Yo-yo, what up, what up? Good morning, good morning. GMGM Wednesday, look at that most useless day of the week, March 26th, 25. Look at that another beautiful day to have a beautiful day. I got my Co host, you know, Tyler, Tyler. Tyler, good morning. How are you doing today? I'm good. I woke up there was big green on the board. I was excited. Looks like we're reversing a little bit, but it's all right. It's it's Wednesday.
We'll see what happens in in pivot day here to see if we're going to be feeling bullish the rest this week or hopefully not the opposite side, but big day for you. Some poker games happening later today. Dude, it's going to be, yeah, it is going to be a, it is going to be a big day. I can't wait, you know, to play poker and kick kick KBM ass here. For those of you who are taking, you know, for welcome myriad, you know the vibe. So it'll be a it'll be a it'll be a lot of fun. I can't wait.
I can't wait, I can't wait. I was actually just I just thought Jing Tao reactivate his account just on time 'cause he's we got to market with him going going heads up with with with on some. So it's going to be, it's going to be interesting. That that, that feels like that should be heavier. Jing Tao, I'm going to have to fire into that line a little bit.
Yo, I'm not going to lie, I'm shaking idea that Jing Tao was playing, you know, the guy's been winning tournaments to the win during the bear market, you know, he's, he's cooked. You know the guy, that guy's like, he's, he's silent assassin in the poker streets, you know? Yeah. Man, what is happening on Hyper Liquid? Jesus, they're really squeezing coke in his left and right. Anyways. That is so funny. Someone's really fucking with that vault.
Yeah, I mean, it's hyper liquid and that the hype token is down 15% on this. This is like they got to, they got. To get this, Yeah, yeah, I'm sure we'll talk about it. Well, anyways we'll talk about that. We'll talk about topics, we'll talk about the markets, we'll talk about all things. Then we'll be joined for great interview today with Smokey the Barrel, founder of founder and Co founder of Baratrain. Baratrain, which is one of the main narratives this time
around. We talked about this a lot on the show, so figured why don't we just get Smokey himself on the show? A lot of people are curious about Baritrain. I am curious about Baritrain. I want to learn a little more. So I think it's a it's good to have Smokey on. So if you have questions, feel free to write them in the comments and, and we'll try and take a few and, and I'm excited for that.
And then last but not least, we'll we'll have, of course, you know, it's Wednesday, so robit loot box spin. So lucky person may win a punk may win a pudgy Penguin or a red guy. So you're definitely going to leave a winner, that's for sure for coming on the show. And then last but not least, this show is powered by galaxies, galaxies of Web 3 platform, empowering creators and brands to build unstoppable communities with full ownership
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If you've connected to Web 3 app you've seen wallet connect that blue logo it's everywhere and I kind of trust in crypto is recognizable as we check out want to learn more follow wallet connect on X and Telegram to stay ahead of what's next Tyler tell me what's up four daily NFT and crypto analysis Tyler T on FOMO our calls the kids can't it's. Great to bastard. Yeah, folks, crypto majors woke up green today, but looks like we are flipping red.
It seems to be tied with the move in equities. A couple major banks have lowered their year end S&P 500 targets. Barclays cut their target from 6600 to 5900, so that's a 10% down cut. And then Goldman Sachs also lowered theirs from 6500 to 62, so a 5% reduction there. Several of them are citing inflation and tariffs as their primary drivers. So it looks like crypto caught up in that to a degree.
Yesterday overall was one of the more quiet days from a headline standpoint that we've seen in a while. A few topics out of the SEC. So the SEC did close their investigation into immutable with no findings of wrongdoing. We also they basically have settled with Ripple Labs. Ripple Labs agreed to pay a $50 million fine to settle the SE CS investigation. So that is now like it's coming
to a close. And then also the SE CS crypto task force, they said they're going to hold 4 crypto roundtables from April till June as they look to create some more clear rules for the industry. So a lot of SEC news there. In other macro headlines, GameStop now plans to add Bitcoin. As to Treasury Reserve, the stock was up 15% pre market and I think it's sold off a little bit since then. Napster music NFTS there was a. To metaverse music. NFTS acquired.
For 207 million to build a music metaverse. So that's a big bet on music and the metaverse right there. Nikita Beer known for his ability to launch in hyperscale apps, it's coming to Solana as an advisor to help select to help select Solana apps launch and scale. So big news from Solana there. And then the CBOE submitted a filing the list Fidelity's Solana ETF.
So a couple bullish headlines for Seoul and token AirDrop and protocol news, Walrus share new new details around its Wall staking rewards and why stickers will earn more as you should scales Kaido big day of news, they launched their Kaido Pro mobile beta as a crypto search engine on the go. They also announced plans for to change their NFTS in the PFPS and then also new rewards, weekly rewards for the top 50 yappers and top 50 emerging yappers.
So they they keep rolling out the updates, rec drinks, new flavors coming, green can't. I don't think the flavor has been revealed yet, but that will be launching soon. And then Mintify did launch its token yesterday. A little bit disappointing opening up a $5 million market cap, $15 million FDV. Rounding things out here, AI, it was up about 3% this morning when I read numbers. Meme corn layers were up big. They're up 10 to 15% across the board. That may have reversed a little
bit here in the last hour. Overall meme market up about $11 billion in the past four days. But Doge and Sheba, clearly a big chunk of that. But a quick rebound there kind of across the board. And then in NFTS, Tappered Wizards, they sold 16160 of those 17150 Wizards. I don't have the exact numbers. I think it's around a 240 Bitcoin raise, around $21 million. There's 90 Wizards left. Those are going on sale in the Dutch auction tomorrow at 11:00 AM.
