Original title: Building the Perfect Crypto Ecosystem in 2024 | Keone & Smokeythebera

Original source: Empire

Original translation: Peisen, BlockBeats

Editor's Note:

This podcast episode takes a deep dive into the world of Layer 1 ecosystems with the founders of Monad and Berachain. The conversation explores community building, the complexity of brand development, and the challenges of attracting developers. Keone and Smokey share their ecosystem development strategies, discuss the importance of interoperability, and present their vision for the future of decentralized applications. Finally, discuss the role of tokens in project development and the delicate balance between technological innovation and user adoption.

TL;DR

· Differences in community building:Smokey describes the Monad community as charming, welcoming, focused on content creation and visuals, and having an interesting atmosphere. Keone describes the Berachain community as having both friendly and eccentric members, as well as some edge lords or psychopaths.

· Importance of community and culture:Avoiding a sense of exclusion and a profit-seeking mentality is key. Exclusive strategies can create a high-pass filter that provides value to those who commit to the project for the long term. However, the effectiveness of this strategy may vary depending on the environment.

· Project uniqueness and founder brand:New founders have difficulty gaining credibility and resources, and brand building is critical to attracting talent and investment. Founders' brand building should maintain authenticity and strike a balance between approachability and professionalism. Ecosystem construction faces challenges such as attracting investors and maintaining a healthy startup ecosystem.

· Future Vision of Crypto Apps:Keone envisions the crypto ecosystem eventually evolving into super apps like WeChat, offering multiple services. Keone noted that to evaluate the success of apps, they can be viewed as businesses, with a focus on profit and growth.

· Development of Interoperability:Keone said he focuses on the quality of the app, followed by the choice of backend, and highlighted Monad’s EVM compatibility and lack of vendor lock-in. Smokey added that efficient entry and exit of the ecosystem is critical.

· Coin issuance and price fluctuations:Building a good project is the best way to ensure a healthy token price. Innovation and project construction in the crypto space requires longer time and patience than in the traditional technology industry. Compared with the rapid launch of tokens, truly innovative applications require a longer period of polishing and improvement.

What is a community?

Jason: Both of you have participated in many podcasts, discussing technical aspects such as Monad, why Berachain is better, liquidity proof, parallel processing, etc. Today I want to talk about community building, ecosystem development, and the overall development of the L1 and L2 ecosystems. So let me ask a question about the other party first, Smokey, how would you describe the Monad community relative to Berachain?

Smokey: Overall, they are a pretty friendly and enthusiastic group. They seem to particularly encourage content creation, and slightly quirky art and visual creation. They have their own set of mascots, including various animals, some reptiles, etc. I think they create a very interesting atmosphere. When I think about the Berachain community, I feel like it has more of a friendly feel, which is attractive to some people, but may not be so suitable for the more hardcore, more sophisticated Crypto Twitter users.

On the other hand, when I think about the Berachain community, I feel like there is a more aggressive and focused spirit among the people there. There are more "fringe" characters in the Berachain community, or people who may not be in a good psychological state, that's my initial impression. Another point that comes to mind is that there seem to be some good backstories in these communities, and these characters have rich backgrounds and legends. I'm not sure whether these are spread through Telegram or Discord, maybe some tasks, requests, requests to participate in certain things, help produce some form of content, and may be combined with different strategic initiatives of the community. So this feels like a well-coordinated group.

Jason: Keone, what do you think about this issue?

Keone: I also have great respect for the Berachain community, and I highly recognize the work done by the team in cultivating the community, as well as the contributions made by individuals in the Berachain community, which have helped the community truly enter the public eye and make the community famous. I think the Berachain brand is more "bear" in character.

This might sound silly, but there are just more bear-related themes, like honey, other related things. So maybe that makes it easier for people to resonate with these related themes.

Where the Monad community is more random, it started out as just one character uploaded by someone, and then through the curation of the community, it gradually took up more mindshare. Then the legends also developed somewhat randomly and organically. But I think this may be true for everything. So I'm not sure, but it seems to me that there are more new characters being created in the story world of Monad.

Santi: We talk a lot about community and culture here, how do you define these concepts?

Smokey: I think it comes from a variety of aspects. On the one hand, it's the first thing people associate with your brand or chain. It's very much a psychologically driven feeling. Culture is also closely related to this, like, what does this feeling make you want to do? Or what does this culture broadly encourage? Is it encouraging people to interact with each other and lift each other up? Or do you encourage people to post jokes, copy and paste, make memes, and do things online? Or do you encourage people to express strong emotions online? What is that baseline?

I think a lot of what we think about is how to build a culture that is authentic and authentic, and how to build a culture that can be accessed by other audiences but can also be adjusted over time. I think in a lot of cases, we try to stay true to our roots, and we have a lot of confidence in the work that we do, but we also don't want to be too serious, because I think being too serious is one of the biggest taboos.

And when I look at a lot of L1 and L2 ecosystems in the past, they often feel like they're being devalued. You don't seem to be good enough to understand X or Y, and this is not a space for you. So I think that building an authentic community and culture includes a spirit of not manipulating others. We're not manipulating you to do X or Y. We're not trying to get you to produce X or Y content. What we try to create is a culture that's fun and engaging, and we encourage people to pursue excellence while having fun. That’s probably our biggest take on culture and community.

