AMA with Chris Spadafora, Founder of BadgerDAO

Chris Spadafora is the Founder of BadgerDAO, a decentralized protocol that promotes the use of tokenized BTC in DeFi. Like all our AMAs, the interview is live and incorporates questions from our Inner Circle Discord and live YouTube Chat. These are hosted the 2nd and 4th Wednesday each month, so mark your calendars, tune in, and ask questions! ----- 🚀 SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER: http://bankless.substack.com/​​​ http://bankless.substack.com/%E2%80%8B%E2%80%8B%E2%80%8B 🎙️ SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST: http://podcast.banklesshq.com/​​​ http://podcast.banklesshq.com/%E2%80%8B%E2%80%8B%E2%80%8B ----- GO BANKLESS WITH THESE SPONSOR TOOLS: ⭐️ AAVE - BORROW OR LEND YOUR ASSETS https://bankless.cc/aave 🚀 GEMINI - MOST TRUSTED EXCHANGE AND ONRAMP https://bankless.cc/go-gemini 💳 MONOLITH - GET THE HOLY GRAIL OF BANKLESS VISA CARDS https://bankless.cc/monolith 📱 DHARMA - MOBILE ONRAMP DIRECTLY INTO DEFI https://bankless.cc/dharma ------ Resources: BadgerDAO https://badger.finance/ Chris on Twitter https://twitter.com/spadaboom1?s=20 ----- THIS WEEK ON BANKLESS: 🦄 Uniswap V3 Alpha Leak (3/23): https://youtu.be/TRJYs7v7gYo 🎙️ ULTRA SOUND MONEY (3/22): https://shows.banklesshq.com/p/-ultra-sound-money-justin-drake 🗞️ Weekly Rollup (3/19): https://shows.banklesshq.com/p/-rollup-elon-musk-nft-song-stimulus 🧢 Weekly Action Recap (3/20): https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/another-1400-weekly-recap ✏️ Ultra Sound Money (3/15): https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/eth-is-ultra-sound-money-market-monday 🐦 Follow Bankless on Twitter: https://twitter.com/BanklessHQ ----- Not financial or tax advice. This channel is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This video is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research. Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/bankless-disclosures

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  We've got Badger, Chris from Badger, who is a co-founder of Badger. We have an opportunity as the Bankless community to ask Chris anything. I think he's representing the Badger project here today. This was brought up by community votes. So we asked who you wanted to have on the next AMA. And there was a resounding, you want Badger. So we are bringing Badger to you. Just some ground rules on this community, Ask Me Anything. Of course, you can ask any question you want. David and I will try to field those questions to Chris. You can ask those questions in YouTube. We are broadcasting this live right now. Also, in the Discord Bankless Members Community, we will prioritize questions there. We do Ask Me Anythings the second and fourth Wednesday now of the month.

• 0:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  So this is coming at you live on a Wednesday, 12:00 PM Eastern Time, 9:00 AM Pacific Time. This is your time to ask questions of these fantastic projects. David, can you talk about why we are having Badger on this for this conversation? There's a theme here that I think is really important.

• 1:04David Hoffman?

  Yeah, Badger, by popular demand, coming into the Bankless livestream. Just the amount of energy and community excitement around this project has really just blown everyone's minds. And what Badger is really trying to do is to generate BTC infrastructure in Ethereum's DeFi. So just providing a suite of financial tools around BTC, but on Ethereum. And so it's trying to bridge the communities, which is always an ambitious endeavor, which is always, in my opinion, a noble endeavor to help bridge the gap between the BTC, the asset, and the Ethereum economy. And so we're going to dive into what these suite of tools looks like and how they can help Bitcoiners get their Bitcoin expressed into DeFi.

• 1:47David Hoffman?

  And this project has, like I said, just generated a ton of community hype and excitement. And so by popular demand, we have Badger Dow here on the Bankless AMA.

• 1:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  Absolutely. I think there's a question in the minds of investors and everyone in the crypto community. Is it going to be Bitcoin on DeFi, or is DeFi going to come to Bitcoin? I've had some recent debates around this too, and I'm super curious to hear what Chris from Badger says. We are going to come back with Chris in a minute, but first, we want to tell you about the sponsors that made this episode possible.

• 2:21David Hoffman?

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• 3:03David Hoffman?

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• 3:42David Hoffman?

  version 2, which has a ton of cool new features that makes using Aave even more powerful. With Aave, you can leverage the full power of DeFi money Legos, yield, and composability all in one application. On Aave, there are a ton of assets that you can deposit in order to gain yield, and all of those same assets can also be borrowed from the protocol if you have deposited collateral. Here you can see me getting a $200 100 USDC loan against my portfolio of a number of different DeFi tokens and ETH. I'll choose a variable interest rate because it's a lower rate than the stable interest rate option. But I could choose the stable interest rate option if I wanted to lock that interest rate in permanently.

• 4:22David Hoffman?

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• 4:46David Hoffman?

  Bankless community, I'm super excited to have Chris Spadafora, who is on the founding team of Badger Dow on this Ask Me Anything. Chris, how are you doing today?

• 4:56Speaker 02

  I am great, Ryan. How are you?

• 4:58David Hoffman?

  I'm doing great. Look, you guys are putting out a lot of energy these days around this theme of Bitcoin on DeFi. And it's super exciting, but I think we should maybe start with the why for the community. Could you explain Badger Dow and start with a why? So why does Badger exist? What is the mission here?

• 5:19Speaker 02

  The mission's straightforward, right? It's to build the products and infrastructure necessary to bring what I and many of the people in the community believe to be the best collateral ever invented into open finance. And to really accelerate how it gets there and when it's there, give it utility. Because there's a, you know, the key statistic to think about is 0.7% of all Bitcoin is on other chains. And it's mostly is obviously on Ethereum, but like that's how little is actually been wrapped or bridged or whatever you want to call it. So that's our mission, but we don't want to just do it like the normal company or whatever.

• 5:59Speaker 02

  You know, we're completely community owned and we're trying to rewrite the playbook on how businesses go to market, how businesses operate, how these open communities or collectives actually work to produce, you know, revenue and manage hundreds of millions of dollars and do it in a decentralized way. Like that was a big part of our mission is how do we push forward this idea of DAOs and and how DAOs could be self sustaining businesses again with you know substantial amount of revenue and profit not just you know a way for someone or a group of people to kind of structure themselves and do certain things it's like let's use the power of the the technology that we can build today and and have a community run and own it so that those are some of the things

• 6:41Speaker 02

  that that really tie Badger together and share the the value and beliefs of the community.

• 6:47David Hoffman?

  So Chris, let's talk about the the genesis of Badger. Where did this initial idea come from? And talk about the decision to focus on actual infrastructure on other change rather than doing something like WBTC or or renBTC.

