Here are 22 BANGER CLIPS from the Remint Reality x Pacman | Blur + Blast interview with all the goods on Blur, @Blast_L2 and Blend! 💚 DOES THIS COUNT AS $BLAST FARMING? 😝 Bullish on RIP, WarDaddyCapital & SHILLR!

🧙‍♂️ OUR FIRST EVER PACMAN LORE @jenndefer: You have a particularly interesting background. You dropped out of high school at 16, which I think is insane, incredibly awesome. And then a year later, you found yourself at @ycombinator. And I believe you built a company there. And then you went to @MIT afterwards, right? Can you take us back to maybe right around the time that you were deciding to go back to MIT? Like, what was going through your mind? What were you working on? And what did you want to work on? @PacmanBlur: Yeah, definitely. Let's see. So basically, you did your research, which is awesome. So I left high school, went to Silicon Valley. I was originally in Boston, so I was going to school there. I moved to Silicon Valley, started working at a company called Teespring and it was always my dream to basically go to Silicon Valley and go through @ycombinator. So I was fortunate enough to, after spending a year as a software engineer at Teespring, go and start a company and go through Y Combinator. And during that process, something that I also just realized as I was like a 17-year-old kid at the time, I was like, I really wanted to go to school and have the college experience, basically. So that was really the motivation. I actually really just like wanted to like get socialized, in a way, actually it was kind of weird school to do it… @wardaddycapital: The guy wants a college experience and de's like, yeah, I'm gonna go to MIT. I’m like dude that’s epic. @PacmanBlur: Yeah actually it was it was kind of an interesting thing, because you know most schools are kind of difficult to get in as a dropout. @MIT is more like merit-based so you know I was able to like do all the the tests and everything like that and I was fortunate that they like accepted like a high school dropout effectively. I went there and, you know, it was cool because I got to go at the same time as all my peers. So I would have gone when I was like 18 normally, and I was able to go when I was 18 to school. Uh, but yeah, the motivation was really just, I really wanted to have the college experience. And then the second thing, which is actually, I haven't really shared as much, but you know, one of the nice things about college is that it's like a really dense network of similar people and is a really good place to find co-founders. So I explicitly really wanted to find like a good co-founder. And MIT has like an incredibly dense network of engineers. So that is actually how I ended up finding my co-founder was like through my MIT network. And that was like a secondary goal.

🧠 HOT TIP: FIND CO-FOUNDERS AT MIT @jenndefer: Did you know going into MIT what exactly you wanted to build? You're like, I need a technical co-founder so I could build “X” ? @PacmanBlur: No, I just knew that I wanted a technical co-founder just in general. I was an engineer myself, so it wasn't necessarily a technical co-founder, but I wanted a co-founder. And I just had this inclination that there would be a lot of potentials at MIT.

🙌 ALL HAIL ANTHONY @wardaddycapital: Where along that road did crypto come in, and what was that kind of early start there? @PacmanBlur: For crypto, it was my second year at school. I had really, really wanted to go and start a company again. I knew my first semester at MIT, I was like, there's no way I'm finishing school because I was very inclined to go and start something again. But I was in my second year, and I was starting to explore. And that was also when I met my co-founder, Anthony. Basically, the story there is I had a friend, Efe, who was this really brilliant engineer. He was an IMO champion from Turkey. And just a little tidbit, at MIT, if you're an international student, it's really, really hard to get in. So if you're an international student at MIT, you have to basically be one of the top math people of your country. So he was this IMO champion from Turkey, and basically as a side gig in school, he also ran this recruiting agency. So he was basically connected with all the engineers at school, and we were good friends. So I basically just asked him, I was like, who are the best builders that you know at school? And then he introduced me to Anthony. And Anthony was hands down, even amongst my MIT peers. He's like the best builder I've ever met. So as soon as we met we basically kind of like immediately hit it off. We started working on various side projects and we eventually started looking into crypto, and we discovered this protocol called @HNS, which is like long kind of you know extremely niche now, kind of like forgotten but at the time, it was just like really hot protocol. And for us, as engineers, it was very attractive because it was solving like a technical problem using crypto in a very concrete way. Basically, it's just like decentralizing the domain name system, which is mostly decentralized, but actually at its core has these centralized elements. So for us as engineers, we're like, wait, this protocol actually could improve the security of the internet in a way that's very, very concrete. And so we were attracted to him. We're like, okay, what can we build to basically accelerate its adoption? I think that that kind of ended up becoming a theme in terms of what we built is just kind of focusing on market acceleration.

