Hey Brian, say something. Hey, yes something something something something. Um, can you make me coast?
Yes. Okay. Cool. All right. So we're going to get kicked off and it's going to be a rant in anybody who wants to come up and ask questions or getting engaged in the conversation.
So we're just going to hop in and get started on grants of Paloza. Okay, so a little bit of update, you know, what Alpha Growth is. We are a matchmaking service between
chains blockchains there's around 240 that we're tracking in over $10 billion of grants and projects and developers that are interested in building or looking for the next chain to build or kind of like what's going on. So we're going to do this probably like every two weeks to talk about kind of the latest or greatest of what's going on in terms of
of narratives that chains are looking for and we'll start off with an anecdote. The anecdote that we're going to probably repeat and it's going to get annoying but we're just starting with this anecdote is essentially what does Alpha Growth do. Imagine you got an iPhone, you opened up the box, you got on the iPhone and you went into the iPhone
and there was no apps. How much of your phone would be worth not much. So what we see with a lot of these blockchains in that launch, they launch a blockchain, they launch an ecosystem and there's nothing to do on the chain. So there's a couple things that you can do. You can either build and use your core team to
to build initial dApps or you can effectively go in by dApps in the form of grants. There's like seven different types of grants that we've deployed in the past. What does that mean? That means we've deployed here's cash built on this chain. We've employed
investments, we've deployed liquidity incentives, we've deployed loans. And what we have here is the ability and action to help developers build on these new chains. Now, you know, chains that have been around for six, seven years, Ethereum, you know, probably
has been around for a little bit while and some of the more decentralized ones such as like Arbitrum, they effectively don't give as many grants in the grant process as a little bit, you know, through governance and a little bit harder, but some of the young and early chains, you know,
were heavily supporting Kava, launching with Diffinity, doing some stuff with Nier, did some stuff with Aurora in the past, and Thundercore, Meteor, and there's probably like five or six other chains that we're going to be working with to help them find and source the grant. So Alpha Growth is created
system to make this easier. That's what we do and why we do it is because a lot of blockchain developers and a lot of core development teams are not the, you know, they don't really, they want builders and they want to be building cool things. But the BD side of it
is not something that most of these guys are interested in doing or getting involved with. So, I think the kick it off is kind of like this rant or this, you know, understanding how to get a grant really starts with the basis of these different narratives that are coming up within
with a crypto, right? So we provide a lot of DeFi support. And so let's start there. Right now we're tracking 19 categories of different types of DeFi apps from collateralized debt positions like a maker Dow maker die.
all the way through some of the later and greatest things with voter escrow decks and voter escrow lending markets and things that kind of utilize that flywheel. But the hottest one right now in this space that everybody started to talk about are real world assets.
And real world assets are effectively how do you tokenize assets in the real world on chain and then how do you make it capital efficient enough so that not only do the chains get these assets on the chains in the form of TVL but there's things to do
and things to buy on the chain. So the fundamental thesis of real-world assets is, hey, there's like a lot of regulation if you want to buy a home in the United States, there's notaries, there's pricing, there's commissions, it takes time, you have to have this notarized. What if we could encapsulate that process and take that reg-tech
process and zip it up into a really nice tight package. Instead of having them jump through seven layers of hoops, all of that rig tech was stored in the back end and you could get access to growing markets in terms of real estate or places that are gentrifying or get
exposure of your portfolio to real estate assets because it's historically known as a safe inflation protection mechanism is investing and real estate investing in commodities. So commodities are another thing. How can we get commodities on the blockchain?
