very competitive landscape. I think both of you guys have a healthy, vibrant kind of startup ecosystem of projects building. I've met a few on Monat. I've met and invested in a number in BearChain, as I have in other ecosystems. Um, I'm— I'd like to like double-click on this. Like, is there a particular founder that you guys think that you're not attracting that you would like to attract, but it's just been difficult because of how you position the protocol, of how you position like what you're looking for? And is there something that you guys think that has been very beneficial to the success that you've had so far in attracting builders?

I mean, I would just say that it's hard as a new founder to, you know, attract the resources that are needed to grow the product further, build the team further. It's hard because you're also competing for mindshare, but nobody really knows you. They don't know what— yeah, like for most people, they don't like start out with a significant Twitter following or something. And then they're building a company from like building a team, building a company from scratch. And learning all of the lessons of, yeah, of creating a startup from nothing, creating culture, like figuring out how to hire, figuring out how to, like what they can compromise on. Making the first hire is honestly like the hardest thing in my opinion, because you're starting at a time when you have no like credibility or resources. You don't really have a lot of money. And then you're, you're trying to get real, the like absolute best person because getting that first or second or third really good person on the team then helps set a really high bar, which then makes it easier to recruit more good people. So you're kind of, you know, like you have to figure out what you can compromise on and find a diamond in the rough in some way. But then also you've never, for most people, like they've never done that before, so they don't actually know like what to look for either. And I think in traditional tech, the startup journey could last like several years before like, you know, starting to get bigger and raise more money. And, and the team sizes are quite small in the early days, whereas I feel like in crypto, everything is sped run. So, you know, people are expecting that you I don't know, it's just that everything is faster, but you're— but the learnings still have to be kind of the same. So the learnings have to happen a lot faster.

When it comes to founder brand, how much of it— I mean, this question in the most respected, respectable way to you guys— how much of it is because of you and like what you've done on Twitter and building the community versus like, oh, Monad just raised hundreds of millions of dollars, therefore Keone is someone we have to follow. Therefore, Keoni gets a lot of followers, which then gets VCs more excited, which— right, there's this kind of virtuous flywheel that happens. And I think, Smokey, the same could be said with BearChain because you guys are very hyped up, people like you guys, but like the, the tier 1 VCs invested and it creates this kind of big brand building flywheel. I guess like maybe with the audience in mind of like a founder of an L1 or an L2 or an app that hasn't really taken off as much, like What would your advice be to them to do like both brand building and founder brand building?

Yeah, I think a lot, a lot of it like comes down to just having something to believe in. I know that sounds kind of corny, but I believe that there's like a non-trivial element of truth there. Right. And going back to a little bit of like what Keone was saying, I think that there's very much something to be said about like, like attracts like, right? It's one of the oldest laws in chemistry, but it's also one of those things where You know, good talent attracts good talent. Differentiated, interesting, creative builders attract differentiated, interesting, creative builders, right? And I also do think that the space is so small at the moment in terms of like actual vetted leads or addressable market in terms of people who are actively using crypto knowledgeably on a day-to-day basis and people who are actively trying to build in crypto. That in many cases, if you think of yourself or of your brand, your community, your network as a set of nodes, if you do have a few strong nodes, right, whether that's people like Santi advocating for us or, you know, other friends spreading the good word, it sort of ends up, you know, getting in a lot of the right places at the right times, right? I think of it as like, you know, those, those branching network effects. Um, and a lot of it does come back to that brand, like, like you were saying, um, I think on, on one hand, like, definitely, like, the hype cycle plays into it and people are like, oh my God, lots of VC money raised, like, something something airdrop, Yahoo, like, let's, let's go farm the shit out of this and engage and, and, you know, do our best to find free money. I also think that more recently, it's definitely created an angrier faction, if you will, of folks who are like, oh, scam VC chain, like bad, like, you know, money bad, go away. I hate you. VCs are going to dump on me. And I understand that too, right? I don't think it's like an irrational viewpoint. I also do think that that comes from a history of like lots of L1s that have raised an unholy amount of money, or L2s for that matter, and then ended up with like a ghost chain and a pretty dead ecosystem with nothing for these users to actually engage in. So I understand like the PTSD there. So when I go back to your actual question there, like, you know, founder brand building, community brand building, I think it's giving people something to believe in that is real and backing it up with evidence and empirical facts, right? It's not just, hey, look at this ecosystem. I promise there's so many sick builders here. I promise it's going to be great. Like, you don't want to sound like a SoundCloud rapper. You want to be able to demonstrate like proof of shit being done, right? I think that's why for us, we do our best to really help support projects that are building stuff that we think have a chance at adoption. And it's, it's so like funny, especially with this like consumer crypto wave that's happened recently. It's like people suddenly woke up and realized that we need things that people want to use, which, you know, maybe seems a little bit more logical on its face and like incredibly obvious, uh, that I'm just like, you know, it's, it's almost insane to me that we're calling it consumer crypto when it's just like, okay, crypto that people want to use in some manner. Um, and I think that being able to help encourage more products that ultimately solve a problem or like make people's lives better in some manner. And then showing how that translates back to your brand or your community that sort of helped enable that in the first place is kind of the way to go about it, right? It's like, how do you become the melting pot or like that launchpad that, you know, cool things come out of? And I think that certain communities and certain ecosystems have like temporarily captured that lightning in the bottle in the past. Like I think there was one point to which, you know, you would see cool new stuff living on Arbitrum. To start, right? And that was just like the playground, that was the test ground, that was where all the cool new like spicy ideas came out of. Um, I think we're seeing a whole bunch of it on Base right now. I think the bigger question is how do you keep momentum, how do you maintain inertia, and how do you keep that ball rolling such that it isn't like a 6-month flash in the pan, but rather, um, it's something that, you know, has a continuous stream of hits one after the other after the other and maintains attention like Hyunee effectively mentioned earlier, right? Um, so like, I, I think that it comes down to authenticity. I think it comes down to clear messaging. And I think it comes down to like, you know, evidence that the work is being done. Because I think that there's a lot of people who like yell from rooftops and are like, look at my X or Y partnership. But I ultimately think that like the applications and the numbers and the users tend to tell the real story.

