Web3 Galaxy Brain 🌌🧠

Nicholas: Welcome to Web3 Galaxy Brain. My name is Nicholas. Each week, I sit down with some of the brightest people building Web3 to talk about what they're working on right now. After a hiatus this fall, Web3 Galaxy Brain is back in action. In this new season, look forward to interviews with founders from the Farcaster ecosystem, ZK-powered applications, and the creators and stewards of some of the hottest AI agents on-chain. My guest today is Proxy, founder of Proxy Studio and ProxySwap. In this interview, recorded in late June 2024, Proxy shares how his writing practice enabled him to grow a token-gated crypto research community amongst fellow Farcasters. By leveraging Farcaster Connections, HyperSub, and the then-new DegenChain L3, Proxy Studio launched a UniV3 fork and began experimenting with the concept of a social DEX. It was great getting to learn more about how a creative writer and mechanism researcher used Farcaster to transform his practice into a community capable of shipping blockchain software. I hope you enjoy the show. As always, this show is provided as entertainment and does not constitute legal, financial, or tax advice or any form of endorsement or suggestion. Crypto has risks, and you alone are responsible for doing your research and making your own decisions. So you were saying how you got into DeFi, or how DeFi started to appeal to you.

Proxy: Yeah, you know, so I was teaching, and I was working in academia, and I was trying to make some money. That's like how I got into crypto in general. And I found... I found DeFi fascinating. This was at a time when DeFi was so much smaller, right? Like now we have a million protocols, we have liquid staking, we have all this complicated stuff. And back then it was really just like stake token to earn token. And my brain could grasp that. So I got really into that. And I kind of just dove in.

Nicholas: Can you tell us what kind of academia you were involved in?

Proxy: Yeah. It was on the humanities side, in journalism and writing. So, you know, my approach to learning anything has always been to just read as much as I can about a topic. And I just kind of started reading. And that really led me down this huge rabbit hole. And I ended up working in a venture in crypto. And the last job that I had prior to joining BarCaster was... Was ghostwriting for a VC on Twitter.

Nicholas: I love it. It's funny because I, you know, I came from a somewhat academic arts humanities background as well. And I had a lot of friends who also made this similar trajectory. Often, I mean, somewhat motivated by the kind of financial dead end that that whole part of academia is. Or sort of compromised to whatever. Just odds. Securing a career inside of the institution is pretty low and sometimes unfulfilling. So, I think that's not actually maybe as uncommon as people might think.

Proxy: You know, it's funny. I, even since I've been on BarCaster, I've been really drawn to a few people, I think, who have similar academic interests. Like, Jihad is a really good example. He's like, he's the first person who subscribed to Proxy Studio and he, you know, is a writer, right? And he, like, is always there. He's always reminding me of the importance of writing and getting your ideas down on paper. You know, crypto is like, in some ways, it's a tech product, right? Like, we're all kind of selling this product. But in other ways, it's really a culture. And having that culture stand for something and be something that is interesting enough to attract smart people and have smart people working in the space, I think, is enormously valuable. And that makes sense. I mean, that means, like, really standing for something. And I think that requires, like, having more than just, you know, the finance people involved. No shade to my friends, you know, in finance.

Nicholas: I mean, it's a very mimetic field, for sure. It's, it's, I've always thought of, to me, I think one of the things that I'm sure I've mentioned to people who listen probably have heard me say this before, but Bitcoin, like, mobilizes the early adopter to have some financial influence. upside to evangelizing and that sort of is so entrenched in the. as a as a youngster watching the tech industry from a distance there was nothing i could really do aside from like try to get an internship or something and move or maybe find a local office for something. but there's really no way to be involved. but with this stuff it's so uh accessible to the audience to participate in the upside. um but it's so. uh it's very it's very it's very cultural although a lot of the times the like tech uh the sort of deep native people prefer a technical person to be the spokesperson even if the actual activity of being a spokesperson is non-technical.

Proxy: oh 100 i mean that that's. i think one thing that always that drew me in was that crypto was i think unlike tech like. okay. so if there's in tech like what do you do if you're like a tesla fanboy? i guess you can like join a investor community on twitter and like talk about how much you like on and how much you like tesla. but you you're probably not gonna like go work at tesla right. whereas in crypto if you um are like really passionate about ethereum and you're a smart person you can like start contributing to open source ethereum research. you know next month like you can find a collaborator in a discord and you can at least that's kind of like partially the promise. i don't know if in reality it's always so smooth but um that to me is like so much more interesting than the kind of like web 2 model of like. we have our startups and we have our. you know people who like think we're good and those never mix.

Nicholas: well i think especially because it's so permissionless you can start your own open source project right now if you want and no one can stop you from from participating. so if you consider the at you know the code that runs on the evm for example as uh part of the and i think it is obviously the code that runs on the obviously part of the ecosystem uh then you're contributing to the ecosystem you know even just by deploying some app layer thing permissionlessly.

Proxy: i think you could argue that right now any serious farcaster user is contributing in some way to like proliferating uh l2s for example. um you know forecast i i think it's like exactly. we all work for base. we're like uh you know pushing forward something that a lot of people have talked about which is decentralized social but very few people spend any time like doing and we're kind of we're on that vanguard right of like the early you know 50k daily active users and that's pretty special. i think it's true at least when i feel positive and optimistic. that's what i would say.

Nicholas: i think i'm just such a malcontent that any kind of uh dominant uh thing in my world i end up having a little bit of maybe not animosity but like oh why does it have to win? yeah you know why what you know? yeah uniswap or whatever you know everything just uh as soon as apple like you know things things that i love.

Proxy: are you mad about base? are you mad about the dominance of base on farcast?

Nicholas: i'm definitely not mad about it. um i'm i i really like. i mean they're doing. the smart wallet is exactly the stuff that everyone who's known about four three three seven and past keys has been saying is bound to happen and they're. they're one of the groups that is doing it big and theirs is the most composable. so it's the most interesting i think. so far. yeah at least it's the most interesting one that's being advertised to me all the time. and but i i kind of was drawn to ethereum. i know everyone has. you know coinbase is a coinbase alum and has coinbase and has bags and whatnot. but i wasn't drawn to especially not living in america i don't know. i just don't have this. to me coinbase is like reputable binance or something like. i don't. i'm not excited about having a coinbase wallet. that doesn't excite me. yeah um it's a bank. it's an american bank that some nice people worked at.

Proxy: yeah yeah so and and if those nice people work there they can more easily raise capital to do cool things on chain.