Smokey:When it comes to community, I think of it as a series of little ripples where you plant some seeds, but you don’t want to forcefully intervene, you just want to give people some ideas, or talk about an ideal future world. If people agree with those ideas, some people might stand up and say, “Hey, we’re going to do this.”

For us, a lot of the work that is considered to be done by the Berachain Foundation is really the product of some random members of the community who have been active for a few years and stepped up and said, "We're going to do this ourselves, whether it's an app developer or not." Things like Honey Jar, which was a community initiative that is growing into a super team structure that helps with a lot of ecosystem work, funding support, exposure and community resources for different projects. Or more targeted initiatives like Bear Baddies.

I wish I could say I played a role in these things, but for the most part I just exchanged ideas with people and said, "Hey, this sounds good," or "This sounds bad, maybe let's not do this," and then it evolved into a series of organic interactions where people wanted to help each other and have fun.

Jason: In terms of openness, one of the best ways to build a brand is to be clear about who you don't serve, and I think that almost makes it exclusive at the beginning and gradually expands from there. For example, Anatoly and Raj have done really well on Solana. The slogan at the time was "like chewing glass", and they would publicly say: it's really hard to build here, we don't need everyone, and nine out of ten people are not suitable to build on Solana. I'm curious how you think about this approach of building for a targeted group of people and then gradually opening up over time.

Keone:Really, there are many ways to think about this. You can think of it as a process of segmentation and pruning cycles. So, maybe at some point, it's right to take a more exclusive approach. I see a lot of early communities now trying to get started by creating an atmosphere of exclusivity. Like "We just opened Discord for 10 minutes, and everyone who came in was a member, and now you can't join anymore."

I think there's a potential problem with this, now that everyone is doing it, it may not be as effective as it used to be. And within these Discord or similar threshold communities, the actual experience needs to be valuable to people, otherwise it will eventually fade away. So I think the idea of building a community ultimately has to be about creating an environment for members that they enjoy and provide value to them.

And in fact, in order to make the community a pleasant place, sometimes you need to set a threshold in some way, mainly to prevent spammers from coming in and constantly sending "GM" messages, or asking a bunch of repetitive questions to show their presence. I think this is becoming more and more of a challenge for new projects - how to filter useful information from the noise.

It's almost like "vanishing point" or something like that. A few years ago, when I was thinking about this, it became increasingly difficult for crypto startups to hire engineers over time because more and more job applicants might be from North Korea. So it became increasingly difficult to screen the right people from these potentially malicious people.

Similarly, when you're building a community, it becomes increasingly difficult over time because more and more bots will flood in and overwhelm you. And the cost of running these bots is almost zero for the operators of these bots, so they will keep pouring in. So setting up barriers or providing some kind of protection to make the community environment pleasant, coupled with very careful consideration of what community members really need, are both very important for the growth of early communities.

Ecosystem builders, profit seekers or missionaries?

Santi: In every cycle, someone will jump out and say we have too much infrastructure, why do we need new competitors? Why not focus on the existing ones? Obviously, you don't think so, you are building your own ecosystem. How many of the builders you attract are pure profit seekers? Do you care about this? What do you do about it? Is it important to you?

Smokey:I think this is somewhat related to what Jason mentioned earlier. Like Anatoly and Raj said, "You're going to have a bad time here." This actually creates a higher barrier to entry, and the best goal of doing this is to self-screen those who can stick to the end.

In the crypto field, the issue between long-term and short-term incentives is very prominent, and it may be more biased towards short-term incentives at the moment. Through on-chain mechanisms or communication and incentive plans at the foundation level, those who are purely profit seekers can be avoided as much as possible. There are a lot of obvious signs that reveal these problems, because what we really want to create is loyalty and belonging on the one hand, and "vendor lock-in" on the other hand. This may sound a bit bad, but I don't think it's completely inaccurate.

In Web2, you wonder if there are ways to increase switching costs while also creating enough value in the work being built around the protocol that that increase in switching costs is worthwhile, so that the relationship between protocols is not adversarial.

For us, I think we take a few steps to make sure we don't attract developers who are looking for profit. First, we take a very careful look at the backgrounds and prior work experience of the developers within the ecosystem that we work with. I think just doing a little homework can reveal a lot about whether someone has been involved in bad projects in the past, which can be very useful in avoiding some potential risks.

On the other hand, we don't run any grant programs because we think the vast majority of these incentive programs are toxic and attract more of these profit farmers and developers. Just like Keone mentioned about the bot problem, similarly there are a lot of "bot developers" who just quickly copy some poor quality Uniswap v2 or v3 contract to try to get grants in every ecosystem.

So I think one of the simplest things you can do is to be very blunt in your messaging and at the same time have a healthy skepticism of a lot of developers. Ultimately, this will keep you focused on brand new applications because most profit farmers are not building brand new things. Of course, there are some who are very capable and will say, "Hey, I'm building something you've never seen before, provide me with funding and we'll go to the highest bidder."

But at this point, if you can help convince this person that maybe instead of taking a short-term profit-seeking mentality, it's better to make this a generational, category-defining thing and stick with it for the long term, then it's possible to turn a profit farmer into an evangelist. Of course, ideally you get missionaries right out of the gate, but this is our internal thinking on this.

Jason: Keone, I want to get your thoughts on this. Also, Keone, you mentioned earlier about avoiding hiring North Koreans, and I want to get your thoughts on that, and also your response to Santi's question.