📜 HX OF NAMEBASE @PacmanBlur: What @NamebaseHQ was, which was the first business, was it was two things. It was a domain registrar, for @HNS. So it's like, you know, similar to GoDaddy or Namecheap. You can like, you know, buy and sell domain names on it. It was also a crypto exchange for Handshake because there was no infrastructure for HNS, which is like the protocol. There was no infrastructure for it. We had to build everything from scratch. So we ended up building not only this like application layer domain name marketplace, but we also built the infrastructure layer. We built a fiat on ramp. Right. So you can buy and sell it with your actual dollars. We built a, you know, BTC, HNS token exchange, like spot exchange, so it was very similar to like Coinbase Pro or Binance, you know, that sort of spot exchange. So we built all this infrastructure and we had to, you know, basically like learn those skills and learn how to build like a real time exchange. And also on the domain name side we also built like a marketplace as well. So the transition to @blur_io was actually like very natural because when I first got into NFTs, the thing that I realized was I was like, oh, this is basically the same thing as like a domain name marketplace, it’s just for like more assets, you know? The domain names are non-fungible as well. So it's like I already had a lot of experience with that and it felt very natural to get into it.

🤯 APPARENTLY "DOMAINERS" LOVE NFTS @PacmanBlur: So I think it's probably helpful to just like, share the origin of how i got into NFTs because it's, it's all related actually. What ended up happening was in 2021, I had an acquaintance, uh, I think he goes in web3 by worm emoji. But I knew him as um…well I’m not gonna dox. I don't know if he’s doxxed, but he's pretty doxxed. But I knew him personally because he had gone through @ycombinator as a teenager as well. So we knew each other through that. And we were in a group chat and he pinged in this group chat and he was like, Hey, I'm working on this project, if you guys want, like check it out and it was @blitmap. So this was like March, 2021 at the time and I basically checked it out and I was like, you know what, I'll throw a few hundred bucks at it and mean the blip map was like $300. Um, and then I basically held it up until like it's eighth and I sold it around like 25 ETH-30 ETH. And after that I was just like totally hooked. And I was like, what is… @jenndefer: How do I do this more? @wardaddycapital: I hit an 80x, and now I'm good to go. @PacmanBlur: Yeah. So it was crazy to me. And then I started digging into it and I was like, oh wow, these are basically like, you know, domain names. @jenndefer: But I just I love that. That's how your brain processed it. Instead of being like, oh, these are NFTs. You're like, oh, this is just like domain names. I've been doing this shit for like three years. @PacmanBlur: Yeah. It was very, very familiar. Actually, a lot of like “domainers”, it’s like a weird industry, but a lot of domainers are also into NFTs.

