Crypto's Next Layer 1 With Smokey The Bera | 1000x

When I think about like, you know, what a future for crypto looks like, I think we're moving into the right direction in a lot of different ways, right? We're seeing lower latency blockchains, we're seeing higher TPS, better proving systems. But really, at the end of the day, we can build the best infrastructure possible. But if people aren't building applications on top of it, then it doesn't fucking matter.

This episode is brought to you by Perennial Finance, the on-chain DeFi primitive redesigning derivatives for the DeFi native. You'll hear more about Perennial later in the show.

Welcome back to Another Thousand X. We have a very special guest here who I'll introduce in a second. But just to take a step back, Jonah and I have been talking about making real investments and doing real things and finding things with real product fit and real value in crypto and how difficult that is. So with all of that in mind, we've brought on Smokey from Barachain today. Which when I first found out about it, I legitimately thought this thing was a complete meme. I think this was 2 years ago. I just thought it was a joke. And then, it actually turned into something very real. And, Smokey's here to explain to us how it is both real and not real at the same time. Welcome, Smokey. Glad to have you.

Thank you for having me, guys. Yeah, truly the duality of man or bear if you will. Yeah, that was actually really funny. I don't know if you still remember, Avi, but back in the day when you slid into my DMs, it It was because there was a pasta going around on like Twitter and it was like, "Barachain does not exist," and like a few more lines. And you just hit my DMs with that. And then I responded with the exact same thing. And I think we repeated that for like 4 or 5 iterations. And then you're like, "Anyway, what the fuck is this thing? And like, should I be investing?" I was like, "Yeah, totally." And then that somehow devolved into us making fun of you and Steve Tannenbaum and a number of other things.

Yeah, that was a hilarious introduction because I genuinely thought this was just a meme coin launch.

Yeah, me too.

I didn't really know what it was. I just thought the content was really funny. Every time I saw it, I would crack up. I looked at the Bong Bears and I'm like, "Dude, this stuff is great." But when I originally was talking to you guys, I mean, I couldn't really wrap my head around what the hell you guys were actually trying to do other than just be hilarious. And fast forward 2 years, you've actually done a lot. You seem to have accomplished a lot. I see like some pretty insane headlines in the news, like Barachain raises from insert all top VCs that have ever existed. And what's kind of fascinating to me is that, you know, you've managed to combine this sort of like weird whimsical nature with what seems to be real tech. Dude, how did Barachain even start? Like, what is it? How did you come up with the idea?

The backstory is honestly like a series of unfortunate, unfortunate events if I think about it. Um, I'll give you like quick background on myself, my co-founders, you know, without doing too doxy. Um, you know, myself, my co-founder Papa have been in the space for like the better part of the decade. Um, definitely not like OG ETH ICO, but, you know, a couple years after. Um, we're both originally founders in the healthcare space, you know, raised and scaled companies, raised venture capital, blah blah blah, did the whole shebang in the Valley. Um, all your classic meme bullshit. Um, and of course had fun along the way buying shitcoins. One of my first investors in my first company was pretty senior at the ETH Foundation back in the day. So, you know, when you're living in the Bay Area and seeing a whole bunch of people, you know, running in a given direction, you either think everyone else is stupid or you're stupid. And I know for a fact I'm very stupid, so I decided to, you know, at least take a shot and follow the crowd a little bit and, you know, fuck around the space. And then I think like watching the market evolve, you know, over the 2017 to 2018, you know, like absolute meme ICO cycle, and then like more interesting unique things popping up in terms of Uni, and Curve, and Aave, and Compound and Yearn and everything else in between and DeFi Summer was always keeping a pretty steady pulse on things while effectively in my day job as a founder, then a VC. And I think that at some point it was probably, it was late 2020, early summer '21 when Pop and I had been messing around with a whole bunch of these DeFi 2.0, I say ecosystems and Discords. So like Frax, Alchemix, all that kind of stuff. Olympus, of course, can't forget the boys. And we found that like NFTs were starting to take an interesting turn. On one hand, they were starting to become a little bit more financialized and like beyond your, you know, $10K profile picture collections. And on the other hand, you know, you were starting to see things that might have interesting utility as much of a meme as that's become, you know, 3 years in the future. In that, you know, like we were starting, I think it was like Parallel that actually was like a little bit of an aha moment for us. And they were like, oh cool, these like, you know, high quality Magic: The Gathering/Heartstone on-chain type cards. And, you know, they're going to have like revenue accrual potential. They're going to turn into something that's more than just like, look at my ape, bro. And we thought that was interesting. So of course, we chose to launch an NFT collection of 100 completely useless bears smoking weed because we thought it was funny, having been inspired by the greats. And it honestly just started as like, hey, let's see what we could do with the NFT project and see where we could take it. It was very much make it up as you go. And we actually decided to raffle these off at like 0.069 ETH. In a whole bunch of different heavily DeFi-oriented Discords. So what we ended up doing by accident was cultivating this initial community of Bong Bear holders that were highly left curve because they're willing to buy a JPEG of a bear smoking weed for no apparent reason, but pretty DeFi native and tuned in and sharp as well from the communities that they came from. And I think after enough times where the group was like, when marketing, what happens next, when roadmap dev, we were like, huh, maybe we should do something kind of spicy with this and see if we can where we can take it. So we decided to make those NFTs effectively rebase, definitely not 8,000% APY, good old days rebase, but expand over time such that if you held one of the first NFT collections, then you would automatically be entitled to claim one of the NFTs from the second collection for free, with a small amount being minted as inflation every time so that new people can enter and buy into it. And what we ended up doing over the course of 4 or 5 collections was effectively bootstrapping a community of a couple thousand real users, which feels like an oddity nowadays in terms of people who are like, on one hand, like, hey, these are kind of fun, like, liquidity game theory mechanics with these multiplying bears. And on the other hand, maybe there's an actual interesting endgame or community there. And at some point, we'd actually talked to the Olympus guys about what it would look like to build OMChain just because we thought that was a funny and interesting concept. There was whole thoughts about what a reserve currency could actually look like. And despite perhaps falls from grace or a number of reductions in sentiment over the past few years, I think there were a lot of cool ideas. Ideas that came out of like the, you know, Olympus/DeFi 2.0 ecosystem, like protocol-owned liquidity and a lot of that stuff really did sort of like find its existence there. And at some point after talking to those guys for long enough, along with the own, you know, community that we had developed who was largely like traders, developers, retail users, we just tried to better understand like the problems that they were facing in their day-to-day, you know, like user environments. And one thing that came up a ton that was just, you know, kind of silly at first thought was just the trade-off that was experienced between liquidity and security when someone actually allocating capital on network in that 9 out of 10 times it's, okay, I have 32 ETH. Do I run a node or do I toss this in like your DEXs, your Uniswaps, your Aave, what have you? And stuff like Lido and Nagan Layer has very much started to move this in the right direction in terms of allowing one to use LSTs to go a lot further. But nonetheless, that's not really a native/out-the-gates thing, right? It's something that you opt into. It's something that's very much an option. It's not a default, if you will. And we thought to ourselves, it was really illogical, especially after viewing so many, like, ghost chains in that 2021-2022 cycle with hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars securing the chain, but absolutely zero capital or activity actually active on the network, that this had become the metagame. So we thought to ourselves, what if it was possible to effectively build an ecosystem that allow you to effectively align incentives between liquidity and security at the protocol level? I think more importantly, along that time frame as well, we were in the peak of this bullshit zero interest rates phenomenon, like throw grants at everything meta, where the only differential between a builder going to chain A or chain B was how much money are you going to throw at them, which I think is like incredibly cursed, completely stupid, and just generally a waste of time and funds and attracts the wrong type of builders. So I guess the secondary point in the back of our heads was, is there a way that we can actually build a system, you know, from a mechanism design, incentive design point of view, if you will, at that protocol level that's meant to drive value to the application layer? Because when I think about like, you know, what a future for crypto looks like. I think we're moving in the right direction a lot of different ways, right? We're seeing, you know, lower latency blockchains, we're seeing higher TPS, we're seeing, you know, effectively better proving systems, so on, so forth. Um, but really at the end of the day, we can build the best infrastructure possible, but if people aren't building applications on top of it, then it doesn't fucking matter. Um, and I think there are some very like clear use cases that are quite basic in terms of stablecoins, payments, etc. But I think my, my strong belief is that if you don't have applications that are uniquely, um, you know, built or existing in an on-chain environment, then there's very little impetus for someone to actually go from a Web2 world to a Web3 world and start actually using them, right? And we see Barachain as more than anything a bet on the application layer powered by the chain itself. So, you know, if I, if I sum this all up and put these rambles into a nutshell, we thought that it made a lot of sense to build Barachain because it's the first L1 that allows users to effectively turn their liquidity into security without, you know, adding leverage risk, etc., and actually use that liquidity to help power the protocols that are building on the chain itself. So hopefully that gives a little bit of context on, you know, the story, how we got here, all that kind of good stuff.

