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Bankless nation. Are layer threes real? Well, at least some people are trying to build them. Dgen chain is a layer three built on top of basechain. The layer two using Dgen, the token, as its native currency and unit of account, a chain built by degens for degens. Apparently the genesis story of Degen is one for the ages and one youre about to hear firsthand from the man who started it all, from idea to token to farcaster tipping to base. Layer three, working to make a first class experience for all the dgens out there, both cryptonative and crypto novice dGens, because apparently Degen culture transcends crypto. Today on the show, you're going to hear from Yasik, the creator of Degen and will paper of syndicate, who's the main service provider of this new Degen layer three. Why a layer three? What's a layer three? Why settle on base? Are layer threes even real, or is the ethereum world jumping the shark? What's next for Degen? Is there a roadmap? How did this thing go up 2000% in 30 days? Let's get all of these questions answered right now from the source. But first, a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible. Bankless nation. Excited to introduce you to Will, the co founder of Syndicate. What? Syndicate, an infra provider for devs who want to build on chain experiences. Will, it's been a while. Welcome back to bankless.

B

Thank you.

C

Yeah, last time was loot. It's great to be back.

A

Yeah, last time it was the whole loot phenomenon almost a full entire cycle ago. A lot of things has happened ever since then. Joining will here on the podcast today, we got Jasic, founder of Degen, Yasik. Welcome to Bankless.

B

Yeah, hey, nice to be here.

A

So there's going to be a number of different conversations that I think are going to be immensely interesting as we pull out of this conversation here. Yasik first, just letting the sage here is the degen chain. The chain for degens. What's the deal here? What's dgen chain?

B

Yeah, it's absolutely the chain for Degens. I think this is the place you want to be, or at least that's kind of the idea, you know, kind of long term. Is there anything you want to kind of know about the degen chain or specifics or something like that?

A

Yeah. So Degen chain is like piercing through a frontier that I think a lot of people didn't realized, didn't realize existed. Uh, maybe there's two things to pull out here. First, it's a layer three. So it's a another blockchain, kind of like a layer two, except at instead of settling down to the Ethereum layer one, it's settling down onto base chain. So that's already an interesting design choice. Also, the other interesting design choice is that it uses dgen as its money. So denominates in dGen, like, runs on Degen. And so it's a layer three, uh, with its own unit of account, own native currency, which are two very interesting design choices that we haven't really seen explored yet. And so, like, I think the crypto industry, the Ethereum world, the broader, broader conversations are like, is there really a there there? Like, or are you just doing weird stuff with technology? I think these are kind of some of the questions that I'd like to kind of run through. But, like, first, what's your reaction to that?

C

I'll talk a little bit about why layer threes make a ton of sense for DGen, and a little bit about why layer threes makes sense in general. So, with Degen, Degen is a community starting from existing token. The existing token is on base. That means that the audience is on base. So the question for the Degen chain is, okay, let's go where the audience is. Let's make sure they can bridge in and out easily. Let's make sure they can enter and exit this chain very easily and very cheaply. The answer for layer three in that case was very clear because the layer three allows you to bridge in very cheaply, interact on chain incredibly cheaply, a millionth to a billionth of a penny per transaction, and bridge out very cheaply whenever you're ready. So that low cost experience allows for a ton of experimentation. That's why we're so excited about Degen. What happens when gas fees are a millionth of a penny or a billionth of a penny? What kind of experimentation does that unlock? Can you start giving tips as micropayments? Can we start to get back to some of the original visions of crypto that Degen has been pioneering? On top of Farcaster, on top of Warfcast, on top of the on chain social ecosystem, layer three is our huge enabler of creativity. Ultra low gas fees for both bridging and for interactions really enables that. And, yeah, that's why I'm so excited about the stack that we chose.