Keone:This is actually a specific comment about hiring Solidity engineers. There have been several well-known incidents in the crypto space where teams have hired certain people who were either anonymous or they were not anonymous, but they acted like they were in another country, they couldn't turn on their cameras, they couldn't do interviews. A few months later, there were some attacks after the protocol went live. I think Munchables is a good example of this.

When I say "North Koreans," it may be a general statement, but in general, it refers to people who try to infiltrate companies and insert backdoors. I think as time goes on, as more and more of these resumes are floating around, or more and more of them are automatically submitted to job postings, it becomes harder and harder for companies to screen them.

I've written a bit on Twitter in the past about how to identify so-called "North Korean software developer applicants." I think there are ways to train yourself to ask the right set of questions, but it's true that over time, especially for certain roles like Solidity engineers, the process becomes more and more burdensome.

Jason: When you think of the ideal Monad builder, who do you think of? Have you ever met someone and thought to yourself, "Honestly, you should go build at Solana or Berachain or Move or Sei or Avalanche instead of staying at Monad?" Or do you think everyone should be invited to join?

Keone: Generally everyone is welcome. I agree with Smokey that a lot of grant developers are proposing to build things that are actually very similar to things that already exist. There's basically nothing wrong with any project that's trying to build something very unique, very differentiated, it's just that there are different levels of aggressiveness in how speculative applications different teams are willing to build.

Some people are very focused on applications where their storyline is easy to understand, where the path is very clear because they are very similar to similar projects that have been successful before. Other ideas are more speculative in nature. I’m very interested in these more speculative ideas because I think the space needs a wider diversity of effort, and that’s how we can eventually cross the chasm and achieve mass adoption.

Santi: I agree with you that sometimes you need to set a high bar to filter out those who are serious and committed. On the other hand, this can be a barrier to attracting other investors because they may simply exclude you. I want to dig deeper into this question: are there specific founders that you wanted to attract but were not able to attract? Is this because of your positioning of the protocol or your needs? What do you think are the key factors in attracting developers so far?

Keone:I think as a new founder, it’s very difficult to attract the resources you need to further develop the product and grow the team. Because not only are you competing for market share, but most people don’t know you. For most people, they don’t start with a large number of Twitter followers, and then they build a company from scratch, build a team, learn all the lessons related to entrepreneurship, establish a corporate culture, figure out how to recruit, and figure out what can be compromised.

The first hire is really the hardest in my opinion. Because you're at a stage where you don't have any credibility or resources, you don't have much money. And then you need to find someone who is absolutely great, because hiring the first, second, or third really great person sets a high bar and makes subsequent hires easier.

So you need to figure out where you can compromise and find that rough diamond. But the problem is that for most people, they've never done this before, so they don't know what to look for. In traditional tech, the startup process might last for years before you start to grow and raise more money. In the early stages, the team is relatively small, while in crypto, everything is accelerated. So, people expect a lot from you, but the learning process is accelerated.

How to build founder brands?

Jason: In addition to the Monad and Berachain brands, how do you think about building personal brands and balancing Degen and professional? Keone, I feel like your brand image is the calm, clear-headed, experienced engineer, while Smokey is more Degen style, likes fun stuff and memes. How do you think about this balance?

Smokey: I think about this a lot, how to make it resonate with the broader brand, but also keep it authentic. I don't want myself or my public image to be distorted from who I am in reality, especially when people meet me offline or we end up communicating. I think this is an interesting tool for us, especially in the next period of time, a lot of people may have very high expectations for both of our teams.

On the other hand, a lot of people initially ignored Berachain because they thought it was just a bunch of bears, and these people were anonymous and didn't know what it was. It looked stupid, and it had a name like "BearChain" that was deliberately stupid. So, I think there was a part of people who thought that talking to us was like talking to a clown. I actually don't mind it because I would rather see that contrast or that difference in perception and not be seen as a clown when talking to these people.

Sometimes we have an interesting recurring theme when talking to people who have only seen us online or haven't known us deeply. On the one hand, if this perception becomes the dominant narrative, it could backfire.

On the other hand, if enough people see these network effects forming and keep asking themselves why their friends who they respect and think are capable are excited about or support Berachain, then I think it will trigger a series of interesting "what the hell is going on" opportunities, and people will be confused and curious and want to learn more.

So when I think about founder branding, I try to keep it real while also being responsible to Berachain as a whole. I'm not going to do something ridiculous for no reason, but I'm also not going to look like a guy in a suit because I'm far from that image.

Jason: To what extent do you think it's because of the work you guys did on Twitter and the community building, as opposed to Monad raising hundreds of millions of dollars, that people felt they had to follow Keone, so Keone got a lot of followers, which made VCs more interested, and then formed this virtuous cycle of brand building?

I think it's a similar situation for Smokey, Berachain is highly sought after, people love you guys, but the investment from top VCs also creates this flywheel effect of brand building. What advice do you have for those founding L1, L2, or app founders who haven't gotten off the ground yet on brand building and founder brand building?

Smokey:I think a lot of it comes down to belief. I know it sounds a bit cliché, but I believe there is some truth here that can't be ignored. Going back to what Keone just said, I think the saying "birds of a feather flock together" is very applicable here, which is an old law in chemistry, but it also applies to our field. Good talent attracts good talent, and differentiated, interesting, and creative developers attract equally differentiated, interesting, and creative developers.

