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SPILL THE ALPHA #3 - Bera Talk with @SmokeyTheBera
Recorded: April 10, 2025 Duration: 1:00:10Space Recording
Short Summary
BearChain's ecosystem is thriving with the launch of innovative projects and a vibrant community, as highlighted in the latest episode of 'Spill the Alpha.' The Kuma platform is now live, offering significant trading opportunities and rewards, while new applications like Osito and Paw Pass showcase the diverse potential of the blockchain.
Full Transcription
Thank you. Hey, hey, hey. hey hey
yo yo what's poppin guys how's it going mate not bad at all dude how about yourself
i'm good i'm good having a nice chill day. Actually, finally having a lazy day after these two chaotic weeks.
Ah, man. You don't doubt it, man.
Yeah. I was just at a friend's birthday party and I told him I got a bail.
But it's nice to just have one of those days.
How have you been?
How's this whole
tariff thing?
Do you feel it at all?
Do you focus on markets at all right now?
I mean, look, I think that
you definitely have to pay some degree
of attention, but I also think
that there's a point of which it's just diminishing
returns and you're looking at the markets as opposed to doing shit that that's actually useful and fundamental so
i'd be lying if i said it didn't hit my hit my desk um i'd also be lying if i said it was
consuming all my thought processes you know yeah yeah i feel like it's not even much about uh you
know caring about it too much it's just this shift of like a news based market that we haven't had
for quite some time honestly
yeah yeah 100%
I think it's like no it's funny because
I feel like I sleep better
overnight because I'm like you know I'm not
even I'm not actively trading or anything but I'm like there isn't
going to be like a wacky Trump announcement overnight
in most cases that will like start
in the morning you know and then I'm like okay
yeah so you're in the US right i mean i'm in here like you know okay yeah so it's
good for you man i'm in europe i wake up sometimes to like a shit storm and i don't even know what
the fuck is going on you catch the worst of both sides yeah it's kind of funny because like um
ever since trump got elected i I go to bed much later
and it's like, you know, I start work later.
I try to wake up like you just shift your day a couple of hours later just because of
the North America time.
Just a part of being European, you know?
We have Alex with us as well.
Yeah.
How's it going, Alex?
Hey, what's going, Alex?
Hey, what's up, fellas?
All good, all good.
Good to have you on.
Yeah, appreciate it.
Nice.
So we have a bunch of people already joining us.
I think we can start opening up with everything.
Well, first of all, I want to welcome everyone to this is the second season of Spill the Alpha.
For those who do not know about it, we have a weekly show where we bring different guests, traders, builders, founders, and we talk about their products, their path to growth and stuff like that.
So make sure to give Kuma a follow and stay in tune with that
and yeah we hope you enjoyed this episode we thank you for coming and thanks for coming on
smoky and thanks for coming alex as well yeah cheers man thanks for having me here
yeah our pleasure um for those who do not know uh smoking the famous bearer um he is the uh founder i guess of uh bear
chain right a co-founder or just founder yeah co-founder yeah basically like the one who started
everything so yeah um if you don't follow him give him a follow just for the updates and all
the information all the freshest news and stuff like that about bearer a lot of interesting stuff
to follow so make sure to give him a follow.
We also have Alex with us, who's the founder of Kuma,
so make sure to give him a follow as well.
And give Kuma a follow.
That's good to be on the news with them.
A reminder before we start to all of our listeners
that on the bottom right corner, there's a chat box icon.
At any single moment during the space, you there's a chat box icon at any single
moment during the space you can just click on it leave any questions you have to smoky to alex to
myself or whatever and we're going to touch on them before we end the show and yeah and before
we go to the questions again we have the kuma platform is finally live it's live on bear chain
you can trade all the majors with up to 50x leverage you can trade
a couple of a couple of altcoins with 20x leverage um we just listed xrp last week so you can trade
that as well and uh we currently have a prize program we have basically the emissions of bgt
which you can get every single week i know i actually believe that's every single day that
you get those emissions um and yeah so make sure to check that out you can make i think i got like
eight times what i was paying on fees so that's pretty awesome above ten thousand dollars every
single week uh given out so yeah check that out um so yeah we can just jump straight into the questions um first of all
i want to know a little bit more about uh bear chain smoking uh which is by the way it's kind
of funny i remember when bearer launched i was um you know i was going over my dms in the first
couple of days and then i suddenly saw that i have a dm from you about yeah about joining the team
and stuff like that and um and yeah and i was just like circle yeah man so yeah it's it's cool to have
you on and uh chat about that um but yeah how did bear changes come to be i mean i've seen the famous
screenshot of your first message talking about
how you want to start something and i heard there's also olympus dow is somehow related to
that story um so yeah how did it all start and how are they connected yeah man um so a number
of different layers there one is that uh you know bear chain started as an accident uh in that at
first um for context myself my my first co-founder papa we have been you know, bear chain started as an accident in that at first, for context, myself, my first co-founder, Papa, we have been, you know, in and out of crypto since 2015 and 16.
Spent a bunch of time around, you know, first just the OG shit coins, a.k.a. Bitcoin and ETH, and then the 2017, 2018 shit coins, a.k.a. everything else.
And then got back into the trenches in DeFi summer a little bit and just
enjoying everything around there right Curve, Alchemix, fucking around the Luna ecosystem here
and there and I'd say that not long after you know was a little bit more checked out as things
got scarier and you know Luna blew up or briefly blew up and then you know I'd say sort of started
spending a lot more time and attention again as as we went into COVID mode, and everyone was stuck on their computers playing the great internet game and
whatnot. And I'd say that, you know, we were poking around in a whole bunch of different discords,
you know, sort of very DeFi heavy groups, for the most part. So Olympus, Frax, Curve, etc. were all
quite interesting. The OM Discord was by far the funniest and like most entertaining group, because
you always had your far left curves and your far right curves who would just cheer as price went down, which was just the funniest shit possible.
advent of interesting new um you know nfts come live um that were you know nfts beyond pictures
of monkeys and that were like a little bit more involved a little bit more um you know high
utility more thoughtful if you will stuff like parallel etc um that we were like you know fuck
it what if we what if we try doing our own thing like i don't know if it's gonna work but like what
do we have to lose here and um we decided to make a hundred nfts of bear smoking weed um there was no weed. There was no brilliant master plan at that point.