B

Degen chain is a little bit, at least in my mind right now, kind of like the Las Vegas of blockchains. And actually, I think a lot of people kind think about it also in just terms of, well, crypto is kind of like the Las Vegas of finance almost to a lot of people who are outside of crypto. But inside of crypto, for me, it is that sort of experience. I don't know if in particular with gambling, let's say I know Degen and all that kind of stuff is kind of associated with that. But I think, like Will was kind of saying, it does offer a sort of different experience. And I'm kind of thinking that, okay, base is the home chain. This is where we created the token. And then people might bridge onto this Las Vegas Djen style chain. And it's like going to Vegas and having $500 in your wallet and saying, all right, I'm going to spend this at the poker table, I'm going to spend this for a nice restaurant or something. And if I lose my money, whatever, it's fine. But maybe I come home with an extra 500, maybe a couple thousand. I got lucky. And so maybe people come back from the degen chain onto the base chain with full bags, or maybe not. But at least the main focus for me is that people are having fun on this chain. So whatever the experience is, hopefully people are building apps that are sort of fun experiences, maybe also cross section of social, and there's a lot of benefits beyond just the technology. So if you think about just a token, just in general, I mean, it's fairly easy to maybe launch a token, but it's also not that easy. There's a lot of legal implications. You have to find a liquidity pool if you're trying to get bigger, maybe a market maker, you have to get into exchanges. There's all these different things that I figured I didn't know about, and I'm doing now. How do you create a token and how do you create this community? And so maybe if you're, I don't know, like an indie app developer or like a small startup or something, maybe you don't want to focus on innovating or creating a token. And maybe you do. I don't know. But maybe it's worth just using the degen token and then essentially bootstrapping your project this way. And maybe you grow out of that. Maybe you keep Degen as a historical token or as a key token because the community is still there, and then you create your own token. And we've seen a couple of projects that do that. Perl, for instance, is a big frame on forecaster that's using degen and things like that. So I think it's a cool way for people to almost bootstrap in a way, or kind of like use degen as a tool, as a platform in a sense. And also of course, the super low gas fees. It's a roll up on a roll up essentially, is what an l three is. And that does allow for some kind of gas cost savings. I'm not super knowledgeable at the blockchain level as to why some of that is. And I do have some questions myself. If the congestion gets super high and things like that, what if we get. I've heard people say degen chain is going to get more popular than base chain, which to me kind of seems crazy. But it also kind of seemed crazy to me that people would bridge like 30 plus million dollars in 24 hours or something to the degen chain with nothing built on it essentially at launch time really. I mean there were people building and there are people are building, but I thought it was going to be much more gradual and we would introduce tools, tooling for developers, developers would build that stuff. So anyway, those are my different thoughts. And also one more thing I kind of wanted to add is I could also see visibility being a cool thing where you have this specific community. One thing about the djing community that I think people kind of know instinctively is that these people will take large sums of money like you saw in frontic or whatever, and they'll just throw it, they'll just throw it in, they'll just ape in a few million dollars or something into these apps that nobody knew about maybe a few days ago or something, and there willing to give them a try. And then of course they'll also basically liquidate and take their funds out just as quickly. But they're willing to, they're almost like VC's, like they're willing to give things a try where other users are. Like there's no way I'm going to put my funds on this weird app that just launched. So I think there's a lot of benefits beyond just the tech, but the tech is also part of it.

A

There's two main pillars of conversations that I'm seeing here. There's the l three conversation, and then there's the app layer of Degen conversation. As well as what is the culture of Degen? What is the unique properties of Degen block space? And then there's also the connection between these two things. What about the fact that it's layer three, makes unique properties in its block space, and is actually a conduit to whatever Degen culture is, whatever is the unique application layer around the dGen, layer three. Well, I want to go back into the layer three conversation just kind of at a conceptual level. Like you said, DGen started on bass, and so bass was the settlement layer for Dgen. And so just as a hypothetical, right, as a conversation starter here, maybe just like a thought experiment, isn't actually Djen a layer two, where bass is the layer one, and Ethereum is just totally irrelevant here. Ethereum is not a player in this story, and so is this a valid perspective. Degen is actually a layer two and base is a settlement layer.

C

So I think there's two mental models for thinking about layer threes, and this relates to how we scale compute in general. So you can think about it as essentially scaling vertically. We have layer one, we have layer two, we have layer three. At each layer, the gas fees get lower, scaling gets higher, the block space gets more dedicated. You could think about it as that mental model. But the other way, which you're proposing is you can think about it horizontally. We have a whole bunch of blockchains, and they connect in various ways. And how they connect and in what way they connect doesn't really make a huge difference. What matters is that these are independent blockchains with their own ways to be customized, and they bridge in and out of another chain. That's another way to think about it, where you have base and you have dgen, and base and dgen are bridging back and forth, but you could have ethereum, you can have dgen, and they could be bridging back and forth, and in this case, it would be more scaling horizontally. The more block space, the better. The more we can scale, and that allows us to get all kinds of creativity. That would be impossible on a layer one. My own personal belief is that what the chain settles to, whether we call it a layer two or a layer three, that doesn't really make a huge difference. You can get equivalent gas fees for layer two s and layer threes for most things besides bridging. But what really matters is, are we adding more block space to the Ethereum ecosystem, to the EVM ecosystem? Can someone write solidity contracts and start to do more and have their smart contracts be cheaper, easier, faster to interact with? If the answer is yes, that's a net good for the EVM. That's a net good for ethereum. Even if ETH is not being used as the gas token, that helps the whole ecosystem scale, because all the block space that previously would be crowded, is now spread out nicely among all these different chains that are bridging back and forth.