💰 PROGRESSION TOWARDS FINANCIALIZATION @PacmanBlur: But basically I started digging into it and I really fell in love with the trading side of it. I started like flipping NFTs. Back in the day, like reveals used to take a really long time. So I did some like scripting stuff to kind of like scrape the reveals and kind of like programmatically figure out which were the best ones. @wardaddycapital: The good ol’ days. @PacmanBlur: It was really, really crazy times and as I was doing all this, I couldn't help but notice that all the infrastructure was extremely bad. It was just slow, it was clunky, and it was just wasting time. And basically, at the time, you would basically be using 10 different tools. OpenSea was really slow, it was clunky. It took 30 clicks to do something. It was very painful. And I knew that for myself as a user, I wanted something better. I also just knew that in terms of the market development, typically any sort of financialized market, it professionalizes over time. Every single financialized market, whether it's, you know, like, @eBay sellers, you know, kind of first started off as this, like, online flea market. Now the top eBay sellers are, like, professional businesses. You know, same thing with @Etsy, right? Like, the initial sellers, they were like moms that were selling something on the side. Now it's, like, real legit businesses that are selling things on Etsy. And that's just for a non-financialized market. In crypto, which is way more hyper financialized, it's even more so, right? So if you're thinking about like the progression of exchanges, the first exchanges were kind of these like normie friendly retail exchanges like @coinbase, right? Like that's like where everything was initially. And then over time, what we've seen is there's a progression towards more, you know, professionalization and financialization. So it's like then you had @binance, @okx, like @BitMEX, you know, Perps were invented and all of this additional advancement on top. This trajectory is basically how any sort of financialized market develops. So I knew that, again, like both as a user, I wanted something better. And then just from like a market level perspective, it was always going to, you know, kind of professionalized more from there.

✅ DEFINING VALUE CREATED @PacmanBlur: We believed that we could create more efficient market structure in terms of just like a better marketplace, and in order to get there, we needed the users in the community to basically rally behind it and contribute to it. If the community were to basically just switch over 100% over to @blur_io immediately, it would create a lot of value. @jenndefer: Value in terms of liquidity? @PacmanBlur: Value in terms of liquidity, but there's also inherent value. At the time when Blur launched, @opensea was valued at $10 billion. So you can basically think of it like that market structure in terms of a NFT marketplace, whichever NFT marketplace it is that's leading, is basically worth $10 billion, and it happens to be worth $10 billion in a structure that is rewarding the equity holders of OpenSea. But if that market structure was inhabited by a decentralized protocol, that 10 billion could actually be realized by the contributors to that protocol, by the holders of that protocol, by the users of it. And so, the goal was basically can we make Blur that market structure? And in order to do that, we wanted the community to basically contribute to it. And so, the whole idea behind the point system was can we basically define a system that allows users to contribute to that outcome? It's not like the value is coming out of nowhere. We know there's value in this market structure if it's achievable. That's why we had confidence in being able to deploy this point system and having there be something to back it.

📈 USERS AS MARKET MAKERS @jenndefer: Your users are your market makers. @PacmanBlur: Yeah, exactly. It's like the users, you know, every user is inherently kind of like a market maker, like whether you are… @jenndefer: profitable or not… @PacmanBlur: Exactly. If you list or you bid, you're doing the job of the market maker. So, you know, and that from that perspective, it was like, ok if you're a user and you're contributing that way, can we actually like calculate your contribution and and basically like come up with a formula for it and actually show you, hey, here's how much value your contribution is producing? And then in that way, we can actually distribute the value of that market structure to the users in a fair way, effectively. So that was a lot of the thinking behind it.

💸 INCENTIVIZING LIQUIDITY @wardaddycapital: Do you see this incentivized liquidity as people like actually wanting things? We see farmers all the time, like they get dumped on and then they dump on the next farmer and then they manipulate the floors. So yes, they're market-making, but it's with ill intent. So like, how do you kind of see @blur_io, @Blast_L2, Blend, all kind of flowing into the NFT finance ecosystem? @PacmanBlur: Yeah, so that's a great question. There's like a number of topics that you touched on there. One is just like, in terms of the API, actually, one of the emergent properties is that we noticed a lot of third-party APIs actually just popping up that were very good. I forget the names of specific ones, but basically, we noticed that those APIs were just popping up and were really good. So when it comes to individual implementations, like @BendDAO for example, not indexing the floor, for whatever reason, it's, I think that's more idiosyncratic. It's not like a systemic outcome, it’s more so implementation specific, right? Like it is like very, very possible for @BendDAO or like a player like BendDAO to actually like accurately track the floor. It's actually like, pretty trivial. So I think that it's hard. And the interesting thing about like NFT finance is that there's so few players, it’s really hard to, you know, derive whether an outcome is like systemic versus idiosyncratic.