That is a deeply articulate take for a bear.

Years in the forest, man.

You know what's kind of interesting is that we've been talking for a while about how it's sometimes hard to see how you derive value for the base layer from the application layer, right? In theory, the application layer at some point in the future should be worth a lot more than the baseline, because the applications are what's actually driving people to use the platform. It's what people are actually engaging with. In theory, they should be able to generate some economic value because of that. Now, in the cases of chains like Solana, or really, really high throughput, high scalable chains, having that value accrue back to the chain, it's a little bit tough. I mean, the chain is effectively just a place for you to run code, right? That's it. And you get some security for that, but it's just a place for you to run code. You've brought this idea of the application and the base layer a little bit closer together, right? That's sort of what you're tying it together. But one question for you is, does that improve that? Does that improve stability of the platform? Or is that, you know, are there risks to embedding applications so closely with the base layer in terms of security? Like what you're describing?

Yeah, I think, I think it's all a matter of like nuance in the process, right? So the way the BearChain works, like, at a fundamental level, is that while the network itself is still secured, like from a, you know, a stake perspective, by the Bera token, which is like the gas token of the network is like, you know, relatively generic in that sense used to pay fees, etc. Where it actually does become interesting is like the flow of value and the flow of emissions across the network. So in like a typical proof-of-stake chain, right, the vast majority of those, of those emissions and block rewards as the chain inflates or as, you know, more blocks are produced end up going to, you know, validators and their delegates, right? And in most cases, in a lot of cases in proof-of-stake chains, they just sort of end up going to the validators. And while they play a very important role in maintaining the security of the network and keeping it up and running, they aren't necessarily the groups that are actually like driving new value or bringing new applications like we talked about, into that network itself, right? And I think that in a world where the biggest meme is like, cool, we've got all this infrastructure and all these layers for people to build stuff on, but no one building things on it, or, you know, users to actually use the apps, that seemed really counterintuitive to us as well. So the way that Barachain actually works is that, you know, validators have to, you know, post a standard bond with Bara to effectively, you know, come online or turn on their validator. But then they're also able to get BGT delegated to them. BGT is the illiquid soulbound reward/emissions token of parachain, which is what block rewards are actually given out in. Now the thing is, the only way to earn BGT is via providing liquidity on the network in a set of different venues. When the chain goes live, this is a pretty vanilla, pretty basic set of DeFi primitives. So a DEX, a perps vault, and a stablecoin lending market. But over time, and this is where, you know, things might get spicier from a security, etc. point of view, is that it can extend to really any application on the network as voted in via governance. So you could think of it as like curvification of the chain from an emissions perspective at the network level, right? And instead of those emissions only being able to go to pools and a DEX, they're actually able to go to any smart contract on the chain. Now, the thing is, a given validator always has the same likelihood of proposing a block. However, a validator with more BGT delegated towards it, i.e., more people who have provided liquidity choosing to delegate towards it, will produce a larger block reward when that block— when it actually produces a block. So in this way, the security of the network is not actually threatened in any manner because there's always bearer at stake securing the network. But the validators that have effectively worked with the people who have provided the most liquidity to the network stand to gain the most from producing larger block rewards when they actually hit a block.

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Okay, so just zooming back out a bit. I have this sort of theory about crypto right now that I've taken a lot of heat for, and I wanted to run it by you because it ties into that specific point you just made. Basically, I'm worried that just like you just said, there aren't enough apps showing up. And there aren't enough people building applications that, that users want to use. There's a lot of infrastructure getting built everywhere. But like you said, Applications need to show up and attract users. Otherwise, what the hell are we doing here? So my thesis has been that we don't need more infrastructure. We need people to build killer apps. The pushback I've gotten, which I would assume you probably agree with, is like, hey, infrastructure has been built and there's a lot of it around, but there isn't the right infrastructure. And so, you know, to your point about incentivizing a certain type of activity on your network that's conducive to a certain type of app building, Like, I guess here's my question for you. Bit of a long-winded question, but bear with me. Uh, back in the day, NEAR did something very interesting, which is that they, uh, rewarded economic activity on their network by basically paying developers in NEAR, uh, proportionate to the amount of smart contract activity that a given app would generate. And I thought that was really brilliant. That's like what the dollar does. You, you know, you participate in the system, you get rewarded in dollars. That's how petrodollar economies work. Etc. So they built this empire, this sharded, amazing technological empire with that premise, and nobody showed up to the party to build apps. Can you maybe touch on why it is that your liquidity-based reward system, which is, you know, similar but actually very different as well, will reward a certain type of builder to show up and build like what type of app?

