Can Proof of Liquidity Solve the Blockchain Trilemma? | Smokey the Bera

Transcript

I think the black pill that we took was people talk a lot about the blockchain trima but I don't think that that's practically what most devs are optimizing for I think they're optimizing for a much more practical trilemma of where they can get access to users other Developers for Integrations and liquidity or Capital right as opposed to necessarily decentralizations scalability security which of course you want to be able to check either way so I think the the second realization that we had was that it's really important for applications to have a reason to exist on chain a versus chain B hey everyone if you have been listening to Empire you know that Santi and I are fed up with unaffordable fees and frustrating transaction speeds that make the onchain experience basically unusable so the arbitrum team reached out and they

showed us the platform they showed us what you can do on arbitrum whatever you're doing you can experience frictionless transactions at lightning speed on arbitrum so head over to portal. arbitrum doio and check it out what's up everyone before we jump into today's episode I'm excited to share Empires first ever security partner Harpy is the best tool to prevent your wallet from theft in real time Harpy is not just a security solution they are a peace of mind solution but don't just take our word for it Harpy is the only wallet security solution that protected 100% of its users from attacks like The Ledger 1 and Q4 which was an offchain signature attack to learn more about Harpy click the link in the show notes

or visit Harpy doio ire this episode is brought to you by Supra an oracle provider across more than 50 different blockchains if you are building anything in crypto you likely need verifiable Randomness and you need oracles well for Empire listeners Supra is now offering a limited deal it is 12 months of supra free for any Empire listener you can go to supra.com that's supr ra.com for/ blockworks limited time only go check it out thanks sura for sponsoring Empire hey everyone uh welcome back uh today we have Smokey the co-founder of bar chain I've had the privilege of uh seeing

Smokey in the bar team build uh as an early investor and I'm very excited to bring him on I think it's G to be a great discussion uh talking about all things bear chain everything that's happening under the hood uh which is a lot and I think a lot of people are appreciating so uh anyways Smokey thanks for coming on and uh it's great to have you here yeah thanks STI glad to be here um should be a lot of fun I've definitely I've observed from the sidelines before but cool to be uh you know having a little fun in the spotlight as well yeah so for goex uh Smokey pinged me we were supposed to record this three days ago and he said like I have Co I just come out for Denver I think he still has Co so this is one of the hardest working MFS out

there and this is Testament he still has Co and he's here showing up so uh thanks for doing that uh so tell us a little bit about the the story of the conception of building uh be chain and kind of the the zero to one moment yeah for sure man and yeah I'll apologize in advance for any coughing fits or slightly prey best and sounding voice I promise it's not always like this but uh conference flu got us good and well this year like there were like 10 plus bears in Denver and um we threw like an all day event called bear PLA and I think some were in the you know shaking thousands of hands or whatever I I got I got wrecked so would be the time get who would have thought right who would have

thought um yeah man so to to answer the actual question um I think we we very much subscribe by accident to the whole idea of like you know something interesting will start out looking like a toy um for contacts myself my co-founder Papa have been in the crypto space since like 2015 um so you know started just buying eth and Bitcoin and all the fun stuff when we were you know doing our services or spending our our Tour of Duty in the valley if you will and building our first companies um and I think when you just see enough smart people moving in a given Direction you're like okay cool like you know I should probably not fade this like either everyone else is stupid or I'm stupid and we definitely do have a habit of betting on our own stupidity which um beain has perhaps been an extended

exercise in um so you know over time I think that uh we saw a bunch of fun stuff come and go we saw the shitcoin SL like the you know the icos of 2017 2018 um we saw like defi summer actually kick off we saw like some of the cool stuff in defi 1.0 um and I think it was in like summer of 21 when we saw parallels start to take on off um at the same time as like a bunch of these D5 communities are ripping whether that's oh alchemics Olympus Etc or you know curve fracks Etc um and we're like okay cool like you know all this funky stuff is happening on chain um and now for the first time there's like what looks like a pretty high quality game um with like you know this whole like mag of the Gathering Hearthstone on chain Vibe um and there's

all these like high quality nfts that they're putting out so pop and I had been spending a bunch of time in like these defi discords at the same time as like you know paying attention to parallel and like playing the first couple of pack drops and whatnot and was like H look maybe there's something fun that we can do more than anything for just shits and giggles like there was no Grand end vision of a chain there was just like hey what if we made some some nfts for fun you know sold them to some of our friends see if they're into it and then kind of just like you know wing it from there um and that was honestly the the the Genesis of all this which is is very like [ __ ] and hilarious in hindsight honestly and um we you know

Papa Drew 100 jpegs of be smoking weed and we literally uploaded them in the like like the most Hood manner possible like open sea store tokens not even like you know proper 's and raffled them off in a whole bunch of different defi discords so a bunch of these went out to like the OM Community a bunch of these went out to like Frack a bunch of these went out to like curve and alchemics and stuff and they were like being sold at 0.069 eth or something back in the days where I guess back when he was 4K again is so you know not enough to really put people out a bunch but definitely not like you're you're oh my God this is such a an overpriced entertainment kind of moment um and we ended up with a very like interestingly distributed Community

you had on one hand these groups who were just like highly defi native highly defi Centric spent all their time thinking about the next onchain game and then you had these people who are like oh cool funny jpeg of a bear I'm gonna buy it because I like nfts and um I think somewhere in that mix we ended up striking a really nice mix of like left curve and right curve um and ended up with like a pretty cool um I'd say version of what we think about a lot is like you know just a barbell or or a horseshoe Theory kind of thing where you have like the far left and the far right intersecting uh and we actually just ended up like talking with these guys over time and as we you know did that we also made a series of honoraries for

like some of our friends on CT folks like Zeus and DCF God and so on so forth um and we were you know talking to some of those friends and we're like you know what if we found a way to take this a little bit beyond like your standard you know kind of like wacky nftd project and added a little bit of like Game Theory to it so we decided to make the the jpegs of the Bears rebase and we're like cool we're going to you know have collections they're not exact can have like, 1600% apy and and rebase three times a day but we'll we'll allow for a cool distribution mechanism that means that we can put out a new collection every couple of months and let that you know that that Supply decentralize over time while basically rewarding initial holders so people who hold held one of

the initial initial Bears ended up with like one the second collection people who held those two ended up with another two you can go from like 1 to two to 4 to 8 to 16 you know 32 Etc Bears um and I think that was the point at which we decided to do the thing that I I think that I found less of my protocol founder friends doing and the thing that like you know YC Etc just kind of Beats into your head which is to a try to make something that people want uh and B to actually talk to your users and you know find a h 100 people that love the idea of what you're doing um and even better actually love an interactive product and um as we talk some more more of these people within like this this barbell group as I mentioned we had a bunch of

folks who were fairly technical who are running nodes who had been you know involved in like you know basically running notes since like e Genesis Etc um and we have them like fairly on chain nowadays and um the question that we found them asking quite a bunch was uh I guess like this this logical tradeoff or this fallacy of of liquidity and security and their interaction on chain in that if they had a given pool of capital they had to choose to either allocate that to Stak with a validator you know um or to you know onchain liquidity and Unis swap a whatever it might be and it was very like nonsensical that by contributing to the security of the network they were inherently detracting from the liquidity or the onchain activity uh and vice versa right um and I think we we certainly believe that