🪞 BLEND MIRRORS A CEX @PacmanBlur: The design of Blend is basically to go and replicate that system as much as possible for NFTs, and it's actually quite similar. So when you borrow on Blend, you have a loan that you're paying interest on and basically that loan is by default. Like let's say I have a Bored Ape and I borrow, just to keep it simple, I borrow like one ETH, right? So it's like worth like 11 ETH and I borrow 1 ETH on it. The lender can call that loan and it triggers like a 30 hour auction. And because the market is mostly efficient, it is almost definite that that loan is going to get refinanced by another lender, right? So it'll be like a very low interest loan it'll trigger into an auction and then some other lender will step in and take it over. And so I can basically keep that loan open indefinitely. Then the question is like, oh, when does it get liquidated? When does the lender trigger an auction and then it doesn't get refinanced? Well, it doesn't get refinanced when the credit conditions of the market change. So let's say Bored Ape went from 11 ETH to 2 ETH. Now this 10% LTV loan is now actually a 50% LTV loan. At that point, there might actually be less lenders willing to loan against this or the lender might be willing to loan, but they're going to require a higher interest rate. And so this mechanism basically mirrors the CEX the centralized exchange in a way in which the the loan is indefinite it'll have a flexible interest rate based on like the credit conditions of the market and then if the the market turns too South, then you're going to get liquidated effectively, just like it would happen on the centralized exchange. So that's like the system design of Blend, it basically kind of like mirrors that experience on, on a CEX just with like a decentralized lending protocol. Blend to me is actually like one of the coolest things that the contributors have like ever created.

🤝 THE PREMISE OF BLEND @PacmanBlur: The entire premise of Blend is that as long as the market is relatively efficient, then it's going to basically mirror that CEX-like experience and things will be processed properly. Where it falls is like, let's say I'm a lender on a Bored Ape and you're borrowing 1 ETH against your Bored Ape and it's at 11 ETH and I call that loan and let's say I'm like the only lender that exists in the market…so even though anyone else could step in and they should step in because @wardaddycapital: it’s a good deal.. @PacmanBlur: Yea it’s a great deal, I’m going to get like 10 ETH on that. So I'm going to, you know, what is that like 1100% return? Like that's incredible. I should not be able to get that, but like, let's say I'm the only lender in the market that is looking at this in that case. Now this system is not working as intended because the market is just like inefficient and it's not working because the system doesn't work or is broken. It's just working because there's not enough attention on that market specifically. And so these like inefficiencies…you know, like if you put $100 on the ground, for the most part, it's going to get picked up in New York City. If you put $100 on the ground like a forest, maybe it's never going to get picked up. So the whole purpose of the blend incentive is to basically provide a reason for lenders to basically be like observing these markets. And so, you know, giving them an incentive to participate in the market means that when there's like $100 bill on the ground, someone's going to pick it up eventually. So all of that basically goes to say that I think that the incentives generally work as intended because there's enough eyes watching these on chain auctions that if there were a large arbitrage that was possible, someone would come in and pick it up. If someone's not coming in and picking up, it's probably because the credit conditions did worsen to such an extent that it's perceived as too risky to go and pick it up, and then it's going to get liquidated, which is what should happen in that market condition.