And I think the space is still very small right now, given the people who use crypto every day and the people who are actively developing in crypto, in a lot of cases, if you think of yourself, your brand, your community as a set of nodes, if you do have some strong nodes, like people like Santi who are standing up for us, or other friends who are spreading the good news, it will eventually have an impact in a lot of the right times and places. If it has those branching network effects, then it does have a lot to do with the brand.

The hype cycle does play a role, and people will say, "Oh my god, this much VC money was raised, there must be an airdrop, go participate, try to make some free money." But I also think there has been a more angry faction that has emerged recently, and they will say, "Shitty VC chain, I hate you, VCs are going to dump the market." I understand their point of view, and I don't think it's unreasonable. Because there are indeed many L1 or L2 projects in history that raised huge amounts of money, but ended up being ghost chains, and the ecosystem was almost dead, and users didn't have anything to participate in. So I understand their PTSD.

Going back to your original question, I think the key to founder brand building, community brand building, is to give people a real belief and back it up with evidence and empirical data. It's not just about saying, "Look at this ecosystem, I guarantee there are a lot of great developers here, I guarantee it's going to be great." You don't want to sound like a rapper, but to show evidence of "we're really doing something."

I think that's why we try to support projects that we think have a chance of being widely adopted. Especially in this recent wave of consumer crypto, a lot of people have suddenly woken up and realized that we need to build something that users actually want to use, which seems very logical, but obviously it's not always the case.

By helping build products that actually solve problems or improve people's lives in some way, and showing how those products can in turn connect to the brands or communities that originally drove them, that's the path we're taking. Like how to be a melting pot or a launching pad for all the cool stuff to come out of.

Some communities and ecosystems have really captured that inspiration temporarily at certain moments in the past. For example, there was a period of time when a lot of the cool new stuff first appeared on Arbitrum, which was a lab, and all the cool new ideas started there. We're seeing a lot of that with Base right now. The bigger question is how do you keep the momentum going, how do you keep the inertia going, how do you keep this snowball rolling, not just as a flash in the pan, but as a series of popular products that continue to attract attention.

So I think it all comes down to authenticity, clear messaging, and evidence that "work is really going on." Because a lot of people will shout from the rooftops, "Look at my XX partnership," but ultimately, I think the applications, the data, and the users are what really tell the story.

Santi: Like the three startups I’ve invested in the Vera ecosystem, I would ask them why they chose to build on Berachain. I feel like they all really appreciate the novel liquidity approval mechanism, which is very interesting in terms of both yield and consistency. Similarly, for Monad, when I meet some of the startups there, they also seem to really appreciate the advantages. Although there may be other competitors, my biggest question in this parallelization context is: why not build on Solana?

For both chains, you are taking time risks, which may be in the next cycle. There was a startup that was originally building on Solana and then decided to take the risk and move to Monad. For you, how much of this is about positioning ourselves as different from Ethereum, or different from Solana? Is it a differentiation by telling people what you don’t support, or differentiation by what you are truly unique?

Keone: I think it’s a question of differentiation and branding. For founder brands, it can be valuable to draw attention to yourself, and perhaps even more controversial. But that has never been my approach, I have always just wanted to say what I think and maintain a common sense driven approach while not getting involved unless I have a unique perspective.

So CT is a little bit like entertainment, it's a way for all of us to catch up on what's going on. But there's also a competition for attention, and as soon as something happens, there's a ton of posts or topics in response. And one strategy is to grow your Twitter presence by responding to those things right away. I personally never thought of doing that unless I had a really unique insight or something that made me laugh, but I'm not really good at being funny, so I can't do that.

So at least for me, as I get more and more experience in the startup process, and I do have something to share with other people that I think is valuable, I'll share that more on Twitter. But no matter where you are in your startup journey, no matter how well-known your project is, there's always an opportunity to make the snowball roll a little bit bigger and keep the virtuous cycle going.

It's not always necessarily as fast as the Monad community or Monad's reputation growing rapidly after raising money, but if you keep improving, then every now and then you'll get a speed-up, just like the speed-up you get when you pass through the speed-up zone in Mario Kart. If you do it right, if you have the right principles, then you can really leverage it when you go through the acceleration zone.

So all of this is just to say, I think it's possible to overthink this. There's a lot of other things going on. We're posting on Twitter, but we're also growing the team, we're also in product development, we're also planning a lot of other things. So it's possible to focus too much on brand building. I think it's better to do things that are natural and consistent with our true self. People tend to respect authenticity. If there's anything to adjust, it's the frequency of posting. Because if you don't share anything, people can't respond. That's the only thing I would say to be intentional: try to hit the send button more.

What is the specific job of BD in a large L1 chain?

Jason: Maybe we can move from brand to BD. Smokey, I want to throw the first question to you. There can be a lot of high-level philosophical discussions about BD, but can you drill down to the micro level and be as specific as possible? I want to get Berachain’s perspective on BD. You hired great people like Jack, what does he do on a day-to-day basis? What do you do on a day-to-day basis? Are you cold-contacting developers on Github? Are you cold-contacting project founders in other ecosystems? What does the BD job look like in these large L1 chains?