It was just like, hey, yeah, this is pretty funny.
Let's see what happens.
And we, you know, minted out a bunch of the bear smoking weed
and, you know, raffled them off to different communities.
Among those, the Omies, and, you know, they were a pretty good group
when it came
to that that left curve right curve overlap and um you know from there i think we've been uh
growing in the funniest of ways in that you know sort of as a hat tip to olympus we thought to
ourselves what if we actually make the bears rebase um so that initial collection of 100 bears
then effectively spawned a second collection of 126
bears where there was a little bit of like inflation effectively um that new people could
could come in and buy but the other 100 people got another bear for free and then the next
collection had you know 200 and something bears now the next collection had 400 something bears
so effectively kept on doubling in supply each time um such that you know there was uh you know
each new collection introduced
less scarcity and allowed people to enter that ecosystem while also, you know, effectively
rewarding the initial holders. So I think that there was, there was a lot of, I'd say, like,
homages to OM in that process as well. And, you know, from the time being, we've been good friends
and, you know, I think supportive of the community and they're quite active on bear chain among many other groups so uh you know we've all um and along
the way i think that as that community formed and as we sort of went from you know hey we've got a
whole bunch of these like russian nesting doll nfts to okay you know we've got a community of
folks who are um both left curve and right curve they're thinking about interesting things happening
within crip as a whole they're thinking about curve. They're thinking about interesting things happening within CRIP as a whole. They're thinking about DeFi. They're thinking about
security and alt L1s and whatnot. And we saw the alt L1s of 21, 22, 23, et cetera, popping up
and thought to ourselves like, hey, there seems to be a couple of major points of misalignment
at the network level. And some of these are things that people like Tarun have famously, you know, written about before, in terms of the trade offs between the staking
rate on the network and the supply rate of an asset in the lending market. And really what
that almost boils down to is the trade offs between liquidity and security at the network level.
And we're like, wow, you know, all these proof of stake chains or, you know, vanilla proof of
stake chains, if you will, are optimized for bootstrapping security while not caring about liquidity and on-chain economics
and really network being used.
It's like, cool, you've got the most secure chain ever, but no one uses it.
What does that accomplish?
And I think there are many examples of this at the time where there were hundreds of millions
or billions of dollars in a validator set, but nothing happening on the chain itself.
So our thought process was, you know,
what if there was a way that we could flip that model on its head a little bit,
merge those two concepts, and then while we're at it,
see if we can solve one more problem,
which was that I think at the time we found that many application builders
had very little reason to build on chain A versus chain B.
It was kind of just a game
of okay let me follow the hype um you know maybe i'll at the time i'll follow whoever throws the
most grants at me you know is it polygon is it near like yeah who wants who wants to pay to play
um which you know just i think set up very poor short-term incentives uh and actually you know
gives the application no skin in the game or no alignment with the chain itself.
It's just sort of there to rent for a little while.
And our thought process was,
could we also build a mechanism into the system
that was meant to drive value to applications?
And that's sort of how BearChain went
from a bunch of NFTs of bear smoking weed
to a layer one blockchain
and kind of where we are now.
Yeah, that's really awesome that it all started like that.
A hundred percent, man.
I think it's, you know, kind of one of those like the most entertaining outcome is the
most likely type things.
So yeah, it's just really cool looking back at it.
I know you've been working on it for such a long time and, you know, put so much effort
into it.
And I really liked the the launch uh
video that you guys made just showing the process and like all the oldest messages of you just like
saying hey guys i have this idea i'm thinking about and stuff like that um yeah so yeah that's
really cool that you got here um but so okay so you had the, and I want you to tell us a little bit more about just the experience of launching a new L1.
What would you do differently if you had to do it again,
and just what was it like?
Yeah, good question, man.
I think that there's a number of things that come to mind
because it's always such a shit show.
And I think that there's lots of conflicting advice
that people will give you.
And I'll try to think about what's most relevant for people.
But one thing to say a quiet part out loud
is that a lot of the launches over the last,
let's say six months have been pretty scammy
and that teams will advertise that they're airdropping 20%
or that there's a massive percent of the supply
that is circulating on day one.
Meanwhile, the real float will be like 1%
and it's all held by insiders.
I think that that's something that has kept me up at night
in different ways.
And that on one hand, I've seen teams successfully do that
and use that to paint a beautiful chart
in terms of, you know,
getting people excited about price accumulation. I also think it's like crime and quite bad,
to be clear. And then the other side is I'm like, well, we didn't do that. We airdropped and there's
pretty public evidence of us basically, you know, giving a massive percentage supply to the bear
NFTs that helped start all of this um a massive percentage supply to the teams
that are actually building on the network a large percentage supply to the folks who are on the test
net um people who are socially active you know what i mean like um i think that and and i think
the part where we made a mistake there is we thought that it made more sense to unlock the
rewards from boyco which is a pre-launch program that we did, you know, in like four weeks-ish or like, you know, three weeks and change.
Because we're like, okay, yeah, it makes sense to space this out.
I think that, you know, having a token live now, I think to myself a lot more about how it's actually much healthier to just find a way to flush and drain existing cell pressure of people who don't want to hold your token.
There's no point in really attempting to prolong outcomes or fight against gravity.
I think that's one of the biggest issues with a lot of the VE systems that were in place at one point.
Yeah, and I think that from our side, I think one of the things that I've done differently was just saying, fuck it, we ball and eating that, even that remaining like 1.8% at launch.
It's by no means like massive,
but it's just something that I would rather not have
to think about at this point in time.
So that's one thing.
And perhaps there's a little bit of recency bias there.