How can we get these sourced on the blockchain and pretty much every single Chain we've talked to that's interested in defy there's a couple of chains that aren't interested in day five Pretty much every single chain that we've talked to recently is interested in in real-world assets trying to
consume the real world. And there's a famous quote by Mark and Jason quote is software is eating the world and and blockchain is software and so kind of extrapolating from his quote blockchains eating the world. And this is one of the first ways that blockchain
can start eating the world. Now, some of the issues on this is that there's current processes in place and there's current regulation and there's like all of these different aspects. One of the nice cities of blockchain kind of like launching out of the gate was there wasn't a lot
regulation around it. So when you had these digital assets and these digital tokens, it was very easy to move very quickly and without the regulatory. Now we're starting to go to more and more regulated markets. The capital efficiency is going to end the
the types of fees that are going to be generated in the back end of these deals, not maybe not necessarily on-chain, but there's going to be hitting commissions at fees. So, one of my concerns in this kind of all of these different chains asking for real-world assids is, what are the fees on the back end? If you're going to go and buy
building by home. We're just talking real estate because that's kind of like a very obvious one. You're going to go buy land, buy home, buy a building and put it on the blockchain. How many how many bonus fees or how many extra fees are hidden fees? Am I going to pay to the organization that's controlling the real world asset?
that then is it going to be as capital efficient? So the thought process behind the real world asses is get the tokenization on the blockchain, but also if you can get, give access to a lot more capital and capital is always searching for alpha.
If you can get access to a lot more capital, that underlying asset clash should rise. So if there's only like 10 people that can buy a piece of land and now you open up to tens of thousands of people that can buy a piece of land, that price of that land should go up in value because more people have more access to it.
a lot of power in real world assets going on chain, which is one of the hottest narratives right now. And however, there's a lot of kind of like hidden fees and discrepancies on how that's all going to actually work. And then one of the major
things why blockchain is amazing is it gets rid of the middleman. So when we put a blockchain in between a home purchase and a user like we're not really removing the reg tech of the middleman right, is that going to be more expensive or is it going to be less as a
expensive. Is the technology and the alpha embedded in there other than distribution and access and the fractionalization of these assets is there really going to be less capital needed and less fee structure needed and is the technology really going to do that? So I have a lot of questions.
on the blockchain and throw it into an LLC, throw it into a C-Core, and then effectively go from there. All right, so let me recap. Well, how does narratives now that every chain that is interested in it all in DeFi is real-world assets? So if you're working on real-world assets, talk to us, we can help you out.
That's a big demand. The next hottest thing is VE Fork season. So solidly launched about a year or two months ago. And from solidly, that was kind of like a failed experiment, but a lot of good ideas in there. Since then, Velodrome on optimism has
has increased to 300 million in TVL. I think that's the last time I checked that's floating around there. We helped out equilibrate, go on to Kava. There's meter chain is looking for a VE fork. ThunderCore is looking for a VE fork. Definity is looking for a VE fork. And we have grants available for
people that are looking to build a VE DEX and engage in that community. It's a hot sauce right now. If you're not familiar, the Velodrome is probably the biggest. There's a three different tier mechanism going on.
you have the users who swap, you have the voters who hold the token, and you have the LP providers. The way that this mechanism works, where it's not like a Uniswap V2 fork that just kind of, you know, trends to zero of their governance token over time, what happens is the game
is based upon this voter escrow mechanism and where the emissions on LP pool, so you have the people that provide liquidity making LP pool. The reason why they would make LP pool on Velladrome versus a sushi or a uniswap
is because they can earn emissions and governance token. And that is based upon swapping fees and it's also based upon how many people vote on the pool. What happens in these V2 models and why the emissions are important is because
the more liquidity that is added to a pool, the less the slippage fees and the less the swapping fees become. If you have less slippage then you have more capital efficient trading. What Dex is one and Chains one is the liquidity for every pair
that's that wants to be traded. And the voting mechanism, because people are locking up their token to vote, the emissions, people tend to dump them right away because they have more utility than just your average governance token.
So it retains its value, it kicks off a flywheel, and there's a bribing mechanism so you can go in and bribe a pool, and then people will vote on the pool to earn the bribes. And so at a bear market, like we are kind of in, I feel like there's the inklings of coming out of a bear market.
But the bear market that we're currently in right now, the bribe mechanism is what's driving a lot of the growth of these dexas. And the bribe mechanism for somebody who owns a pool or a protocol owned liquidity, the reason that they want to bribe
is a form of marketing. So I have an article out there on Medium about curve wars and stablecoin and the fundamental reason why people in curve, which was the first kind of like voter escrow, mechanic was that
different stablecoins were buying curve and voting on their own pools because when you have a lot of really high APY on your pool, it becomes marketing for your stablecoin.