Smokey:The BD people have really been trending on Twitter this week, and I expressed my thoughts on this topic on Twitter yesterday. It’s all been a lot of work at this point. I say that because I’ve seen a lot of examples in the past, like the Blast ecosystem, where a bunch of people were like, “Yeah, I can’t wait to build on Blast, I can’t wait to go live.” But the token price collapsed and half the team jumped ship to other chains.

So I think on the one hand, you can have the best plans and build a strong ecosystem, but at some point you may face market pushback despite your best efforts. If the market says "this isn't working right now," then you'll get slapped in the face. I think the more constructive view is that if you do well enough, the market won't slap you in the face. But the macro environment is the macro environment, so I'm still conscious of this point.

In our work as a BD team, I think there are a few different angles. The first thing to do is to always try to identify those projects that really have potential, those that can break the norm. On the one hand, this is sometimes just a founder who has a potential that can't be ignored, and you know that no matter what they do, they will rise to the challenge.

As cliché as it sounds, they will do whatever it takes to win. These founders are very rare, but once you find them, you bet on them and do everything you can to help them win and succeed. Not in an unfair way, but if you can teach them something, impart some knowledge, or introduce someone to them, you try your best to do it.

On the other hand, sometimes there are good ideas that need polishing. You’ll find that they have a lot of the right ingredients and the right framework, but they just need a little tweaking to make it actually work. This is something we spend a lot of time doing. Like, “This product has great potential, but I don’t think you’re telling the story well. Here are some ways to make it easier for people to understand.” So I wouldn’t say it has much to do with cold contacts and DMs.

Luckily, the team is well connected now, and we have a lot of ways to reach out to different people. On the one hand, we talk to different investors, friends, and community members and ask them what cool things they’ve seen recently and which projects we think would fit well into the ecosystem. Today, there are hundreds of projects on Berachain, and there are a lot of natural flywheel effects within the ecosystem, where people will say, “Hey, my friend heard that I’m building here and wants to join us.” We’re launching on the testnet, and they’ll ask if we can help solve certain problems in the deployment.

On the other hand, we're a little more assertive and say, "These are a few projects that we think could be absolutely huge in the future. How do we get ahead of them and make sure these concepts are represented on Berachain early on?" How do we make sure we're not simply following a narrative, but helping to define it ahead of time?

I think this is really important, just like the question you asked earlier. It's important for startups and early-stage teams to not just follow an existing narrative, but to help create a new narrative that furthers the metagame. I think that's cool and it's something we try to work on with teams. How to tell your story in a way that's both authentic and novel, but not novel for the sake of novelty, but because it's true. I think that means you have to have a very high filter.

Another really important aspect is thinking about how the different aspects of an ecosystem work well together. Berachain naturally places a lot of emphasis on liquidity, so we think about how we can attract more TVL (total value locked) into the ecosystem, although I think TVL is no longer as reliable a metric as it used to be, the question is how do you make sure there is enough capital flowing so that people can transact as they want.

One thing that has become increasingly important over the last few months is how to think about distribution. There are a lot of chains out there that have dozens of applications and maybe hundreds or even thousands of users, but that ratio is often not ideal. You need to find a way to get your application or content into the hands of thousands of people to have a chance to really take off.

So, we try to curate an ecosystem of applications that have a chance to attract people. Whether it's good ideas, or a more seamless user experience, like the abstraction approach you mentioned, the Telegram front end, etc. How do you make it easier for people to use it and want to use it.

At a micro level, the real core is to have conversations with founders and team members, understand their strategic plans, and find out what problems they need to solve. For example, do you need a better way to guide your liquidity or user base? Or is there a bottleneck in the narrative and ideas of the project? Or is it difficult to raise funds? Community building problems? These are all aspects that need to be solved.

A lot of times, our job is to find ways to expand as an advisor or team, rather than short-term behavior. We are not simply investing money or raising funds for you, but how to teach you to do these things yourself so that you can become a better team in the future and get better support from the ecosystem. The result of this is usually to build loyalty and brand affinity, and many people will become real loyal supporters.

It's easy to say that you will do something, and it's easy to invest some money, but what you really do is to take time to work with you every week, check progress, look at different materials, and personally participate in the success of these protocols. The most authentic manifestation of this support is that it is not a gift, and there is no requirement to get advisor tokens from it. If you are helping a team in the ecosystem, you should really help them.

A chain should not be the protagonist. It may attract initial attention, but in the end, the application is the key. Our job is to give these applications the best chance of success and let them really get out of trouble. This requires time and energy. There are almost no other excuses or alternatives. This is true in my heart and in the hearts of many project founders. They hope that someone really cares about their work.

What will the ultimate form of applications and ecosystems look like?

Santi: A lot of the discussion can be philosophical, around culture and positioning. I'd like you to look ahead and describe what the future applications and ecosystems will look like? What breakthrough applications will be the top choice for people in a year? From your perspective, are there any projects under construction that you are excited about and think will really lead the way?

Keone: One clear vision in my mind is an application similar to WeChat. If you have used WeChat, you will find that there are many sub-applications that are almost embedded in the application. For example, you can order food, hire a repairman, find a courier service, shop online, or check your friends' social media in WeChat. Almost all functions are embedded in this super application.

Blockchain has the potential to become the backend of this super application environment because we already have payment systems, currency systems, and account systems that can store arbitrary data. The commitment scheme for the data could be compressed or encrypted and stored off-chain, but the commitment itself is stored on-chain. We have all the ingredients in place, but it's all about piecing them together to create a modular user experience that allows new app developers to quickly get onboard and provide a delightful user experience.