Yeah. From my perspective, like the 3 startups that I've invested in the Beara ecosystem, I asked him like, hey, like, why are you building on parachain? And I think all of them seem to appreciate the novelty of proof of liquidity and how that can be pretty interesting from a yield standpoint and just alignment standpoint. And similarly, I think for Monad, when I, you know, I've met a few startups that are building there and Um, they seem to appreciate kind of the, the benefits of, of MOTA, even though like there are other perhaps competitors around, you know, this parallelization kind of concept. And the biggest question that I ask is like, why not go and build on Solana? Like you're taking for both of these chains, you're taking timing risk, right? This might be a next cycle kind of thing. You could be building in Solana today. Um, there's a particular startup that you introduced me to, Keoni, that like has— was building on Solana and decided to just, you know, take the risk and build on, on Monad. So I'm curious, um, you know, for you guys, like, how much of the positioning is we're different from Ethereum in this way and we're different than Solana in this way, um, or how much of it is this is what we stand for? Because a lot of times you can you can like attract people that have been perhaps frustrated in certain other environments and say we're different by being, you know, I guess like differentiation by like, um, you know, telling people what you don't stand for versus something that you're just truly kind of, you know, novel in some ways. Uh, like contrarian for the sake of being contrarian versus like standing on something very unique.

Um, so going backward to something earlier that, that you said, um, which I think is like a question about, um, differentiation and brand and founder brand. Like there's a lot of value in like getting people's attention, maybe being a little bit more controversial. Um, and that's never really been my approach. It's always just been trying to give, like, you know, say what I think and just be like sort of common sense driven and then also stay out of it. Like if I don't have a unique opinion. So there is, you know, one thing that happens is like basically crypto Twitter is like, you know, it is a little bit of, you know, to a certain extent is for entertainment. Like it's how we all like keep up with what's going on, but there's, there's a competition for attention and something will happen and then immediately there's like a whole bunch of posts or threads or whatever about in response to that. And what— there's sort of a strategy for like growing one's Twitter account, which is to like immediately go respond to that with something. And I've just never personally like wanted to do that because it just— unless I had a really unique take or something that actually like made me laugh and I'm not that funny, so I can't Can't really do that. So I think that at least for me, like it's just about like trying to share unique insights when I have them. And as I've gotten more and more experience, like building a startup and so on, then I do have like something that I can share with other people that I think would be valuable. And so I try to like tweet more about that, share more about that. Um, but no matter where, you know, one is in their startup journey, and no matter like how well-known one's project is, like, there's always still an opportunity to like grow the snowball a little bit and get the, um, you know, have the virtuous cycle going. It won't necessarily always be going at the speed, you know, of at which like the Monad community or the Monad's like repute grew like right after a fundraise, for example. But it's like, if you're constantly making progress, then every now and then, like, you get a boost. Like, it's like in Mario Kart where you go through the, you know, the little like booster square and then you get a boost. And if you're doing the right things, if you have the right principles, then when you go through that boost, you are really able to take advantage of it. So all that is just to say, like, I'm not— I think it's, it's possible to overthink it. Also, there's so many other things going on. Like there's, you know, we're posting on Twitter, but we're also trying to grow our teams. We're also like working on product. We're also like strategizing around a lot of other things that are going on. So it's possible to over-index on like the brand building. And I think it's better to just sort of do something that's natural that is like consistent with who we really are. And then, you know, like people tend to respect authenticity. And if anything, like the thing to tweak would just be like the frequency of tweeting, because like, if you're not sharing anything, the people can't really respond to that. So that's like the only thing that I would say is like an intentional, like, just try to like push the button a little bit more.

Maybe let's shift a little from brand to BD for a second. There's like a big BD week on Twitter this week. Smokey, I think I'll throw this first question to you. Like, can you— there's a high-level kind of esoteric conversation you can have about what BD means, but can you actually go really micro and like as tactical as possible? I'd love to hear just how BearChain thinks about BD. You guys hired That guy Jack, who's great, obviously. And like, what is he doing on a daily basis? What are you doing on a daily basis? Are you like cold DMing people that you find on GitHub? Are you cold DMing founders of projects and other ecosystems that might not be like be doing as well? Like, what are you actually— what is BD inside of one of these big L1s?