• 7:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, so you know it's been shoot, it's already April now, so it's been almost a year since we started thinking about it, me and a few friends. I've been in the space about eight years. Got into Bitcoin relatively early, was in Ethereum when it launched, and I've always just kind of been on all sides of the fence, right? Like I've always perceived Bitcoin and Ethereum to be completely separate and different things. And I never was a fan of, you know, a lot of the maximalism that that that caused a rift, right? I always looked at it as, you know, one, we're one industry trying to push everything forward and we need to have each other's backs and we need to collaborate to get there. So it started with, you know, how do we build more financial, you know, decentralized financial products?

• 7:46Speaker 02

  To put the Bitcoin to work, right? Put Bitcoin to work. That was really where it started. And and when it started, I actually spent quite a bit of time digging into a lot of the other alternatives that are call them side chains to Bitcoin, right? You know, the liquids, the RSKs, the things along those lines. And the fact of the matter is then and now, you know, the infrastructure, the development community, the interoperability and composability, none of that stuff, the tooling, none of that stuff really exists. And it was a very quick, hey, but it's not going to make any sense to build it here. And we're going to focus on building it on Ethereum and and accelerate how we can how we can take that to market.

• 8:27Speaker 02

  That that was kind of the the earliest stages and around then too was when we started to see, you know, the yearns and some of these projects that were open communities, actually bring products to market that had great product market fit, generate millions of dollars in revenue and operate in a way where it was like, you know, open, anyone can come, anyone can collaborate, anyone can get involved and um anyone can build some really cool stuff with the developer first mentality of of the of the community or organization. And that was when a lot of light bulbs went off for us and we said, you know what? This is the path. We can rewrite the playbook on how businesses get to market. We're going to focus exclusively on how do you build the products and infrastructure to get Bitcoin there and bring utility to it?

• 9:11Speaker 02

  And um and we're going to build these products before we launch, at least what we felt were were good products to start with, which were our vaults, which are similar to urine vaults, except dedicated to tokenized Bitcoin. So we optimize the yield that users can get out of uh certain uh Bitcoin LP positions. And then what our first attempt was at creating a synthetic Bitcoin, which is DIG, which is similar to Ampleforth, except I'm intended to peg to the price of Bitcoin. And uh let's go to market with these and let's do it the right way, right? Let's let's be transparent with um who we are. Let's make sure everything was audited. Let's, you know, engage other communities as we prepare for launch like, let's have the communities make the decisions on day zero well before launch.

• 9:54Speaker 02

  So when we got the, you know, the Discord started in September of last year, you know, it was really me and and a few developers kind of putting stuff out that hey, this is the plan. This is the token structure. Here are the products. Here's the code. Here's here's all these things like let's figure out how we actually get it there and get it to the finish line. It took almost three months. Um but excitingly enough, a lot of those individuals that got involved then were today, they're long-term contributors at Badger. They work with Badger full-time. Um and um they've been able to get us from where we were to where we are and there's sixty people now working on the protocol, almost four months after after launch, which is pretty mind-blowing.

• 10:37Speaker 02

  And um you know, our products, you know, our vault product, which is our core product, you know, holds about, we have one point two billion worth of Bitcoin, almost, you know, twenty percent of all the tokenized Bitcoin on Ethereum. So for us, it was important to, you know, get off the ground with with the right products, but also with the right community. Because if we were gonna try and rewrite this playbook, we needed people that shared in the same values and beliefs. Because if it if it was, if you didn't, the longevity and the sustainability and the ability to have people actually work and dedicate their time, effort, resources on the protocol, it would have been next to impossible to do. So what we did was, we said, okay, we're gonna look across Ethereum and collect, and we ended

• 11:21Speaker 02

  up collecting thirty two thousand addresses, and said, people that have done these nineteen actions, that we felt aligned with like kind of three pillars of our values. One, they participated in decentralized governance. So if they voted on sushi, or harvest, or yearn, or one hive, or things along those lines, if they use tokenized Bitcoin in DeFi, so you provide liquidity on Curve Balancer, sushi, Uniswap, you lent it out on Compound Make, or whatever it may be. And then finally, if you contributed to public goods. And we were the first group to airdrop anyone that contributed to Gitcoin through one, through rounds one through seven. And that was really like, we felt like those people would be the exact type of people

• 12:06Speaker 02

  that really help us get to where we needed to be. And that was really how we launched. And we said, hey, you know, anyone that's done these actions, come claim some Badger. And by the way, here's our vault product, and it just so happens to have, I don't know, billion percent APY. So why don't you, why don't you get involved? And that was, that was the start of it.

• 12:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  I think you guys have crushed it on like building out your community. And there's almost a playbook there. And we've got already some, some questions coming in from the Bankless community on that playbook, and we'll, we'll definitely get to that. I just want to camp on this, this, this question, you know, going back to the why. So why is Bitcoin on DeFi important? You said, because look, it's a, it's a, over a trillion dollar asset right now, and only a small percentage of it is actually being put to work. We put out a post last week, Lucas Campbell from our team, put it, put out a case for like the The trillion dollar opportunity for tokenized Bitcoin, he was specifically talking about Ren B T C. And that's the opportunity. It's either all of this Bitcoin ends up just being, you know, held forever. Or it's being put in productive use in kind of the crypto banking ecosystem.

• 13:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  Or it's in DeFi, right? And you guys are saying it should be in DeFi. That that post, though, did, Chris, trigger a back and forth I had with Anthony Pomiano. Where, you know, he was very much of the like mindset of, no, not Bitcoin on DeFi, right? What we're going to have is DeFi and Bitcoin. And I want to get your take on that because I've got sort of my preconception. I kind of compared it to like, yeah, but that's really hard because you're essentially trying to program on a, you know, T I eighty-three calculator when you have like a full PC with a full stack and a virtual machine and everything else. But he has kind of a different take on that. I'm curious to get your take.

• 13:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  So having explored what it would take, I assume you did explore this to build DeFi on Bitcoin. You came back to Ethereum. What's your take on that whole debate?

• 14:06Speaker 02

  My take on the debate is there's no right or wrong answer. So do I think there will be financial services on the Bitcoin network? Yes. Do I think those those applications and the ability to put your Bitcoin to work on the native Bitcoin network are going to happen anytime soon? No. I think they're quite a bit of ways away because of a lot of the things that we that I mentioned earlier, right? The developers, the tooling, the composability, the ease of usability. You know, think about how long it took Ethereum to get to the point where, you know, with a browser extension, you can pop to different applications and start putting a variety of different assets to work.

• 14:50Speaker 02

  And then have, you know, liquidity, deep liquidity in markets and a variety of different players and products. And like, it's it's it's an ecosystem. That in itself is gonna take years to build on Bitcoin. And um because of that, I just don't see, and I don't, and I don't think that's gonna make, oh, okay, guess what, like, you know, Bitcoin's never gonna be able to catch up to Ether or other chain. I don't think that's gonna be the, the case either, because so much of the asset class is there already. Right? And you have, like I said, point, point seven percent. Do I think um a hundred percent of Bitcoin is gonna be moved? Of course not. Do I think thirty or forty percent's gonna be moved? I sure do.