A

What advantages would a layer three like Degen have to specifically onboard consumers? Is there anything unique to the dGen layer three that it can do to produce a consumer ready experience that a layer two can't do?

C

Yeah, so the vast majority of layer three so far are settling to base. The reason why is that base is very accessible for consumers. You can bridge really easily in and out from Coinbase. It's very easy for people to move funds in and out. And as a result, it's kind of become the de facto chain for crypto onboarding. That is where the layer three element comes in, is that if base is very easy to onboard to, and Degen is very easy to onboard to, the bridge is quite simple to interact with. You don't even need dgen when you start interacting with the bridge. It can help you. It can help you get dgen. At that point, you can onboard onto Degen in essentially two steps. Bridge from Coinbase or another exchange to base, bridge from base to Dgen, and you're good. That's all you have to do. I think eventually we'll start to see the world become more and more multi chain, where Degen has and other l three s and other chains have also direct bridging in and bridging out. Right now, that's quite logistically difficult for most decentralized exchanges. So you see these shelling points around ethereum, mainnet, around base, as bridging points for bridging in and out.

A

But why do you need a layer three? Why can't you just take whatever we're doing on the DGen app layer and just do it on base? Why do we need a layer three? What's the unique properties that are being built here?

C

Yeah, so if you wanted to transact on base, you're looking at one cents to $0.10. If you want to transact on DGen, you're looking at a billionth of a penny to a millionth of a penny. That is a massive, massive improvement. Because you could start giving out tips that are $0.01. You could start to take part in these experiences at very low dollar amounts. If you're playing a game, like every game, every hand in poker, every action you take can be on chain affordably in a way that allows you to experiment. That property of low gas fees, which is enabled by modular data availability, like Celestia, like arbitrary. Many trust that ability to have ultra low gas fees is not possible on an l two that is settling data and funds to an l one, but it is possible on a layer three that is settling funds to the layer two and settling data to either the layer two or modular data availability layer.

B

Okay. I also want to add to that that there is certain customizability that we could potentially add in there. Obviously, I'm not familiar with exactly all the customizations that we potentially could do, but it is possible. And we were talking about Farcaster native precompiles. Rather than calling out to a smart contract that you deployed to interact with, signing farcaster casts or whatever needs to be done at the technical level, you could probably make that more native to the chain and that could offer some benefits and some developers are asked for that customization. And so maybe it's worth thinking about how can we customize this experience at the technological level without maybe innovating too far into. I don't know. I don't think we particularly right now I don't see us as doing something like blast where we do. I don't know. This native yield a huge technological shift, huge reworking of, I think they took months and months of time to basically rework the chain and maybe that is in our future. But right now I think just doing those customizations, helping out the developers build their experiences, that's probably a big value add to a lot of people. Also, I think visibility is another thing where definitely if you're building on base or you're building on optimism, of course they have grants programs and all this stuff. If you're a smaller developer, like a mid tier developer, it's definitely harder to gain visibility. And also I think a lot of these grants programs, a lot of these other things, they less revolve around fun stuff and more about these serious big applications. And are you vc funded or potentially are you going in that direction? That's really cool. But then there's also this other side of let's just build something that's also fun. It could also blossom and become a huge app. I'm not saying that Degen isn't for people who have ambition or anything like that, but I think it's just a more fun space to build in, which is also, and also that visibility aspect of it is a little bit smaller right now than, let's say optimism or base or something else. So we would like to maybe highlight those people who are building there. And so if you're early now, it's kind of the beginning. I think building on there also makes sense and I hope we do support the indie crowd, the mid tier crowd. I always think of Dogecoin as obviously they're an l one if they were EVM compatible and they had their own ecosystem. Personally as a developer, I'd probably go and build there. Or at the very minimum I'd go to the Dogecoin app store and check out what is the top Dogecoin app. And I think for Degen chain I'd like to do an app store style model where you have several metrics, I don't know, weekly transactions. Maybe Farcaster likes a little algorithm that takes into account different things and that's your ranking for the week, where Google Play or some other stores maybe taking account downloads. But anyway, that's kind of how there's a lot of different reasons why you might want to choose a degen chain.

A

Yasik, part of your answer that Im hearing is that Degen just has space to be far more opinionated than any of the layer twos. So base still is trying to be as credibly neutral as possible, trying to mimic Ethereum uses ETH as its currency, uses the EVM, all this kind of stuff. A lot of the layer twos are playing in the same field. Optimism, base, arbitrum, all going for ethereum equivalents. Base isn't doing that. Base is more opinionated and directional and specific about what it wants its application layer to look like. Maybe you could talk a little bit more about just bases or DGen's room to be more opinionated.