Yeah, no, great question, man. I think that it bears resemblance like some like the CSR type stuff we've seen even like the last cycle or two, like And I do think that unfortunately a lot of those metrics end up being gameable, which is why I think both the mid-curve take and the correct take is that social consensus and capital consensus is actually what should drive incentive distribution. And I do think that that's very much what, what the BearChain system sort of enables, right? And just to go to double-click on that a little bit more, each validator effectively has a gauge and they can choose how they would like to, you know, direct the emissions when they win a block, right? So they could say, hey, I've got a bunch of capital in this pool as like myself as a validator, I'm going to put all my emissions there, or they could You could say, I'm going to put 20% on this pool, 20% on that pool, 20% on that one, 30% in this options protocol, whatever it might be, right? Where I think that gets more interesting is when you add or you explore the incentive marketplace that's built on top of it. This is probably what one would think of most conventionally in DeFi as bribes. So you can actually have an application go and say, I'm going to give you as a validator, or I'm going to post a bribe or an incentive that anyone can pick up and say, in exchange for X amount of emissions, I will give you Y amount of my token. To be distributed amongst myself as a validator. I'll take some commission on it, and my delegates who've chosen to actually, you know, provide, um, to, to delegate BGT to me and, and give me voting power, right? Um, and with that, you actually cause, I'd say, a new layer of that market to emerge in which people can basically, you know, decide their own risk preferences and what they want to get more exposure to. Um, now that doesn't answer your core question. It just more answers the idea of, like, you know, what is it that actually makes this more interesting perhaps for a protocol in the first place? It's that they can decrease their cost of capital right? And instead of just doing a classic pool to sort of liquidity mining type program where they're pairing a token against their own token and then emitting a whole bunch of their own token, they're actually able to actually effectively pay a small amount in their token and ideally based on an effective market, receive a number of emissions in the form of that chain's token itself, BGT, which one would hope is value accruing and useful over time. Right. But I also think the answer is, and this has been the biggest deficiency as I see it in most ecosystems, is this like laissez-faire attitude that if you build it, they will come. I think that's retarded. I think that if you build it, no one will give a shit. And I think that you have to go out there and aggressively tell people what solutions you have, why they need it, and why it's a good fit, right? And I think that like, we've seen so many people pontificate and build like, you know, castles in the sky about things that have ultimately yielded very little to nothing. And maybe they do in the 5 to 10 year time horizon. But I very much believe in like power law distributions. And I think that if you, you know, go and hit up 100 different teams, and you know, 10 of them are half decent, then again, out of those, maybe there's the chance that one of them turns into a unicorn app, right? So if you're not going out there and chatting with hundreds, if not thousands of builders, then the chance of finding the next milestone, like just lodestone crazy app, the next Uniswap, the next GMX, whatever you want to call it on your chain, is near zero. So I think my broad answer to that is I think that you can have all the right base plates from an incentive design or from like a builder point of view. But if you don't go out there and do the work, then it's ultimately useless. Having the right design just sort of helps remove friction as I see it. But by no means guarantees outcomes.

Wow, that's a fantastic answer.

I will say that you guys have definitely figured out how to go out there. The community and the memes, and I mean, it's just absurd, honestly, what you've been able to— like the cult that you've been able to assemble. And I think that had to have been somewhat intentional to build what is effectively a meme coin cult around real product in a way that I haven't really seen since kind of since Link. You guys remind me a lot of Link, I'll be honest.

Yeah, no, I love that.

Pretty deep hardcore in terms of community at least. And then also backed up with some, at least on the side of Link, somewhat real tech. And I think that it's kind of, it's kind of interesting to see that combined because it's really, it's really hard to do that. It's hard to thread that needle to be both, to be both a serious, you know, serious builders, but then have fun while you're doing it.

Yeah.

It's like, it's whimsical.

I think a lot of people take themselves very seriously.

What's crazy about it is like you're, okay, so let's take a trad fi lateral, right? If you were going to start a hedge fund, you wouldn't name it like Pissant Capital LLC. Everybody's afraid to do it.

That's a great idea.

Yes, let's start this, Avi. Let's go found it. The thing is, because that doesn't attract—

Oh, okay.

LLP. Um, and so because like investors don't want to put their money in something that with a name like that. And so what you get is just this like the opposite end of the spectrum. Everything is named like Bridgewater, Bridgestone, Stonebridge, Citadel, Castle, and you know, it's all boring. You kind of hit that middle of the gradient, which is perfect. Like, your background is, uh, like, uh, Jesus Christ is a bear with a bunch of bear apostles. It's freaking hilarious. Like, it's whimsical, but it doesn't sacrifice the sense of, like, you're safe on this chain, you know? It's, uh, it's— you, you struck a very, very difficult balance.

Also, like, yeah, like, why bears? Bears make price go down.

Yeah, yeah. We're, bro, you know what I, so I don't know if you guys saw, but for our, for April Fool's gag this year, we like rebranded to Bullet Chain for a day and we like dropped this video that showed like the running of the bulls and stuff and like how we were going to build a perpendicular EVM L4 to Cardano. And I think that's exactly it, right? Which is to say that I also believe in, I don't know if you call it horseshoe theory or, you know, a barbell distribution, if you will, but I really do believe that the left and the right curve even out at some point. And that to win you need to be both highly retarded and highly competent, at least in a space like crypto where the industry is so new, but it also very much caters to a younger demographic as well. Right. While we are seeing the Fidelities and the Franklin Templetons and so on and so forth starting to actually plow in here and get involved, in many cases they're involved by— they're being advised or they're taking a good look from someone who is more likely closer to our ages. Right. And I think you have to be able to appeal to that population too. I think I also realized a while back that between our founding team and just the guys we have on board and what we've seen of the space over time, we weren't going to win by being FedChain. There's no world in which we try to come off as, I think, polished as Sui or like Misten or like Polygon, depending on whether they're making Polygon jokes or not or whatever, right? And ended up in a position of power. I think we realized that we very much had to carve our own path and carve our own brand, right? And the bears, it just felt fitting because it's like, okay, this whole thing is going to evolve out of an NFT project of bears smoking weed, then we might as well just like run with it. So we didn't even actually— we called them the Bong Bears and then someone came into the Discord being like, ooh, Bongobeara. And then we're like, hey, that's pretty funny. And then we just kind of ran with it. And I think that's been a lot of like—

this is a random guy. This is a random—

yeah, random motherfucker.