Nicholas: yeah and there's nice people who work there now and they're very talented. so i think they're going to do a great job. of the stuff i'm just like. i don't. yeah hold stock. so i don't benefit from shilling base as the particular uh l2 i have no for sure ideological commitment to base. it's nice they do they seem to do good stuff uh but there's lots of them. i don't know.

Proxy: if any yeah if anything i feel like i'm a jesse maxi over mace base like i. i think jesse is. um i just wrote like a i don't know 2000 word like june update for proxy studio subscribers and jesse has first of all he subscribed to my hyper sub which has like 200 people in the world are subscribed to it. there may be a thousand people who know what hyper sub is. and then jesse who's like the head of base took the time to not only to read this update that i wrote but he wrote me an email afterwards referencing something and it you know those kind of like little motivations. uh for me that just like goes so far and i think that having that kind of personal leadership is incredibly valuable for base and is really why we've seen such traction is like they've shown up and i know so many small builders who've gotten base grants and so like i could see here we could talk for an hour critically about coinbase but i will say that like being that active in the trenches is like i think it's pretty fucking cool and you know what they have a lot of money to be active in that way and i think it's cool that they're deciding to spend some of it on that rather than i don't know stock buybacks as they easily could.

Nicholas: it is cool. i honestly the preponderance of uh base stuff in my feed just makes me think about what a filter bubble i'm in and like how the majority of volume is in asia and i don't know anything about what's going on there really. and yeah um but definitely i think what you're pointing at is that like cohesion sort of the the anyway this farcaster coinbase zora op stack base um super

Proxy: chain

Nicholas: super chain yeah this this

Proxy: uh

Nicholas: you know there is a cohesive um i don't know i don't even know what to call it. it's not a community exactly. i guess you could call it a community you might as well but just people who are aware of things that are happening within a certain part of the whole space and that has a kind of effect of concentrating attention and and and providing opportunities to other projects that are also in there. but i honestly one thing it makes me think about a lot is solana. how how much is going on there that i'm completely oblivious to and there's surely other networks like that over there.

Proxy: i want to talk about both of these things um both solana and you just mentioned like the asia volume. um one of like the biggest experiences i've had on farcaster has been trying to like really actively trying to get outside of my uh euro euro poor burger bubble like my us europe bubble and i've done that primarily through working with these. this group of devs in farcaster builders of india and what that's done is just like opened me up to this huge world of like asian builders um also african builders. they're connected with a bunch of like african devs who are working in the ecosystem and they like. they all use different exchanges. they have different like vc funds that they care about. they all are way more solana pilled than like the super chain people i know from from like new york and um it it's been very i i think it's for me it's just shown like how i like language limitations and who i look up to and get information from how limited that is and how like if you're not really active in trying to get outside of it you're doing yourself a big disservice. you're like you're missing a huge market segment um and farcaster has the tendency to do that.

Nicholas: yeah and but everybody does and i encounter people. actually i i'm very curious to hear more about your um visit to india. um but it's so easy to just open the same social apps not even farcaster even twitter and just be in. you know the sort of filter bubble of the set that you've selected for and there's such a a bias to the accounts that you follow uh for what you get exposed to. so it is totally. it is interesting to travel physically in order to kind of get some exposure to. uh what else is going on? can you tell me a little bit about that trip to india?

Proxy: yeah i would love to um. so i mean i feel like to tell you about india. i have to tell you a little bit about proxy studio and i'm going to talk a little bit about proxy studio.

Nicholas: um please.

Proxy: so proxy studio i founded in february when i joined farcaster and uh i wanted it. the idea was to create an open venture studio. so what does that mean? it means like money can come from anyone. it means talent or contributors can come from anywhere and it means that uh you know we're building stuff and that's like a very lofty idea. so tangibly we uh we bootstrapped it on hyper sub which is hyper sub has these subscription tokens. people mint them and and they mint a certain amount of time just to.

Nicholas: i did want to get into hyper sub context first for people who aren't as familiar. can you maybe explain for someone who's never heard of hyper sub? yeah uh what it is?

Proxy: yeah uh i think the easiest way to think about hyper sub is that it takes a nft and it adds time as a as a component. so uh i don't know. in like an alpha group right you buy an nft and you lifetime access to that discord chat or telegram chat. here you're buying an nft but in the act of buying it or minting it you also are subscribing for a certain amount of time. so usually it's priced by month and usually it's quite cheap. so you know it might be like 0.005 eth which is around 15 per month.

Nicholas: that's what proxy studios is and then i can buy as many months as i want.

Proxy: you can buy as you want and uh most hyper subs are uncapped. so an infinite number of people can join and and it it's kind of like a sub stack but on chain. um a couple of us like ted is a really good example of this. uh proxy studio terminally on chain. um we've been kind of like creating these small communities that are a little bit a little bit more exclusive. um so proxies hyper sub is capped at 200 tokens and what's what that has meant is that people have actually subscribed for like a lot longer and i kind of leaned into that and like very slowly distributed some of these tokens to the point that like if someone wanted to get in towards the end of our token distribution they were minting like a decade worth of time.

Nicholas: so the time component of a hyper sub can get like pretty loose but you can require that they they you can require that they have a minimum amount of time dedicated to to purchase. or how did you manage that?

Proxy: yeah i used pseudo swap so i pre-minted a token with a certain amount of time on it and there was just like no supply on the market. but there was a lot of demand for these tokens and so people would end up you know buying a token for like 0.5 eth which when you divide 0.5 by 0.005 it's a. it's a quite a long of a subscription. um that's a pretty like rare model. i i would not like say that everyone should do that for a hyper sub but i love the platform. i think it like a lot of these groups. i've seen these small like token gated groups have kind of like free rider problems where people people join they buy a token and they never contribute right and adding that unit of time adding that time component i think gives much better sense of like what they're getting into. and um at least for me it's it's helped like identify people who are really long-term oriented. um it also helped us raise some money right. so i think from uh from proxy subscription sales we raised around 16 eth and um we started building. and uh very early on a lot of our partners for building were farcaster builders of india. it's this network. on farcaster they have a channel they have a telegram chat and um they i was going to them for dev talent. right and like affordable dev talent dev talent who's really passionate about building in farcaster. and um we just kind of got close. and uh samia who's the founder of fbi reached out to me and said um alex you know we're having this in uh to in the himalayas and uh i can't come can you come and and kind of help lead this hackathon? and i said yeah and and i you know a couple weeks later i was on a flight to delhi.

Nicholas: crazy.

