Unchained - How Berachain Became One of the Most Popular Blockchains - Ep. 793

Episode Date: March 4, 2025

A new consensus model. A bear-themed brand. And one of the most debated token launches in recent memory. Berachain is trying something radically different. Instead of just rewarding validators, it pays liquidity providers—turning the traditional blockchain incentive model on its head. But not everyone is convinced. Some critics say too much of the token supply went to VCs. Others question whether “proof of liquidity” can actually work at scale. In this episode, Smokey, Chief Smokey Officer at Berachain, joins Unchained to break it all down. Why did Berachain choose to make itself EVM-identical? What really happened with the token launch? And what’s next? Show highlights: 1:47 How Smokey got into crypto and how that led to the founding of Berachain 7:24 What proof of liquidity is and what problems it solves 12:06 Whether there’s an incentive problem in how BGT and BERA are designed 16:03 Why Smokey believes the EVM has the “largest capital base” 21:12 How Berachain leveraged culture to accrue network effects 26:23 How Berachain achieved so much TVL growth 30:01 What Smokey thinks about the big allocation of BERA to VCs 35:38 How the bear-themed NFTs were born 39:26 How the project was able to buy back a portion of the tokens sold to VCs 40:58 Whether Smokey should have done things differently when launching the token 43:21 Smokey’s response to the criticism of private participants staking BERA 46:57 Why Smokey believes that the inflation will be useful for ecosystem growth 52:23 What’s next in Berachain’s roadmap Visit our website for breaking news, analysis, op-eds, articles to learn about crypto, and much more: unchainedcrypto.com Thank you to our sponsors! Bitwise Guest: Smokey the Bera, Chief Smokey Officer at Berachain Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We very much do see baritaine as a many-sided dye, but that allows for a capital efficient and an application layer focused ecosystem to flourish. So when I think about it at the end of the day, I do really like that canvas for infinite economic games as a scriptor. And I very much do think about it as an accelerant for the application layer. Hi, everyone. Welcome to Unchained. You're no hype resource for all things crypto.

I'm your host, Laura Shin. We are now featuring quotes from listeners on the show. Today we have a few comments responding to Muda Gupta's breakdown of the $1.5 billion by-bit hack. On X, Rangers said, $1.5 billion in a single wallet was asking for trouble. Basic Opsack fail. And on YouTube, J-UZ 88202-0 wrote, If you're going to use ABUS, make a proper VPN to your local network and only access it via this interface,

allowing just straight from internet is fucking insane. Use the tools available to you on your network. To have your comment featured, write a review of the podcast overall or leave a comment on our video on YouTube or X. This is the March 4th, 2025 episode of Unchained. Crypto moves fast. It's why Bitwise launched the weekly CIO memo, a jargon-free summary of what's moving crypto markets

written by one of the best in the business, CIO Matt Hogan. Get up to speed in five minutes or less. Check it out at bitwiseinvestments.com slash CIO memo. Carefully consider the extreme risks associated with crypto before investing. Today's guest is Smokey the Barra, Chief Smokey Officer at Barra Chain. Welcome, Smoky. Hey, Laura, how are you?

Great. Tell us how you got into crypto and came to found Barat Chain. Yeah, for sure. Jumping right into it. I actually started very much on the opposite side of, I guess, the career spectrum, if you will. My original work was in science and engineering for the most part and was actually sort of a healthcare slash pharma founder for the first half of my career. So with that, I studied engineering at Waterloo. I spent a non-trivial amount of the time out in the valley building my first company.

And I think that it was one of those things where, you know, when you see enough smart people running in a given direction, you question whether you know you're the, whether you're missing out or whether everyone else is wrong. I tend to be wrong more than others. So I started looking at the crowd a little bit more. One of my first investors in that first company was sort of fairly involved in the Eats Foundation at the executive levels. And I think I just found, you know, an interesting opportunity there and said, hey, like, you know, maybe there's something fun here in terms of an actual evolution of money point of view. And that was just sort of messing around with Eith and Bitcoin in 2015 and 2016. Then still played the 2017, 2018 cycle and thought that everything was going to be the future of finance.

So that did not age incredibly well. So like, you know, that was mostly just, I guess the modern day equivalent of punting on meme coins. but I sort of found my way back once again in Defi summer slash 2019-2020 time frame when a good friend of mine sort of prominent Twitter non drew me back in and it was showing me some of the cool stuff that one could do on Curve and you know I guess more of the advent of Defi itself took a couple years off while I was working in VC and was just like not paying a ton of attention to the market between I'd say like early 2020 and like mid-2020 but that's sort of when I got pulled back in you know forever I suppose and have been pretty heads down

ever since. And I think that was sort of the advent of DeFi 2.0, if you will, and sort of, you know, more thoughtful things happening on chain. Some of the work in terms of like the urine ecosystem, alchemics, fracks, et cetera, that sort of brought us home, along with, I think, some of the evolution of NFTs and stuff that was coming out like parallel, et cetera, that was taking us a little bit beyond like, you know, pictures of monkeys and into like on-chained, trading card games, matches the gathering type experiences, et cetera. So yeah, have, I guess, been in and out of the space for close to a decade now. And certainly not as OG as many folks who have met along the way, but trying to learn from

the past, if you will, and then have been building a barricane sort of inadvertently since mid-2020 and it's very actively sort of since the early mid-22 timeframe. It's super interesting all you said there because, yeah, just I am so curious who the OG Ethereum person is, a Ethereum Foundation person is, but maybe we can talk offline about that. So what problems did you see in crypto that you hoped that Barrow Chain would solve? Yeah. You know, I think that Barrow Chain was fundamentally borne out of conversations with power users and developers, which again, very much came about as an accent of growing this Defi-adjacent NFTE community over time, which is sort of what Barra Chain came out of. I think the biggest thing that we noted was not necessarily even a takeaway that myself from my co-founders had immediately happened upon beyond just thinking about how to maximize our yields to some extent. but rather it was that we had both sort of like security-focused folks and researchers and very defiant native folks and very risk-on folks all in one location in a discord.