That's a fun one, man. Yeah, it's been a big week for the BD guys on Twitter. They're having a moment. Um, and then, uh, like, just to preface this, I think my, my take, and I, you know, yapped into the, the void on Twitter about this yesterday, it's like mostly all bullshit right now, if you ask me. Um, and I, I just simply say that because I've seen a lot of cases in the past. Look at the Blast ecosystem where like there are a whole bunch of people who are like, yep, can't wait to do this on Blast. Can't wait to go live. Token price cratered. You know, half the teams are dipping to other chains. There's literally like the meme coin of the ecosystem going to Solana, like. You know, shit happens at launch, right? So I think that on one hand, you can make the very best plans on launch and on having a strong ecosystem. But there's also a world in which you get punched in the face despite best efforts if the market says like, fuck this. Now, I think the more productive viewpoint there is if you do a good enough job, the market shouldn't punch you in the face. But, you know, macro is macro. So I try to be self-aware on that front. In terms of the work that we do on the BD team, I think that there's a few different angles. I think that the focus number one is always, you know, trying to identify projects that have something, you know, incredible going for them, something that really breaks the mold. On one hand, sometimes that is just a founder that just absolutely has that dog in them. And like, you know, that no matter what they do, they'll, you know, run through walls, not to be corny, but they'll just, they'll just do what it takes to win. And those are very few and far in between. But I think when you find them, you, you know, you bet on them and you do everything you can to help them win and enable them, right? Not in an unfair manner, but just like if there's things that you can teach them, if there's knowledge you can impart, if there's introductions you can make for them, you do what you can there, right? On the other hand, sometimes there are just amazing ideas that require refinement. And it's like, okay, you guys have a lot of the right pieces of the puzzle here and you have the right skeleton, but you just need to like rearrange a little bit to make it actually able to walk. And that's another thing that I think we spend a lot of time doing. It's like, hey, this product actually has great legs, but I don't think you're telling the story correctly. Here's some way that, you know, it might be a little bit easier for people to grok it. So I wouldn't say that it's as much like cold calling and DMing. I think at this point, luckily, the team is pretty well networked you know, has a way of getting to a lot of different folks. It's on one hand talking to our different investors and our different friends and community members and saying, hey, what's cool stuff you're seeing? What do we think would fit nicely in the ecosystem? Nowadays with like, you know, a couple hundred projects and change building on the Beara Chain ecosystem, there's a lot of like flywheels like forming there by themselves and folks saying, hey, my friend heard that I was building here and I want to come build here as well. We're live on testnet. Like, you know, can you guys help us with this or that? You know, can you help us solve this problem with deployment? So that's part of the equation as well. On the other hand, it's us saying in a more opinionated manner, like, hey, these are a few things that we think can be absolutely massive in the future. How do we get ahead of that? And how do we make sure that there's ideas that represent this concept on parachain nice and early? Right. How do we make sure that we are not simply chasing a narrative, but rather helping to define it ahead of time? And I do think that even going back to some of your earlier questions, man, is the thing that's super important, right? Like, if you're building a brand, if you're a founder, if you're some early stage team, It's important to think about how does one not just subscribe to an existing narrative, but how do you actually help craft or create a new narrative and help further the metagame? And I think that that becomes really cool. And that's something that we try to work with teams on. So how do you tell your story in a manner that's both authentic and new, but not new just for the sake of it, but new because it truly is that, right? And I think that just means you have to have a very high filter. I think The other side that this really comes down to is thinking about the different aspects of an ecosystem that need to work together well, right? So, you know, parachain has, of course, a large focus on liquidity. So, of course, thinking about different ways that there are applications that could bring lots of TVL into the ecosystem. Even though I don't think TVL is as robust of a metric as it once was in the past, it's a question of how do you make sure there's enough ambient capital floating around to make sure that people are actually able to transact as they desire. And then I think increasingly, increasingly important over the last few months, it's been how do you actually think about distribution? There are so many chains that have, you know, like, you know, dozens perhaps, let's say, of applications and maybe hundreds of users or let's say thousands of users that are there. And that ratio doesn't often end up working out really well. Like you need to find a way to get your applications, your content, whatever it might be in the hands of, you know, tens, hundreds of thousands of people if there's a chance of stuff actually taking off. So I think we also try to figure out how we can help curate an application ecosystem that has a chance of actually attracting people, whether that is, again, good ideas or more seamless user experiences that you can't abstraction type approaches. Is it Telegram front ends? How do you actually get something to a point where people can use it easily and they want to use it? So, you know, on the micro scale, what that really comes down to is having conversations with founders and team members, figuring out what their strategic initiatives are, figuring out what problems they need to solve, right? Is it, hey, I need a better way to bootstrap my own liquidity in my user base? Is it, hey, my project is running out of steam just from a narrative and thought process point of view? Is it, hey, I'm having trouble raising? Is it, hey, I don't know how to grow a community? Like, what can I do here? What are some things I can try? I think a lot of it is just finding ways to be that concierge or that extension of a team in a manner that isn't short-termist again, right? Hey, like, let's just go throw money at you and let's just go like raise around for you. I think it's a lot more, hey, how can we help teach you guys how to do this for yourselves such that in the future you're just a better team as a result of having worked with parachain and having, you know, just jumped into the ecosystem. And I think, you know, when done correctly, especially with the right sorts of concentrated bets, that leads to a lot of like loyalty, that leads to a lot of brand affinity, that leads to a lot of people who end up being, you know, pretty ride or die. Because I think it's really easy to just say you're going to do something, or it's really easy to say, hey, we're going to throw some money at you. I think it's a lot harder to say, hey, I'm going to make time and effort to work with you guys on a weekly basis and to check in on this or that or to review different materials you're putting together and to really get your hands dirty and have a vested interest in the success of these different protocols. And I think it's also most authentically done when it's not a grift and when you're not like, hey, you should give me some advisor tokens from doing that. Like, fuck that. If you're helping teams in your ecosystem, you should just be helping teams in your ecosystem. You know, like I've said this quite a few times, but I really do see a chain as a sum of the apps that are built on top of it. The chain should not be the main character. You know, maybe that attracts some of the hype in the first place, but at the end of the day, the apps are what matter. And it's our job to give them the best chance of success and actually like making it out the hood, if you will, right? And I think a lot of that just comes down to putting in that time and effort, and there's very few excuses or alternatives for doing so, both in the minds of myself and I think many project founders that, you know, want someone who cares about what they're doing.