Proxy: yeah so i mean it's hard to sum up the trip but i guess a few things i'll say is um there are 16 fellows. these guys were not you know there for money that none of them paid some large amount of money. they were all really excited to be building on farcaster. a lot of these people built tools specifically for communities in farcaster like hire or dgen or uh you know proxy studio and um. they built like really tangible tools that you or i could use on the day of launch and they ship them in a month. so this was like kind of as gritty as it gets like no funding no audience. none of these people really have huge like networks on on farcaster. sorry huge audiences. but they were there to ship and it was so inspiring to work with them and it gave me a sense of like. this is actually how we grow is like we need to. we need to get like devs in bangalore caring about building on farcaster because otherwise it's just going to be like you know the coinbase people building launching another. uh i don't know app chain or something and it's just that's not how you grow a culture.

Nicholas: that's maybe the starting point of something but that was hugely inspiring to me and they but they had already picked up on i mean they this fbi already existed for a little for a minute at least right? um? so something about forecaster appealed to that audience even though they're not in the kind of bi-coastal uh north american context.

Proxy: oh totally um. i mean these are devs right like these are people who are excited about the on-chain social graph. um i think like what i found a lot a lot of what i was doing was trying to get these devs to understand the importance of things like marketing or talking about what they're building or just like casting consistently. um which are like i don't know those are like people skills that's like soft power. if like being a really good dev is like a really good thing to do and i think that's hard power. this is like the that really matters though um especially on a network like forecaster.

Nicholas: i think yeah absolutely um. yeah fbi sort of just uh appeared in my uh view maybe a couple months ago three months ago something and and now there's been this uh hackathon. so i guess we were talking about originally how the sort of the founding of proxy. so proxy studio you have this hyper sub and people and you do this interesting drop style where you your own hyper sub for a long duration and then put them on sudo swap which particularly the sudo swap i've never heard anybody doing. but um yeah. and then with the capped supply you end up having a kind of tighter knit community of more highly committed people who would be spent a little bit more to get involved especially if they joined in the late stages. so and is that? does the studio live inside of a group chat somewhere?

Proxy: primarily yeah we have a telegram chat. um it's quite active. we had to move from warpcast because having a warpcast group chat with hundreds of people who are uh you know especially in like march uh when it was incredibly forecaster was blowing up and people you know it was just like unsustainable. um on workcast. and uh so we moved to telegram. and you know i will say a lot of crypto people still use telegram. as great as forecaster is yeah i like telegram.

Nicholas: yeah um i wish it was a. fundamentally it was governed in a more interesting way but as a product it's pretty good.

Proxy: me too me too uh and you know actually telegram is great for like bringing data in on chain you can have a bot like we have a. we have a bot that gives an ai summary of our chat. we have a bot that you know. you can list a token address and it gives you all the info. but yeah that's where we live. um and then i we have a few other parts right. so we have a trading fund which is gated to the and that is like and this is mercenary ventures or open. yeah this is called mercenary capital. uh one of the biggest notes i have from proxy studio from from people i get notes on is that uh the need for brand consolidation. it's all proxy studio it's just like. you know we like to build stuff we like to buy stuff and we like to read and write about stuff. um so yeah mercenary capital is our trading fund and we like to buy stuff and we like to read and write about stuff and you have to hold a subscription token to put money in into that.

Nicholas: so mercenary came subsequent to the.

Proxy: uh the hyper sub mercenary mercenary capital launched i think a couple months into proxy studio being being live. um and you know that was like a way for me to add an additional benefit for subscribers. it's been a really fun way to just like try new varcaster projects and to like stay stay up to date on everything. that's launching skin in the game. um and then the the final part has been either incubating projects or helping subscribers uh who are building projects. so we have kind of two paths right like. we have a lot of founders in network and some of these founders are just building something and they might want like product feedback or they might want us to i don't know boost a cast announcing a drop and that happens a lot of times and i think that's a really important part of the process because it happens very naturally. there's no like formal partnership there and then on the flip side we'll have a founder who's like. i have an idea. i think that you know this is like great timing for this idea but i don't have dev resources. i don't have. um you know whatever it is they're missing and proxy studio or one of our partners like fbi might come in and say okay let's like find you front-end dev let's find you smart contract dev and then we'll have a founder of. let's get someone who can do like a light audit of your contracts. all of these things that i think make make it really hard to actually take an idea and like make it a live project. um and that's happened now i think with two projects in the studio and it's been really exciting for me to see because that's like the venture studio part of it coming coming to life which projects are those? and maybe i've seen them and didn't realize yeah well so one of them is not live but should be soon. it's uh it's called um caster rank. so they built an analytics dashboard. um i can link it to you and it it's. it's great. it's like a leaderboard of uh farcaster you know data for users and casts uh following you know all that kind of data that we love to to look at obsessively. um and then proxy swap is the is the second which which is like was incubated directly by me in collaboration with um farcaster builders of india so samia and their whole dev team.

Nicholas: so um i definitely want to talk a lot more about proxy swap. um but uh maybe it's worth taking a moment for caster rank or what that kind of project represents. so people come in with an idea they're matched with or they have talent and they are looking for something to work on. they sort of are matched together in this group of people and they chat um and then yeah you can also help with publicity i suppose because there's so many people who are excited to see a project coming out of the community and i guess there's no uh strict plan for how that should unfold. it's just whatever kind of projects come what whatever kind of monetization or membership.

Proxy: yeah the other one is is called on shelf um which is another. i think of these as like subscriber founder projects. so these are. it's a situation. both are situations where you have a a founder who's part of our network who wants to build on farcaster but probably can't raise capital or isn't at a stage where it makes sense to raise capital. um needs support though right usually like dev support most critically and um is in that kind of like early bootstrapping stage. and i think for a lot of projects or a lot of people building on farcaster a big part of this is like how do you like what product do you build? so much of this is new and emergent like channels just decentralized um i don't know something as simple as like having a connected wallet for solana right like. there are so many people i know who are building on solana now. they can build farcaster solana projects um transaction frames etc. right. so for a proxy studio subscriber who might have a idea they come to me usually. usually it starts with like just a conversation and then um we'll go deeper. and and i think the the exciting thing also has been figuring out ways to to make it mutually beneficial. so you know what are we bringing to the table and what does like proxy studio get? that might be like a rev share. it might be i don't know a token allocation it to subscribers. um i don't really care as much like it's so early i just want to see things get built. i'm not like trying to get rich off these projects um but i love figuring out ways that we can like just help someone make an idea real make an idea material.

Nicholas: i think it's also very relevant for the network. you know dan has talked about it and i think with the shuttering of nook uh for example there's this. it's kind of known that it's difficult to build a venture scale business on top of farcaster at this stage of its development. it's a bit early to. there's not enough users to uh. i mean who's to say there's no rules. but at least it's difficult. it's more difficult than building on a larger uh. set of users. so it makes a lot of sense also to have the development tied into a community of early users who um are also excited to see it propagate.

