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Chad’s Lounge: ADR021 Talk & Catching Up with Chad Barraford
Recorded: Aug. 23, 2025 Duration: 3:03:45Space Recording
Full Transcription
Thank you. Yeah, I can hear you.
Hey, man.
All right.
Yeah, that was, oh, sorry about that, Thorchain intern.
I got a little bug there.
Wouldn't let me join on the app, so I'm on desktop now. Hey everybody. Hope you're doing very,
very well. What a beautiful Saturday it is. Okay. Let's get this party started as Kenton tries to
get in here. Guys, you guys know the drill. Let's talk about ThorChain. So ThorChain is a
decentralized exchange that enables you to swap Bitcoin with thousands of other cryptocurrencies.
All layer one native tokens. There are no bridges or RAP tokens used. It is all from your self
custodial wallet. There's no KYC on ThorChain. KYC means kill your customer. We don't do that.
It's permissionless. ThorChain's token is called Rune. That is spelled R-U-N-E. You do not need to buy or hold RUNE in
order to place a swap on ThorChain. Very good design decision from us. However, the fees
deducted from your swap are used to buy RUNE and this RUNE is the yield that goes to your liquidity
pools and nodes. So how it works, you maybe have an Ethereum to Bitcoin swap. All the fees needed for the intermediary gas transactions are taken from the starting asset, which would be ETH.
There are no block rewards on ThorChain.
100% of the yield is real.
ThorChain has another token called TCY.
This token is kind of like a preferred stock.
10% of the protocol's revenue goes to these tokens.
If you deposit crypto into savers
or took out a loan on ThorChain, make sure to claim your TCY token so you can start collecting
this yield. There is no rush to do this, so make sure you understand what you're doing before you
do it. And anyone can buy the TCY token as well. To swap on ThorChain, go to thorchain.org, click
on swap, and you will see all the wallets and websites that use ThorChain,
and you can choose the interface you want to use.
Rujira is building a decentralized Binance on ThorChain smart contract player.
It's being rolled out as we speak.
And speaking of Binance, if you hold Rune on a centralized exchange,
you need to withdraw into self-custody,
because these tokens can be used to short sell Rune and drive
the price down on yourself. And once in self-custody, you should look into bonding your Rune
to a node to earn some yield and help secure the network. And you can do this at runebond.com.
Very easy. All you have to do is pick a node, request a whitelist, and then bond your Rune
once approved. If you have questions, feel free to DM me.
There's a ThorChain community discord and telegram. You can all join to learn about ThorChain and make friends. And in fact, we're going to have Baloney Bones on next week to talk
about that more, but to find it, go to Thor community. That's Thor, T-H-O-R, community
account on X. Guys, please repost the space. If you're listening to the recording, I'm watching
you right now. I'm watching you right now. Maybe you're in the bed. Maybe you're in the gym. Maybe
you're on the toilet. Maybe you're driving the car. You need to repost this space. I don't care
if it's dangerous. You repost this shit right now. I'm watching. And if you don't, God will judge
you. Guys, this space is aimed at anyone towards their Thorachian journey, whether you're learning
about it for the first time or you've been around for years.
There should be something for everyone on Spaces today.
Currently, a shout out for the node operators.
There is a vote going on.
The one is reducing the outbound delay from one hour to 20 minutes.
And then ADR21 should be going out today.
That is the marketing ADR.
We're going to be probably talking about that later today.
But that's enough, guys.
Let's get this party on the road. My name is Patriot Sounds. I am an
educator, a content creator for Thor chain. My co-host is having problems coming up. It is what
it is. We'll get up here, but then we have the man of the hour, Chad Bearford. Chad, how you doing,
sir? Good to see you again. How are you, sir? Good to see you again how are you sir good good to see you again
i am doing so so very well man um thank you again for for coming up and talking you are definitely
a favorite of the four chain spaces so last time we had you we had you know you were talking about
all the things you're working on you know um order book and all that good stuff would you like to maybe
give a quick introduction of yourself if people are new and don't know you and maybe break down
what's been going on yeah sure so uh for those who don't know uh my name is chad barefoot i'm
one of the co-founders of thorchain um i was one of the original developers and helped architect
design and build this code i think to this day like a majority of the code is still one of the original developers and helped architect design and build this code.
I think to this day, a majority of the code is still mine of the core protocol, but I haven't looked in many months, so maybe that's not correct anymore.
But still a strong contributor.
And these days, I've been working on expanding our swapping capabilities away from just basic market swaps towards limit, what we call limit swaps,
which is conceptually similar to a limit order.
And then the other thing I've been working on is what we call rapid swaps,
which is basically allowing streaming swaps to occur in a single block rather than over several blocks or many blocks.
So allowing people to trade very actively on the protocol in a much more capital-efficient way.
And then the limit swaps, I think what excites me the most about it,
although there's many points of value to it,
is it allows our arbitrage bots to move from a passive kind of arbitrage perspective
to a more active arbitrage perspective.
And that just allows us to maintain the pool prices much more effectively
and much more quickly and get more volume passing through the protocol.
Awesome. Yeah. These are huge, huge increases in efficiency for the protocol. I am so very excited for them. And I know everyone's super excited for them. Well, we got Kenton up here. Kenton, you want to check out your mic man see if we uh got you there yeah mic check hi guys thanks sorry about that i don't know
what the problem was oh dude don't worry i had a problem with my phone it so then i just switched
to desktop so uh it is what it is it just x-places are capricious go ahead and give a quick
introduction of yourself buddy and then i'll let you take it for a little bit oh yeah my
kenton rough toes uh i have a fund dedicated to investing in rune and
running nodes on door chain and um uh yeah that's it so i'm a node operator and bond provider in
door chain uh yeah that's me love it man awesome so um yeah i don't know if you had something for Chad, but he was just doing a brief recap on what's going on.
Everyone always asks me, like, when?
When, when, when, when, when?
Are you able to say anything to that, Chad, right now?
Because that's all I get asked all the time.
Yeah, so the limit swap code is going to be part of 3.11.
Well, it's already, majority of it's actually already in to be part of 3.11. Well, it's already...
The majority of it's actually already in the code as of today,
but there's a few more things to be added, which are in 3.11.
There's a couple of kind of more finishing touches I still need to work on,
but the main meat of it is already kind of there.
It'll be part of 3.11.
RapidSwaps will probably also be in 3.11 as well,
which will come out in a few weeks
onto the main protocol.
We can start taking votes or whatever
to enable
those features. So it's getting
rather close.
Chad, I have a question for you about
limit swaps and rapid swaps.
Is it, this will work,
like you don't need to use trade
assets to utilize either
ones, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
So the memo that you pass to do the trade is almost identical to the current memo we
use for just like a regular old swap.
So you can do it.
You don't have to have trade assets.
You don't have to use anything like that.
You can just do it straight from a wallet from layer one bdc to whatever asset you're trying
to receive on the other side and the and the rbots because of their clout score uh they're able to
bypass the outbound delay in essence so they'll um they'll be able to like truly benefit from the
rapid swaps from like settling instantly like they will get instant settlement to be able to withdraw if they want uh well it's a
little more of a complicated answer to that one so it depends on how the our
bodies are being so if the our bots are being with like trade assets for example
then there's no outbound to be signed and therefore there's no delayed up on
at all it's all keeping within the. So they don't really have to deal with the outbound delay in general unless they're
trying to exit the liquidity from a trade asset into layer one Bitcoin and then exchange it on
some other exchange or protocol or whatever. So the whole idea ofout swaps is kind of going away a little bit
just because we implemented it specifically to reduce the delayed outbound.
And it just seems like the community, we're now voting,
as we mentioned earlier in the session here,
that we're voting to kind of reduce the outbound delay.
So the whole clout concept is kind of reducing in its value,
and that's not necessarily a bad thing.
I actually was just talking to a familiar cow yesterday, just brainstorming about the
idea of using the clout score as a way of getting reduced fees.
Because a lot of exchanges would do like, if you're trading under $10,000 in a month,
it's this much fees.
And if you're doing $100,000 in a month, it's this much fees. And if you're doing $100,000 in a month, it's less fees.
And it kind of goes up over time to incentivize larger-scale traders to trade.
So I was talking, and I'm familiar with that notion yesterday.
I don't know if we'd actually do it or not, but I was just kind of brainstorming out loud.
I'm totally in favor of it.
I think absolutely we should.
Basically, you just copy Binance's fee schedule.
Yes.
Right.
It's duplicating the fee schedule.
It's using the cloud score to do so, in effect.
Because we don't have KYC, right?
So we can't KYC people and apply it to the KYC.
So we have to do it based on a wallet address, in effect.
And then what about the idea of referring to binance's fee schedule
for example not only did they do it by volume but they also pair it with how much bnb tokens you own
what about that how much rune tokens that address owns would also help get you a lower fee
yeah that gets a little bit more complicated because most of the swaps are going from Bitcoin to USDC, for example.
And so there's no rune address with these.
So it becomes a little bit more difficult in those scenarios.
But I'm open to that.
I'm open to exploring and hearing ideas and kind of playing with the idea and seeing what we can do to kind of strengthen the protocol.
You know, I mean, kind of the point of like the whole cloud score in this context is that, at least in my mind,
was that like if you get less fees as you trade on ThorChain,
it kind of causes traders to be kind of locked into the ThorChain community, right?
Instead of being drawn by, you know, other competitors.
This is exactly what happens.
This is why they do like, you know, that free trial stuff that you ever go on some website
and sign up for like a 14 day free trial and, you know, and all this kind of thing.
The reason why that works so well, so effectively is that you spend 14 days, like getting to
know the software, configuring it to your, you know, specification, so effectively, is that you spend 14 days getting to know the software,
configuring it to your specification, and then after a while, you've invested a lot of your time and a lot of your energy into this free trial. So when the free trial is up and they want to
charge you $15 for the service, you're more likely to say yes to that than you are on day one.
More likely to say yes on day 14 versus day one.
And so this conceptually could be a little bit similar in the sense that the more people
trade on ThorChain, the better of a discount you effectively get.
And you don't want to lose that discount by going to some other provider.
You want to continue to build that discount and get an even better discount.
And it kind of creates like an incentive, like a rewards program, if you may want to call it that, to have people be long-term and aligned
with Thorechain as their primary swapping platform. That makes perfect sense. So like how
you just said if somebody swaps Bitcoin for Tether, there's no ruin address associated.
Well, doesn't the cloud score
follow a Rune address?
How is cloud being measured or tracked?
No, it follows any address.
So you get value swapping from the Bitcoin
and you get value swapping to the ETH address, right?
And maybe there's a Bitcoin address,
an ETH, a Rune address as well.
But all of those addresses,
individual, each individual address, the Bitcoin address and an ETH, a Rune address as well. But all of those addresses, each individual address,
the Bitcoin address and the ETH address,
have some cloud scores associated with those two addresses.
And then when you swap through those two,
you get the combined cloud score of both addresses
because you're swapping the to and the from, right?
Got it.
And then you get some sort of reduced, delayed outbound
because of the collective score of those two addresses.
Got it. Okay, got it.
No, I love this idea.
I think we absolutely should do it.
And going back to copying...
Actually, what you can do is actually like you could take Thor names, for example, and buy a Thor name,
and buy a Thor name, register your Rune address,
your Bitcoin address, your Ether address,
whatever address you want to register with this.
And the Thor name kind of builds the cloud score.
That way, if you trade from anything to anything within those addresses,
theoretically, that's another way of doing it,
to kind of register your addresses that you want to start combining together to do some CloudScore thing.
There might be some privacy concerns around that, like, you know, doxing that these addresses are owned by the same person, whatever.
But that's up for the individual to decide for themselves whether they want to do that or don't want to do that.
Yeah, and it could create something really interesting.
So there's two things I want to bring up.
So there's two things I want to bring up.
One is a reason not to have people's ruin holdings contribute to lower fees is that that's how we compete with Binance.
These traders and market makers have to tie up a lot of capital in the BNB token to just sit there.
And if we don't do that, that frees up more capital.
If we don't do that, that frees up more capital, right?
We're more competitive.
We're more competitive.
And then the other thing that's happening, this happens, Binance knows about it, and
Binance is trying to fight it, is that these big market makers and OTC desks, they're getting
VIP 10 or VIP 8 or whatever on Binance, getting these reduced fees, and then they're upselling
it to their
customers, to their clients.
So it's like they're pooling all these smaller traders into this one house, into this one
larger trader, and then trading on Binance.
And so Binance is trying to find ways to fight that.
And I'm wondering if we almost encourage it.
And your idea with the Thor names, if we can have,
if someone can have a cloud score build up with a Thor name,
let them run wild, let them upsell it.
Sell it to other users, you know,
you following me where I'm going with that?
Yeah, maybe.
I think it requires more thought and consideration,
both for me and the rest of the community,
but it's something worth kind of noodling on to see
if it can be valuable to the protocol for sure. Well, it's definitely, you know, we want to give
our power users, the people who use store chain, you know, some extra benefit over the casual user,
right? You know, it's every, every business does that, right? Like, like rewards points, whatever.
There's some advantage to the, your best customers, right? You give them something back.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I'm kind of interested in at some point pondering on the idea, like,
how do we become like an OTC desk as well?
Because I don't know how people on this call probably use an OTC desk.
Probably not many because they generally require your trades to be at least
$100,000 each trade, which obviously not a lot of people have that kind of money thrown
around.
But OTC desk do massive, massive, massive, massive, massive volume, right?
And they basically work as they, you, oftentimes you have a communication with some person
like Kraken or Coinbase or something like this, Binance.
And you have a DM with them through Signal or WhatsApp or something like this.
And you say, hey, I want to do a trade.
And they say, okay, what do you want to do?
I want to sell Bitcoin into USD.
And they give you some sort of quote that's locked in for, I don't know,
five minutes, 10 minutes, whatever the hell the number is.
And then you execute the trade and you get a very reduced fee and an easier interaction in some ways. So I wonder
if there's an area of trading that we can dip our toes into and try to pull in some like OTC like level trades.
Nice. Right on.
So I'm curious about this vote with the outbound delay.
I'm kind of the one to
start pushing for it and being loud about it.
I think it's a great
step in the right direction. Try to go down
to 20 minutes. Maybe give, you know, just
slowly edge your way
out of it what are
your thoughts chad on completely removing the delay and just being going back to wide open
are you scared of that are you like no we should still just take it easy you want some delay
i mean i personally like the delay um especially as we're like launching into like the app layer
and the app layer is going to have its own potential exploits of new code
and having a methodology to protect the app layer
and provide ways of stopping capital exiting.
Here's my cautionary tale to the community as a whole on this idea.
Is that if you think about the last cycle, when we went into the bear market, almost
like every single centralized lending platform went tits up, right?
They all kind of collapsed.
The reason why that was is because there's this unhealthy thing in the market where everybody was just trying to outbid everybody else.
Because each centralized kind of like lending platform wanted to kind of get more loans.
And the way to do that was – they want to get more loans.
And the way to do that is to offer like lower interest rates or high rates, depending on if you're a giver or a taker or whatever.
And that just pushed them to do more and more riskier and riskier bets on the back end.
And then the market went bare, and they all went tits up, and they all went under because of just kind of these bad practices and the market kind
of pushed them in towards these bad practices like they're all starting to participate more
and more with them and so like this is the cautionary tale i have here is that like
the push to remove the up the delayed outbounds because there's the more competition in thort
chain's marketplace right we got near and we got Chain Flip and we got Changely and like, you know, whatever
else out there. And there's a kind of a push to be more and more competitive. And there's this kind
of like natural kind of race to the bottom. But as you get closer and closer to that bottom,
you're introducing more and more risks. You're introducing less fee generation. You're introducing
all sorts of different things. And so we have to be cognizant of our competitive landscape and react accordingly.
But we also don't want to go to kind of like, you know, do whatever has to happen in order
to be like 100% competitive in every kind of element or attribute of like what a trade
looks like.
So like that's my kind of cautionary tale to the community as a whole.
It doesn't necessarily mean that going down to 20 minutes
is a bad thing.
If I was a voting node, I'd probably vote for it myself
just because it's been very effective
over the last few years we've had that feature.
And the core protocol has become so much more stable
in the last few years than it was when we first implemented delayed outbounds, which was in 2021.
So there's a good reason to actually argue that we don't need as much as we did in the beginning.
But I also don't want to throw caution to the wind either. The rapid swaps, that's my concern is that how effective our rapid swap is going to be
if right now, like somebody will still wait up to an hour for their trade to go through.
If the swap will go through instantly, but they're still sitting there waiting an hour
to get it. You know, so if we, like, do you think that will
have this big of an
impact on volume?
If it's still, like, you understand
what I'm asking? Just because the swap happens right away
doesn't mean the user gets their
funds right away. It still takes forever
for the user to get their funds.
The RapidSwap will get them, allow them to get
their funds faster, right? Like, if there's
an hour delay now in the RapidSwap executing the trade in a single block versus an hour delay in 30 minutes where it would typically would have executed in 30 minutes, then instead of getting it an hour and a half, you get it in an hour.
So it's still going to be faster no matter what.
But you're raising a good point, and it's the question of what kind of security posture do we want to have.
Again, the upload delay was never there to create a good UX.
That was obviously never the intent.
The intent was just to have a stronger security posture that in the event that something happens and funds are at risk,
that we can pause and retain those funds and not have to deal with another situation.
Yeah, yeah.
Right?
Yeah, no, I understand. and retain those funds and, and not have a deal with another situation. Yeah. Right. Yeah.