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So a lot of this has been perhaps a more philosophical discussion around culture and, you know, positioning. And I want to, I want, I want you guys to take us into the future. Um, and what is the, what do the apps look like? You know? Um, What does the ecosystem look like in a year from now? What are the breakout kind of apps that people are using? Like, yeah, I'm curious from your vantage point, like if there's anything right now that you're seeing that is being built that you're really excited about and you think is going to really, you know, if you were to survey 100 people that are using the chain, they're like, most of them are like using X or Y or a few apps.

And, um, yeah, yeah, I think maybe one, um, like vision that, that seems pretty clear in my head is, um, like WeChat. Like if you've ever used WeChat, there's just so many like sort of sub apps that are like almost embedded within the app. Um, just to name the obvious ones, like you can order food within WeChat, or you can hire a handyman, or you can, um, you can like, I don't know, get a courier service, or you can, you know, just do online shopping, or you can like see your friends' social media. Like there's just so much that you can do all embedded within the super app. And I think that crypto has the potential to basically be the backend for, for this super app kind of environment because you have embedded payments. Like, we have a currency system already, we have an account system with— that could store any kind of arbitrary data. There's like commitment schemes to like the data could be potentially like compressed or encrypted, stored off-chain somewhere, but then the commitment to it is stored on-chain. So that we have all the pieces, but it's really on us to put the pieces together and create this coherent user experience that is modular, that allows new application developers to kind of plug into that, um, and give a really fast just like, um, you know, very pleasing and fast user experience. So I think that when I think about that, it comes down to like the user onboarding, the user experience. Uh, mobile is a huge part of it, um, which is why I actually feel like the, the, you know, Blast's pivot to focus on mobile does make sense to me. And in, in some way, of course, it's all about execution, but But I think that, yeah, just like that would be, that would be one very specific vision of the future that I feel has, is like pretty reasonable to imagine the possibility.

Smokey, what about you?

Yeah, I think that I imagine sort of an infinite playground of sorts. And I think that ideally that playground is as accessible as possible and has little satellite locations in every system or every city and a very smooth and pleasing user experience for sure, because I think that that's evolving over time and the bar is going higher and higher in the space, especially as adoption of stuff like Solana increases and people just get used to that nice snappy user experience, which I think is very important. I think that for us, we've been excited to see a lot of teams just getting a little bit deeper and growing and expanding on testnet and getting to try cool new things. And I think that is what I hope for to see continue. I think that I'd love to be able to see the parachain ecosystem as a place where people go to build something cool, new, and interesting in a very welcoming environment. And where there's a lot of precedent and scar tissue by their peers who built cool stuff in the past. On one hand, I think the ecosystem is primarily known or was first known for a pretty heavy DeFi focus. And I think there's a lot of really cool stuff in the mix over there, right? Whether that is the Gummy guys that allow you to basically borrow anything against anything else and have some very fun experiments with leverage. The Concrete dudes who are building credit default swaps on-chain, which can be incredibly interesting for a more sophisticated, more traditional finance audience as well. Or the guys like Exponents who are allowing you for the first time to effectively directionally incentivize leverage trading with different tokens. So you can actually use that to really tap into some of the crypto culture and have someone saying, hey, like, you know, this is MOG versus Harry Potter, Obama, Sonic, Taninu pair. You know, I'm going to, you know, bribe someone to go long on one token and go short on the other and actually, like, you know, have those mini social games with economic incentives playing out. I think all that's super interesting. I think, like I mentioned, consumer has been a bit of a meme, but I'm actually really excited to see some of the stuff that's like tapping into the culture and feels correct for parachain starting to see, you know, legs. And I want to see more and more of those in the future. So For example, there's the guys at PuffPaw who Santi knows. Um, and I say I've invested in 3 startups you have mentioned. No, don't worry. No, but like, they're, they're amazing, right? These guys are, are building something that, uh, you know, is actually— it's, it's very, um, you know, colloquially seen as vape-terin, but it's actually a pretty interesting incentivization mechanism for people to quit smoking over time. Um, and I actually think that is like a superpower of crypto. Like beyond even instant settlement and, you know, efficiency, which taps into some other apps in the ecosystem. You know, it basically means that one can use these token incentives to help enforce certain behaviors. And I think the core of that is having a product that's good enough for people to use without that incentive and using that incentive to really turbo it. But in the case of PuffPaw, for example, they actually incentivize people to decrease the amount of nicotine they're consuming over time with increasing token rewards and have a pretty elegant system there. There's guys like Over/Under, which I know Santi loves, and I'm a big fan of as well. Just a founder who very much has that dog in him and is building the kind of, you know, abstracted experience that allow people to use, you know, computer vision approaches to actually speculate on Twitch streams and basically automatically predict odds of various events happening in-game from previous trading data. I think stuff like that's super cool because you can basically go and like, you know, partner with the streamer and start reaching tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands and hopefully even millions of people in a very simple way. Just with like a Chrome extension, right? And I think that stuff like that gets really cool because it sets a precedent for more stuff that could actually like, you know, utilize crypto in a manner that isn't annoying to people and actually, you know, have some advantages when it comes to instant settlement, yield earning potentials, etc., on-chain. So I guess, you know, without just doing a massive Bara eco shill fest, what I really want to get at is like, I think that we want to see cool new things continue to develop. I think we want to see experiences that that truly get to users. And I would similarly agree, I think there's exciting stuff happening in mobile. And one of the areas that I haven't seen talked about as much, but I actually saw Peter from 1KX talking about this on Twitter recently, that I think is so untapped, but it's really cool is like building products for women, right? Like, this is maybe like a taboo topic in some cases, but in or just not discussed that much, because I don't think crypto is always the most welcoming space for girls. I think it's been actually really enlightening to like meet more folks like the Bear Baddies, because they're actually, they're pretty cool. They're, they're like sharp. They like what they're doing. They're like, you know, learning more about crypto and having a good time while doing it. Um, and when you think about it, just from like a spending power point of view, from like a purchasing habits point of view, women really do, uh, you know, drive that in the United States and in many other geographies. They're the largest content producers. In many cases, there are guys that follow them into different habits for various motivations, right? Like, I think the building apps that the girlies want to use is actually like like a massively untapped field. And we've got a couple of those starting to cook in the earlier stages. So I actually think that like building products and sort of airing towards applications that help tap into the increasingly prevalent culture of the internet, if you will, while keeping like a nod towards, you know, crypto's more like cypherpunk origins is really important here. And I think that's what I hope us to see, hope to see the ecosystem continue doing while just like like, you know, taking advantage of the capital efficiency, the liquidity unlocks, the customer acquisition cost advantages of Proof of Liquidity, and staying fun, right? I think that if we stop being fun, then we've lost it all. And I think that that's what I want to really make sure we maintain going forward.