B

Yeah, I think that just goes back to the customizability where, let's say base probably won't do certain things, they probably won't add the forecast or native precompiles or things like that. So they're not trying to orient themselves towards one application or something. I think for us it does make sense to orient ourselves to maybe a specific application in the sense that maybe it's in a broader sense that maybe other people also want to do that. And we also tie ourselves to farcaster in a large sense right now, maybe that will grow, who knows? But I think having that ability to be able to interact with the developers and offer like, and offer like this experimentation layer that I think like base or some of the bigger l two s, I think they're less willing to maybe experiment with some like specific features or like, like they're. They're probably. I think with the risk profile it's a little bit different. Like we're able to like probably do a lot riskier things and just like totally mess with the customization and things like that. And like if it doesn't work out then whatever, like maybe revert it, maybe add something else, like do something that's wild in a sense, whereas base might look at that, or some other l two chain might look at that and say, well that's a little bit too much or that's too specific or something like that. I think that part could be pretty impactful. And it's like, I don't know how far we want to go into that. Do we want to innovate at the blockchain layer and the customization layer to the degree that, let's say blast has done, where they've innovated quite a lot of, or do we want to just offer those smaller customizations which are still impactful that other chains just won't do because it's too specific or something like that? I think on that front there's a lot to potentially do and I think Will would probably know a little bit more about this since he's been implementing some of that stuff. But I also want to get into the weeds and do some more coding in that space. But yeah, absolutely.

C

Yeah. That customizability is really important. When you can start to add your own code to a chain, you completely change what it can do. Ethereum transactions can only do so much computation before they run out of gas. You add a precompile, as it's known, and you can insert custom code in the chain that can do anything removed from these gas constraints. That's incredibly exciting. You can start to see these chains be customized where I think over time they will start to look less like general purpose blockchains and more like blockchains with all this custom functionality that's opinionated in a specific way. That space is still early, but there's already a number of pre compile frameworks coming up, so I think we'll start to see blockchains that are as customizable as apps and start to support this huge developer ecosystem where they're less so chains and more so platforms designed for specific use. Cases in mind, we're talking a little.

A

Bit about the genesis story of the Degen token and this whole entire endeavor. Was it always the plan to make a layer three? Josa, can you kind of like walk us through the beginnings of this whole thing?

B

Yeah, so a lot of the things I've been doing, it seems like a lot of feedback that I get is that the whole process has been pretty thoughtful and that's been like a big word that people have used when they've come to me like, thoughtful, thoughtful. And it's like, yeah, I am putting in a lot of thoughts and effort into making things as smooth as possible, but also a lot of things have not been intentional. So I quit my job in November ish, I think. Yeah, beginning of November, end of October, and then November chilled with family. Just wanted to take some time off. And then December, I was like, okay, now I'm starting my startup and I was going to do channels fun, which was going to be basically taking friendtech and the whole blur points meta that they started. And Blur started the points meta. Friendtech kind of started this whole social fi narrative. And I was like, all right, there's something there. So I'm going to do that basically with subreddits and combine this kind of social bonding curve experiment thing. So that was my idea. But then I was hanging out in the DGEN channel on Farcaster, and that was actually like one of the least popular channels on Farcaster because Farcaster was mostly onboarding, like the web three developer community. So they did like a pretty good job of that.

A

So, basembers, right? Vitalik. Yeah, yeah.