like lsts are a meaningful step in the right direction there um but this is also like you know mid late 21 early 22 Igan layer was barely a concept that people knew about um and and even still you know as we think about this in the context of today I think I super interesting but isn't necessarily all-encompassing in terms of liquidity um it's more about you know what can one do with ethanol if it's different forms um and we basically thoughts would it be possible to build a network that actually allowed you to fundamentally align incentives between security and liquidity um at the protocol level and I think that this was sort of bolstered by another set of you know realizations that we had while playing these different chain rotations and exploring all the different alel ones well that's you know near and and Santia if I recall

correctly you're pretty involved in that ecos at one point or avac or Phantom or anything in between um and just seeing more than anything else like ecosystems with hundreds of millions of dollars if not billions sitting relatively inactive in their valuator sets like contributing to network security while the chain itself was just dead like absolute Ghost Town um Andor the applications living on top of it if not entirely dead were entirely devoid of any reason to exist on chain a versus chain B right like I think the black pill that we took was people talk a lot about the tremma but I don't think that that's practically what most devs are optimizing for I think they're optimizing for a much more practical trilemma of where they can get access to users other Developers for

Integrations and liquidity or Capital right as opposed to necessarily decentralizations scalability security which of course you want to be able to check either way so I think the the second realization that we had was that it's really important for applications to have a reason to exist on chain a versus chain B um and I don't think that a reason that that lasts it's simply like hey we gave you a grant now you can live for two months I think that it actually has to be much more mechanistically enshrined and much more I'd say closely intertwined that application itself and that's sort of where that that second extension of proof of liquidity came to mind which is okay can we allow any form of liquidity including that contributed to or that derived from other applications living on a network to actually become part of

chain security um and that's basically my my long-winded answer for you know how we thought about bear chain it's you know how do we actually turn liquidity into security and how do we make that a productive you know source of capital or source of efficiency for the applications that are building on the Chain itself yeah definitely so I think when I first heard the pitch proof of liquidity really resonated with me as someone that is actively in thinking and using Defi and at the time you know as you said Ian layer was not really in the in the picture but you know in today's world I want to double click on what you just said like how do you see proof of liquidity relative to how ethereum is kind of shaping up with you know

obviously Pro of stake uh and you know a lot of these kind of derivative products to yeah try to get out what you guys have probably do more natively which is just more Capital efficiency and Alignment between security and liquidity but I want to dive deeper into that yeah yeah no it totally makes sense man and and I think it's a good question um because there's the devil's always in the details and so is the Nuance right um and I guess rule number one of CT crypto and Generals that people don't read um so the way that we think about it is that um proof of liquidity in many ways is a variant of delegated proof of stake but there's some pretty important differences um one is that you know it actually relies on you know what we have in in a sort of a dual token and it's

actually a tri token system for us specifically because there's also a network stable coin that's very low risk Etc um but for us proof liquidity really comes down to the interactions between two tokens bgt or the Bara governance token and Bara um which is the gas token liquid token for Network the first thing to keep in mind is that bgt is a natively el liquid soulbound token um which is to say that one cannot Market buy it one cannot just go purchase it on a DEX they actually have to do the work or provide the value of providing liquidity to the ecosystem in order to earn bgt itself um so that in itself is like the basis for for proof liquidity in that the staking token and the governance token of the network bgt can

only be obtained via actually doing the work of providing liquidity and I think that's part of like the the social contract or the consensus that we want to enforce which is to say in order to reap the the you know the rewards of network governance or network staking you have to first provided the value that we think is most essential to the network I.E liquidity right so um to go more granularly the way that this actually works on the network level is that bechain has a set of you know 100 plus validators um and each of those valid validators have their own um you know you could think of it as a gauge or cutting board in the same way their fracks or curve gauges and validators when they win a block are basically able to allocate their block Awards across

the different pools on the network so that starts with you know something as simple as the deck the per Vault and the lending Market that'll be live when the chain goes live um and valuators can basically choose to forward or redirect their block Awards towards those different points in the network in the form of that bgt um and at the same time users can choose to delegate their bgt that they've earned via providing liquidity in one of those venues to the validator uh to a given validator depending on how it's Distributing its bgt so for example you could have a user who has a large you know position in the decks and they could choose to you know delegate the vast majority of the bgt that they earn to where it's a validator that's doing the same and that is

effectively pushing the vast majority of their block Awards towards the the Dex pools they're p in um on the other hand you could have a validator that's taking a much more you know index like approach and is effectively you know pushing part of its block Awards towards a per per Vault and towards pool a on the decks and pool B on the lending Market Etc and a user who might have a more Diversified portfolio might actually choose to work with that validator um so you know the the whole the whole idea of proof liquidity is that in order to earn the Sten token um of the network and the governance so the network you have to first do the worker providing liquidity and by voting with or staking with the Val ators that are you know effectively determining where Emissions on the network go you were able to as a user

help control the flow of incentives and therefore ideally liquidity across the network um and at any point in time one can take that bgt um and one way burn it into Bara the gas token so you can never just go buy a bunch of B of Bara and turn it into bgt but you can take the bgt that you've earned via providing liquidity on the network and turn it into Bara um so I think that's the the most base implementation of it there's definitely more Nuance there in that you know protocols can work directly with validators to incentivize their own liquidity pools uh and over time you know the part of proof liquidity that I think gets most exciting uh and I think is is a major deviation beyond what I've already described from proof of stake is

that over time any smart contract on bear chain can plug into proof of liquidity it can actually become an eligible destination for bgt emissions and generation so you could have a you know delta neutral Vault you could have have an nft amm like pseudos swap you could have anything that people are effectively depositing liquidity into and in exchange for some portion of that application's value generation whether that is fees whether that is token emissions Etc going towards the bgt stakers on the network you can actually have the chain itself directing emissions and part of its block rewards that bgt reward uh towards that new application and I think that's what gets really cool because you know I don't

think there's an example to date to my knowledge at least of a proof of stake chain that can actually you know power the applications building on top of it right we've seen CSR type approaches that sort of you know give rebates of sorts to the largest gas consuming you know contracts on the network but I don't think that's actually the chains block rewards going towards the protocols that are being you know deemed as most important by its validators and users and I think that's the the social contract that gets uh very exciting over time and hopefully gives more and more applications a reason to actually build on be chain uniquely because they can turbocharge their Capital efficiency they can effectively enshrine themselves into the chain uh and they can find a way to work with the validators to gain

a mechanistic advantage in a manner where I don't think they could anywhere else yeah how is the allocation uh decided in terms of the bgt rewards yeah so it's it's entirely done by the validator set so you know any and I guess the way to think about it is that you know validators will have different amounts of bgt Stak uh with the or you know delegated to each of them and each validator will also have it its its own customized distribution of how they wish to you know divide that bgt across the network right in terms of where there will forward those emissions so what actually determines the you know rewards rates across the network or across all the pools being powered by pref

liquidity is the weighted average of each of those validators right so you know one validator might have 100,000 bgt Stakes them another might have 10 right um so obviously one will have much more weight than the other um but it's effectively the valid intercept and the users distribution of their delegations um that determines the network reward rates and the the breakdown the bgt in that model can you talk about who the validators are and could they have a misalignment of interests or incentives when it comes to allocating that bgt yeah yeah for sure so you know the vors on the Chain will will have a I think a few different profiles um on one hand