Yeah, we have both of you guys here. Clearly, these two ecosystems along others are great, like, beachheads to attract not just existing builders, but like, the other builders that haven't bothered to think about crypto and now they will, or they, I mean, at least that's the bet. How do you think about interoperability? You know, maybe, you know, a founder comes in, starts building on Monad. Um, but ultimately, like, are you guys actively encouraging or facilitating interoperability to the point where, I mean, at the end of the day, you want the app to be extremely successful, especially, you know, and that may entail building connectivity between other ecosystems?

Yeah, I think I care the most about just seeing the growth of the space of decentralized apps. So for, for me, that's, that is the single biggest thing. Um, the technology that we've built at Monad, um, basically like building a much bigger pipeline that can support a lot more users, support a lot more transactions. We think that that's an unlock for a lot of users, or for a lot of developers that are aspiring to mass user adoption. And if you run the numbers, it doesn't take too many, um, DAUs from like a traditional tech perspective, or that many transactions per user per day from a traditional tech perspective, to end up with a pretty high number of transactions that are needed per day. Relative to what, you know, Ethereum offers right now, which is like a million transactions per day. Crazy low. So I think that there's, um, there's good synergy between like certain kinds of applications and the technology that, um, that we're working on, that we've built. But I actually am most focused on just seeing like high-quality applications within the space in general. And then in terms of like where people choose to build, what they choose is the best backend, that's almost like a secondary consideration to me personally. And so I will do what I can as an individual to like just share learnings and try to do things that like share information, share learnings that help accelerate the space for all builders without worrying as much about the exact where. So from an interoperability perspective, I think it's great that we have um, you know, great different bridging solutions that are helping to connect all these different environments. And Monad is an EVM-compatible layer 1. It's actually really easy for developers who built for the EVM to deploy on Monad or to, to deploy in other environments. There's not a vendor lock-in aspect that, like what Smokey was mentioning earlier.

Yeah, for sure. And I guess to quickly add on to that from our side, I think it's incredibly important to have effective inroads and outroads to an ecosystem. I don't think that one should ever attempt to constrain users. I do think it's important to be able to find a way to keep applications sticky because I do think that that's a meaningful portion of the problems that have plagued a number of other ecosystems. And I guess the way that we think about that is in the the course of value alignment, right? Tapping into proof of liquidity is not just necessarily a one-click process, but it's hopefully one that can make lives better for a lot of applications. And we've definitely found it to be one of those tools that sort of answering your original question, Santi, has allowed us to get more builders excited because they're like, oh, cool. Like for the first time, the chain can actually help power my application. Like it's not me, you know, just having a parasitic relationship in some manner. It's this chain actually helping me succeed. So I think that's been really helpful. And I think it also does help model a little bit more clearly for folks even coming from more trad development audience and that they're like, okay, the infrastructure of the baseplate that I'm using is improving my experience as a builder. Right. So I think that's been quite good to us. And I think for the long run, it's incredibly important to actually build a welcoming place, but also one that that ultimately recognizes some of the power laws that will exist, right? I do think that in almost all ecosystems and in almost all cases to date, there do tend to be these breakout applications. I think that we should do everything we can to support a wide range as possible. But ultimately, you know, I think that striations form within those ecosystems. And you want to be able to make sure that you're supporting every team, but you're not neglecting those that are actually helping to drive a ton of value into the ecosystem as well.

As a follow-up to this point, a lot of— there's some confusion around what success for an application looks like. You know, we talk about mainstream adoption, but Kiana, you said something around it doesn't take much. Maybe the user, current user base of crypto is one that skews high purchasing power, so you don't need a million. People on chain. You don't need a billion users. You need maybe thousands, but, you know, are more engaged or are because they're stakeholders in the system and, or because their purchasing power is higher. What I guess depends on the application, but the question is like, what is that KPI when you think about breakout success and how do you define that for the applications being built on the ecosystem?