Wow, OK, that's a lot going on. What up, Mando? Good morning, Mando. In the sun. Look at that sun shining. I'm doing great man. How are you? I'm good. It was snowing again today. It's great, actually. It's fucking snowing where you are, that's just why. It's OK though, it's. Like 20° around hey. I started looking for apartments in Portugal yesterday, so we're good. We're getting there. One step forward, you know we got we you. Seen this high plate? Yeah, we open with that.
We may as well go there directly and just since you guys a tweet, so HLP gets liquidated completely on Jelly, Jelly at on cross at 16 cents it seems. So what's happening here? I feel like we just got to open with this, like, what's going on again? It's a decentral, it's a dex, right? It's not they don't. There is actual liquidity behind. So like you, you're trading perps, but it's not like robot, right? You trade perps and robot like.
Yeah, there's no cross. You got to actually fund the per the position, right? They're they're actually they've actually now got a short on Jelly Jelly and it's quite big. So they. Need $1,000,000. They need to buy a crazy amount of Jelly Jelly now and if they do that, like obviously it's going to drive up the price. So like. That. A lot of people are just going to like try and front run them now and force Jelly Jelly high and the high Jelly Jelly goes
it's an A liquid coin. I don't know. I don't what's the LP of Jelly Jelly It's. Probably low. Oh, watch these guys. Like if Lesson's about to come out and be like, oh, my token's up. I told you so. But he probably doesn't even know what's going on. Is that Jelly? Jelly? No, that's not it. It's. It's literally Jelly. Jelly. Yeah, there it. IS Liquidity's $3,000,000. So that's kind of scary. That is very scary, right?
Wow. If that go because they're going to have to buy back, how much are they short I. Think it's a four and a half million dollar position here, No, yeah. How are they going to? How are they going to liquidate four and a half million? So look on chain saying the crazy squeeze causing hyper liquidity provider HLP to lose approximately $12 million in the
past 12 hours. OX DE95 shorted Jelly on hyper liquid and remove the margin causing HLP to passively liquidate 4 and a half $1,000,000 short positions. A newly created wallet OX20E8 opened a long position of hyper liquid and the current unrealized profit is over 8.2 million. Holy shit people are playing games on their cooking bro. Wow guys, this is actually crazy though. But then if the long takes profits, then the price will go down. Yeah, so Sue Zoo's explaining here, right?
The guy going Max short Jelly Jelly perps likely while buying spot pumps the spot on chain to self liquidated the perps. He's self liquid himself. He's done this before. Then HLP inherits the giga shorts Jelly Jelly position and then he continues to pop the spot and then HLP is still short so down. So actually, you know, aside from being this actually the right. Explanation. That's exactly it, yeah. That's exactly it, right? And they've done this before.
Remember that when he self liquidated himself in like a $300 million long position is. It the same trader I. Don't know if it's the same trader, but it's the exact same approach. It's the same approach, yeah. With the ETH long so yeah, it could be the same trader. I'm I'm not saying it's the same as it could be like, but it's the exact same thing that happened last time. This is a good explanation. Wow, guys, this is not great.
I mean, you were saying on the back of this that hyper liquid oops, wrong app. You were saying hyper liquid on the back of that? Oh fuck, it's down 60. Wow, yeah, that's not great. It was really starting to see some momentum too. How do they control for this? Like this is not my area of expertise. Me neither. Yeah, not at all. How do we fix this? You just not list these tokens. Do you change the the perp structure? Well, they changed the perp structure already, right?
That was for Bitcoin and ETH. They lowered the margin but meme coins are lower. I think they're only. Meme coins like 3X usually on on a hyper liquid. Damn guys, this is actually wild. Oh, it's not on there anymore. I can't even find it. Oh, perp. Sorry. Yeah, he's sorry. Sorry. It's 3X. You're right, it's 3X. Like when you go 3X you go perps. It's only three X here. Damn order book is just going. It's asked another way, like why is this something that's
happening to hyper liquid? Why does it not happen to other? Because it's decentralized on chain or something. So it makes it easier probably to do it on there, right? And it's got it's got actual money in there, right? Like you can't do this on like. How many? How many perps? I guess there are some perps for like really low market cap stuff, but this is a risk on like really low market cap coins, right?
Also it's way less public, like when this would happen on finance you would never know it. You would never know. Yeah, it's like the. Telegraph of This is what's causing the trade to happen. It's because it's public that allows this to make so much noise and therefore people piling too, right? So now you probably have people like piling on the trade and and driving Jelly Jelly up because they know this guy's pumping in spot, right?
So if you caught this early on chain, you were able to probably make money while they're down. Well, that was 24 minutes ago. It was down $11 million. Wow. I need to make basically. Fuck. You just got to cut meme coins under a certain market cap from your perps right? Like. Yeah. They're just asleep at the wheel here. Like, why is Jelly Jelly still on their perps when it's, I mean, it was a $5 million market
cap. Fuck, it's at 50 right now, 40, but it's, you know, by the way, if you're listening to this, like, don't be trading this. Like, it could go both ways right now very fast. Be careful. But yeah, I don't know. Wow. Yeah, that's it. That's really it. Shorted Jelly. Jelly on Hyper Liquid. You can assume that he pumped it to himself on chain. Liquid himself does, forcing Amplit to inherit the toxic
short position. And now it's giga pumping and Hyper Liquid are holding on for their dear life with -10 million PL. Fuck. Wow, that is not great, boys. Yeah. Oh, wow. Hey, the tools are there. Someone's using them, right? Is he doing anything wrong, whoever he is? I don't think he's doing anything wrong, right? Let's try a game to me. I mean in my eyes. Seems like it. Damn this is actually crazy guys. Fuck. Well, that is not great. Yeah, imagine Finance just lists Jelly Jelly here.