there'll be a number of your I'd say your classic sort of most established validator groups so think like your figments and your kills and your coinbase clouds and all those types of groups um who are just experienced node operators that can can keep up with good Network upgrades all that kind of stuff um on the other hand I'm sure that we'll have a number of investors um that'll be looking to run their own nodes and folks that have you know previously been private participants in Bear chain rounds um we also expect to see some of the largest LPS on the Chain um serving as volunteers at some point for those that are competent in running node operations um because you know it actually very cleanly sort of satisfies that social contract that we discussed right if someone is going to be you know dropping $25 million into a stable pool

um they're contributing a lot of value to the network that should allow them to you know gain a pretty meaningful initial bgt stack and they as a validator could also choose to do as much as possible to direct more towards their pools um we also do expect to see a few protocols running validators um which I think becomes really interesting uh and opens up a little bit more of of a competitive Dynamic so for example some of the ones coming out of the the chain incubator the build-a bearer program we expect to see some of those guys running validators and some of the larger names that are coming over from other chains which we can't exactly you know disclose as of yet but it's definitely one way for those groups to have a little bit of like Edge in the in the market um the thing that gets

interesting is like I think that the incentive Marketplace that'll be built on top of the validators should allow for you know the most efficient market to rign free um in that at any point in time you know a new protocol will be able to effectively submit an offer or you know bribe I think like vum cell in in a manner to the validator Set uh and you know whichever validator chooses to to pick that up um will a be able to have a call option on that that protocol in the form of its token its fees whatever it might be um while B effectively being able to actually help power that protocol from an emissions and capital efficiency point of view um a lot of this goes towards I think um the end point that I mentioned of really just getting the best protocols to build

on the chain and actually getting the validator set to work closely with those groups such that we actually I think strive towards as meritocratic of a system as possible right if you're a validator and you and you're figuring out what you want to do with your block Awards um you can either choose to double down on you know the the most classic perhaps High yielding pools um or high activity pools or you could basically say hey there's this new protocol that I want to have exposure to and I want my delegates to have exposure to why don't I work with them and direct some portion of my rewards there um and when we think about ways that this could be you know exploited or or you know effectively enforced in a manner that's that's negative a lot of it does and and will come down to governance and social

contract um I do think that the nice part is though you know the governance here is very much people who have had to put skin in the game um and people who have had to you know do the work contributing to liquidity if they want you know say over how it actually flows um so I'm sure that I'm sure that in practice we'll definitely have events where people try to do you know weird like Mochi like stuff but I also do um have belief and I think we think a lot about the initial validator set selection and or delegation uh and ensuring that they're sort of responsible actors um you know with the network safety and long-term Health uh at as their priorities which is of course why I mentioned some of the private investors some of the protocols

Etc um you want folks who care a lot about and who are have a vested interest in that work you know living for a very long time safely yeah and what do what do these emission curve look like um yeah so we've um we've been joking about the the bear chain happenings um in that you know the well I can't say exact apy um we do expect to have you know meaningful inflation to start um enough to really you know give proof liquidity a good amount of juice uh and allow those those block boards to flow well um and then to basically have a series of happenings um you know first one after like a year and change secondy one after another one so on so forth um with the idea of basically you know driving inflation to the you know low single digits over time as sort of a

maintenance rate yeah um so I want to maybe focus a little bit on the journey to what you are now and the road map and how you you know see the next year unfolding for you guys um but so timeline wise just walk us through so like the nft conception and then you start building a bear um how long did that take You're Building through the bear no you're building bear through the bear so how was that where are you now and what are the thing like what's in store for the next six 12 months yeah for sure um there's there's a lot coming and there's a lot in the past I suppose so you we

sort of that our and I don't think that fundraising is a milestone but I do think it's something that ends up as being a little bit of an anchor Point um so you know I'll discuss you know with context of that as well so you know I'd say the the idea fully found its its wings uh probably in like early 2022 um the nfts themselves were for the most part like over the course of like mid 21 to like late 22 in terms of like those different collections coming out over time and the community growing and growing and and sort of like you know effectively snowballing a little bit um and I think the the whole idea of like bear a chain uh is something that we started like you know basically joking with people about and and throwing around a little bit more seriously um in

like that early 22 time frame uh and actually for the longest time you know the meme that we were just like doubling down on was we were just like yeah bear chain isn't real um because we'd have a bunch of people you know asking us if we were building a chain we're like no there's there's no way the anonymous Bears could build a chain that's ridiculous um and we just thought it was kind of funny um it it may have worked too well to an extent because because we ended up with a whole bunch of folks actually thinking that bear chain wasn't real and being like Oh I thought was just like a crypto Twitter meme uh so you know we're glad that we kind of proved that part wrong um you know we basically started building out the team on the engineering side in that like

early 22 time frame um Dev bear you know who who leads all technical operations internally spent the vast majority of his career at Apple previously you know studied one engineering at a top engineering school in Canada um and was like you know building out the entire base plate for this uh and I think our first major public release of that was um was Polaris which is like sort of our our open source uh implementation of of evm on Cosmos um it's currently under a b USL license but we plan to open source it over time just wanted to make sure that we you know we relatively protected until until the chain itself goes live so that we don't have to deal with even more Barry chain copycats than we have at the moment um and then uh you know we basically announced our our series a our

larger fund raise in the um in in like I believe it was April 23 we actually completed the majority of that while FTX was blowing up over the year before um which was lots of fun and I'm sure you remember that market fondly um and then you know I'd say yeah our public code debut was uh with Polaris was sort of in like that March that like you know q123 time frame and then after that we really started more aggressively expanding the the BD and growth team um for the longest time it was sort of just myself and home from our team um spending time like talking to projects cultivating the community a little bit um just trying wear every hat possible and we wanted to make sure that as we started thinking about International expansion as we started thinking about sort of more formal I'd say breakdown within the

growth team whether that be devil functions marketing functions you know valid inter relation functions everything in between U that we we hit that stride at the right time um and then you know we launched our test net in January of this year um has been pretty exciting we did like a couple of small private test Nets with you know some 50 75 projects that wanted to build with us prior to that in just like a very lock down you know password protected manner uh towards you know sort of the end of last year and then um you know took the rains off a bit and and decided to show the world what we've been cooking up earlier this year um so you know it's it's been a wild journey and we've SE the team go from like you know three dudes like living together to

like you know seven dudes in a house to now like close to 45 people um with the entire engineering team in Toronto uh and the the growth and and sort of like BD team that I spend more time on um pretty globally distributed so there's folks in Korea there's folks in you know mainland China there's folks in India there's folks in Dubai um there's a decent contingent in like New York and New Jersey and then of course there's a decent Toronto presence as well um which is where we're we're Sur all headquartered so we've just been expanding all over the place um and are looking towards our main net uh within the next few months um So within the next six to 12 months we should see you know the token live we should see bear chain Alive and Kicking