Is he a core team member now, bro?

I think this man like dropped off the face of the earth like a couple of years ago. But like, you know, his impact is felt and lasted. And I think for us, what we realized at some point is that leaning into that whimsical nature, if you will, and being able to execute while also being kind of silly was a space that had not really been fully explored or done right at the protocol level either. And it also just sort of felt like correct for us.

To your point, the virality is so critical because you can't just build it and expect people to show up and build amazing apps. So here we go, Smokey, get ready for the best transition ever. You built the bear chain during Build-A-Bear during the bear market of 2022. Tell us what that was like. Very few products launched or got conceived of and worked on back then. Most people were just busy throwing in the towel. Was it like building in the bear?

Like roping themselves, I think.

Yeah, yeah.

There was—

There's a healthy amount of rope around the office, but I think that we managed to grind through it for the most part. I guess when I think about that, I probably attribute to a couple of different things. One is that like the community sentiment has always been pretty meaningful, right? I think that on our side, I think we've typically seen chains built by someone being like, okay, like I've got, you know, a prof at X or Y university or, you know, someone out of X or Y research institution. I'm going to spin this shit out, raise a bunch of capital and try to make people care. I think we took a very opposite approach, which meant that we effectively had a bunch of people who like kind of cared from the beginning. And then as more and more stuff came together, they still kind of cared. And then, you know, as we worked our way along and sort of iterated on the idea, we saw more people popping up and, you know, saying, hey, I want to build this, hey, I want to build that. And I also think that like having seen some of these like, you know, just growth or business development relationships mature over the last couple of years, I think that period of like trauma bonding was also kind of important. It's like when you get hazed in a frat. Right? Like, you go through some shitty times together, but then you end up being closer over a longer period of time, right? So I think that with that, you know, building through the bear was a pain in the ass, but it wasn't the worst thing. I think that if we had a live product at the time, I probably would not have enjoyed it quite as much because I'm sure it would have just been, you know, doom and gloom and people being like, when will devs fix price, etc., which I, you know, I truly feel for all of our comrades who had to go through that. But I also think it provided massive turnaround opportunities or massive hero moments for some groups that we're big fans of. I remember talking to the Pendle guys in, I think, late summer, early fall of '22. And at the time, they were sort of figuring out, I think, end of V1, early V2 and what that was going to look like and completely rebuilding their internal pricing models. And the market had absolutely destroyed them. They're like a $4 or $5 million market cap. And I talked to them and I'm just like, yo, these guys are cracked. And I'm pretty bullish on interest trades derivatives. So like, I feel like I should pay attention to this. Um, and I wish I bought a bigger bag, but then I saw them like, you know, absolutely kill it for the next couple of years, right? And, you know, kill the points meta, kill the LST meta, everything alongside it. Um, so I guess like it— I find that the whole building the bear thing is just more of a barometer of like griftiness, uh, and/or like mental fortitude. Which is to say that if you're a grifter, decent chance you tap out there. Uh, and if you're mentally weak, decent chance you tap out there as well. I think that we were fortunate to not be in either of those scenarios. And it gave us a bunch of good time to go heads down and figure some shit out. That being said, like raising towards the end of that was a pain in the ass. We were, I remember we were closing up our Series A like a week before FTX blew up and then FTX blew up as you're still like taking wires and stuff. And it was like, ah, this is less fun than it was a couple of weeks ago. So that was definitely an experience.

Wait, wait, was FTX committed to being an investor at that point?

No, no, no, no, fuck that. We were not taking money from FTX, bro. We had a conversation with some of the members on their team and they were really unimpressive.

That's really funny. I mean, I remember at that point they were basically just throwing money at everything that they could. But then the way that they would do it is they would come up to you and they would say, we are the best thing that's ever happened to you. Take our money and give us the best terms ever.

Yeah, yeah. We do not negotiate with terrorists. So it did not, you know, no such luck over here.

Yeah, that was a different time. That was good. It's good you guys persevered through. That was a— I mean, I don't think I've ever wanted to rope myself that hard after FTX. So it's like, I remember I was sitting there in the TradFi world and it's always, it's always both the best feeling and the worst feeling in the world. World when TradFi looks down on you with disdain and disgust. Because on one hand, you have to deal with all of them. But on the other hand, you know how good it's going to feel when it starts going back up.

Yeah, yeah. You know that, uh, you know, that comeback arc is going to be crazy.

Yeah, it hits different. Bitcoin rips and everyone told you 3 months ago that it was going to die. It's like, oh, it's alive! Shit's alive. And also, I mean, what really hits different is when you try to explain to somebody you invested in something called Barachain and it's like returned you meaningful capital. And they look at you and they're like, I invested in Walgreens and it's down 25% today.

And dude, anyone who invested in like biotech during the 2021, like COVID vaccine boom and whatnot. Oh my God. I had a lot of fundamentals homies being like, what the fuck are you doing in these, these internet coins, sir?

Yeah, honestly, honestly hilarious. But I mean, somehow through all of this, humanity, and you managed to get some trad fi money. I think I saw in the latest headline— who, who was—

yeah, it was Brevin Howard, who's on the Kellys. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're pretty—

I mean, I know they have a crypto business, but they're, they're pretty trad fi. What is it, what is it, what is it like, like, what is it, what is it like sitting in front of somebody and trying to pitch them something serious while also needing them to understand that it's like supposed to be a because that's good for it, right? Yeah.

