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Inside Build-a-Berathon with the Winning Projects
Recorded: Sept. 17, 2025 Duration: 1:04:12Space Recording
Short Summary
The Build-A-Bearathon has unveiled exciting new projects in the Barachain ecosystem, including innovative platforms for lending, political donations, and gamified shopping experiences. With significant funding opportunities and strategic partnerships, these initiatives signal a robust growth trajectory for the blockchain community.
Full Transcription
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Hello everybody. This is Sugarbara. We've got Smokey and Build-A-Bara on now. Just waiting
for a couple more projects to join, and then we'll dig into this Barathon. Smokey, can
you hear me?
Yeah, yeah, you're all good. Let's give people a couple seconds and we'll tune in um who's in
from the the build a bear account is that uh we've got mr mr square or ian it's ian here
yeah yeah okay yeah um ian maybe once we got some folks in here i'll ask you to give a little bit
of a rundown of like you know how the what will we do the build a marathon um we can also perhaps
do a little bit of preemptive reflection if you will on things that uh you know, how the, what will we do to build a marathon? Um, we can also perhaps do a little bit of preemptive reflection, if you will, on things that, uh, you know, we did well, things
we could do even better, all that kind of good stuff. And then we'll get the ball rolling.
Can do. I'm just going to drop a link. Um, okay. And sugar, um, we should probably also get Maude up here unless he's planning on joining from the CreditFy
account.
Okay, let me take a look. Although, Matt, you might want to join from the Credify so that the listeners have an
easier time finding where to follow y'all.
Hey, guys.
Hey.
Thank you for having us here.
Yes, sir.
Sugar, do you know who we're waiting for slash looking for?
I imagine that we've got the change guys joining us, and I know that we have the scrambled
guys joining us as well, yeah?
Yep.
So scrambled said they'd be a couple minutes late, so we could hop on or start before they
join.
Let's see.
We've got Hummingbird, and we are still waiting for change.
I would say just my own curiosity,
when I joined the team,
one of the first things I think Yogi told me was,
we don't do hackathons.
So I'm just curious to hear your thoughts on
what the change was or why this barathon was really
different than how you had kind of thought of hackathons previously
yeah ian you want to actually uh you know start by answering that and it'll help i'll try to help
supplement yeah um i guess just to kind of start from the beginning to provide everyone with a bit
of context as to build a bara um just to kind of reintroduce what
we do. We're essentially the ventures slash incubations arm of Barachain Foundation.
For the past year or so, we've been lurking in the shadows, building some of, I would say,
you know, your favorite applications and some of the applications that really act as the pillar
of the Barachain ecosystem. Just to name a few, Kodiak, Infrared, Baritone, PuffPaw,
these are all household names that we have worked with
for the past few years.
We've helped them on an advisory basis.
We've been helping them with fundraising.
We've been helping them with partnerships,
pretty much everything from A to Z that they need
to kind of reach the
point that they've reached right now.
We've been supporting them and we've been continuing to support them as an incubator.
And we're continuing to do so with a lot of prospective teams as well.
We have a portfolio of up to 15 teams right now under our belt.
And we're working, you know, tirelessly to make sure that we're able to build the best
consumer apps and the best apps in general on the, on the bear, uh, bear chain ecosystem itself.
Um, and kind of leading back into build a bearathon, um, yet again, establishing some
context, this is kind of our first hackathon experience.
Um, I would say as a chain, but specifically as a fund itself. This is kind of our way to, one, engage with builders IRL,
but also, you know, put our name out there
and start working hands-on with prospective teams
that we think can be the next big project on BearChain as well.
So this time around, we have around 15 teams show up in New York. And we worked with
them for an entire week, you know, bringing in partners, advising teams personally, as the Build
a Bear team, but also with the help of the foundation side, essentially just being in one
house for, or just one space for seven days or five days,
amalgamating into a demo day with Smokey, with some of our investor friends as well,
and, you know, crowning a couple of the teams with prizes. So we had a couple of cash prizes
and partner perks as well that we've been allocating to the hackathon winners along
with a prospective BAB investment of $150k as well.
So that's just kind of setting the context as to who we are, why we've been trying to
pursue doing an in-person kind of hackathon.
kind of hackathon um and yeah anything else to supplement on that smoky yeah i think that the
And yeah, anything else to supplement on that, Smokey?
biggest thing is like you know we've seen um we've seen hackathons uh do really well and also do
really poorly i think i'd almost err towards like the latter as you know how they go without a lot
of um i think strong guidelines and um without the right guardrails around them and i think that
ends up happening
for a couple of reasons. One is sometimes there's such a broad mandate that it's like, okay, what
are we really looking for? What do people care about? Two is that sometimes you just sort of get
like your hackathon farmers, if you will, and you'll have like a great team who goes from,
you know, play from hackathon to hackathon winning prizes and like collecting grant money,
which is like, honestly, like, you know, know game is game respect when people can pull it off effectively um but i think that uh more importantly
and where we find it more interesting as a whole um is when you can have a bunch of sharp motivated
people being uh in the same room at the same time um and create an opportunity for them to help
bounce ideas off each other and actually work on something that's collectively better than the sum
of its parts right and i think that's sort of very in line with like the bear chain POL as a whole thesis.
So what we tried to do approach-wise here was on one hand to bring in a whole bunch
of different partners that different hackathon participants can actually use to make their
lives a little bit easier, whether that be, you know, some of the folks who would provide
RPC services or account abstraction stuff like Alchemy,
or people who would be useful for on-ramps like Coinbase slash Coinbase Pay,
or whether that is people who would be helping when it comes to actually corporate partnerships with the team from PayPal and everything in between.
So, you know, on one hand, we first tried to make sure that we set the different hackathon participants up with some of the infrastructure providers or partners that they would need to actually, you know, ship things that would be useful to an end user.
And then most importantly, I think we tried to help curate that group. So the Build-A-Bear
hackathon wasn't really, you know, open for everyone. And that's not to gatekeep for the
sake of gatekeeping, but it's to make sure that we really had people in there who I think were
focused more than anything else on building interesting, unique things, who, you know, cared a lot about what was being built as a whole, and who had a reason to exist on Verichain.