And I'll try to find the link to that and throw it in the notes here. So imagine you're a new project. You launch a token. You're like, cool, how do I get exposure to this token? Well, you know, I can get some bots and influencers on Twitter. I can buy some videos and influencers on Instagram.
YouTube, I can do some kind of like PPC marketing and some kind of strange places, I can do suppress releases, or I can get exposure to the people who are trading by making the pool a high APY. So what ends up happening is these token launches and these token individuals then bribe these pool
and bribe the voters to give a mission on their pool because you know, add APY to their pool and then the APY people will see that in the world and be like, "Wow, this must be a hot token. What's going on here?" And people will do research about the project and either APN or not APN. And so what happens fundamentally
is that bribes are a form of marketing and a marketing expense for these token projects and it's a capital retention form of marketing because you bribe, you get the votes, then you can bribe the votes the next week or the next epoch. So it's a flywheel mechanism that
continually to provide value, sustains liquidity, helps market to new users and new DGens, and then is pretty capital efficient because you're deep in the post liquidity. So it's got a lot of really cool mechanisms in place. So if you're building
a voter escrow type of model. We want to talk to you. We have a lot of different chains that either a fork or voter escrow decks, voter escrow money markets. We recently talked to this was really cool. A voter escrow liquid-steaking company.
So basically, which validators is a stake with, the validators are going to start to want to accrue the token to understand, get more stake and more validation and get their fees and then the earnings go back to the liquid stake and token. So that was a little bit complicated to talk through.
But voter escrow has a lot of power. So different new ways to apply voter escrow to new models such as liquid staking, such as money markets, such as like, perps, very, very cool ideas, and we're interested in that. And there's a lot of chains that are interested in that.
Let's see what else. So, DeFi 19 categories, you have Dexes, you have Options, you have Derivatives, you have Vaults, you have Yield Optimizers, collateralized debt positions, basically like MakerDi or RI, lending markets, insurance,
insurance, privacy protocols, bridges and infrastructures. All of these different types of things, these different different categories are things that we can get grants for, especially if you have a tested
If you have a security audit and you're on a test net and you've been on a test net, that's something that we can get grants for. Moving on to infrastructure. This is a little bit more in the weeds and not as retailing. But if you have an infrastructure product, these are things that change pay grants for
So, what do they pay grants for? They pay for grants for RPC nodes, multi-sick solutions, infrastructure in terms of bridges, the ability to bring external on-ramps, off-ramps, external liquidity onto their chain, external wallets under
are different things that are very interesting. There's one that we recently talked to, a community example, it's kind of like acorns for crypto. They have like 30 or 50,000 users, monthly active users that are constantly compounding the leftover money in every transaction. So if you swipe your card,
your bank account card and you pay you know 50 cents it's like you know a dollar and 50 that 50 cents left over automatically goes into a vault into your app that then gets put into DeFi and so they're growing their user base and they're growing users and so chains are looking
for things that increase five different things. I think this is a really key point. There's five KPIs that change our constantly looking at, and one. The number one is the quantity of apps. So just like the iPhone example, there needs to be a lot of things to do on the app, right?
So quantity of dApps is something that's important to them. The next thing, let me put the defi hat on for a second here, is TvL. Right? So how much value is locked on the chain? So TvL, and they're always looking to grow TvL.