Imagine. Yeah, 4X is still a pretty big move, right? 4X is what they're saying would totally liquidate them, and of course they probably would have additional measures. Yeah, I mean, this is not good. You definitely don't want that. Well, you got to hope that somebody else wants Jelly. Jelly also just like stops it from being a 4X but. Wow, that sucks for that man. So anyways, so there you go. We talked about it. We'll see what happens next. It'll probably happen during the
show. I mean, these things were fast, so we'll see wherever that goes. Be careful if you're in those trades, but if hey, if you catch this early, you catch this. Anyways, the rest of the market is dumping boys. So Amanda, what's happening with the market? So we're back. We're not as back as. We've had three, three back-to-back days and now stocks are down at 1%. I, I, I, I don't know. I wouldn't go too crazy. Doesn't seem that bad.
Yeah, it's good healthy little bit of red today Bitcoin still 86 four love to see that. I I really thought we'd see our squeeze yesterday. Not going to lie. There was a point yesterday I was like 88288 three. We're getting there where we were. Yeah, 88 What was it, 88.7, didn't they? I didn't notice, so I was looking good. Solana's up 140 again. 139 here. ETH is 2000 and far coin back slightly. It's 570, which is actually not that bad. Not gonna last. So the market is being the market.
Tyler, what else did you have for us today? There was a there was a lot of stuff to uncover. I know smoke is going to be there as soon as I may as well go through it. Yeah, I think the, the, the Nikita beer news, him coming on Solana as an advisor was big and a surprise. I think he's been somewhat arm's length at Crypto. I think he, he, he shared that in his announcement thread if folks aren't too familiar with
his background. So he's had some significant success launching and selling apps. So he launched this TBH app. In fact 2017 hit 5,000,005 million downloads acquired by Facebook for 30 million. He didn't worked at Facebook for four years as a product manager focused on consumer engagement and growth. And then he launched this gas app, 10 million downloads in three months, acquired by Discord in January 2023. So those are a couple highlights.
And yeah, now he's coming in to help provide his expertise to Solana Apps. And everyone's saying it, we need more apps. And now we're actually starting to see some experts come into the space. This is a big deal. So who I actually only know this guy like a little bit like his his background is in. Apps, just apps. Buying and selling apps, but not buying, building and selling apps. So he sold the famous app to Facebook back then.
Like it was super popular when I was in high school and then on and on. He's just, he's just good at building apps and advising apps in the background and he's an Angel investor, etcetera. And so that's pretty what it is. But what Tyler was saying, that's his background. He's also a really good chip poster goes viral a lot.
But to me, like the biggest signal here guys is we've been saying this forever, but like .1 here, regulatory environment is far more conductive to experimentation on the new administration. This is really what we said would happen, right? People won't enter the space. They listed Jelly Jelly here. Binance could take out Hyperloop. You. Don't take it up, Jelly. Jelly. I'm not like this is serious. I think that's. I. Think the reason could want.
It right, like Binance could do the I don't want him to do it. I'm just saying Binance could really do something nasty here and, and list the thing and hurt and hurt their competition for for how much people have screamed that they're going to take out Binance, you know, it could it would be quite the war. You know they've taken on FTX in the past so. Have you have you guys got money on Hyper Liquid? No. I have a hyper liquid position. Yeah, you've had. On hyper Liquid?
Oh no. It's it's on Hyper Liquid, yeah. Are you starting around in the bank, Mando? Relax. I'm just saying like guys, this is not, this is not small, this is, this is not like something that means. $12 million, they have more money than that. Well HLP is then like it would be a proper sell off. If that happened, I mean, let's just hope this doesn't happen. It's at 31. So it's it's back down. They got a Jelly. Jelly is going to go to 16 cents. So $160 million market cap.
What's that? It's 5X little slightly above 5 X 5 1/2 X. Right. But like. The amount of money to take. Finance. Just list them. I don't think they would do it. It's just such a negative signal to send the industry. I find what they would do, if anything unlisted their fault. It's not their fault, but I feel like what they would do if you were trying to be an evil
person, take it out. It's just ape like $25 million on in it instead of listing it. So you also don't offer it to your clients because you all know this token's going to 0 up after a certain amount of time, right? I think if if finance listed it, they'll be seen as like, yeah, not great. But I would also say that the issue really is with is with hyper liquid. So why does why does JLP not face this risk? What's different? JLP only does Solana, Bitcoin
and ETH. There's nothing else on there you can't trade perps for for the rest. Yeah, we got to clean this up. That's why GLP is so well done. What's GLP at these days? Actually I'm curious. Oh the APY is significantly lower but that's because people are trading on less. But what's still at 3.9 dollars? That's actually not that bad man though huh? So $4.00 token? It's not that bad. It's actually performed better than soul ETH.
I don't know about Bitcoin from the highs, but yeah, the manipulators are Binance funded on chain metrics to say, look, we don't know who it is. It could be anyone. Like there's a lot of people in this industry that have this much money and that are capable of doing this a lot like a lot of people that are able to do that. But that is a crazy squeeze. And definitely hope that it doesn't, you know, affect anyone. Let's say, oh, wait, Zack, XBT is tweeting about this right
now. Sorry, guys. This is like happening live. So I feel like we kind of got to talk about it. Hedgehog said CZ about to less Jelly and I believe fuck everyone's thinking about this. It would be even funnier if this outcome happened because both of your many players were fresh in front of your Binance on Arbitrum. Boom boom boom boy. He's got all the wallets and where it was funded from, damn. I don't know. We don't hope this for our boy
Tyler Mando, that's for sure. OK, he's wearing hyper liquid collars this morning too. If if if my connection gets a little bit fuzzy, it's because I'm firing up the the. Little flight taking a flight anyway. So OK, well, this is not this is not the best way to start today, but this never a dull day in crypto, right guys? Like never a dull day. Never. I really don't want this to happen because actually we like the hyper liquid product. I think it's the best out there.
And on top of that, wait, we have another post about it from look on chain. And on top of that, a lot of people I know are involved in this like you know, have positions, etcetera and including you Tyler DS and a bunch of people. So, so look on between 3 minutes ago, a massive whale with 124 million Jelly. So $4.85 million manipulating the price of Jelly Jelly to make hyper liquidity provider HLP face a loss of $12 million.