I think thinking a lot about just the tooling
that's available to your ecosystem is super important.
I think we were very on top of most things
in terms of oracles and bridges and wallets
and all that kind of stuff.
But there's stuff that will catch you by surprise as well.
You know, whether that be certain RPC node type bullshit, whether that is, you know, custodians having issues.
I think when it comes to layer one, there's just so many different stakeholders that it can be really tough to make sure that everyone is always catered to at the right time.
everyone is always catered to at the right time, while not having some sort of like super bloated
expansive team, where people have the opportunity to just do nothing for extended periods of time
as well. So, you know, I think my, my take is that we, I think we did a lot of things right.
I think we also did a lot of things wrong. You know, our airdrop, like the NFT bridge wasn't
the smoothest. You know, we could have been better in comms
but overall i think a lot of people were happy um minus some people fighting about investors being
able to uh stake locked tokens at uh like one tenth of the rate of any other chain so that was
that was fun yeah but i mean there's not much you can do when you're launching something i mean
there's always going to be a mistake.
I feel like there's no way to make it just perfect and smooth and everything right.
Even if you're testing and like, you know, trying to prepare as much as you can, it's, you know, you're always going to just learn from the experience itself.
Like, you know, we iterate, right?
It's tough to do things perfectly.
I think the good thing is now that when it comes to you know ecosystem founders i want to want to chat and learn
more um then it's it means that i can probably help pass along some advice that can be a little
bit more functional to them right and be like hey guys like listen like it's not you know it's not
how do i you know it's not do a five percent airdrop so people can't sell my token it's
actually figure out what you want to distribute, figure out who you want to reward, be super thoughtful about that, etc. Right. So,
yeah, I think definitely a lot to learn from. But overall, something that I'm pretty happy with,
and I think went over a fair bit better than I've seen in many other cases.
Yeah, the launch itself felt really smooth.
Yeah, the launch itself felt really smooth. I mean, there's definitely been, you know,
I mean, there's definitely been, you know, some questions.
I remember at the launch, like people were, like you said, like talking about investors and stuff like that.
But I mean, again, I was active on day one, day two, like the first couple of weeks and to this day trading on Kuma.
And, you know, just by checking the, you know, all the platforms that existed on day one, it felt pretty smooth, honestly.
So good job on that.
Like, you managed to launch and have already, like, a lot of things to do, which is pretty cool.
Appreciate that, man.
And I think that was one of the things that we focused on the most, right?
Like, we've seen so many people come to a new chain and it's like, you know, this is dead.
Like, there's nothing to do here.
What do I do?
And I think one of the things we very much focused on was trying to get as many people
as we could and as many applications as possible live so that we could, you know, have stuff
for people to do.
And that was pretty damn important for us.
I think it's super important because, like, we've seen so many different chains launching over the last three or four years.
And there's a lot of examples of chains that launched and six months later, there's just nothing to do.
Absolutely nothing.
There's one DEX and there's some Web3 game or something and that's it like you know if you take for example from my experience
at least harmony um that had absolutely nothing other than like kingdom yeah briefly
a little bit that like mars base thing or whatever it was yeah i i completely remember
yeah so i think that's that's pretty important so good job on that um but
you you spoke about olympus dow and how they you know
were a part of how it all started and olympus was i don't know how it is today actually i'm not
in touch with that community anymore but it was one of the biggest and strongest communities
back in the day um you know they started a whole new wave of like, you know, on-chain stuff.
And you've built an incredibly passionate community with Baruchain.
Like you see bears everywhere just rocking NFTs and like just, you know, symbols of Baruchain.
Like how would you suggest people to approach building a community like that and just, you know, getting people together and just, you know, building that community?
Good question, man.
I think there's a few different things that I keep in mind.
One is probably discouraging as much authentic action as possible, inauthentic action as possible, to be clear.
As in like, I think these questing campaigns and like incentivize reward scheme blah blah blah i
think it's all bullshit um i think that that's just like kind of again prolonging a a undesirable
outcome is in if people don't want to use your shit they're not going to use your shit
um so i think that what's probably important is two or three things um one helping to actually
make sure you're built something that people want and that they can, you know, gain utility from that they think has an opportunity to effectively improve their quality of life or their daily experience in some way.
Like make a product that people want, right?
And that's one thing.
Two is unironically listen a lot to the users and to the customers. Because I think I've seen a lot of L1s
or I think I've seen a lot of networks as a whole fall into this trap
of like, if we build it, they will come and they'll be excited about it.
And the real answer is like, no, no one's going to give a flying fuck
if you don't give them a reason to care.
So I think that is pretty important.
And then I think a lot is sort of making sure that you seed that initial community with the right people.
Because network effects are a very real thing, right?
And if you can make sure that the first 50, 100, whatever it is, people in your community are diehard or, you know, all in, you know, care extensively about what it is that you are building, et cetera, then, you know, then that, that gives you a great place to grow from and to move from.
And I think it's, that's, that's, you know, much more easily said than done in many cases.
So yeah, I think being methodical about that is, is pretty damn important.
And I think the last thing I'd add there is like, you can't speed run it.
Or at least I don't think you can do it right in terms of speed running it.
A lot of people are just like, oh, yeah, like, you know, if I whip this up and I do this in like, you know, 30 minutes and then I got to run a test there for three months and boom, happy.
I think that, you know, I think that that is the number one way to doom yourself as a network.
Because you kind of need that trial by fire.
Yeah, and I mean, a lot of communities that build up fast because of a specific thing,
you know, bribes or whatnot, like, they die fast as well.
Like, building a good, strong community takes time, definitely. Like, rushing it like building a good strong community takes time definitely like rushing it
is not a good idea but yeah so i mean just everything like you mentioned started from
you know those ideas of about those nfts and you know what's your take on the underground scene
in in bear chain like there's a lot of there's a unique mix of just, you know, artists,
people who just,
you know,
make NFTs or any sort of art,
cyberpunks,
just creative people that seem to thrive there.