I would say it's two things. Number one is like you have to sort of evaluate the application as a business as well. So like how, like to what extent, or sorry, when you're evaluating businesses, there's sort of two things to look for. One is like the revenue, or more specifically the profit of the business. And then the other thing is the rate of growth of the business. And that's how companies are valued in the traditional space. And while not everything is the same in the crypto space, I think it's a useful framework for reference. So I think that the good news is that because the amount of on-chain usage is still very, very limited, there are a lot of people that are excited, that love crypto, that think about crypto a lot, but they're the only— they've never actually like set up a wallet. Like, they only just trade crypto on centralized exchanges. There's actually this huge amount of potential energy, potential users, um, that already have like some amount of maybe alignment with the values or awareness of the memes or awareness of like what's going on that just need to be tapped into and encouraged to come on-chain and, um, are just waiting for like the right application to, um, to really get them going. I think that, you know, from looking back in the past, um, you know, there were certain applications that absolutely went viral, that absolutely had incredible rates of growth of their user base. Axie Infinity comes to mind, StepN comes to mind. Those were like I think it's fair to say, like, driven by financial incentives. And the speed on the way up was really aggressive, and the speed on the way down was also really aggressive because there was a bit of an element of, like, you know, new users coming and buying the NFTs, then push the price up, which then propels the economy, which then causes more people to want to go jump in there. But it's not, like, fundamentally sustainable. So I'm not advocating for that. Rate of that specific mechanic. But I think that you can see that when, when there is opportunity, when there is something that like really goes viral, you can see an incredibly fast growth. And there's just so much potential. It's, it's really just about having that, that application that has inherent value, that offers inherent value to the end user so that they keep coming back rather than being purely motivated by some sort of like temporary temporary incentive or temporary condition that maybe logic would dictate is not really going to last.

I'm curious, I'm curious if you guys' answers overlap here. Um, Smokey and Keoni, who do— who are the 3 chains that you guys end up competing with the most?

But you got to let Smokey answer my question.

Go off, Smokey! Go off, Smokey!

You know what, this is— you'd think that Yano and I would get better over time.

We gotta—

this is who I have to deal with on a daily basis.

Check the YouTube comments. We gotta check the YouTube comments. Yeah, here, everyone's got to go on YouTube and say who, who's a better host this episode, Santi or me. That's the, that's the real— Smokey, go ahead.

The question, we know the answer to that.

The patience of a saint over here. Um, I think that, uh, I would agree with a lot of what Keone said. I'd also add a couple more things in there. So on one hand, you know, yeah, Can it stand on its own feet? Or does the application get inflated/emitted to death, you know, without weird additional incentives, right? That's one thing for sure. You know, can it be cash flow positive? Very few apps in crypto are. I think part of the reason that everyone's like hyped over PumpFun is because they're like, oh, this makes money, right? Part of the reason people were hyped over OpenSea in the past, like, oh, this makes money, right? Now, notably, no token for either of those. So it becomes a bit different when that dynamic is added. But that's 100% part of it. On the other hand, I also think about, you know, like, you know, total number of users, because Santi, you're quite right in that there's right now a very heavy skew towards, you know, more enriched users. But I also do think that if like crypto is ever to not be like a weird thing, and if it's not to be like a thing where it's just like, here's a bunch of grifts and here's a meme coin, not that meme coins are bad. Like, I think you do need stuff that like, you know, laypeople can use and people actually care about if they have a couple hundred dollars or $1,000 in their bank account or whatever it might be. I do think that becomes especially interesting for emerging markets. And I was actually recently talking to a builder from Nigeria who is like, literally, if you go to the gas stations, if you go to train stations, if you go anywhere in public malls, people are just clicking with playing these tap-to-earn Telegram games nonstop. And he wanted to find a way to get those to trigger backend actions on different smart contracts or on different apps. And I was like, that's pretty funny. Anyway, I think that we do need to be able to skew towards things that actually have a chance of getting more than a small subset of users and that aren't just whale games. I think two more things I'd add in there are one, like the user experience, like, you know, just the feel of that application. Is it something that's really easy for people to onboard and get to use? You know, like I think the Moonshot app on Solana recently is an interesting thing there, right? Like a Robinhood for meme coins kind of thing. And then I think another thing is like how much of a fundamental baseplate is it within an ecosystem, right? I think like GMX is a pretty good example of this within the ARB ecosystem. You had a ton of people building products around that. right? Whether that was like delta-neutral vaults or leverage products or means of like borrowing against different primitives, etc. I think all that becomes quite important at scale. So really like how embedded or how much of like a foundational piece of an ecosystem is this actually? And then Jono, for your question, man, which chains do I think we compete against most? I guess like I'm sure there'll be competition between us and Monad, obviously. I think we address different user groups groups, but like, you know, EVM identical/EVM compatible chains. I think people will look to that and like lots of recent activity. I think that Base is very much in the mix more recently. I think that there is a pretty thriving consumer/user-facing ecosystem there. There's interesting DeFi projects/experiments being there. It very much feels to me like where Arbitrum was a couple of years ago, but with a better shot at distribution and like better brand value in that sense. Not to look down on ARB, to be clear, just saying where I think a lot of the attention is at. And I think Hyperliquid is also interesting. I think that they have a very strong community-based group who's like, hey, this has no VC funding. This is a good product. There's a lot of excitement around what they're building, and I believe they're extending that into an EVM environment as well. I'm not sure exactly what the interplay between the core Hyperliquid infrastructure and that EVM will look like. But I expect that there will be cool stuff being built there and that there'll be like, you know, some cool competition to see.

Yeah, and I would, um, echo what Smokey said. I think for— from my perspective, it would be Base, Solana, and, um, perhaps Blast, although it depends a little bit on, on the timing there.

Hmm. That's interesting.

Like, I think in the past it was, it was a little bit more of a, yeah, we were, there was a little bit more overlap.

Mm-hmm.

I recently saw, this is great tweet by one of the like pretty involved Solana investors out there and says like most of the first batch of apps in that ecosystem, like are no longer around and are not the breakout apps that you're seeing today. Like the pre-FTX apps were like, you know, very few of them still have any decent traction today. Most of the best apps came after this kind of traumatic, hardening, defining moment for the chain. That's true for Solana. For Ethereum, like it's different, right? You had like a lot of the ICO projects went through this boom-bust and then reemergence in some ways. Changed a lot, like, you know, Aave of the world, for instance. Um, anything that you guys are paying attention to prior, kind of, kind of observing the evolution of an ecosystem like Ethereum or Solana, and, and like, I guess like, what are the, if any, lessons learned from perhaps those two projects or others that you're taking to heart and then you're kind of making sure you avoid certain mistakes? I wouldn't necessarily call them mistakes, but just like lessons learned, I guess.