Guys, I don't think $12 million is going to affect HL like this Hyper liquid, OK, but anyways, he first dumped Jelly, crashing the price and leaving HRP with a passive short position of 398,000,000 Jelly $15.3 million. Then he bought Jelly back, driving the price there it was. So that's really what we're saying, the explanation that's like look on chain now just showing it with the on chain data to back it. So that's actually fucking wild. God damn it. How do we think this ends? Man this?
I mean, I think Mando is right to to share caution out there and this is a serious situation this. Isn't serious like this? Isn't that that? Yeah, I don't. I would say this is one of the biggest challenges for hyper Liquid as an exchange, right? It's doing volumes bigger than a lot of other exchanges, at least on perps. A lot of perps traders could get destroyed. Yeah, because. You've got a lot of money on Hyper Liquid. I don't know what Hyper Liquid TDL is right now, but it's.
I'll just take Defy Lama, right? Hyper liquid? Which one is this? That can't be right. Is it not higher than? That the bridge, that 2.2 billion, I mean, that's a lot. No, it's. A 2.2 billion, There's only 380 million there. I don't know. It says the TDL of the bridge 22221 on hyper on on the Phi Llama. So that's what that's what it's giving us at the moment anyways, See what happens then We're we're like I said, we're probably going to get this update like really soon.
These things usually like it's not like it's going to last all day long. Yeah, Jelly's dumping at least it's 25 mil, so that's good. So the position is probably not down as bad as it was just a minute ago. But they've got to buy it back. It's not like, The thing is, it's not really like a they need to be buying this thing. They need to buy four and a half million with a three million LP so. I don't know, man.
Between this and Adam Cochran fucking, you know, trying not to freeze in the woods and my whole timeline becoming Studio Ghibli, I, I, I don't know what's happened. I I, I don't know. Yeah, I don't know, man. I don't know that maybe and you know, maybe the whale is is is is Hayden from from Libra. I I, I don't know what's happened right now in the timeline. It it it's madness. I see, I see Smokies join us on
Twitter spaces. Smokey, do you want to join us on on stream yard or no you, I don't know you're on dogs, but if you want, I mean. Yeah, you guys tell me whatever is best for you, man. I can if I don't have the streamer link. I think I didn't see it on my. I can send it right now hold. On yeah, yeah, I'm happy to hop in over there, man. I DM D it to you on X, is that easier? Do you want me to e-mail it? Yeah, no, no, XXTM is good, bro. All right. I just terrifying to hear the word X.
I'll hop in there in a second. All right, no rush, no rush at all. Tyler. In the meantime, is there anything else you wanted to cover while Smokey makes his way here? A couple headlines. Well, we hit the meeting. There's not a whole lot to unpack there. Temper Wizards, probably the biggest other story. So it's like they're going to get through. They're going to sell all these things they sold.
There's only 90 left. I don't have the exact numbers on the split of how many Wizards they sold, 0.1 Bitcoin versus 0.2, but I think it's ballpark 240. Twenty, $1 million raise. So it's going to be one of the larger NFT sales in the past three years. Fuck. So there clearly is a lot 90 are going on sale tomorrow and I don't think they go live for trading until I think they kind of they kind of punted the deadline like it could be Friday, it could be Monday.
That's what Bongo was saying yesterday, right? It's either Friday or Monday. So I think that's why you haven't seen a whole lot of chatter like about price action on the timeline because these aren't trading yet. Like a lot of people were sharing their Wizards. That was great. But I think we'll we'll we'll get a much better feel for the market, of course, when these
actually start trading. My gun on the Dutch auction if if it starts high I think it could close at like .35 point 4. I think that's the expectations, right? That's where I think it's going to open in, in general in the secondary market. So anyone who minted is feeling pretty good about that. Then we'll see. It's a longer term play. Like I, I don't think UDI and team are going to come out with a bunch of twists and surprises like next Wednesday. I think they've got a longer
term plan. I think that will be shared over time. So I wouldn't be surprised if we kind of like maybe see an early pump and then kind of a a chop consolidation from there. OK, so we'll see what happens on that front. Anything else? Any last things? I see Smokey's in the store. I'm going to bring him up in a second here. Was there anything else that we should be covering that we haven't today? I don't think so.
Right, No big ones. We can talk about the kind of stuff we can talk about tomorrow. Yeah, more money to be made for for for yapping. There you go. Just keep on the app. And that's the TLDR. Gamestop's buying Bitcoin. Love to see that. Probably a lot of people are going to do that. Fully embracing the meme song thing, but not backing it with Bitcoin, which I find funny as fuck. Tyler, I love that. It's up 15% even with the stocks down like Nvidia's 4%.
Gamestop's up 15% today, so the market likes it. And to do, I was trading almost $30 here. I actually love to see that. And then the other thing that you talked about is music NFT is Napster. So back $27 million to build a NFT music metaverse, whatever the fuck that means. Y'all this how you know this is not a bear market because this type of shit only happens during a bull market. OK, so. I, I drank the metaverse Kool-aid in 2021.
Like the Infinite Reality is buying the streaming service to transform it into a platform where fans can hang out in virtual spaces, attend concerts, and buy merch directly from artists, basically in a virtual world. And like, I've done that, I've been to concerts in the metaverse. I don't think we're quite ready to replace the physical, physical concerts with virtual concerts yet. I don't know if it's because the tech isn't there. Maybe this all changes?
We're definitely not. When VR is 10 times better than it is now. So like maybe they're visionaries. I don't know if we're if we're quite there yet. I'm not going to the concerts in the next year, I don't think. Yeah, no, I'm not. I mean, if I go to a concert, it's to feel something. And the only way you really feel something is in person, right? And so the whole metaverse thing I don't think has worked and I don't think it'll work for a little bit. But anyways, let's get Smokey up here.