No, I understand.
Yeah.
My, my concerns with, you know, if I look back over the last four years,
all the things done to protect Thor chain,
make it that much harder to use.
And, you know, and it's, it's like, I get it.
It's a trade-off, but, but at some point, like, we have to accept the risk, right?
Like, we've got to take some risk, because otherwise we're just protecting a protocol that nobody wants to use.
Sure, but that becomes like, where do you draw that line of what is too risky or not risky enough or whatever?
Right.
And that's a subjective line that you can draw, that I can draw, that everybody on this call can draw.
And it just becomes up to the nodes to decide where that line is we want to draw.
Is it an hour or is it 20 minutes?
Right.
Or is it zero minutes?
Right.
Like where is the line we want to do as a community?
And that's up to the community to vote. i think the 20 minutes is a good step forward and like
pragmatic monkey said in the last spaces you know we're going to be introducing a lot of new code
with the app layer a lot of new attack surface um you know i'm personally i'm confident in their
abilities but you know shit happens so um i am partial to both your argument but i think i think
20 minutes is definitely i mean we're reducing it by 66 so i think that's a good step in the right direction
yep yeah i'll be curious to see what actually happens as a result of this like if we pay
attention to you know the volume whatever uh and does this actually mean more volume to the
protocol or does it not mean like any more volume like when these we get these like kind of
apis like swap kit for example that kind of quote a bunch of different protocols thort chain
included and then they pick one and they trade like how much does the length of the trade the
time of the trade really matter i don't know i guess we'll find out it definitely matters because
i like i can tell you i've definitely avoided door chain, so I don't want to wait.
So that's it too.
So how many people are not trading at door chain
because they don't want to wait?
Or they trade once and like, what's taking so long?
And then they don't want to do it again.
It's definitely a factor.
Time is a huge factor.
In today's world, time is everything.
How often you go to a website, if it doesn't load within two seconds, you're gone, right?
Yeah.
Time is huge.
I would argue even more important than price.
How many times in your life have you paid a premium to get things done faster?
So time is huge in today's world.
Yeah, no, that's a fair statement.
And we should just pay attention to the results of this kind of experiment that
we're going to reduce the light up on. Let's see what the data tells us.
And that's, you know, that's, that's the way to go at it.
Yeah. Patriot, you mentioned AppLayer introducing a whole new attack vector.
This is, I mean, does it really?
Like I thought the whole point of AppLayer and the SmartCatcher layer is that these,
like AppLayer can't do anything different than you and I can do, than just a regular user.
It's just automating a person or the ability to interact with Torchain.
Like there's no new, like there's no real change in the code.
Like, or how do I say that?
I think you're right.
And what I'm saying is,
I think with, as the app layer goes,
like ThorChain and Regera,
their reputations will become intertwined, right?
And it just, I think you can see the permutation in real time,
like the communities are coming together.
And so for me, it's just about promoting the best experience when it comes to security.
But then to your point as well, I mean, speed is such an important aspect.
So I got to be honest and say, I'm really not sure.
There's a lot of unknowns, unknowns.
I might actually want to kick that to Chad or if Pragmatic Monk was to to ask him because i'm not sure but that's just what my gut tells me
well this is why i keep people keep bringing up i have to push back on this combining the two
community idea this is why thor chain and regera need to stay separate it's our chain can promote
door chain regera could promote regira if regira has any
problems if there's any issues that's on their brand right that's how the chain protects itself
um you know then we can have be isolated from that and not take it on right so um you know
that's fair but you gotta remember the interface If we start offering these primitives on the app layer with a Thor chain skin,
then also that may that may just have I don't know that might mean right.
Like I think that's the goal on the front end is, you know, we'll have perps.
We'll have this and it'll be called Thor chain, but really it's for Jira.
And to your point, people won't be able to distinguish the difference.
I'm really not sure, Kenton, to be honest with you.
I don't really have a hard stance on this.
Something I think about a lot though.
Yeah, no, fair point.
Chad, do you have any insight though on that,
on AppLayer, on like,
does it actually increase the attack surface
by just having an automated user?
That's a little bit of a complicated answer.
So the short answer is no,
because it doesn't really have any additional access
or capabilities to the base layer
than what you or I have as people.
It's still using deposit statements or whatever else,
like the same as anybody else.
But of course it has its own individual kind of attack surface.
So there could be a software bug in the CosmWasm Rust contract that's being written or whatever that has some sort of possible exploit or something like that.
that has some sort of possible exploit or something like that.
And that could be exploited and some trade assets that were locked into that particular, like, you know,
DAP are kind of exposed and released.
And then they're like, you know, try to exit until like layer one Bitcoin or whatever the hell it is.
Like the core protocol, like doesn't really have any additional risk to it really,
to its bonds or to its LPs or whatnot.
At least not to my knowledge.
But it does have its own independent risk, separate from the core protocol, where its funds could be lost, theoretically.
Yeah, like the Ruji pools and stuff and the perps.
Like the Ruji pools, for example, and the perps and the Bitcoin backed stablecoin.
All those things can have its own risk of collapse or risk of exploit or risk of whatever that's separate from the base layer.
But it doesn't put Rune holders at risk, to my knowledge, or anything like that.
Gotcha. Gotcha.
I want to ask you about limit swaps.
So do, will the front ends have to do like a lot of work to support them?
And, you know, have their users be able to enter limit swaps and cancel their limits?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's definitely going to need some help from the various UIs to help kind of visualize what's happening, you know, because you're going to put in a limit swap and you're waiting to buy up wait for potentially days for that trade to be executed, waiting for the prices just to kind of hit a certain kind of ratio where you can actually execute a swap and get the thing at what you're looking for.
the feature. But I think that makes sense because to me, the type of person, the individual who
wants to use a limit swap is not like a swapper in a traditional sense. They're more like a trader,
right? Somebody who looks at charts, somebody who makes a long-term analysis and TA, whatever it is,
and fundamentals, whatever. And that type of person wants a more complicated and more powerful
and more rich kind of UI.
And I think that's really positive.
I can imagine ThorSwap or other kind of UIs just kind of engaging with this
and giving a very clean UI for it, which is great
because it's attracting a different type of swapper
or a different type of trader into our ecosystem rather than just try to compete with, you know, chain flip or whatnot on just like basic market swaps where we can do that but also expand to a different marketplace that they're not servicing and get volume that way, right?
And being kind of, you kind of like water and mold ourselves
as we need to to attract the most amount
of volume and fee collection as we can.
Oh, totally. No, this is
I think this will be huge for us.
So will there be, like on ThorChain.net,
like a way to see the whole order book
on ThorChain?
There should be.
I don't know if that's actually going to happen or not.
I'm not clued in to the UI as working on this. I'm just trying to get the feature off the ground and then let whatever UI, whether it be ThorChain.net or whomever wants to engage in this particular feature and offer looking at order books and seeing how much liquidity is waiting to be executed in one direction or the other or what have you.
I know that the app layer will probably be using this feature themselves to some degree.
And also market swaps as well.
So they'll all kind of plug into that to some variation or some amount.
But it's up to the different UIs to decide what they want to do. And like, you know, we were talking
before, you and I, Kenton, about
like a ThorChain official
UI, a swapping UI,
right? That's part of like the
memelist world. And whether this
is included in that is, you know,
another discussion to be had and
debated. Cool.
So the, but the, so
ThorChchain base layer
is going to have
its own order book
and the
Emrigira app layer
is going to have
its own order book
and then
in theory
traders
and arbitragers
will go between
the two,
right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's going to be like,
it's kind of a funny thing
because you can say that Thorchain has its order book and you can say that the app player has its own order book, which is kind of factually true.
But they also trade with each other like, you know, like their neighbors, you know.
So in some ways they're like one order book, you can argue, right? Because on an order book on Ruggieri, you know, like if the pool
can execute the trade, then the pool executes the trade. And even if they don't have the liquidity
in the Ruggieri, it would have it, it can go to the base layer to get the liquidity there that it
wants or needs. So the two are like, they're separate, but they're also like highly, you know,
coupled, you know, in a matter of speaking. So, okay.
So my own ignorance then,
what the limit swaps on base layer,
that's L1 assets being held.
And then on app layer, that's secured assets.
So the protocol can swap between an L1 asset and a secured asset
as if they're the same.
It'll see that, read them the same way.
Yeah.
I had to double check the code to make sure,
but I think, yeah, you could go with a limit swap
from an L1 to a secured asset or even a trade asset.
I think, maybe.
I have to look at the code again.
Petri, do you have anything else?
Yeah, I have a question here.
It is from Gima. this is from uh the clout
system this is something you're talking about earlier chad his question is can um can't dex
cheat chad's idea at least for evm chain by sending all swaps through a wrapper first
that's his question uh all swaps through a rapper first so uh that would mean that like a dex like
uniswap for example would create a rapper the thing and it would channel some of its volume
through thor chain through that rapper and then get like lots of discount trades that
that's the favorite is that that's the question i understand correctly uh maybe
i don't have much information i think that's probably right though yeah um yeah it's possible but in order to to do that you have to through a smart contract through a smart contract he says
yeah it's what i i don't see why it would not be possible to use it to build a smart contract and
and that begets that contract contract gets the clout score.
It doesn't really bother me so much because in the end,
in order to get the clout score,
you have to just trade a lot.
I don't really fucking care
if it's like some random dude
in an EOA wallet
or a smart contract, whatever.
As long as the volume's coming in,
then I think that's fine by me.
Yeah, it's like spending millions of dollars on your credit cards to get thousands of dollars of airline points.
Like, you know, you got to spend so much money, right?
Yeah.
So, yeah.
To be fair, it depends on, like, the configuration of that cloud score.
Like, how much trading do you need to have before you get what kind of discount?
And that kind of ratio right there would probably matter, right?
Because if you just did like, if you trade $10, you get like 90% off on your fees.
Like that would be a pretty like ridiculous, you know, ratio.
So it depends on what the kind of parameters are that would matter in that hypothetical situation.
He describes it here. He says, this is in regard to token pocket specifically. on what the kind of parameters are that would matter in that hypothetical situation describes
it here he says this is in regard to token pocket specifically says all swaps done through token
pocket go through their own contract first where they skim the fee and then they go to uh door
chain yeah yeah theoretically would we be that's how it would work in that scenario
that's probably how it's working right now in that scenario. Like there's probably very little outbound delay out of that particular smart contract
you know because it's using the same cloud score. Well wouldn't that be a good thing that we would
you know if Token Pocket if they're sending us lots of volume we want to give them a discount.
Well it depends on how you want to look at it. So to argue for the questions the question
per person prompting the question to argue from their perspective, like, well, we don't want people to, everybody get access to this discount. We want people who, like, earned.
5% off on the trade. I'm just making up round numbers here.
it's better to have five different people trading $1,000 each to each get the 5% off
than all five doing $200 worth
and combining together. Now all of them get the discount but only actually traded
with $200 each. See what I mean? It's a way of undercutting
of abusing the, you know,
cloud score and that, and that hypothetical, right? So that you only trade $200 to get
the 5% discount where you're supposed to be getting $1,000 before you get the 5% discount.
Does that make sense? I think it's actually kind of aligned to what you were saying earlier,
Kenton, about like Binance having a problem with like you know people just
kind of like wrapping their their cheap fees and avoiding paying larger amounts of fees to binance
yeah exactly uh patriot do you have anything else i don't think so man if you want to move to another
topic marketing or something i'm totally open uh well yeah i figure that's going to dominate
the conversation.
So I want to give Chad a chance to talk about anything else you want to bring up,
Chad, before we get into marketing.
Yeah, I mean, I think the protocol in general is doing quite well, actually,
from a technical perspective.
We have a handful of things we want to see done in the nearest future
for major features in the base protocol,
and all of those are kind of already in flight by one person or another.
So I'm hoping that within the next, I don't know,
I'm going to say like five or six months,
we'll have all those major features landed,
and obviously that's like rapid swaps and limit swaps
and DKLS for cryptography.
That's memeless inbound and memeless outbound.
That's batch outbound.
So we can reduce on gases, gas fees,
transaction fees, so forth and so on.
You know, I think like the thing
that's like happening now
that I think is really interesting
and something we all need to be kind of cognizant of in our community
is that I do see the landscape shifting in the cross-chain swap marketplace.
And while ThorChain was really the first to do this,
and we were kind of the only ones to do it for, I don't know,
it must have been three years before somebody else forked and created something very similar.
There's more competition these days and people are trying to compete in different ways.
I know like Near is subsidizing a lot of their trades with like zero, like no fee kind of
scenario to try to stand out and get more kind of bigger piece of the pie in a matter
of speaking.
But it seems like there's kind of like a race to the bottom situation now where,
and it's not just even just like the core protocols, it's also like the UIs, right?
And the UI has been charging a lot of money for a while now, and that's probably not going to
survive over the coming, you know, six months or 12 months, whatever it is.
There's just going to be this race to the bottom
because the in the result we're all doing the same exact thing right like if you buy like like
like a cake from somebody there's such thing as a better quality cake or a lesser quality cake
and that's you know comes into the price but in our case we're just swapping bitcoin for an ethereum right and there's no
better quality ethereum right it's all the same token so the only time the only thing you can differentiate yourself on is basically like you know uh price and time and and and trustability
that the 12 is actually going to execute the way you think it's going to execute that kind of thing
and that's a very little kind of small margins.
And that's going to push the market as a whole into very low fee trade
because if you don't do it, somebody else is, right?
And that's just like the free market doing what the free market does in that scenario.
So we have to think about how we can compete in the long term as a protocol
against this kind of rapidly changing kind of landscape that we're compete in the long term as a protocol against this kind of rapidly changing kind of
landscape that we're now in. And fees is kind of like the thing that everybody's kind of focused on now and again the cheapest thing. But that's not going to be like make sense over the long
term in terms of survivability. You have to start thinking about like other ways of attracting
liquidity and volume other than just like cross-chain swaps, right?
We're doing that with like limit swaps and rapid swaps.
We're doing that with like the app layer, for example.
We're already kind of forward thinking in this particular way.
But it's the same thing that's happened to centralized exchanges, you know,
because now they're plentiful.
They don't really make a lot of money, Coinbase and Binance,
like on their swaps and the money they typically do make from their swaps, probably not even from the actual fees. It's probably from front-running those trades and doing their own counter-trades in front of your trade or something like this.
A lot of them make money predominantly on just holding assets, right?
And asset management is kind of a very valuable part of like Coinbase's like income, for example.
So it's like we can't rest our laurels on just on like being the first and the best market cross chain market swapping.
We have to think about what else we can do to to to to garner more volume and more interest and more innovation and value to the protocol, to the industry as a whole.
I think we're doing that,
but we just have to keep on being creative in that sense.
Yeah, actually, I think that's a great segue
into talking about marketing.
So maybe just to refresh people,
in case anyone's not aware,
myself and Scorch started a new ADR21.
I think GitLab, it's been a commentary period on Discord.
And there's been some debate to talk about here over the last week.
Hopefully it's going to go to vote here next week.
It'll be put up to vote for the nodes.
But the gist of the ADR is to ask for 5% of ThorChain's revenue to go towards a marketing team, a marketing fund, just like the dev fund.
And the goal of this marketing fund is to start promoting ThorChain, get users, start developing and building ThorChain's brand.
So Chad, you're talking about,
you know, reevaluating things, doing things differently. The way like Thorchain has been
run, like its marketing plan has been no marketing. Let other people tell the story,
let the front ends do it. You know, Thorchain is business to business, let, you know, get into
their wallets and then let the wallets communicate to their users
and get trades and all kinds of stuff. And ThorChain is supposed to be in the background and
invisible. And that was a great idea. I think I bought into it, a lot of us bought into it and
it was going, it was working. ThorChain was getting into all these wallets. It's continuing
to get into more. I think it's inevitable ThorChain will be in every wallet in every world. It's going to happen. But there's some other things that aren't happening. ThorChain is not invisible.
that have Thorchain integrated, like the top volume,
all of them except trust, you have to go and select Thorchain.
It's not invisible.
You have to choose to use it.
And these wallets, these platforms with, you know,
over like 300 million downloads, you know,
it's been four years now.
And where's all these users?
Like, you know, we have 30,000 users per month right now. You know, it's like 1% of 1% of all their, of their,
that whole, you know, user base. There's, there's some, there's a disconnect, right? So like these,
you know, we're all waiting and hoping for these wallets to go promote and market
their users to trade, but they're not, or what they're
doing. They're doing a horrible job if they are. And are we going to sit here and wait for another
four years for something to be done? Or do we start doing what we can to educate people on
cross-chain trading? So this is what kind of pushed me and Scorch and, you know, to kind of push this along, like,
you know, I'm seeing that the business plan and model of Thorchain is not working.
You know, we need to shift gears and it's okay that this isn't dire, like, you know,
it's the end of the world. It's just, we're taking in data and we need to like, we need to readjust,
we're taking in data and we need to like, we need to readjust, we need to refocus.
And if you, if you think about also, you know, all these things were done to protect door chain,
right. To, to be decentralized, to not have a front end, to let others have to sell,
integrate door chain, let others distribute door chain and door chain is going to be this
really, you know, difficult to pin down type protocol. Well, if it's difficult to pin down
by regulators and big brother, it's also difficult for people to use. And that's kind of what's
happened. And while we've had this decentralized distribution of Torchain, we've also created this
decentralized distribution of our competition as well. And like, you know, ThorSwap's classic example, like it's, you know, you mentioned Near, Chad.