And that felt like things that we could see actually being really exciting breakout apps at the end of the day.
So that's why I'm very excited to, you know, have, you know, Suga and Ian and the rest of the team, you know, dive into this a little bit more with some of the folks, you know, who were actually part of the hackathon.
And I think that helps to give, you know, the remainder of the context there.
Would you say that's correct, Ian?
Yep, I would agree.
And I think that in the future, you know, one thing that we're going to try to do is
we had it as a little bit like more of an informal, like, you know, you can drop in,
drop out, you know, try to stick around for times when partners are there, book office hours kind of
thing. But I think that it could also probably benefit from more formal structuring and like,
sort of like tighter programming in the future. That way we can say, okay, these hours are for
like co-working, if you will. These hours are for partners pulling up. And these hours are sort of
meant to, you know, go about and take meetings and do whatever it is when everyone's in one place
that's, you know, accessible and useful like New York. Right. But we figured that, you know, go about and take meetings and do whatever it is when everyone's in one place that's, you know, accessible and useful like New York, right? But we figured that,
you know, first shot on that, we'd be a little bit looser. You know, I think as we go forward,
we'll probably make sure that we expand that a little bit more and have that slightly stricter
schedule that's meant to balance, you know, teams having a lot of accountability and getting a lot
of face time to work together with making sure that we have the right people in the right places at the right times
so a little bit more work to be done on structuring but in the meantime um pretty exciting ideas coming
out of here that i'm excited to to you know to i think help uh expose to a larger crowd
um i think that's actually all i have to say is that's good from your side
no i agree i think this is a kind of a good proof of concept
that, you know, this kind of works. I think there's a lot of good synergies with teams. And
I think just the overall energy of having a bunch of builders build together in person,
it doesn't really get any better than that. So it's good to kind of see, you know, there are a
lot of ambitious founders out there building something novel, building something useful, really pushing the edges of, you know, what can be implemented with POL, but just what can be implemented with crypto in terms of consumer apps, CeFi, infrastructure, you know, pretty much everything that we cover as an ecosystem.
as an ecosystem. And I think, yeah, there's, there's so many more opportunities for us to
improve on this and, you know, scale this larger. So I think definitely be on the lookout for any
other prospective hacker or hackathon events that we're going to be doing in the future, because
they're only going to get, you know, better from here on out.
Yep. A hundred percent. And we've got, you know, plans for a future build a marathon.
There's been some discussion about potentially doing that in like, you know, SF or, you know,
even like maybe New York again, but giving a little bit of variance and attracting a
different crowd of builders.
And at some point doing something more internationally as well.
And then at the same time, we're also going to be announcing something relatively soon
with some of our good friends at ThirdWeb and Founders, Inc., which is a major accelerator
incubator slash venture program on the West Coast
that'll help to bring a number of new, pretty interesting builders to BearChain
with a very similar thesis in mind of like, hey, if we can help to vet these guys,
give them the resources that they need to succeed,
and then make sure that we have high quality projects participating in the first place,
then that gives us that much more room to grow.
So yeah, without further ado, Ian, do you want to start going back and forth?
We can start with either Credify or Hummingbird, whatever you're feeling.
Sure.
Sugar, do you want to go through some of the quick found intros first before we go into some of the outline?
Yeah, I think it'd be great to have Hummingbird
if you could kick us off.
So Hummingbird, you guys won the top foundation prize,
the 30K prize.
And my understanding is you're like in the deep end space,
which is kind of tugs on my heart.
That's where I sort of started professionally in crypto.
Would love to hear more about the project
if you could give us a quick intro.
Yeah, for sure.
First of all, guys, thanks for having me.
It's kind of funny to see you here on the space
since I first met you in person.
And I just wanted to say, first of all,
you guys pointed out all the improvements
of the hackathon week,
but it was honestly also an amazing experience.
I had an amazing time working with
everybody everybody was super supportive so i'm super thankful for that uh hummingbirds guys uh
i'll just keep it very very simple we're basically gonna revolutionize the the world of deliveries
the deliveries are broken the last mile delivery is like a huge issue in the us everywhere in the world and we're
pointing at drones basically to solve this problem and we're using the deep end model to basically
create a distributed drone network where anybody can basically host a drone host a station provide
coverage to the network and then these drones can be used to perform any kind of jobs
and in that way basically using the Deepin model
to decentralize the infrastructure and scale the infrastructure,
where right now we're seeing all these use cases
where infrastructure is pretty much centralized.
It's pretty much coming from top to bottom.
The US has done some kind of like POC,
some extensive coverage,
but it's in in very like restricted areas and so we're
basically working on trying to expand that work with the regulations and
eventually be in a place where we get the green light from the FAA then we can
like scale way faster than anybody else on the market that's about us myself
I've been in the deep in space, maybe like yourself, Sugar, for like a while. I remember going to like the first Deepin events where it wasn't called
that and nobody would understand what we were talking about. So it's been like a few years.
I've been in the crypto space for a few years, like maybe six now. So yeah, I'm super happy
to be here, guys. Thank you.
Awesome. Thank you for joining. Maad, do you want to tell us about Credify?
Yeah. Hey, guys. You guys won the 15K, the second foundation prize. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you again
for having us here. I want to echo as well the hackathon experience. For us, it was great.
We were very welcome, and we got to spend time with a lot of smart people, and the better people
on the team were very welcoming to
us so thank you again for that. Mo the founder of Credify. Credify is a verifiable underwriting and
default management protocol. What this basically means is that we allow or enable unsecured lending
or maybe for crypto for access loans with no collateral. So how do we do that? A user comes to us,
we verify them, we do some underwriting,
and then extend them a credit line. And then the question happens is that what are the defaults?
So we would have some management protocol on what to do when the borrower defaults.
We're live beta in the US right now. We have close to 100 verified users and have already
extended loans to over 40 borrowers.
We'd welcome anyone here who's based in the US with a bank account to come and check us out at Credit.Fi.
Test it out. We're sending live beta again. We'd love all feedback from all users.
You know, what was it like, what your experience was on, and we'd love for you to try it out.