And this idea of the lack of alignment, if you will, between liquidity and security at the protocol level came to mind. And of course, it's something that people like Tarun have written about before in his paper in, and I think like 2019, about sort of what happens of, you know, your eat supply rate goes over a staking rate, et cetera, and what that can mean for the, you know, for the safety of a system as a whole. But I think the bigger question that we asked ourselves is just sort of like philosophically, why is it that one has to choose or should choose between contributing to security or liquidity on the network? And that was sort of the initial thesis behind proof of liquidity, which is to say, if I have 32Eath, why shouldn't I be able to both find a way to run an out and actually contribute to economic activity? And of course, LSTs move this in the right direction. But I don't think that they're adoptions by any means ubiquitous or natively enshrined per se. And they're very much a layer on top that's nice to have. I think the second big thing that sort of led to the creation of approval liquidity or bear chain as a whole is the, I'd say, relationship between applications and the chains that they live on. I think we saw this a ton in sort of the 2021, 2022 cycle back when, you know, big sort of, I'd say, inflated grant programs that had lots of, you know, whizbangs, if you will, around them were really in vogue and everyone was just announcing some, you know, multi-hundred million dollar ecosystem fund denominated in the native token that eventually blew up. Our thought process was just like, you know, this seems very unsustainable on one hand. And on the other hand, very few chains seem to have given applications a real reason to exist on them. Like, yes, one can talk about fast finality, one can talk about sharding, one can talk about whatever the flavor of the day from a technical perspective might be.

And that's not to, you know, to undermine the importance of that. But I actually think that the majority of applications being developed were very rarely taking advantages of those technical aspects of their underlying chains. but rather just hype waves in an ecosystem, right? Which tend to have that, you know, Virgil-Kleafa pattern. So I think on our side, we thought, is there a way that we could actually build a mechanism into the chain that actually fundamentally drives values of the application layer? Because if we're thinking about the future of the space as a whole,

I very much do believe it is a bet on the applications, as in the chain itself should be a backdrop. The chain itself should be an afterthought, if you will. It really is what is it that it can enable. So I think POL came out of those two major observations. and then baritain as a whole came out of those two observations. One, can we natively align liquidity and security? And two, can we make the chain value additive to its applications as opposed to vice versa?

So you've been referencing proof of liquidity in your response. Why don't you explain what that is for the listeners? Yeah, 100%. A proof of liquidity is a civil resistance mechanism. You one can call a consensus mechanism in a sense. It is meant to, as you may have heard, align liquidity and security at the chain level. What it fundamentally means is that it sort of turns value flows in a blockchain upside down. In a traditional proof of stake or delegated proof of stake chain or in L1,

you know, the block rewards are effectively flowing to the validators and or, you know, the stakers and or their delegates of its depots. In the case of proof of liquidity, application block rewards really flow from the validators to the applications to the users of set applications. So as opposed to that inflationary reward set going outside of the ecosystem, if you will, or only to the people who are providing security on the network. In the case of bear chain, it actually flows internally and actually serves as a means of driving value to the apps

and therefore their users, primarily those that are providing liquidity on the network. It gets a little bit more abstract over time because proof of liquidity can actually be used to, I'd say, incentivize a number of different sets of actions over time. But what it really starts with, and what it really is, I'd say, most cleanly applied for is the incentivizing the provision and the presence of liquidity.

in the network itself. So the way to think about this is that there is a system by which each validator on the chain has its own cutting board, you could say, or a pie chart of sorts, such that when it wins a block, its block award is distributed across those different pools on the network. So that might be, you know, I've won a block that has 10BGT, which is the reward slash emissions tokens the network. I'll go into this in more depth. And I choose to send five VGT to pool A and five BGT to pool B in the decks, for example.

A founder could also take a much more opinionated stance and say, hey, I'm going to send this one to these 10 different applications across the whole network, whether that be the supply side for ethon and money market, or a 4626 volt for a more, let's say, exotic options protocol. Notably, as I mentioned before, all these emissions come in the form of BGT, which is perhaps a little bit on the nose, but stands for the bearer governance token. This is the illiquid slash soulbound rewards token and inflationary token of the network. And what's quite important here is that the reason that BGT is a liquid and sole bound is because we wanted to very much enforce, I'd say this social and technical contract of the only way to receive emissions or

awards on the network being through liquidity provision, such that one cannot just go and purchase an unholy amount of the staking token and use that to take over the network and its incentives, but rather if one wants to actually be able to influence the flow of rewards across the ecosystem and have a say in whether application A or application B receives more emissions over time, they actually have to do the work or contribute the public good of having contributed liquidity in the first place. And I think that to just sort of tie the system together, one should note that BGT can be one way burned into Bera at any given point in time. So you can turn the BGT into the liquid staking token of the network, Bera, but one cannot take that BGA, which can be

purchased in his liquid, and turn it into BGT. So just for the BGT, so just for the liquid, for sort of a mental image of putting all these things together, since there's a lot of moving parts and prove liquidity, you know, each validator effectively has two portions. They're bare a stake and then their BGT booster delegation. The bear a stake is what's very much used for basic security on the network. It controls the number of blocks that are produced by that validator in sort of a linear ranking order. The BGT boost is what actually determines the size of those block awards. So the validators that have more BGT that have been delegated to them via providing more liquidity or by their delegates providing more liquidity to the network over time

will be able to produce larger blocks. Those who have more bearer will be able to produce more blocks, and this is quite important from a network security and safety point of view. At the end of the day, sort of the product of those two, if you will, determines which applications and which pools across the network, and by virtue of that, which users will receive the most, you know, rewards from the chain's, I guess, development or growth over time. I hope that that made sense.

Yeah, yeah. I think it might be a lot for the audience to take in. So we'll just break down part of this again, which is that there's two tokens and then there's a third, which is called Honey, but that's not relevant for this part of the discussion. So BTT is Barra governance token or Barra chain governance token. And then it's a Solbound token. You cannot purchase this. It's not transferable. You can't, however, burn it to turn it into Barra. And then if you have Barra, it doesn't go the other way because, you know, the system doesn't allow you to just buy your way into governance. The one thing that I did want to ask about this setup is basically, so what I like about,

and by the way, also, BGT goes to people who are participants in the network. It's like you can't just participate in governance if you're an outsider who isn't active in Barra chain. But I did want to ask, so that all makes sense to me, incentive-wise. But then I also started thinking, oh, it could also be a situation where basically the people who participate, as we just mentioned, are the ones who earn these governance tokens. But then over time, assuming that Barrowchain does take off and become a bigger thing, I could see a scenario where the way that they influence governance is to enrich themselves more against newer comers or people who haven't accumulated as many BGT as they have. And in general, it does feel like it could be prone to a civil attack in the sense that, you know, I just think about the layer zero gaming where Brian Pellegrino came on my show and he said that.