um we should probably see the next batch of projects out of the the build-a bear incubator as well um which we've been seeing a ton of inbound for more recently um and I hope to see just like a very buzzing Lively real ecosystem um I think that like you know what what's always been most exciting to me and where I spend um as much time as possible is just thinking about the zero to one stuff that can exist on bear chain or that bear chain is uniquely sort of built to serve um and can really just you know how how we can help enable that next group of of Builders who could go anywhere but but see a real fit here whether that be user base whether that be culture whether that be mechanism design um and I'm excited to start seeing you know more and more of those

groups sort of come out of stealth announce their rounds announce that they'll be launching first on bear chain um all that kind of stuff because I I think that's something we've we've talked about a whole bunch internally um is like you know what our approach is to the whole like next million next billion users thing is and I think I think while it has been a lot of a bit of a meme to date honestly um I do think there's a number of paths forward there I think that on one hand you need these projects that are like GMX they're like front Tech they're like arbit they're like dfk that actually have a chance of being like a vacuum for new people net into an ecosystem um and I think you also need a really healthy degree of like you know user like chain abstraction ux

improvements account abstraction type stuff that makes it friendly and usable for a new person um and ultimately if we model um a chain as the some of all the applications that are living on top of it in the same ways like you know I think you think about an operating system whether it's like Android or iOS you don't necessarily think to no end about the operating system you think about you know how it improves your quality of life and the apps you can uniquely use on one of those operating systems um we want to make sure that the apps that are building things that people actually want to use uh are living on bear chain um and that we are that home or that sandbox for people building cool new interesting things um both culturally and mechanistically so I think that's like the the real end goal

next 6 to 12 months how do we have all the new Heavy Hitters um building cool new stuff on Barra and what's the pitch to so you mentioned there's a lot of like firsttime builders on Bara but the pitch to protocols that are in another ecosystem what is the pitch to them yeah for sure I think there's um there's a mixture there right on one hand there's this idea of like okay you know if you guys want to you know turbocharge your Capital efficiency if you want to access a bunch of users who are actually pretty engaged and and have actively tried new products whether that's maxing out sort of the you know every new options platform or every new nftf platform um or just generally have meaningful onchain net worths from every piece of

data that the one can find um you know there's a there's actually like a captive audience there's users there there's liquidity and then on the other hand um it's actually showing them um not even just the the firsttime application Builders but the experienced application builders that will be launching new applications for the first time on be chain and how they could plug into some of those ones and effectively the synergies are like the the king maker trades that could uniquely exist for some of the apps that are building on Bara um with bringing other people over so you know for example like there's the guys at Smiley Finance who I'm Who I'm fans of they are you know part of the the Italian options Mafia that builds really cool products but a lot of people you know it goes over their heads or it's just under the hood

and you know a lot of proof liquidity will revolve around the or revolve around products that will have some degree of intermittent loss um you know for uh for basically you know the people who are involved there right um sorry impermanent loss my bad for people who were involved there um and these guys build actually like really cool like yield hedging products that can allow people to actually hedge their ilil which could like pair super nicely with even the native decks or a number of the other applications building on top of the chain right so I think that being able to show people um that there are some very unique and inter you know some of the parts is greater than the whole opportunities here um has been a great pitch to builders um and also like a vibrant and real ecosystem um and I think that's that's become like

a bit of like a a meme as well over time as people are just like oh yes like look at my ecosystem look at my like you know 10 vome forks and like three uni forks and like two a Forks um and I think that the nice part has been that when Builders look under the hood here um they see a like you know there's a vast majority of of quality of life Services um that they've been used to on other chains whether that's just ease of deployment of code and evm equivalence um or on the other hand you know account abstraction on ramps you know different wallet accesses H sort of like everything in between there um and they have just access to an ecosystem that has like people building new stuff that they haven't seen before and I think Builders really do appreciate that um

because I think they're also a little bit tired of like the the Grant and like you know chain of the day rotation meta yeah yeah so much of the pitch that I hear from teams is look we want to plug into ethereum because that's where the users and the liquidity exists from your standpoint how important is that or yeah how important is that for you no totally I think that and you know it's an interesting it's an interesting question because it it makes me think of another one that we've discussed a lot um I personally do not necessarily ascribe to the belief uh around an ethereum killer at the moment I think there's a world where in like I think there's a world down the road where you have um you know ethereum killers that perhaps with a massive

amount of of social tide changing um and buy in from major major institutions your your Googles your apples whatever it is that actually have the Firepower and the distribution to achieve that uh could could will into existence um but I actually think that you know the majority of chains right now are our best positions as as ethereum adjacent right and having access to a lot of e like resources but not necessarily deviating from the ecosystem self um and I think I I view us very similarly like I'd love to see us right up there beside Eve in terms of you know a chain that has a similar set of resources um perhaps one day a greater and or a similar amount of capital uh and a great you know Dev community and user

Community um but I think that it's foolish to assume that that's you know feasible out the gates um what I do think is entirely possible um is to build an ecosystem that allows you to have the access of you know the capital the users the liquidity from eth and that's easily enabled by different bridging solutions by different sort of like middleware Solutions so for example for us you know we'll have layer zero there day one we expect to have outposts for liquidity acquisition on a number of different chains for a number of the applications that will be living natively on be chain such that we can actually you know be a little bit more like as much of a meme as it is like eth aligned or like eth adjacent right um and do our best to to have access to those resources without necessarily

living solely on ethereum yeah so I think we we think about it like a lot more in terms of eth proximity as opposed to necessarily one to one on eth a lot of the challenges historically has been that liquidity is very fickle and is a hot ball of money that is constantly trying to optimize um is how do you think about that and you know in proofer liquidity because the incentives are kind of perhaps more aligned and enshrined does that create more stickiness to liquidity or do you foresee you know the same Dynamic where people are just trying to optimize um

and Chase kind of better yielding opportunities yeah I think it determines it it's determined a lot by the profile of user that we end up attracting at the end of the day um I think that in all cases liquidity is always mercenary and I think it's rational for liquidity to be mercenary right um I think most people are not necessarily onchain to change the world I think they're onchain to make a buck which you know I can respect um and I think that when we model that the way that we thought a lot about bear chain is how do you give people the greatest amount of utility and the greatest amount of flexibility with share liquidity right like how do you have your stake in E to2 without creating you know threatening situations from a safety or leverage point of view

right um you know so for example we often end up with a question of like you know what happens if if liquidity is pulled from bear chain right in like relative mass right does that cause a death spiral does bar chain blow up it's actually you know I understand why people would ask that because it is of course proof of liquidity um but that is just you know a name for it at the end of the day you know the chain doesn't blow up if people you know lose emissions or sorry if people take out their liquidity um rather it just means that emissions are more concentrated to the group of people that remains right um there's a presumably market equilibrium where that increases the API attracts new users exactly exactly and there's other other Nuance there around how you know bgt itself acrs fees from

the Network's operation so at some point it's actually sort of more EV positive for theoretically for a user to hold that bgt that's occurring yield over time um than to just you know sell and to Bear withdraws their liquidity Etc but that that's a whole different Rabbit Hole um I think that for us the whole the thing that's that's very interesting is that I believe that we give users more flexibility in terms of what they can actually do with their staked or lped capit um than any anywhere else right so you know they don't have to change their user behavior in lping um in these different applications especially as more and more end up being powered by proof liquidity over time they rather just end up having their emissions boosted you know by the chains emissions itself uh and actually then get to