Awesome.
Okay.
Okay.
Well, we're still waiting on the other two teams scramble.
Hold on.
I think we just got the guys from change, I think.
Oh, there's your team.
I just tried to approve this as speaking requests.
There we have Mr. Richie Root.
Good.
Your time almost got stolen by the other team.
So welcome.
Mr. Root, do you guys want to give us a rundown on Change and what you guys do?
Yeah, for sure.
And Sugar, I guess I'll say your part.
I guess I'll say your part.
And Change was the winner of the third place prize for the foundation.
Change was the winner of the third place prize from the foundation.
They have been great participants and will be taking part in the program as well over time.
Sorry, I was taking my daughter to school.
A little late, but here we are.
Basically, Change, we're creating a platform that effectively instantly stables
fiat transactions for donations.
Initial launch target is the Politify space.
We're working with a handful of super PACs
all the way down to state and city level
campaign fundraising,
whether it be for governor races, mayoral, what have you.
Basically to bring transparency to what is otherwise typically dark money avenues for
LLCs to be able to wash money through charitable organizations.
So we're not here to solve every problem immediately, but we can at least capture the
inflows and outflows of all capital on chain while also providing an opportunity to generate
yield on that idle capital using solutions like proof of liquidity.
Nice, Rich. I think you sort of answered one of the questions that I had, which is like, what is something that a unique solution that you're bringing by putting this solution on chain.
And I think with with with Hummingbird, we have that as well because of the deep in the decentralized nature of it.
But credit, do you want to speak a little bit to kind of what you can achieve by bringing this on chain compared to the legacy kind of Web2 credit players in the space?
on-chain compared to the legacy kind of web to credit players in the space?
Yeah, I mean, the whole game of being on-chain is protocols, automated protocols,
ones that are battle-tested, cost less to operate, and then easily auditable. So we think the more
we're able to move the infrastructure and the stuff that we're currently doing especially with unsecured lending uh uh we're powered by by defy uh we will be able to scale this category uh bigger so this
is really our thesis uh is that you know uh the credit markets today can do uh with with the new
tech that we have uh and if we're able to power uh power the credit market with DeFi, we can scale it by lowering the costs of, again,
of operations, the risks of it, the operational risks, easier auditing, and just lower costs overall.
Thanks. I just saw Justin from Scrambled joined us, so I sent over a invite. There we go, Justin. So Scrambled won
the Build-A-Bearra prize, which was an opportunity for investment from Build-A-Bearra.
Can you tell us a little bit more about Scrambled and we'll round out these founder intros?
Yeah, yeah, of course. Wait, is my audio coming through clearly?
Yeah, gotcha.
Okay, sick. Yeah. So so scrambled is just trying to be
a uh a new shopping platform um the problem i saw was that people were people my age i'm like 20
years old people my age are just buying stuff from all different sources and there wasn't a unified
place where they were getting stuff right so people would tell me like abercrombie and fitch
or they'd like browse or something but they But why is there a unified marketplace for this?
So you can't just build a marketplace out of thin air, though. Right.
Like it's valuable to build one. But how do you get people to care?
So the idea that I was going to have was bootstrapping this marketplace by putting fun games on it.
And the most important game that we're going to put is mystery boxes and being able to gamble on your shopping items. And that second part,
gambling on your shopping items,
I don't mean like you're betting on like what type of stuff people are buying.
I mean something a lot simpler, a lot, a lot simpler and more degenerate than
that. It'd be like, let's say you want to buy like a $100 hoodie.
We would let you put down $50 and you could have a coin flip at whether you got
the hoodie or not. So yeah, that's the long and short of scrambled.
One of the things I love here is now that we've gone through all four projects,
they couldn't be more different.
Like, I don't think I could have made up for more different projects.
Smokey, was that kind of a surprise?
Was that what you were looking for across winners, Smokey and Ian?
I mean, I think that, you know, what we were always, I think we're selecting for two or three things, right?
One, and I think that this is probably the most important thing when it comes to just like people building in a new ecosystem or people building a new company as a whole.
It's just like founder caliber, right?
So do these guys know what they're doing?
Do they have a good sense of what their business actually is?
Do we have the feeling that if something goes wrong,
they'll figure out a way to engineer a solution?
Or do they seem like someone, you know,
or people who are defeatist by nature?
So I think the first thing we were selecting for is just like,
hey, who seems like they could be a really compelling founder?
And I think that lends itself to quite a wide group of people.
There's some folks who we had known for a while,
like, you know, Maude,
and, you know, had known of a while like you know maud um uh and you know
had known of him since like the days of beanstalk which for those of us who were around like 2021
2022 was like a pretty interesting algo stable that i think there's some new takes on over time
as well um others were just completely new folks who you know like justin who mvp met on instagram
when he had like 200 followers or something um or giuseppe and and the hummingbird guys who i believe
we i forget actually how we met him directly but i mean we first heard of him towards the
iotex ecosystem uh or mr richie rich who was introduced to us by friends from other ecosystems
right so i think that part of it was just like founder quality um the second part was just like
finding stuff that seemed net new interesting and cool and i think that was you know i don't
think it was on purpose that we got this like spread of winners um but i do think it
ended up that way and in what is relatively fitting uh fashion i love that i feel like
the under quality doesn't get talked about enough during hackathons it's often just the project and
the idea.
Agreed. And I think, like, just to kind of echo what Smokey said, like, for us, it's not just for novelty's sake, we're not just trying to look into different verticals as to what could be cooked up. But, you know, founder quality is super, super important for us, especially looking at our portfolio. I think business wise,
these are all crazy new ideas, but I think they have very substantial business models
that can scale and monetize in the long term. And I think, you know, the fact that these guys are
actually able to put this stuff into reality really speaks volumes as to what, you know,
they and their teams can really do in the market right
now. It seems like the market right now is a pretty hard place to build. This is kind of an
open question for any of the founders. What would you say is the hardest part about building and
what do you see with Barachain that would help you solve that and why you kind of decided to come into the
bearathon maybe i can get rolling i don't know it's like open question right yeah thanks yeah
i guys again i'll speak from my heart i was so impressed by the quality of the people that were there from the,
you know, all the bears that were in New York City for the hackathon.