They found civil farms of like 50,000 accounts and things like that, like kind of an industrial-sized situation. So I don't know if that, if there's a way to account for that where that is in a way like, I don't know if buying your way in a governance is really quite the word. But, you know, you have to put, you have it has to be a way. a more professionalized civil operations. So how do you account for those two potential pitfalls? Yeah. No, it's a great question. It's something that we thought about a lot along the way. And it's one where it's almost like, what is the lesser of two evils in many cases? In that in a traditional system, right, you would be able to do, you'd be able to perform this sort of attack simply by buying the token, which I guess might make people happy for some, you know,

period of time, but also comes with a very, you know, detrimental sign effect. And exactly this reason is why we've been looking a lot and how to, in effect, we stage the rollout of proof of liquidity. Because the situation that one would want to avoid is one where, you know, some hostile actor comes online, acquires a meaningful amount of BGT via providing liquidity to, let's say, kosher pools, and then sets up one that is value extractive where they, you know, sort of do the Batman attack, repair one useless coin against another useless coin, and then try to push lots of emissions towards it. This has happened in the curve ecosystem in the past. And I'm sure that people will attempt to do so on bear chain in the future.

And with that, there's a couple of checks and balances put in place. One is thankfully the fact that, you know, when it comes to those, the block award production, the BGT boosting or delegation operates on a bit of a, I guess a logarithmic curve is the best way of describing it, where at some point, there is not much additional benefit to actually delegating your BGT to a given validator because it will really not increase the block award that it produces meaningfully. So that is meant on one hand to really curb that sense of potential stake centralization, or I should say, you know, governance or boosting centralization. The second thing is that there's what we call, what we call, I guess, a guardian council in place that's very much meant to serve as, you know, a safeguard or a set of guidelines and guard wheels to make sure that people don't go and approve things that are very much seen as potentially destructive to the ecosystem. So this is a group that's made of folks that are primarily outside of the foundation, basically technically.

auditors, councils of various large foundations from other projects in the space, people who contributed both to the technical and economic assessment of bear chain that are meant to more than anything else serve as like a, you know, worst case scenario, press the red button. You know, this could be really detrimental to the system, sort of, I guess, group. And thankfully, that has not had to be used yet, but of course, we're in very early stages. And so far, all the things that we've seen people attempting to put forward into governance have been quite kosher. But nonetheless, I think that the real answer is, Laura, there's 100% a risk of this in the future.

We've done our best from both the technical and social layer slash guardian layer aspect to limit the likelihood of something like this happening. But I believe that it's almost somewhat inevitable in many decentralized systems to people take a shot at centralizing it in a malicious way. So one other technical choice that I wanted to ask about was you chose to make the chain what's called Ethereum. identical or sorry, EVM identical, which is interesting because we're in this environment now where chains that launch actually have a choice in whether or not they will try to appeal to Ethereum developers and users. And that wasn't really a thing before this cycle. So, you know, and then also I wanted to just talk about that specific distinction of EVM identical versus EVM compatible. So why is it that you decided to try to appeal to the

Ethereum ecosystem, but then also explain what an EVM identical is as opposed to EVM-compatible. Yeah, for sure. I think that, you know, as a chain, we are focused on liquidity in a sense, and it might be a little bit of a misnomer if the proof of liquidity chain didn't have that much, you know, volume or capital flowing through it. So one of the first and simplest answers is simply that I do think that the EVM is perhaps the most lindy from that point of view, right, in terms of capital acquisition and the ability to actually bring assets over into a new ecosystem. I do think that other alternatives and bridging methods, if you will, have made it a lot easier to get funds over from various echoes, whether that be Tron or Soul or Move or whatever it might be.

But I do think it's fair to say that the EVM does have the largest capital base by a couple of orders of magnitude. So I think that is just sort of like one simple starting point there. I think the second thing is actually just developer talent and the developer ecosystem. When we started working on Barrechain in like that mid-21 time frame, I would say that the SVM was sort of, you know, getting ready for its, it. its first major wave of struggles, if you will, post-Macalino bros and then moving into the FDX, you know, less than fun times. And I think that, you know, there was certainly not as much of a

community for us to learn about or lean into over there. I think it's been amazing to see how that's grown over time, along with the Move VM ecosystem, et cetera, but I would still argue that the barrier to entry or a person's willingness to become a dev in crypto, or a capable person's willingness, I should say, to become a crypto debt, is still pretty low, in my opinion. And I think that many folks still question what we're even doing in the space and what, you know, ideals we're chasing at the end of the day. For good reason, honestly. And with that, you know, we wanted to think about things that would, you know, really lower the barrier of entry as much as possible for a developer who might be, you know, in Web 2 right now or who might be on another chain in crypto to say, hey, like, you know, let's come and try to build something on bear chain. We found this to be incredibly important from a dev tooling end, and I'd say services compatibility point of view.

and that we actually started by working on something, I'd say a VM that we would call EVM compatible as opposed to EVM identical. And what that meant is that it was certainly close and you could deploy solidity smart contracts that had much issues, but at the same time, there were these nuances or small gaps that could very much lead to issues in developer experience down the road, whether that is the ability to use sort of popular dev tooling

or I'd say development libraries sort of on the hard hat slash foundry side, whether it's the ability to have effective compatibility with certain RPA, that would just make it easier for people to actually, you know, you interact with your DAPs, or even analytics tools like Dune and Nansen and EtherScan, etherscan, et cetera. So we opted for something that would mean that we would not actually have to maintain our own fork of the EVM over time and rather something that was as minimally opinionated as possible. And in fact, we gave us the ability to benefit from or latch on to a little bit of the EFs or Ethereum's development as a whole while not having to reinvent the wheel on the dev tooling side.

So that was sort of the idea of EVM identicality. It means that the bare chain execution environment is basically one-to-one or as close as you can get to Ethereum Mainnet itself in terms of the op-codes, in terms of the EIPs, in terms of the ability to build L2s or scaling solutions, etc. The main difference being that as opposed to using Ethereum's consensus, we use CometBFT for consensus under the hood. And that gives us basically sub two-second block times, a single-slaught finality. And of course, you know, comes with its ups and downs. We have a limited validator set in contrast to Ethereum's, you know, more or less unlimited set at the moment, but still maintain the execution layer environment that makes it very easy for applications and developers to do what they need to do without having to change their habits. Oh, so interesting. And does that preclude? So I guess if you wanted to do more like an SVM style execution, then would you just use a bridge or like how would that part work? Yeah. So there'd be a couple of different ways. One part that's kind of interesting. It's simply that Bear Chain is built on a framework called Beacon Kit that's very much meant to serve as a glue between sort of consensus and execution layers. So there's

very much a world in the future. We're perhaps not for Bear Chain itself, but for a group using the same framework that we developed, one could actually build an SVM chain with Snowman Consensus Under the Hood or with Comet for that matter or whatever that might be. Right now, if someone was looking to develop on Bear Chain, you know, while taking advantage of the SVM, they'd probably actually build a layer too. And there's actually a couple of groups that are thinking, about doing so as well, sort of on the RWA slash trading side. And they just roll up to Bairchain in the same way as they might roll up to Eith. So interesting. Bearchain is very famous for its culture. And obviously, you know, people have long said, oh, Bitcoin is a meme. And this whole past cycle has been all about meme coins.