🤔 ARE INCENTIVES GOOD OR BAD? @wardaddycapital: You see certain marketplaces and lending platforms and things like that that do have incentives that aren't catching bids on certain things, and it's actually really impressive. I think what you've done is you've really captured the attention via incentives or whatever you like. Like I've always liked using @blur_io as a marketplace and things like that. And I prefer that to other marketplaces, right? But it's pretty cool to see these incentives actually working, whereas like other platforms are kind of failing with this. @PacmanBlur: Yeah, I think one of the reasons why the incentives get like a bad rep is just because it's quite challenging to implement correctly. It's like very technical, so it's very easy to shoot yourself in the foot with incentives. And we also see not just like poorly implemented incentives, like now that it's like more popular to do these like point programs, but not just like poorly implemented incentives, but also just almost like adversarial incentives where it's like the team is kind of like farming the farmers in a way. So there's like all these ways in which the incentives get implemented in like a sub-optimal way. And I think that kind of just skews the perspective on it when it's like not the the tool that's the issue it's like not like the fire that's the issue. It's like whether you're using the fire to build a combustion engine or to burn stuff down, right?

❌ ADVERSARIAL INCENTIVES ARE BAD @jenndefer: I mean, high level, what do good incentives look like to you versus bad incentives? @PacmanBlur: Yeah, there is a number of things. I guess one of the easiest things control from like a builder perspective is just whether it's adversarial or not. So like something that I see a lot now is you have some teams that are, like I mentioned, just farming the farmers. And what that looks like is maybe it's like an exchange that's incentivizing volume and the exchange is also taking a fee at the same time. So basically it's just like a value transfer from the farmers to the exchange to the team. It's an especially malicious thing because sometimes they'll also not specify how long the trade period is, right? So it's like this indefinite thing and you're just giving them your fees and they're collecting fees at the same time. And it's actually like super misaligned incentives because the users are basically transferring value like losing money in the short term and giving that money to the team. The team is actually making money in a short time horizon and the users are maybe going to make that money back in a long time horizon. But like it doesn't really matter to the team at that point because they already collected all the fees. So that's a very like adversarial situation because the team is earning on a much shorter time horizon than the users and they're also directly earning from the users with those different time horizons. So that is like adversarial and you kind of see various instances of this across the board on like every chain, right? Like it's just always going to be kind of like co-opted by these…I don't know if they're necessarily like bad actors, you know, they're not not like necessarily malicious…but it kind of has this malicious outcome. That's like one of the most common issues that i see.

👎 SUB-OPTIMAL INCENTIVE USE EXAMPLES @PacmanBlur: Now, this is the second issue, which is incentives that I think implemented sub-optimally. The thing that we always recommend to teams building with us is incentivize liquidity, don't incentivize volume. It is like the number one most common thing for people to think to do is to incentivize volume. It's been tried so many times before in the NFT world, like, you know, LooksRare tried it, X2Y2 tried it, in the token world, Fcoin tried it, it was like an exchange back in the day. There are like so many protocols that I see just like incentivize volume and I guess it's just like one of those things that we're just gonna keep on doing for whatever reason. I think it should because it's like it it sounds like it's the right thing to incentivize, but it's not. The reason why it's not is because basically all that does is it incentivizes MEV people to basically come in and arbitrage the incentive program in a very like non-constructive way. So sometimes we see teams gearing towards that and then we try to basically step in and say hey, this is kind of a suboptimal incentive scheme and you should probably, you know, tweak it and sometimes like recommend ways to tweak it. It's up to the team to whether they want to listen to that or not. But I would say it's like probably happening on @Blast_L2 to an extent, but i don't think it's happening in a malicious way, but it's definitely. way, way, way less than what I see on other ecosystems.

✨ INCENTIVIZING VANITY METRICS @PacmanBlur: If a project's incentivizing for vanity metrics, there's nothing you can do about it. There's just an improperly implemented system, but it's very easy to think that's helpful. It's helpful maybe short-term, but long-term, it's not helpful. When it comes to whales versus retail, I think in an optimal world, there is always some sort of... you know, boost that you can provide to retail to like the smaller players. That that is kind of a desirable outcome, right? Even if you provide like a minor boost, it is kind of like desirable. The issue is that there isn't really a way to do that on chain because it's not like you know if an address belongs to retail or if it's just like a simple account from a whale. There's no information that you have on that, and because you don't have that information, you can't actually design a system to reward those retail basically. So whenever I've been able to contribute to any sort of incentive design, I typically try to not think about whale versus retail and more so just think about how can you, you know, perfectly to the extent that you can capture in a numerical way the contribution that someone provides. So in the in the case of like blast as an example is like you get points like every block for your your balance. Right. So if you get if you deposit 1 ETH and you hold out for a bit, you're earning certain amount of points. If you deposit 1000 ETH, you're also getting points and it's like perfectly proportional. So that sort of system is kind of just like perfectly fair in a way. It does mean the whales are gonna get more, but they're also putting in 1000x more, right? So it's perfectly proportionate proportional.