We got a dope fire guest up on FOMO hour with us this morning. Smokey, what's up brother? How you doing? Good morning. What's up man? Good morning to you too. How you guys doing? We're good. Another day in paradise, another day in the East. Thailand. Of course, man, how could I ever complain? Dude, it's crazy. I don't know man. I wake up this morning and see this hyper liquid thing. I'm like, oh shit, here we go again, you know? Yeah, man, it's it's crazy out here.
Kind of reminds me of the older days to be honest with like, you know, weird people just attempting to attack vaults a lot, you know, not, not not exploit style, but just, you know, profitable trading strategies I suppose. Yeah, it's, there's just so much going on. I mean, Speaking of, Speaking of the, the, the past, etcetera. Smokey, why don't you give us a little like intro? Like, you know, I kind of want to know a little bit of your
background, to be honest. I mean, obviously you're at the helm of Beretrain now. We're going to dive deep into that. I know Tyler's got some questions, so do I Congratulations on your success. I mean, you are arguably one of the top narratives this cycle and at least you know for for quite a little while more. I also have Soby who has not stopped speaking about you to me personally for the past few years. I think 3 last three years. So you got to fan Sobie.
I know Locksley, our CEO also is a big fan of yours. Amazing man. So we got we got we got a lot of friends in common. So I kind of want to hear more about like who Smokey is and like what, what's your background like? How did you get into all this crypto stuff? Yeah, man, you know, sort of came from the the pretty opposite side of things.
I've been in and out of crypto since like 2015 and 2016, but I was originally in like healthcare, biopharmaceuticals, you know, very much unlike the empirical science slash, like, you know, web lab kind of thing. So, you know, I, yeah, definitely did not start in crypto, but I was building, you know, my first company was spending a lot of time in the Bay Area. I think, you know, you you just run into a lot of folks who are building cool shit.
And I think that when you see enough friends start to check out something interesting and then folks who are often, you know, directionally correct about things, you kind of got to ask yourself like, OK, what am I missing here? So that was just sort of first messing around with with even Bitcoin and then playing the 20/17/2018 cycle and thinking that everything, whether it's fucking like, you know, rape block slash Nana or Oyster Pearl or like dragon chain was going
to be like the next big thing. Getting rinsed pretty hard on that. And then having fun again in like D5 summer and like sort of round two right when NFTS took off and we sort of had this D 52.0 wave. So, you know, dip my feet in 2019 DCF God, who I'm sure you guys might have run into before, like a good IRL friend as well. So he sort of helped drag me and and some of our buddies back
into the into the fray. And then I'd say that like, you know, sort of one head first in like mid 2021 and have been working on bear chain and in some way or the other ever since. It started very much as a, you know, like a complete joke slash a, you know, an NFT collection of bear smoking weed that we just thought would be funny, which is, you know, sort of how a lot of that this this whole
shit started out of nowhere. And then over time, we said, we said, hey, like there's probably something a lot more meaningful that can be built here and, you know, decide to run with it. I love that. That's so cool. I, I remember it started off with like a joke in an FT project. It's the same with us. Like the whole rock radio thing started off as a joke and then became an NFT project in, in late 2021, early 2022.
And here we are like you're one of the biggest media publishers in the space and we're launching like a prediction market. So it's I love this back story. Yeah, man, I mean, I think like the the, the things that often have the most interesting outcomes and of course I'm biased here are the ones that are not like overly overly like engineered, right, like. It's. True. You know, like you kind of just gotta let shit happen at times.
Of course you don't have a plan, but if you know, it doesn't always have to be some super prescriptive playbook sometimes. It can't be. How do we fuck around and find out, right? It can't be in the space because you got to adapt and change like we then we got to stop with two year bear market. You know what I mean? It's like you got to figure the fuck out. So it's like you can't if you stick to one plan, but you can't flip flop too much. But you. You. Just can't bitch out.
Well, it's also like you can't there. And I think there's a there's a healthy medium too, right, Like I think there's a point in time at which everyone, which is like I'm a chase whatever narrative comes up right. So you know, for a week everyone was ZK, then everyone was modular, then everyone was like re staking and then like, I think briefly everyone was like a Bitcoin L2.
And then you know what I mean? Like I think that that chasing narratives also has like pretty aggressive whiplash because if you do that too much, then you end up with a bunch of grifters following alongside you who are like, OK, cool, I'm just going to follow whatever is hot right now. And then you know, when when the the music kind of like turns off a little bit, you're you're left with no one.
You've just got like the grift brigade who kind of ran out of exciting things to get to get hype about right. So I think one thing that we've kind of always focused on and, and, and maybe to a fault, honestly has been like, yeah, we've got like this core thing, proof of liquidity that we care about. You know, there are bears, there's an ecosystem that's pretty expensive.
Like we're going to do the thing that we know best and we're going to try to avoid, you know, getting too caught up in a lot of the, the noise, some of which is, is great, but some of which is just like people saying shit because it sounds cool. So trying to find the the right balance of all the above. Of that. I, I definitely want to dive into proof of liquidity here, Smokey Before we do that though, I mean, the headline story is pretty incredible.
It's from a point O69 ETH net in August 2021 to a $4 billion FTV 3 and. 1/2 I mean good tech. Cool story. Maybe like in an extra level of detail. Let's pull, let's peel the onion back a little bit. Like how did it? Yeah. Yeah, for sure, man. I mean, look, we were spending a whole bunch of time, my Co founder Papa and I and these like, you know, very define native discords. Think like summer 21, right? This is around the time when it was the heyday for like just cool shit and defy.