• 15:33Speaker 02

  Now, what about the other sixty, seventy percent? I think, you know, there's gonna be a whole segment of the market that doesn't give a shit about that and just holds it. Right? I think there's gonna be a good segment of the market that wants to maintain some of the security posture that comes with the Bitcoin network. Um, you know, a lot of, and I saw, I saw Anthony talking about a few folks like Sovereign or whatever, and you know, I know the Sovereign crew, they're good crew, they're trying, you know, they're doing their thing. But at the end of the day, you know, if we're gonna call something what it is, not speaking about Sovereign in general, but just more of this concept. Um, anything that could potentially be built on Bitcoin today is not technically being built on Bitcoin.

• 16:15Speaker 02

  Right? And if you, like, RSK is a good example, like, all these different chains, right? Like, it's not technically on Bitcoin. Um, there's kind of like this multi-sig-ish thing happening outside of that. So like, the whole argument around decentralization and security for Bitcoin in particular is somewhat removed immediately because now you have a level of centralization that has to happen to facilitate these types of applications and services. But, you know, my take is, and Badgers, in, you know, my opinion, as, as a community member at Badger, is, you know, we are chain agnostic. You know, we believe Bitcoin's gonna be on a variety of chains, including being used on the Bitcoin network, and we'd love to support that when the time comes.

• 16:59Speaker 02

  Um, but today, the majority of it's being used on Ethereum, and we're starting to see other chains uh really start to accelerate. Even just yesterday, we launched Vaults on um Binance Smart Chain, and we're intending to launch on Layer Two Solutions and a variety of others down the road, but you know, tha- that's our take, Ryan.

• 17:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, that's a good take. You know, the interesting thing here is I think there's something in the thesis for everyone, right? If you're a Bitcoiner, if you're a Bitcoin proponent, you love the asset itself. You want Bitcoin to be propagated everywhere. You want it in crypto banks, you want it in DeFi, you want it everywhere. And if you're maybe a DeFi maximalist, somebody who believes in kind of the bankless vision, then you want all of those assets to come into DeFi, right? Ethereum serves as a gravity well for all of the world's assets, as we've said so often before. So there's kind of a win in both places. But I think this maybe brings the first bankless, like bankless consumer question here. Somebody from the community asked a question about the Binance Smart Chain, actually.

• 18:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  Because, and I think this is a deep question, so let me pose it. This is from Graham. "Why are so many projects porting to Binance Smart Chain? Where it is centralized and controlled by 21 validators? Is it for fear of being forked there? Do you believe in the chain? Is it user choice?" I think he's presenting that question to all projects, but also to you specifically. Why a Binance Smart Chain?

• 18:26Speaker 02

  So two reasons. One, in no particular order. That is by far the chain with the most Bitcoin being put to use outside of Ethereum. And we care about Bitcoin, right? And we care about utility for Bitcoin regardless of where it is and making it easy for anybody and everybody to put that Bitcoin to work. Two, well, actually, there's three reasons. Two, it's driven by the users, right? I couldn't even tell you how much user demand was coming around Binance Smart Chain and how many users were already using Binance. And we saw that even just with our launch yesterday. We launched with interest-bearing ETH assets. So like, we didn't say, "Hey, bring Badger and Digg."

• 19:11Speaker 02

  We said, "No, you gotta bring the staked version of Badger and the staked version of Digg, cross-chain, and then LP that, and then deposit in our vault," right? So think about all those loops. We still had $25 million cross-chain in under 24 hours. Right, like that tells you a lot and obviously the APYs are high and you know all those types of things happen. But you know, the the the proofs in the pudding is relates to the the user demand. And then I'd say the third piece is um is ease of deployment, right, like it's it's it was not hard. For us to really ramp up to deploy our infrastructure over there from the graphs, the keepers, the actual contracts.

• 19:55Speaker 02

  The multi-sig infrastructure like, you know, and then for users to just kind of plug in with their metamask and do what they gotta do, there's such little friction now. And um and I believe we're gonna see a lot of, we're gonna see a lot of projects. And a flock in, not flocking, like ETH's our home, like there's no doubt about that, right, like. We're not at all, and you probably could tell in Canadian with the way that I said that, but nonetheless, like that, like, there's no doubt, right, we're building a ton. On Ethereum and like Ethereum's our focus at the same time. We gotta, we gotta provide utility where Bitcoin's being put to work and we gotta. We got to uh fulfill what the users want and we're users spending their time as well. So that's how we look at it. I'm not.

• 20:36Speaker 02

  Concerned around forks and all this type of crap. I'm uh for for the core team at least and thinking about the product, those are the things that we thought about.

• 20:44David Hoffman?

  So Chris, I want to dive deeper into that because you you said something that I want to tap into, which is that, you know, ETH is the home. Oh, am I muted?

• 20:53Speaker 02

  No, you're not muted.

• 20:54David Hoffman?

  No, I'm not muted, uh not to you guys on OBS. Um, uh, and so you guys, you said ETH is ETH is your home. Uh, and so I want to, and then I also, I am personally, I have skepticism as like the long term. Usage of something like Binance Smart Chain outside of a bull market, right, like. You know, there's a plenty of usage to go around during bull markets, but during bear markets, does that usage, do those users and liquidity stick around? And so I I kind of wanted to dive deeper into um what you mean by when you say ETH is your home, right? Because ma- many, many assets become issued uh on Ethereum first. And then find their ways to other blockchains, Binance Smart Chain, like any other EVM compatible ones and. Because because they're compatible with Ethereum, they, these these assets can float around.

• 21:37David Hoffman?

  The whole crypto world, right? Not just Ethereum, but they were issued on Ethereum first and foremost. And so that they ultimately settles to Ethereum. So when you say like Ethereum is your home, dive into that a little bit more like what does what does Badger DAO have on Ethereum? That perhaps maybe it can't replicate anywhere else? Or is is it actually Badger DAO really just a nebulous thing that exists wherever the users go? How does that work out?

• 22:04Speaker 02

  Well, from a practical perspective, Ethereum's our home because that's where governance lives. And that's not going to change, right? And that's obviously specific to our project because our project runs as a community governed initiative. So that's, you know, from a practical standpoint. From a not so practical standpoint, when we're building and integrating with different protocols and looking, there's so much work to be done on Ethereum. Like just enormous amount of work. And even if you look at, you know, what we've brought to finance and what we're going to be bringing to other chains. It's really like what we brought to Ethereum a few months when we first launched, which is like, you know, here are yield optimization vaults.

• 22:47Speaker 02

  Here's the strategies that they run, you know, these are the types of things that it can do. And that was the extent of it. And when we look to bring things to market, we're most likely going to be bringing those things to market first on Ethereum. And spending the time to really develop them there. And then looking to how can we do it, but also do it in a way where it's not a huge technical lift for us? That's a that's a big thing, right? Like you guys know, and a lot of people know, like, you know, finding talent's not hard, not easy. You know, we've been lucky enough without doing the job posting to have 60 people working with us. But neither here nor there, we're stretched, you know, ridiculously thin on all the things that we're working on.