🟢 INCENTIVES WHEN IT COMES TO BLAST @PacmanBlur: For @Blast_L2, it's a more complex problem, because on the point side, which is for TVL, that's 100% not vanity, because it's literally just based on the TVL, so it's just like, you can't fake the TVL, you can't fake liquidity. Liquidity is one of those things that's very, very hard to fake. Volume is one of those things that is very easy to fake, in many regards, so for the gold, it's really just a matter of looking at each specific Dapp and trying to think through like what are the KPIs that can be authentic, and what are the KPIs that, like, you know, can be easily faked, but maybe you can get some other signals to try to get that sense of authenticity. So, you know, when it comes to a DEX, for example, maybe they can fake their volume, maybe they can fake the number of users, but they can't fake liquidity. They can't fake the tightness of the liquidity.

🫢THE ZERO TRADING FEES SOLUTION FOR CRYPTO? @PacmanBlur: One example of something that’s possible on @Blast_L2 is it basically enables new business models. So, uh, if you're like a @perpprotocol DEX and you have like $100,000,000 TVL, normally the way you monetize that is you charge trading fees to your users, right? And you know, that's a tried and true business model, but the other way you can do that is on Blast is you can actually just monetize the yield. That $100,000,000 TVL, if it's like USCB, if it's like a stable coin, which is probably the default for a perp decks, you're going to be earning around, you know, $10,000,000-$15,000,000 in yield annually and that's like basically totally invisible to the users. So now that you're earning like all this revenue and your users, you can actually charge your users zero trading fees, so it's like a zero trading fee Perp DEX. You know, where have we seen zero trading fee trading apps before, @RobinhoodApp, right? Robinhood, they came out and they launched the first like zero trading fee app for stocks and that had profound impacts on the market, right? @jenndefer: Especially retail. @PacmanBlur: Especially retail. It enabled the entire Wall Street Bets meta and retail participation just like completely changed and it basically forever altered the stock market landscape. You know, similarly I think for Blast, the direct effect is maybe you have some Dapps that the users earn the yield and the Dapps maybe incorporate the yield. But I think like the secondary emerging effects are actually like it could have, you know, as significant of an impact on the broader market as Robinhood did on the stock market.