B

Anybody who's kind of like in industry and there's some big, yeah, big players and all that kind of stuff. So it was a cool space to be in, but like, all these people don't really want to be known as DJ's or they don't want to show their djin side, so. But ironically, I mean, cool, it was cool that actually the Farcast team, they created the original Degen channel because you used to not be able to create channels. Only the Farcaster team could create channels. And so I didn't really know what this whole DJN thing was about, but I saw that people were basically posting Wall street bet style charts and things like that, like screenshots. And I was on Wall street bets previously, so I kind of liked that whole idea. And like, I guess I'm a little bit more shameless in that aspect where I'm fine to expose that side of myself. So I was in there and there was only a couple of us. And then in December, I kind of saw things blowing up with the points token that just had so much inflows in such a short span of time. And I was like, wow, how do you get half a million dollars in eth in just a few hours? Seems pretty amazing with pretty low effort. You're just creating a token. So it felt like there's a spark and there's something going on here. And then there was another token and then another token, and then all these tokens kind of fizzled out in a way. And I kind of create, I saw this, I was like, all right, well, I'll just create a token. So I started with a promise of just a cast, and it was, I'll create a degen token. It's going to be fairly distributed. Do you guys want something like this? And I got a whole bunch of likes. And then once I realized, like, okay, this is like the biggest post I've ever had on Farcaster. Like, there was 100 likes, which was a lot for me. And I was like, wow, okay, so I'm just gonna work on this day and night. I have nothing better to do anyway, so. But I also felt the spark. Like, I felt like, no, there's a demand here. And so, like, and that's not something I saw with channels fun. Like people were signing up for the invites and things like that, but here there was real demand. And I was like, all right, well, if people want this, it seems fun. I'll learn a ton. So I was basically working day and night figuring out tokenomics and looking at blur, looking at uniswap, figuring out how smart contracts work. Exactly. Because I was a developer, but not in this space, and trying to do things properly, not get hacked and set things up for long term, for sure. My vision was kind of like longer term. Two weeks later, January 6, I think I deployed the contract. January 8 was basically the Genesis. Now the airdrop is out and everybody gets their tokens. And the whole airdrop was based on the points meta from Blur. I took the Blur font. I totally like their design. I'm a big fan of the way they gamify things, but I also didn't want to do it in a sleazy way, so I kind of wanted to do it like Reddit Karma. So basically you're on this platform and typically you do get points or karma and Warpcaster or Farcaster doesn't really have that. So this kind of filled that space a little bit. I think it wasn't super intentional, but it just felt natural. This is something that is cool and it kind of catches the eye and, yeah, so that was Airdrop one and then Airdrop two happened, and that was focused on tipping. So less on your ranking, like how many likes you got and more on, like, do people value you and still still based around the likes? Like, you get a tip allowance and you can tip others. And that was actually not so intentional as well in the fact that I actually had a list of things. So I had a whole list of like things I wanted to do and I wanted to build more of a game, like kind of like farmville for facebook. I thought that was going to be great. I built a little plug. Now we have frames but I was going to somehow figure that out. Then I went down this list, I was talking to a friend of mine and down at the bottom was tipping and hes like whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait. Tell me about this tipping thing. Hes like how long would it take you to implement? I was like, I dont know, maybe 4 hours, 5 hours or something really quick. So yeah ill just do that. Just go ahead and do it. And so I did it and then like basically the day it came out, people were just like so amazed by it. Like I got like all these messages, like, like people were like their minds were blown. Like what? Like what happened? Like how did you, and I didn't think it was that crazy. I like, it just felt like, I just felt like this is cool, like, you know, we can tip now. But then it started also sinking into me like, no, this is a little bit bigger than just like cool but it's also, but then I started thinking, wait, didn't like dogecoin do, didn't I do this on four, like four chan like a while ago? Like what? This wasn't this on Reddit and then I kind of like, so a lot of it was kind of like subconscious where I was like, I think I was pulling from those experiences I had before and things that I did but it wasn't like so thought out where I had a sheet of paper and I was like, you know, this is what dogecoin did and this is like what litecoin did or something like, something like that. It was more like, feels kind of cool. Let's give it a try and if it doesn't work, then let's go to the next thing and just do it super fast. Let's not wait. Let's not wait and build things like months or weeks. And now we're at this point where now there's the l three chain and the genesis of that was basically, there's this frame called power bald and I think they also called themselves lotto, pgf, I don't know if that's the parent company. I don't know. But it's basically a group and they created this frame where you could basically claim a ticket and it's a lotto and then you win some degen and things like that. And they came to me and they were basically saying they're spending $300 a day on the base chain because they want to do everything on base. They have this, like, this verifiable randomness technology or something like that, and it's all on chain. And I don't know the whole details, but I was really trying to convince them, like, just go off chain, you guys. Like, I'm doing everything off chain, and then it's cool. Just make the experience frictionless. But they really wanted to do it, and they just kept coming back in the conversation. I almost got a little bit annoyed because they just kept coming back three or four times. And then after it sunk in, I started thinking about it, and they were really pushing this whole l three idea that they really, really wanted it. And so I just thought to myself, well, if they really want this, then let's just give it a try. Let's build it. And if they want it, maybe somebody else wants it. Maybe even I'll start building on it eventually. That's been the genesis of a lot of ideas. Liquidity mining program. That was a comment that somebody posted, and I just thought it sunk in. A few days later, I was like, that makes sense. The way I've been doing it, it has been community driven initiatives where some people have been just really pushing it, and I just kind of go for it, and I have nothing to lose. I feel like, let's just try it.

A

Let's just try. It. Feels kind of like the motto of this whole, entire story. Fa let's just see if this works.

B

Yeah, yeah. Totally amazing. But also, it's not just a shot in the dark, because a lot of this stuff, for sure, will and syndicate, they put in massive amounts of effort to make this thing work. Like, once we decide to do something, I think we do put quite a lot of effort into it and then to make it the best experience possible.