• 23:28Speaker 02

  But there is still so much of an opportunity to to continue to be like the home for Bitcoin on ETH. And there's so much more to the stack and to the utility tool belt that we need to build. Because for Badger today, and I've said this so many times publicly, but I'll say it again. You know, Badger accelerated because they were the best farm, best APY for Bitcoin, right, in December and January and so forth. But, you know, again, when you look at the bull market, you know, that could sustain for a period of time, especially when the majority of ours, like many others, yield is subsidized with token

• 24:08Speaker 02

  distribution and rewards, right? Like, that is not sustainable at all, like nowhere close to sustainable. So for us, there's still so much utility that we need to build, and we're going to be building on ETH and potentially looking to how we bring that to other chains down the road. But that's, you know, that's what we think about when we think about ETH being our home. And, you know, a quick piece around utility, like where do I think utility can come for us and for projects like us? You know, it's interesting what's happened. We've, you know, we've collected so much capital, like billions of dollars in Bitcoin and a few other, like our native assets, Badger and so forth,

• 24:49Speaker 02

  that, you know, we can create a, you know, use the synthetic layer on top to create a variety of other assets that unlock the liquidity and create capital efficiency in those positions, eventually becoming the best place to unlock liquidity in any BTC LP position. Because that's where the majority of our deposits are. They're either Curve LPs, Uniswap LPs, or Sushi LPs. So for us, that's our focus around utility so that people can further participate in DeFi. And I think that's going to happen a lot. Like, a lot of the protocols today are going to be more of the primitive protocols tomorrow. And it's like, how do you kind of transition to be more on the bottom of the stack than on the top of the stack?

• 25:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  Just one last one on this, because I think this is all part of the philosophy of the project and it's important. Then we want to go into quickly the components of Badger DAO and make sure everyone listening understands those. And there's some other viewer questions coming in, but I want to ask this, Chris, because I think this dovetails with what Graham was asking is, do you worry that we lose the definition of DeFi somewhere in here? So I think that's what really Graham is kind of getting at, right? So when- When we call something DeFi and it's really on the Binance Smart Chain that's managed by 21 validators and looks a lot more like a crypto bank, is it really DeFi? And maybe the answer to that question is, what's the definition of DeFi? Is another question, right?

• 26:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  So that's the question I'm going to ask you, Chris, is what is your definition of DeFi?

• 26:20Speaker 02

  My definition of DeFi is a financial system that's predicated on peer-to-peer transactions. Right? When I think about decentralized finance, I think about that. I think about removing the bloat of the middleman. I think about people being able to own and control their own assets and having the ability to participate in finance like they've never been able to participate before. But because of the value proposition on both sides of the fence, they're actually interacting with other individuals that are doing the exact same thing. And that's, you know, that's kind of how I think about the future financial systems that we're building today, but are going to obviously evolve tremendously in the future.

• 27:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  And so do you think that definition for DeFi extends to something like the Binance Smart Chain?

• 27:09Speaker 02

  I think so. I think so, you know, if we go with that definition, you know, if someone's, you know, LPing on an AMM on Binance Smart Chain and they're making a trade, they're trading with someone on the other side, right? You know, they're using something like Badger. It's not like Badger has control of those assets. It's just a set of smart contracts in the end of the day. So, yeah, that's, I think it does, you know, again, it kind of goes back to, and I know, you know, there's been some controversial things that you guys have gotten into with a few folks online over the years. But, you know, just in general, you know, I'm just never been a fan of any type of purist type

• 27:53Speaker 02

  perspective on things because I think it moves the needle away from needed innovation regardless, right? Like this is so ridiculously early anyways. Like what it is today won't be what it's like tomorrow, but like an example, okay, here's an example. If Binance Smart Chain didn't come with such a, with such a powerful push in the last three months, it wouldn't have accelerated something like multi-chain that the AnySwap team and Andre collaborated on building to be pushed to the forefront as fast as it had. They were looking at, you know, getting something off the ground six to nine months from now. But because of that, we're starting to see all these tools and tooling being pushed to the forefront.

• 28:37Speaker 02

  And the fact that we were able to, through messaging, through community engagement, obviously through incentivization, you know, have $25 million in 24 hours move across chains. Like, think back to like 2017 when everyone's going balls crazy about like atomic swap stuff and shit like that, right? Like, things are actually happening. Where it's going and the centralization of where it's going and all these types of things, in my opinion, don't matter nearly as much because of what's actually happening and how that's gonna be, what, you know, what pushes what's gonna happen forward so much more, you know, so much faster.

• 29:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I think, look, I think the Bankless take on that, on this whole thing is, what you're saying is true. Like, the adoption of Binance Smart Chain is actually good because it pushes Ethereum to scale more. I also think we probably come at this with different perspectives, right? Like, so Badger Dow, you're all about optimizing yield for Bitcoin. That's super important. That's what the whole project is about. Bankless has to have a little bit of a

• 29:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  a viewpoint perspective that is consistent with our philosophy and our name, which is we're trying to remove the banks. Like, what we don't want, Chris, is to create a worse system than the one we came from, right? It's like, it's protocols, not kings, right? And so where we see points for centralization, for more banker control, that's where we're less likely to hit the accelerator and more likely to hit on the brakes. But I agree, like, this is all going to evolve in the way that it needs to, and ultimately... Ultimately, if the thesis is right, that the most decentralized protocols, most credibly neutral protocols will win, then none of this matters. It'll just play out in the way

• 30:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  that it's playing out. Let's get to the components of Badger Dow now, because you've referenced them earlier. I want to make sure folks understand this. And I'm actually, Chris, going to pull up the Badger Dow app to explain this. But can you tell us about first, this first component that I think is important, which is SET. What does SET do?

• 30:50Speaker 02

  So SETs are named for our vaults. So the reason why we called them SETs was because that's actually the home of a Badger. So there's a lot of memeing that happens in our ecosystem, including the fact that the Honey Badger is our lead thing. But nonetheless, it's called a SET because it's the home, but they are actually individual vaults. So if you were to, Ryan, click on any one of these vaults, it will give you the ability to potentially deposit, or if you click that button, excuse me, that button in the top right corner of each of those, you could withdraw. So each of these have different strategies. And as

• 31:29Speaker 02

  you can tell, each of them also have a different return on investment over an annualized basis. And then if you see to the far right, that's the number, the value in capital that's been deposited in that vault, that's earning that specific interest rate. Now, if you were to connect your wallet and you were a Badger, you would see the ability to claim Badger and Dig. So every two hours, there's a cycle that releases Badger and Dig to users. And if you click on that, you'll see the breakdown on where the rewards are coming from, from that specific vault strategy. And when you see something like Badger rewards and Dig rewards, those rewards would be claimable through the app, which goes to kind of what

• 32:13Speaker 02

  I spoke about before, right? The organic yield and the lack of sustainability and inflating APY, or subsidizing, excuse me, not inflating, APY for the purpose of providing a high interest rate for users. So this is essentially how it works. If you're looking at some of these, um, RAP BTC, RAP Ether, you would bring, you would go to a sushi swap, you deposit WBTC ETH into their liquidity pool, which is um, one of the largest liquidity pools for those assets. And then you would bring that LP token to us. So what do we do? You deposit it in the vault. Everything's non-custodial. Everything's smart contract-based. This, we have active strategies on the backend for those vaults. Of course, everything's transparent.