Would that be Alchemics and Fracs and Ohm and so on so forth, along with like, you know, I'd say an increasingly mature NFT scene, right? We were seeing stuff that wasn't just 10K profile picture collections, but we were seeing shit like parallel. We were seeing groups of the fact we like, you know, we're taking NFTS to a new level. And I think that meant that, you know, we were attracted for a
couple of reasons. 1 like, you know, more weird volatility, liquidity place arrow is interesting and, and, you know, fun from like a market participant point of view. And entities are just sort of like, you know, I, I don't think meme coins are as much of a thing at that point.
Entities are just a a different level of like of yeah, if you will, right that that also had like very interesting community forming capabilities, some very corny, but others like quite interesting to to get involved with. Like, you know, I still think to this day about like folks that were involved, like forgotten ruins and stuff. And you almost like end up being able to ascribe a, a bit of a personality trait or an architect to people based on the NF TS they run with. Right.
You know, are you, do you have like a fucking goblin town thing or do you have like, you know, pudgy Penguin? Like what is what, what's your personality? Are you a punk? Etcetera, etcetera. And I think that at that point we were like fucking like, you know, it'd be kind of fun to make an NFT project and see where this goes. We don't have a grand plan for where the sun's up, but we'll make 100 NFTS of these bears.
We'll raffle them off in like Discord servers with like, you know, basically lots of folks who are friends and, or, you know, smart participants and we'll see what happens. And that happened. You know, we, we sold those out pretty quickly and like, you know, you know, not faster than NFT meant like an hour or something like that back in August of 2021, I think. And then we were like, OK, now
what? We could either make, you know, 9900 more pictures of bears smoking weed, or we could try to do some weirder shit with us. And we decided to make them, you know, quote UN quote rebase or just like multiply and supply, you know, not not quite, you know, 6 figure AP wise, like Ohm. But the whole concept of OK, if you hold 1 bear in collection A, then collection B, you'll get
another bear for free. And if you hold those two bears from collections A&B, then you'll get two more bears in collection C. And if you hold those four bears, you get, you know what I mean? Like you almost get these these Russian. Nests. Right. Allowing the community to on one hand like reward or early holders and they end up, you know, pretty deeply in the green. As in I think that people went from like, you know, a single 0.0693 hundred ETH worth of NFTS
or something. And at the same time actually like, you know, decrease the scarcity, make that supply actually a little bit more distributed as people go in and out. So we just kind of ended up with this community of a couple 1000 people who were both on one hand pretty define native because of the original communities they came from, but on the other hand, like pretty retarded and risk on because they're down to like ape a bunch of NFTS of bare smoking. This is true.
So we like we, we, I think we found we struck a happy medium there where it's like, OK, cool. Like we got people who are down to see interesting things, but they're also like, they're also somewhat sophisticated market participants. And it was at that point that, you know, it was, I'd say late 21 or early 22, there were lots of conversations being had about like, you know, what is the future of D5 look like, right?
Like, how do we actually end up looking at all these ghost chains at the time that have like, you know, 10s? I'd say like, you know, 5 to $10 million in TBL on the network, but like hundreds of millions of or billions of TBL secure in the chain. And we're just like, well, this balance seems fucked. It's like you're paying, you know, $250 million a year, let's say, and security slash emissions to secure, you know, like a fraction of that.
Why? Right. So I think the whole concept is like, can you build a chain or can you build, you know, an application or something that effectively allows you to have, you know, liquidity and security well aligned at the protocol level, just like an incentive point of view. And can you give app builders a reason to exist there 'cause I think the other thing we really noticed at the time was like people were just choosing which chains to deploy their applications on.
And like, you know, sort of a very mercenary Madlib style. They're like, OK, cool. Like, you know, near or like Aurora doesn't have a balancer fork. Let's let's go, you know, hop on there and be the balancer for Aurora, right? They're like, you know, let's hop on to Avalanche and be like their own fork or whatever that
might be, right? Like there's very little true reason beyond a little bit of hype to say, hey, I'm going to exist on chain A versus chain B. And the latter concept or the real part about Pol was figuring out, OK, how do we actually make sure that we find a way that the chain drives value to its applications? And that's sort of the the real concept in a nutshell, right? And that's sort of what, what sort of, you know, got this, his journey off the ground.
Wow, it's a this is good story. That's a great story. I love this. That makes sense. Could you, so can we dive into proof of liquidity and it said highlight. Can you just point it for the time or kindergartner audience out there myself? And don't worry, I don't as a, as a kindergartner myself, I'm
almost happy to help. I mean, look, the fact is like the best way of thinking about proof of liquidity is that typically when you have a proof of stake chain, you've got emissions that are flowing from the chain or like flowing out basically to the validator set. Either if they're just like, you know, solo stakers like each for the most part, or a validator
set and they're delegate. Right, If it's like a Cosmos chain or an Aptos slash suite type that has delegated group of stake that that's fine and and great and all. And I think that validators are a very key part of the network in terms of, you know, keeping it safe and afloat. However, one of the biggest issues that you run into is that like you're actually sending the vast majority of the value that is being generated by the network.
It's it's natural emissions to groups that are not necessarily invested in the long term growth of the ecosystem, right? Like validators are, are necessary infrastructure partners, but they don't, they don't have a vested interest in many cases in the, you know, success of the, of the application ecosystem, of the user growth ecosystem of all the things that actually allow a chain to get to the point of
adoption. So a proof of liquidity really does is it effectively inverts the value flows in the blockchain. So typically you have like a chain, you know, sort of like pushing to that, you know, the chain through its validators, you know, pushes block awards, either just those validators, slash takers or their delegates, right. However, in the case of proof of liquidity, it's that the chain in each individual validator on that chain is pushing its block rewards or emissions slash its
inflation to the applications. And in turn, applications are basically pushing that to users. So the chain is very much empowering each of these applications to act as I'd say more efficient, like user acquisition funnels or in A in AB to B to C sense and taking those, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars worth of emissions that would be flowing out of the ecosystem in many cases and directing them into
its applications. So I think that's like the the best way of like sort of mentally modeling it in a nutshell, it's taking that value that typically flows out and it's pushing it in and using that to turbocharge the app layer. And what that also means is that it opens up a lot of opportunities for applications and validators to form like a really efficient marketplace and a set of commercial relationships as they look to bootstrap their own adoption, liquidity, etcetera.