A

So is there a roadmap for this whole thing? What are the next steps? Or is a roadmap more or less antithetical? When does the let's just try it stop and actually a coherent plan is put in place?

B

So I do think the whole l three chain is something that's super important now. I was kind of thinking of it like, okay, let's give it a try. But now it seems like so many people have bridged, so many people are interested in it, that this is probably going to be a centerpiece of the whole story and figuring out how to push it forward and, I don't know, make the whole user experience great. I think that's going to be a big part of everything. In terms of roadmaps, I don't think I have these huge roadmaps. One, because a lot of it is user feedback based. A lot of times people come and they have their own ideas, and I just kind of filter these ideas or kind of put them together or, I don't know, creatively change them. So I think it's hard to have a roadmap. And the other part of roadmaps is that crypto is so speculative that giving people another, like, I don't know, piece to speculate on. I don't want to be a part of that. I don't want Djen already kind of goes up, it goes down, and all these things happen. And then giving kind of people, like, this thing to, like, this argument where they could be like, well, you know, Yasik said this, and so, like, we need to, like, buy, we need to sell. Like, I don't want to be a part of that whole thing. And I rather surprise people. I rather things to be like, you know what? This is a surprise. And once it launches, it gives you that wow effect. And another part of the whole thing was also like, degen. The name itself sets very low expectations. So when you hear Djen, you're not expecting a whole lot. You're kind of expecting like, yeah, this is some guy probably trying to rug us or some really weird thing. But then you get into it and you're like, whoa, there's an l three chain. There's this tipping mechanism. There's a website where I could have, there's a leaderboard. This is, like, kind of advanced. And then people are like, oh, okay, there's more to this whole thing. And I think setting, with the roadmap, setting expectations sometimes lower, and then just, I don't know, pushing the gas and promise over deliver.

A

Classic.

B

Yeah, yeah, a little bit, yeah.

A

Will, what's syndicate's whole role in this thing? What's your guys job here?

C

Yeah. So we essentially brought together the components needed to make the l three happen. So we got on a call with Yasuk during ETh Denver. Ian, my co founder, and I were connected from our hotel rooms, and the Wi Fi was really bad. And we were, like, explaining essentially our vision of rollups and layer threes, which is the hard part, is not launching the chain. It's making the chain useful. It's bringing together all those components that make it a first class experience. Because an empty chain doesn't mean anything. A chain that has bridges, a chain that has apps, a chain that has precompiles and customizations, that's what's really important. So we get on the phone with Yasuk and we're all jammy and we're super excited. Ideas are flying like a million ideas a minute. And then Yasaki, if you don't mind me telling the story, I'm in. But let me think about it, because I want to make sure that I'm making a deliberate decision to commit to you all. Give me a day. And we're like, sweet, no problem. And we're still in an irmastyne afterwards we're like, oh, we have so many ideas. We can do so much here. And then Yasik messages us an hour later and he's like, I'm in. Let's do it. So it was an amazing collaboration. And what we did for it is we essentially did all of those steps to make the layer three useful. We have a bunch of first party tooling at syndicate that allows for on chain transactions and transaction automation. We have a bunch of contracts that we deployed to the degen chain to make it useful. And then we've also brought together a bunch of great partners that we work with. Conduit for the Ras, decent for the bridge, airstack for data. And all of these components combined together start to make the chain very useful for developers and make it easy for them to interact and build on top of it. Leave your goal as like you want to roll up. Let's make the roll up of your dreams and you tell us the ideas and we make it happen.

A

What's on your guys roadmap? So if you guys have the north star of making Djenn a first class experience, like, what's left to do with that? What are your guys ideas here?

C

So we're keeping a really close eye on requests that people have made. So people have requested, for example, easy contract deployment templates. We deployed some of those they requested on chain farcaster signature verification. We added that. There's a bunch of stuff that we're working on around making it easy to get data onto the Djen chain. So, for example, price data is really useful for, let's say you're running an e commerce shop, you want to price something in $100 of Djen. Having a price oracle for that is very helpful. Let's say, for example, you want to have a multiplier based on someone's number of forecaster followers or their cast Degen channel. Having that data on chain is very useful. A lot of what we're doing is Degen chain has a pretty strong base of apps. What we want to give it is a really strong base of composable data. And once there's a bunch of data on chain, developers can be like, oh, I could pull in the Djinn price here, and Farcaster follows here. And I've just made an application where there's a random chance of getting a discount on this specific purchase based on the number of forecaster followers. And I can verify the signature and all that. A lot of what we're doing is around that on chain data piece, and that is only possible on a layer three because we can put data on chain for a millionth of a penny or a billionth of a penny, not one cent to ten cents.