As far as I understand, the majority of Near and Tense volumes all going through ThorSwap.
The platform we spun out to support ThorChain is now sending our users elsewhere.
ThorChain is now sending our users elsewhere.
And so I think the idea of ThorChain, like it's ThorChain interface being decentralized, I don't think is working.
We need to centralize it.
We need to be vertically integrated in that we have our own front end.
We start building our own brand.
We start to get users.
We start working on the distribution,
we have a free API for all the wallets to use,
and we take all that stuff back in-house.
The base layer, that needs to stay decentralized,
that's fine, but the top layer, I guess we can call it,
that should be centralized and vertically integrated so we can control every piece of it and start creating a brand, a real brand for ThorTrain that has – and it's brands that have pricing power.
So that's how we avoid the race to the bottom on fees with the competition and all these other wallets, because that's what it is.
You're absolutely right.
Whereas we can start building our own brand on our own platform.
And yeah, that's how we pivot.
That's how we fight it.
We'll stop there.
See if you guys have any comments or questions.
So to give a little bit of like historical context, as somebody who's been in the project
from the beginning, when we were like me and JP in the very beginning of historical context, as somebody's been in the project from the beginning,
when we were, me and JP, in the very beginning of this thing,
we were both living in Melbourne, Australia at the time,
writing the code before we even launched, before any of these things, super early,
we looked into having a cross-chain wallet somewhere to be able to swap between Bitcoin and ETH or whatever.
And there really wasn't much out there for cross-chain wallets. wallet somewhere to be able to swap between Bitcoin and ETH or whatever.
And there really wasn't much out there for cross-chain wallets.
And if there was, it was closed source.
So it wasn't great for us to work with for obvious reasons.
And that's partially what we wanted to do.
It was an opportunity here to not only create a cross-chain swapping protocol, but also an open source source freely available like wallet and that's kind of
what what bep swap was and they really did bep swap is like the precursor to what we call thor
swap today and it made sense at the time and and it we were like kind of highly aligned for
a long time there but uh over time as more competitors came into the space we proved the this can work, this cross-chain swapping can work.
And eventually other people wanted to kind of get a piece of what we were cooking.
And more competitors came in.
And it makes sense for Thorswap.
Thorswap started sending volume to like Near or whatever, and I don't want to sound like I'm criticizing them because I'm not, but they were also just responding to the marketing conditions, right?
Because if they didn't actually engage with multiple swap choices, then their competitors
would have, and then maybe they would have lost out to their competitors, and that was
like a choice that they made, and not necessarily a bad one.
I don't criticize them for making that particular choice, but they're also like charging a bunch of fees, but to do so, like, you know, 25 bips sort
of held the number of bips that Thorsup charges. And that's just like, that's also like, as there's
more competition, that's going to become a problem, you know, for the market as well. Right. And so
you, you ran into this kind of interesting problem of like, well, there wasn't really anything for
cross chain wallets to begin with. So Thor, so, so Thor chain created it and we kind of interesting problem of like, well, there wasn't really anything for cross-chain wallets to begin with, so Thorchain created it.
It kind of made it possible for this whole world to fucking exist
to begin with, but as soon as there was more competition in the market, it created
kind of the lines of being
vertically integrated, to use Kenton's words, as it was before,
kind of broke down, right?
So building a new UI that allows us to do swaps,
whatever, that's official to ThorChain,
that'll have some good value to it.
I'm really excited to see that come out,
and especially if it comes out and only has
either a zero BIP or a one BIP fee,
instead of the 25 BIPs or whatever the hell it is
that ThorSwap and other people utilize.
Like that will just drive a lot of volume towards us because now it's like it's cheaper to swap on ThorChain than it is on NIR even though NIR is not having any fees.
Right?
Because you still have to pay the ThorSwap, you know, 25 BIPs, which is a lot because on ThorChain you only do five BIPs for the actual fees.
Right? So it's just like – So it's going to create more competition.
It's going to force ThorSwap to also shift their position as well
and create more competition in the market.
So it makes sense we have to do this for ourselves
in order to give us the best chance and offer the best quality of service.
And we should create our own ui that is you
know one bip or very small um fees and just have the most of the fees being taken out to the core
protocol yeah exactly like the the biggest you know one keeps criticizing doorchain you know get
better quotes it's like all right well we are we're getting our own front end it's no way better
quotes than every other front end so yeah there you go and it doesn't mean we shouldn't still i always feel like too many people always
think it's like an either or question like thor chain should still be working on getting
good quotes in its other you know in general right on these other platforms right and have its own
uh fearless front end right it's not like yeah you know we have a
fearless front end and then we just stop worrying about the quality of our quotes no no we still
want to be competitive we still want to compete and make those make those as best as possible um
yep yeah um so the okay the other thing is too like you, you know, a lot of people, you know, ThorChain was built out of a, during a hostile regulatory environment, right, where, you know, people are getting debanked, you know, if you're in crypto, you know, it's kind of a badge of honor, I guess, if you've been debanked in crypto and projects are getting blackballed, all that kind of stuff, you know, it's hard to get, you know, we're, you know, governments around the world basically are against us.
And we're in a completely different regulatory environment right now where it's friendly.
And I just posted something the other day on Twitter that DOJ said they're not going to go after developers if there's no criminal intent proven, right?
Like if a criminal uses your code, if your intent for writing that code was to facilitate criminals, fine.
Then you're, you know, we're going to come after you.
But if your intent for writing that code was not to facilitate crime, we are not going to come after you.
And like, that's a huge, like, you know, hey, guys, we're not going to come after you and like that's a huge like you know hey guys we're not
doing anything wrong here um yeah you know you should get more comfortable because that was part
of the reason for you know third chain being as decentralized as possible so we don't get shut down
and um and and you guys have to think about the bigger picture here like the second and third and
fourth order effects of this is like,
everyone's talking about institutions and big money coming in and, you know,
401ks, all this, all this like trillions of dollars,
going to start buying crypto.
They're not going to buy anything that they think is regulatory,
like against the regulators, like, like, or uncompliant or whatever.
against the regulators, like, or uncompliant or whatever.
And so if ThorChain's position is that,
well, we don't want our own front end because,
and we don't want to market it because we're scared
of getting in trouble from the regulators,
no institutional investor is going to want
to invest in ThorChain.
Like they want to know what we're doing is legitimate
and it is, and so you know having
our own front end and promoting it is totally fine it's safe you're not doing anything wrong
um the front end will have a blacklist we will do that that's how we that's why protect ourselves
right that's how we um you know say playing we're playing the game, you know, we're trying to do right.
The base layer is where there's no censorship, right?
And that's what stays decentralized and free from any, you know, intrusion.
But the top layer, you know, we can play the centralized game.
You know, we can do that.
And I think we can do a really good job at it.
And we can do it totally safe and compete. We just have to do it, right? Like we just, you know, have to put ourselves out there. I got something to say here. And this goes to what you're saying, Kenton.
So I've had some people step up yesterday and we've done stuff like this before, but I think
it's the real deal now, especially with, you know, once ADR 21 gets approved, assuming it does, I don't, I don't
think it won't be, um, it's gonna be marketing time. Right. So I had someone come into the
sour chain, uh, community telegram and, uh, basically talk about marketing. And they said,
you know, I want to help, you know, they're not expecting any competition, uh, compensation
whatsoever. Um, and then I had another person say it, right.
And so we started chit chatting in the telegram and, um, this is what we came up with. And I think this is a great idea. If you are listening to this live or the recording, um, and you are
really excited for ADR 21 and you want to help Kenton or just marketing, um, in general, please
come over to the Thor chain telegram and tag me. me. And if I know who you are, you know,
cause I know a lot of people,
I don't want to do any scammers, obviously.
I will give you a marketing mod tag.
Okay.
And this is going to be great.
So what we want to do then is then be adjacent
and supplementary to Kenton and Scorch's
and anyone else's attempts to market.
So if Kenton tries to market something,
you definitely can help that,
but also take it upon yourself
to do something of your own fruition
to also market as well.
So on the ThorTain community,
the people with the marketing tags,
I'm gonna let you talk about marketing strategies,
whatever you wanna do.
And this will be great.
So if anyone wants to come in there,
please tag me.
I will give you a marketing mod tag and let's get this done.
Additionally, there is a separate group on Telegram.
You can't just join it.
There's an amplifier group.
And there's about 180, 190 people in there, if I remember correctly.
And this group is specifically for posting links.
We don't like to do chit chat there.
We want to have all signal, very minimal noise if we can help it.
We want to have all signal, very minimal noise if we can help it.
Okay.
Okay.
So between the ThorChain Telegram community channel and the Amplifier group, we want to
engage in marketing.
So again, I shout to anyone, if you are excited, if you want to work for your back, just like
me and the other people in Telegram, go to the Telegram chat right now, tag me, say,
hey, Patriot Sounds, I want to help with marketing.
I'll give you a
marketing tag and we're going to do this. We can all do this together, right? Cause ADR 21,
this is specifically a deal with Kenton and the nodes and the strategy for marketing.
There is no reason why the average holder of Rune or even on the Regera side, right? Because
on these interfaces, there's going to be Regera print amounts on there where there's no reason
why we can't promote this together.
And I will definitely help anyone in this endeavor.
So I just want to shout that to the community.
Let's get this party started.
I'm really excited.
It's go time.
This is marketing for real.
We've always been doing this in some little way.
But now it's time to really buckle down and get serious.
So Kenton, when the time comes, when ADR21 gets going, the interface goes up, my goal is to have an army ready to help you so let's go you guys thanks man that's great and
and you're right like i've had um i've had people my dms like pros at seo and pay-per-click like hey
i can help i want to do it for free and like this is the power of our community right this is how we win is we've got you know all these
like door chains full of really the community is really smart and successful people um who want to
you know do things for free i'm doing this for free right i'm i'm doing it the same way as you
guys like i own a ton of room i get yield from my my nodes you guys like i make the same money you
guys do i'm not getting paid for this
marketing push. I'm getting paid the same way you guys are. And so maybe it's good if I kind of,
maybe back up and give everybody like the full picture. So I think it was in March,
I started kind of running my mouth about marketing. And JP gave me, he basically, here I'll be 250 grand from the treasury, go do
what you want. And then I went, all right, cool. So I started looking into it. And then I realized
Scorch, he had written this kind of, I found out he'd written an ADR for marketing in January,
like a draft that he's been working on that he wanted to like, you know, try and do something.
draft that he's been working on that he wanted to like, you know,
try and do something. So we kind of joined forces,
bouncing ideas off each other.
I started looking into all the different crypto marketing agencies and like,
guys, I get it. There's a lot of garbage out there.
There's a lot of marketing strategies that are garbage.
There's a lot of waste of money. And I'm like, these things don't work, or it's going to be expensive.
I talked to one firm.
It's like $120,000 for a couple months, but it's a black box.
You don't see where the money is.
I don't know how much it's going to pay per click.
I don't know how much it's going.
I don't know where it's going.
And I'm like man like
how does this work and then um so then I'm like and back then I'm like okay we want to try and
promote ThorChain through um like TrustWallet or Ledger you know our front ends right and I was
going to start with TrustWallet because I felt like that's her lowest hanging fruit and um um
and it's just it's just proving to be too difficult and cumbersome. We can't track the data.
We don't have control of the user because that's all untrustful.
And then even just trying to organize with them.
It took me several weeks just to have meetings with people.
It's just so slow.
And then we had this vote for moving the min swap free from eight basis points to five.
And now we're trying to get it back up to eight.
And I'm like, guys, none of this is working.
We're just in a grind race to the bottom on fees.
And like we came in, like, how do you tell someone to use a store chain?
And we came in, how do you tell someone to use store chain?
Like, is our only way to get people to use a store chain
is to be the cheapest provider in the world?
I'm like, it's such a horrible business to have.
And so then that's what it dawned on me.
Like, we need our own front end.
Like, why are we squabbling between five and eight basis points
when our front ends are charging 50 to 100 basis points like it makes no sense so we need our own front end with with zero
affiliate fee we just have our base fees um and then that we can market that we can sell we can
promote that because we can link back to our website and we can track that data and we
can see what works right with SEO and pay-per-click.
You know, we can get all the analytics, see what's actually working, what's doing what.
And, you know, when I talk about marketing guys, I promise you, I am not talking about
the Thor truck.
And I don't want to talk shit on anyone.
We're all trying our best and doing good,
but I don't think that was a wise move in marketing.
I think I can do a lot better than that.
And it isn't just me personally or Scorch.
We're talking to others.
Like we're trying to find the smart people who do this.
And it just so happens that Nine Rounds has been talking to a new marketing person
about trying to fix ThorChain's brand reputation online because I don't know if you guys know,
January and February weren't great news for ThorChain.
But ThorChain not having a communications department, not having a public relations department, not having any kind of organized messaging, it really hurt us because you have
all these journalists and all these negative nancies taking hold of the narrative and telling whatever story
they want and that story that dominates online meanwhile we're just sitting here doing nothing
like we're a bunch of pacifists in a war like who if two countries go to war and one of them
is a pacifist which one's going to win like it's it's no question, right? And so ThorChain's marketing strategy has been pacifism this whole time.
How can we possibly win with that strategy?
We can't.
So we need to combat that brand, that reputation, that messaging online with positive stuff, right?
Remember, guys, solution to pollution is dilution.
whole right remember guys solution to pollution is dilution you know we can't scrub those articles
but we can overwhelm them with positive content and um and and a lot of that content can be free
right it's called earned marketing uh chad you you mentioned you dm me the other day saying you're
willing to do interviews and stuff again um i'm willing to do it patriot you've been doing it but
you know um you. And this is,
if we have a marketing person helping us, they can go reach out to these different platforms.
They want content. Journalists want somebody else to write an article for them. Everybody
wants to do nothing. Nobody wants to work hard. Everybody wants their job to be easy.
And a lot of these platforms want content.
And so we just need to reach out to them and find them.
And, hey, we'll give you some free content.
You know, we'll come do interviews.
We'll come do stuff.
Here's a story, publish it.
We just need somebody out there doing that, like actually contacting, you know, those platforms, right?
So this is what's great with, you know, we're going to talk to this lady that nine rounds have been talking to.
It seems like, you know, she can help us do all these sort of things.
So and if not her, then we have to find somebody else.
But the point I'm trying to make is this isn't just me and Scorch just sitting here, you know, doing this, like coming up with her own things.
like coming up with their own things like we're trying to find like real people real companies
um who are gonna do things properly and not for like stupid amounts of money either um
you know the cost has to make sense so um um yeah maybe i should just stop there and see if you guys
have any questions i thought that was great kenton. I think that's great. And I like the ending how you ended it. You and Scorch and myself and Chad and whoever, we are not ADR21. Everyone can be ADR21.
Everyone can contribute to this goal. And to Chad, I mean, the story of Thorchain is one of
extreme, it's extremely compelling. It is the classic story of the human condition,
struggle, perseverance, determination, and pushing the idea of a free, emancipated world
where children don't have to grow up under the same economic tyranny that we all grew up,
where our purchasing power is being siphoned. In order to accomplish that goal, ThorChain had to
take risks. ThorChain had to try to be innovative. With just doing cross-chain swaps, it wasn't going to cut it. That doesn't liberate anybody.
We had to try to build something like the app layer, which is why Thorify happened.
It didn't work out. It is what it is. We don't apologize for that. We say, yeah,
everything was open source. It was the code. And we gave it our best shot. And every failure that
we had was an opportunity to learn. And in fact, when you think about ThorChain, we actually have like a 99.99 correct success rate where all the different code
changes we made, all the different lines, it worked. It's just always the negative stuff is
always what garners the most attention. But to your point, Kenton, the solution to pollution is
dilution. We now all have the story of ThorChain in our hearts and our minds.
We have the history to back it up.
And we need to tell this narrative of what ThorChain, why it was born and what it has done.
We can tell the story together.
So that's why I'm telling everybody, get in the ThorChain telegram and request a marketing.
If you believe in this, like I do, just like Kenton, just like Chad.
And anyone and everyone can go in.
And if you have the knowledge, go talk on spaces.
You know, I've been really hitting up the XRP spaces.
And now ThorChain and Rujira and AppLayer and NoKYC
and permissionlessness,
these are common vocabulary terms from now.
They just simply are not aware that we exist, but we can all change that together. So let's go, let's get this done.
Chad, do you have anything you want to add? Cause this is your space. I want to, you know,
and, and I really, I'm so glad that you supported AR21, man. And I just feel so good. And for the
first time ever, I just, I'm not the first time ever, excuse me, I just really feel good right now.
I feel like Thorchain is like light and healthy and springy and I'm just so excited to get going, you guys.
It feels so good.
Yeah, I think for me, like I'm coming around to a more marketing approach that you guys are talking about, that Ken's talking about.
about that Ken's talking about. I think my biggest concern about the marketing
concept as it stands today is that we don't have enough capital investing into
marketing to make it as effective as I would like to see it be if I can make
that argument. That's partially because you know fees are reduced on
ThorChain relative to like macro, relative towards, you know, we have like, we're no longer
doing the emission anymore. There's a whole bunch of reasons why yield is relatively low to its
history. Rune price is down, for example. And so the 5% that it's producing is producing some kind
of money to help kind of fund this thing. And I'm not sure if it's going to be enough.
I would like to see more capital goes towards this marketing effort.
That's a little difficult in today's kind of market conditions, but I think that'll change over time.