Mobile is really important when it comes to onboarding and user experience, which is why I think Blasts' move to mobile makes a lot of sense to me. Of course, it's all about execution, but I think this would be a very specific and reasonable vision for the future.

Jason: Smokey, what do you think?

Smokey:The future I imagine is an infinite playground that is ideally as accessible as possible, with distribution points in every system or city, and a very smooth and pleasant user experience. It's important that the standards in this space continue to improve over time, especially as adoption of projects like Solana increases, and people get used to that kind of responsive user experience.

We are excited to see many teams developing, growing, and scaling deep into the testnet, and hopefully this trend will continue. I hope the Berachain ecosystem can become a place where people build new and interesting projects in a very friendly environment with a lot of peer experience and precedent.

The ecosystem is first and foremost known for its strong DeFi focus, and I think there are a lot of really cool projects here. For example, the Gummy team allows you to borrow any asset as collateral and has done interesting experiments with leverage, the Concrete team has built credit default swaps on-chain, which is very attractive to traditional finance audiences, and the Exponents team has allowed you to trade with different tokens for the first time in a directional way, which has triggered economic incentive games in crypto culture. I am very excited about all of these and hope to see more of these projects emerge.

For example, teams such as Puff PA Husantinos, although colloquially referred to as "vapetern", are actually a very interesting incentive mechanism designed to help people gradually quit smoking. I think this is a superpower of crypto technology, beyond aspects such as instant settlement and efficiency, which also involves other applications in the ecosystem, and it basically means that these token incentives can be used to help enforce certain behaviors.

I think the core is to have a good enough product that people would want to use it without these incentives, and then use these incentives to really drive it. For example, Puff Off incentivizes people to gradually reduce their nicotine intake by increasing token rewards, and has a pretty elegant system in place.

There are also platforms like Overunder, where the founders are really motivated and are building an abstract experience that allows people to speculate on Twitch streams using computer vision and automatically predict the probability of various events in the game. This is very cool because you can work with streamers and reach thousands or even millions of viewers with a simple Chrome extension.

These examples are interesting because they set a precedent for more applications that can leverage crypto in a non-intrusive way while having certain advantages in terms of instant settlement, potential for earnings, etc. So I hope to see these exciting projects continue to develop and see experiences that really reach users. I also agree that the development of mobile is exciting, and I haven't seen much discussion about this.

I saw Peter discussing this recently on 1kx, and I think this is an under-explored but very interesting area - building products for women. This might be a taboo topic in some cases, or less discussed because I don't think crypto is the friendliest space for women. However, there are groups like Bear Baddies who are actually really cool, smart people who love what they do, learning about crypto and having fun doing it.

When you look at spending power and buying habits, women really dominate these areas in the US and many other regions, and they are one of the largest content producers. Men will follow their different habits, so building applications for women is actually a huge untapped area. We are seeing some early stage projects starting to get started in this area now.

I think it is very important to build products that can integrate into the increasingly popular Internet culture while maintaining a homage to the early hacker culture of crypto. I hope to see the ecosystem continue to do this while taking full advantage of capital efficiency, liquidity unlocking, customer acquisition cost advantages, etc., and keep it interesting. If we stop being interesting, then we lose everything. I hope we can maintain this in the future.

Will you actively promote cross-chain interoperability?

Santi: Your ecosystem and other ecosystems are excellent breakthroughs to attract not only existing builders, but also builders who have not considered crypto technology. How do you think about interoperability? Maybe a founder starts building on Monad, but ultimately do you actively encourage or promote interoperability to ensure the application is wildly successful? This could involve building connections between other ecosystems.

Keone:What I care about most is seeing the growth of the decentralized application space. The technology we're building on Monad is really about building a larger pipeline that supports more users and transactions.We think that's an unlock point for a lot of developers who want to achieve mass user adoption.

From a traditional technology perspective, you don't need a lot of daily active users, or a lot of transactions per user per day, to reach a relatively high number of transactions, and Ethereum is currently at just one million transactions per day, which is really too low.

I think there are good synergies between certain types of applications and the technology we're building. I'm actually most concerned about seeing high-quality applications across the space. As for which platform people choose to build on and choose the best backend, that's almost secondary to me personally. So as an individual, I try to share experiences and information to help all developers accelerate progress without worrying too much about the specific technical details.

From an interoperability perspective, I think it's great to have excellent bridging solutions that help connect different environments. Monad is an EVM-compatible Layer 1 platform, and for developers who build for the EVM, it's actually very easy to deploy to Monad or other environments. There is no vendor lock-in issue like Smokey mentioned earlier.

Smokey: Exactly. From our perspective, it's really important to have efficient ways to enter and exit the ecosystem. I think it's important to not try to restrict users, and to keep applications sticky because that's a big problem for many other ecosystems. This can be done through value alignment, leveraging proof of liquidity is not just a click away, but hopefully a better experience for many applications.

We've found that this kind of tooling really incentivizes more developers because they see that the chain is actually helping them succeed, rather than being in some parasitic way. This helps clearly show developers from all backgrounds that the infrastructure they're using can improve their experience as a developer.