Yeah. Well, compliance definitely didn't get it too easily, but they figured it out at some point after a lot of leg pulling. I think that the good thing is the partners at Brevin have become increasingly crypto native over time. They picked up the guys from the Dragonfly Liquid Desk, etc., who were good friends and early investors of ours. So it made that transition a lot smoother. And then I think there's also the fact, like, in a past life, like myself and Papa and a lot of our team members, we were suits, right? We've had to be serious on an extreme occasion. It's something I really do try to avoid doing, but when necessary, you got to do what you got to do. And I think that we're capable of cleaning up. And more than that, I think just allowing people to take a peek under the hood and get past first impressions. And I find that that really does tend to be an interesting cognitive dissonance activity for us. I think there were a lot of people who at some point wrote us off or were like, this is retarded. What the fuck is Barachain, man? This can't be serious. And, and, you know, just sort of formed a very strong opinion based on that. But then it's sort of the same thing as you mentioned earlier with the markets, right? When we actually chatted with them and they got a chance to, like, you know, look under the hood a little bit, like, oh wait, maybe these guys are actually, like, you know, on to something here. And then that reversal of, like, you know, someone who's highly against you to extreme zealot tends to be a pretty powerful one if you pull it off properly. So I think that definitely also leans in our favor. But I think you're totally right, man. Like, there was a number of times I remember around the time that we were finishing up that raise, our Series A, like, Canto was live, Evmos was live, and everyone was like trying to compare us to that. And we're just like, okay, cool guys. Like, you know, lots of respect for those teams in some cases. But I just think that that's inaccurate, and then we'll let the market decide. And I think the market has made some noise since then, perhaps in one direction.

So I think those two names I have not heard in a long time.

Yeah, right. Um, I think a lot of them are cool, interesting ideas, just like— and, and I don't think by any means that we've found ourselves in a position of success yet. Like, we still have so much to prove, and we can so fuck up so many different things. Um, but I just think that, like, it was very easy for people to mid-curve, and, uh, and also for institutions especially to be like, oh, but isn't it just this? And it's like, no, no, not really.

Well, hang on. So on that note, about what does success look like? Like, I mean, obviously, there was a period of time during the post-2021 euphoria when, you know, every new L1 was, you know, it's like, alright, get a couple DEXs on there, something that looks like a CLOB, something that looks like Uniswap v3, and a few like basic infrastructure plays, maybe an L2 depending on the chain, blah, blah, blah. But like, I get the feeling that your chain, I I think it has one of the highest throughputs, TPS, in, in the entire crypto space. It's capable of processing immense amounts of computation. Um, like, surely, you know, talk to us about your ecosystem and what success looks like and what types of apps you want to see just crushing it on your chain. And I'm sure the answer isn't, oh, just like something that looks like Uniswap but on Barachain, or, oh, just another clob job? Um, like, yeah, what is it? What does it look like?

For sure, man. So, you know, one thing is I always try to be super, you know, direct and honest about where we are, like where we do win massively and where we don't, right? Um, I think that I'd love to see us, and we have, you know, thoughts on how the few in the future we can be incredibly scalable. Right now I think we see ourselves as like one of the fastest slash most efficient, if not the fastest slash most efficient L1 designs. I do expect groups— uh, I'm sorry, I should say EVM-compatible L1 designs, because like I'm sure that Solana is faster than us and Sui and Mist have their own timeframes as well. I think that what we have that's pretty interesting from a tech point of view really quickly is that like BearChain is actually the first completely EVM identical L1. So I think you've heard a lot of people say EVM compatible, Polygon, AVAX, etc. And that means vast majority of things are compatible, but it's still in many cases maintaining some degree of a guest fork. What BearChain actually has is like an identical execution environment to mainnet in that you can run BearChain/run the ETH environment using like Nethermind, like Ergon, like Ref, what have you, any of these different execution clients. And for that, that means that we don't need a, you know, team of 20 researchers trying to figure out how to maintain a Geth fork. It actually means that if there's an EIP or if there's something that actually goes into, into place on mainnet or it's upstreamed, you know, we can make that change very easily as well. So that compatibility saves us a ton of trouble and also makes it super easy for people to build scaling solutions, rollups, everything in between on parachain, which we're actually already seeing prior to launch, which is like pretty exciting for me. Um, and then the other thing is that we use Comet BFT consensus under the hood so that we still get that single-slot finality that's really nice to have. It is one of those things that's on the Ethereum roadmap. You know, definitely prob— I don't expect Ethereum to implement it in the same manner as Comet to effectively caveat that, right? But I think we really do end up with the best of both worlds in terms of like a super EVM identical environment where if you could deploy something on mainnet, you could deploy it on parachain without having to reinvent the wheel or do extra legwork, which tends to be a point of friction. And you get that single-slot finality, which is super nice for a transaction, you know, execution ordering point.

View.

Um, more importantly though, like, I think that success looks like BearChain being the ecosystem where people go to see cool new things being built. Um, and then I, I don't know if I necessarily subscribe to the concept of an ETH killer. I think it's possible in some senses, but I don't necessarily know if that's like— I don't think that's the game I want to play. Um, the game I'd much rather see us play is one where if you were looking to find the most interesting new applications that actually do have a shot at product-market fit they're coming to life on BearChain from a cultural and liquidity point of view. And this sort of goes back to what I was talking about earlier in terms of like shots on net, portfolio construction, power laws, whatever you want to call it. The structure of BearChain is meant such that validators drive incentives and drive rewards towards the application layer. And I see that as effectively an enabling factor to give the most number of applications the best amount of shots on net and opportunities to reach escape velocity, to break out and actually get real adoption. Um, so, you know, what I would love to see is like those next groundbreaking apps that end up defining the crypto space as a whole, like living on BearChain and then finding their home there before going multi-chain, or effectively having that as their home base settlement layer, whatever you want to call it. Um, and there are a ton, so I'll think about ones that, you know, come to mind off right off the top as cool ones to start. But like, um, you know, one of them that I've been yapping about a bunch recently, and I bet you guys would probably think is cool as traders is called Exponents. It's effectively a pretty new take on derivatives in that on one hand, it's something that we've seen a little bit more recently in terms of allowing you to take leverage on long-term asset or on long-tail assets. So, you know, perps on shitcoins. But the part that gets really cool, if you ask me, is that they've actually added a different incentive layer on top of that in that it's not just long or shorting, here's your funding rate, etc. They've actually added a separate incentive layer such that one can actually speculate on trading direction and say, hey, I'm going to bribe someone or incentivize longs or incentivize shorts specifically. So you can actually have like, you know, coins PvPing each other in a more explicit manner than ever before, if you ask me. And that, you know, if you're like Tremp versus Boden, for example, you can be, you know, bribing people to short one coin while long another, which I think is very cool beyond just like, you know, incentivizing LP, which has been the metagame to date. I think that's really cool. I think it's something that relies on, you know, effectively the velocity of capital and something that turns into a pretty crazy like, you know, yield sandwich when you think about that in a bear chain environment. You could have a given pair there. They use sort of Uniswap spot arbitrage style pricing, both leverage to actually determine like the fees that are generated by the protocol. And then you add that bribe layer up in long and shorting on top of it, and then you add proof of liquidity emissions on top of that. Like that in itself becomes a really cool set of applications for someone to build around. Um, you know, there's groups that are building, you know, funkier stuff in the consumer space. I was telling you guys a little bit prior to the call There's one that I've been calling a vape to earn on BearChain. It's actually quit smoking to earn, but it's called PuffPaw. It's super cool. And then a bunch of really sharp guys who've shipped like, you know, 75 million vapes to some of the leading, you know, tobacco manufacturers/vape manufacturers in the world and are partnered with some of the largest like quit smoking applications in the world. And it's actually like a custom-made like D-Pen vape that incentivizes you to decrease your nicotine usage over time and you get like more tokens for using less nicotine until you get down to effectively a green tea extract. Um, I— that one, that one's an absolute—

that, that's, that's actually really cool. Uh, I've heard of an application in crypto that actually helps people with their health. Everything else destroys your health.