The next thing is trade volume. Trade volume is effectively how much tokens are being traded across the decks, lent and borrowed on the money market. What is the financial activity, the trading volume of activity on the chain? The next one
is can be defy or doesn't have to be defy we're getting to the NFT space, the consumer space with these next two transaction growth. So if you have a gap that can create a lot of transactions on the chain, that's something that's very, very important to blockchains. And the final one is
monthly active users and user wallets. So like wallets, monthly active users, something that every chain is looking for to engage in, to get more users onto their chain, and there are grants available for all five of these things. Now, some of these chains, prior to
tries some KPIs more than others. Some of them are saying, "Hey, we're only going to tackle a specific narrative." Some of the chains are like, "We only want to concentrate on transaction volume in users." There's a lot of things like NFT projects or GameFi that
Chains are very excited on getting people to play and engage with over and over again Cool Some other interesting things that are along those line and on transaction volume a couple of the chains that we work with we're finding that it not just NFT projects, but structured products
add a lot of transactions volume. So like think like auto-compounders, rebalancers, index sets. Ooh, that's another hot one. There's more requests now for index sets and token sets. So just like token sets, like creating an index fund
specific to the chain is something that is also interesting. So, grading a way to have an index set that rebalances, maybe market cap weighted of the native based tokens, like on Ethereum you have token sets, but these other
that are interested in DeFi are also looking for, basically like auto rebalancing ETFs, exchange traded funds that have an index of the top by market cap, you know, weighted different tokens that kind of makes a
representation of the chain. That's a hot one. Another hot one in the defy space is liquid staking and liquid staking derivatives. So if you're working on liquid staking and liquid staking derivatives, it's something that these chains are are looking for because liquid
taking derivatives effectively kind of like create new money. And this is an interesting conversation that, depending on where you are, in which country you are, asset growth is not considered, you know, a taxable event while
getting staking rewards is. So, you know, we could see a future in the next year or two where the staking rewards, you would never want to necessarily collect the staking rewards because it's embedded as income and you might be willing to say, "Hey, take the fees in a liquid staking
derivative because the tax implications is much less, right? Because there's asset growth embedded in the liquid-staking derivative. But if you collect the rewards directly, it could be seen as a source of income. So not only that, but the capital efficiency when you're trading in
the second derivatives, you have an embedded APR. Right? That's where the token should always be rising in price. It should always be, have an embedded APR that not necessarily rising in price because the underlying, but should be a more valuable held asset.
then just having the native token that isn't wrapped in a liquid-staking derivative because that has an implied APR embedded in it. So when you start pulling or doing DeFi with these implied APRs, you get this compounding effect. So not only do you, let's say
you pull for with a native asset, you might just get the pull emissions. But if you pull with like a liquid staking, you get the embedded APR plus the pull emissions and auto compounds. And if you use an auto compounder versus one of these emissions, that's also something in which
Hey, there's implied asset growth versus they may start looking different governments may start looking at emissions as collected emissions as taxable events, which would be not cool. So automation is cool because you get this abstracted representation
There's embedded asic growth in there and these are these different challenges or different problems that a lot of different chains are looking for in the solutions. Let's go back to some of the basics. Really know when you're
When you're filling out a grant and you're filling out a proposal or any of these things, you really have to have a very clear understanding of the problem that you're solving. So let's take the liquid-staking to root. What's the problem? If I stake token and I collect the rewards of the token, it's a taxable event.
If I use a liquid-staking derivative, the users don't have to claim a taxable event. There's just a$$$$$. So really, really understanding the problem and making clear that you'll understand the problem and you can communicate it clearly.
when you're filling out your grant and your grant profile is something that's super helpful. So there's kind of like three killer things that you have to do. You have to understand the problem. You know why your solution to the problem is good.
Do you have experience and do you have the team that has done this before and do you have other like past examples? So problem team and have this has this team done it before and you know if you can kind of solve those
a couple of things, then effectively what you have is a really good solution to potentially get a grant. Now, the other things that I would speak to them, and I'm coaching a couple of different projects as an advisor,
is speak to this other five KPIs right by going with us and giving us a grant we're going to increase your user wallets by coming us they're going to increase your transaction volume we're going to increase your trading volume we're going to create your TVL and or we're just you know
another quantity depth on there, which is like, obviously, if you come and join the number chain, it's less intriguing. Okay. So those are the four major things. What's the problem you're solving? Do you have to team it to do it?
Do you have proof that you can do it? That's even better. Do you make your GitHub code public? That's a more interesting one that can be relevant or not as relevant depending.