Long term, it's important to build an inclusive environment, but also ultimately recognize the power laws that may exist. In almost every ecosystem and use case, there will always be these breakthrough applications. We should try to support the widest possible range of applications, but ultimately make sure to support the teams that are bringing great value to the ecosystem.

Santi: A lot of people are confused about the criteria for success for an application. We talk about mainstream adoption, but Keone, you mentioned that it doesn't take a lot, maybe the current crypto user base has a high purchasing power, so you don't need a hundred million people on-chain, or a billion users. You may only need a few thousand users who are more engaged, either because they are stakeholders in the system or because they have a high purchasing power, depending on the application. So when you think about breakout success, what are those key performance indicators? How do you define the success of an application in your ecosystem?

Keone:I think there are two aspects to the criteria for success. First, you need to evaluate the application as a business entity. So when evaluating a business, there are two important factors to look at, one is the profit of the business, and the other is the growth rate of the business.This is the standard for company valuation in the traditional field, and although the situation is not exactly the same in the crypto field, this framework is still a useful reference.

Thankfully, the amount of on-chain use is still very limited. Although there are many people who are passionate about crypto technology and think a lot about crypto technology, they have never actually set up a wallet and just trade on centralized exchanges. In fact, there are a large number of potential users here who already have a certain identification with certain values or have some understanding of certain popular cultures. They just need to be guided and encouraged to go online. They are just waiting for an application that can really arouse their interest.

From past experience, there have been some applications that have gone completely viral and have seen incredible growth in users. Think Axie Infinity and Stepn. The success of these applications was largely due to financial incentives, and the rise was very fast, and the fall was just as fast, as new users came in to buy NFTs, which drove the price up, further fueled the economy, and led to more people wanting to participate.

However, this model is not fundamentally sustainable. I'm not advocating for the growth rate of this particular mechanism, but you can see that when the opportunity arises and something really goes viral, the growth rate is very fast. The key is to have an application with intrinsic value that provides ongoing value to the end user that makes them want to keep coming back, rather than just being driven by some temporary incentive or condition.

Smokey: I'll add a few points. On the one hand, it's very important whether the application can stand on its own and whether it can be inflated or over-utilized because of strange incentives attached to it, and it can't just be a short-lived popularity. There are very few truly successful applications in crypto, which is why people are so excited about pump.fun because it makes money, and why people were excited about OpenSea in the past because it made money. Without token lockup, the impact of this dynamic will be different, but it is definitely part of it.

On the other hand, I also think about the total number of users, because Santi is right that the current user base skews towards high net worth users. But I also think that if crypto wants to get out of its weird state and become more than just a place to give out gifts or popular coins, there needs to be something that ordinary people can use and actually care about. This is especially important in emerging markets.

I recently spoke to a developer from Nigeria who mentioned that if you go to a gas station, a train station, or a public mall, people are constantly playing these "click to earn" type Telegram games. Finding a way to have these trigger backend actions for different smart contracts or applications sounds interesting. In short, we need to focus on applications that have the potential to attract more users, not just whale games.

Two more aspects to add: One is the user experience, that is, whether the overall feel of the application is easy for people to get started and use. The Moonshot application recently launched on Solana is an interesting example, which is similar to Robinhood’s popular currency platform.

Another point is how fundamental the application is in the ecosystem. Take GMX for example, it's been very successful in the Arbitrum ecosystem, and a lot of projects and products have been built around it, such as reserves of neutral positions, leveraged products, or lending methods for different primitives. These are all very important when it comes to scaling. So how embedded or fundamental the application is in the ecosystem is very critical.

Jason: Smokey and Keone, which three chains do you think are the most competitive?

Smokey: I guess there will definitely be competition with Monad. Obviously, we are targeting different user groups, but EVM-compatible chains will be part of the competition. A lot of activity has been focused on these chains recently, and these infrastructure changes are interesting.

Also Hyperliquid is interesting, they have a strong community base, advertise no VC funding, but have a really good product and a lot of people excited about what they are building. I believe they are also moving into the EVM environment. I am not too sure how well Hyperliquid's core infrastructure interacts with the EVM, but I expect there will be some interesting things coming out and it will be a cool competition to see.

Keone: I echo what Smokey said. From my perspective, Base, Solana, and possibly Blast chain are the most important in the competition, although the details may depend on time. In the past, the situation was slightly different and we had more overlap.

How to deal with traumatic events?

Santi: I saw a great tweet recently from a very engaged Solana investor. The tweet mentioned that most of the first applications in the ecosystem no longer exist and were not the breakthrough applications you see now. For example, there are almost no applications before FTX that still maintain some traction today. Most of the great applications only appear after experiencing some traumatic and decisive moment.

This is the case with Solana, and the same is true for Ethereum. Are you following the development of ecosystems like Ethereum or Solana? Are there any lessons learned from these projects or other projects, and do you have measures to avoid similar situations when building your own projects?

Smokey：Almost every major ecosystem has experienced some kind of traumatic event that has stood the test of time. For example, Bitcoin experienced Mt. Gox, Ethereum experienced the DAO attack, and Solana experienced FTX. These events were catastrophic in their respective fields. But these events also serve as very interesting screening opportunities. The teams that survived and continued to double down tend to be more determined and completely more invested in what they are building. And it's also a great learning opportunity and starting point for moving forward.