A little bit more on other,
well,
not even a little bit,
but quite a bit more than other networks.
Are you involved in that side of Baruch? Or,
but because I know it's,
I mean,
obviously it's not strictly DeFi, but how does that attract you? Dude, I know it's I mean obviously it's not strictly defy but
How does that attract you? I did I think it's I think it's amazing
I don't think that by default I'm someone who would consider themselves like a creative
But I think I'm pretty retarded and sometimes that helps
And like you know in her town her daughter and founder is good
You know, I'd rather you know, it is what it is.
And it's very true.
And then that, like, I think the bear chain wins by having a barbell.
Like, you can't win by just having DeFi, for example.
And then you just get a bunch of mercenaries trying to PVP each other to death.
And you can't win by just having consumers because then no one has money.
And, you know, I say that pretty bluntly because it's often the case, right?
You kind of need a little bit of both. And, you know, I say that pretty bluntly because it's often the case, right?
You kind of need a little bit of both.
And I think culture is an underlying thing that we've thought about a lot in the past.
And I think we're trying to have a renewed focus on in the future, especially now that
like BearChain's live, right?
And there's like a real thing.
And whether that is us putting on massive events like Bearpalooza in Denver every year
that had like 4,000 attendees in 2024.
And you know, this year, like 1,500 or something,
even while the market was absolutely puking
and everyone wanted to kill themselves in 2025
and was like one of the largest events there
with lots of community panels
and like the opportunity to talk about things.
You know, I think it comes down to fostering
a place that feels safe for the natives as well.
Because I think that a lot of chains or ecosystems don't really feel welcoming to
someone who's, who's crypto native, who has grown up on the internet.
And then who's also high performing.
And I think that that is almost what, what bear chain, you know,
caters to the best, like the, the retards of aunts who are like, Hey, you know,
like I'm someone who can,
who can really fuck around and have fun and live my life well um but i'm also deeply capable of of doing hard things and building things that
are important and uh and impressive and i think that that's almost like you know our our ideal
intersection that venn diagram um and i think there's lots of different parts of that right
there's the honeycast guys who you know have been running a podcast um discussing all things bearer for i want to say like two plus years now um which is just sort of an entirely
community built or you know initiative and organization um there's the guys from the
honey jar you may notice that there's a bit of a theme here uh who built like sort of a super
team mask like product studio plus just suite of different venture uh you know opportunities
effectively um that has been massive across the Berry ecosystem,
everything from, you know,
different programs that help people get familiar with new apps to community
art type stuff to, you know, even their own tokens,
like just a massive range of things.
There's guys who've gone and built like the,
like you've been putting on like, like bear raves.
And I don't know if you've been to,
if you read like Brussels last year, maybe,
but that was like one of the gnarliest events there
on the same night as Rave
has been continuing in other jurisdictions as well,
like Bangkok and Singapore and whatnot.
So, I mean, like, I think that there's culture there.
And I think that that's just a fact
that like we haven't,
we haven't tried to be corporate to a fault.
We haven't tried to hide ourselves from, you know,
cryptos like cyberpunk roots per se.
We've tried to just like, you know, do shit that, that,
that feels true to our brand identity, but is, is performant.
And I think that's going to be one of the biggest things to make sure that
we like keep going as a moat in the future.
Because if you can't appeal to people
from a cultural point of view,
then what are you left to appeal to them with
apart from your price?
And sometimes your product.
I feel like that's one of the beauties
when a project starts from just people
who are passionate about,
like, you know, you started with the NFTs,
and then a bunch of people joined and said, like,
okay, let's talk about it.
Maybe we can make something a little bit bigger than this.
And it just starts from fun, people hanging out,
and not just necessarily, okay, you know,
let's collect a bunch of, like, VC money,
start, like, focusing on tech, a billion transactions per seconds
and stuff like that.
Obviously, the bare tech is good as well.
It's fantastic, but that wasn't your focus.
That's not the central thing you were focusing on.
You were just focused on, like you said,
just the community side of things, having fun,
building something that you know that you're going to like
and enjoy using.
And I think it's almost like just having a soul in a product.
Yeah, 100%, man. Yes, it's almost like just having a soul in a product, you know?
Yeah, 100%, man.
Yes, that's really awesome.
One thing I wanted to ask you about is, you know, looking at just people involved with Barra and just the Discord and stuff like that. I see the word DeFi 3 mentioned quite a bit.
word defy three mentioned quite a bit um can you share your thoughts with us about that defy three
and uh just about talking about that family vibe in bear chain just like groups forming like we said
and you know spinning out projects together um i think that's just really inspiring and it's
something that you don't see in in other places like i said it feels like people
are just you know rooting for each other and trying to actually help each other and not just
you know fight for every single user and like either he's with us or with no one and
so what do you feel like makes bear chain more of a team effort than other chains yep uh i i think
that uh you know i think it's it's a byproduct a lot of like how it came up and
how it was formed, right?
It was people in an NFT community and those are pretty good at building, you know, strong
groups in my opinion.
Like, you know, meme coins are interesting, but they're also very PVP by nature.
NFTs are still by no means not PVP, but I think they are you know far they're they're they're more
valid there right um and i think they they cause a greater sense of community really um so yeah i
mean like that's one part i think the other part is that like a lot of these folks have known each
other for so long and a lot of the people who are building were just folks who originally came up in
that discord or on twitter somewhere and then said, fuck it, like, what if I went and tried this?
And I think that's also been good because people got to meet each other as real people
before meeting each other as founders, per se.
So I think that's important.
And I think that broadly, a lot of like bear chain slash proof of liquidity has been built
in a manner that's meant to be maximally composable, allow people to stack different primitives
together, you know, put it together in a manner that's meant to be maximally composable, allow people to stack different primitives together, put it together in a manner that actually has longevity.
And I think we all know that this market is not great from just a user acquisition,
PVP-esque nature point of view. So it's like, okay, cool. We might as well do what we can to
double down on the things that are working. So yeah yeah, man. I think that's kind of been the super high-level thought process.