• 32:57Speaker 02

  You can look at the vault contracts, see all the transactions. You can prove exactly that, you know, there's thirteen hundred and seven Bitcoins in that specific vault. Uh, but for that vault strategy and why a hundred and forty-seven million dollars is in that vault, is because we optimized their sushi. So what we'll do is we'll earn the sushi on your behalf. We'll stake that sushi for X sushi, which increases the APY. And we do that without you needing to spend money on gas, spend time, effort and resources and mind power on the appropriate strategy. And through that strategy, we're able to optimize, you know, the return on investment for the users.

• 33:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  So Chris, this brings me to another question that that's coming in from the bankless community. And I, I see a few different versions of tokenized Bitcoin here, right? You've got WBTC. Looks like there might be some other versions here. Uh, what's your take on the different versions of Bitcoin? Like, what's the best tokenized Bitcoin? What's your favorite? And what are the trade-offs between these?

• 34:01Speaker 02

  Well, I'll reference um, David here because he was on a podcast with my friend Luke a little while ago and kind of dove into each of these. You know, uh, in general, i- i- they're all different flavors with different risk parameters and different appetites for different types of users. Um, WBTC in particular, there's obviously centralization with Bitco, which also brings a hu- a higher level of insurance around, you know, the Bitcoin deposits. Those are also KYC. You look at some of the others, like REM BTC in particular. Um, they're not KYC. Those are powered through the REM VM, which-

• 34:38Speaker 02

  arguably are is more decentralized than a lot of solutions out there, but when you dig into it, as many people have already brought to the surface, there there is a level of control around those assets from a group of people, part of the REM project. So again, trade offs. Our our perspective as always is we want to support as much Bitcoin as possible in any form. So even if you look at all those vaults, there's all the Bitcoins, right? There's REM BTC, SBTC, WBTC, TBTC. Um, we haven't gone as far to support some of the others just yet, just from a prioritization standpoint, one of the other products, but like, you know, HBTC and and then now we're supporting, you know, BTC B on on Binance.

• 35:23Speaker 02

  Um, but yeah, that's that's my take on that.

• 35:27David Hoffman?

  So one of these versions of Bitcoin on Ethereum is DIG, which we you hinted at earlier. It's like Ampleforth and it's that it's a rebasing token, but it rebases towards one Bitcoin. Uh, Chris, could you go into the details behind DIG and kind of what the the goals of the DIG product are?

• 35:44Speaker 02

  Sure. So Ryan, um, and whoever's controlling this, you would need to connect your wallet to see all the details here. The reason why we did that is just because it kills us from the amount of calls that it does.

• 35:54David Hoffman?

  I might not, I might not dox myself on this.

• 35:57Speaker 02

  I was about to say.

• 36:00Speaker 02

  But nonetheless, yeah. So so DIG is a synthetic representation of Bitcoin, and we believe that there were certain mechanics that didn't need to rely on centralized custody to be able to bring Bitcoin to those other chains. So at the core of it, we have the rebasing mechanics that are similar to that of Ampleforth, and that's, you know, if Bitcoin is um higher than the price of DIG, then there is an increase in supply. Why? So it wants people to sell to bring the price down. Hey, I had one yesterday. Now I have 1.5. I'll sell that 0.5 and that's how pressure brings it down. Uh, vice versa on the buy side. Now, what we found is that there's a lot of inherent problems with that.

• 36:40Speaker 02

  One, um, and it made very prevalent and like David's laugh there, but there's a lot of inherent inherent problems in that. One is composability. Right? So it's very difficult for DeFi protocols, centralized exchanges, any real counterparty, even cross-trained bridges, all these things. They can't support native um rebasing assets. So um that was one issue. Uh, the other issue is the buy, when you look at the rebasing um mechanics, the buy side is really, in our opinion, broken. Right? That's that's the broke, because then what happens is the price is going, we see, we've seen this with DIG, uh, we've obviously seen this with Apple for it.

• 37:19Speaker 02

  The price goes down and instead of people wanting to buy, they're just selling to get out quicker so they don't, you know, it's like trying to move away from the falling knife. So what we're doing is, and what our intention has always been, is how do we leverage the vaults? And automated strategies and smart contracts to optimize these mechanics to stay closer to the peg. That was our mission with um launching DIG. So when we launched DIG, we obviously launched with the DIG Vault, we obviously launched with uh LP pairs and things along those lines. And DIG's been around now two months. I think it's spent about thirty-five days above peg, um, you know, a few days at at equilibrium and and then the rest below. So it's been, you know, a little bit of an up and down.

• 38:04Speaker 02

  Um, but these vault strategies allow for two things, and this is already apparent. So when you deposit in the DIG Vault, you get a token back. It's called B DIG. And it represents your share of the vault or the pool. That token is a standard ERC twenty token, and it can be moved anywhere. And what's happening is your rewards and the APY is being auto-compounded in your position. So whenever you want your DIG back, you just come to the vault and withdraw the the appropriate amount of DIG. So what that's allowed us to do is have that be integrated on money markets. Like even with Binance Smart Chain, like yesterday was the first time a rebasing asset crossed chains and was able to be put to work without some of the limitations that that come with it.

• 38:47Speaker 02

  Um. The other side of it is is what we're bringing to market in the next, I probably say in the next three to four weeks, which is our stability bolt. So we're going to have an active strategy that uses a reserve of WBTC. If you think about, if you guys are familiar with the FRX model, it's kind of like that, but think about like an automated vault strategy that's that's um taking action to optimize those parameters I talked about before. So if we were able to drive quite a bit of the DIG supply, circulating supply into that DIG vault for a lot of the other reasons, composability, APY and stuff like that, and then have automated strategies selling at certain parameters and buying at certain parameters,

• 39:25Speaker 02

  that inherently should drive the market because it represents the majority of the supply from that market to be closer to the peg. And we feel that that is, you know, our attempt at trying to bring a synthetic Bitcoin um to market that doesn't rely on any centralized custody.

• 39:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  Chris, uh, this is a question from Mark from Bankless Community. How would you, Chris, argue that DIG is the most trustless and best asset representation of Bitcoin on Ethereum? Maybe just consolidate what you said to like, what's what's it, what's the elevator pitch for why this is the best trustless tokenized version of Bitcoin on Ethereum?