For us, I've been thinking about this. On the one hand, it may have something to do with how long people have been waiting for Berachain. On the other hand, we have definitely seen some phenomena in the market recently, which is not necessarily Berachain specific, but it does have a ripple effect. Whether or not we have experienced such a traumatic moment, if it hasn't happened yet, I actually expect such an event to happen in the future.

Because it means that the survivors of the blow will be very strong teams. I like to poke fun at Cosmos/Atom because I think there are a lot of issues with the ecosystem, but I can’t deny that no matter how many blows Cosmos takes, those loyal supporters remain consistent and they are there to stick around, which I admire very much.

Another point is that from the comparison between these ecosystems such as Solana and Ethereum, the importance of product leadership and focusing on building user-friendly products has happened in different forms. On Ethereum, we have discussed the expansion roadmap, discussed ZK technology, and a lot of technically exciting things may not have fully achieved the expected effects.

Now, we have a lot of discussions about the expansion problem, such as whether Layer 2 has a parasitic effect on the main chain. We are thinking about how to deal with the relationship between L1 and L2 safely and effectively. We have some cool ideas that we hope to implement on Berachain, which may be very interesting.

On the other hand, I feel that in many cases, one of the problems with Ethereum is the lack of direct leadership or product focus. In contrast, I think Solana has a relatively strong focus on engineering. We need to find a balance between effective decentralization and building a truly distributable product. Excessive decentralization can lead to loss of direction and a lack of power to drive the project forward.

In addition, there will always be some vocal members within the community. For example, Chainlink's early supporters were very vocal. They had a loud voice within the community and became advocates for the project. I think it is very important to have some community members who are really brave enough to express their opinions, and to provide them with a safe space so that their voices are not ignored, while also preventing the community from completely dominating the development of the project.

Keone:Regarding traumatic events, I think crypto does go in cycles. For any ambitious entrepreneur, building a really big vision will almost certainly go through a period of doubt, when crypto is almost universally doubted. That period can be difficult, like explaining what you are doing to your partner's parents, or you may have difficulty recruiting externally.

I can completely understand the builder trauma after Solana and FTX. I also saw that during that bear market, the really ambitious teams were actually mostly building in silence, because it takes time to realize the vision, which also makes it more difficult to obtain resources. I think it is important to understand the time cost of building applications that really push the boundaries.

We should reset expectations instead of expecting projects to be fully online six months after launch. In traditional technology, the build time is usually longer. If we want truly outstanding applications, we need to adjust our expectations and accept that there will be very difficult moments in the process.

How do you view the issuance of tokens, the decline in token prices, and user retention?

Santi: Although tokens are excellent coordination mechanisms, they are also a way to map contributions in the open source world, and they are an excellent mechanism for cascading incentives and acquiring users. But on the other hand, the price of tokens can become a huge distraction. In a bear market, the decline in token prices can cause huge disappointment, and even make people leave and never come back. How do you view this situation? Is it possible to control or guide the team, for example, if you have been around for a while and don’t have a token, maybe other chains are more eager to launch tokens. Is there a good answer or a perfect answer?

This may depend on the market environment. Some people say to launch tokens at the bottom of the bear market, but you may not have this luxury. I am particularly interested in projects that build applications in the ecosystem. How do you view the relationship between tokens and prices? Is it possible for a project to launch a token too early? Because in the traditional startup field, it usually takes years of traction and construction before an IPO. Once you have a token, there are new games and dimensions that you as builders need to consider.

Smokey: I don't think you can control the price. The price has its own trend, the token has its own trend, which in many cases has almost nothing to do with the product, which is a curse in a way. I really think the best way is to build a good project, and I don't think it's a complicated science. Although there are many different interpretations of the definition of a good project, it should be easy to replicate, easy to access, and have a good team building on it, and ultimately can bring real value.

Also, regarding projects launching tokens, I tend to agree with Santi. Coming from a traditional tech and startup background, it's strange to see this incentive structure. In traditional businesses, you don't IPO immediately when you build a company, but wait until the company has been established for months or even years before the market decides your fate. I think this also relates to the unlocking structure of tokens, and I think there may be some interesting improvements in this area.

I recently talked to someone that the unlocking structure of some meme token projects at the moment may be the best I've seen, although it sounds a bit strange because they are tied to some key performance indicators, whether it's fees generated, market capitalization, or FDV. These structures allow investors to exit gradually based on the success of the project, rather than all at once.

I think this may have some impact on the return cycle for investors and predictability for LPs. But in the long run, this may be healthier for the industry because projects need to continue to grow in order to reach the unlocking conditions. Although this is not a perfect solution, I think it is a potential alternative. In this strange world of investing, a token ideally serves as an accelerator, enabling projects that have already reached a certain level of product-market fit to continue to push towards that fit.In our case as an L1, the role of the tokens is a little different, they are used to pay fees and so on.

For many applications, tokens tend to become both a user acquisition tool and an emotional positioning tool. I think the former narrative has been told too much, and the latter is actually more important. User acquisition costs for token projects are often very high, you may need to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars in tokens to acquire a user, which is unimaginable in traditional businesses.

What I think is valuable is how to design a token release plan or airdrop event that rewards the right people, is well targeted, and carefully screened, rather than just randomly distributing a large number of tokens to irrelevant places. I think it is very important to ensure that there are ways to reward those who contribute the most, which can turn the existence of the token into something more useful for the product rather than just a game chasing price fluctuations.

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