And I just wondered if you would talk a little bit because, you know, it seems like Baratine has pretty serious ambitions. And, you know, you've made a lot of really interesting choices around aligning incentives. Yeah, there's just, you can tell that there's thought put into the tokenomics. So it's not like it's only fun in games. But what role do you think culture plays for blockchains and how do you think about how to utilize that for barot chain success? Yeah, that's a great question. I think that increasingly, blockchains are resembling brands with technical thresholds and that a lot of this comes down to distribution, which is one of the things that is, you know, most poorly understood or performed within crypto. And that is not to say that we should not be chasing technical excellence, whether that be on the ZK side or paralyization or simply, you know, higher good gas limits, whatever that might be. But rather that at the end of the day, people need a reason to care about something or believe in something. And in most cases nowadays, that has been dictated by almost, hey, this is going to make you rich or this is going to serve you a bunch of lottery tickets or be in other cases that you're going to have fun here and you're going to have a pleasant experience on chain. And I think that we believe in the ability to leverage the latter portion.

I think the culture has massive network effects. And that that is one of the things that, again, the crypto space struggles with the most. And that some cultures are not welcoming. Some cultures are very much sort of on high horses or have the sense of holier than now, if you will. That is certainly, you know, received criticism over time. And others just aren't very approachable by folks. Actually, someone else who did a podcast with a while back telling me that his mom and his sister tried out our test net, explored the website, and it was very sort of friendly and inapproachable for them. It wasn't a number

of, you know, scary technical jargon buzzwords that had them thinking, oh, no, like, I'm not smart enough to deal with this. It wasn't something that was meant to, you know, to tell them about how this is immediately going to be the future finance. I think they saw a bunch of kind of funny bears and a number of applications that were easy to find from one place and said, hey, this feels like something I could mess around with, right? And I think that in a space where we've all, or a number of the natives have been trained for like almost these dopamine-frying, like lottery ticket responses over time, it's also important to be able to have things that are just easy, simple, fun for people to use that are technically not scary, but can also tell people why they should care about them

and why it might be worth their time and effort to get involved. And I think that there are almost equal parts within the bare chain ecosystem that are very much there because they love the NFT, they love the culture, they love the, you know, sort of like idiot savant side of things, where I think there's groups who are very far on the left curve,

and there's also groups who are very far on the right curve, and every now and then they combine the same person who is incredibly entertaining. And there's also, I think, this positioning that you can build interesting and exciting things, and you can be a very competent operator while not taking yourself too seriously. And I do think that that has been one the greatest draws for meaningful talent into the ecosystem as well.

And I don't know if I necessarily look up to all the examples of that in the real world. Like I think people try to like push the Elon Musk comparison at times in terms of like culture. And you know, you can build cool stuff. There's also other perhaps off sides or other portions of that argument that I wouldn't want to ascribe to. But I do think that it's important to be able to have fun while building things that are important. And I think that's something that the ecosystem has taken to very well. And that does lend itself to constructive network effects. All right.

So in a moment, we'll talk a little bit about Barrowchains launch. But first, a quick word from the sponsors who make the show possible. Hi, I'm Matt Hogan, CIO of Crypto Asset Manager Bitwise. Look, crypto can be confusing. There's so much noise and the space changes so quickly. That's why, every week, I write a five-minute memo on the biggest stories impacting crypto in plain English. Why is Bitcoin up or down? What are people missing? Where should investors look next? Get the lowdown every week. Sign up to get the weekly CIO memo delivered straight to your inbox. Go to bitwiseinvestments.com slash CIO memo.

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Back to my conversation with Smokey the Barra. So a month in, you're already $3.5 billion total value locked, which is, you know, not a shabby performance. What do you think generated such a substantial amount of TVL from the beginning? Yeah. You know, I think that we were quite opinionated in our launch process and ran a program called Boyko. That was more or less led by Jack from my team, my head of Defi and with a little bit of help for myself. Boyko is very much focused on, I think, again, sort of flipping the script on a lot of these pre-launch deposit playlists. books where we see a bunch of people trying to jam capital into a bridge or perhaps into some ecosystem apps prior to a TGE and using that to inflate a whole bunch of metrics.

You know, I certainly understand the value of this from a vanity perspective, but wasn't really in line with the end game that we're chasing of finding ways to really turbocharge the application layer and drive values of those that are building on the chain and actually making bare chain hopefully one day a household name. So the whole thought process of Boycoe was the fact to build a liquidity marketplace of sorts. such that people, and when I say people, I mean application builders on the chain that were on one hand already battle tested, well vetted, fully audited, etc., could effectively match with liquidity providers and provide them a combination of incentives along with a portion of the Barrett AirDrop that allowed them to actually acquire a ton of capital going into launch. because I think that in many cases, liquidity begets liquidity, and applications more than anything else end up having to go through the same process

in almost a one-off method, but not every application is going to be connected to every liquid fund or major family office or Justin's son like LP out there. And this actually provided more of an interface for applications and liquidity providers to meet and negotiate on their value of liquidity and their incentives, et cetera, and then start with a strong capital base. So at the time of Royco's conclusion, which was being, basically powered by ourselves, the team at Royco, which is sort of the underlying protocol that helps do that matching between LPs and markets, or DAPS, I should say. You know, the team at layer

zero, the team at Stargate and the team at Enso, which sort of, you know, powered this massive, I'd say, a hundred and something market application. There was about $3 billion in TVL. Then Ethan Bitcoin fell off a cliff. So I think that went to like two and a half or so. And then we've seen another net, you know, billion in change and inflows since the chain went live. So I think it's a matter of a couple of different things. One is that, you know, that program really helped with activation energy, and there are meaningful incentives, both from these applications themselves, in terms of tokens, points, whatever it might be, and with a lot of blue chip participants. So, you know, the folks like Lombard, etherfi, Athena, I think just folks that people want

to get involved with, along with native applications from the baritane ecosystem that people have never seen before and wanted to get earlier exposure to. So, you know, groups like Kodiak, infrared, goldilocks, dolomite, et cetera, et cetera. And then I think that the, you know, the final part that equation is simply that a lot of chains tend to have this like three to six month half a sleep honeymoon phase, if you will. I don't know if I should even call it a honeymoon phase, but this time frame where there are very few daps that are actually live and doing things in an ecosystem, I think that the gifts and the curse of baritain having been around for so long was that while people had to wait for us to go from Tessnet to main net and for the chain to finally

become real, if you will, there was also a lot of time for applications to really get to the point of being able to go right at the gates. So it meant that when people came to Baratrain, they weren't just looking for something without anything to do. There was an application suite of 15, 20, 25, and now probably north of 30 in change, different DAPs live that they could start interacting with, depositing liquidity into, and exploring, many of which they may have already seen on the TestNet. So I think the ecosystem was there, so people had no reason not to start jumping in. So at the time of Launch Baratine came under criticism for a few different things, One of them was people took issue with the token distribution, in particular, the fact that VCs got a 34% allocation.