I think it's really cool because, like, my thesis on a lot of these, like, I think the tokens are incentivization tools in many cases, right? And what they do is they actually take a behavior that people are already accustomed to doing and allow them to potentially financially wise. That's broadly how I think about crypto gaming as well in cases where it might work, right? It's like if you could play RuneScape versus playing RuneScape that's like 75% as good, but maybe you could make a few bucks, I feel like you play the second one as long as the quality like drop-off isn't massive, right? So I think stuff like that is really cool. I'm all like, I've always been a DeFi guy, so I think that like, you know, I'm super excited about the DeFi ecosystem there. There's a group called Shogun that was incubated by us, as was PuffPod, the Veek Turn one. That's really exciting. And those guys are effectively building what's the best way of putting it? They're building a platform that allows you to trade any asset from any chain without any difficulty there. As in, if you want to go from, you know, Sei on Sei to, you know, Boden or DJT on Sol, they make that trade route possible. And they have some very interesting just-in-time liquidity vaults that allow you to turn MEV effectively into trader extracted value and put that back in the hands of the user. So basically an intense layer/intense/solver system combined with those just-in-time liquidity vaults that allows you to get the best execution possible without ever leaving your home network. I think that kind of stuff is really cool. There's zero-day-to-expiry options with the guys from IVX. There's credit default swaps and distressed debt on-chain from the guys at Concrete Finance. Dude, that's one of my favorite ones more recently. Founders, you know, a prolific on-chain DJIN, but trained as a surgeon at Oxford, then was a VP for years at Point72, then was absolutely in the trenches buying and selling JPEG tokens with me. You know, little did I know and has now built, you know, one of the most interesting on-chain derivative systems I've seen. So all that kind of stuff is coming to the eco. Pretty sweet.

So where are you guys? Aren't on mainnet though, right?

Right.

You just launched—

No, no. Yeah.

So how did you get all these people to start building on just testnet? Yeah, that's been— I think that's been very difficult in general for people to get any activity prior to mainnet launch. I mean, you're talking about all these projects. So, I mean, it seems like you have a lot of projects even though you're still on Tusknet, right?

Yeah, for sure. I think that for us, man, it was seeing that if we actually took a very proactive approach to this, it's very possible to get people to build, especially if they understand that they really have an opportunity to do more with their applications on BearChain than anywhere else. I think the fact is proof of liquidity feels tangible. It feels like something where it's not just like, hey, we're going to give you this grant and please stay with us for a few months. It's, hey, there's a way that you guys can actually be effectively enshrined into the block creation/block rewards process on a chain. And I think that that is kind of special for applications in terms of A, just thinking about their own roadmaps and capital efficiency, and B, I think tapping into the culture that's been built as well. Right. I think there's a very collegial feel of camaraderie. And we've gotten teams together in the past for dinners and stuff. Um, and it's crazy to see them come together. Uh, the other thing that we've done that I think helps supplement that is we also have, um, sort of an incubator program that's run at arm's length from the foundation called Build-a-Bear. Um, and that basically helps incubate/work closely with 5 teams every, every 6 months, um, that are just meant to be cool, new, exciting things that are there to set a bar for quality in the ecosystem. Um, and, you know, the goal there is really to help teams with go-to-market, help them figure out fundraising, all the stuff that actually, you know, is required to, to build a lasting company. Um, you know, figuring out their tokenomics the management structure and what it takes to scale an organization internationally, how they have to figure out their taxes and legals and all that kind of stuff, and use that to give those guys a leg up. So I think we really do view the foundation/labs, whatever you want to call it, as an extension of the ecosystem, that it's very much there to empower people. And I think that by combining that with proof of liquidity as a fundamental, with the culture that's being built of fuck around, find out, but do it in a really effective way, you end up with a pretty magnetic group for builders. So I think that that's been our greatest edge, honestly. And also making sure that we don't take our feet off the gas, right? The team has been incredibly, incredibly competent when it comes to going out there and telling builders how they have an opportunity to win on Verachain and how we're there to help make that a reality.

Well, I mean, I love that. You obviously need community. I experienced this the hard way where You know, back when Solana was trading $20, I FUDed Solana and the community just came out and took me out. And basically, you know, I think that that was an early sign that the token was going to 8x from there, right? Like if you've got a strong community of people fighting to create valuable products and build things that people want, even in bear markets and fight back against FUD, like, you know, you have something lasting. So if you're seeing that community be inside of your ecosystem already, that's like a phenomenal sign, even if you haven't made it to mainnet. But one thing I, I, I heard you say that, that really kind of I found inspiring, I think our listeners would appreciate, is that, you know, you talk about the gamification of activities that haven't been gamified yet but, but should be, you know, like vaping, for example, or quitting smoking. Um, also X2Earn, right? Play to earn, or, or quit vaping to earn. You know, it's obviously a massive, a massive use case for crypto. But I honestly think that one of the reasons why, with, you know, a few notable exceptions like Axie Infinity, it hasn't really caught on in a sustainable way is because in order for your earnings to— you're earning tokens, right? You're not earning greenbacks. So in order for your earnings to kind of be sustainable and for them to hold their value, there needs to be, like you said, liquidity. And so there hasn't really been a chain until now that's kind of guaranteeing pools of liquidity for all these these different types of applications, or at least building it in at the, at the L1 level, uh, the way that yours does. So I think that's super important in order to unlock that massive potential in crypto for, you know, X2Earn applications to go live and scale.