Proxy: i think that's enormously true. like i think that's incredibly important. i think also it's important that like builders are working together. uh one thing that i just found out this week was uh you know we have data costs for if any project is like sourcing data in a live sense from farcaster there's their costs associated with that. so projects can like you know share those costs like share infra um things like that. like we need to be scrappy we're young. uh we don't have money. no one does. uh if a project is profitable they're probably profitable in the like. 50 to 100 eth range tops right and that is short term. typically short term right. that is such small potatoes in crypto. um. so to me it's like proxy studio is kind of an ideological statement of like. uh let's win together. there's if if anyone is trying to go it alone right now especially without i think it's quite difficult and it doesn't really make sense. to me it's like not how the network works. naturally like we're all engaging about these ideas we're all kind of debating like what farcasters should be and what should be built on it. um and so to me that's like part of the development process is is those relationships and those uh conversations?

Nicholas: and also i think um yeah the the the success of a product is dependent on its uptake. so it's not. it makes sense to build as you say. it's kind of. there's something simpatico about um building in the open with the community and building open software that they maybe go hand in hand in a way that like a sas kind of mindset might not fit exactly and even venture in general. the other thing actually is that they may not need venture. um it might not be necessary. i guess still revenue recurring revenues for projects are difficult. uh if their models are more like transaction revenue based i mean even any of the big projects that are earning fees that way have raised much more in vc than they've ever earned. um so it's it's not. uh you know token generation events seem to be better ways to fully capitalize a project that has no vc. but even then i think most of them i guess meme coins don't have vcs. but there is just something about um not needing vc necessarily to build a little a little app on top of farcaster or uh even a little erc20 related app doesn't require bc.

Proxy: yeah well i think it's like. does dgen exist as a project like? does dgen have a really wide generous token distribution? if from the onset it's a venture funded project? right i i don't know. like i i just i i have a hard time seeing a team that's like. this is how we're gonna make our investors rich like we're gonna give a huge number of our tokens away for free for engagement right um and yet like that has now been such. it's such an inversion model that there are venture-backed.

Nicholas: yeah the venture-backed projects will even do it. but it's i i can't i because people uh this week at least are really railing against airdrops. uh on my feed on twitter at least um. but yeah i just apple never sent me two thousand dollars worth of stock ever uh or when even not even stock two thousand dollars worth of gift cards whatever you want to think of it as. uh it's very unusual that some new project is just or some long-standing project that's reached a certain point. its development just sends you a bunch of assets uh that are tradable. um it's such a unusual i think people really if people who are not crypto native really have a hard time even believing that it's real and i guess a lot of the time it does it doesn't work out but yeah it is. it does feel like something substantially new that projects want to incentivize you to use them and also distribute their token even early in their in their development.

Proxy: i actually think it's a great reflection of just how valuable any serious crypto users attention is. and actually like a forecaster user there are so few of us that are like really authentically using this tech right now that any company that's like really trying to build and scale here kind of like should be users. i think um. i think also like um money talks you know let me just put it bluntly like i've tried to onboard a bunch of family members and friends to crypto who don't. they don't like crypto. they have no like intuitive um interest in the space. if i've gotten them an airdrop they have been interested in crypto right like that has kept. that has started a cycle of engagement that hasn't ended for anyone that i've helped get an airdrop. if i haven't helped them get an airdrop you know an airdrop telling them about that is like so hard to do like they have no idea what it is. um i think that dgen is. is it honestly a genius project? i i don't think we've like understood exactly how this type of token distribution should happen and i don't blame that on on yasic or anyone else like. i think it's very hard to get right. but i think um i think that unlock of like tokens should be distributed by people who are really interested in those tokens. um that is i can't wait to see like how else people explore that.

Nicholas: i i when the dgen tipping bot emerged. maybe there's prior art on that that i'm not aware of either on farcaster or elsewhere. but um my feeling is that it's a great project and i think it's a great project and i think it's a great. the dgen tipping bot was the best application built on top of farcaster since warpcast. that it really understood the affordances of the network. and it doesn't mean having a pwa it doesn't mean being in the app store. being an app on farcaster means being a relevant piece of software. um and and what's interesting about the token um distribution of dgen in particular is that it really is so leans into the performance art of staging it out slowly and um kind of really contradicts and obviously there's many reasons why it's a good idea bad idea etc. but it contradicts the notion of uh. yeah you know a forum post that people argue over in a dao um and then ultimately vote on that has like a very strict uh upfront laying out of the roadmap for distribution and instead embraces that. you know actually it's gonna we're gonna need to evolve which feels much more. i guess we saw this a bit nft craze uh these kinds of um yeah on-chain happenings uh that are like stages of evolution. it's also happened in defy too as new products come out. but uh it's very blunt in the in the dgen tipping and then subsequent distribution mechanisms.

Proxy: i love it. i love whenever yasik like uh actually that whole day that he banned all the south korean farmers that was the day i had my most engaged with cast because i tweeted in korea in like i stand with like unfairly targeted korean users and i got so much engagement. i still get dms from people being like. thank you for defending us um. but the secret is that i actually like love that yasik has made decisions like that that are controversial that are significant that have some like drastic effect on token distribution even if it's just the shift from um i don't know recently going with a power badge a thousand dgen to tip and now that's like they're taking it away. it away i kind of care less about the like exact rules that have changed and more i think like it reflects the reality that this is a very centralized project. it's a for a while it was a solo founder project. so one man like making decisions uh and and making those kind of executive decisions but the community has all the power right. like their attention and will is actually really the thing that like gives dgen value. um if none of them wanted to hold the token the token wouldn't have value and there's an honesty to that that i feel like is expressed in dgen and very openly and then kind of like concealed in other projects. and i really like that.

Nicholas: it's interesting because it's also while the community's attention and this is not an endorsement of dgen uh any of any of this. but um of course of course community's attention may drive the design decisions but like with many other kinds of product or performance the audience is not necessarily. they may not know the solution that will uh satisfy them. they may not ask for it directly. yep um so it's interesting to have a kind of uh circus master or i don't know i don't know how you can describe yasik's role but someone defining the engagement. it's interesting like for example this giving a thousand uh dgen to everybody with power badge. it's a user experience question of like. do i have anything to give or not? um and having some minimum amount makes me feel a little bit more cognitively involved in. oh yeah i should give that out because i have it so i might as well. yeah these are kind of like user experience choices being strung out over the development of a token and an ecosystem.