choose what to do with their bgt and then they can choose to either use that to you know basically delegate to validators that are being incentivized by their applications and use that to gain call options on you know cool interesting new depths or they can just use that to you know boost their own yields or they can use that to just earn fees right I think what what I'm getting at is um proof liquidity is meant to make liquidity as sticky as possible by boosting the yields in some manner but on the other hand um by actually just giving users more optionality in terms of what they can do without sacrificing their initial desired position and changing their Market Behavior yeah I guess to compare it blast seems like closest to proof of

liquidity with the Nuance allow and you correct me that for instance now people deposit and blast earning blast points now that apps have launched there are multipliers if you're using the apps you earn uh app points you also get blast points if you're using and encourages usage of these apps but I guess it's not um at the mechanism level that is more I mean I I guess the question really is how do you think about blast in the context of proof of liquidity yeah I think that both groups have um a focus

on on Capital efficiency in some manner in terms of like you know the underlying rebasing on blast um and in terms of the point multiplier systems um I think that what's different here uh in the way that we think a lot about Pro liquidity is how those value flows are aligned right um you know there's no single centralized actor there's no group that's saying hey this app gets more you know emissions in that app um there's only effectively what the validators and what the users on the Chain who have contributed liquidity get to say um so I think that the I think that the whole idea of an application being able to you know launch on be chain and then actually plug into po uh and have the

network dictate its outcomes to some extent um you know is is pretty different from what we see there in that you effectively have the users um in control of of where the applications end up incentive wise and I think that that's like really important to actually focus on users and how to make their experience as good as possible um but I do think that both groups have a focus on you know increasing Capital efficiency in some manner yeah in the so the validators and in a scenario where there's one validator I don't know if this is possible one validator has a disproportionate share of the governance power Y how do you are you a concerned about that being a kind

of an attack vector or a or are there mechanisms in place to you know make governance less of a kind of surface area if you will from that yeah yeah no it's it's a great question and and that is perhaps like the the biggest Potential Threat to to be chain as a whole um and that's actually part of why you know one of the first projects that came out of builda um is called infrared and it's effectively you know a combination of a few different things but on one hand an LST um on the other hand a governance aggregator and on sort of the final hand like a block building layer over time um in sort of an me uh operation context such that you know proof liquidity has pretty interesting incentives in place from a block

ordering point of view because these validators are each incentivizing different pools some of which they might be depositing into as well right um and you actually want to ensure that that's done in a relatively you know neutral and censorship resistent way over time but also that as a validator you're building the most effective blocks possible right and and ordering transactions in a manner that is you know not threatening to the network but also good for you financially if you're running an MV operation right um so part of what we wanted to do by working with the infrared guys who are you know good friends of the team uh is ensuring that if there was to ever be an actor um that had a mean you know meaningful amount of of network control um that they were very much you know I think onside incentivized um you know non-malicious

actors right um and that's why you know their system involves basically people being able to deposit into the various you know po venues through infrared and receiving IBG um a liquid staking token derivative of bgt over time um that they can then choose to you know use in their onchain interactions as they should wish um so so in short you know there I wouldn't say that there's a a hardcoded technical condition um and you know sadly actually the ma the vast majority of Cosmos chains at the moment can be taken over by like their top three to five validators right um and you know always like to emphasize like B Be chain is very evm on the top but at the validator logic level it's it's tenderman consensus it's it's there's Cosmos under the hood um even though the

vast majority of users wouldn't be able to tell that um but the second thing is that like from a network incentiv point of view I'd say that you know bear chain is very much set up to um really in you know I'd say to incentivize stake decentralization right because you have each of these validators with their different incentives and in many cases you'll have some of these protocols Runing their own valers as well and I think that what that actually does is it creates a number of different incentive schemes or you know Game Theory paths if you will for users to subscribe to um when they're choosing what to actually do with their tokens right um so I think it's it's it's very unlikely that we find a situation where between the incentives markets and the inherent incentives of different validators um that we actually end up in a SC where we

just have one Behemoth likee figure in the network yeah no I agree and the reason I asked is because historically you there is this tendency for validators to kind of cluster of course increasingly Lio and then you look at you know in Cosmos you look at all some of the app chains there's like exactly concentration is high and and tends to be higher over time you've got it you've got it and and our goal is very much like I I think we as a chain like ethos wise We Care a Lot about maintaining competition um I think that if you have a non-competitive ecosystem it blows up over time um and I think that that we we we believe that that should ascribe to the validator marketplace as well right and that's why

you know having these different protocols figure out their effectively like you know their their bribe Marketplace or matchmaking system um allows for these different validators to have a leg up in terms of how they want to acquire users delegate stake Etc all right I mentioned them in the pre-roll now I'm going to bring them up again it's arbitrum Santi and I are really fed up with these high fees and we're really excited to have teamed up with arbitrum for the next couple of months on Empire as the leading ethereum scaling solution arbitrum now Powers hundreds of decentralized apps across defi hers nfts gaming and a whole lot more the team has showed us everything in the ecosystem both now and what's to come and we're really really excited about it arbitrum allows both daily

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I think the the only thing I'd add is like one thing that we think about a lot and I think that informs like our our our building ethos if you will is the idea of like where value flows from and where it should flow to um and I think that's like the the biggest thing that led us to a lot of the the changes or conclusions that we made um to prove liquidity over time and that you know I think in a traditional proof of stake chain you tend to see a lot of value acre at the validator level right and that's great validators are super important in keeping the network alive um and you know making sure that things are safe and that the chain does not go down or halt um sometimes there's a bullish halt but most cases less so right I I think that um in proof of

equity the whole idea is that we're in service of the protocols and the users themselves uh and that's probably the part that I would really try to to nail home um because while we do love our validators and we do think that they have actually unprecedented economic control and ability to to gain economic upside in be chain um what we do care about a ton is the users that are actually on the Chain itself and the protocols that are actually bringing in new users like we model a chain like ours very much as like a B2 B to B A B2B Toc function right in that you know I don't think that people will want to use bear chain just because it's be chain like I think that's cool and I'd love if just you know the Vibes the culture the community it but people want to use it

because of what is on be chain right um and I think that by empowering the protocols to an extent that we haven't seen before uh and in turn letting the users decide which protocols really are empowered and which ones wi um I think we create the first system that as I see it um has value flows appropriate aligned right it's not just going to the minors it's not just going to validators it's going to them in whatever way they want especially with tons of upside to them if they work with the best protocols that are bringing new users into the chain and I think the Das is like the the most exciting like philosophy that I've seen around the building side yeah historically that's been probably the biggest point of tension in ethereum right you see time and time again from dyx to so many

people within the ethereum camp that end up going to as you say you know start their own eth killers and it really boils down to this concentration of rewards to a particular group whereas this presumably locks in and everyone shares in a more Equitable manner creates more consumer preference creates more uh line flows as you say so yeah it'll be interesting to observe for sure um I guess sometimes like when you I want to talk about skillability fees and how would that might compare to salana to an Ethel to um and particularly on the user side