Yeah, thank you, man. And like, you know, we very much do see liquidity as a lifeblood of DeFi and then DeFi to be fundamental in crypto nowadays, right? Um, I think everything you see, whether that's like the fantasy top, like bonding curves or like pump fund stuff, or like everything is in some manner downstream of or tapping into a DeFi ecosystem, right? I just think that some things are more obvious than others. And I think that like, you know, a lot of people think, oh, can Proof of Liquidity only be useful for DeFi apps? I don't think so, actually. I think it can actually play a role in a whole bunch of different things because almost everything has some element of liquidity-centricism, right? So I think that's also where I'm very excited in the long term. You know, we're starting to see plans right now that are at very early stages for Proof of Liquidity being used outside of the bear chain. Chain ecosystem, if you will, for, for extensions. I'll leave that one a little bit more amorphous, but I think we'll see those assets doing a lot more than just providing liquidity on parachain over time, which I think will be really exciting. Um, I think we're seeing more like NFTs, games, social apps, um, you know, all the stuff that is an extension of the culture, if you will. Um, and then these L2s, which present their own like interesting world, right? Because the parachain has its own brand, it has its own like selection of life, if you will. Um, but I think we're seeing, you know, highly competent groups from consumer, gaming, media, et cetera, go and build L2s that are going to roll up to BearChain and sort of take advantage of and draw on that native community, but also help to onboard like tens of millions of new folks in a completely sort of like, um, in a same, same but different manner, if that makes sense, in that they'll very much be an extension or an arm of the brand, but they'll have their own ecosystem, their own lifestyle, uh, their own, you know, culture that can, that can go back and forth here. And I think that that's part of what also becomes very interesting about building this anonymously, um, in that we end up being a little bit amorphous in terms of what the identity of parachain is, right? On one hand, people could view it as a DeFi chain. On the other hand, people can view it as a meme chain. On the other hand, people can view it as, you know, an application acceleration layer, right? People can say, oh, it's like something between EVM and Cosmos. Like, there's 100 different ways to view it. And I think that, um, where things get really interesting is by having a number of different extensions of that brand that allow it to tap into all the different demographics. Like, not— it's not us trying to boil the ocean. It's can we, in a B2B2C manner, find enough ways to spread the good word in enough places where it actually makes sense such that, you know, everyone has a reason to care about BearChain. And I think that like, that's one thing that, you know, going back to that Solana example, I think they've been doing a really good job of that at different points in their life cycle. And I think that it's exactly what you mentioned, like having the community beatdown or the ability for someone to get absolutely wrecked by a community is one of the most bullish things possible. Saw that a ton back in the day with Link and at some point Omen stuff. And I think we're seeing that too. But that only comes when you have people who care about all these different aspects of it, whether it was like the Magic Eden ecosystem and the fucking like, oh my God, I forgot what those robots were called. And then the Tensorians and all all that, or the DePIN ecosystem there, or like PumpFun and DeFi stuff. I think, I honestly do think that they're one of the best to have done it so far. And I have a lot of respect for what those guys have put together as well from a, you know, I'd say a longevity point of view and also just like a scope and performance point of view.

Interesting. I mean, yeah, I couldn't agree with what you just said more. And in terms of like what our listeners care about, people that listen to a trading podcast hosted by traders tend to want to know like, where's the money? How am I going to make money off of this somehow? And so just in thinking about how to bridge the gap between your community and the trading community, one thing that just immediately pops into my mind is if you're building a liquidity-focused L1, the money is where there's going to be liquidity for your tokens, for your, your earnings. And so I can kind of see if I were to try and brand Barachain, it would be the chain where, the chain where you don't you don't basically get rugged by disappearing pools. I don't know if you want to brand it that way. But if— because it's like, because you can't validate without basically staking liquidity into the network, applications that touch parachain are ultimately going to be more stable for people who earn tokens on those applications.

I think that's part of it. And I think like what I'd even sort of double-click on even more is it's, it's a chain that's built to provide the majority of its value that's being generated towards applications and users. Like, ultimately, it's like, you know, validators to apps and apps to users in terms of like that flow of incentives, if you will. And I think it's, you know, there's a way that you could position it that's probably a little bit more bastardized, but it's like, you know, in a sense the chain rewards you to use it, right? Um, the, the term that we've been playing around with internally is like this whole idea of like, you know, have your steak and eat it too. And that the whole idea is like, you know, on BearChain you go and you, you LP in whatever you want, use whatever protocol you want, and if that protocol happens to be one of the ones that is whitelisted or that is receiving emissions from, you know, from the protocol, such as the chain itself, then, you know, you're getting whatever rewards that you normally would get, but you're also getting this additional upside in the governance token or the emissions token of the chain, right? And then you can choose to use that to compound in whatever manner you like. You can go stake that with a validator that is incentivizing the pool that you're already, you know, taking part in and effectively use that to compound your own rewards. You can use that to stake with a validator that is effectively receiving incentives or bribes from another protocol that you want exposure to. That's like a, you know, a long-tail call option, effectively, right? There's, I think, a lot of game theory and a lot of different choices that the user has, all without sacrificing the basic behavior that they'd want to take either way. So I guess when I think about it, it's like you're getting to do what you want, or you're getting to pursue your average user behavior, ideally with a whole bunch of fun, cool new applications if you choose to use them. And you're just reaping the benefits of actually having exposure to a new ecosystem. So I don't think any system is truly perfect, but I do think that there's a lot more thought put into the incentive alignment across all parties.

This year. You know, that's actually really exciting because this reminds me, like, this particular conversation, the last 50 minutes of us talking, reminds me a lot of the conversations that I used to have in 2021 or 2020 when people were actually building new and innovative DeFi applications. Like, I haven't had a conversation like this in a very long time. Everybody's so— everybody's just so focused on, like, dogs with hats, which I love. I love a dog with a hat. Like, I love—

yeah, yeah, of course. Good tech.

I love I love them. It's good tech. It's good tech. It's good community. It's good culture. However, sometimes, you know, it's nice to get in the weeds of something new and innovative. And the other thing is, you know, not to talk bad about other projects, but, you know, a lot of the latest projects that release airdrops, a lot of the L2s, they're sort of effectively the same. They're all the same across the board.

Totally.

Right. It's just, okay, yeah, maybe this uses a slightly different version of ZK tech, you know, but it's all basically the same.

Yeah.