And I don't think we could have picked like a better ecosystem to develop this
with both on like, you know, the go-to-market strategy,
technical help that we received, product help and so forth and so on.
I don't know.
I don't find the Web3 crypto aspect to be so challenging at the moment.
I think, at least for us in our own little world, interfacing with the Web2 world, with
the various players that are known, like Web3 native is a little bit slower, a little bit more complex.
But yeah, it's still worth doing because I think with, like you were saying, Sugar, at the beginning, with the deep end element, the scaling element,
I think we can bring something that is basically not even different from what's out
there is like a completely uh different completely unique approach so uh we're yeah quite excited
for that i think also uh learning more about uh bear chain learning more about pol uh really uh
stuck with us because uh it's a great way and there are plenty of interesting things that we can do
to start kickstarting the web3 ecosystem from zero to one which i think is at this point the
hardest part so leveraging for example pol leveraging uh leveraging um vaults and so forth
to kickstart the web3 community the, and prove that there is traction and enough traction,
then you can be a player that is also recognized by that, quote unquote, traditional Web2 industry is going to be fundamental.
Yeah, one of the things that I, even just coming initially into BearChain when I first was learning about POL,
it really resonated with me coming from that D-PIN background because it's this additional source of sustainable incentives for users,
which in deep in,
you can't just always have to be incentivizing those users. It's a way.
So did you see that as a way of being able to kind of make that those rewards
to the people who are operating the drones or supporting the network more
sustainable?
100%. It's like, if you can say it in a few words,
it's basically sustainable triple mining
or dual mining rewards.
And the fact that it works insanely well,
like when I was learning about this in New York
with the bears,
the fact that these rewards
can also be backed up by like protocol revenue and it's not just gonna come out of mere
token distribution
at the beginning and the more revenue the protocol generates the more these rewards can be amplified then it just creates like this snowball effect
Which is incredible not saying that at the beginning obviously need to like bootstrap some of the rewards from like at the protocol level on our end you
know hummingbird tokens but eventually once revenue starts kicking in you're
providing basically these extra rewards and you're doing something that honestly
like 99% of the deepens out there are not doing which is creating a product
that sells the service that in itself generates revenue. A lot of the projects out there are basically on the data collection side,
on the sensor side, and there is a ton of incentivization token-wise
on supplying the data, but there are only a handful
that are actually providing a service and generating actual revenue.
So since we're trying, we're not trying, we're basically, that's our niche.
I think it's going to be even more successful.
I love that.
I'm excited.
I want to see more deep in on a bear chain.
It's going to be the diva.
Justin, I'll throw it over to you.
Cause my understanding is you were kind of coming not from a SuperWeb3
background.
Is that accurate?
Yeah, yeah, that is accurate.
I could definitely kind of talk.
Yeah, I had pretty strong thoughts on this question as well.
So in terms of big challenges, the big challenge, and I guess I'll kind of like peek behind
some of the, like give a peek behind the curtain at the thesis behind Scrambled is
can we, at least at the start
before we you know hopefully become like a full-fledged shopping platform at the start
the arbitrage that we're looking to pull off here is can we get like gambling level LTV out of our
users while having shopping app level CAC so that's like sort of the core thing that if I can pull off
I think this I think this project is going to be very successful.
So I don't know.
I come from a pretty strong marketing background.
But, but, but that, that can't just happen just through the marketing and the messaging.
There also needs to be requisite requisite things in the product that show that, Hey, this can be more than just another gambling app and thus not have to have the same CAC that a normal gambling
app would have.
So one of the things that really attracted me to BearChain is just how, well, every in
the community was very helpful at getting me onboarded, which is, yeah, that is really
important when I don't come from a traditional Web3 background.
I'm just a regular app developer, basically just been making things like that for many
a regular app developer, basically just been making things like that for many years.
years.
But specifically how I think this helps in fulfilling that thesis is that with these
proof of liquidity rewards that reward our users, we might be able to become one of the first
positive sum gambling applications. Because as crazy as it sounds, we don't plan on making a cut off the
gambling really like we just want to use that to bootstrap a large marketplace and then if
our house edge and all these operating costs if we get enough volume hopefully the proof of
liquidity liquidity rewards can cover that and then that means our users will be uh holding the
surplus which i think would just allow us to position ourselves way differently than any other gambling player. And I think it would be a win for Scrambled, for the bearer
ecosystem and for our users. So that's something that really, I don't think we could have gone
from any other chain. And yeah, we pull that off. I think it will be huge.
As a marketer, hearing someone say CAC is like music to my ears. So for everybody who's not a marketer,
the cost of acquiring a customer.
And I think what's cool is both of these teams,
Smokey, kind of just were speaking about revenue.
And I think you're often talking about
Barachain building businesses.
And that feels really apparent in the way that
these teams are thinking about their future.
100%, sorry. these teams are thinking about their future. 100%.
Sorry.
Maybe I'll hop in on the next question, actually,
which is to say, like, you know,
guys, obviously you guys have come from a number of different walks
and or have been involved in a whole bunch of different stuff, right?
You know, what was something that you guys ended up learning
during the Build-A-Barathon that surprised you, if anything?
Like, what caught you off guard,
perhaps in a positive or negative sense for that matter?
I think to me in a positive way,
my probably the past five years or so,
I was like heads down really into DeFi
and just like coming and spending a lot of time
with all of these people and be like, well,
I mean, you hear about it
and you see all of these other verticals
such as like content creation.
We're talking about like gambling, deep end,
but like really seeing it there
and seeing a lot of people working on it
just made me realize this thing is happening
and it's only like growing from there.
So I think this was like a kind of like
an eye opening moment for me.
Sweet.
And what I think would be very useful in each case here
would just be to dive in a little bit more
to each of these projects in a sense.
Because I think that we've got a good overview.
But just to go off script for a second, Sugar,
I think that people could also benefit from understanding,
what is the win condition for every group here?
Right. So, you know, like the Hummingbird guys, you guys talked about like last mile delivery.