How did you decide upon that and what do you have to say to the critics? Yeah, I mean, I don't think that the critics are entirely wrong. I think that if I could go back and redo this again and the team could start a ground zero, we probably would not have sold as much of our supply to VCs. And in fact, the vast majority of that was in our seed round back in, you know, early 22 when we'd We thought that this might be something interesting, but I just don't think we imagined the scale that this could get to. So I don't think that their criticisms are invalid. And in fact, what we actually worked on doing over time was non-trivolvely buying back portions that, you know, seed round, series A round, et cetera, supply. So we could actually minimize the dilution that, you know, the community had to take on as a result of VCs.

I do think that we've been, you know, remarkably lucky to have the group that we do have on our cap table. And I do think that there's in many cases in which VCs can be value accreative to a project. Whether that is simply from a strategic connections point of view, whether that is helping with sort of later stage exchanges or market making or whatever it is type stuff, or simply in some manner setting a very informal price floor that they are locked in at and that the community may choose to buy liquid above or below. But with that being said, like, yeah, we totally sold too much to VCs. And our goal is now to make sure that we do right by people over time in light of that. And I think that what we tried to focus on more than anything else is how can we ensure that the parts of the supply that we can be more opinionated about and where we do not have legally bounding obligations are ones that are really directed at the folks who drove value to the community and to the ecosystem over time and who were not silent participants. Yeah. And actually, just to understand that, because we had a conversation about this on the chopping block, we were talking about how Bear Chain's culture was kind of like a little bit more like the party chain. or something. We just seem very culture-oriented, like the make-crypto-fund-again type of chain.

And so, you know, that con- because that has a more organic grassroots type of feeling, like more similar to a fair launch rather than a VC chain. So how did that come about? Was it just like, yeah, talk about that contrast or like, is it more that you took the VC investment before the culture began and then you ended up fostering this culture. And so you had to buy that. And that's also interesting, the buying back of some of your, the distribution. Can you, yeah, just explain kind of that divergent, how you bought back some of that. I haven't heard that before.

Yeah, for sure. I mean, look, we raised our seed round at a $50 million valuation. And I think that was when we were three anonymous dudes in bearheads. I don't even think we had the bearheads at that point talking about building a novel consensus algorithm on an EVM on Cosmos chain, which is, you know, I guess the kind of thing that worked. in the early 22 to 22 market, but was definitely a kind of weird floater. And we weren't exactly sure where things would go. But I think that we very much said, hey, we're going to commit to this. We're going to go end to end. And many people, including some of the folks who you shared your last podcast with, you know, thought that we were just going to kind of burn out

halfway through and then, you know, right off into the sunset. Unfortunately, that is not the case. We were still kicking. And I think that what we found was that over time as we brought in capital because I do believe that it is non-trivly important, both from a potential strategic partnership point of view, an optics point of view, and a user acquisition part of you for chains to have a war chest, especially considering the most recent competition we're going up against, right? Think of Apto's in suite with their three, four hundred million dollars raises. There's certainly things that one can do to signal the ability to make serious plays in the market. but I don't think that I see venture capital and memetic narratives or community building as mutually exclusive.

I think that it's very popular nowadays, more than ever, to demonize VCs. And I think that sometimes it's very rational and fair to demonize VCs. But I also think that if VCs are on the same vesting schedule as other people, if they've actually contributed, and if they've taken a bet, before there's the opportunity for most people to take a bet, if you will, then I don't know. I think that some of the hate can be unjustified as well. I do think that the bar of performance of the bar for standards, if you will, for crypto vCs is in most cases abysmal, and many are guilty of behavior that would never fly for a second in Web2. But I do think that one can build a community or one can build a group that has its own culture,

its own ecosystem, its own different vibe, if you will, without having to be like the the gig of fair launch chain that drops 90% on day one. what I'd actually say sort of in parallel is that for Beretander was a method of actually being in and involved in the same terms or better terms than VC's I would argue and that was in the form of those NFTs that we actually all started out of back in the day and that was actually the group that received a massive portion of theirdrop that was fully unlocked on day one or I should say majority unlocked on day one and is actually getting more over time and part of the group that we very much wanted to be able to reward because I don't think that we would have gotten to where we

are, whether that be VC fundraising, whether that be the ecosystem growth, whether that be the culture and without them. And actually, I think we've seen some of the things that have defined the chain the most come out of some of those folks who just started by holding funny NFTs of a bear in the Discord three years ago. Yeah, actually, can you tell that story? Just, I don't, I don't think you described it here. Yeah, for sure. It looks though. I think as I discussed, Bear Chain started in its weirdest form. And sort of that summer of 2021 time frame, and myself, my co-founder thought to ourselves, hey, you know, we've been hanging out in a bunch of these defy discords.

We've also been exploring some of these newer, more fun NFT metas. You know, what if we did something that was somewhere in the middle? And we just started with 100, you know, and that was actually 101, because I uploaded a bear twice, NFTs of bears. And they were actually bears with bongs. So they were called the bong bears. I don't even smoke. We just thought the idea was quite funny and started there for some reason.

And we raffled them off for 0.068th and a number of different DFI oriented discords. So, you know, popping up in Ome and Fracts and alchemics, etc. In servers that we've been hanging around a lot and just saying, hey, guys, you know, we're messing around with this project. If you're interested, let us know. And then we did, you know, effectively a fair launch slash a fair mint on OpenZ. These beers sold out quite quickly, ended up being reped or you're sort of being, you know, held by a number of, you know, fairly influential or fairly thoughtful folks in the defy space. And then we sort of asked ourselves, okay, what comes next? And we said, okay, well, we could make a 10,000, like,

we can make one of those 10K PFP collections, but that might be a real pain and that might be like a little bit overly generic. And after talking with some other folks who had already joined that, you know, small community of 100 folks, we thought, what if we made the Bears rebase or multiply similar to

actually Olympus's mechanisms back in the day? Now, this is nowhere close to the high flying six, seven figure APYs of the past. But it was very much something where if you held, you know, one of the initial bear collections, then as we made in a second collection, you'd be entitled to, effectively, a free bear from there.