KPI, are you going to increase on the chain? And the more explicit you are with it in the assumption that the easier it is to get a grip. Okay, so
The next thing in the last thing, I think, and I'll definitely open up to questions if we have any questions. If anyone wants to come up now and speak, ask a question, come on up. The last thing that I'll say is a lot of meetings that I have with potential grant applicants, and we do like discuss
They come into the call and they basically start asking questions of like, "Well, we could build anything. What would you like us to build?" That is probably the worst thing that you can do. There's hundreds, if not thousands, of dev teams out there, right? And yes, we have a good team, we have a good experience.
like, you know, that's very interesting, great for you. But I mean, chains and grants ecosystem projects get inundated with developers that are like, "Hey, we're here to build. What can we build for you?" And it's just not a right like aspect. Like, read what they're going through, read their narrative,
like engage with their ecosystem. What are the problems and narratives that the ecosystems talking about? And then specifically tackle that narrative with the solution, right? If you understand the ecosystem and you dive in, you can understand the problems that they have. And then when if you come and say, hey, we see that you
you have this problem. Here we're coming here to help solve it. Here's how we're going to solve it. And here's what KPI we're going to move. And then at the end, this is how much money we need to move that KPI. And it's an experiment obviously because like there's no, I mean some chains will do milestones, milestones based
contracts and grants. But effectively, you know, if you have clear thought and clear vision and a clear plan, how are you going to move those KPIs? These grants and ecosystems, I'm not guaranteeing that they're going to go with you, but they're much more likely. So having
clear ask, have a clear indication of what you're going to provide, what KPIs you're going to move from them. And then, you know, we've seen one team come in very talented, a project had hundreds of millions of TVL come into a conversation and it would just be like,
What would you like for the builds for us? They're like, okay cool. And you know, there's some flirting with the idea of working with these guys, whatever. And we had another team came in with about one third of the TV on their previous project. And they said, hey, we need, we need
it was a crazy amount. We need X amount of money. This is exactly our plan piece by piece. Here's exactly what we're going to do. Here's how we're going to execute. And then it's going to be a one year contract and a one year grant and it was alone. And then we're
return you the money and it was like, wow, these guys have their stuff together. They know exactly what they're doing. They know exactly what they need to do to accomplish what they're going to accomplish. They've proven that they've done it before. Now they're doing it a third time. They're saying, hey, we could do it cheaper, stronger, better. Here's what you're going to get at the end of
the day. And when you take those two offers side by side, even though the other team had more TVL, more experience been around longer, but because they had a structured ask and it's structured, here's what exactly where you're going to get at the end. We ended up
going with the second one. And a way more expensive price point, just because they gave us the confidence that they have their exact ask together. And it came across as confident and legitimate. So that is how you win a grant.
Understand the change problems, understand the ecosystems problems, have a team that can solve the problem, have a very specific ask in mind, and have it all laid out and structured, and it makes it a lot easier to get a grant on any chain.
I think if we don't have any questions, I'm going to stop there, you know, show a little bit of stuff that we're going through on Alpha Growth. We're going through a redesign. Sometime this year, you're going to be able to get investor introductions on the platform. There's around 74 ish. Last time I looked
investors, professional VC that are looking from the old flow by filling out a profile in alpha growth, you basically get a shot to get introduced to a DC. There's a direct connection and kind of connection requests mechanism in there. The other thing that we're working on is
is one of our clients said, "Hey, we don't want projects, but we need a whole bunch of stuff built." So we're building a RFP module. We have a couple partnerships there to help distribute the RFPs. So these RFPs are more like, "Hey, it's not a project. It's more like, hey, we need a bridge built or we need a module connected
from Ethereum to Cosmos or whatever. So all of these different things. And so a bunch of requests come in for projects, a bunch of requests coming in for builders and building teams. So we're adding that functionality to our platform with the redesign. And super exciting. I mean, we're over five
We have, I think, 17 chains that have logged into the platform that have used it and looked at it. And there's eight that are actively engaged on looking through the deal flow and the grants partners and everybody who's applied for a grant right now.
Now, slowly moving numbers up to the right on every capacity and, you know, happy and hope we can continue to help out speed up the velocity of the crypto ecosystem by matching developers and projects to new ecosystems and chains.
Cool. On that note, I'm going to, uh, there's no questions. I'm going to end it.
Thanks for everybody's time, and I'll catch you on the next one. Later.