And I think that's sort of the the part where it gets very cool and where you actually are able to see the, the, the governance slash emissions token of the network. BGT stands for the Bearer Governance token as something that actually accrues value, not just because more bearers being printed or sorry, more BGT has been printed, but because there's actually other tokens that are effectively directing yield towards it. And we think that that gets super interesting at scale as well.
So sorry I rambled for a little. Bit no, this is good. Gives good context. No, but you're good at explaining it. I love that. Yeah, it's my job, man. I gotta do it. No, it's no. But a lot of the big brain shit, a lot of the big brain shit, sometimes people come on here and I'm like, what the fuck you talking about? But even I can understand this, so I like that. No 100% man. And you know that my it's making
bite size right? And like it's, it's tricky because on one hand we could lean into it and be like poof, liquidity, like, you know, just like try to make it sound like some some crazy next shit. On the other hand, I think it's more important, especially nowadays in an era where like, I think people are a little bit over like the technical jargon bullsh. You know, they're kind of like tired of not understanding things, but thinking they should
bid them. Now it's more like, how do we make things like, you know, actually palatable and, and something that the layperson can understand. So even as we think about, you know, the different framings or branding for proof of liquidity, it's like, OK, do we say it's a chain that allows you or gives you the opportunity to earn more by doing, you know, the things that you're ready to do is that, you know, a chain that really puts power in the hands of the
applications. Like there's so many different ways to to frame it and we're very much work shopping that as we get more and more feedback over time. Makes sense. I'm starting to understand that more in in the concepts I would love because you may like walk through an example of like an existing app. You know one wanted to deploy capital on bear chain app like kind of walking through it to get. Make it 100%, hundred percent, 100%.
So I, I guess what I'll do is I'll start from the, from the top down in terms of just understanding how emissions flow within bear chain, right. So all emissions in bear chain are in the form of BGT, bear governance token. Important thing to keep in mind here is that it's entirely illiquid and soul balanced. So you can't just go and buy
BGT. Perhaps one of the most important tenets of proof of liquidity, hence proof of liquidity is that the way that you earn this emissions token is by actually doing the work of providing liquidity or values network. So you know, the way this works is that each validator on the network and you know, right now there's up to 69 validators, like 60 something live.
This will expand over time. Each time that they win a block and they're the one that like produces that block award, there is a, they effectively have like a little pie chart or a cutting board. And let's say that they produced a block with five BGT. They can choose to say, OK, I'm going to send, you know, 2 BGT to pool into this pool in the decks for I'm going to send two BGT to this like supply side vault in the lending market, etcetera.
And that's really how the that you know, that interaction occurs in that the validators are sending block awards to the applications and or rather they're sending it the block words to the depositors in those LP tokens slash those vaults of those applications. So if we look at that from the other perspective, you're a user, right? You hop on the bear chain, you go to like the Becks, which is like the chain native decks, right?
Or you go to Kodiak, which is like AV 3 slash, like third party decks that's built on the chain. And you say, OK, cool. Like I'm, I'm going to LP, you know, in this pool, you know what you can you do from there as you basically, you know, you LP as you would in, in any other decks, you provide liquidity for whatever those tokens are.
You get an LP token and then you can take that LP token, you stake it on hub.berrachain.com, and you start earning rewards both from the chain itself and that application, whatever their baseline rewards might be. Now, to be, to be clear and to be explicit, this isn't the case for every single app on the chain. It's not like you immediately go on there and the chain starts like directing omissions towards
you. There's sort of a more robust process by governance and by almost like a council approval of sorts that allows new applications to come on and say, hey, here's how this vault is in fact we contributing value to the ecosystem. Here's the amount of incentives or here's the amount of, you know, rewards that as the provider or as this protocol, I'm actually going to return to like the BGT holders, effectively the stakeholders in the chain themselves. And here's why this should be a
place where people can earn BGT. Like here's why this should be an eligible destination of the chain. So you get that value exchange, which I think is like very cool. But did that flow kind of makes sense? Sorry. Yeah, it does. It'd be. Helpful. Awesome. So yeah, like from the user sense, it's not it's meant to be as like, you know, low touch as
possible. It's really you do exactly what you would do in any other app in Define, but you also have this added benefit or this ability to effectively take that, you know, receipt token that you would receive and stake it to earn rewards in the form of BGT. And what's happening in many cases for that, you know, third party or that external applications vault to actually earn BGT is they're posting
incentives in their own form. So they're telling validators and rather the delegates of those validators, hey, I'm going to give you guys, you know, $1.00 in my token in exchange for every two or three dollars or whatever it is of, of BGT emissions you push towards my pool. So what that ends up being is a pretty interesting money multiplier for these protocols, right?
I think we've seen lots of cases where you can sort of take, you know, $1.00 permissions here, then, you know, use it to earn. So like, you know, you start with $1.00 of your protocol token in your treasury, then you say, OK, cool, I'm going to use that to get 4 or $5 worth of BGT emissions. Hopefully with that four or $5.00 of BGT emissions, maybe I'll get $100 worth of liquidity.