And if you hold on to those two, then when we made the third collection, you'd have two more free bears, four, eight, eight, 16, so on so forth. And with this effect, we did was it created a community of folks who were on one hand, you know, risk on or lack of daysical enough to be entertained by NFTs of bears with various themes, everything from James Bond to Halloween to Boxing Day, etc. And on the other hand, who are quite interested in, I'd say, you know, more funky game theory or liquidity mechanisms and thinking, okay, do I want to hedge by derisking a bear at this point, or do I think that the value of the next one I'm going to get

for free is going to be more, et cetera. And I'd say about halfway through, probably three or four collections in, we had a large enough community that we'd have productive conversations with them about, you know, any sort of topics, whether that be on-chain trading strategies or the overlaps between security and liquidity. And it was very much that, instead of, you know, conversations with the community that led us to a point where we said, hey, we should start something. We've always been people who build and like to try, you know, ambitious, weird, new ideas. And this feels like, you know, the time and space to give it a shot here. So I think that it was interesting because Bear Chain very much followed, I think, the upside down playbook again,

of sort of how traditional L-1s or scaling solutions even get off the ground. And that it wasn't us saying, you know, hey, we are spinning this out from a large research institution or a large corporate entity, whatever it might be. It was us saying, hey, we've actually built a community around NFTs and, let's say, fairly defy-minded NFT players. We've interacted with a whole bunch of power users and developers on chain, and we've identified a problem that they identify with to some extent as well. And we're thinking about how this could be actually extended into an effective solution. And, you know, that's sort of how we got to bear chain. And then just to go back about the token distribution at launch. So how much of the allocation had you originally given the VCs? Because you said

you had to buy some back. Yeah. I think that if we actually, like if I, if we started at the full percentage, it would have been 37, probably or 38 that we actually started at and then basically bought our way back to you that 33, 34 that's that sets now. Oh, wow. And so how do you do that? You go to the VC and you say we need to rejigger that like, what does that conversation look like? Well, the fun thing is that between our seed round and our series A or series B, there was definitely a non-turvially rough point in the market. And a lot of our initial seed round participants were folks from crypto Twitter and, like, you know, I'd say friendly angels and folks who we had met along our ways between these different discords. There were definitely a couple of formal VC funds in there. But it was a very angel dominant and angel heavy round.

And put simply, some folks blew up. So, you know, we were very much in a position to say, hey, guys, you know, we'll help. back the SAF that a 2X or a 4X or whatever might have been, it's completely up to you, but we're here to be helpful. So it was basically after we had raised that second round, which was in the late 2022 time frame that we were able to help, you know, clear up some of that initial cap table space for the most part, sometimes because people just want liquidity and are less bullish or because of different financial situations that might be affecting them.

And then we would just basically sign a SAF transfer agreement. And it was simple as that. Okay, okay. Just for people's curiosity, some of the investors were framework ventures, the Abu Dhabi branch of Reverend Howard Digital, Palisian Capital, Hack VC, Hachkey Capital, Nomad Capital. I do see some others that are more like angels, it looks like. Anyway, yeah, super interesting. So the other thing was, I'm sure you saw people were kind of criticizing the price at which the token launched. And Arthur Hayes, who's very prominent. person. He tweeted, to all you shitcoin founders about to TGE, work with your market makers and exchange partners to open the market at lower prices. This chart is ugly, and he had a screenshot of the barra chain launch. Not because the project is dog shit, but because the price is too damn high, bring your users on a wealth generation journey with you. So what do you have to say to people like Arthur or people generally who are critical of the air drop? Well, I mean, I should only dispose so much,

but Arthur's fond reached out to me quite recently about working together on some other stuff. So I think his comment and his pricing has aged incredibly poorly. I think that it's really, I guess it's in vogue to do a little bit of grave dancing or dunking on teams for the first couple of days, especially as air drop farmers get out of their positions or as, you know, larger players who've been around for a while get out of their positions. I do agree with his initial point around working with exchanges, market makers, etc. to do what you can to actually give people a reasonable entry and or a reasonable price point at launch. But it's also important to keep in mind that ultimately the team doesn't really have control of that. In many cases in the past, for example, exchanges have used premarkets to basically price their opening ticks.

And in those pre-markets, we were trading some between $4 and $5 billion for the most part, causing a lot of those groups to actually open us around that point. When myself or when members of the foundation were asked for guidance from these teams, in most cases we just told them to refer to our last private round price, which was that $2 billion and say, it's up to you guys if you'd like to list around there, but that is the most that we can give you in terms of recent guidance of where the market has priced us.

So really, our goal is not, there's no glory in a down-only chart, nor is there a glory in like, you know, opening incredibly high and then watching that wave pattern. I think that we actually very much align with Arthur said, but I'm not here to comment on price. I'm just here to comment on the fact that our goal is to build something that people resonate with and want to engage in long term. But there's certainly things that can be done along the way to set yourself up for the best probability of doing so.

And so were you hinting earlier that you are going to be working with Arthur's Maelstrom? No, no, I don't think so. Okay, got it. So there was another controversy about the fact that private investors were able to stake their Barra and similarly kind of like a related criticism or not related, but it's around staking as well. I guess community members felt that the ability to stake was not even well known or well community communicated to them ahead of time. So what do you have to say to the critics about those two issues with the staking? Yeah, I mean, I don't think that the, I don't think that the criticism

is entirely incorrect. I do think that however in perspective there's a reason that it exists. a couple of different things. One is that a lot of people were making fairly ridiculous comparisons to Celestia staking. I have nothing against a Celestia team and consider them to be good friends and partners of ours at different points. But they sort of had 20% APY staking rates out the gates, you know, 70 plus percent of supply state pretty quickly, et cetera. Despite that, I think, did great over time and are building something quite impressive. On the case of Bear Chain, on one hand, you know, our biggest issue is actually getting our tokens out of custody and into the hands of investors because that's a very manual process involving cold storage and vaults

and our partner Bitco. So, like, right now, I think that's still under 25% of that supply is staked. And notably, since the vast, fast majority of incentives on bear chain go to actually those emissions into applications, as mentioned, the effective staking rate is closer to like 1.5%, which is notably like half of Ethereum. I would love for that to be zero. I truly would, but from a token standard composability technical point of view, and also a legal point of view in that we raised in a time where, you know, L1 staking rewards being unlocked slash being part of inflation was quite standard. That wasn't something that we could completely undo.