Proxy: i think farcaster is kind of this hilarious place where it's like we have a network that's large enough that it feels like real and meaty right like we are engaging with it we have. you're not someone i know closely right but you reached out to me. now we're talking about all this like stuff is happening here. um but on the other hand it's like if you make a loud enough stink about like a feature flaw of warpcast there's some likelihood that v or dan will see that and like execute to change to Warpcast as a client within, you know, days, weeks, a month. And that is very rare. And I think there's actually like a double-edged sword of that, which is that it gets back to what you were saying, like we don't necessarily know what we want or what would satisfy us. And so I think like there's this constant tension here. And you see this with Degen or you see it with Warpcast where we're all kind of tinkering, trying to like find the perfect formula for distributing a token or showcasing content in a feed or incentivizing good content. And really, it's like no one knows the perfect way to do these things. I don't think there is a perfect way. And I just personally love the kind of the drama and the performance of trying to get towards a better way. Yeah.

Nicholas: I think the really successful founders, core contributors, other kinds of contributors are the ones who embrace that. And it can be very difficult because the metas are so harsh. The transitions are so brutal and often dispiriting and maybe lose a bunch of money also. Or just the thing that you were hyped up on as being the next big thing in the last cycle is actually completely irrelevant and nobody cares anymore. And people are actively dunking on. Thank you for having cared about that. So it can be very emotional. But the people who I find are most successful, you mentioned Jesse before, it's sort of people who are engaging with it more as an enduring performance art where you have to reinvent the narrative every day. And they are cumulative, but also things get shed. Jacob from Zora is another one who I think has been good at that. And I mean, frankly, I think of all these networks, I often think about how the, the, the tech can be completely swapped out as long as the community tied to a vision is coherent across the things. Like looking at Polygon, looking at Zora, et cetera, the stack is completely swapped out, but, or even DYDX, other things, but that's not the relevant point. It's whether the sort of faith in a vision or a brand or a community persists long enough. And it's actually what makes me very curious. We were talking about Solana earlier and your trip to India and some devs in Africa too. Yeah. Thinking about Solana, thinking about, I also think about all these dead chains, all these zombie chains who have people who like your friends and family, who made a bag somehow early on and, and developed a really tight connection with that brand and maybe the community. I feel like those people are going to be diehards until it's not possible anymore. And that there is a weird opportunity for like creating opportunities for people who are fans of zombie chains with not much development happening anymore. To each of them individually, and maybe even them collectively as a set or like a, an audience for, I don't know what, but they're very well capitalized. They're looking for things that make their thing relevant. I think there's something, I don't, maybe a simple way might be to say like conduit for turning Alt L1s into L2s or something or, or other opportunities. Seems, seems to me like these.

Proxy: Well, I, yeah, that really like speaks to me. I think like that actually relates. To how I felt about Farcaster when I first showed up, which was, I'd heard a lot of kind of like, you know, this is this like really great high signal, low noise environment. And when I showed up, I realized also how hungry people were for content and for how like really small it was. And I think there are a lot of bubbles like that in crypto whether it's like an Alt L1, whether it's, I don't know, near, right? Like if you've been stranded somewhere, for a long time and that's where your community is, that's where your culture is, that's really like what you identify as in this space, especially if you're just a like token holder or team contributor. I think we definitely need to like, think about how we bring these people into the future with us. Um, at some point chains that just don't have that much use really, there's no justification for them to continue development. And in fact, I see huge upside to figuring out ways to bring these communities into a larger, more successful one. Um, I don't know how you do that. That seems like a hard challenge, but maybe a ideologically challenging.

Nicholas: if they're committed to that, uh, vestigial tech as a symbol of their sovereignty. But, um, I also wonder if just like, uh, charismatic individuals may, Yeah. enter these communities late stage or emerge from having been holders for a long time and completely commandeer the narrative by providing a vision to a visionless people and that that may be the way that they migrate to completely different technologies.

Proxy: You know, we've seen this happen in crypto time and time again, like even nouns, I feel like you could argue that the people who came in and forked, like I'm not like pro the fork necessarily, but I will say like they filled a void, right. They filled a void. They filled a void that other leadership failed to, to fill. And I think I happened to like ideologically align with that earlier leadership or those more like good faith nouns contributors. I love all those people. I think they do amazing work, but there clearly was a gap there between like those intentions and the outcomes. And, um, I'm all, I, I love that kind of drama too, because to me, that's like what makes crypto feel substantive. Is when we have like really divergent visions for the future. And some people's vision is extracting as much profit today as they can. And if your vision, isn't that you're probably gonna have a harder time of it, but I'll be more interested in whatever your vision is. Yeah.

Nicholas: This is, this is one thing, um, speaking of Solana and, and watching the difference between, uh, Solana's vision and, and Ethereum and metallic, and there is a feeling. That the more extractive energy, which animates the space for the most part. Um, and as you said, yeah, onboards people for the most part, or, or makes it sticky. That more extractive element, uh, is also doesn't really need to be decentralized. Would be, I mean, can probably function just fine on Solana. You know, there's no, a

Proxy: hundred percent, which

Nicholas: is interesting because if the thing that people gain a filial connection over is, uh, you know, getting a bag for free, um, early on or for cheap, uh, then do we lose the, I dunno, I guess it was nice to have the firepower of that potential attached to decentralized cypherpunk values, but maybe they are being sort of teased apart. And I wonder if at the end of the day, a lot of, because it seems like a lot of the things that Ethereum would be good for, we're not able to do because in order to get a lot of users, the things need to be sort of compatible with the legal system, like on some level. Uh, yeah. And so a lot of the cool things we could already do, but it's just, they're not allowed. Uh, so we explore at the edges of what's allowed. Um, but if that's the case, then what is the value of decentralization anyway? If very, if, if, uh, you know, tornadoes, you know, et cetera, like if there are limits to what you can do, it expresses free speech on decentralized permissionless censorship resistant chain. I have no doubt that some things will end up there because that is valuable to have that trustlessness. But do most of the applications. That the kind of extractive set want to actually rely upon those things. Maybe yes, maybe no. No.

Proxy: Yeah. I, I, I totally, I totally agree. I think that, you know, the end of the day, we're kind of always on chain, like some step beyond the law. It does really get me upset, I guess, when I like read someone who's really closely follows regulation or crypto law. And, you know, uh, and we're just like, we're not there yet. We're not at a point when we're, where we're, I don't know, distributing equity on chain to, uh, to contributors, right? Like the minute that you start raising capital for a project, you become a, yeah, a company and usually not like one of these Dow legal rappers. You become just like a normal, regular company. You custody your assets, maybe in USDC on chain. But like. I don't think it's always greed either.