Right. Like if you can give us a 30 second rundown, like how does actually having that on chain work?
What are the biggest challenges? How do you guys get from zero to one in that?
How do you guys get from zero to one in that?
Yeah, of course.
It's funny because the on-chain element, the decentralization element,
is the condition or is the canalizer to get from zero to one.
So if you look at last mile delivery now,
obviously everybody's had their experiences with it
and there is a ton of issues that come to mind right so there is
traffic there is the fact that like uh these trucks are like polluting uh they're slow it's
super costly like more than half of the cost of any delivery that you get is the actual last mile
which is insane so uh obviously there have been companies
throughout the world even.
I think the US is kind of lagging behind.
But if you look at, for example, China,
drone delivery is already happening.
It's actually already in production
in some places in Latam,
like Ecuador, for example, or Brazil.
Some places in restricted areas
in Europe and so forth.
US is a little bit stricter regulations right now but they're improving point being people are tackling drone delivery
right the sky is basically on top you don't see the many drones around there is like huge potential
for faster deliveries way cheaper and so forth so what is the problem and why blockchain? When you start basically decentralizing the infrastructure so that anybody can buy a piece of infrastructure, in our case it's basically a drone station host and an actual device, all of a sudden you basically have no capex on the insane insane investments that would take to basically cover up a city like Atlanta or like New York or any of the larger metropolis in the US.
You basically offset that cost to the community.
You're kind of creating like a franchise.
The thing is that these machines are then performing work this work is basically
obviously generates some protocol revenue and all the incentives that we talked about earlier in the
in the previous question um but on top of that it gives people the opportunity to uh have just
machines working for them autonomously uh in the best case scenario and i think that is in general
where we should be going uh as society so
how do you do that and why blockchain because first of all you create like an um a payment
system that is trustless uh you create a whole system where the the drones can basically act on
their own right they have their own wallets they do their own handshakes with their own owners. They generate rewards.
They can do all that by themselves.
And you're not bound to, let's say that we scale globally, you're not bound to what currency you need to deal with in specific states.
So that is one of the biggest elements that were deep and offers a great solution so no
capex decentralized infrastructure and it's really a way to scale infrastructure i think i don't know
that's just me right but i think at some point any type of physical infrastructure will be
community-owned and you can see it even in the in the ai space right with like decentralized gpus
and stuff like that so that i think is the most important element.
On top of that, you add all the like DeFi elements
that can even boost and bootstrap the incentives for owners.
And all of a sudden you're creating this like positive feedback loop
that is just going to like keep on scaling even faster.
I hope I kind of like gave an idea.
I don't know.
Some, it depends like, i don't know some some it depends
like yeah i don't know definitely and you know i'm going to be a little bit stricter on time
with some of these with the rest of the guys ah sorry yeah no no you said one minute it's okay
happens the best of us and i'll try to ask a slightly more pointed question right so you know
let's take the example of mod and the credit flag guys um you know i don't think there's many people
like there's there's some people playing around with the you know sort of like um uncollateralized
credit space on chain like the guys at three james right um you gave me a very good answer
when i asked in person about you know how you guys see yourselves differentiating from that crowd
um can you tell you know the audience about how you guys see yourselves versus some of the other
people building in that space yeah um so we we were one of the first, I believe, if not the first, we issued our first
unsecured loan last April. But this space is still pretty new. So I think we're all still,
you know, learning from ourselves and probably we'll learn from, you know, from others as well
as we progress. I think the main difference I would differentiate between us is
that we are focused on the underwriting and the default management aspect of it, but we don't
manage the money markets ourselves. So we issue what we call as credit tokens. These are composable
tokens that can then be used across any existing lending markets or money markets in DeFi. So, you know, if you're talking about like Morpho, Euler, or the others, our tech stack is composable across it. We think this is powerful in the sense
that it enables kind of the curator model that you currently see in over-categorized lending,
where you have different risk assessors deciding their own risk or curating their own risk.
So I would say this is the main differentiator between us.
At the moment, if you come across our app, you will see that we are the lender.
So you may not understand this immediately as you see it from the front.
But as we scale and as we go there, I think this is a fundamental and crucial part of our design.
Just to touch on briefly as well, smoke on what you think makes us different. I think the
whole game of what we're doing with unsecured lending has to do with underwriting. So the more
information we have about you, the better we're obviously able to assess. But this introduces,
you know, the problem or the worry of privacy and what do we do with your data. So moving things on
chain, using cryptography to enable that we're dealing with private
information, encrypting it in the right way for you to also be able to audit and see what
we're doing, including different technologies.
This is what sets a difference, I think, from the existing traditional markets.
So not only are the protocols automated and they're able to run at a lower cost, they're
also verifiable uh privacy preserving uh and you know
and the user can audit all of that and check what's what's going on you know with it uh sorry
for the for the wrong answer and happy to expand uh if any no no all good and i think that like
what gets really interesting there is that the ability to for anyone to effectively offer credit
to people at terms that they deem to be acceptable. So you guys are creating the infrastructure for people to set the rules, but you're not defining
every rule. You're simply using yourselves as a proof of concept and the first lender of last
resort, if you will. But in the future, Richie Rich can come on and say, hey, man, if you got
a credit score, then I'm going to lend you some money and you can use that to shove in a political donation.
Now, I don't think Richie Rich is going to do that, but I think that like, you know,
it allows him to set the rules of his market if he chooses to do so.
Is that correct, Mark?
Absolutely nailed it.
And, you know, Richie Rich might surprise us, we'll see.
But this is that exactly.
We verify, we ensure that the data is there is correct and we offer you the rails in order for you to deal with it, but then we give you the option to choose based on your risk, you know, appetite.
What's super interesting is also mod like you and the team during the week that we had during the bearathon.
We're actually experimenting with implementations of the tech that you guys have built through somewhat of a buy now pay later solution.
Would you be able to kind of expand really briefly as to why you guys opted to try build something out like that and how that would actually kind of translate credit fly in the real world?
Yeah. So we what the core product, which is extending credit, we think that can have multiple use cases.
Some of the ones that we want to play around with and we did in the hackathon was the buy now pay later.