Yeah, it's sick.
I think it's super important.
Like, just, again, like I said,
meeting the people before they're, like,
before meeting them as founders and stuff like that,
it's pretty big.
Especially in crypto where everything is so digital, so online, so anon.
It's very easy to forget there's actual people behind the screen.
And by default, so adversarial, right?
I think that's probably the thing that often gets forgotten as well.
A lot of the time, people are just out there to fuck each other over.
fuck each other over yeah i think i think just the involvement of uh of money in in a space like
this is something that makes it a little bit dark and you know that's why natively we always have
had you know a lot of scamming going on a lot of like grifting and it'll probably stay that way
just because money is so deep in the core of crypto nowadays. It's not what it used to be.
So it's nice to see, you know, a different vibe,
at least between the communities of BearChain and all the founders and stuff like that.
100%, right?
Like, and look, I think that there's always,
there's always some degree of money involvement, right?
I don't, I think we'd be foolish if we said
that people didn't care about, you know, their bags.
But I do think it's fair to say that, you know, there's ways that we can,
that, you know, that things can be net positive some games, right? And I think that is what we are trying to optimize for in as many cases as possible. So yeah, people still want to do well
and make their bags go up. But I do think that other people, you know, are like, I think even when
we had, you know, drawdowns in the last little while in the course of tariff mode, we saw people
crashing out, we saw people freaking out, like that's, you know, that's to be expected almost
anywhere. But I do think that the rebound that we see, not in terms of price, but in terms of attitude is way more important.
Yeah, 100%. So, again, going back to the community side of things,
you've been rewarding people in the Discord
and making a lot of different people that helped Bera over the years.
Oop, I think, did we lose Smokey or is it just me?
Alex, do you see Smokey? I think we lost him.
There we go.
I see him now as a listener.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I'm adding him.
No worries.
It's normal.
It's funny.
I think Spaces has been on for, what,
like three years now,
and it's still super buggy, like just the way it was on day one.
But yeah, so I was asking, you've been rewarding people
for such a long time on Discord,
just all the people that have been over the years
helping the Bara community, helping build it.
What inspired you to focus so much on like giving people back?
Because it's easy to say that it's not something that is super common in this space.
Yeah, I mean, I don't think that we've done a perfect job with this either, to be honest.
And I think what we thought about a lot when it came to distribution is like,
what are the vectors that a pre-launch chain can grow, right?
One is capital, which with a program like Boyco,
and, you know, it's like, okay, cool,
we should allocate rewards towards that.
Two is with the ecosystem itself and the builders.
And it's like, okay, cool, we should allocate rewards towards that.
Three is like the actual users and the people who are helping
to spread mindshare and awareness.
And it's like, okay, well, we should allocate tokens towards that as well,
which is some of the stuff that we did on our social airdrop
that both looked at activity on Twitter and Discord.
There was an ecosystem NFT airdrop that wasn't,
where we were just like, hey, there's a bunch of people
who have made different NFT projects for Barachain,
but they actually minted them on Arbitrum,
which is really funny because Barachain wasn't live yet.
So there were multiple NFT collections
that were top 10 NFTs on Arbitrum that were just like the bara eco minting shit and we're like well you know
these guys are it's ultimately up to their projects to do right by them but it doesn't
hurt for us to to give some you know tokens of the folks who actually have um demonstrated their
interest or their skin in the game there as well um and then finally you know this is a later
correction on our part but there's also like an army of like you know 50 something or just a bunch
of helpers in our discord um who are the ones who are there and helping to to you know keep a control
of everything um alongside our mods helping to translate things in different international
channels i'm helping to overall make sure that the scene is good there and that, you know, good conversations are being had and that information is being shared.
And I think that having folks like that around is like super important and tough to replace.
So it's like, well, you know, if they're doing all these things that are helping us and
we should probably do what we can to help, you know, demonstrate that we care. Because if you
don't do that, then, you, then it becomes tougher for people to believe
in that in a longer term manner.
It's not like you just have to pay for it.
It has to be
truly long termist.
Yeah. I mean, they give to you.
You should, you know,
if you got something, you should try to give back
if you can.
Obviously, if you can't, that's something else.
But if you can't as a founder, can't that's something else but if you can as a founder
obviously that's something you have to do um i i and using the word have to is kind of hard but i
actually feel like you have to because like without them you wouldn't be where you are probably right
100 yeah so i want to move towards the more more towards the DeFi focus of everything.
And currently, the last couple of months, actually,
well, since Barra launched,
every single person I've spoken to
and talking to people about different farming stuff,
everyone agrees that currently the APIs in Barra are the highest.
They're just wild.
It almost gives us flashbacks from DeFi Summer.
Do you think they're sustainable in the long term?
I know it's a hard question, but it's interesting to me.
And what would you say to people who are concerned about yields
just being a little bit too high or something like that?
Because we have seen it in the past where networks launched,
had some high yields, and then just experienced some exodus.
I think it goes both ways, man. And I think that if yields are too high, people complain. If yields
are too low, people complain. And that is the funniest part of it all. I think that they are
somewhat sustainable. And I'll position that from multiple viewpoints
in that a lot of the value
and a lot of the interesting parts of proof of liquidity
are that there's incentives
that are basically going towards people
who are providing liquidity on the chain, right?
There's incentives from people
who are choosing to delegate
and or boost their BGT to different validators
who are in turn looking to push their block rewards
to different applications on the network.
And those aren't just bear tokens.
Sorry, those aren't just incentives from BearChain.
They're incentives from all these different applications that are trying to get emissions towards their pools.
So I think that's why I believe that there is a meaningful degree of longevity there.
Simply because there's a bunch of folks
who actually are paying for those rewards.
So do I believe that it'll always be phone number APIs?
Not really.
But do I believe that they can always be quite competitive
and some of the best in class across the market?
I think so.