And we'll have more kind of capital towards Kenton and the efforts that he's trying to put together
and be even more successful than he's going to be with whatever little capital we start with. Actually, thanks for that, Chad,
because I think it's been frustrating for me to try and get this through to people.
50 grand a month, you guys, is nothing. That's water on a hot frying pan. It just evaporates.
in a hot frying pan like it just evaporates like um and like i still even with the little bit of
money i do think we can stretch it out i do think we can can find something that works but um um
like i don't like i'm it's going to work it's just a matter of when like we and the reason it's like
marketing will work for us is because door chain solves a real problem in the marketplace
like we're not we're not a solution in the search of a problem right like like how many how many
times you guys have heard of like people in cryptos they don't know about door chain it's
like how does nobody know about us right and if we get once people know about us and they and they
finally figure out or understand what we do like we are going to get more users and more volume.
It's just, it's inevitable.
We just have to, we have to find,
we have to reach people.
We have to tell them.
We have to make sure that they find out.
And so, you know, with this ADR, with marketing,
my intention for it, my goal for it is that,
like this marketing becomes a permanent fixture in ThorChain,
just like the
dev fund um it should never go away uh what should be reviewed in question is me you know me Scorch
um you know the person you know we hire to help us manage this the people involved absolutely
scrutinize us 100 percent um you don't have to wait a year to scrutinize me. If after a couple
months you're like, Canton, out of here, fine. Guys, I do not make money off running this
marketing fund. I make money off ring going up and the nose going up. So if someone can come in
there who can drive users and volume to ThorChain better than me, I will be the first person to step away. I have zero interest
in getting in that person's way. There's no entrenchment here or ego. It doesn't make any
sense. And that's why. So Scorch and I, we're doing this for free. And I should, I wanted to
bring up something else. Oh, the money. Oh, yeah. So like some people are like, you know, let's try it for a
couple of months, see how it goes. And it's like, that's kind of like saying, just trying a cancer
treatment for a couple of months and see how it goes. Like you keep doing whatever you need to do
until you cure your cancer. And then once it's cured, you don't go back to the lifestyle that
you had that got you cancer in the first place you stick with the newer
healthier lifestyle so like with marketing and sales you know i don't know what's when it's
going to kick in you know when we're going to start you know seeing the fruits of our labor
um if it's going to take two months or three or six or 12 um you know it's gonna it's gonna take
a while but there's the one thing we can start seeing right away is like if we're doing SEO and pay-per-click,
like that, we will be able to measure right away.
But it's like, you know, anyone who understands pay-per-click and pay-per-view,
like you got to start out with like, you know, a couple of grand a month type thing.
Okay, is this working?
Okay, then we start, then you start amping it up.
All right, it's not working anymore. We
dial back. It's a very iterative process. And it can take months before we find something that works.
And meanwhile, we spent 10, 20 grand a month, whatever, trying it. It's just how it goes. Like you can't, you know, you can't, there's no other way to do it.
But if we have a lot of smart people, a lot of engaged people, people with experience doing it, I'm confident we can figure something out.
It's just a matter of time.
And then the other thing is like, you know, our reputation, our brand, that's a's, you know, a little bit harder to measure, but
that'll definitely take time. You know, we can't fix or your reputation online in three months.
Like anyone who says that is, is lying to you. It is just not possible. Um, it's going to take
time and, um, you know, won't be obvious at first, but it should be obvious after a year or two.
you know, won't be obvious at first, but it should be obvious after a year or two.
And, you know, anyone who's still stuck on this whole ThorChain is business to business only and shouldn't be marketing to users.
ThorChain is we're having some integrations or, you know, potential integrations hesitate because of the negative news on ThorChain.
of the negative news on ThorChain.
Like we have to fix, even if your mind is just stuck
on ThorChain only going into wallets,
we still have to fix that reputation and brand online
for those integrations, right?
Like wallets, if they wanna present to their users
that they're integrating ThorChain,
they don't want their users looking and saying,
oh, this ThorChain, it's stupid, it sucks,
all these problems, blah, blah, blah, right?
They don't want that. So like I posted Oracle the other day. Oracle is a business to business
product. They spend more money on marketing than they do R&D. Like just because you're a B2B doesn't
mean you don't do marketing or sales. You absolutely do. So what's great is if we are fixing our brand and reputation,
everything online, it does, it fixes everything, right? The B2B, the B2C,
you know, there's all these spillover effects. So yeah, maybe I'll stop there, guys,
see if you have any comments or questions on that.
Well, I think this is a good segue to open up to questions for the audience.
If people want to come up, you know, we have chat up here.
If there's any integrators who have any questions at all.
But no, I'm totally lying with you, man.
I think that's perfectly said.
And I think most people are starting to get it.
You know, this is something, like we said, that all of us can do.
You're not getting paid to do this.
I don't necessarily get paid to go and do all this extra free stuff or nothing. So,
you know, this is just our own hard work and we can do this together. And I firmly believe that. And also Kenton, it's really good. The Regerians, they also have a marketing redundancy. I gave a
little hint on this, but just in case it doesn't work out guys, the Regerians have done a vote and
they have decided that if it doesn't work, we could always try big titty goth mommies and push memes, big titty goth mommies, and see if that works.
So we do have a fallback plan, buddy, if your ideas don't work, okay?
Just give me a little.
Well, God help us.
My plan works then.
So, yeah, and if no one's coming up, I do have a list of all the criticisms I've seen.
So I'm happy to go through them and, you know, point by point and address them if nobody wants to come up.
We did have someone request.
I did approve them.
I don't see them yet, though.
Okay.
Well, maybe I'll just kind of start.
And this is no particular order.
I just kind of have a jot them down.
You know, I've had people say, you know, like crypto is, you know, it's kind of how I've jotted them down. I've had people say,
like crypto is,
it's not a business.
It's not like TradFi or anything like that.
And I'm like,
I think you're crazy.
You're insane.
Like crypto follows the laws of physics.
Like Bitcoin follows the same laws of physics
that gold does.
And it also follows the same laws of economics that gold does. And it also follows the same laws of economics that gold does.
Like ThorChain is a business.
ThorChain is an exchange.
It follows the same laws of economics that Uniswap and Binance and Hyperliquid follow.
Like, and if people insist on treating ThorChain unlike a business, no one will take, no investor
will take it seriously. Like we have to view this like a serious
business, a going concern. And people will say, well, Bitcoin didn't have a marketing budget.
And I'm like, wrong. There's thousands of people spent millions of hours and billions of dollars pushing and pimping Bitcoin to the world.
That's why it's one of the biggest brands in the world, because you've had all that capital going
into it. So to suggest that Bitcoin had no marketing, I think is the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard.
And to compare Thwart Chain to Bitcoin, it's like, come on, guys, get over yourself.
It's like saying Brad Pitt walks into a restaurant, women throws themselves on Brad Pitt.
When I walk into a restaurant, why don't women throw themselves on me?
Well, I'm not Brad Pitt.
And neither are you.
We're not Bitcoin, you guys.
The sooner you recognize that, the sooner we can get over ourselves and start moving forward and actually getting somewhere.
You have to understand the situation and circumstances we're in. And this is part of the push for having our own front end is to give
our thousands of ThorChad something to sell. This is how many Bitcoiners with their friends in a pub,
here, check out Bitcoin. This is how you use it. Download this wallet and do this.
And the Bitcoin community made it very easy for each other to sell Bitcoin.
Whereas the ThorChain community has made it very difficult for each other to sell ThorChain.
With our own front end, our own interface, it will be much easier for us to sell it.
Somebody sent me a DM here today that on Ygon CoinGecko, Ruji Rune is the highest
trading pair and it links to ThorSwap. We need that to link to our front end. There is marketing
in all these other cryptos. Hyperliquid, people say, oh, Hype didn't do any marketing. Yes, they did. They had several months of, what do you call it? You're doing trading and getting points to get the airdrop. That's marketing you guys. Why can't we do that? We get our own ThorChain interface. We do up some kind of trading program where we try to get users to farm points and we you know, we give them, uh, you know, a gift of a TCY or something like that. Like, these are viable strategies, you know,
way to try and get users that we can, we can think about. And, um, and what's cool is,
you know, we can like, you know, everyone's taught, you know, uh, we can fork other people's
marketing methods, right? So that works for hyperliquid. Let's try it for us.
All that grassroots marketing for Bitcoin worked for it. Let's do that, you know, and try and support that. So yeah, there's, oh, the other one, okay, Polkadot, people are telling
me that, you know, Polkadot failed. Okay, so we don't do what Polkadot did, right? Just because their strategy failed doesn't mean marketing doesn't work.
It just means that strategy of marketing doesn't work,
and we shouldn't do it.
You know, it's kind of like...
Polkadot had a lot of reasons why it failed,
not just marketing or something.
You know what I mean?
It's hard to blame marketing for that.
Well, and they...
Are you saying, like, they had a shitty product?
Like, it just well
yeah there's issues the product was unstable i mean it's this ecosystem was fairly weak in my
opinion like there's lots of reasons to to kind of like poke at polka dot uh and you could argue
that maybe their marketing wasn't done well and maybe that's true or not to be honest i don't
even know what their marketing was even like but if it's just not a valid argument in my opinion
because there's lots of reasons why polka dot you know didn't do so well yeah and like and
thort chain is a fantastic product like we just have to tell people about it like how many times
have you guys seen garbage products garbage companies garbage whatever succeed you know
their their token their share gets a bid. And you know, it's garbage,
but, you know, people buy into it. It's because you have great marketing. Imagine combining great
marketing with a great product. Like, we would be unstoppable. You know, we just have to figure
it out. So, yeah, thanks for that, Chad. just because some people fail in some way, there's also
maybe other reasons. It could have been a giant grift. Maybe Polkadot's marketing,
they're just funding into their pockets. So this has been a, this is a valid question people,
concern people have. How do you know that I'm not going to take, me and Scorch aren't going to take
this marketing money and put it in our pockets somehow it's a really good question because this is endemic around the world and all industries
you have management teams who are double dipping and they they you know they contract to the
businesses that they indirectly own and all that kind of stuff um this is why we want to put all
our receipts and everything in a google drive and so you can go look at it. You can go check it out. You can audit it.
I want to be as radically transparent as we can.
And part of me is like, gosh, it's going to create more work because there's always going to be some jerk who's just going to be a Karen
about everything.
But the flip side of that is if anybody is really, truly honest
and looking at that and you do understand the industry and how much things should cost, by all means, come tell us, hey, you guys are spending too much on this.
This is what it should be.
And you can help us and tell us where to go and get the lower fees.
Right.
Like this is a collegiate exercise.
Right.
So the benefit of being transparent with it is that if people can find cost savings, we will implement them. Right. So the benefit of being transparent with it is that if people can find cost savings, we will implement them.
Right. And so and if we're not or if we're doing something, then that's how you know that we're doing a bad job.
Right. That's the best way I can try and prove it to you guys is that, you know, we'll, we'll be as transparent, as transparent as
possible. So in my, in my experience, and we're going to get to the people who are on the stage,
thank you for joining up. In my experience, Kenton, don't let the loud voices carry much
sway. When I talk to the numerous people, because that's what I do, I manage the community in some
ways. I honestly, it is overwhelming in support of ADr21 so um yeah i think i think people agree
with you man 100 and i think you've basically all those threads that you posted talking about
juxtaposing the marketing efforts of really successful companies and what they had to spend
on it um i think i think you've made your argument and i think people are pretty much locked up
behind you i'm doing a great job um Okay, we got some people up here.
Beats. I'm going to shorten it. Yeah. Hello, man. Hey, what do you got for us? Hi, everyone.
Yeah, I have some questions because yeah, I think every everybody agree with content on the
importance of marketing. But the problem is when I talk to other Tor guys,
Tor army guys,
they are afraid about the change on the tokenomics.
And can we talk more about the tokenomics
and where you want to take the 5% for the marketing?
You're talking about removing the burn?
Is that specifically what you're talking about?
Yeah.
Great.
Oh, you go ahead, brother.
It's all you.
Great question, man.
Thanks for bringing it up.
So guys, I actually like the burn.
burn i i do think i think it's great marketing um so like we i i that being said i but at the same
I do think it's great marketing.
time i don't think the five percent burn is doing anything to support the room price so it's like
well why do i like it if if that's the case like because i understand the value of marketing i
understand that like like a lot of people buy things for the wrong reasons right We don't care what reasons people are to buy rent.
We just want them to buy rent.
And so if this 5% burn is what keeps a lot of people invested
in ThorChain and interested, I'm all for it.
Let's keep it.
I was just kind of reading the tea leaves between lines and stuff
like online,
you know, Twitter and Discord.
I was starting to get the sense that a lot of people were against the burn and weren't
liking it and wanted to get rid of it.
And so for me, because I'm like, I want this marketing 5% to go through.
I'm like, okay, how can i do with the least impact or or how
do i sell it to the community and so i was thinking well maybe more maybe there's a lot of people that
want to get rid of the burn so we can we can end the five percent burn and move that to marketing
and then there's no change in the yield going to to nodes and pools so it's like a cost neutral way to do it.
If the community is saying,
Kenton, we love the burn, we want to keep it.
And we're more than happy to do another 5% for marketing and have that other 5% reduction on nodes to pools.
I am too.
I'm totally cool with it.
Like, let's do it.
My goal is just to get this 5% going to marketing.
I'm not worried with it. Like, let's do it. My, my goal is just to get this 5% going to marketing. You know,
I'm not worried about where it comes from because I think it's,
the numbers are so low right now. It's not going to, it's not going to material materially affect anything.
So I'm just trying to sell this to the community. Right. So it's,
I'm not, I'm not against, and like,
I'm happy to keep the burn.
If everybody else is fine, let's do it. Let's keep it.
So I just, I'm trying to, I don't know.
You know, I need the community to tell me, you know, you guys,
what everybody wants.
Yeah. In my opinion,
I'd actually wouldn't mind dropping the burn and then just giving the burn to
the marketing to be honest. I'm fine with that. Like I was, to be honest,
I was never really for the burn.
I was never really for removing admissions admissions either personally but you know the community voted um so i would
i'd prefer to see the burn um you know just redirected to marketing personally
yeah are you there did we did we lose them i'm sorry what's that can you can you hear me do we
lose i can hear you did we lose beats no no no I'm here I'm here sorry
you prefer the
redirecting the 5% Patriot
are you
not the operator
no no no to be clear
I don't care either way I'm fine
my opinion is the same as Kenton
if people want to just do a straight transfer 5%,
remove the burn, or if they want to do an additional 5%,
keep the burn and 5% marketing, I am agnostic either way.
The important thing for me is getting marketing started.
That is my important thing. But real quick beats.
We have a lot of speakers that have joined up.
So I want to make sure we move through because people might be,
we'll definitely come back to you. Don't worry if you want. Okay. The next one was more,
better you. What do you got for us? Go ahead and check your mic. Hi guys. Can you hear me?
Yes. Can hear you just fine. Yeah. So regarding the burn, I felt, I feel that the the five person burn on a daily basis doesn't really make much
noise doesn't make any doesn't make any difference maybe we should have like a make it an event like
a quarterly event where and we can have now that we have an official marketing campaign being
planned we could have drum could have a drum beat going leading up to the event.
That would make more of an impact, I feel.
Yeah.
So that's one thing that I had regarding the burn.
The other thing I felt was now that we finally have
an official marketing campaign being planned,
is this the right time to rebrand ThorChain?
And maybe I had an idea like we rebranded to like something like RuneChain.
And we have runeswap.com and then we have runeborn.com and we have Vujira as the app
layer.
We have one unified message to promote and we put behind us you know all the the negative baggage that
the the thaw branding has carried and we this is a new rebirth we we are starting with an app layer
we are starting with a simplified base layer um i feel that it would be
the marketing campaign will have a more unified message to convey.
And it will create more noise in the market.
So these are the two things that I wanted to bring up for discussion.
So over to you guys.
Yeah, I have an anecdote exactly to that point about rebranding.
I don't think this is necessary at all, particularly when I go and there's some XRPers in the audience, by the way.
Hey, guys, thank you for coming. Um, when I go to the XRP community and I've talked to them now for months
and describing what ThorChain's done. In fact, Chad, I don't know if you remember this, I think
it was back in 2022, 2021. I don't remember, but remember when the SEC clamped down on XRP,
um, and said it was a security you had said at the time, I don't remember if it was a space or
an interview, but said if only XRP was available on ThorChain, they could have just literally told the government
to go kick rocks. I have told that same story to the XRPers. This is one of our founders
actually said that. And they hear, they see the articles as Kenton's allude to the negative stuff.
When you just explain to them the actual thing at ThorChain, they love it. They love it. And
ThorChain's brand now is actually quite powerful and quite recognizable. I don't think we need to run from it. I think we just double down
and we just fix the contextual nature around the marketing of that. I think ThorChain has a great
story to sell and we should sell it. And so, yeah, I don't know if Kenton, you want to comment
anything? Other than that, I'm going to go to another speaker yeah I can comment um well first off this is I I would like to talk to this about an actual professional
to get their views um but my thoughts are are no for a couple reasons one is just cost and time
you know that we don't like Chad said like as it stands, this grant from the Treasury and 5% revenue is so little money.
I don't think we have the resources to even consider it.
Because if we're going to do it, we would want to do it right.
Hire a real agency, spend real money on it to do it properly.
And we just don't have that.
And part of my impetus for trying to push this front end through now and get this marketing done now is, like, I'm convinced we're entering a new bull market here, guys.