• 40:03Speaker 02

  Well, I I wouldn't say that's the case today. It's not, you know, it's not the best trustless um representation of Bitcoin because we haven't been able to knock it out of the park with stability. The volatility itself makes it difficult to claim anything close to that, to be honest with you. And that and that's really not our intention to be the best. Our intention is to give an alternative and another representation from a a price perspective that allows you to take advantage of all the great things that can come with DeFi and all the utility that can come with DeFi. We're also proponents for the other types of Bitcoin, and we believe there's just going to be so many

• 40:42Speaker 02

  so many varieties that fit different risk profiles. So I wouldn't say, um, I wouldn't agree that is, or I wouldn't say it's to trust the most trustless and best representation, um, but that that's our take.

• 40:55David Hoffman?

  Chris, I'd like to get into the details of the Badger token. And so earlier you illustrated how the Badger token is a tool to issue rewards. And you alluded to it being unsustainable in its current form because it's being issued, right? So what is like the long-term sustainability plan with the Badger token? And also perhaps just comment on the role that the Badger token plays with both governance and value capture?

• 41:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, at the core of it, David, it's, you know, it is a governance token. Any and everything associated with the Badger ecosystem, all products, all parameters, all fees, treasury, everything's decided. We've had, I think, 43 different improvement proposals that have been voted on. To put in perspective, our last vote had 1,299 unique wallets participate in that vote. And that accounted for almost $20 million worth of Badger that was used to vote for that specific proposal. But that is the core of Badger. It's like, you know, by having Badger, you have a real voice and shared ownership in everything that's being built.

• 42:04Speaker 02

  And it's not, again, this is the evolution. It's not just, hey, I'm governing like this cool, fun stuff. And it's like me and a few friends kind of ring around the rosy. You know, our vaults alone create almost $5 million in profit, right? We have $600 million in the treasury. Like, these are real, real dollar amounts. These are real, this is a real profit generating business slash company. And the only way decisions are made and things change and that company is going to be successful is if the token holders put their voice forward, have impact, genuinely give a crap, and give the type of insight necessary to push it in the right direction.

• 42:49Speaker 02

  And that's the true value, call it value. That is the utility of the Badger token. Today, we don't distribute any type of revenue or profits back to the token holders. Of course, that's to the token holders to decide. But nonetheless, that's what Badger is all about. And, you know, when you talk about unsustainability of reward distribution. You know, there's, there's a couple of things to point out there. From a pure product perspective, that's what I'm speaking to. From a token distribution standpoint, and further putting the hands of your token into, excuse me, further putting the token into the hands of people that should have it in their hands. I don't know a better community to put it into than your product users.

• 43:34Speaker 02

  Like, you're using a product. That product, you then have say over everything about it as the product user. Like, i- it's as if like I used any product in my normal life and I had the ability to say, you know what? These fees are just pissing me off, man. I don't really want this anymore. Put a proposal forward. Make a change, rally the community, right? We don't, we don't necessarily have as much of a convoluted governance structure. It's very straightforward. You know, there's a forum vote, it needs to meet quorum of fifty, fifty, uh, yea votes, then it goes to snapshot. And then you can vote on it. There's no delegation, there's none of this type of stuff. And then, you know, the delegated multi-sig signers that are controlled by the token holders.

• 44:18Speaker 02

  Then, um, you know, execute whatever, whatever the, the token holders want to be, you know, want to be had. And, you know, like I said, we've done that forty-three times already.

• 44:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  Chris, I think this is a good time to fit in a question from, uh, Joe K. from Bankless. Uh, I'll just read it out. The Badger Project has really put community first, built up this amazing war chest while doing it. What advice do you have for current or future founders to follow their lead?

• 44:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's, you know, I'm a big proponent for, you know, breaking the system. I was just talking to, um, you know, he, he suggested I say hello. I was just talking to, uh, John from Opelous, um, right before this call. And, you know, we kind of shared in the same sentiment, right? Like, that venture-backed system is broken. Um, how that system allows companies to go to market and accelerate is that the, um, at the, i- i- it really, it really, I was looking for a specific word. It's at the expense of the founders in many instances, right? Um. I've been through those. I've been through those circles before. So what I would say is, you know, we have an opportunity and timing is very important, obviously.

• 45:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think we all can relate what, you know, what it's like launching a project in the bear market versus the bull market. Um. But nonetheless, you know, le- leverage the network effect that can come from um tokenomics. And the ability to have your product users be owners in said products. Like, that's very important. So if I were to tell someone, you know, what playbook they should potentially use, I'm obviously gonna be biased and suggest. You know, art playbook, right? Build something, make, test the shit out of whatever you're building. Make sure what you're building, you believe at least to have some type of product market fit and and have a level of uh uniqueness and innovation.

• 46:15Speaker 02

  Then think very, very closely about what types of values you want the community members to share. And trying to align that with a specific message. Like, I've said this, you know, a few people have asked me a similar question. And I, and you know, when now in the market, when someone says Bitcoin, at least in the deep, if you're, you know, DeFi head. You'll probably say, like, Badger. If Severt asks, like, hey, what Badger's about, they'll answer with Bitcoin. Like, think about how simple that message is versus what we're used to, you know, the elevator pitches, the the things that come with crypto projects. I'm doing this for X and that and like all these crazy words and people are like, what the fuck are you even talking about?

• 46:57Speaker 02

  You know, so it's like, that message needs to align with the values that you wanna share because similar to Bankless. Bankless is another great example. You have a shared belief system, right? And that's what builds community. And with community, you have sustainability. Because that community is gonna go through their trenches with you when we're in different types of situations, right? And they're gonna be there when we're out of those situations and, you know, the market picks back up and all that type of stuff. So I would say identifying that and then, and then the final piece to it would be. How can you use on-chain actions to verify and quantify those specific values?

• 47:36Speaker 02

  So that you can attract those community members early and feel confident that if you have a product that solves a problem, that's aligned with a mission, that you think based on these on-chain actions, that these people will share, that by you going to market, you'll at least get off the ground and be able to hit it running. And then with that, if you are successful, even mediocrally successful, you'll have plenty of money to bootstrap the business, you know, find other streams of revenue, hire people, and now you're doing all this without a board to talk to, without all the bullshit that comes with investors and, you know, traditional, you know, you know, company-type stuff,

• 48:20Speaker 02

  venture-backed company-type stuff. So that would be my suggestion.

• 48:24David Hoffman?

  Chris, it's always very refreshing to hear when somebody can communicate the association between like the cultural shared values of a community and what is ultimately then value capture in the token. Those two things, if people that, there aren't very many people out there that can communicate those two links. So that makes me really optimistic about what you guys are doing at Badger. I want to turn to a question that I'm seeing out of the Bankless YouTube is, what other chains are, is Badger interested in deploying onto next?