you know do you have a view where you guys Canna place on that map for sure for sure um and you know that's one of the things that we think about the most especially because like you know one of the biggest issues that we had with our testnet was we were you know thrilled to see the the amount of user inflow um but we did not expect like a million users you know I I always say the word users with with air quotes here right like it's definitely 50 plus% Bots from the data that we've seen um we'll take it over like the standard of like 80 plus perc Bots but you know still uh we we didn't expect the degree of traffic that we saw um and that actually caused us to run into some fundamental scaling issues that haven't actually been seen since

like Tera blew up in a cosmos chain um which is like you know a a champagne problem in some ways a problem problem in other ways right um so we've actually been spending a little while working on upgrades to the chain itself and its architecture um that moves closer to um you know a beacon chain like structure that actually you know resembles a lot more like eth Mana which we just thought is really funny at the end of the day um but something that allows us to maintain um a ton of users without having as much of a dependency on the cosmos men pool or the comet M Pool I should say which has been a subject of great contention uh or debate and every now and then a major blocker for folks including ourselves um so by moving you know the execution into the into the evm and

making our lives a little bit easier there um we should a unlock a fair bit more performance in terms of you know concurrent users and and traffic on one hand and on the other hand we actually end up with a chain structure that you know is even more interoperable or even easier for users to build around um than the current version of Polaris so Polaris has already you know been demonstrated to be pretty compatible across a stack for different rollups so if someone wants to deploy an OP stack rollup to to plis we've done this in the past with with the guys at celesia and just for explicit context Polaris is effect fact with like our version of evm on Cosmos it's the base PL that bar chain is built upon so if you thinking about it as a stack you know you have Cosmos logic underneath you have like

the plis evm um and then you basically have like the P logic you know basically wrapped on top of that or into the validator set for be chain itself to work um and what we basically found over time is that we can build a solution that should have you know fairly low fees I think there's a there's a good amount of control over that um I don't think they will shoot for quite as low fee wise as salana but I think that's somewhere in like the you know the avax and or polygon impr of stake type of like you know Fe F layer is probably where we where we end up by um while at the same time you know maintaining our block times as as as low as possible looking s of the one to two second range and ideally driving those down more and

more over time while being able to support lots of different rollups for application specific use cases so we're starting to see the first couple of rollups pop up already on bar um there's Shogun which should be like super cool um intense you know yeah like and I just a I love the product and B I think it's very interesting from a be point of view and that the whole idea is you know trade any asset from any chain um in like a coincidence of wants plus you know jit just in time LP vaults in parallel um while settling it on be chain so you know you just have like your your your Mothership for trading of sorts um while ideally passing through a network that should have some of the deepest liquidity flows on chain and then we already have other groups who are looking to build you know structure

product chains um gaming chains a couple consumer ideas um everything in between so I think when you say that it's using Polaris yeah you've got so they would either some of them will want to use Polaris itself as a rollup to Bear chain um other groups want to use like op stack I think those have been the the two most like popular options to date um in terms of actually you know building a roll up to be chain and when someone builds a rollup on Bara how does that fee sharing or like governance sharing happen is it basically the same if they're plugging in the rewards can be routed to them and that's exactly what we're sort of like you know architecting right now but um ideally yes and what we think is like extremely interesting is

sort of like you know apps you know basically app chain specific rollups right um rolling up to be chain and being eligible for bgt distributions and or you know bgt incorporation via po um in the same way that any application living on be chain might be right because you know they can have their Super Clean Men pool they can capture their own me from the application and the users on the Chain um and they can perhaps you know plug into p in exchange for some portion of trading fees or sequencer fees or whatever it is that might make most sense yeah so I think that's like one of the very you know I I think the the beauty of p is like the degree of customizability that we can get in that you know an application really has to exchange value for liquidity but that

value can take so many different forms it could be commissions from an nft Marketplace it could be you know fees from a social f app like I think that that can be you know super malleable um and it actually just you know basically in Denver I had to I had to give a chat at both modu day and liquidity day at the same day so I decided to write a deck about modular liquidity I was literally just thinking that like reminds me so much of modularity but like module of liquidity I like it exactly right and I'm like listen this is kind of a meme but there's actually an element of Truth here and that proof of liquidity itself makes you know block rewards and incentives you know incredibly modular from a liquidity standpoint in terms of where it goes across the ch where they can be distributed what

they're distributed in exchange for everything in between right yeah um so you know I don't want to I don't want to you know vibe there for what it's worth I like the customization term better exactly it's just more precise I think and you know looking ahead you know in a world where we have these rollups using Polaris we have native apps like also plugging in to proof of liquidity is it fair to assume that in the early days most of the reward will be derived from the high emissions from bgt over time success probably looks like that shifts

from governance rewards to fees from apps in a in a world where you have a ton of thriving app ecosystem across different applications um the validators are probably earning I don't know maybe 8020 starts with bgt and then that shifts pretty on the app side more exactly exactly that's pretty powerful too because exactly right like what we think about is like what is something that can actually be sustainable for a meaningful time frame um and also like culturally enforces the right ideals right um and I think that that's like a point that sometimes goes underrated like a the a chains culture like what they what they

embody like from an ecosystem a building whatever point of view um is often like tough to exactly put a nose on right you think of of BSC as like a wild Casino you think of like you know optimism as a lot of like pretty like OG ethaline folks you think of arbitrum as like a home for pretty cool defi stuff right like Bas is starting to get in the mix there as well um I think that what we want to enforce both like mechanistically and culturally is this idea that like if people build cool stuff here they will win right and and I very much think that that's you know uh that's embedded within the valider logic and the incentive systems within the chain on the me side of things and the validation side of things like if a validator um has a pretty big stake say

that a validator like figment right they have a fund that is also investing in projects and they've been say that figment the capital invest in a bunch of projects like Shogun or whatever and then is is there like a potential like conflict of interest where like a validator um has a disproportionate say on like block ordering or me if they like want to really just prioritize one app versus another and then that is in conflict with another validator group like does that problem make sense like again would you mean to an extent I think that like again like you know

basically a validator will win will win more blocks if it has more bgt with it right um and presumably the validators that have the most bgt will be the ones that you know are directing emissions towards the pools that are most used across the network right so I do think that the free market to some extent helps resolve that problem um in terms of you know the incentives will flow towards the pools that are most productive but I also do think it's in it's entirely possible and likely that you know some of these you know groups and to be clear there won't be many like we're thinking like single digits in each of them um will be able to effectively you know prioritize their own applications and and their own you know vested interests right in the same way that any LP who any validator who is

also like a liquid fund May likely have like a meaningful amount of capital on chain be like cool you know I'm going to you know prioritize my transaction execution first right so I think that that I think I think both are feasible but I also think that with the right checks and balances um neither end up being you know spiral problems yeah it's I like the sort of the market takes care of it of these things exactly exactly and like customization exactly and I think that like sometimes just talk I think sometimes like the space airs in one of two directions to a fault it's either super L aair like trust me bro decentralized governance will figure everything out and then you end up with Cosmos right on the other hand sometimes

it's way too much like no we need to be you know everything Hands-On like there's no there's no room for flexibility whatsoever and then I think you end up with a centralized system and I don't think either of those outcomes are ideal I think what we're trying to go for is like you know a happy medium where there is some social Covenant there's some expectation of how people are to behave um but it's not to the point where it's like okay cool you do something bad and you get booted right I think that's what slashing and and everything in between is meant for yeah no definitely um what um what are the things that are you you're going to be paying most attention to now that you're kind of closer to