Nicholas: I think it's, I think it is really, people just don't want to get in trouble.

Proxy: Exactly. Oh, a hundred percent. People have different risk tolerance, right? Like I have a slightly higher risk tolerance for like being on the edge of, of our on-chain future. Um, and some people do not, and I really respect that. I think some people also come from like a startup background where there's just a way you do these things and you don't deviate from that. Right. It makes no sense to them to, to experiment with something. Whereas I, I want to try like every new thing. I'll mint a LLC on chain and in five minutes, like, um, I think with Solana, one thing I want, I wanted to say there is, is that like people talk a lot of shit about this kind of speculative fervor and how it, how it is like contrary to our cypherpunk values and, you know, in the end, it's like, what are people doing with the crypto they hold? What are the people doing with the tokens? And as it happens, as it turns out, the thing that people really like to do is trade those tokens for much more speculative assets and either make a lot of money or lose a lot of money. Very few people, very few retail investors are interested in like staking Ethereum for a long time today. And, you know, part of that. That is a marketing and narrative problem. But another part of it is that like a lot of the people who work in our industry love doing these things all the time. Like, I, I don't know, I don't know many people who wouldn't be excited if I DM'd them and said, hey, I've heard about this new small token. I don't know a lot of people who would be like offended by that. And that's a statement of values, right? Like, I think that we need to be a little bit more careful. But honest with like the financialized state of our industry, even if not everyone's building like a gamble five product, we all have a much higher risk tolerance and a much higher tolerance towards speculative behavior than people who don't work in crypto. So clearly there is something here that is like, is not just about people trying to gamble. It has to do with like tokenization and financialization as well.

Nicholas: Yeah, it is funny how much emphasis mainstream, let's say, North American culture or, I don't know, the cultures I'm aware of are so obsessed with status as it relates to financial wealth. And yet it's so gauche to be directly interested in financial outcomes or new opportunities that Maybe asymmetric upside potential. There's an interesting. what it ends up is that it's the culture is quite separate from the regular culture, and it's seen so distinct from, I don't know, it's sort of a secret. Some people keep or it's like a, a type of person.

Proxy: It's a dirty secret. Yeah. Oh, totally. I don't know. when I started getting a little bit older and I had friends who are thinking about money and stuff, I realized how, how just working in this industry, like if I phrased everything as I work in a emerging tech and I often invest in early stage companies, um, and I'm looking, you know, to get a gain, if I put it in those terms, it might be more palatable. But if I say I'm buying a token of like my friend, you know, Jed, who launched, launched like some kind of crypto product. If I say any of that, people are sure they hear, they just, you know what they hear. I mean, it's crypto and that, yeah, it's very good. Exactly. As soon as you say, I'm kind of interested not to like ask you a question,

Nicholas: but

Proxy: I'm interested in, in how you, I feel like being a podcaster, like, I don't know, I was just reading the last people that you talked to, like you talked to Cassie about equilibrium and all these other people. Um, how do you feel about that? Do you feel like, do you feel like you're able to keep pace with the meta in our industry? Do you have like a, a top down view or do you feel like, I don't know, your, your own taste comes into it and like you express that taste in other ways besides your podcast or, I don't know if that's a very clear question. Definitely.

Nicholas: I'm only aware of what's in my sort of cone of vision. Um, and there's many deep areas I don't know much about. And as I say, there's all these other, token communities that I met some people who are really into avalanche. I mean, who's thought about avalanche, but you know, they're really into it and they're still building on it. They're building new stuff on it now. Uh, so there's so many parts that I am absolutely not aware of. Uh, I would love to be more aware. I actually, what I'm noticing more now is, um, a dichotomy between a kind of here and now meta, which I would, I relate to as what people are talking about today on Farkaster and Twitter, and, uh, these sort of deeper, um, less culturally driven, less, uh, sort of fad of the moment driven, but still part of some sort of slower, like eigen layer, for example, we've been talking about eigen layer for years, um, or, you know, POS or, uh, all the, all of the kinds of technical arguments people have, or now it's about smart account, uh, whether it's a good design or not. And then you hear something from near or from Solana or some other chain, and they have a completely different concept of, you know, account abstraction is built in. And, and then because of the, like I spoke recently with, um, one of the co-founders of flashbots, uh, on an episode that's coming out soon. And, um, he just in doing research for that, the way that flashbots evolved, it has nothing to do with the way that MEV has evolved on different chains. And there's, uh, there's no saying that the same, uh, just the whole, the affordances are, can be very different in different communities. So, um, I think what I see most is the kind of difference between living in, uh, you know, people talking about meme coins are people who are involved in the meta right now. And people who are maybe thinking about, um, things like restaking, or, uh, MEV or, um, data availability, or these kinds of things are maybe invested in sort of more longer term trends that are not turning on a dime anytime soon, or ZK or, um, autonomous worlds kind of stuff. These are trends that are much slower evolving. And I feel like you're kind of either in one or you're focused on one or the other. You almost can't see both at the exact same time.

Proxy: Yeah. I think it's quite hard to, you know, I recently, I was looking, I was doing some research on meme coins, um, for proxy swap. And I was looking in, there's a new, uh, trend in some Dune analytics. People have been making, um, dashboards trying to, um, basically surface like narratives rather than on chain signals. Um, so these would be narratives from like Farcaster or from Twitter. And there are a couple of analysts who have been able to do this in a way that, that actually does connect with on chain data. And one thing that I was shocked by was how much of the conversation, um, in our social networks, uh, focuses on meme coins, but actually how low the, um, like TVL of, or like the volume numbers of, uh, capital that goes towards buying these assets compared to, I don't know, the amount of like money. That's just an ETH that's staked somewhere. Um, it's like, obviously it's grown a lot. Uh, the amount of money that is chasing these meme coin assets, but it's really quite small in comparison. Um, the amount of money that was being, uh, traded for these meme coin assets was smaller than I expected. And it was a good reminder. I think that like the stuff that we care about culture, culturally, like crypto, the, the kind of like meta of the day is oftentimes way outsized to the actual market impact. Yeah. Like, I don't know, across markets, whether it's like equities or, you know, tokens, we've seen a big increase in like retail speculative appetite since, uh, 2020, but on the other hand, like there's still a huge amount of crypto that is doing very kind of normie things, like they're just holding it. They're just holding Bitcoin. Or they're just saying, like, we're just holding it. they're just holding ETH or maybe they're staking it. Maybe they're borrowing against it on Aave. But usually they're just kind of holding it. And I don't know. I don't know what that means. I don't know what the lesson to take there is. But I think like as an industry, we can be incredibly kind of navel gazey. And I feel like meme coins are something that make people really mad. People get like really upset that like money is being spent on this kind of vapor. And I understand why people are mad about that. But I just feel like you're fighting something that you'll never beat. Like you'll never beat people's short term attention being directed towards kind of things that don't matter. Like that's like who we are as humans. And I think it's kind of a waste of time to fight it.