It was basically, would we prefer to get tied up in, you know, six months of legal battles or we'd prefer to launch the chain? And I'd say the final points in this equation is that we were a chain that going into launch already had $3 billion of liquidity lined up and transferred there day one. If we did not have a non-trivial amount of the chain and or the supply staked, then we'd be putting ourselves in a position where one would incentivize an attack on the network. So, you know, for multiple reasons here, one legal, two, practical, three technical. This was really the only solution that we had on the table. In terms of actually being able to stake, I do believe that there's probably elements of

of truth, but also elements of misinformation in that statement. One is that there's been projects like infrared that provide LSTs for the entire ecosystem, Smiley, Fat Bear, et cetera, that have become quite prevalent, and that the foundation and or team members have helped to raise awareness about over time. I think that the part that's probably less clear to people or less easy to wrap one's head around is that bear chain staking is a weird fusion of some Ethereum and Cosmos elements. because on one hand, detour EVM identical nature, it's like proof of stake staking

as opposed to delegate a proof of stake. So it's very much optimized for solo operators. But on the other hand, since it is still using common consensus, which has a cap limit effectively, the number of validators that one can add before performance falls off a cliff, you basically are really optimized

for staking pools and larger validators, as opposed to, you know, 3,000 tiny validators that each person can run themselves. So that's 100% something and that we can do a better job of communicating over time. And as, you know, the core team, we're doing our best to help point people towards different resources they can use to stake their bear as much as they like to. One of their criticism is that the circulating supply in the first year

is expected to grow quite a bit. I'm seeing here it looks like aggressively it would be 50% inflation in the first year if all the BGT were burned. But obviously that won't happen. So that's like worst case scenario. So it might be more like, you know, 20, 25 percent, you know, I'm just making it up. But the point is, you know, how do you address this concern about the inflation early on, especially in light of the fact that the launch price, you know, was also criticized. And by the way, you know, just the launch price was over $13. And right now, Bear is trading at about $7.50. So, you know, that is a significant draw. I mean, I'd say a couple things, right? One is that if you actually go a little bit deeper on that,

The launch price was about $8. It wicked close to $15, and then traded on very little to no volume for about half a day, and then found its way to as low as $5 and then as high as $9, and it's kind of like bounced in between there quite stably the past three weeks. I think that that's, you know, on one hand, a little bit of the path of a new coin. On the other hand, I think that to actually answer your question around CERCLA supply, I'm not 100% sure where those numbers might have come from, But basically our initial circling supply was, I believe, just around 22%.

Our yearly inflation is closer to 10%. That's also something that can be very much adjusted via economic policy or via governance over time. And we've already had a couple of people discussing ways that could be modulated to be even more thoughtful or even more sustainable in the future. There's a little bit of a chicken in the end in that inflation is actually what does drive rewards or prove liquidity emissions into the ecosystem. So I think there's also an argument to be made that, you know, while typically that inflation, a set of rewards or incentives would be going towards validators and stakers, and in many cases being aggressively dumped and exiting the ecosystem. In this case, it's actually being used for ecosystem growth and sustainability.

That's not to say that the same people won't take those emissions and choose to sell them off or choose to hedge themselves with them in some manner. But what I do think is fair to say is that economic activity will very much be spurred by this as opposed to something a lot less defined. So yeah, I think that on one hand, I would assume that number is actually a little bit smaller, so probably closer to that 20, 25% growth that you indicated. And on the other hand, I do think that that growth will be productively channeled as opposed to, you know, purely extractive.

So, you know, obviously I just ask you these tough questions about the airdrop and stuff, but it sort of feels like for pretty much most of them for the last, I would say, like a year and some change, that one of them haven't been going well. And, you know, it's just interesting to see how, yeah, the community can kind of turn on you and start, you know, being upset about different things. But, you know, because Bear Chain was so well known for having, you know, being this fun kind of party chain, having the best culture and parties and stuff like that, how do you feel community sentiment is now post-TGE? I think people suffer a lot from recency bias. and having that perhaps we've seen that the most in crypto and that, you know, one day someone's a god, the next day they're a scammer, etc. A lot of it somehow tends to be related to price for some reason, but, you know, I can't imagine why.

My, you know, my barometer, my internal heistic was very much, okay, do we see top teams in the ecosystem freaking out? Do we see them leaving? Do we see Turin where it matters? And I think instead what we had was a lot of loud voices, including from like folks whose primary content in the past was closer to Nazism posting that were like, you know, taking their time to criticize Bear Jane. And instead, the core community members were pretty happy. There were certainly folks that grumbled about air drops. There were certainly folks that said, oh, why did my team get less tokens of that person's team, et cetera?

But what I will say is that we didn't see a single team leave the ecosystem. I'm sure it will happen. But we haven't seen a single builder that we have a lot of faith or potential in waiver in the slightest. And when we actually saw the community that come out of Denver, think that it was fair to say that they were some of the most well attended and I generally enjoyed events of the conference, whether that be things that are more like parties or a lot more like ecosystem side events, happy hours, educational panels, et cetera. So I guess my TLDR is that I think

people are in a pretty good state right now. I think that there's always more work that we can be doing and I think that our next little while will be very much focused on showing people the second order north star metrics that are of interest to us, which isn't to say, you know, TVL or number of users or transactions. I think those are all kind of bullshit metrics. I think what's all a lot more interesting is what are the, you know, what are the employer revenues looking like? How much value is BGT actually grabbing from the chain itself and from exogenous applications? What are the narrative violations or things that people would not actually expect bear a chain to do that are coming around the corner? Perhaps even more importantly than that, you know, what are the actual like sort of NPS or

turn rates looking like? How many apps are bringing in more apps and more users? How many apps are causing people to fall off? And I think. over the next little while, our goal is to really just double down aggressively on these metrics that are empirical, useful north stars, and that whole community and an ecosystem can rally around and use to, you know, points in the right direction there. So, TLDR, I think things are going pretty well, especially recently. And I think Denver left me sick but energized. All right. So, you know, now after you're up and running and you have a decent amount of TVL, what are you looking forward to you on the roadmap for this year? Yeah. I'd say there's a couple of

big things. One is that proof of liquidity itself will really roll out, right? And what do I mean by that is more of taking off some of the initial safety features or rate limits. As you may have seen, you know, proof of liquidity right now is very much just pointing emissions at the most conservative or safe parts of the ecosystem, which is to say the native decks that's been built by the foundation that's actually part of the chain. However, in the next couple of weeks, we'll actually get to see these various governance proposals, hopefully come across the line and see a number of different ecosystems actually start a number of different projects when the ecosystem actually start setting up their own vaults that can actually receive emissions from that validator sets in the same way that

the pools and the decks can currently do. So with that, I think that it opens up some pretty exciting new avenues for the ecosystem. We'll get to see which apps really get a ton of adoption this way. We'll get to see fun new games that people might be able to create around that. And I think that we'll get to see, you know, the full like logic gated, if you will, or the full range of possibilities with proof of liquidity. So, That seems very exciting to me. I think this also opens up the opportunity for something that we're quite excited about long term, which is the ability for BGT to have better and better in unit economics over time.