Yeah, I think one thing that, that comes to mind really quickly, um, and this is something that I discussed, I can't remember if it was on a pod or where, um, but I think that almost every major ecosystem has had like a— that stood the test of time has had some massive trauma bonding experience. Like some point where shit hits the fan and everything goes wrong. And everyone's like, holy shit, is it all over? Like, you know, Bitcoin had Mt. Gox, Ethereum had like the DAO hack, like Solana had FTX. Like, I think, you know, those all were craters in their own respects, right? But I think that that actually serves as a very interesting culling moment where, you know, the people that survive and the apps that continue doubling down, you know, are that much more locked in, right? And they're that much more like hell-bent and fully, I'd say, aligned with whatever is being built. And also, you know, tends to be a good, like, just learning experience and endpoint, you know, for change going forward. I think that, you know, for us, I've been thinking a lot about that. On one hand, it's simply perhaps been like how long people have been waiting for BearChain in some cases. On the other hand, you know, like, I think we've certainly seen shit in the market over the last little while that isn't necessarily BearChain-specific, but it has had ripple effects. But I think that, like, whether we've had that trauma bonding moment or not, I actually think that that's an event I will look forward to in the future. If, you know, if it hasn't already happened, because I think that that means that whoever, like the crowd that remains after, you know, getting gut punched is an exceptionally, you know, strong crowd. Right. I like to make fun of Cosmos/Atom a ton because I just think it's like a very problematic ecosystem. But I can't deny the fact that there is a number of diehards that no matter how many times Cosmos gets punched in the face, they don't care. They're there to ride, right? And I have begrudging respect for that. I think that one of the other things to think about from the SOL versus ETH and just sort of these ecosystems over time is the importance of strong hands up on product leadership and focus on building something that is pleasant for people to use. And I think that this has happened in a couple of different ways. On ETH, I think we think about the scaling roadmap. I think about ZKs over time. I think a lot of things that have excited people technically, but may not have always borne fruit in the manner in which they they thought. Even right now, there's lots of conversations about, okay, L2s scale ETH, but are they actually parasitic to the chain itself, etc.? Like, what does that look like? And we think about this as well as a number of groups look to build rollups or L2s to Bera. Because with the full EVM identical environment that has an unmodified execution client, you can deploy OP stack rollups, Arbitrum rollups, whatever it is, to Bera chain without having to do anything different. Different, right? And we think about how you actually secure effective relationships between an L1 and an L2. And we've got some kind of cool ideas brewing over there that might allow for some stuff that taps very uniquely into proof of liquidity and how an L2 can actually play a role or its token can play a role in like block rewards and the block building process on BearChain that we think will be quite cool. On the other hand, I think that there's been complaints or concerns in many cases over or, you know, a lack of direct leadership or product-focused vision on the ETH side, despite having a massive and very difficult roadmap. Whereas I think the one thing I've always seen within Solana has been like a relative relentless like engineering focus, like, you know, not— and I think that there's a balance that needs to be struck between, you know, effective ethos of decentralization and building something that is actually, you know, correctly distributed and is effectively decentralized. Versus decentralizing to the point at which it's easier to lose path and to not have a force that is clearly pushing things forward. And then there's always vocal members within those groups. And then, sorry, that'd be the last thing is I think that another example of this is Chainlink back in the day. And I make reference to these guys relatively often. You find this set of folks in your community who just become the loudspeakers for their voices, if you will, right? They become their advocates in some manner. I think Mert is a very famous example and a classic guy who does that for Solana. He, you know, obviously is friends with the foundation, but he speaks his mind and says what he thinks about the path of the product going forward. Um, and I think that having that network of a few folks in the community who are really not afraid to say what needs to be said, um, is also really important to curate and to create a safe space for them to, like, say things. Because you don't want it to fall on deaf ears, but you also don't want, like, a, you know, a full community takeover of a project, if you will.

Anything to add? Yeah, I think regarding the trauma bonding, I mean, crypto definitely seems to go in cycles. And I think for any startup founder that's really ambitious, that has a really big vision, it's going to be a multi-year build that almost certainly will you know, go through a period where crypto is almost universally questioned and, you know, where it's tough to like tell your, yeah, your partner's parents what you work on, or like, you know, there's just, inevitably there's going to be tough times for the industry or maybe like where the reputation isn't as great and where it's harder to hire from outside of crypto and so on. So I think that to the point about Solana and the builders trauma bonding during the post-FTX really tough period, I can definitely see that. I can also see that it was just like that bear market period was a time when the builders that were building really ambitious things were mostly just building because it does take time to build things. It's almost like not the— you know, obviously makes it difficult, much harder to, you know, attract resources. But like, you also just need that period of time to like go and realize the vision. And so one thing that I think would be good to be better understood in the space is just like the amount of time it takes to build something that is that is really trying to push the limits of what's possible from an application perspective. Like, we should reset our expectations a little bit. And instead of being like, okay, well, you know, like, project started, like, they're going to have, you know, be launched in 6 months and like fully deployed in a year. Like, it might take longer. In the traditional tech space, it just takes, you know, the expectation is much longer for how long it takes to build things. And I think if we want really great apps, then we should set our expectations longer and we should almost like, you know, know during that time that they're going to be periods that are really tough.