And what I'm very excited for with products like Kuma and others is the actual opportunity to double down
on products that can become self-sustenant. Because I think one of the best or most interesting parts
about proof of liquidity is that there's really the opportunity to, what's that word? There's
really the opportunity to accelerate something that's already demonstrated some degree of product market fit.
And, you know, from my understanding and then, you know,
brief chat with Alex, it sounds like, you know,
since coming to BearChain, you know,
the native user base has expanded and it sounds like, you know,
stats have been trending in the right direction.
And the perfect world is one where POL actually allows
an application that has a native fee generation, you know,
component to reach that
point of like critical velocity or you know breakout velocity critical mass whatever you'd
like to call it um and then it's like cool now they can incentivize more emissions with their
fees and as long as they keep on growing demand you just rinse and repeat that cycle right um
so that's where i think it gets really cool And that's something that also makes those long-term, you know,
rewards and APYs a lot more sustainable as in real users,
real use for the product, real utility.
Yeah, that's really sick.
I mean, for me, I don't, you know, I'm not a tech head.
I really don't know that much about DeFi.
I only run around and, you know,
listen to my friends and farm stuff when i can
uh but you know it's been really fun to just uh i that's one thing that's another thing i can say
that i experienced with barrett i haven't in a long time in other chains is just feeling the
defy excitement uh just of you know like i said seeing those phone number yields um but but yeah it's really it's really awesome and
i do hope that uh you know it's obvious that it'll balance out with time right um you know as bear
grows it'll just balance out but uh yeah so the people are i'm sure people are counting that uh
on you guys to stay competitive in that um but yeah, I want to talk about also different projects.
What are some projects on BearChain that you're excited about?
Just like something that you haven't expected to see on BearChain?
Yeah, man.
There's a bunch of stuff that's kind of cool.
I don't know if I'd ever say there's something where I'm like,
I haven't expected to see this because we do try to be really active
and really hands-on in terms of like, you know, meeting the different teams in the ecosystem, being there to help figure things out.
But, you know, there's a lot of things that I'm pretty hyped about.
I'd say one that caught me by surprise more recently, but I thought was really cool.
It's called Osito.
and you know it's still pretty early
but it basically allows you to
you know launch any token on like
Panda Factory which is Kodiak
our native DEX's or you know one of our native DEX's
versions of Pump.Fun
or Ramen which is like a
you know more like you know Fjord style launchpad
and it actually allows you
to effectively to borrow against
their you know that position instantly
so like it's
in a very fried
world it's like pump fun but with leverage uh they're in early stages right now but i i just
think that that's going to be really cool if they do it right and make the ux good um so that's one
that i'm like personally quite interested in uh just because i think it's something that could
could spawn its own set of interesting mechanisms being built um so that's one then that's like you
know somewhere between defined consumer um when i think built. So that's one. Then that's like, you know, somewhere between DeFi and consumer.
When I think about other stuff, that's pretty cool.
You know, there's of course you guys and what you're doing.
I think that, you know,
the team at Over Under is one that not that many talk about
or hear about as much,
but is often doing some pretty cool stuff.
They've effectively built like a, you know,
effectively a computer vision powered app that allows you to bet on each
e-sports streams. And, you know, the,
the Oracle effectively is like the actual computer vision algorithm that says,
did this happen or does that happen?
So you can basically build parlays on e-sports and have it settled like,
you know, on chain, which I think is just like pretty cool conceptually.
And, you know,
they have been basically in sort of like early beta mode
with a couple hundred users,
but have had an average, you know, screen retention time of like five hours,
which is insane because it means like people are like spending their days
glued to the screen betting on this and they've increased their volume like threefold.
Right? Like, you know, I could maybe spend half an hour or something
if I'm like really doubt about watch streams. You know know i don't even know exactly what to say there um
so that's why i think it's kind of cool and and could be you know one of those things that people
don't expect but can be one of those massive non-defi consumer funnels for bara and then
there's so many other ones there's one that very few people know about that's building as an L2 that will actually be for
pet identity, which I think is the most
funny thing ever.
I've seen people talking about it.
Yeah, it's called
Paw Pass. They're super cool.
Digital passports for your pets.
Pretty gnarly.
There's a bunch of stuff that's going to happen there
that very few are expecting
and that I think will be a lot of fun.
That sounds awesome.
It's just cool to see, you know, people starting to build just anything they think about and, you know, it actually working.
I mean, five hour retention is insane.
I mean, like it was when I heard that,
I was like, fuck, really?
Yeah, that's wild.
That's like, I've been working in,
like before I get into crypto,
I've been working a little bit in the marketing spaces
and that's one of the things we were looking at all the time.
That's mental.
That's like numbers you don't really hear much of.
So that's sick. Well, good luck to all of those um yeah cheers man one um i i wasn't really i mean i'll be honest i wasn't super involved in anything
bara up until it got closer to the launch um i did participate in uh you know the the pre uh vaults like with royco and stuff like that but
uh i wasn't really taking such a huge part i didn't have the chance to go to any iRL events
in crypto actually throughout all these years sadly so i missed all the bear parties and stuff
like that but i did hear that uh you got married in a barrier in the bearer meetup.
So I don't know about that.
What's the story behind that?
Yeah, no.
So funnily enough, that was a dude in a bear head
that was not me.
I think it was pretty,
it was somewhere between really funny
and like slightly cringy,
depending on how you view it.
One of our,
Cammie who leads like our developer
of Angelism Slash Outreach and has been, you know, educating a bunch of folks about some of the non-DeFi use cases of POL as well. of you view it um one of our uh cammy who leads like our developer evangelism slash outreach and
has been you know educating a bunch of folks about some of the non-defi use cases of pol as well
um you know and and one of our my good friends and actually small angels david like uh crashed
an eigenlayer event or an eigenlayer slash mega eth event and somehow turned it into like a bear
chain wedding um and i i don't know how the fuck that got there. I was actually not even at the event.
I just saw a bunch of folks later
and I was like, man, what the fuck is going on?