Other use cases would be DeFi powered credit cards,
which is something else that we're playing around with.
So now that we're able to get a user to verify them
and extend them a credit line,
we can change the details of it.
So instead of sending the user the money,
we can send it to the merchant immediately,
and then the user pays us back.
So that effectively is a buy now pay later. We can change the model a little can send it to the merchant immediately. And then the user pays us back. So that effectively is a buy now, pay later.
We can change the model a little bit.
So it makes a credit card, but at the end of the day, it's all credit.
So now that we have the core product, I think we look, we can talk as well about P2P, you
know, use cases.
So now that the core product is there, we will play around with other use cases and
see, you know, where, where this goes.
Sweet.
Yeah.
I think that's the most exciting
potential of creditfy right you guys have established a decent infrastructure that would
be kind of the core user acquisition funnel for you guys to kind of scale on mass and i guess like
the the amount of implementations you guys can use in the real like in terms of real world use cases
are pretty endless in terms of how you guys can direct your users and kind of the loan collateral into different kind of, uh, um, situations
such as like a buy now pay later feature.
Yeah.
And, and also to our listeners here, uh, if any of this interests you use cases and
if I bet we'd love, we'd love to talk on, on just like chat and chat.
Uh, we're still at this early stage and you know, we're, we're, we're learning a lot.
I'll, I'll hop in for a second then
you know i'll ask richie the next question which is to say you know for change you guys are enabling
people to effectively you know donate to pax and have all that happening on chain right um now to
you know the uneducated or naive layperson i.e myself you know the question that one might ask
is okay well why can't someone just spin up a multi-sig or spin up like a Fireblocks account and then say, OK, this is this pack.
I'm just going to send money here.
You know, could you help educate, you know, myself, the crowd, the group as a whole as to, you know, what is being unlocked by the platform?
Of course, you know, the yield bearing stable coin makes a lot of sense.
But, you know, like, you know, how do you guys plug in with these large organizations that are no doubt highly regulated and have their own share of issues, I'm sure?
So there's two primary platforms that pretty much everybody uses currently.
It's either WinRed or AgBlue, depending on which side you fall into.
But the primary issue, especially on crypto native donations, they don't really exist at the moment
because reporting is a nightmare.
There's a handful of people,
they'll use like a Coinbase wallet
and not a EOA, but just through Coinbase.com
and use that to collect.
Actually, there's a county commissioner
we deal with in Utah
that has been doing that for quite some time now.
And her biggest headache is the fact
that there's no reporting that goes with it so once the crypto is sent it's just
basically a transaction she has to go back through it and see you know who
donated and trace it back through documentation etc so we supply all the
reporting needs at federal and state level depending on you know
independently which one requires.
So all the FEC reporting will be, you click a button and you get everything you need.
We're able to facilitate that for both fiat as well as native crypto donations.
And the way everything is structured out is we're not allowing any EOAs.
Everything is going through Privy to where you basically have one wallet across the platform
that just acts as
your account. And if you decide you want to natively donate in tokens, you can send Bitcoin,
you can send ETH, you can send a shitcoin, doesn't really matter. We auto-stable it and
it creates a couple opportunities. One for the donor slash consumer end, we're going to have a
flywheel that creates opportunity to basically put that into a treasury account to where you're earning yield on that.
And then you could just donate the yield if you don't want to donate a large amount.
And this way you just kind of create a free opportunity to consistently donate to a cause that you want to get behind.
And the same side of that, we have idle capital yield generation for the B2B aspect of it.
So traditionally it doesn't really exist in the space.
And, you know, when somebody use a high yield savings account and make 2% of the money,
it just it creates new opportunities and also gives a chance to better leverage the underlying
technology to push adoption forward within that ecosystem.
Because the more we're able to leverage the rails especially politically
the more we can enforce why it's a better solution than you know a traditional database that exists
today makes sense that's so cool yeah the idle capital part of it is something i don't know if
i've ever thought of before there's probably a lot of money sitting in political bank accounts doing absolutely nothing. Well, to put it into perspective, one of
our advisors and partners is the president of Club for Growth. And you can, I mean, you can even
Google it because all the FEC records are public, but they spent $132 million in the primary cycle.
So there's a lot of money flowing, and that's just one super peg. So there's a lot of money flowing, and that's just one super pack. So there's a lot of money that flows on a yearly basis through this ecosystem that just benefits nothing other than ad spend and things in that regard.
So absolutely, when large donors come in and spend big money, it creates an opportunity also for the pack to be self-sustainable.
So like the club, for example, their board is who pays for salaries, et cetera.
They don't pull any money out of donations that come in.
And this kind of creates a path to do the same thing, but without the board needing to fund them, they can do it through yield generation.
Yeah, make your money work for you, right?
Sweet.
Okay, so what I'm going to do then is I'm going to ask Justin this
question as well in terms of, you know, what makes Scrambled unique? You know, on one hand,
I think that there's been inspiration from some stuff that we've seen, you know, take off in the
eastern side of the world, like Pinduodo, et cetera, but obviously with a very different format.
I know Justin's a very big Pinduodo guy. So I'd love to get a rundown on, you know,
what makes Scramble different
and like what is that like major unlock?
I understand the positive sum
that's unlocked by Verachain and POL,
but is it like tapping into a certain social trend?
Is it understanding how to really hit the customers
where they are now?
Like what's the secret sauce, if you will?
And then I'd also like to start with Justin
and ask sort of like maybe one or,
you know, one of two final questions, which is to say like, what's coming up for you guys next?
What are the next major milestones you guys are chasing in the next, you know, few months,
the next year, if you will? And what will those look like?
Yeah, yeah. Happy to start on this. So I think the big unlock of Scrambled, even besides the proof of liquidity through bear chain, the main unlock here is that, yeah, I'm actually not afraid to just look like an idiot giving this a shot.
I mean, I think some of these ideas are on the face quite brilliant.
But a lot of people that I spoke to when I pitched them a shopping gambling site thought it was one of the stupidest things they ever heard.
Right. So I'm not afraid to end up with a little bit of egg on my face.