• 48:54Speaker 02

  So we released a post, I guess, last week, and it had an infographic on a variety of different chains and layer-two solutions that we're looking at. And the end of the day, our priorities are going to come around what I spoke to before, like where's Bitcoin being utilized? Where are the users? And then how easy is it for us to deploy there? So like EVM compatibility is top priority, first and foremost. And, and, you know, the whole slew of them, right? Like, you know, we're looking at optimism, we're also looking at Solana, we're going to be launching on Polygon, you know, within the next few weeks. You know, the list, once again, it's, it's, you know, we're looking at, we're looking at Polkadot, it's early, we're looking at Avalanche.

• 49:39Speaker 02

  Really early, you know, we're we're looking at these different types of things, but in terms of like what prioritizes Phantom, of course, right? Phantom is a really interesting play because it has a lot of the tools already deployed there like sushi and cream and curve. And a lot of these things that we need for testing purposes. That's another thing that people don't talk about much is this, you know, when you when you have a yield aggregation product like we do, it's very, very, very difficult to build the type of test environment necessary to to get it ready, getting your strategies ready for launch. Do all these types of things because you have to plug into so many different Lego pieces and to mimic those Lego pieces exactly how they are at that state. It's very difficult to do in a test environment.

• 50:24Speaker 02

  So something like a Phantom, it could be a great place for us to plug into all the protocols. You know, the AMM, that all these different things that that we need for creating yield and optimizing yield strategies for users. And doing an environment again where, you know, it's cheap, it's fast, it's easy. It's not a big technical lift for us to do. Um, so that's, that's how we're looking at um our cross chain initiatives. And, you know, I envision I envision a time, not not the near future or excuse me, not so near future, where a user comes with Bitcoin to Badger and, you know, and looks at, you know, what type of yield they want or what type of return they want. They click a button, a minute later, they're they're earning that yield.

• 51:05Speaker 02

  And what's happening behind the scenes is we're taking that Bitcoin, we're wrapping it, we're bridging it, we're bringing it to different places. We're optimizing it in a cross chain. We're doing all these types of things, but for the user, you know, it's one click and and now they're um, you know, they're they're earning on their Bitcoin.

• 51:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  Chris, here's another question coming in from Bankless community member Mark. Uh, what DeFi app has been the biggest inspiration for Badger?

• 51:31Speaker 02

  It's easy, that's urine.

• 51:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  Why Urn? Tell us more.

• 51:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, a lot of the things that I mentioned already. One, you know, we built our codebase off of the Urn V1 Vault Foundation. Um, two, you know, how they went to market and the fact that they are an open community and collective, you know, is exactly, you know, the, the type of blueprint that we were trying to follow and, and, you know, I've always been a fan and a community member and like, you know, the teams, you know, the, the core team behind it, they're, they're awesome and they're committed to innovation. Um, but for the most part, you know, it, it, it's, it's easy for, it's easy for me to say that because, you know, we, we've, we've just like in my mind, like I've always looked at Urn as kind of like that, that leading example uh for us.

• 52:19Speaker 02

  And, you know, even now, um, next week and I don't want to make any promises, but hopefully next week we're going to be launching, you know, our Urn integration. Um, be one of the first partners to integrate Urn Vaults and have like a revenue share relationship um with that integration with the WBTC Vault, which is really cool. So it's, it's starting to come full circle and there's different things, you know, that we have an opportunity to collaborate on, but you know, Urn was definitely that, uh, that inspiration.

• 52:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  Chris, this is a question just for me because I'm super curious about this. Um, we're seeing DAOs now with just absolutely massive treasuries, like crazy treasuries. Um, what, what's your treasury now? I'm just curious. I know it's all on chain. I could look it up, but.

• 52:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's, it's, I think it's, it changes so much. I think it's like five or 600 million, something like that.

• 53:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay. So how are you gonna spend it? Exactly. That was gonna be my question. So like, um, so i- and let me maybe direct this question to a theme that David and I have been repeating on Bankless, which is that, um, in this new crypto economy, there are infinite opportunities. Do you want a job? You can get a job. There's money to pay you. Um, what are you guys going to do with all of this treasury is the first question? And then how can people give the Badger Protocol what it needs to earn some money from this treasury? Two-part question there.

• 53:40Speaker 02

  So the first part, you know, we're obviously gonna hire the best people that we can. How we hire is a little different, and that speaks to the second question, which I'll answer in a second. We're gonna be investing in, you know, R and D and building new products, obviously. We're gonna be leveraging the treasury for incentivization for some of those products to accelerate users, build stickiness, so that we can start getting them into our other products. Like, if you just were to think about this for a second, we launch a vault, we want that vault to have a hundred million in it, because immediately after, we're gonna say, hey, you can borrow against that vault position. And, you know, once those APYs are down to like fifteen or twenty percent,

• 54:20Speaker 02

  there, there's additional utility on top, so like getting them in the door there and using Badger and Dig as incentives to get them there, and, you know, and reward them appropriately, you know, it's like customer acquisition costs to an extent. And you can kind of think about it like that. And you know what's interesting, and a lot of people are talking about, we don't have much time, so I'm gonna, I'm gonna make it quick. Because of these massive treasuries and DAOs, and because of how early DeFi is, and because of how open this financial system is, I believe, Protocols like us, and I'll just speak to Badger, our ability to put our own treasury to work is gonna potentially be our largest revenue stream, moving forward. And that in itself is so unique to even think about,

• 55:04Speaker 02

  on how, you know, as your assets, as Badger and Dig are further integrated in places where you can borrow and lend against it, and potentially, you know, LP it and earn APY on it, and then the same thing with our Bitcoin and our ETH and our USDC and all of our other assets. You know, that, that's gonna be a very, very unique opportunity that has never existed before. Never mind crypto, like a year ago, like, you know, Protocols, a year and a half ago, we weren't talking about Protocols making money. Right? Like, and tokens like making money, like, that was just ridiculous. Now it's a reality, and now with that capital, there's a lot that you can do with it to optimize.

• 55:44Speaker 02

  You know, people would go nuts. Traditionally, these DAOs are also gonna have, like, I don't wanna use- Traditional banking terms, but like asset management and funds like that sit, you know, underneath that they're putting that treasury to work to generate that type of revenue. It's it's pretty wild and and when you have a large community like us with like fifteen thousand people that can give input and say, yeah, here's a proposal. This is what we should do. Hey, I was doing this, this, this, and this. And then these groups come together. We're actually talking to a few folks that are very DeFi uh native um investors and and users that are gonna kind of build this like subcommittee within Badger that are responsible for a percentage of the treasury upon, you know, community vote.

• 56:27Speaker 02

  And they're gonna be putting that to work to optimize the return on it, right? Um, but nonetheless, the the second part, which is important, really important to us is um, how can people get involved? So um, like I said, we're open, completely open. You can do as little, you can do as much as you want. You can do anything you want across all spectrums, technical and non-technical. Everyone today that works at Badger outside of a few people literally came from the community. They decided to put a little more thought into their forum posts. They decided to put a little more thought into their Discord posts. And what happened there was after a few times, I'm like, fuck, let me ping this person.