A

One of the stories cool parts about this is that Degen is actually an arbitrum orbit stack of technology. So it's an orbit chain settling on base, which is an op stack, not fork, since Coinbase is actually an operator of the op stack codebase, but an op stack chain with an arbitrum orbit settling on top of it. Can you talk about the choice to build an arbitrum orbit chain?

C

Yeah, yeah, we managed to split the baby. Everyone loves it now. I'm kidding. But having, having support from both optimism and arbitrary was amazing. So arbitram orbit and op stack, they have very different philosophies as roll up frameworks. So the op stack is very focused on the super chain vision, and as a result, they have a lot of uniformity in the stack, which gives you interoperability. So they have uniformity in the sequencers, uniformity in the bridges, and eventually, when the super chain is fully ready, you'll be able to seamlessly bridge back and forth between. Because optimism and base, they're both running the op stack, they're in the same code, arbitrary, morbid. They take a different approach, and their approach is much more focused on customizability. They're like, hey, customize these chains. Do anything you want with these chains. And all we expect is 10% of the net sequence of revenue back to the arbitrum dao. They're two very, very different philosophies. I'd say it depends on what kind of chain you're looking for. In our case, what we needed was the custom gas tokens. That kind of customizability to have Degen as the gas token was really important. Arbitram orbit let us customize in that way. So we're like, great. And we settled to base because the DGEn token was already on base. Think about it as let's kind of assemble grand big tent of all the relevant providers, but that's essentially what we ended up doing. So, yeah, it's been wonderful to work with both the teams, guys.

A

It's been absolutely fantastic. Is there any other part of this conversation that we haven't touched on yet? Any stone we haven't unturned? Yasik, anything come to mind?

B

Oh, man. Yeah. I don't know. There's so much happening that the last three months, things have just picked up so fast and things have been moving so fast that I almost feel like I haven't even had the time to just sit back and be like, why is this happening? Yeah, process everything, kind of analyze, and I think I probably will start doing a little bit more of that. But in terms of next steps and what's going to be out there, I tend to like to surprise. So I think I'd rather not talk about that kind of stuff.

A

Who's actually the. The dgen team? Is there a team going on here?

B

Yeah, I mean, I would say will's a little bit part of the team, but, like, not. Not like, not officially, let's say, in that sense, but, yeah, so it's weird because, like, Degen is, in a sense, almost, like, decentralized in a way, where a lot of people. So one of the big focuses, I guess, was how we distributed the tokenization and we distributed, obviously, on Farcaster to all these builders. And so a lot of people who are really deep in the industry ended up receiving a lot of tokens and some of them sold, but a lot of them kept. And so now they're super. They're almost like, a part of Djen as an organization because they have, like, they have, like, I mean, there's people who are obviously, like, millionaires now because of degenitive, probably even, like, you know, past that. So and so, like, I talked to some of them and, like, like, just like everybody. I don't know. It's. It's. It's wild. It's totally wild in that sense. On the other sense, I think we do want to, like, add. It's. Right. It's just me, like, at Djen. So, like, people have definitely been pushing me.

A

Like, Degen, the company or the organization is. We're looking at them. It's. It's Yasik.

B

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So it's just me right now. And I think that needs to change a little bit, because on the one side, I don't think you need to have a huge team nowadays, maybe, versus a tech company 40 years ago or 20 years ago or something. So I think now you could probably build something pretty huge, maybe even multi billion dollar business with just a few people. It's kind of crazy, actually. So I think I do want to bring on. I have one person in mind that I want to bring on, and that would be a huge value add. We could like ten X. I think this guy's really. But we'll see. I do want to bring somebody else. So it's not just me. I'm not the only point of failure then. There is the whole decentralized aspect of people who are vested. And so we have been distributing tokens so that we incentive align with different companies and different people. And it feels like people want us to succeed almost because they're in this with us. Yeah, I think that's part of the distribution process. And we have 70% for the community. 15% was supposed to be for the ecosystem. Maybe that needs to be divvied out a little bit better, because right now it's not the best division out in that particular sector. But I think that. I don't know, it's a weird thing. Things have moved so fast that I haven't had time to even create a business entity. That's something that now I'm realizing. I'm realizing, well, people want to invoice us. I have a Vercel bill or something that's starting to be pretty high, but there's all these bills coming in. I'm like, well, I'm just paying it out of my savings account because I don't even know how to get the tokens into my fiat without crazy taxes. And I'm a polish citizen, us citizen. There's all these different things I need to figure out. Now I'm finally figuring out, I'm talking to people and they're like, yeah, it's time to do something a little bit more serious. I think we're going to create a foundation and move in that direction. But it's been too fast, so we need to create a baseline.