Hopefully not, but we'll see how it goes. But essentially, yeah, this is an idea that is relying on a gut hunch. I mean, my theory on consumer as a whole, and this could be completely
flawed. I mean, I'm 20 years old. My theory on consumer as a whole is that you can't really act
on lagging indicators or even things that are
like very obvious in the present, right? I mean, things are just too competitive regarding consumer
attention to make anything happen in that way. So I have to kind of use these leading indicators
that are a little sus, right? So things that I look at are, well, Popmart is doing, you know,
or sorry, Blindboxes as a whole are doing 10 to $ billion. And they're growing at like a 10 to 15%
CAGR. And my thought is, do people really, really like these, like, sorry, if you collect these,
but these like stupid toys, or is it about the gambling element? And I look at things like,
you know, sports betting, 6Xing in the US over the past five years. And I say, you know, like,
why is this only male? Is it because only men gamble? Or is it because this is an experience that only really appeals to men?
So just like these indicators make me think that there's a large market being underserved.
So if you could take gambling, maybe add some more feminine elements to it,
or, you know, take like these blind boxes and make something that would appeal to men.
I know I'm kind of describing different icps here
but i basically just think that if i experiment and work pretty hard at it um there will be an
icp that isn't being addressed that can emerge out of this and i think it will be a bigger market than
other people will will expect and then um in terms of milestones um i don't know in consumer then
i think i'm just going to find the numbers that don't lie.
When I strike a group and we're seeing strong retention here, yeah, that's basically what I'm looking for.
The next milestone is can we just get a small cohort that retains incredibly well?
Yeah.
That's super fair.
And actually, from what I recall, you're mentioning something about the short list or people that are pretty down in certain interest.
to act on you're mentioning something about like the short list or people that are pretty
demonstrate interest do you want to give a very high level highlight reel of like you know
sort of what you guys have put together in traction so far yeah um in terms of in terms
of traction on the on the app in our first few weeks of advertising we got to like a 10 000
person wait list which we were pretty happy about and a lot of these people this wait list wasn't
just to to use the app actually it was to make content for it, right? Which kind of shows me that like
the way we're positioning strikes a chord with people. I think a greater societal zeitgeist
you're trying to tap into is just like the intense economic cynicism that people are feeling.
Hopefully that wasn't too jargony. But long story short, the average person, especially a younger
person, just feels
intense, like unfairness towards the economic system. People just feel like it's all bullshit.
So that's why they drive outward toward making money through promoting gambling apps or
using one themselves. So I don't know. I think we're trying our best to tap into that. And that's
how we got that early traction. And then on the on the app itself yeah our volume isn't too large right now we're just talking like uh like in the thousands
here um but that's actually because we've only been really releasing to people off a closed beta
so very soon um once i'm confident things are set up right we're gonna we're gonna be um gonna be
more aggressively getting people on board and then we're gonna be able to run a ton of experiments
so yeah i'm still experimenting really hard right now.
All this stuff, I wouldn't chalk up any of it to Signal actually.
It's all noise until we give it time to see if people really give a shit about this over
the long run.
I guess my shorthand here is PMF is not growth, PMF is retention.
So we'll see how it goes.
Sweet.
Yeah.
So it sounds like things that are coming up for you guys are onboarding more people to that closed beta, perhaps eventually going into an open beta,
you know, making sure you figure out the stats that like, you know, tell you truly what things
are looking like. And like you said, retention, not just growth. Should be exciting, man. And
hopefully, you know, when you guys are ready to take it, you know, in a more public fashion,
she definitely helps onboard some folks in the Bayer community.
Yeah, for sure. Thank you very much.
Awesome. Okay. Mr. Rich, you're up, man.
What's coming up next for y'all?
What are the major milestones?
What are things that people should be looking forward towards
or that we should be trying to hold you accountable to?
I think we'll probably be doing a soft launch in October
to iron out any initial bugs.
We have one of our launch partners is going to be speaking at the UN conference on the 20th, so in three days.
So we're targeting a decent handful of initial launch partners to roll out with.
It's October. It should be a pretty fun month to finally start exploring what this opportunity
looks like.
And also some of the creative ways that proof of liquidity can be used just outside of natively
within the Barrett ecosystem because I think we're going to be able to showcase very interesting
use cases that people probably haven't thought of because
ultimately my decision was how do we find a way to benefit everyone without you know going the
traditional path you know credit card processing five six percent fees sometimes even higher because
technically donations are high risk and you know when you donate directly with crypto on our platform, we have a
1% flat fee instead of you having to pay on the processing side. And now that's just additional
capital that you have to work with through your donations. And with the interesting ways that POL
is structured, especially around honey, I think there's some interesting opportunities that
we'll be able to showcase to probably get other people in the ecosystem to try and achieve something similar because you're able to create new paths to
revenue without having to target the customer base in order to achieve it. So I don't know,
I think it's going to be exciting once donations are actually flowing through the platform,
not just on the transparency aspect of it, but also on how the proper tools can be leveraged
to cater to an ecosystem that otherwise wouldn't even be paying attention to this space yeah 100 and i think that
you know you guys are building a place that i'd say like you know i very rarely see almost like
political or politically oriented projects um actually building in crypto unless it's almost
like a government initiative um that ends up having a ton of red tape.
So it's kind of cool to see someone who's actually building that middleware that will
still work in a highly regulated space, but is actually doing so in a manner that allows
them to ship fast and get shit done.
So excited to see what happens there.
Cool.
Maude, tell us what's coming next for Credify, man. Yeah, we hope to launch sometime next month.
So October hopefully is our month.
And this is where we want to basically start extending and scanning and opening this tab on it.
So October hopefully is our month.
That's what we're looking at.
Awesome.
And just for people's understanding here, right,
will this be primarily a mobile app?
Will it be a web app?
How do you expect folks to interact with CreditFly for the most part?
Hopefully it will be both.
So there will be a desktop app, a web app on your phone,
or even on the iOS store.
on the Apple, on the iOS store.
So you'll be able to do all of that.
So you'll be able to do all of that.
We may not have, you know, bank transfers immediately by then.
So you will still need to be a crypto native user with a wallet in order to eventually take out the loan.