I was like, on one hand, hilarious co-opting.
You're like waking up and you're married.
Yeah, I'm like just hilarious co-opted marketing.
On the other hand, I'm like,
we are going to get dunked so hard on this.
So no, it was not me,
but one of our homies in a bear mask, you know, fake walked down the aisle there.
So, pretty good band.
Yeah, I think I've seen videos of it spread around.
Yeah, that would not surprise me.
Nice.
How was the honeymoon?
Did they tell you?
Hey, man, don't ask me.
That one's beyond my pay grade.
Yeah.
Well, before we go through the last question,
just to chatting about Bear a little bit more,
I just want to remind all of our listeners,
there's the chat box icon at the bottom right corner.
If you have any questions to Smokey,
just click on it, leave them,
and we'll touch them in a couple of minutes.
I'm pretty sure that there's people listening to us right now.
I see a lot of bears, but I also see a lot of different people that probably some of them never had a chance to try bear chain.
If any of our listeners wants to start dipping their toes and just starting to explore where do you think or
where would you suggest them to start oh good question man um there's uh there's so many
different places but i think that baritown is is a pretty good place to take a look um they're
they're a community built app um that just has like and it's barra.town and they've got a little
bit of everything they've got you know access to Bera.town. And they've got a little bit of everything.
They've got, you know, access to a bunch of the different applications.
They've got, you know, a token marketplace.
They've got like, you know, sort of a little bit of like a learning slash a guiding tour.
And just super friendly in general.
So in my opinion, 100% worth a look.
All right.
Can you ever be the name?
Yeah.
Bera.town. And the site is just barra.town
yeah barra the town there you go give it a shot guys and uh don't forget to also check out the
referral link to kuma in my bio and use use that link for a 10 discounted fees fantastic
um and yeah before we go to the questions, what are your next plans?
Where do you go from here? So much work to be done, man. I mean, I think that in my mind,
it's, you know, tightening up parameters and policy on the proof of liquidity side,
helping new and exciting applications go live and, you know, doing our best to, you know,
work with builders to develop interesting strategies.
And in fact, we, you know, have cool stuff happening on the chain, spreading the word
and making sure that we make our way out of just like these sort of crypto native audiences
and, you know, to the real world and making sure that people know about what's going on.
And, you know, I think that's sort of where my head goes next, which is to say,
making sure that we are happy with the product where we, you know, I think that's sort of where my head goes next, which is to say, making sure that we are happy with the product where we, you know, I still think there's work
to be done from the UX side and from quality of life side, making sure that we have really
clear comms and all the stuff that's going forward on the governance, et cetera, side of things.
And then I think doubling down really hard on the community and taking that package,
putting it together and, you know, making it
digestible for a lot of folks outside of bear chain. And then I think just going on a major,
you know, media push slash, like, you know, almost distribution push. And I think a lot about
applications that have really simple experiences and interfaces that people can use to get
comfortable and get familiar there without feeling like they have to you know reinvent the wheel on things yeah that's sick and how how does it feel just generally this is something i just thought
of right now uh because a couple of days ago i swear to god a couple of days ago not even related
to preparing to the space or anything like that i remember i was talking to a friend of mine just
about a state of market and i was like yeah trump like I don't know are we getting into a bear market is like is it really like the last
push what's going on and then I was thinking I was just randomly so like dude of course there's
like a good chance we just got into a bear market ever since bear launched we've just been going
down only so yeah I was wondering how does it feel to you does that feel like an accomplishment of like
yeah we launched you just like kind of just put a mark yeah man it's it's so funny because i think
for a little while people were like oh yeah they're just trying to time the market with their
launch i'm like bro like i in a world i wish that we we you know time the market more but really we
were just like no here's the point at which it feels like the minimum viable product is in a
decent spot. You know, not even a spot that we're like, yeah, this is amazing.
But like, yeah,
because if you look at some other teams that did time the market that tells a
pretty different story, it's pretty good to do that at times.
But like, I think we also just focus on the fundamentals and you know,
we're like, okay, cool. It's, it's build a good product so i mean the it's it's definitely
funny i was talking to my right hand guy on the ecosystem side yogi and he was like yeah you know
we were so we launched on the worst all day in history yeah oh my god cool you know love love
that for us you know so it's good uh good natural comic timing you know yeah you know sometimes shit's just funny yeah that's very i just i just randomly
thought of it so no no no um yeah uh let's take a look uh we we have uh red cav asking is it like
they know red cav i did chest today did you guys guys hit the gym today? I did legs this morning.
Oh yeah?
I did legs yesterday.
Dude I hate leg legs so so much.
It's like I know everyone says that
but every time I hit legs I'm like
I just get reminded of how bad it is.
I don't know why but I've come to appreciate them a little bit more.
I'm not sure. It might be because I'm deadlifting less or something. But like now i'm kind of looking forward to leg day i feel like it's um i feel like it's
when i have to hit like heavy shoulders or something or sometimes i don't know i sometimes
i'm lazy to do like weighted pull-ups you know what i mean i feel like that yeah i mean it's
not the the one thing i like about leg day is you feel huge like you feel so strong
because the weights you move are insane like uh when you're in north america you use these pounds
in canada or do you use pounds you got it man okay so so like you know squatting 100 kilos is uh
is like it feels fucking amazing and or just like just leave you like 200 kilos like press, you feel like a beast.
But I don't know, man.
I don't know.
I feel like you go out of the gym shaking like nothing else.
Totally.
Yeah.
So there you go, Red Kev.
It was leg day.
We have Big Rennie Bear Chain saying,
It feels so good to be here.
Smokey, good to hear you laugh.
I try.
I try to get her a little ha-ha.
As long as we don't look at our portfolios,
we can laugh and everything's good.
Close her eyes and all that.
Yeah.
Well, from my side, that's pretty much it.
I don't have any other questions.
Alex, do you want to add anything?