Like, an altcoin bull market this fall.
It's going to start.
And, you know, we need to do stuff now.
So I think we stick with DoorChain. with door chain um i think you know my my view is that like even people who are like have become
disenfranchised with door chain over the years still pay attention to it um you know there's
still i think you know people once once you understand and get poor chain like there's no
unseeing it you know you you you get it so i think there's still a lot of value in the brand there. And then also, what have we been, we haven't done anything.
We haven't been doing any marketing.
Like, in essence, we don't even have a brand.
You know what I mean?
Like, let's actually try doing some, like, positive outreach and positive marketing and promotion.
And if that's not working, then fine.
Maybe then we look at doing a rebrand for whatever reason.
But, I mean, we haven't even tried to do anything, period, right?
I think the biggest issue is that while we are promoting,
if we are promoting using the Thor branding,
there's bound to be some confusion with ThorSwap and ThorChain and
the Thor token.
So if we are putting serious efforts and proper money behind this, then we should make sure
that Rune and ThorChain are tied together strongly.
I can address that.
Do you know why there's confusion?
Because ThorChain's whole community was sending people to ThorWallet and ThorSwap. Just stop doing that. As soon as we have our
own front end, we send people to ThorChain, swap.thorchain.org. They're not going to know
anything about ThorSwap or ThorWallet. They don't have to. It's never going to come up.
So that's why it's been confusing and a problem because ThorChain's grassroots
marketing has been sending people to these other platforms and confusing them. That's been our
marketing plan, confusing people. So if we just stop confusing people and start making it easy
for them, like, let's try that first before we actually change the name and everything.
I agree. And I'm going to go ahead. go ahead this is a great great questions by the way let's um i want to add to it
if if thor chain's friend end ends up doing really well and again i promise you guys my
intention here is not to try and suck users from um the other front ends right i don't think that's the goal is to grow
not not to be cannibalistic but let's just say it is and and thor chain's front end is taking
users away from thor wallet and thor swap that'll force thor wallet and thor swap to rebrand
and call themselves something different so um you know to try and like you know get new users and whatever right um because if their
whole shtick is just to try and promote thor chain and people are like well i'll just go to
thor chain why why go to you i'll just go use thor chain um it'll force them to rebrand so um
yeah i'm not i'm not worried about that i think if we just we just stop sending people to them
we avoid that headache altogether.
Makes sense to me.
Okay, guys.
And I'm damn sorry.
I don't know who came up with some support.
Is more better?
Do you have any more questions, comments?
I'm fine with that.
I'm fine with that.
Yeah.
Any comment on the bug making it like an event rather than like a regular thing?
Honestly, I think, so, you know, I think we burn tokens, we have nothing else to do
with the money, is a simple way to answer that.
So I think we have a lot of things we can do with that money instead.
So you know, if we get to the point where like ThorChain is a global brand. We're the biggest crypto exchange in the world.
You know, we're doing Super Bowl ads.
You know, we got, you know, revenue into coming in the yin and yang.
You know, BPs are getting yield like there's no tomorrow and we still have money left.
Oh, devs are getting paid.
Well, you know, we're done doing development on ThorChain and starting to ossify.
All right, fine.
Then we start
burning but like um i think in my mind that's the way we we should look at it that we just have a
better use for the capital now on other things i think what he was saying kenton is if we do a burn
let's just say that's the world of community we incorporate that into the marketing strategy and
we do like a quarter release like hey for chain burned oh oh oh of course yeah oh totally sort of like bnb does oh totally yeah yeah I mean any absolutely
of course if we if we if the community decides to keep the burn 100 that's why I like it because I
think uh I do think it resonates with people like to say that the you know when I talk especially
normies um I talk to them about crypto
and ThorChain, they'll ask me what's the token supply, you know, and I'll say, you know,
this is why I was against why I wanted to end block rewards, because it's very simple for
somebody to understand the value proposition if there's no inflation. And then we can say, well,
it's actually the supply is deflationary. Like,
so many light bulbs go off in their brain, right? And they just, like, they latch onto that. And they think that's a huge, huge feature. So I believe me, guys, I definitely believe the
marketing ability of having a burn. And if we do keep it, absolutely, we should, we should promote
it and talk about it.
That actually, oh, I'm sorry, promote it and talk about it. That actually...
Oh, I'm sorry, Kenton.
No, good. Go ahead.
Well, I actually think that might be what the Burns missing element is.
A little marketing, like if you add those two elements together,
it becomes super, super powerful.
So I totally agree with you guys.
Let's go to another speaker here.
I'm going to go with the Coke next, and then Joel.
Go ahead with the Coke.
Great space, guys.
I really appreciate Kenton's marketing effort and the ADR21.
A lot of what just said, what I actually wanted to say,
and I will just, I guess, emphasize that burning tokens,
yeah, it is easy for people to understand what's going on,
but I think this is the most expensive way to use our revenue.
We should not just burn.
We can burn if we are like the best exchange.
We dominate the market.
90% of volume goes through us, etc.
Then sure, yeah, we should burn.
But at the moment, I think as Kenton is doing free work,
Scorch is doing free work
Patriot, I, everybody else in the community
we are doing free work to
try to market and just having
this extra lift from the treasury
and then switching
from burn to the
marketing budget I think
this amplifies
all these
efforts way more,
especially when we have our own front end.
So I just want to say that burning tokens is the last resort
when we are bonkers rich and we just don't know what to do with our money.
So yeah, that's about it.
I think you're right there. Thank you for saying that.
We're going to go ahead and by the way, I should actually say thank you with the Coke
for the things you do in the background with recording these spaces as a redundancy.
I really appreciate you. And I know the community does. So thank you so much. Again, someone who
works for free. I love this community so much. You're all rock stars. We're going to go ahead
and go to Joel. Go ahead, Joel. Hey, everyone. How's it going? I just wanted to say that obviously
the marketing push is a good idea,
try and get more users, et cetera. One thing that I think that kind of explains some of these things
too is historically, it's been pretty difficult to actually use ThorChain. And if you look at
the top volumes, it's almost always in integrated apps where it's like in something like say trust wallet or swap
kits obviously killing it as always um and because it's like one of the few cases where you just
want to swap and you just go to swap and this has been kind of a big challenge uh after getting dash
in the Maya protocol being able to actually get anyone to use it has been a struggle because of
the user
experience because it's like well connect your wallet we don't have any wallets that connect
all right let's get in control oh control we paid them money whatever they they didn't end up
integrating oops we'll get a key store oh okay well how do i do that and just all the confusion
around it the fact you can't just go to a website and interface and then just use it the fact yet
well which wallet do you use do you work this way that way and then combine that of course with
almost every single time I do any kind of a swap of any kind on for Shane or Maya or any of these
the the amount of times that I have like dust transaction problems or miscalculations of this or just the the actual
product still feels kind of clunky and so like I find myself again I haven't earned fiat currency
in 10 years I exclusively live in the crypto world I find myself half the time using more
centralized swap services when I need to go from an asset to another and
the other half when I use like this greater Thor chain ecosystem it's out of
like principle but not because it makes the most sense because it just it's
always more annoying more clunky to use etc like I think the memo of slops is
like the number one big thing that could really change this where you can just go to
a website scan a qr code send to an address whatever and it just works as opposed to having
to do all this like connection and custom memo type stuff i think that's a massive barrier so
whenever you're strategically thinking about the like the marketing push about how and when you push a front end etc and um i think that once
memolis is active is where most of the attention should be saved up for that if you if it is a
matter of saving up a budget to deploy a campaign that's how i would think about it at least because
i'm kind of doing the same stuff in the dashboard where i'm planning exactly when to launch these
campaigns based on
product releases, based on products that didn't like, where will this get the most bang for our
buck? So all that ramble to say, basically get my MLS. And then after that is when you should
spend most of your marketing money. That's just kind of an idea I had. Yeah, it's a good idea.
And like, well, to be honest, we could A, B test, right?
We can do some pay-per-click for L1 swaps.
We can do some for Memola swaps.
And whichever one's winning, winning, right?
When we, you know, and just put more money into that.
Like there's an argument to be made that, and I was talking to a pay-per-click guy about
this, a community member who wants to work
for free. He started a nine-figure online business and he knows pay-per-click and all that kind of
stuff. And he wants to help for free. And he's saying, just put all of the money into pay-per-click.
Just get users. Don't worry about anything else. Everything else will come after the fact.
Don't worry about anything else.
Everything else will come after the fact.
And just drive users to the site.
And maybe that gets honed in on just doing memo lists, right?
If the memo lists transactions are a hit and people are into it, just push that.
But it's going to be, we'll just have to let the numbers talk to us, right?
Which is what's resonating with people.
You know, Joel, you mentioned difficulty, you know, using a wallet and stuff like that with ThorChain.
It's something I've been thinking about.
Like when I was talking to Trust Wallet about promoting ThorChain, I was talking to their BD people.
And he's saying like only 1% of Trust Wallet users
have ever swapped inside the wallet.
And like when they go to conference and stuff
and they do surveys,
like the vast majority of their users
have no idea they can do it.
And I'm like, well, how, like, well, what are you guys doing?
How are you trying to fix that?
I was like, well, I am like,
that's my entire job is trying to fix that.
And so, you know, it's not just, you know, the store chain difficult being hard to use,
like these wallets having a hard time communicating to users to get them to do it. Right. And so,
and to be honest, like I have control wallet and I'll be honest with you guys, I don't,
lots of times I don't trade inside the wallet. I go connect it to another DEX, then I go trade on the DEX because that's what I'm used to.
And so, you know, maybe that's part of the problem is people just don't want to trade inside their wallets.
They'd rather connect to a DEX because that's what they're used to.
And, you know, us having a front end can help solve that.
But going back to Trust Wallet struggling to get their users to trade in their wallet. Well, maybe that's an opportunity for us.
We're all smart people.
You know, I like to think we're, are we some of the smartest people in crypto?
Sure, why not?
Maybe we can figure it out and crack that nut to figure out how to get people to do,
you know, cross-chain swaps in their wallets.
You know, at least we can try.
You know, we can throw our hat in the ring and we can try and help solve that problem too.
It behooves us just as much as it behooves TrustWallet.
But sitting back and waiting and hoping that everyone else is going to communicate to that, to the market,
while we don't do anything, it's like, well, no, let's do what we can to try and do things.
And if we're as smart as we think we are, we can figure it out.
I know we can.
I think that's right.
And I just want to shout out Joel.
Thank you so much for your question and also being a friend of the ecosystem.
He has a show weekly and I've attended it a few times.
And I believe you have a big milestone coming up, man.
So thank you for promoting ThorChain and being a friend of the ecosystem as well um really appreciate you dude very much um okay oh
what day is your show on just so might as well go ahead since what day is it typically gone i can't
remember i apologize oh which one are you talking about so if it's my own the one i did the one I did with you. Well, you did both. But I have a live show
every Friday
at 3 p.m. Eastern or
7 p.m. UTC. That's the one that's
on my podcast, personal podcast.
But for Dash, I run the Crypto Quorum
Space, which is 5 p.m. UTC
every Thursday. That one's a big one.
That one's kind of the bigger of the two
and you've been on both of those.
Right. That's right. Thank you. I'm on a lot of stuff, so sometimes it gets a little blurry. one that one's the kind of the the bigger of the two and you've been on both of those right that's
right thank you i yeah i'm on a lot of stuff sometimes it gets a little blurry uh you're a
rock star man thank you so much dude um okay we're gonna move on i'm gonna do slam bammer then eric
then thor max um go ahead slam bammer hi all um yeah i just i just wanted to say I'm a huge believer in marketing. Really appreciate the work that you've been doing, Kenton. I think it's going to be really beneficial to the protocol.
the moment. I mean, I've seen nodes operators say, you know, they're worried about having an
additional 5% come out of the revenue. I've seen the people saying that they're concerned about the
change in the tokenomics. I think the saying that we're going to review it after, you know,
a year or so is a good move, just so we give, we're giving people that full warning. So we're saying that, yes,
there may be a change in a year. I think just the way that we manage the transition within the
community is important because I think, yeah, people in general are feeling a bit tender at
the moment. But yeah, I mean, if we just look at the increase in revenue over the last two days,
If we just look at the increase in revenue over the last two days, I mean, when we see that, it just makes the pain from everything else seem sort of minor.
And then I'm sure people won't mind the additional 5%. And I know, or I strongly believe that, you know, that 5% will go really far into increasing that revenue going forward.
increasing that revenue going forward.
A hundred percent agree.
And those who know,
Kenton did get rugged from the space,
so he's trying to get back up.
So, you know, that happens a lot.
Oh, good.
He's a listener.
So maybe we can get him back up here shortly.
Yes, I totally agree, Slam Bamber.
And by the way, guys,
Slam Bamber is also a node operator.
He is an excellent, excellent node operator as well.
So I just want to show you just a little bit, buddy.
If anyone out there is interested in buying their room,
which I don't know why you wouldn't be.
I don't know why you wouldn't be with all the things coming.
You can consider Slam Bammer.
He is excellent.
Go ahead and DM him if you're curious about what, you know,
how it works and what his parameters are.
And also make sure to use runebon.com.
We built it, guys, to make the process effortless as well.
So I just want to show you a little bit.
Thank you so much for that slam bammer.
Eric, go ahead.
I'm going to try and see if I can get Kenton back up here.
Go ahead.
What do you got for us, buddy?
Hey, mic test because sometimes I rub.
You're great.
You're great,'re great brother go ahead
perfect dude i love this conversation and definitely i i mean you knew probably like
from six months ago that i i'm a big proponent of marketing and i'm so glad that this adr proposal
came out i just want to mention a couple of things that might be useful and you having
hands and already knows about marketing and you're bringing an expert.
So it's probably something
that you already considered.
But two things.
I would love to see a comp guide
for the community to follow on
when they're trying to publish content.
Because A,
when there's not a cohesive message,
you know,
whenever someone reads a post and it uses certain words or it uses certain concepts that are not that well, maybe they are correct, but they are not so as aligned with the narrative.
It kind of puts people off or it might confuse people.
But also, you know, with all the memes and with all of the short content, I don't know how to say this, but a lot of it is cringe.
And we have to find a way to resonate with the crypto people on X by, you know, following this, like I said, cohesive message.
But also, like, let's just say, avoid these kind of memes or avoid these kind of words etc etc
and the other one is is more simple uh there's a very low hanging fruit in conferences when when
you go for example to uh singapore token 2049 there's side events that you can just organize
and you can just just host people and you can name it, I don't know,
the cross-chain site event or whatever.
It doesn't cost a lot because you just have to get the venue
and to get something for people to do, whatever,
get a few speakers, you know, something.
It's a low-hanging fruit that we can consider
that maybe doesn't need a lot of budget.
And it's going to be speaking directly to our user base or to our potential
swap user base so it's just that that couple of things that might work or at least worth considering
i think that's great and i i plan on attending that actual exact cryptocurrency conference as
well so if anyone wants to come up and hang up um because you know i try and attend as many
conferences as i can and just try to promote the space.
And I totally agree. You know, some marketing. I mean, honestly, you know, brand recognition, you know, bad news is like sometimes considered as good news marketing because it just gets the brand up there.
But I agree. There's definitely things we can do, which is why I mentioned earlier, guys, go to the Thor chain community telegram.
And if you want to get involved in this, please ask for a marketing tag and we will get this going.
We will strategize and talk about marketing efforts so we avoid the cringe elements and try to maximize basically the efficacy of ADR21.
Kendon, I see you're back.
Go ahead and check your mic, buddy.
Mic check.
Can you guys hear me?
You, I hear you.
Great. I'm glad you made it back. Okay, great. Yeah yeah me too something that happened last week too i don't know yeah let's be with my phone um sorry guys but i was listening so i did eric i think i
heard most of your about the organized messaging um yeah i so this is i was actually talking to
nine realms has a new bd person, her name's Monica,
and I was kind of chatting with her about it.
And like, we need like a proper brand package for ThorChain,
like images, logos, colors, all that kind of stuff.
So if people want to start, you know,
promoting ThorChain on their own, they can.
Better Than Sex seems to be the logo everybody likes.
I kind of, or, you know, tagline, I kind of like it too.
I was even thinking for investors, bigger than sex.
That's why I've pitched ThorChain to investors is that, you know,
we want to become the biggest exchange in the world.
You know, as far as like the cringe memes and stuff, like, I kind of get it.
But at the same time, it's like, well, you know, let people, it doesn't have to be official from, you know, Thor chain,
you know, marketing department or, you know, accounts, but I say let people run with it,
you know, like everybody, you know, like look at all the nut jobs in Bitcoin, all the Bitcoin
maximalists, like they're the biggest liability for Bitcoin. But what can you do about them?
I feel like, I don't know, maybe decentralized marketing in that sense, just everybody do their
thing instead of trying to control it. I think it's kind of like freedom of speech. If somebody
says something you don't agree with or don't like, you just ignore it. Right. Don't give it any energy. Um,
and it'll just naturally go away. Um, so I'm not, you know,
I don't think we have to worry too much about it.
I agree. I agree. Um, and guys, uh, I'm going to go to Thor max.
And then I also, after Thor max gets done,
I want to just make sure we open up the audience.
If anyone has a question for Chad while he's up here, I mean, it's not often we get the guy.
So if anyone has a question.
But I think what's great, Chad, as I've noticed, is people are just so, like, I've never seen the community so understanding and so locked in.
Like, I really feel like everyone understands what the game plan is.
So I'm really excited.