mainnet um you know oftentimes I think about the evolution of a network like ethereum and then also salana now to some extent where a lot of times like you set certain parameters fees in particular is what I'm thinking about that you just it's hard to model out and predict and over time they've had to revisit like e theum went through number of iterations and most importantly EIP 1559 um salana is probably going to have to do something similar is there something in your mind that it's kind of like a Known Unknown that you're GNA have to just over time figure out

through governance um another perhaps way of asking the question is like what are the biggest risks that you see yeah yeah but I like better kind of known unknowns because risks I think that like you know the so so to start like from a a scaling like fee point of view um I think there's a couple things that that keep me up at night um one is you know what happens if the validator set grows to some extent Beyond part of our control um as in if enough folks just via providing a ton of liquidity whatever it is um end up with a large enough delegation or effectively a large enough bgt stack um that the active set ends up expanding to the point where you know um block are no longer palatable right and you just end

up with like [ __ ] 10sec blocks or something right and then you you feel like you're on E main net um I think a lot of people like yeah I think a lot of people don't necessarily care about the um about the actual block time like there's actually just a whole bunch more Nuance in terms of like gas per second and like what the the the feel is is what I think people care about they want to feel like like you know they hit a transaction and even if it's like a soft confirmation Soul style right that that it went through where they're like they're probably good right um I think that's what the vast majority of users think about I think you know when you think about Quant trading groups and you know large liquid funds everything in between you know that's there's there's

more Nuance there for sure um but I think that that's one of the things that we we give some time of day to um not something that we worry about a ton um the Fe side as mentioned you know we will have like an EIP five an EIP 1559 type system like implemented as well so like gas will be burned when it's used on Virgin um so you know that should make our lives a little bit easier there but I'd say that since we aren't thinking ourselves thinking of ourselves either as like a you know the the lowest fee chain right I don't think that that's necessarily our our core Focus but also one that is relatively malleable over time from a government's point of view um one thing that I do think is kind of cool and an idea that we've been toing with but it's probably

just a little bit early for implementation for us is what some of these localized fee markets could look like um because I do think that there's promise there and I think that like um the idea itself like um makes sense from an implementation point of view um that's just probably likely more one of where you know devils in the details right um and then I think beyond that the the biggest practical thing that keeps me up at night is you know what happens if we just do not amass a ton of liquidity and what happens if proof liquidity does not lead to people being as sticky as we' like them to be right I think it's super easy to to model the world I'll like wag me and like like trust me I'll I'll turn on the gates and then you know the billions will flood in

um but I also think it's very important to to be pragmatic or um you know internally a little bit of a futter as well in order to ensure Max performance right um so that's why we think a lot about it in in a very you know non-lee Fair manner um we think about it in terms of you know how do we talk to people who acely want to use a chain how do we talk to groups that want to deploy you know idle liquidity how do we talk to different groups that actually want to move their tvl over from other chains whe that whether that be their treasury their vaults whatever it might be right um and you know do everything we can to stack the pads to have a strong Advantage rolling into launch such that you know we have the stage set correctly

for success in the long run so bgt is generating lots of fees validators are starting to work with protocols new ones are being launched and working with other groups on the Chain everything in between um so I think that's actually the part that like you know that that's the biggest thing that keeps me up at night in in other words yeah absolutely um have you been opinionated in the type of applications in so you mentioned baroa yeah I wouldn't say that um I wouldn't say we've been opinioned in it in as much as I think the applications building on the Chain um represent some of the team members different interest and and sort of like what we feel like

we can like add outsized value in right um and also what the chain is most optimized to support so for example I don't necessarily think that um from a liquidity or like Capital efficiency point view that's always a top priority for games but at the same time I do think that they care a lot about like a cash incens like a cost incentive uh and and like active and engaged user base right so popup from our team takes points on a lot of our gaming initiatives and whether they are projects that are building you know uh building games on chain or infrastructure and bringing you know five figures or eight figures of users um they have one reason to to care about what we're doing right um on the other hand you know myself Sammy you know Yogi who is part of you know some of the

first first defi protocols to ever exist um you know we we definitely air more towards Defi and are like cool like a lot of these applications will fit really well into approv of liquidity um then there's actually Our Roots as an nft project right so we have both bunch of folks who want to be like hey how do I go and build like nft per How I build a cool new marketplace with liquid backings you know how do I build like the next Chan of like nft production and or financialization permits um so I guess to answer the question most succinctly we definitely have a leaning in that I think that we are t-shaped with with a focus on defi um just given the structure of the chain but I very much think that we do not self- select out um because you end up with folks

building cool stuff in rwas in Social fi in gaming um in nft f everything in between yeah yeah I agree um timeline wise and I know you you may not want to commit to but just rough timeline and I don't want your engineers to kill you either of course taking but you know you've had mainnet you've had some success there a lot of interest um when when mainnet yeah yeah so you know Tesla has been good to us um I think that we're looking at mainnet you know sometime in Q2 Q3 so it's really not that far out now um you know of course there's always a little bit of like logistical stuff we'll need to

handle so you know finishing locking down on Market maker selections and all that kind of stuff and talking with some of our our lovely friends at Big exchanges and all that kind of stuff um but I think for the last little while we just wanted to make sure that product and scalability was in the best place possible before you know hitting the road I think I think the last thing that we want to do is ship something that we aren't proud of um or ship something that we don't think will you know very easily stand the test of time uh and I'm pretty excited about a lot of the the recent progress that's been made because I do think that that very much leaves us in a state where we can think to ourselves like yeah like this thing is going to run for 10 20 whatever years

and it'll it'll sustain in the future sure yeah yeah I think it begins and ends as you said with you have to believe that have conviction that there is a very thriving applications be being built that support the fee the fee mechan like because that drives everything it's so obvious but somehow we it can get lost when um with other things but it's always been clear for um I'm curious um I always like to kind of end these discussions um with you know as someone that you know you built bear through the bear um you've

been involved in crypto for a long time um what is surprised you the most and I think it's interesting to cons like set the stage because you built it not only at the time where like there's just so many l2s there so many competing you know EV like ethereum Killers yeah here you are building something new through a bare market and I'm curious like what has surprised you the most in this journey yeah that's interesting one um I think the I think the biggest thing that has surprised me probably one probably two things um one is that is it's very easy I think when you're when you're starting out um you know building in a new space that isn't super super

familiar from like a builder point of view right um it's it's easy to think like okay there's some pre-ordained book um there is a set of rules that I have to follow that leads to a win condition right like I check this box I check this box and I'm good um and I think that that's that's what we believed for some portion of time it's like okay cool like you know avax did this or Harmony did this or near did this or you know arbitrum did this therefore this is what we have to do um and then I think that like as you you meet your heroes or as you talk to on on a relatively like you know on a relatively raw level with a lot of these folks um it's the same thing that I think anyone learns like you know as they they grow up or as you

build your first company Etc and like for context Popa and I had both built companies in the other side of the Spectrum in like healthcare before this um so we definitely weren't unfamiliar with the feeling but we thought that there was a much more established Playbook I want to say in crypto and I I think quickly realized that um you know it's much less deterministic and rather it's actually one of the interesting Fields where leaning into the degree of of insanity or the lack of seriousness can be a massive source of edge if done correctly so I think that you know that was massively surprising um and I think that the other thing that was somewhat surprising um was just how mercenary and how low the bar can be at times right