• 57:07Speaker 02

  Hey dude, like, what are you working? You wanna get involved in something? We need some help on like figuring out the treasury. We need some help on this. We need some help on, hey, did you wanna help on this cool project? And what's cool, uh what's awesome is is like, you're not just like working on some random shit in like a in like a sandbox. You're working on potentially production-ready technology that's gonna have millions of dollars touch it. Now, there's so much other people and involvement and security practices around that, but to be at the forefront and go from like someone that's not as involved and maybe a participant to like a builder, that's like, that's huge for a lot of people. It's huge for me, it's huge for so many people. Um, so for, you know, what the the immediate thing is like, join the Discord, right? You can find that on our Telegram, on our Twitter um Twitter uh profile.

• 57:51Speaker 02

  And or reach out to me and and anything, we we need help across the board. Anything from like a couple hours a week to, you know, however much you wanna do, I'm more than happy to chat. Get involved. We have a grant program. Um, with that grant program, we paid out $500,000 in grants last month alone. And these are people that don't want, that aren't ready or we're not ready to have them commit full time to the project. And they're just working on different initiatives based on their skill set, based on where they want to learn. And based on their time effort, um, we'd either get a retroactive grant for the work they did. Or we'll put them on kind of an ongoing grant. And then at any point in that time, either they suggest they want to be more full time. Or we try and pull them into the full time because they're a rock star. And that's, and that's how we work.

• 58:36David Hoffman?

  Really truly pioneering the, the future of the self sovereign, independent worker. That's pretty cool. Chris, to, to rack up, wrap up here, I just kind of want to ask you about the, the five minute roadmap for, for, uh, for Badger. Like what's coming in the, the pipeline that, that users can expect?

• 58:52Speaker 02

  We got an exciting few weeks ahead of us. Actually, we've been building for the last couple of months, getting ready for this big push. Um, either today or tomorrow, we're going to be doing the second round of our NFT drop with meme. Which I would argue is the most gamified NFT drop anyone's ever attempted. Essentially, um, you can use the interest bearing version of DIG. And you can stake that on meme. Uncapped, so it's the first uncapped, um, meme, meme initiative. And, um, earn points and then mint NFTs. But then you have these NFTs, what do you do with them? We have a game that we built and what we're releasing called the Badger Arcade. And, um, there's a $400,000 honeypot. And we call it Diamond Hands.

• 59:37Speaker 02

  Because the, you could redeem a percentage of the honeypot by giving your NFTs in. The longer you hold, the larger percentage of the honeypot you get. Okay. It may never end. For a few reasons. One, because there's obviously going to be a secondary market for those NFTs. Two, we're going to be enabling those NFTs to earn an APY boost inside of our app. So giving it real utility inside of the ecosystem. So we're launching, we're going to be going to turning that on either today or tomorrow. And then subsequent to that, we're going to be launching on additional chains. And we're going to be really focused on the utility side of the business.

• 1:00:19Speaker 02

  So we're going to be launching two initiatives, one called claws, the other one called interest bearing Bitcoin. Essentially with both of those, you'll be able to use your existing interest bearing vault positions on Badger. And either borrow a stable coin against it. That's with claws or mint interest bearing Bitcoin, which is backed by an index of all of our curve vaults that of course you guys saw have all the different tokenized Bitcoin in there. Which in itself mitigates some of the risk associated with each Bitcoin. And now you, you know, our whole thing is like, why would you own normal rapid coin if you can own, you know, hold, you know, interest bring rapid coin? And all the fun things that are going to be able to to go on with that. So those are the initiatives that we're pushing forward in the in the near future.

• 1:01:03Speaker 02

  And then there's a whole slew of other things, but it's all kind of around the same thing. We're launching our Bitcoin bridge, actually in between that where you can take native Bitcoin and go right into vaults. Launching Zap, so Zapper, so you can go from any asset into the vaults with one click. So we have a lot of these things that we've been working hard on and we're excited to make it easy for people to use the app. Give more utility to Bitcoin and then give more utility to already existing vault deposits.

• 1:01:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  Chris, that's awesome. Thanks for walking us through the vision, this community, ask me anything. This is Bitcoin on DeFi. It's super exciting to see the community built around this vision. You guys are building hard, man. So well done. Thanks for joining us on Bankless.

• 1:01:47Speaker 02

  Awesome, guys. Thanks for having me. This was a blast.

• 1:01:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  Bankless Nation, risks and disclaimers, of course. Bitcoin is risky, so is DeFi, so is all of crypto. You could lose what you put in, but we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the Bankless journey. Thanks a lot.

• 1:02:07David Hoffman?

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• 1:02:49David Hoffman?

  It took me just under three minutes, and after signing into my bank account via Plaid, I am now just one transaction away from any token that Uniswap has to offer. Go to www.dharma.io, that's D-H-A-R-M-A dot I-O. Download the Darba app and get yourself unbanked today. If you want to live a bankless life, you need to get a Monolith DeFi Visa Card. Monolith is both a one-two punch of an Ethereum smart contract wallet, as well as an accompanying Visa card that lets you spend the money that you have in your Ethereum wallet wherever Visa is accepted. It's really a fantastic tool that lets you use Ethereum for what it does best, which is holding and managing your financial assets, but also keeps you connected to the rest

• 1:03:34David Hoffman?

  of the world's payment rails. Monolith also offers on-ramp services for getting your fiat money into the world of DeFi, so it's trivial to top up your Monolith card if ever you need to, and your deposited money goes straight into your non-custodial wallet. So your money is never held by a centralized intermediary, because your Monolith wallet is native to Ethereum. Monolith helps you transcend both the legacy and the crypto worlds, because the money that you hold in your Monolith wallet has the power of DeFi behind it. Swapping assets on Uniswap or earning yield in DeFi is at your fingertips, but with Monolith, so are the groceries at your grocery store or the coffee at your coffee shop. Go to monolith.xyz to sign up and get your Monolith Visa Card today.

• 1:04:18David Hoffman?

  Hey, we hope you enjoyed the video. If you did, head over to Bankless HQ right now to develop your crypto investing skills and learn how to free yourself from banks and gain your financial independence. We recommend joining our daily newsletter, podcasts, and community as a Bankless Premium subscriber to get the most out of your Bankless experience. You'll get access to our market analysis, our alpha leaks, and exclusive content, and even the Bankless token for airdrops, raffles, and unlocks. If you're interested in crypto, the Bankless community is where you want to be. Click the link in the description to become a Bankless Premium subscriber today. Also, don't forget to subscribe to the channel for in-depth interviews with industry leaders, Ask Me Anythings, and weekly rollups, where we summarize the week in crypto and other

• 1:05:03David Hoffman?

  fantastic content. Thanks everyone for watching and being on the journey as we build out the Bankless Nation.