So the fact that may not be questions for you is actually a testament to how good you guys are doing.
But anyway, Thormax, go ahead. What do you got for us?
Hey, everybody. Just a few thoughts today.
On the 5% burn, I agree that it's, you know, I've been a big advocate for the burn.
And at today's prices, with today's volumes, 5% is pretty irrelevant.
But it's always been the source of hope for me as an investor.
You know, I don't see a
whole lot of reason to expect ThorChain, you know, is going to do amazing things at the moment.
You know, like there's things on the horizon, but the price action has not been great.
But there's always this hope that like, OK, there's this 5% burnout there. And then when
Rajura kicks in or other things come around, if you 10x volume, then that's going to increase the revenue.
And then in dollar terms, it's going to significantly scale the amount burned.
So that sort of scaling property of it being a percentage has always been attractive to me.
So I'll just throw that out when people are talking about the burn.
Like, yeah, today's volumes and today's revenue is really pretty irrelevant.
But that doesn't mean it always
would be. I think of it like a stock buyback on Wall Street. I'm certainly no Wall Street
trader or investor, but there's a reason companies do those, and it seems to work.
And part of that is just the, I would agree that there's definitely marketing value in saying that
Thor chain is becoming more and more the, you know, becoming more
and more scarce, it's becoming more scarce. So just to throw those points out, it's like, don't
just think about the dollar amounts today, because they will scale. So that's just, that's just it,
though. Like, it's, it's a chicken and egg thing. Like, how to, let's take you out of the equation,
you know, how do we get volume up? We need users. Well, even to keep Gertrude in the equation, we need users.
Like, Gertrude is going to go out,
they have a marketing people,
they're going to go out and promote and sell
and try to get users, right?
Like the burn is only as good as the revenue.
Well, how do we get revenue up?
We need to get users.
So like, everyone's clinging to this burn,
meanwhile, revenue is at like a two-year low.
I mean, like, you know, when the burn started, we were burning like 3,000 ruin a day.
Now we're at 1,000 ruin a day.
Like, everyone's precious burn is dwindling because revenue is dwindling.
Like, we got to, you know, focus on revenue, right?
Yeah, for sure.
And I'm not putting that out there to advocate for not doing marketing instead.
Yeah, I know.
I think it's worth a shot.
The burn's not doing much right now.
But I would like to see a Thor chain that has a significant burn also at some point.
Maybe that comes a few years down the line when that's better aligned with how the market is going and things are structured.
Dude, trust me.
I get it.
This is why, again, from a marketing point of view, I get it, that people like
to burn, even if it doesn't matter, somebody can have like with concrete proof that the
burning tokens doesn't help the room price, that won't change people's minds.
They still like to burn.
So, you know, it's like kind of like a stock will have a 1% dividend just so it
can get included in dividend funds. The dividend is meaningless. It's not doing anything for anyone,
but it's just getting them into a new audience of investors. And if the burn is necessary to
introduce door chain to an audience of investors to keep people interested and holding, I get it.
That's why I'm happy to keep it.
I have been thinking about, there's two things I've been thinking about.
Maybe Chad can help answer one of them.
One is, what if we went to 1% burn and 4% marketing?
That might be a compromise.
And then the other one is, if we did end the burn on revenue to put towards marketing,
Chad, what about all those fees, like the 0.02 rune and the extra gas fees that the protocol makes money on that that
goes into the reserve right and could we maybe look at burning those um and then we still keep
the burn narrative alive and you know having those tokens go into the reserve really isn't doing
anything for anyone um could. Could we do that?
Would that make sense?
Is that possible?
It would be a lot of dev work.
It's certainly possible.
I'm not sure how much dev work off the top of my head.
I know JP and I had a conversation recently, like last week,
about all the extra room that's currently going into the reserve right now.
about all the extra room that's currently going into the reserve right now.
Instead of going to the reserve, just going to the system income
so that it increases yield, but also burn, but also TCY.
Everything gets basically kind of bumped up some.
Up to my head, I don't know how much room the reserve is actually collecting
per block or per day or whatever. I don't really know how that number offhand but that was one discussion we had it was
just to throw it into the system system income and have it just kind of boost more or less everything
a little bit well that that might be I was trying to look it up yesterday I thought it was on Thor
charts and I can't I can't find the chart for it anymore. So I was trying to look up the amount.
That'd be great too.
Just have it go to system income.
And if it represents a few percent, I mean, maybe there we go.
We can keep the burn, do the 5% revenue, have those extra fees get added on to our revenue.
So it's still almost net neutral. It's not too much of a hit.
So instead of 75% being paid out, maybe we're only at 70,
oh my god, my numbers are all mixed up, 79% or something,
78%.
So maybe everybody, kind of best of all worlds.
Yeah, it'd be interesting
to know what those numbers are.
Another thought along those lines,
if we're going to be burning Rune,
I would hope that we're buying Rune
off the market with the fees,
the affiliate fees, whatever the fees.
And so it's getting bought off the open market
rather than just being internal accounting
coming off the reserve or something.
Seems like that would be more effective.
Maybe I'm getting the tokenomics wrong.
It's irrelevant.
But at least from a marketing point of view,
it seems more important that it be bought off the market.
And similarly, with this 5% or 50 grand a month
or whatever it is,
it occurs to me that
there may be months where nothing happens. Everybody's busy with real life stuff or,
you know, programs are rowing and things have been paid for. And a few months go by where nothing
happens. Then like, is this building up in a marketing fund, which, you know, sounds good
for a couple of months, but if, you know, X number of months go by per year, pretty soon you've got a million, $2
million marketing honeypot sitting there.
And at that point, maybe you guys have passed it along to other people and somebody new
comes in and maybe they're not as honest about it.
And then their girlfriend is now got hired at a
marketing firm and next thing you know there's a major contract going out for
really not all that much and that honeypot gets basically looted for not
much value and so part of me wonders if the money doesn't get spent on marketing
in one month then should that money go to some other purpose? Maybe it's the burn.
Maybe it's something else.
Another thought I've been having a lot of,
if you just let me segue here.
I and a lot of other LPs are still out here
walking wounded out on the battlefield
after the Thorify collapse.
TCY did a lot to appease and repair the lost goodwill for savers.
But we still got all these LPs, and we're all sitting at, like, you know,
a few days this week, it was minus 100% loss.
Like, literally everything is gone, And the LP position is negative.
And then room price goes up a little bit, and maybe I'm at a 99% loss.
But that's still, like, a big wound for me.
Early on in ThorChain, back in the multi-chain chaos net days, I recall, first of all, there
was ILP, which gave this certain amount of reassurance that, like, okay, I'm dealing
with people that are good and honest and reasonable, and they're going to make things right, and da-da-da-da-da.
And then I understand all the reasons why ILP had to go away, and it shouldn't come back, and
even that was tokenomically problematic. But it sort of sub-communicated, like,
ThorChain is a safe thing to invest in. And then there were hacks, and people were covered for
those hacks. And it's like, oh, okay, we're dealing with some really honest, moral people here.
And that makes ThorChain feel very investable.
And that's part of the reason I've been so loyal to ThorChain, despite all things that have happened.
These days, I, you know, after this ThorFi collapse and he's seeing lots of things on Twitter that are just like, well, you knew the risk, tough crap. And it's like, well, the way that collapsed was not within what was, you know,
expected as normal operating parameters and whatnot. So I, you know, I use myself an example
of what I assume is a much larger cohort of people out there that are still, you know,
as I say, the walking wounded from that. And if you want to improve, you know, public relations and all of that, repairing that
damage would go a long way towards, you know, reputational damage, let's call it.
And, you know, so that's another one of the things like, well, if the marketing doesn't
get, you know, one month of that marketing budget would almost make me whole and probably a whole lot of other people.
And if that happened a couple of times here and there, like that would go a long way or anything to juice that, save the LPs.
And probably there's probably way more sophisticated ways to do that.
That might involve whatever happens with LPs and leverage.
But lately I've been seeing a lot of talk on Twitter that's just like, well, screw the LPs, basically. I know what you're talking about, and I don't share that view at all,
and I'm an LP myself, also suffered a significant financial loss. I don't agree with that at all,
not at all, and especially LPs. It's hard to know as an LP, because a lot of people
like the argument LPs knew the game. I don't think that's right at all.
I mean,
it's very hard for someone who's not a developer to understand the exact
behaviorism of code,
right?
You have to try to parse the data.
So I'm right there with you,
Thor max,
right.
You know,
I've taken a huge financial hit as well as an LP.
So I feel your pain.
My goal is definitely,
you know,
just let the LPs just chill out.
Let's push this marketing
thing as hard as we can. That's why I'm so eager to get started. And so that we can get ruin
appreciation up and then we can absolutely come to the defense and really help some of the most
loyal and best members of the community, which has definitely been you and many, many others.
So I hope that gives you a sense of feeling okay.
I know it's painful to look at that LP position. Oh my God. See a negative 100% is just like,
oh my gosh. But as you've said, when the ruin price appreciates, it starts to look a lot better.
I really want to turbocharge that. And for anyone other out there who's LPs, just think of what's
going on. Finally know the system is not
leveraged we've got rogera you know mocha is going to be starting in september we got kenton we got
the marketing thing going on we have all the amazing innovations and advancements that are
chad b that are going right now things are really looking good it's painful right now what it is
sit tight um if anyone ever mentions you know liquidating the lp i'm just
gonna i'll be honest i don't know if anyone does agree that i'm gonna be very against that um let's
try and fix it let's try to bring everyone out of the hole together i think that would be as you said
the best public relations thing we could possibly do yeah i mean i don't just bring it up you're
like oh poor me and make me whole and blah blah blah, blah. I just bring it up because, like, let's recognize that this is a black eye on our community here.
And it's, you know, something that needs to be dealt with.
And it is an opportunity, perhaps, to, you know, improve public perception of the chain and all of that.
And I think that's a little corner of Thor chain that's easy for people who weren't LPing to sort of forget about.
Won't be forgotten by me.
How do we fix people taking risks they don't understand?
Well, it's not that. It's not that.
It's the risk is not adequately communicated.
And so they can't understand.
They can't understand. They can't understand because I
have educated on this, especially when it comes to leverage and sense and savers and lending and
how it all works. And I even gave out bad education because I didn't understand how it
worked and the severity thing. So I take some accountability here as well. Right? It's a very convoluted thing. It's not as simple as saying that LPs
were playing in the casino and they lost. I just am so against that because LPs stayed in ChaosNet
not to win money. They believed the original mission of we are trying to build something
special here that liberates the world. And particularly down chaos that it was communicated, you know,
you may lose everything.
LP stuck it through knowing that.
And they supported the protocol during our hacks before we had POL, right?
They could have left and it could have left Thor chain ruined, right?
So this is one of the most powerful and devoted aspects of our community.
And I'm not excusing, you know, of course, you know, it's not about communism and making losers winners.
But if there is an opportunity here to make everyone do well, if we can get this marketing thing and help lift everyone and rise all boats this tide, I think we should go for it rather than just write them off right away.
Let's give it some more time because we have so many good things going for us.
It's not communism, I promise.
Let's give it an honest go.
Let's give it a shot.
And I really think, Kenton, that we can really get this going.
I understand.
And trust me, I've been fortunate for four years.
I know everything going on, you guys.
I get it.
And I understand the casino
comments are harsh. But both of you just have said that you didn't understand the risks,
yet you put money in it anyway.
Kenton, even the devs didn't understand the risk. Or if they did know the risk, then that's...
or if they did know the risk, then that's, you know.
So let me, let's rewind and tell you how you can trust Kenton.
I did understand the risk.
This is why when they canceled, go look back,
I think it was ADR5, and when the nodes canceled ILP.
And I'm like, what is going on?
And I freaked out on everybody.
You can't treat people like this. You can't abruptly remove ILP. And I'm like, what is going on? And I freaked out on everybody. You can't treat people like
this. You can't abruptly remove ILP. And I pushed everyone to give it a, you know, that influence
everyone to give it a 30 day notice period to give LPs a chance to withdraw, right? Don't,
don't just change the terms on them instantly like this. And I'm serious, read that whole thread,
this and um um i'm serious read that whole thread you guys and i'm sticking up for you for the user
for people that don't understand and um i understood it completely that we get rid of
ilp and we add savers and since it's it's i'll it's impermanent loss squared who's going to take
that risk that right and so this was the my concern is that we get we move away from ilp
to then savers it's like uh i don't know how to i don't know how to explain it but it's you're um
i was i was i was worried we were going to have a bank run then that no one's going to want to
stay in the pools because no one's going to want to take this leveraged ilp risk um but turns out
lots of people were happy with it so all right um now like and it was communicated back then too
they're like if you don't want this risk this is what savers is for go into savers and um so uh
yeah like there was this is why i was fighting savers this whole time.
I was trying to end it and get rid of it, the synth leverage.
I've been fighting it ever since it came out, you guys.
I've been fighting, I was fighting lending ever since it came out.
So, you know, I understood the risks.
This is what probably makes me mad is I'm still here.
I stuck around.
I still got burned.
I understand the risks and I still got burned from it all.
I've been screaming at you guys, everybody, for years about this. So that's how you know you can trust me. And so let's bring it back to the million dollars in the dev fund. It's a great
question. You're right. So what if, okay, Kenton, we trust you, you know,
you're not going to do anything shady. What if I quit? What if I leave? What if I die? Right?
You know, what's going to happen? I don't have a good answer for you. You know, hopefully,
you know, Scorch, I trust him. Hopefully other people involved, you know, we can, we can trust
them. But it, it is a, I actually would like the Dev Fund to get to that point where like, you know, we are kind of getting a point where we can't spend the money fast enough type thing.
Like we're just becomes wasting it.
And we do let it accumulate a bit.
And then that'll help us weather the bear market.
uh, uh, weather the bear market so that when our revenue goes down and the marketing fund
goes down, like, like the, the marketing fund, uh, income goes down, we've got this war chest
that we can, we can stay on.
It can stay on higher during the bear market.
And, um, like we're getting to the point, we're already there guys, we're, we're going to
have to pay wallets to get integrated.
Like it's just, it's coming. Like they're going to call it wallets to get integrated like it's just it's
coming like they're gonna call it grants or partnerships or whatever you want to call it
but it's a bribe it's good it's already happening it's going to happen and so um if we build up that
war chest and a marketing budget we then we use that money to go buy our way into these wallets, like into these platforms. So there will be,
there is a reason to save some money in the funds so that we can have a bit longer term
planning with it. But yeah, I don't know how else I can say you can trust me other than my track
record over the last four years. years um oh dude we trust you
you're you're beloved in this community you're an absolute rock star and dude i i would trust you
with my life i think you're a great dude um and i appreciate your hard work i know you and i have
talked for a long time um i don't want this you know thor max um i totally hear you i don't want
the community uh this conversation to consume the whole space because it is very,
but I'll just say, you know, I love what we're doing here and I just want to see how it pans
out. Let's really hit this marketing thing full force, you guys. Let's keep it positive. Let's
keep the good vibes. And I'm willing to go as hard as I possibly can to make everyone in this
community be much better, but we do have some new speakers. So if that's okay, I just want to go,
I'm going to go to Graham. Graham has his hands up. Go ahead, sir.
Before you jump off, I'm going to
jump off the call, guys.
Hanging around for the last couple hours with you.
I just got some other plans to get to, but
I just want to say goodbye, everybody, and
I'll see you all soon. Thank you so much, dude.
You're a rock star. Thank you for your time, brother.
Keep going, man. We're so
excited to see what you're doing, dude. I'd love to talk to you again when we get that stuff shipped, star. Thank you for your time, brother. And keep going, man. We're so excited to see what you're doing, dude.
I'd love to talk to you again when we get that stuff shipped, bro.
Yeah, I'll be around.
I'll be around.
We'll talk soon.
Bye, brother.
All right, cool, guys.
I'm going to keep this short and sweet.
But anyway, pleasure to talk to you all.
I think this is a very tight community.
Been part of it for far too long.
But I'm excited by this concept.
I am in numerous conversations with builders, funds, liquid funds, ventures, like DGens,
the whole shebang.
And I think we have to appreciate that in this Solana cycle of meme coins and everything,
we onboarded so many users that have no idea what
this product is. Like full stop. I talk to people who are very deep in the space, who are living it
24 seven. And if I mentioned either of the products, whether they be Thor chain, which I'm like a
little more surprised about or Rujira, um, literally full stop, nobody knows anything
about it. So in my opinion, I mean, to honestly take a quote from Lennon, cinema is the greatest
weapon of all, which was really about the camera and about marketing and messaging.
It was emblazoned over Mussolini's production studio.
So like, this is a very real concept, but I'm excited to see the word get out there.
I have worked with, you know, Avalanche, Polygon, time and time.
Like, you need some messaging.
And I do think the product is at a really healthy place right now to start from, like,
base layer.
But we just, we need awareness.
And it's quite simple.
So, like, hell yeah, Kenton.
Go for it.
Love that, man.
Yeah, cheers.
Thanks.
No, you're right.
Like, cinema, it is everything.
Like, that's how, because of all the propaganda in the world. Like, it's all, it, thanks. No, you're right. Cinema, it is everything. That's how, because look at all the propaganda in the world.
It's all cinema.
It's all messaging.
It's all marketing.
Right?
Like, it's nothing to, like, everybody always
is wondering, like, fiat.
Fiat has a fantastic marketing department.
That's why everybody uses it.