You know, right now, if you think of a traditional L1 in the case of, you know, a salana or a sui, etc., you know, there isn't much beyond burn to some extent, and that often isn't really the thing, especially for these high, you know, high performance, low gas chains, that actually offsets inflation in some way. However, in the case of BGT, there are these various incentives that different applications are directing towards that token in exchange for having validators point BGT emissions towards their pools. So what that actually means is that BGT ends up accruing exogenous value from the ecosystem over time and becoming an asset that I think is more and more exciting as more and more applications become part of it. So I think we're very excited to see that entire thesis play out. And we're very excited to start seeing that sort of like defy consumer barbell forming. We're on one hand, we have the opportunity to see exciting new zero to one apps that are building everything from LP restaking to credit default swaps on chain to incentive layers on tops of perps beyond funding rates.

And on the other hand, we're seeing people building, you know, AI powered gaming prediction platforms or people building, you know, quit smoking during deepens or the cultural, you know, initiatives that are built by other teams in the ecosystem. So I think that's sort of what I'd like to see the most. And on the technical roadmap, we will see our first L2 is going live sometime. And we're figuring out the exact name that we want to run them there. I'd say that there's been a decent amount of enthusiasm around the term cub chains. But we'll see that sort of in that Q2 slash Q3, I'd say. And then we'll also see unstaking slash withdrawals turned on because right now, you know, all the staking deposits are effectively locked, sort of like ETH pre-merge.

But now in the not too distant future, we should also be able to see people unstaking and restaking, et cetera. Oh, yeah, I had meant to ask you earlier also about your stable coin, Honey. Can you talk a little bit about how that works? Yeah, for sure. Honey is very much meant to be nothing more than sort of a stable measure or I'd say a bit of an aggregation of stable value within the ecosystem. In the past, it was meant to be a lot more exotic, but we wanted to make sure that from

a legal compliance point of view, honey was kept as kosher as possible. Right now, at effect, we serve as a wrapper for a year. USDC and PayPal USD. And notably, Barra Chain has the greatest population or the greatest supply of PayPal USD outside of these main nets and will continue to try to do some interesting things with that team. And I think that over time, Honey will likely evolve into a form of a meta-stable that very much just aggregates, you know, stable coins that have both legally compliant and very robust

capital bases, such that there is less fragmentation of these, you know, let's say 10 different stables as you get into an ecosystem. and rather one that has both a, you know, cultural and and technical branding side that is integrated into core applications across the barit chain ecosystem. And last question. So, you know, a number of these different chains have, whether intentionally or inadvertently, kind of differentiated in at least what types of communities they draw, what types of activities you see on the chain.

And, you know, famously Anatoly Akobanko of Solana has talked about it being the NASDAQ of blockchains when it's ended up being the center of meme coin activity. So I understand there's not always, you know, whatever actually happens doesn't always correlate with what the vision is. But what would be your vision for how Baratine would grow and what types of activity and participants he would attract? Yeah, I think that's a great question. I think that Baratain has been described in a number of different ways. The one that has probably stuck with me the most or that I've enjoyed the most has been a playground for infinite economic games. This was, I think, written by one of the guys from Hashkey way back before we actually even worked with them. But I think it's very

much that there's a number of different ways that one can choose to engage in their chain. And the concept of proof of liquidity means that there are nearly infinite ways to incentivize different forms of economic activity on the chain, whether that be engaging with different games or RWAs or classic DFI-S-consumer mechanisms that we might have already know. So, you know, when we think about bearer chain over time, I do believe that there will always be a little bit of a T-shape in terms of the ability to outperform on the D5 slash capital efficiency side. For example, there's a money market called dolomite right now that allows you to borrow nine figures of Ethan and Lupit with, you know, 10 times better rates than Ave on Eith Mainnet, right? But on the other hand, I think that we'll very much see almost the extensions or the offshoots of the bear chain brand through a lot of these different, you know, scaling solutions or L2s or cub chains or whatever we call them, some of which are deeply focused. focused on consumer adoption, some of which are deeply focused on RWAs, some of which are more

trading and or AI focused. And I think that we'll continue to see extensions of the brand, even within the base plate L1 itself. So I think that for many reasons, perhaps, you know, a portion of the anonymous nature, perhaps a portion of the fact that while we spend our times as very crypto-native bears on the internet, myself and many members of the founding team, were very much more suits or a little bit more professional in the past life and have pulled in many folks from our old days into the ecosystem as well.

We very much do see Baritian as a many-sided die but that allows for a capital efficient and an application layer focused ecosystem to flourish. So when I think about it at the end of the day, I do really like that canvas for infinite economic games descriptor and I very much do think about it as an accelerant for the application layer. So I don't think we're overly opinionated on where things go.

And I think that we'll see a little bit in terms of every, you know, vector or every industry vertical. But I think we'll continue to see lots of cool things coming out of defy and consumer to start. And then a bunch of stuff out of left curve that most people probably would not have initially associated with the chain with the dudes in the bear masks. So that's my guess for now. All right, Smokie. Well, this has been super interesting.

Where can people learn more about you and Barra chain? I'm easy to find on Twitter. So Smokey the Barra is my handle. there and you'll probably find me in a number of comments and my team is around and the channel for barra chain is just at barra chain on Twitter. We try not to abuse it too much, but feel free to hit us up whenever and my DMs are open. Perfect. It's been a pleasure having you on Unchained. Thanks so much for joining us today to learn more about Smoky and Barachane. Check out the show notes for this episode. Unchained is produced by me, Laura Shin, with all from Matt Pilchard, Wanda Ranovich, Macon Gapas,

Pamma Jumdar, and Marka Curia. Thanks for listening.