Nothing from mine. I just want to say thanks to Smokey for coming on. Also give him a shout out of how supportive he's been for us builders. The responsiveness is insane. I think we shot a message over to them one Sunday afternoon and he and Jack both replied within like five minutes.
And he and Jack both replied within like five minutes.
He reaches out to check in occasionally.
So that's something we've never experienced from the other ecosystems we've been building on.
So I just wanted to glaze him real quick and give a shout out to the support he's been giving us.
Too kind, man.
Shout out to Smokey.
Well, that's awesome to see.
I mean, I'm sure it's actually one thing I like about people from city building stuff is they're not the typical founders.
I've worked in the last couple of years with a bunch of protocols about different things, whether if it's from just advising them and helping them building products.
So many of them are just non-responsive.
They're never in the Discord.
They're just nowhere to be found.
And it feels really disconnected.
So, yeah, you should.
This is really, I'm sure me and Alex are not going to be the only ones saying that to you.
But it's really cool to see someone who's actually heavily involved in everything.
Thank you, man.
You know, there's always room for improvement.
And I try not to forget it.
But we, you know, we just got to do our best.
Yeah, 100%, man. that's the way to success
well uh smoky again thank you so much for coming man i really do appreciate it uh we have a huge
amount of bears in the crowd so shout out to all of them as well um and yeah do you do you want to
add anything before we uh finish things up no i, I think I would just say, you know, excited for the next round of reward vaults going live shortly.
I'm excited for a bunch of cool new things coming online using POL.
And just kind of excited to see what happens,
especially like hopefully once we get past all the macro volatility
to see what happens when the system can like really rip
and just have people build really cool shit around it.
So for now, we just stay the course, do the hard thing.
And later, I think we'll get to see some pretty cool upsides from that.
You know, we've got to wait for Trump to chill.
Hopefully soon, yeah.
Well, guys, thanks again for coming, Smokey.
Thank you to all of our listeners for coming.
We really do appreciate seeing you guys here every single week.
Wait, before we have a couple of new comments on the space,
let me check if anyone has any other questions.
Okay, we have a good one.
We have Nick Wads asking,
what's the best way to find vault opportunities on BearChain, BearTown's vault page.
I think that he may have answered his own question.
But yeah, there's great vaults on BearTown.
And I gave him a little bit of a shout-out earlier.
I'd also say that you can check out,
and the BearTown's page pulls a lot of these in,
but Euron is launching new vaults through one of their sub-DAOs.
The Infrared guys have vaults on their page. Origami guys have vaults on their page. There's a bunch of vaults through one of their sub-DAOs. You know, the infrared guys have vaults on their page.
Origami guys have vaults on their page.
There's a bunch of vaults.
So hopefully more to be seen there.
All right, there you go.
And we have SemiSweetDude asking,
what's your favorite eco project?
Project Su?
I don't know if I can pick favorites.
That's a little bit hard to...
Yeah, yeah.
It's like making your babies
to be quite honest um i'm trying to think about like what like you know i feel like there's some
that are like very deeply barricaded i think that i i like heat a lot because it's just so
fucking stupid but also so funny and like good in many ways too um and i don't mean that from like
a fate like i don't mean that as like a favorite,
but I think that that's one I'd give a quick shout out to
is something that's just like very barricaded.
And I think I've also,
I've gained a greater appreciation for one called Bacino
because I think their marketing is really funny
and that they have like these like TikTok style videos
in which they'll go up to people
and make them spin like Plinko effectively on Barachain.
And it's just easy to chill and do stuff on well there you go that's all yeah it's really hard to
say like choosing one or just a couple when you have so many and i'm sure that personally when
you're involved with most of them it's pretty hard um but yeah let me see here all right um and yeah i mean that's that's it for
me um and like i said smoky uh has uh nothing to add for now but uh yeah if anyone joined in the
middle of the space if you guys missed on anything uh there will be a recording available the moment
we finish the space so you can check that out and to all the lazy guys who don't want to spend an hour listening to the lovely laugh of smoky
there will be notes available possibly tomorrow probably on monday so make sure to follow my
account and kuma to check those out and yeah once again smoky thanks a lot for coming man appreciate you and uh
appreciate you having on our having you on our side uh helping us move kuma forward yeah it's
awesome to work together cheers man yeah awesome and yeah yes you did and to all of our listeners who haven't checked kuma out yet make sure to go
to the kuma profile or make go to my profile and click on the link in the bio um you will get 10
discount and fees and uh i won't be fired so so click on that link check kuma out it's now live
on bear chain you can trade with up to 50x leverage on majors with
up to 20x leverage on altcoins um like i said we just listed uh xrp you can trade on bear as well
um and we currently have the bgt rewards they have arrived they are live you can trade on kuma
and you can stack bgt and uh convert it to bera which will give you, we currently expect the price pool to
be above 10,000 weekly.
Check it out, you can make money even if you lose money on trades.
So that's nice.
And one last shout out, we do have currently a partnership with Tierra, so you can check
the Twitter account of Kumo to learn more about them and you'll get
rewarded. At the end of the month, we have 600,000 pre-Tierra tokens that will be distributed between
all the best traders on Kuma. And one last thing before we say goodbye, we do have a new space show
coming. We will be calling it The Bears Are Bidding.
It will be all about the bear chain ecosystem,
talking about all the new stuff launching,
different yield opportunities, trade opportunities,
whatever we can think of, whatever you guys can think of.
So yeah, so make sure to join the Kuma Discord.
You can reach out to the team via the Discord and let us know if you want to join,
who you want us to bring on the show
and talk to any founders,
any projects that you enjoy using on Verachain.
We currently don't have specific dates.
So yeah, so make sure to follow Kuma
and my account for updates on that.
But yeah, once a month will be recurring.
And yeah, see you guys next next week we have a brand new guest
uh the show continues season two excited to have you on and uh yeah guys thanks a lot for coming
thanks all for coming smoky thank you for co-hosting alex and appreciate you guys much love
have a nice weekend. Bye-bye.