Nicholas: The thing that strikes me the most about what you're saying is that I think we're very, or at least I'm guilty of being very, tension driven by what's on the feed. And it's not very quantitative. And you know, I think I was looking at the token, like meme coin holdings of Farcaster users, and also the biggest meme coins on base I was looking at at some point. And they're just not that popular compared to other kinds of meme coins. And so it's like all this conversation about this, but actually like we're all playing some kind of imitative derivative of the actual game that's happening on a completely different chain. So it's so narrative driven that even we think we're playing, but there's not even that many people who are involved in this subset of the meme coin space. So to be more numerically driven is something I hope to do more of in the future. when thinking about even just what's important, you know?

Proxy: Oh, yeah. I think it's huge. I think it also just like can be really grounding. The big impact that had, like when I started using Farcaster, I made a point to try to like, balance my assumptions against data that I could verify. Like I had assumptions around degen and it's adoption or like importance. And I was able to kind of confirm it in data. And I think it's important because like you can have an impact on things in Farcaster in a way that you can't elsewhere. And so if you feel like meme coins are this kind of like horrible, have this like horrible impact on the feed on Farcaster, I would argue that Farcaster is small enough that you should be able to do something about it. You should be able to build something that captures attention away from these things that you don't like. And if you can't, you're not trying hard enough. And so I kind of like meme coins, right? Like, I don't love them all, but like they're very dumb ones. And, you know, I actually have been more interested in our like nerdy meme coins that require you to like read charts and like figure out where to post them. And so I think that's been more fun for me than the like, there's this little character and his name is something. And like, I don't know. I don't know what they buy on base, probably something like slightly racist, but they, you know, people buy weird stuff.

Nicholas: On Solana, you mean?

Proxy: That, yeah, on Solana, sorry. Solana is definitely the racist chain on base. Sorry, Solana friends.

Nicholas: Sorry, Solana. Okay. There's a bunch of questions.

Proxy: I think they're like proudly so.

Nicholas: Yeah. Well, defiantly or something, some subset at least.

Proxy: Yeah. Yeah.

Nicholas: Where did the proxy token come into play? Is that, that's not the hypersub NFT. No, no.

Proxy: Proxy is the native token of ProxySwap, which is a project that we incubated. It's an exchange on Dgen chain. So Dgen's layer three.

Nicholas: And it's a UniV3 fork, right? Or instance. Yeah.

Proxy: It started as UniV3 fork and we, we've gradually been adding features that have nothing to do with UniV3, which you know, I love a fork. Like I have nothing against forking software, but it does feel good to me to be like contributing, I don't know, our own contracts to slowly be, to add onto this product rather than just like have a fork and let it sit there.

Nicholas: Yeah. So I saw there's some buttons in the nav bar that are not typical of your Uniswap.app or whatever it is. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The airdrop functionality, I assume that's, I mean, maybe it's borrowed from Uniswap, but that's not typically something that you see in an interface anyway for a DEX.

Proxy: Yeah, no, that we built that out custom. So the airdrop functionality allows you to drop tokens to, to any address. We also, we also built a launch pad, which is built on top of actually metals, UniV3 single-sided liquidity launch pad, which is more, you know, open source code, which we love. And, Yeah. Those can be paired together. So you can launch a token and distribute it using our airdrop and claim functions. And one thing I'm really interested in is the whole trend of basically like token distribution to communities on FarCaster. So I'm hoping to add a real channel component to these tokens. We've heard a lot of people talking about like channel tokens. What do they mean? In the purest sense? i think they just mean like a token distribution to uh kind of self-selecting group of people on farcaster.

Nicholas: so it's interesting because it's a dex. that's both. i mean i want to talk about the social and the channel side in a second but it's. it's a dex as we all know and love and it's the best dex there is yeah basically um but it's also token launching um and and airdropping and claiming of those drops uh all inside of one interface. and there's also one other button the lock button. that's. what does that do? that's for yield farming it's for lp positions.

Proxy: so basically if you're creating a token um if you're launching a token the only way that you can verify that like it can't be rugged to some degree. every token can be rugged in different ways but is to have that liquidity be locked. we also just needed a token locker for our own lp positions. so we shipped that tool. that's been an experience we've had a lot on far. on dgen layer three. is it's so new that like you know like there was barely a multi-sig when we launched. luckily there was someone had deployed safe contracts. um but yeah. so these are all like very basic features that you either find in a dex or in a launchpad and we've combined them into our our unified interface.

Nicholas: so there's that element uh which is very dgen appropriate i think. and then there's this other element of bringing in farcaster. and uh is it a social dex? you call it?

Proxy: yeah so this is like let me be clear none of this is live yet but we you know i just used like some of the first features that we've shipped the other day on local host. um we're building a social dex and the way i think about this is just like it's basically a trading client for farcaster users. so um there are there are a number of us on farcaster who love to trade and a lot of the signals we get about like which assets to trade on farcaster come from people casting people creating channels. um you know there have been a number of like big tokens that have started from a channel first and then have that kind of network of people has led to the creation of a token. i think higher is the best example right where like if you were early to the higher channel you had the opportunity to receive an airdrop that is now worth like 20k. and that was all about. you know i don't know. did you read like lights mirror post about higher? did you think it was cool like do you follow martin or six or jihad? or are these people in that network? and um it's all just to say like. i think social data is playing a larger and larger role in how we trade that expression key opinion leader or kol. if you've ever traded a meme coin on on x you probably know what a kol is. and like. i think in some ways it's kind of bullshit right like it's. it just means like someone who's connected someone who like has that alpha. but on on another hand like we all have have people we trust or we look to for signal and our goal with the social decks is to to surface that information right where you're swapping tokens

Nicholas: so to bring because there have been other people who've been experimenting with creating tokens for channels in some kind of generalized neutral way. um. but what you're proposing here is somehow that the bringing all the tools together to drop erc20s in particular as the a kind of maybe not endpoint but evolution of um you know the life of a channel towards having its own token that that that it's more appropriate that it be an erc20 and that um uh that you're going to provide all the tools to not only launch the token but then maybe also participate in the community via uh decks empowered interface.