My last question, I know Jono has another one, is around this idea of price and tokens, right? I mean, tokens, while they are phenomenal coordination mechanisms, they're also the way that you map contributions in this open source world and they're great. They can be great mechanisms to layer incentives and acquire customers. On the other hand, they can be very distracting. They can really, you know, when it's down only because the markets, you know, we're in a bear market, you know, it can lead to this huge disillusionment to the point where people leave and don't want to come back. How do you think about that? I mean, is that, I mean, something that you can control or you can at least guide teams to say, hey, to your point, Smokey, I mean, you guys have been around for a while, you don't have a token. In many ways, perhaps other chains are a bit more eager to launch a token. I don't know if there's a good answer or perfect answer to this. I guess it depends on market environment. Some people say launching the bottom of the bear, but you don't maybe have that luxury, right? But I am curious specifically for the apps that are building on the ecosystem, like how do you think about tokens and price being in that relationship? And are we perhaps, are projects launching tokens too early? And because in traditional startup land, you know, you have many years of, you know, traction and building and, you know, and then you IPO. And so I'm curious what your thoughts are there, because once you have a token, you know, it's, it's a whole new game and dimension that you have to think about as a builder. And that could be both really good, but also really bad.

I think that you can't control price, like price does its own thing, the token does its own thing. It is in many cases almost, you know, famously separate from the product, which is like kind of cursed in its own way. I really do think that the best thing that one can do for, you know, the health of your token price, etc., is build a good project. I don't think that's rocket science, and there's many different interpretations of what a good project is. But I think something that's easy for people to use, something that's accessible, and something that has good people building on it that it can ultimately, you know, help, you know, bring value back home, if you will. I think the other thing when it comes to, you know, actually projects launching tokens. I tend to agree with you there, Santi, in that, like, I don't know, I come from a trad tech, like, a trad startup world. And it's incredibly odd to have this, like, set of incentives where it's like, yes, you IPO as you start building the company, or, you know, a couple months or a few months or maybe a year into building the company, and then the open market is really what decides your fate in many ways after that. I think a lot of it also does come down to vesting structures, which I do imagine at some point are due for some sort of a spicy overhaul. I was talking to someone recently about how I actually think that like right now, like certain meme coin projects probably have the best vesting structures that I've seen, as cursed as that is to say, in that they're actually more tied to certain KPIs, whether that is the amount of fees generated by X or Y LP, whether that is the amount of market cap or the FDV of a given token. And they'll basically have it set up such that, you know, people who have invested are— they, they get out over time versus based on the project's success. And I'm defining success broadly here, but I'm correlating it to price action in this case. And on one hand, I can see that being more problematic for different funds that are thinking about return timeframes and the predictability for their LPs and what they can take management fees on, etc., etc. On the other hand, I can see it as something that might actually be more healthy for, you know, the world in a long-term scenario where it's like, like, hey, in order for one to hit this unlock, this project actually has to have continued growing in some manner, right? Do I think that's a perfect solution? No, far from it. I just think of it as a potential alternative in this kind of weird world of vesting. I think ideally a token is an accelerant or something that allows something that has already hit a degree of product market fit to continue driving said product market fit. Of course, for us as L1s, it's a little bit different and you kind of need those for gas and the utility of that, if you will. But I think in the case of many applications, they end up being to some extent a user acquisition tool, on the other extent, a sentiment acquisition tool. And I think that the former narrative has been played out more than the latter. I think the latter is ultimately almost more important, as in like, I think that the acquisition cost for projects with tokens is actually famously quite high, right? Like you're paying like, you know, hundreds of dollars or thousands of dollars in tokens for a single user, which is like kind of insane when you consider that from like a CAC to LTV ratio in trad businesses, right? But what I do think is valuable and what I think can be, you know, thoughtfully engineered is how you can actually, you know, design a token release schedule or an airdrop or distribution event that, you know, rewards the right people, is targeted around that, you know, effectively has well-vetted leads. As opposed to just, you know, spraying a whole bunch of tokens into the abyss and hoping that a few people, you know, want to start playing with it after. I think that, you know, pre-vetting that audience and then finding a way to actually ensure that you're rewarding the people who have contributed the most is super important and can maybe turn those sorts of like, you know, token distribution events and the existence of a token into a more useful thing for a product than just like, oh man, charts up, charts big down, right? And riding that wave.

Smokey, how's your, how's your lifting game these days?

You know what, man? Travel's been, uh, been less than ideal, but it's, it's, it's good. I'm in, I'm in decent shape.

Setting the bar low for Keone.

All right.

I see.

I think Smokey is, I saw a tweet of yours saying you really like, you really like these oversized shirts. I've started, yeah, Yana says that I can't lift. I mean, but fine. Like, so I wear these oversized, uh, shirts to hide the lack of muscle. That's what I'm going for these days.

They're just very cozy. And that way, like, you know, I never like being that— you never want to be that dude in the gym, or I don't like being that dude in the gym and like the tank top. I would rather be the dude in like the oversized hoodie who's like, you know, hopefully pushes some good weight, and then people like, whoa, what's going on over there?

You know that you can't even wear a tank top in, in out here.

They're like, really?

No, you're gonna be honest, you gotta wear a polo shirt. That's why I'm blaming it.

Yeah. All right, guys, this is great discussion.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Smokey, thanks. Keoni, thank you. Appreciate it.

Thanks for having us, man.

Hey everyone, big thanks for watching today's episode. Wanted to just quickly remind you about the Stellar Development Foundation's 6th Annual Meridian Conference this October 15th through 17th in London. This is an incredible incredible opportunity to network with the forward thinkers who are defining the future of this space. Head over to meridian.stellar.org and use the code BLOCKWORKSPOD for early bird pricing.