Tyranny has a fantastic marketing department. Like that's why everybody uses it. You know, Tyranny has a fantastic marketing
department. Like it's all marketing. It's all messaging. And yeah. And like even Bitcoiners
are not necessarily up to speed with this thing, which is kind of nuts because I think
that's sort of the core of where I approach this from, which is the liberty of Bitcoin
and to be able to swap. And quite frankly, after all these years,
the first app I ever used was ShapeShift and props to it.
But it's like we still can't do really good cross-chain swaps.
And obviously that's picking up steam and there's getting to be a lot more competition.
But I'm just shocked when I talk to people
and they're like, I don't even know what that is, dude.
And that's, again, around ThorChain.
And if they do know ThorChain, they know the history,
which is more unsavory versus where it stands today.
So I'm just in full camp, like pump the volume and let people know.
Love it.
Love it, man.
Oh, there's someone transmitting sound.
I love the historical anecdote used there.
I think that was perfect.
Well, well done.
Slung you a follow, brother.
Good job.
And real quick, guys, just to refresh the space here guys go ahead and share it if you haven't shared it already a lot of good information has been said over here and uh to the haters out
there who say these spaces should be no more than our i have no idea how to do that there is so much
we have to talk about and i love giving a platform to people come up here to speak their
mind. I think it's healthy. It's a normal releasing the pressure, like opening a valve,
because everyone has these thoughts. Everyone has these internal dialogues. Everyone has these,
you know, understandings or misunderstandings. This is the place where we come. Kenton and I
will go as reasonably long as we can to make sure everyone speaks, everyone's heard. And Graham,
I'm really
happy you came up and said that. I could not agree more with you. We got a new speaker, JR.
Go ahead. Check your mic, buddy. Hey, Patriot. How are you? I'm well, man. What do you got for us?
Not too much. Just going over the same kind of stuff, like with the LP, same thing. I put a
bunch of money in there over time and I never thought that it would go to zero
right I thought either I would end up with a bunch of Bitcoin or a bunch of room like worst case
scenario right like if one went to zero the other one would I'd accumulate a bunch so yeah that
might have been my misunderstanding there about how that went I knew that the ILP protection was
gone but I still thought that it would work as a regular pool. But anyways, just back to the marketing thing, I totally support Kitten. And I think that, yeah, it's more like
a dividend paying stock versus a growth stock. You don't usually have growth stocks paying out
dividends right until they're more mature. And then they've, and then they, yeah, they don't
have a, usually a dividend's a confession that we don't have a use for the money, right? So we're
giving it back to you. But since we do have a more productive use of it, I think that that's probably the way to go.
But like I've said to Kenton privately in some DMs and that, it's like, I do like the burn,
not because I think it's doing much. We've, you know, we've burnt almost a million, 850,000 or
whatever in just over a year. And it's really picked up recently, gone from 0.5% to the 5% mark.
But all this UI that's been built up around it is pretty cool.
Like you can watch and see the metrics.
That's what I love about ThorChain is that you can literally see where every tour is
going, right?
Like you can see it and there's no fraud or anything in the system because it's all like you can see exactly where everything's going anyone can see it so it's pretty cool um
but yeah if we could reduce the burn back down to half a percent right we're talking that's 50 bucks
100 bucks a day at current uh at current rates you know it you can still keep that narrative alive
and i think it's pretty cheap for you know for the amount of money that we're spending on it it seems
pretty reasonable if we just gear it back i don't think it has to stay at five percent
well i don't know if you guys noticed um we had those huge uh slip uh fees we yeah yesterday huge
and i think we had what 10 over 10 000 rune get burned yesterday so that's really powerful
that's really cool only we need to get that revenue up. And to Kenton's
point, I think if we get the revenue, like a hundred X man, imagine what that's going to do
and how sexy that'll be. Um, and so, yeah, I, I think you're right. And guys, I just got to say
it again. I think it's time that we all rally behind, uh, Kenton scorched ADR 21. If you're
a Regerian as well, especially because the same primitives
that you guys are building,
they're gonna be available on the ThorChain interface
at some point in the future.
We must maximize the traffic at this site.
Get people used to going to ThorChain,
trusting it, enjoying it, get the positive vibes.
I really encourage everyone,
because I gotta tell you guys,
me and Kenton, during our darkest moments in January, February, we were in DMS a lot.
We stuck together. We did spaces, you know, I'm not taking credit for anything, but you know,
definitely Kenton really stepped up. He helped us and he did all that shit for free. I know he's
invested in ruin. He wants room to do well, but I think it's time now we got to invest in Kenton
guys. Let's pay it back the karma is real
let's give him a shot he's going to spend money but there is no damn reason why we can't all
rally behind him and push his efforts for free because ultimately it pumps your own bags and
it makes the interface better it makes Rogera better it makes everything better so let's go
for it guys and I just really hope that message transcends to
everyone listening, whether you're listening live or the recording. We're really onto something
special here. I feel it. I think about the first principles and I get really warm and fuzzy inside.
It just makes sense. The logic is congruent with the emotions, right? I prefer logic as much as I
can, but I emotionally get excited when the logic tells me I should be.
So, guys, let's do this thing.
Did you have anything else you wanted to add to that, Kenton or JR?
No, I'm all good there, Kenton and Patriot.
You guys are doing a great job.
Appreciate all the work you're doing, pumping my bags.
And it's not happening yet, but I'm sure that it will.
And, yeah, you guys are awesome.
Thanks, brother. Thanks, man. Thanks, Patriot. I do sure that it will. And yeah, you guys are awesome. Thanks, brother.
Thanks, man.
Thanks, Patriot.
I do appreciate that.
But honestly, guys, I don't want you to rally behind me.
Rally behind marketing, right?
Like I said, this isn't about me doing this pet project,
you know, Kenton's experiment.
This should be the ThorChain community nodes acknowledging
and committing to marketing ThorChain community nodes acknowledging and committing to marketing ThorChain for the rest of its existence, right? That's the way you should look at this. And I'm happy to kickstart it and
get it going and stick with it for as long as I can, right? But maybe I fail, right? Maybe I'm not doing a good job.
Um, but that shouldn't mean stop marketing, right?
That shouldn't mean, you know, you know, pull me aside.
I can't, you know, we need to go a different direction.
Um, please do that.
And I'll be honest with you guys.
I don't want to work for free for very long either, right?
Like, you know, I hope hopefully this works and pumps my bags, right?
And then it doesn't make sense for me um but uh yeah it should be it shouldn't be about uh a vote for kenton it should be a vote for
marketing and and to do it properly for thor chain i totally agree let me clarify rally behind the
vision because as you said in earlier content whaton, what if you just suddenly die, or I die, or whatever happens? You keep the vision alive. You rally behind the thought,
the ethos, the marketing ambition. That's what I mean. ADR 21, guys. That's what I really want
to do. Because I really think we're onto something. So well said, sir. And good
clarification there. Because you are very humble and you abstract yourself away from the equation,
as you should, as an honest,
logical thinker. So thank you. We have another speaker, guys. After math, go ahead.
Hey, GM. I'd like to officially reinvigorate and bolster brilliance in simplicity and we all should agree to start where we are work with what we got and
do some target acquisition and prioritization and just go for it and given the budgetary
constraints perhaps like i hate to say the word commission but maybe a value for value
proposition for marketers hitting benchmarks to get rewards or being paid in equity or
delayed gratification
may be the way to go
and after being 66
plus months deep
into Thorchain, I remain
ever faithful
and believe wholeheartedly
that the talent
of the devs and the steel balls on
gentlemen like Kenton and
Slam Bamer coming up here on Spaces and having a vulgar display of balls is to be commended,
and we should support these guys. Because honestly, it doesn't matter what the hell the devs do if the
node operators don't vote for it, it's not going to get implemented and and i simply think that and i've said it before in prior spaces that we can
force multiply there's a lack of educational outreach and that goes for the currently existing
for the currently existing integrated wallets and coins,
outreaching those communities, those users,
the administrative body of them as well.
It's all underserved.
And I'm dead certain we can do better.
I, for example, am happy and willing and able
to just go after it, guys.
Identify EG.
Hey, I didn't mean to interrupt you.
I totally agree with you.
Your mic is a little rough.
And it was, I was going to say something.
It's barely tolerable.
We can understand.
But yeah, the mic is just a little bad.
But I totally agree with you.
And I'm actually glad you mentioned that
because someone came up with that idea yesterday. someone's gonna look into i don't know guys
this is just me just just free balling here spitting but uh someone's gonna look into maybe
like kato if we can have like a community thing where you know maybe we can have like little
rewards for the best you know show like the best marketers in the community that was someone for
the idea they're gonna look into it i'm gonna look into it. I'm going to look into it. Don't know. But I really like that. I think the incentives are good, right?
I mean, I want anybody to just start marketing Thor chain and, you know, maybe the best marketers
have, I don't know how you would measure that yet, but they would get a reward, but maybe a random
small, random reward if you market at all so that anyone can win. Even if you do five or 10 minutes
of marketing, at least you've
got a foot in the door. And I don't know if that'd be a time weighted thing. I have no idea how it
works. I'm just, I'm really a spitball in here, but I agree. I agree. And yeah, the, you know,
and I appreciate you saying balls because I think this community is the ultimate case of steel
balls. I totally agree. I think this is a very war hardened community, very passionate community.
And that was what makes me so bullish. I think the buy bit thing was very illuminating for me agree i think this is a very war-hardened community very passionate community um and that
also makes me so bullish i think the bybit thing was very illuminating for me when it comes to
the robustness of of everyone so i appreciate that man but uh um yeah get the dms with maybe
we can try and get a different mic because i think you really struggle with that you might
i don't know you might have it just might be broken every saturday the same bullshit i'm on spaces all
week long every saturday my audio is shit so um i don't know and uh yeah if if a space is launched
via a mobile app comments will be enabled and greater communication thereafter yeah i don't
know we tried that um it still doesn't work i don't know i don't know um
that that we have tried that i don't know why when we do spaces comments are not here we've tried
literally everything um people tell me that people have also told me we need to do something else
i don't get it we try it our best so it is what it is um kenton were you going to say something
uh no uh well kind of i was gonna say you know going to say, I'm trying to avoid our echo chamber
because everybody will seem to agree.
So I was just trying to think of more criticisms
and to address people's questions because no one's
really doing that.
Another one was a criticism I've got
is door change should stay business to business
and not do B2C.
And the best, I mean, it's not a, I think a lot of people view these things as like either ors.
Like it's not, it's an and thing. We can do both. It doesn't have to be one or the other. We can do
both. And, and like, you know, Chad alluded to this or said this earlier in the space that, like, you know, things are changing.
The landscape is changing.
You know, ThorChain needs to evolve and change with it.
And, you know, YouTube started as a video-based dating site.
Shopify, it started selling snowboards.
Instagram was initially a location check-in app called Bourbon.
These mega brands and businesses all started doing one thing,
and they just kept following where the money was and what was working
and evolved into what they are today.
And ThorChain has to do the same.
And if evolving from B2B to BDC is the way we go, so be it.
If that's, you know, that's what it takes to make money, that's what it takes.
And even though I think all our efforts should go towards promoting our front end and getting users there,
it doesn't mean we stop getting and being in these other wallets.
It just means it becomes more free optionality for us instead of our bread and butter, right?
You know, I think, you know, if our front end starts becoming our bread and butter,
then we have less and less reliance on the front ends.
But who knows? We'll see. You know, maybe TrustWallet figures it out. They can get 10% of the users, you know,
trading in their app on a monthly basis.
And all of a sudden that becomes our bread and butter. Then, you know,
then we reevaluate, you know,
how do we better service that and capture that? Right.
There's no reason we can't be trying all these different ways to win. Right.
And, and doing this marketing, having our front end,
it just adds to our potential for winning on trust wallet in ledger and
getting those users to act right at all. It all plays in together.
It's not, not taking away from anything. So, um, yeah.
Well said, I'm going to kick it to the audience one more time,
or if the speakers have anything else, um,
please invite if you want to ask something,
we're going on two and a half hours and I think Kenton's right. I think we've
talked about a lot and we're approaching the point where the signal is turning into noise because
we're kind of going on the same theme. If anyone has any criticisms of the marketing thing or
think it's a bad idea, Kenton is more than happy to have a dialogue with you. So please request
to come up now and let's have a conversation.
Because he's as transparent as he comes,
but so far it's just been nothing but love.
Yeah, if I've ever come across as defensive
on replying to people,
it's because I feel like people are attacking
the concept of marketing, not me.
That they're attacking the idea of marketing itself
and that Torchain shouldn't do it.
And for me, that they're attacking the idea of marketing itself and that ThorChain shouldn't do it. And for me, that's really frustrating because it's like, you know, basically people saying
we shouldn't sell our product.
Oh, here's another criticism that people say, oh, it just won't work.
You know, marketing ThorChain just won't work.
And it's like, well, if we can't market ThorChain to get people to use it, how do we expect Ledger and Trust and other wallets to market ThorChain to get people to use it?
Like, it doesn't make any sense.
You're basically just admitting and saying that no one will ever use ThorChain.
No one will ever figure out how to get users on ThorChain.
Like, honestly, it's probably the dumbest thing I've ever heard.
Like, marketing will work. We just have to figure it out probably the dumbest thing I've ever heard. Marketing will work. We
just have to figure it out. We just have to figure out the messaging. We just have to figure out
how are we contacting these people. We just have to keep doing it until we figure it out.
And I can guarantee you doing nothing is not working. So we got to try something.
is not working.
So we got to try something.
I think the bigger concern or question isn't,
sounds like, well, especially if people talk in the space today,
it's not so much whether it should, you know,
sounds like people are more or less on board with marketing.
How do we pay for it?
Where does that money come from, right?
So that I don't have a sense for, you know,
the nodes or the community, how much will there is and the burn versus keep it. But yeah, I do. I do understand, see the value in keeping the burn to keep people interested. I do get that.
goes you guys and if it's more if it's really successful i think that'll bring up an interesting
conversation is should we allocate more to marketing right if it's because right i think
most of the thing is ruin appreciation right kenton i mean that's the biggest winner right
there and if runes really appreciating i wouldn't be surprised if people are just like oh my god
let's do 25 marketing budget i know that sounds crazy right now given the revenue but you guys
it's not crazy if we can like, the stuff like trying to fix our brand
and articles and reputation online,
like that's hard to measure, right?
We don't know exactly what's working and when,
but the pay-per-click stuff, that is literally measurable.
And if we find a formula that's like obviously working
and we can go to the community and say, listen, we're spending X dollars and we're making Y.
Like we throw as much money as possible to that until it stops working.
This is why Google and Facebook are mega businesses, because it's all pay per click advertising.
That's why all this data is being formed from everybody to enable pay-per-click
advertising so that it works, right? Let's take advantage of that. Let's use that, right?
So absolutely. If we actually find something that's obviously working, we just throw the
kitchen sink at it until it stops. Because revenue going up, volume going up, revenue going up drives a room price.
That solves all of our problems across the board.
And so that's why I'm so like in beast mode right now to try and do this.
Because like we need to do everything we can possible to get our revenue up.
Like I'm doing what I can, what I know I can push forward and make happen.
This is what I'm trying to do.
Well, and oh, this is actually another thing.
People thinking this is taking away from others.
I'm getting involved.
Scorch is getting involved.
We're getting new people involved.
The Unstoppable Wallet guys, they're the ones building the front end.
Like everything I'm talking about and is being done
is not taking anything away from Chad,
anything away from Nine Realms,
anything away from Mojira or the other devs,
what they're working on.
This is all in parallel.
So we are adding extra ways for us to win.
So I feel like that's an important thing to understand too like
this isn't taking away from from anything else the only taking away is this this five percent right
where where are we gonna find that money from right where that's gonna take away from something
that's what we have to decide but um as far as the people and everyone working on it this is all
fresh blood new eyes yeah and actually that's really funny you bring that up because I think that's one of the things,
like the people listening right now, like I'll just, I'll just shout someone out. I met in real
life was Max Power. You know, I got to meet him in Las Vegas. Super smart guy, super smart guy.
And everyone in the audience is probably a very, very intelligent person. There is so much
untapped potential. If you guys are still in ThorChain, you guys understand the mechanics.
You have demonstrated, in my opinion, that you are definitely very, very smart and very committed.
And so I just want to activate you guys.
Let's do anything we can and help the core team, help push ADR21.
We have a new speaker, Serge Flow.
Go ahead.
Hey, everyone. So I've been pitching to Kenson on the site about one of the ways we could do marketing.
Overall, I think it's a good idea to do marketing.
Like the main thing that I get from my side of or my circle of friends is they don't know anything about you know rune obviously
your thor chain but they know about you know bitcoin and ethereum at least and a bunch of
other mean coins yeah i basically was telling him that i had a side business and with that side
business we were able to generate at least 100k in revenue it's really niche market but basically
what we did was it was just the very simple like youtuber uh marketing um uh strategies where you
go to youtubers you're like hey this is our product we even send them our product but in this case
we don't have products sent but i'm trying to get the point across so we send them the product
but I'm trying to get the point across.
So we send them the product.
They do like a little 10 second,
you know,
marketing or talk about what the product is.