A

Well, it's pretty on brand for the dGen chains. For Dgen of you, Yasik, who are the big token holders of Degen. I know one confirmation. Made a very early, large investment purchase of Degen tokens at a pretty advantageous price. Is there any sort of initial inception of the DjEn token when that went to some certain parties or people or any comments about the distribution of Degen?

B

Yeah. So the biggest portion of the pie one confirmation has 5%. Now it might seem like, yeah, they got it at a good price, but back then, Degen, it wasn't.

A

It was a huge speculative bet, for sure.

B

Yeah, it could have gone to zero. And so they gave, like, a million dollars at that point. So, like, for me, that was like, wow, if this thing goes to zero, at least we can create a startup and keep going and innovating. So that was, like, really great. But in terms of, like, actual whales, like, I don't know who the actual whales are. People have reached out and, like, they kind of want to do these OTC deals, and there was a lot, like, people reach out all the time. Like, can you do that OTC trade and all this kind of stuff? Some reputable, some hidden behind, like, pseudonyms. I don't know who they are. And so I've kind of avoided doing a lot of that. But I think we will probably work with a market maker, like, a reputable market maker who can, like, facilitate those kind of OTC trades for the bigger players out there. But I haven't actually gone ahead and sold DGen to somebody except for one confirmation and pocketed that money or put it into our foundation or anything like that.

A

Was there any amount of the Degen supply that was held back for you, the team, for building purposes, or was it completely distributed via varcaster? What was the distribution? Sorry.

B

Yeah. So 70% is going to go towards the community, basically, and those are divided into three different airdrops. Right now we're in airdrop two. I don't know how long it's going to take to kind of, like, yeah, basically distribute those funds, but we'll see. And then 15% went to the liquidity pool, which is basically, there's an NFT token you get from uniswap. And we lock that up and it expires in about, like, I don't know. I think now in four months, and we'll probably keep perpetually trying to lock it up. Every six months, maybe we can repurpose the fees to do other things and things like that. Maybe we can create a different liquidity pool if this liquidity pool is already doing well, so things like that. But then there's another 15%, which was dedicated to the ecosystem, and that's where I'm thinking maybe the division isn't that great. I dedicated 5% of the token supply to myself, being a little bit selfish there, but I don't know, that's what I did. 5% to one confirmation, like, you know, like, two months ago. People were like, you know, the DJ wasn't worth that much, so it didn't seem, like, too crazy of a story. And then another 5% is, like, to the ecosystem, which I've been slowly kind of giving out, like, these grants to, like, different companies and things like that. Obviously, I do want to bring one more player to Degen so that that person will have some. Some portion of the pie for sure. So, yeah, I don't know. I might rejiggle things a little bit, but I think I'm not going to change too much, actually. I think that the way everything is working out is pretty nice, and 70% going into the community is pretty cool, like looking at blast or uniswap or things like that. I kind of looked at their tokenomics and they offer a little bit less to the community, but they're much bigger organizations, so they have more of the pie towards investors and, and themselves. And also, one thing to remember, after four years, the token, it's based on the Uniswap idea, where after four years, we can mint 1% of the total token supply. So that will hopefully help us finance other things, maybe keep the tipping thing going. Who knows what's going to happen in four years, but that will hopefully offer some level of financing for other things.

A

Amazing. What a story. Yasik will, thank you so much for coming on the show and helping me tell it. Yasik, if people want to explore Degen, where can they go to either get more information or just get straight onto the chain?

B

I think the best place would be, well, there's probably, like three places definitely go. Check out Farcaster, the Degen channel. I think that's where the genesis, that's where everything happened. So I think that's a great place to start and kind of check out the community. DGen tips is definitely a great place to just figure out basic information, check out the leaderboard, all that stuff. Then I would also probably say syndicate. You guys have a great blog post about basically and just general information to get developers started. I would say check out those sources, especially if you're more on the dev side, since on the website, we don't have too many resources for devs just yet.

A

Cool. Yeah. Will, similar question. Where do you want to point people to to learn more about Degeneres syndicate?

C

At Syndicate IO, we have the great blog post about Degen, explaining a bit about, you know, how it's put together, the different parties involved, why it's designed the way it is, and then if anyone wants to jam on layer threes, I'm super, super passionate about them. Just dm me will on warpcast or papper. P a p p e r on Twitter or telegram. I'm very happy to jam anytime. I love this stuff.

A

Well, Yasik, Will, thank you so much for coming on the show bankless nation. You guys know the deal. Crypto is risky. Defi is risky. Layer threes. I guess they're probably risky, too. Especially ones in the call Degen. But we're headed west. This is a frontier. It's not for everyone. But we are glad you are with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.