like I think that I've rarely I I I think that when you when you have a new industry in a relatively nent space like crypto you do you do two things you attract the best of people and you attract the worst of people tot right you get the folks who are like hey I want to and fix this and make it better and you get the folks who are like yo this thing's [ __ ] let me extract as much value as possible and then get out right so I've met you know some of my favorite people working in this maze but I've also met some people who have you know just inexcusable [ __ ] to your behavior um that in web 2 would just get you like burned for life you know what I mean um and I'm sure you've seen this too having been in it for a while and

having you know shared a somewhat similar background of healthcare crypto Etc right so I think that that was that was a little bit of like a black pill for me yeah and sorry I think like one last thing um and this is probably the taboo point is I really truly believe and and I don't necessarily ascribe to this Camp as a caveat but I really truly believe that the vast majority of the participants do not care about the tech right now um For Better or For Worse right I agree um I and I I think that that like is also shocking um in a manner coming from a field that is very like empir Al driven very like rigor based very like you know you spend 10 years in a lab to spin out

something to try to get into some mice or something right and then you're like wait like no one cares about what's happening tech-wise right now all they care about is what people think is happening tech-wise right now um and that's that's a tough pill to swallow um especially if you're somewhat idealist right so I think that we've very much tried to do our best to um you know responsibly play the game in terms of narratives building Etc um while building Tech that we think can really have massive Edge um but it's really interesting to think about how it's all narratives and barbells all the way down yeah I I couldn't have said it better myself I mean I think if I were a builder and when I talked about it's I think you just

assume that it's going to be mercenary like the beauty of crypto which is also a bit of a curse is that it assumes that everyone will act in their best interest tell me and I think when often times people lean on the more idealistic side and that's where I think problems start to emerge yeah and so I think you just assume that the worst because if you if the system works under that type of stress then you really are setting yourself up for Success you've got it um and I think that should be kind of the operating assumption but you're right I mean it can be hard no and like look not to be not to be and people are bitching

you and screaming at you and guess the best way I've heard it's not recently we're talking about and someone said it look at least they care whether it's they're screaming so they're really passionate so you're doing something right it's like okay you know it it brings a couple things to mind that we say a lot internally right um the opposite of like of Love isn't necessarily hate it's apathy right it's it's just not caring right and then the other thing that's been really interesting to see especially anonymously which I think has been a massive Edge For Us in some ways even though it might be perceived as otherwise in others um has been the like you know something that that Papa said to me once and kind of stuck with me uh and we we say it a lot internally again

now too is that you know we tend to judge ourselves by our intentions uh and others by their actions right um and I think that the interesting thing about the crypto space with as many Anon characters as many people who's who are just abstracted in some manner is that there is perhaps the the greatest like playground for judging people based on their actions and what they do and not just what they say they're going to do and I think that's one of the things that I've appreciated a lot about the space every now and then like you know sucks and people just do bad things but every now and then you can just you know be the be incredibly pleasantly surprised by Ox water bottle kind of thing amen I mean don't send me a resume don't tell me what you think show me your onchain activity exactly exactly

show me your wallet yeah uh it's been a real treat um I think this discussion even as an investor has been a great catchup because uh I've appreciated so much what you guys are building and excited to see the kind of applications uh that are being built um and I think it it does lend itself to very I'm really more excited about the kind of zero to one the New Primitives and how this really tight alignment of security and liquidity which has been a challenge historically for every other chain um shapes up with you guys so um yeah it's uh it's very exciting so thanks for coming on Smokey real real treat uh we' want to do this for a while

and I'm glad we got it done uh I think it's at the I think it's at the really pivotal time you guys are are at and uh coming out of bar paloa coming out of you know testnet um any parting thoughts I guess where can people find more about the EOS system if they're interested in are you hiring or as a builder or just general parting yeah yeah for sure thanks man um a I appreciate the kind words has been a pleasure um B you know when we think about next things for us um we're going to be expanding pretty aggressively geographically um you know on the Tails of AR Rays um so we already have a few different outposts as I mentioned um but we're probably going to be doubling down and spending more time in um in Asia and

then after not too long Latin America and then Africa um so we're thinking a lot about southeast Asia so Vietnam Thailand you know Indonesia Malaysia um you know outside of sea also Japan I'm looking for more folks who can help over there because I think there's a massive tide turning um funny enough you know this this is like this is perhaps a shocker for some folks but bear chain does not have like a formal marketing team at the moment like we got one guy who helps to like events and a little bit of Gorilla Marketing um but a lot of it is just sort of organic autism and that is shocking that that is probably the most shocking thing I've heard in this pod honestly because I think the the thing is like I I I haven't found someone um yet where I'm like yes I

believe that this person is the right degree of native and capable of execution um to to hand over like some of the Reigns for how we try to execute things um so that's also a position that we'd love to see someone take up over time um actively Fielding candidates right now for you know folks across Asia um and sort of like a head of marketing CMO type of role um and then beyond that you know for for anyone who wants to find me I'm normally pretty accessible on Twitter um DMS are a little bit of a mess more recently but but working through them I try to have one night where I just zone out every week and just respond like hundreds of messages um so you know Smokey the Bear on Twitter and beyond that um I'd recommend just reaching out if you tag someone

from the bear chain community on Twitter um there's a pretty decent chance that that'll find its way to me or my teammates tasks really quickly um and we'll find our ways to to help you in whatever way we can and um I think the last thing I'd say is that you know if you're a builder if you're figuring out where you want to go next and if you're if you're looking for a new home for example and you're building something that you think is cool new and interesting um you know please do hit us up we believe that we are firmly in a in a Services industry as as people you know stewarding a foundation or helping to build a chain um it's our job to make your lives easier and our job to do everything we can to help you guys win on be chain um because if you guys win

so do we right so um if you're building something cool hit us up um Twitter DMS you know email whatever it might be and uh we're there to help this is bilda bear me Builder bear is is is real it's see that perite so I love it and it's very much in like a same same fashion of like how do we set the bar high for the ecosystem and also help de you know demonstrate to some teams of experienced builders that we can help them end to end whether that's go to market and product strategy whether that's narrative positioning whether that's fundraising um and I think you guys will probably see much more coming out of that in the next little while all right awesome awesome smoki again thank you so much man uh and I think we're

going to have to catch up soon once you go in we're going to have to have you on and and maybe a couple C Builders maybe the Shogun guys maybe some of the validators to get yeah some an added Dimension here into the discussion and and especially proof of liquidity I'm incredibly excited and um yeah thanks for coming on man really appreciate yeah of course man thanks so much for having me I'll catch you hey everyone Jason here thank you so much for watching today's episode wanted to take a quick second to to thank today's title sponsor arbitrum we know you are tired of onchain experiences that have unaffordable fees and frustrating transaction speeds and that's why we partnered with arbitrum you can experience frictionless trades lightning speed and LaGree transactions all for pennies per transaction explore arbitrum

expanding ecosystem at portal. arbitrum doio that's portal. arbitrum doio see you for the next [Music] episode [Music] oh