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