And I think, I think, I think in the market there's just been a lot of fatigue from this because people are really tired. And the reason that they keep chasing meme coins are one, because of the returns, but two, because there aren't people working on or releasing interesting things. And it's just very— it gets, it gets very repetitive over and over and over. So I think a lot of people in crypto, the way that I would phrase it, have gone back from being users. Like, I was a power user of crypto for 2 years, 3 years. I have— I probably have used crypto less in the last, you know, actually messed around on-chain less in the last 18 months than I did in like 1 month in 2021. Because, you know, there were just so many things to do back then, right? And there's it's just, it almost seems like there's less to do today, which I mean, I think there is, um, in terms of, you know, at least, at least what I'm, what I'm doing, what I'm doing day to day. So this is kind of, it's kind of fun to listen to. We're gonna have to— everybody should go check it out. Can we, can we use the testnet? Is it public?

Yeah, yeah, dude, 100%. It's, it's usable. It's pretty, pretty snappy. I enjoy it. Um, and we're seeing a bunch of applications starting to go live on it. We, we basically moved over from our old testnet to a new one like about 2 and a half, 3 weeks ago. And with that, we're going to see a lot of the old guard redeploying, but there's already some pretty fun dApps on there to play around with. So I think that's exactly it, Avi. It's like, we want to make crypto fun, right? I think that if there's any brand or any community that probably has a good chance of making that happen from a vibe point of view and also from an application point of view, I think we've got a lot of shots on net over here. And I think that what I care about is what I mentioned and what you just touched on, which is like net new things that you haven't seen somewhere else. And I think we've seen a couple flashes in the pan over the last 6 to 12 months. But there's definitely been 4 or 5 times where I'm like, hey, that's something cool and new. But I don't think it's as usual by any means. And our goal is to keep a steady stream of interesting things on BearChain, right? Because my high-level thesis is that I think that most alt L1s or most chains that are not mainnet and maybe Solana, but I think mostly just not mainnet, can really only sustain 10 to 15 if you're really if you're really optimistic, maybe 20 applications that actually get a bunch of use without a ton of liquidity fragmentation and lack of real usability. And I think that that's ideally some degree of a rotating set, right? I think there's always a few that will remain in that. It's like fucking English Premier League teams or something, right? There's always a few that stay up at the top of that league, but there's a few that swap out. But there's a very solid cohort that ends up being at the front of that Cambrian explosion. And I want to make sure that Bearchain always has the coolest ones at the front of that pack. And there's some that are like really fucking fried. But there's some that are like just things I think could completely reinvent the way that we think about the industry, right? So on one hand, we have bear.tv, which is literally like, you know, AI bear reporters that will talk about shit and eventually is going to turn into like a MapleStory megaphone kind of thing where you can use that for distribution of content and bidding over slots where you can actually like talk through people and whatnot. And it's effectively a content slash distribution or you have like, you know, Gummify, which maybe you met those guys at one point, Avi, but like, you know, allowing you to basically borrow/lend against any asset in like an order book style under the hood with shared liquidity profiles as desired. So like, you know what I mean? You get the duality. And I think that's really important. Like, you got to have your stuff that's just good fucking BANT, and you got to have your stuff that's like future finance. And sometimes they're one and the same.

Like, I love it. I'm so on board with this, and I want to mess around. Onchain again, just talking to you about this. Like, Avi, when are we going to start tokenizing random people who are trying to quit smoking and bribe them to fall off the wagon and play against each other?

Whole new level of the game, bro.

Avi, you're on mute. Are you saying incentivizing people to relapse, Jonah?

Yeah, that is what I said, but now I feel bad for saying it.

Saying it.

No, no, it's okay.

It's okay.

Look, I think it's, I think it's, look, if you can go one way, you can go the other way. We're all capitalists here.

My, my favorite was like, we were trying to figure out like, you know, what that flywheel looks like. We're like, okay, so there's vape to earn. And it's like, Zin to win. But like, do you, do you eventually go back to like straight cigs? Like, how do you, how do you continue this loop? And it's like, hmm, maybe we shouldn't continue this loop.

But dude, honestly, I, I, I've actually, cigs are making a comeback on, I think cigs are Lindy now.

I, I think they are Lindy.

I think people are getting tired of, you know, the, the blueberry ice vapes and like the strawberry raspberry sorbet, like inhaling that stuff.

I can verify that in the, in the commodities industry, there's like for every one Gen Z with like the banana ice vape, there's like 3 guys outside at any given time smoking them. Really?

Yeah. That is like, remember, return to tradition. Return to tradition. This is, that's exactly what it's all about at the end of the day. Of the day.

So remember, this is how we win.

The future of finance is good vibes. I like this. This is good.

I was talking to Tommy.

If I were to put the future of finance in anyone's hands, I'm happy to give them to you, Smokey.

You're too kind, Avi. You're too kind to me.

You just got to get the air-conditioned bear suits for the future conference.

Oh man, those things get hot.

Yeah, exactly. Look, I don't want any sweaty bears in charge of finance.

Yeah, no, no. Honestly, you need the marshmallow style with the big fans, like a nice, nice large headset, all the good stuff. Real decked out bear suits, putting the fundraisers to good use.

Amazing, dude. Uh, well, we appreciate, you know, we appreciate you coming on, Smokey. This is definitely one of the most fun podcasts we've done. Definitely.

So cheers, man. I'm always happy to entertain.

We'll have to have you back on once you guys launch mainnet, and then you can meticulously walk all listeners through exactly how to make money on BearChain. And if they lose any money on BearChain, you can guarantee their funds, right?

Yeah, yeah, totally. That sounds exactly like something that my legal/compliance department would love. NFA.

NFA. Nothing on this podcast has been financial advice. Please don't listen to us about anything. We are literally interviewing a bear. None of this is true. Appreciate it. Um, but yeah, we'll catch you soon, buddy. Any last words to say to our audience?

Uh, yeah, man, I guess I'd just say like, um, you know, would love to see you guys fucking around and testing out the, the Beara Chain testnet and playing in the community a little bit and keeping an eye on things when we go live. I think the, the goal for us is to— when we, when we think about what we care about and achieving going live, it's on one hand, you know, helping to reach new users and making sure that like lots of people have an opportunity to get involved in Beara chain. On the other hand, you know, if the chain's called Proof of Liquidity, there better be a bunch of liquidity on it. So making sure we bring a whole bunch of capital into the ecosystem, uh, and then doing right by all the application builders, community members, folks that have been, you know, riding with us for the past couple years. So I just say, you know, keep your eyes peeled, and if there's an opportunity to get involved, please take it. And if you are— if you happen to be like a, you know, retail trader, investor, builder kind of guy or girl who wants to get involved and start messing around on the most fun chain there ever was, then please hit us up and we'd love to find a way to help. Shameless show, you know.

Easy.

Thank you so much for talking to us, Smokey.

Thanks for having me, guys. Much appreciated.