Proxy: yeah yeah and let me be clear it's not just about like launching a channel token. i think this has relevance for trading like any asset. um i don't know. like when i trade i often look at a list of people who hold a token right. i'm interested in like who can sell that asset. i'm interested in who's buying it. i'm interested in who bought it recently um and how much they bought. how large is that position um in comparison to like their total holding holdings? i'm interested in what someone holds and wallets connected to that public wallet. this is all just like social data right and the thing about farcasters. we have an enormous amount of it and we have it in real time so i can find out with a relative degree of certainty what you nicholas have bought on any wallet that is connected in any way to your farcaster id um and that's quite powerful right like and i could even connect that to other data, right? Like, I don't know, you talked to Cassie the other week. Did you buy any wrapped quill afterwards? I'm not saying you did. This is all purely hypothetical. But if you did, that might be relevant to me, right? And right now, people are kind of putting together all this information in using like Nansen, or 0x people, or these other kind of like combination of social networks or alpha tracking tools. And my theory is just that like the future of trading will have all of this data surfaced very easily. And that token creation will also be a heavily influential. by social data. So being able to get like a certain amount of influence behind the creation of a new token.

Nicholas: And I completely agree. It makes sense that it's an incredible superpower for social data to be incorporated into the same interface where you're making trading decisions. And it's something that's uniquely possible with crypto. Maybe Robinhood could do it for within Robinhood, but that's not interesting.

Proxy: Yeah. No, I think like, I mean, to me, what's amazing about Farcaster is that right? So I now have this list of users that I kind of care about them wherever I find them, right? Whether it's on WorkCast, or in an app that just like on Dracula, you know, wherever it is, like I give a shit about like what those people are doing, because that's my network. That's my open social graph. And we still treat trading as this like very separate part of our on-chain lives where we go to a DEX, or we do it in our wallet, or we do it in our wallet, or we do it in our wallet. And yeah, I think you cut out again. But that's like the general vision. And I'm really excited to iterate on it. We're hard at work on it. And it's been really fun so far, exploring the connection between trading, token creation, and all of this social data.

Nicholas: All right. Let me just ask you like a couple more questions, and then we can call it. I'll redo my last question. DJ went through this fun. 500,000 block reorg somewhat recently. First off, do you know what happened with that? Did all the transactions end up getting replayed? Or did some of them not make it because the state had changed such that they were invalid? Yeah.

Proxy: Not every transaction was replayed. Basically, anything involving a token swap or NFT mint or NFT trade was not successfully replayed.

Nicholas: That's brutal.

Proxy: We've actually been digging through this. Yeah. You're telling me. You know, this was like an incredibly serious situation. I don't think we should underestimate how large of a reorg that is. I'm not a technical person, so I had to have other people explain it to me. But it kind of dawned on me what a big deal it was. It was quite stressful. Yeah.

Nicholas: It was quite extreme. But now that that's passed, do you feel... DJN Chain recently experienced this 500,000 block reorg. First up, what happened with that? Did all the transactions end up getting replayed? Or which ones didn't?

Proxy: Yeah. No, not all transactions were replayed. First of all, this was a big deal, right? This is a significant amount of time that the chain was down. They experienced a lot of difficulties in getting it back up. Basically, any transaction that had a time-dependent variable in it. So token swaps, NFT minting, or NFT trades essentially disappeared. Luckily, the number of users who were affected by completely lost funds was relatively small. I know that Jacek has refunded, for instance, relay users. A number of individual users, but proxy swap team has been very involved with coordinating an effort among teams on the layer three to look into this data. And it's like, there's a lot of data. There's a lot of transactions and trying to figure out...

Nicholas: How long of a period was it in human time?

Proxy: I would have to look to tell you, but it was several days that...

Nicholas: It was like a couple of days, right? Something like that?

Proxy: Yeah. Yeah. And then it... Kind of went back up, but it wasn't completely functional. It took a long time. And I think just for any technology that's new, especially a layer three, which is essentially a brand new product in terms of having actual users, this is a big deal. I think the layer three lost a lot of trust on Farcaster.

Nicholas: Yeah. I'm curious, how do you feel about building on DJN going forward? And does this cast a different light on L3s in general or just growing pains?

Proxy: I think that it definitely made me a little bit more wary of L3s as products. Just the fact that we couldn't even run our own nodes at that point, right? Not that that would have solved this particular error, but I also think that there's an element of growing pains. My philosophy here is that there is user demand on the L3s. And I think that there's an element of growing pains. It's still pretty nascent. It's been hit a lot by Conduit, but I'm happy to fill a gap for those users. But I want a stable home for my project. I want a stable home that never goes down or that has no history of going down. So for our social decks that we're launching in July, we'll be supporting some of these L3s, so DJN and HamChain, but we'll also be launching on token to Bay.

Nicholas: I see. Okay. Interesting. So what do we have to look forward to for ProxySwap and your other projects?

Proxy: Yeah. So for ProxySwap, I think the big thing is we have this kind of rebrand and big new product coming out in July. We've been hard at work on this. I'm particularly proud of our team, right? We're entirely bootstrapped. We've managed to raise $7 million DGEN through grants and a token swap with a DAO. And that has funded, at this point, two-plus months of development. And so we'll be rolling out a big new update in July that will incorporate Forecaster data into a DEX experience. And I can't wait to bring that out. For Proxy Studio, we're going deeper with our partnership with FBI. And we want to kind of formalize this partnership and scale it to help more early-stage teams building in Forecaster. So if you're a builder in Forecaster and you're struggling to figure out how to stay alive or what to build or how to onboard more users to Forecaster, please reach out. I'd love to talk. I'd love to support you. And we may have new and exciting ways to do that in the coming months.

Nicholas: Awesome. That's very exciting. And I wanted to thank you for coming on the show and telling us all about Proxy Studio, Proxy Swap, Open Ventures. a little bit, Mercenary. What is it, Mercenary?

Proxy: Mercenary Capital. It's kind of a joke. It's like a tongue-in-cheek reference. It is funny. Yeah. Yeah, man. Thank you so much for having me. This has been, like, I love this kind of conversation. I love what you're doing for this space. I feel really grateful that we have people like you giving your attention to crypto.

Nicholas: Well, thanks so much. Great. Thanks, and see everybody next episode. Hey, thanks for listening to this episode of Web3 Galaxy Brain. To keep up with everything Web3, follow me on Twitter, at Nicholas, with four leading ins. You can find links to the topics discussed on today's episode in the show notes. Podcast feed links are available. Visit web3galaxybrain.com. Web3 Galaxy Brain airs live most Friday afternoons at 5 p.m. Eastern Time, 2200 UTC, on Twitter Spaces. I look forward to seeing you there.