And off that $100 in liquidity, maybe I'll generate one or two bucks for the trading fees and then I'll use that. You know, you can start a little bit of a good cycle there, right? It all of course, depends on user demand and the ability to really scale that over time and use that to a thing, add fire to, to projects that already have a semblance or have potential for product market fit. But that's almost one of like
the ideal outcomes there, right? You use it to get something, you use it to get a flywheel spinning to the point of actual sustainability. While at the same time that application keeps on pushing its rewards, whether that be from its token supply, whether that be from, you know, fees they generate whatever it is to continue fueling their
emissions. And I think that that gets the part where that gets really interesting is that it means that BGT is like really the 1st L1 token that's occurring value from exogenous assets, right? As in it's not just, you know, BDT, you're driving BDT. It's actually the fact that other protocols are willing to effectively incentivize it in
order to receive emissions. And we're hoping that, you know, ends up being a really efficient system at scale where on one hand, applications are able to, you know, basically find ways to, to get $2.00 of useful emissions for $1.00 of liquidity that they would have controlled. And the chain is able to to grow lots in value and give great yields to people who are participating in the ecosystem. Wow, there's a lot to unpack here. I love that. And there's definitely a lot of opportunities.
I mean, we talk about it a lot. I mean, there's something Mendo's been mentioning a lot. I know Tyler here and there. It's like there's a lot of opportunities to cycle, especially as you know, we're gearing up hopefully for another good run here on in in crypto in general. But Baratin is definitely one of the leading. The the leader is here. Actually talking to my boy Jason yesterday night from Oros. He's out in Hong Kong. He's like, he's like, yo, have you seen Baratine, mate?
I've seen Baratin. Yeah, I've seen Baratin so so I love that. Quick question for you. I know we're approaching time here. Yeah, good question from from the audience actually. First of all, rafflebot dot XYZ if you won't have a chance to win a pudgy Penguin, a crypto punk or red guy, the code is Barrett chain today, BERA chain CHAIAAI and Barrett chain raffle ball the next one Z every single day Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. Just no Monday, sorry lads.
We do a $5000 robot loot box spin and we pick someone from the audience to come and win. So hopefully someone wins a puzzie pig win or a crypto punk today. We've given away 3 already so it's not bad, but one and a half million dollars given away in the year on the show four days a week. So you'd love to see that. So the code is Barrett chain but Smokey. But we had a good question in the audience earlier, like if someone it is not involved in all this yet, like what is what
is the best way? You know, how can someone get involved in bear chain now either for fun or to make money, whatever. But if someone just just a bear chain knew what's to get involved, what's the best? Way like what's the lowest lift sort? Of what's the lowest? Yeah. Getting your hands wet. You know what, man, I think that like this is one of the things that we're focusing the most on
as a team. Like what's a really simple onboarding experience and our, you know, I think that within the next 2-3 months, I'll have an even better answer for you. Right now there's a great tool slash team that I've actually
shout out within the ecosystem. It's it's it's called like Baratown. And they've built just like a great interface for effectively interacting with all different sorts of stuff, whether that is, you know, effectively building, you know, using the bridge, whether that's, you know, getting some initial barrel, whatever that might be. Like they've built, I think, a pretty thoughtful interface for just, you know, doing whatever. This is nice.
Yeah, man. Like it's, it's, it's pretty goofy, but it's, I think like the correct way of getting, it's one of the best ways of getting people's feet wet. So, you know, for, for new users, I think it's great to, you know, start playing with that and they can find ways to,
to get involved from there. And then beyond that, I would just tell them to check out like hub.berrachain.com because that's like, you know, just the official website and, you know, there's all sorts of resources on there that basically shows you, OK, here's how I swap, you know, here's how I use different pools, whatever it might be. This is great, hub.berrachain.com and then Berra dot town.
I'm showing them on screen if you're on video, but if not, you guys can go together out for for yourselves. And I guess I mean, I have one more last question for you is like, what, what, what's next? Right? You just, you know, proof of liquidity, like fresh, fresh. The thing is from this week. So what what are you most excited about? Yeah. A couple things, man. You know, so one, I just want proof of liquidity to keep on humming nicely.
I think we're going to see more and more teams from outside of the ecosystem like, you know, non Baron native protocols come in and get involved and then people can build very interesting primitives around that. So for example, for those that have been keeping a close eye, like Pendle was starting to deploy their stuff this morning on Bear Chain. So, you know, I think we'll just start to see more interesting yield primitives pop up. But even like outside of defy, right?
I think that what I'm thinking about a lot next is just how we make sure that we responsibly put their chain in in the hands of the consumer. And I think there's so many different ways that one can go about doing so. But I think it's going to be a lot more like education and a lot more external pushes, if you will, on stuff that allows like, you know, your lay person to get comfortable with bear chain and figure out, OK, cool. Like here's how I can start
messing around with this. Is this a game? Is this an application, is this a deep end thing like puff paw that can end up in the hands of lots of people where they don't even know that they're using like bear chain under the hood, but they're just like chilling vaping, right? Like I think there's lots of ways that the bear chain can
embed itself. So I'm thinking, you know, I think my the North star metrics are kind of value being accrued to BGT and you know, new protocols participating in Pol and on the other hand, you know, distribution. So like real users coming on chain that are contributing some form and and or you have real financial value to add to the ecosystem. So yeah, man, it's a little. It'll be exposure summer. I love that exposure. Summer. Fuck yeah.
That's awesome. Well, Smokey, thank you so much for coming on. Shout to Tyler for for facilitating this. It was a pleasure to have you on and really excited for for the future success of Air Chain Of. Course man, thanks for having me and shout out to you guys. It looks like you're doing great work over here. Thank you, bro. Thank you. Yeah, definitely talk about Marriott and Bear Chain. I'll hit you up. I'll. Hit you up, all right? Take care boys all.
Right, peace see ya. All right, all right, well, that was awesome. Love that great guest. Great guest. I love that. See, we said we had a chat with you. Let's get some guests on in four days. We got Udi, Luca and Smokey. So we're going to get more so
chat. If you want more of the founders on from projects that you're interested in, just just text us, DM us or just, you know, attack four more hour and message Justin. We'll try and get some some cool people on me. If we talk about bear chain all the time is we'll get the man on right. So so here it is that's done. So that's awesome. And after those, great. Very bullish on what they're doing over there.