But yes, it will be both a web app and a mobile app.
Sweet.
Yeah, and all you need is
just to have a bank account.
That's all you need to do to get verified,
and then you get a loan.
Yeah, it feels reasonable.
Okay, and actually
one more question, Mod. Which countries will you guys
be supporting to start? US.
Okay, yeah, it'll be primarily US-focused,
and then I imagine there's still some hoops
that you have to jump through for some of the other stuff,
right, in terms of like EU or Asian countries,
et cetera, et cetera.
Yeah, so it's both, there is some work to be done.
And then obviously, it's also us just like slowly
assessing risk on how we want to scale or expand.
So it's a little bit of both of work to be done.
And then when we think we're also ready for it,
but we have ideas there.
We don't think it will happen anytime maybe this year,
but we definitely plan on expanding.
But initially, we will be focused on the U.S. market.
Okay, makes sense.
And then last but not least, Giuseppe,
tell us about what's coming next for Hummingbird.
You guys obviously have a pretty involved project
that has hardware components that necessarily have
some degree of time under for development. You guys have multiple sides of a marketplace to
bootstrap. Walk us through what comes next for you. Yeah, I think step zero should be I need to
clone myself, but there is so much to do. So October is going to be pretty good for us as well.
So October is going to be pretty good for us as well.
We are going to basically do the first live demo in US City,
which is going to be pretty cool.
Albeit, obviously, it's going to be like smaller scale, right?
So the hardware is going to be pretty much in the prototyping phase.
We might even use like Opti-Shell hardware just for the prototype,
but we want to start basically testing the protocol
and the autonomous flights and so forth and so on.
It's been pretty cool because actually we found this agency that's based here in the northeast.
They have the largest beyond visual line of sight corridor in the US.
And it's one of the largest agencies for drone operations.
So they really help with
like FAA compliance and so forth and so on this is basically what like Google or ZipLine use to
get to their license for basically air carriers so they're helping us out and they're also giving us
like a great they're basically corridor to basically help testing and start locking hours of flights.
In the meantime, we wanted to also create some sort of like concrete product that people can
actually use and start expanding. So we are developing a drone controller app that anybody
that owns a drone can basically download. And then once they download this app on their controller,
they can basically already contribute to the network.
So we're going to start unlocking activities for these people to do,
help us test the protocol,
maybe do some gamified version of the protocol
so that people can actually participate.
We can then get more users
and start creating basically our community
for when we do start launching our own drone,
which is going to be kind of like a developer kit.
So you basically get it.
You can kind of like assemble it yourself like IKEA mode.
And we're going to start basically unlocking this city by city.
So maybe find two, three cities where there is like stronger demand in the US
and then basically start leveraging the drone community there.
I was honestly potentially...
So that's basically going to be over the course of the next,
let's say, six months, maybe a year.
I'm also in parallel just looking at other places abroad
that are not US where there is already a, let's say,
green light in terms of regulations,
where we could go to production much quicker
if we moved faster.
And then in the meantime, obviously,
foster the US community
so that when we do get the green light,
we're basically ready to hit the ground running.
So that's kind of like what's going on in parallel.
It will take us to about end of 2026 for all this to be in place.
But yeah, that's the roadmap.
Sweet, man.
I mean, hardware projects take time, Matt.
And obviously you guys have a lot of different, you know, folks to align.
But, you know, if and when those are pulled off,
then I think you end up in a really exciting space.
So we'll be, you know, excited to keep an eye on these things.
I agree.
Okay, cool.
I'll hand it back to Suga for any wrapping up questions.
I know we're a little bit over time.
We'll try to give time for one or two questions as well,
and then we'll let people get back to their days.
Yeah, if anybody has any questions,
you can request to speak
or put it in the comments of the
posts that we've got on the Barachain Foundation page, and I'll keep a look out there.
But yeah, if anybody has any questions, come on stage.
And if not, that's entirely chill as well.
This is meant to be as educational as possible.
And hopefully, these guys have done a good job of keeping you all in the loop as to what
they're building.
And you'll get a chance to follow their progress over the next few months.
We can tag all the accounts, or like the company accounts, like the foundation page after.
That way if someone wants to follow along with the progress of, you know,
Change, Hummingbird, Scramble.
Actually, Justin,
does Scramble have a Twitter account yet?
Or have you guys been keeping that low key?
Not really.
Just because like,
I don't think Twitter is where we reach
this type of people.
Yeah, exactly.
Entirely fair.
Maybe we'll plug your Instagram
or TikTok at some point.
And then people can follow along with everyone, Credify, Change, Hummingbird, and then Justin's Twitter or Justin's Instagram.
Yeah.
And Justin has some really funny videos, so it's worth a look.
Take a break from your X timeline.
Okay.
Awesome.
All right, you guys. Sugar, anything else you want to go over or shall we call it?
No, I think we can call it. Thank you, everyone, for joining.
Awesome. Thank you, guys. Thanks so much for having us. To all the teams, thanks so much for coming out. To everyone in the crowd, thanks for, you know, tuning in and hearing about some of the cool things that are being built on BearChain.
Everything from drones to political donations to access to credit to gamified slash gambling for the youth.
I'd like to think there's a good swath of things being built here.
And for anyone who's thinking about building something cool and new or interesting,
or simply as someone who's thinking about becoming a founder and wants an ecosystem that can be a fertile playground for them,
reach out to Ian, reach out to myself, reach out to really anyone on the bear chain team because they've also always got a host of ideas that you know we think are pretty interesting
and we'd love to find um you know sharp capable motivated people to run with um ian anything that
you wanted to say as i saw you're off mute for a second there no uh i think you pretty much wrapped
everything up yeah i think just to tell everyone there there's no idea that's too grand for us.
So if you guys want to reach out, just feel free to reach out to us in the DMs.
Or if you guys have a warm intro to us, feel free to reach out.
Always happy to hear what you guys are building.
Awesome.
All right, gang.
Thanks for joining us, everyone.
We'll call it a space at that.
And we'll add those contact information in the socials.
Take care and happy Wednesday, y'all.
Thanks, guys.
Thanks, guys.