And then they're trying to get people to,
to buy that product from our website and we give them a code.
so every time they use a code we know,
you know,
which marketing it came from,
like which YouTuber and we're able to give them you know
like a monthly payout like oh this is how many people use your code this is how much we're able
to give you like monthly payout or whatever so it's a good way to actually gauge is the marketing
working like how many like how many people are coming to you from your marketers like to your
website in this case it'll
be like thort chain if we have a dedicated thort chain website but i don't know how the devs will
be able to do something to to to do that like some type of referral link or something right so
i don't know if these these marketers or youtubers can have their own personal wallet and then it just
goes straight there i don't know but but the whole point was basically um attacking retail because that's how you attack
retail with through youtubers because a lot of retails like like let's be honest most of them
don't don't know you know more than like doggy coin or or that world you know so they they just go straight to like robin hood
or straight to coinbase if anything and that's it and then a lot of them though they do want to buy
and they do want to swap a lot but they just don't know how so they're just paying a whole bunch of
fees for all these extra exchanges but if we get the word out through youtubers i think that's
that's one of the ways that will help
and and it's usually it's pretty simple like you just do you can do it two ways you can do
like let's say you just allocate like 5 000 or a thousand like to youtuber like do this
10 seconds kit or whatever you know um just talk about door chain talk about how you can swap here
and and and just show the website like real quick or something.
You can do it that way or you can do that.
Plus, you know, like every time they use like a referral link or whatever, we also pay you.
So it's kind of like them are helping you or they're helping you, you know, basically sell your product that way.
basically sell your product that way.
And yeah, but basically that's one of the ways.
I don't know other ways to do some type of marketing,
but that's a really effective way to do retail marketing.
And it doesn't cost that much, I would say.
You don't need like the whole $250K budget to do that.
We have a really interesting idea with that.
We have talked about this before, you know, with the interface.
So there's a couple of ways you could do it or do multiple ways simultaneously.
But we're actually interested, especially like with Memolus, right, is allowing building a interface generator that can be customized to an individual, you know, influence or whatever.
I'll just use BitBoy just because I, you know, influencer, whatever. I'll just use BitBoy
just because I, you know, what comes to my mind. You could have BitBoy swap and it's actually a
reskin version of Memolus, which requires no upkeep, you know, not no upkeep, but very minimal
upkeep because it's Memolus, right? Very simple. And then we could also do the same for the
interface that we sell. I know Kenton's been thinking about that. I've been thinking about
that. So yeah, that's definitely, I think, in the cards.
The affiliate thing, I don't know how that works
if we have a zero fee on our thing.
So I think it'd be better to actually give them their own,
to empower them to have their own swap interface,
that they would be more than happy to keep on promoting
because they get the affiliate fee from that.
And so you basically just, what's the word?
Proliferate interfaces and make the system
of making them very easy, which can be very done with tooling like chat and build, which is
essentially like AI generated, very competent interfaces. I mean, that's how RuneBomb was
created. It takes like five minutes. It's so easy. Yeah. There's a lot of things we can do. I don't
know if you want to speak to that, Kenton, but yes, we've been thinking about things that make
marketers that are rewarded for marketing ThorChain on the influencer level.
Yeah, I do have a lot of sad. So yeah, Serge, hang on.
Are you speaking, Kenton?
Yeah, can you hear me?
If you are speaking, I can't hear you. Is it me, guys? Have I rubbed? Serge, can you hear me?
Yeah, we can hear you.
Okay. Can somebody give me a thumbs up in the audience, can you hear me? Yeah, we can hear you. OK.
Can somebody give me a thumbs up in the audience
so you can hear me?
I can hear Patriot.
Can anybody else hear me?
Give me a thumbs up?
Thanks, guys.
So yeah, Serge, you're absolutely right.
And I don't know if you're familiar.
Like, ThorSwap already has this enabled.
Like, you can use a Thor name and get a referral payout on ThorSwap. And so we can do the same thing with the ThorChain front end, where you have a Thor name, and then you get a, you know, five or 10% of the fees, swap fees that go through that Thor name. And so absolutely, you don't want to do that. And, and then as far as using like YouTubers and KOLs, like, again, you're right.
You know, a lot of, oh, that's another criticism.
People are like, you know, all these KOLs are a waste of money and they're scams, this
kind of stuff.
Like, I get it.
Trust me, you guys.
Um, but some must be all right.
Some of them must work.
And, um, you know, especially I've heard like the smaller ones, like the people just starting out,
they're actually a bit better bang for your buck.
And why can't we try some of them, right?
And if we give them the Thor name referral code,
we will know exactly how well it's working or not.
And we can track it.
And if it's working, great.
We keep doing it.
Same with any pay-per-click stuff.
We can have the Thor name or full code to that campaign.
And so we should be able to track it literally directly, right?
It's data, right?
Data is how we analyze this stuff to know if it's working or not.
And then to kind of add to Patriot, yeah, I want... So you know how ThorChain is, you know, we're trying to get it integrated into all these frontends.
What I want to do with our frontend is to enable it to be cloned to create thousands of new frontends.
So like you're saying, like if an influencer or whatever wants to have their own site and have their own decks, their own platform, they can. They can just clone ThorChain and then add
in their own affiliate fee. And then they can go pimp that to their audience. So I want to make
the ThorChain as easily as possible for everyone and anyone to sell and promote.
So yeah, man, you're totally right. You're absolutely right. It's just going to be,
you know, again, it's just a matter of time to figure out which ones work. So I'm curious with
you. You said it was working for you. You're making money. How long did it take you to start
making money off it? And, you know, what kind of margins were you seeing? Like how long did it take you to start making money off it and you know what kind
of margins were you seeing like how much would you would you spend on a youtuber versus how much
would you take home can you share some numbers so yeah yeah so so just to give you guys a reference
basically we were selling uh trading card accessories so without youtubers obviously
like no one knew who we were so we would send out like our trading
card uh accessories to these youtubers and they would basically promote it and then ever since
then like we would have like a big sale like be like you know on friday we're gonna have this new
release everything got sold within like five minutes. Like we would have 15,000 go straight to our PayPal,
like in five minutes.
So it was definitely effective.
Like you just have to target the right YouTubers.
A lot of them are not gonna,
or all of them are not gonna say yes.
You know, some of them are gonna say no.
Some of them just don't wanna promote anything.
But the more you branch out,
especially on the retail side,
like XRP right now is obviously hot.
Solana is also pretty hot.
Once you start choosing the right retail tokens and choosing those YouTubers, the more retail viewership that you get from those guys.
viewership that you get from those guys and and um they start basically realizing what door chain is
and how you can swap there instead of going to coinbase and having to sell your your stuff or
try to swap some stuff there but it's more expensive you know like like if a youtuber
can basically say like they take 30 seconds or like, all right guys, I want to show you guys door chain.
This is their front end just to show you how easy it is to swap it.
There it's a Bitcoin.
I'm going to do like $10 worth.
I don't know,
a hundred dollars worth.
Boom,
boom.
And then they just show that.
And then,
you know,
that that's just like really powerful.
Like obviously we can't send them a product,
but if we can get them to just do like a live demo, then that would be huge.
And then they'll just be like, this is my referral link if you want, or this is my whatever, you know, use this code, blah, blah, blah.
I don't know.
Stuff like that.
You just have to come up with the right marketing idea.
I agree with you, man, about just showing people how to use it.
I think that's one thing.
We can explain it.
We can say it.
We can tell people to use Storechain.
I think we have to have video content that actually shows people how to use it.
And I think that'll go a long way.
So I think you're right.
I think it's a good idea.
Well, can you help us?
Can you, like, I forget, Serge.
I have so many people in my DMs, so forgive
me if I don't remember our conversation offhand. But was it you that sent me the list of YouTubers
already? Can you maybe come up?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I did some research. Yeah, I sent them to the list of YouTubers. I was also asking if
you guys have a Telegram marketing group or anything know it would be fun to be part of that at least to
help out no nothing's just what you see man um nothing's been started um maybe well maybe patriot
he might i think he said he did start something on telegram um some people um but I've not started anything. But yeah, it's a good idea that, you know,
maybe we should have,
have a place for people to congregate type deal.
Okay. So you mentioned you put out your ad with these YouTubers and that
within like five minutes you have 15 grand in your account.
How much did you pay those YouTubers to promote your product?
So in our case, these YouTubers that we got,
they were really cheap.
They don't have, they didn't have like millions of subscribers.
Like the biggest one that we got was like maybe 200k or 300k subscribers so but we targeted a lot of
youtubers that had at least like somewhere between 30k 50k subscribers so for for the most part
they were all okay with just having like a quick 200 uh one-time payment plus you know like here's
like their their coupon code so every time they use a coupon code, uh, you know, like at the end of the month, we'll
give them whatever payout.
And then we can show them like the actual tracks, uh, or metrics from, from our website.
Like it shows all the coupon codes that were used and how, how many sales are generated.
So we would just basically show them like, Hey, this is your payout for the month.
And then the first time they're like, wow, I paid from these guys i got like you know 20 bucks or
50 bucks that's that's that's a lot extra like you know a month for them you know and then it's
then they're like you know i'm gonna start i'm gonna start um marketing even more like we didn't
have to tell them like they started doing it even more and then they realized that they were getting
more volume or they're bringing more volume to our website making more sales and then they were
getting a bigger payout so it kind of just you know was like a self-fulfilling prophecy essentially
just generating more volume and that's just how it started um and obviously it can get bigger from
there but so the list of youtubers that i sent you, some of them are big, like Altcoin Daily.
There's a lot of retail that go there.
Some of them are smaller,
but most of the ones that I picked
were like 100,000 subscribers or more.
Basically, I was just targeting like,
okay, like if I type in XRP price prediction
or XRP something,
like what's the first thing that pops up and where's retail
going you know like stuff like that um essentially that was my analysis and and I was generating
that list of YouTube uh YouTubers uh from there and then going from there like XRP or Solana or
you know something like that but obviously we don't have Solana right now but I know that it's
in the works but as long as we get this ball rolling and we can use XRP Crowd or even some other YouTubers as guinea pigs or just testing the waters, and then we go from there.
We can figure out what doesn't work, what should we do differently, and so on.
and so on. Dude, I totally agree with you. I think if we can get these links into the right
Dude, I totally agree with you.
hands and they start making money from it, they'll want to keep promoting it without us paying them.
So, you know, in theory, we should only have to pay them once, the one time up front,
and then, you know, they'll see the money coming in and that'll encourage them to keep going with
it. So, yeah, I totally agree with you with you man um well so let me ask you this i
are you still running that business i mean it sounds profitable sounds like you just keep it
going um uh my my friends my friends are already in the business i started with my friends i i have
kids now um i'm just i'm just invested in crypto i don't i don't want to do any, you know, like, I don't have time to be
doing like a full, another full time, basically. Like I have time for part time, but not like
full time. And my friends are doing that full time. But no, like there's three or four guys
that are doing this full time and that's their only job. So yeah, it started off part time for
us as a hobby, but yeah, it's a full-time thing.
Cool.
Patriot, I don't know where you are, buddy, if you're up or not.
Thorchain intern, can you help Patriot get on stage?
I think he's having problems now.
Yeah, Serge, that all sounds great, man.
That's exactly it.
I want to try all these different things.
And it all comes back to us having our own front end that we can give these people links to, give something for people to sell.
So, yeah, that's why I started with the front end website first, get that going, and then now focus on get this marketing budget approved so we can start sending traffic to it.
Guys, just to give you an idea, I just looked at the numbers yesterday. We've had this last month in July, 30,000, was it July or August?
Sorry, I forget the exact, but in the last month or two, we've had 30,000 users and
3 billion in volume. So it's like each person on average trading $100,000. And I'm like, okay,
those are bigger numbers, but like, God, I feel like 30,000 people, like, how can we not get,
I just, I don't understand how we can't get up to 300,000 users in a month.
Like, just with something very simple, basic SEO and pay-per-click.
Like, I just, I just don't see how it's not going to work.
I don't get it.
I don't, I feel like the number of users we have is so small that just anything, just any amount of effort to try and get new ones, you're going to get some.
And if we double the number of users, all right, fine, the volume might not double,
but it's going to go up. And the nice thing too with something like Thorchain,
you use it once or twice and now you exist, you're more likely to use it again in the future.
once or twice, and now you exist, right?
You're more likely to use it again in the future.
So this will be another thing we have to measure
is the lifetime value of a user
versus their initial trade, right?
Like we might spend, you know, bucks to get a user
who only places a trade and generates, you know,
earns us like $5 in revenue.
That might sound like a loss but if that
person's going to trade multiple times over the year and at the end of the year has maybe you
know done a bunch more trading and now has created twenty dollars in revenue for thort chain well
then that ten dollars was worth it you know it's profitable so you know we're gonna have to you
know play with the numbers like that and figure it out and try to understand them but um you know it's profitable so you know we're gonna have to you know play with the numbers like
that and figure it out and try to understand them but um you know that's going to be that's going to
be our goal and i just god i just don't understand how we can't get you know a few several thousands
tens of thousands of users you know with some simple marketing um yeah i'm gonna be
we're really shocked if we don't.
And if anybody out there knows how to do it,
has experience doing it, please reach out.
Patriot, are you there?
Are you?
Guys, I don't know.
Can you guys still hear me?
Can you get a thumbs up from somebody?
Am I still?
Yes, yes, yes.
We hear you.
OK, you got me.
Guys, I don't know.
It sounds like maybe we should start wrapping it up.
I think Patriots having problems.
Beat or Serge, did you have anything else you want to say?
No, everything is pretty clear.
Okay.
Um, well, great guys. Think sounds like everyone's on.
Yeah.
Just the last, yeah.
Last thing.
Uh, yeah, we should really try creating that group chat or marketing group chat,
whether or not, you know, it gets approved.
I think we should still talk about ways how we can market.
And yeah, I think i think um go ahead yeah and and you you talk about the
start of the front end project so there is a team on on it yeah yeah the unstoppable wallet guys
um they've already hit the ground running i've already seen uh like the first um I don't know if you call it version,
but like the site is coming alive
and we should have version one live,
you know, first week of September.
It'll be just a basic swap site.
It'll be just like Uniswap basically.
Okay.
And we're just going to slowly,
you know, as things get done, roll it out. And so the goal is to do everything. We've got L1 swaps, Dex aggregation. We have all the Ruggira primitives,
all their fun stuff. Everything on AppLayer is on the ThorChain site.
I want to get a Fiat on and off ramp.
I want ThorChain.org to be the one-stop shop for crypto.
You can do everything you need to do in crypto on our site.
And so the initial push here is going to be, we know, we want crypto savvy people, right, to come in and, you know, people that already have crypto wallets come in and use ThorChain.
And that's our immediate goal, right, get those users.
But, you know, we want to become, if you guys are all serious about making ThorChain the biggest exchange in the world, we have to start thinking like that and acting like it, and we have to capture the entire user experience. So that's
what I want to see on and off ramp for people to use so that we're succeeding, we're winning.
And now we want to start branching out into newbies, having their first experience with
crypto be ThorChain. you know, we need to have
everything on our site, right, for them to use.
And also too, we could just have spillover effect.
Like when you're doing targeted marketing,
like we're targeting, like Sergei mentioned,
like going after certain tokens, you know,
maybe there's a meme of the day or something
and we try a campaign, you know, sell Bitcoin
to buy this new day or something and we try a campaign, you know, sell Bitcoin to buy
this new meme or something. And, you know, we get some traffic and people are like, well,
maybe somebody brand new to crypto is like, is interested in this new trending token.
And they come across our ad and they come to our, to Thor chain and they, okay, they're ready to
start in crypto. We want to be able to offer that to them, right?
Give it to them.
So I'm not saying that is our immediate goal and that's who we target out of the gate.
That's not what I'm saying, you guys.
But this is how I think we have to think.
We have to plan for that and build towards that to eventually be doing that.
Because we will not be the biggest exchange in the world
if we're only um getting crypto natives we have to be branching out into first timers too and so um
that's the big picture yeah yeah but it will be difficult without a mobile app a smartphone app
a great point yeah actually good yeah you're right and um you bring yeah so what i've been
thinking about for a mobile app is memoless um because it should be easy to create and easy for
people to use so they won't have to create or download a new wallet they'll be able to use
existing wallets and and just create you know the memos transaction on the ThorChain app and then go plug it into their other wallet.
But maybe you're right.
Maybe ThorChain needs to have its own app wallet
with all its own features.
I'm not against that.
I'm just trying to be realistic
with everything we wanna plan and do.
That's pretty far down the road, right?
But the sky should be the limit on our imagination on what what we should do right we should um um
i think absolutely we got to strive for that so so you're right
all right guys should we leave it at that? So wrapping it up, I think we lost Patriot.
You know, it's just not the same without him here.
So, yeah, guys, you know, these topics, these spaces are for you.
So, you know, if you have any suggestions on topics, you know, ideas,
if there's other projects listening, you want to come up and tell us your story,
you know, reach out to us, let us know.
You're always looking for content and guests.
Next weekend, next Saturday, we've got Baloney Bones from the Thorchain community Discord.
He's going to come tell us all about it.
The community Discord is going to be the help desk for the new front end.
And this should be the Discord that we're aiming to grow here and leave the the dev discord for devs so they can do their
devving. Week after that, September 6, we're gonna have the Bitcoin cash community again.
September 13, I believe we have some kind of Rijira NFT group coming. I can't I don't know
if that's been official or not. September 20, we've got Eric from Mocha coming on. Mocha is doing their launch, so he wants to come talk about the new Mocha app.
And then September 27th, we've got Hands and Hands Only from Regira.
So Hands can take the floor, talk about whatever he wants.
You guys can come out and ask him questions.
All right, you guys, thanks for listening.
We'll be in touch.
Take care.
Bye.
Thank you very much. Bye. Thank you.