🫶 FAIR CHANGES @wardaddycapital: One of the things I really wanted to ask you about is loyalty. So points program, we've talked about quite a bit, right? Loyalty is something that you brought into the space and you're like, look, you use OpenSea? Sorry bro. That's just how it works. When you guys announced @Blast_L2 , one of my first thoughts is like fuck what's going to happen to people that are using other L2s, right? Like, are you going to take a similar approach to saying like, all right, It's not OpenSea anymore, we’ve gone up to the big leagues. If you're using Arbitrum, like I hate to break it to you, sorry. And we've seen this now with dApps, right? Like you put them into the one, three and six bucket. You're like, if you have a platform or you're serving on another blockchain, like… @jenndefer: 1.5… @wardaddycapital: Yeah, you're not gonna get the same kickbacks. Is that something that you guys have thought about? Are you looking for people to be more blast native? And we're already seeing a flourishing ecosystem that has happened in what, a month? It's insane. So it's working. @PacmanBlur: Yeah, I would say the core driver for any decision we make is not winning market share or having loyalty. Those are not the outputs that we care about. It's more so about how can we define contributions to the ecosystem and if loyalty is something that contributes significantly to the ecosystem, then we want to define that. If it's not, then we're not going to define it. And it's more so about how do we fairly evaluate the contributions to the ecosystem. So that's the core driver. Loyalty is one of those factors, but when it comes to loyalty for users, in general, I'm not a fan of retroactive surprises. I think that's like a bit of like a rug, right? If at the end we were just like, oh, by the way, like all of these users who use these other L2s are like, we're wrecking you that's just like unfair. @jenndefer: It would be war on the timeline. @wardaddycapital: It would be insane. @PacmanBlur: Yeah, it would be a very eventful day, but I think that that would just be a betrayal of trust. So I really don't like that, which is also why it's like with any sort of like incentive system, we try to be very explicit about like, how it works, what's allowed, what's not allowed. It's sometimes very, very hard, but in general, that's our ideal because we want to make it very clear to the user like, hey, this is what's being rewarded. If we need to make changes, we try to make it in a fair way. Basically, we have a commitment to the community to stay along certain guidelines of behavior. We don't have infinite flexibility. Then within those guidelines, then we have our design space. So when it comes to loyalty, to the extent that it is beneficial to the community, basically we're always going to be thinking about how do we better define contributions to the ecosystem. But regardless of what we do, we would always try to do it in a fair way that's not necessarily retroactively punishing people.

🔫 NFTS ON BLAST @jenndefer: If you could just paint the vision of what a robust NFT ecosystem looks like to you, specifically on Blast, and if there's anything you're seeing from NFT projects or that you want to see NFT projects explore more. @PacmanBlur: Yeah, I think that in general, these ecosystems develop, if you think about every market cycle, it's not randomness. People talk about market cycles, but the reason why they operate in cycles is not necessarily the rule of law of the market, it's actually more so due to the underlying market developments and improvements that enable these boom cycles. So, for example, in 2013, it was Coinbase enabling retail to buy Bitcoin. That's a huge catalyst. Right. And then that enables that movement. In 2017, it was Ethereum launching and enabling smart contracts and ICOs, which is new capital formation. And that enabled another huge wave. 2020, it was DeFi again. Now you can actually trade on chain and do other stuff. That's another huge wave. So pretty much every single cycle is driven by fundamental developments and improvements in the infrastructure. When it comes to L2s, what I've noticed is that we haven't had that sort of cycle. And I think it's due to the underlying developments in the market infrastructure just not being there. One aspect of it is having very fleshed out NFT marketplaces. You just need NFT marketplaces for these things to function. @jenndefer: Blur. @PacmanBlur: That's an example of one. It's a great one. But basically, you need that but then also, when it comes to L2s, I think it's really only interesting if you can do new things on the L2s.

🗺️ NAVIGATING THROUGH HACKS @wardaddycapital: Were you at any point in the @munchables hack? There was a lot of chat on the chain about you guys running back the chain and things like that and the centralization versus decentralization conversation. What was going through your mind during that time and was that a realistic possibility and what would be the ramifications in your mind? @PacmanBlur: Yeah, it's a great question. We were very fortunate in that it never got to that point where we even were deep into that discussion because all of our focus was on how we can support the Munchables seem to basically try to navigate the situation as effectively as possible to maximize the likelihood of recovering the funds. And so, I wouldn't be able to give a specific answer because we never even got to the point of really debating it. But I think something I noticed on CT and this is a level of nuance that I think was missed, is that it's not just a binary thing, it’s actually a question of time as well. You really need to look at that. Today, Ethereum hard forking because a Dapp gets hacked. Dapps get hacked all the time on Ethereum. Ethereum doesn't hard fork, and it's a decentralized and robust ecosystem such that it can withstand those hacks, but that's today. If you revert back time to 2016 when Ethereum was in its infancy, they actually went through a very similar situation actually similar amounts of capital as well and what Ethereum did in that situation when the DAO got hacked was they hard-forked and it was so controversial it created ETC, so super controversial but that move, we'll never know what would have happened if they didn't do this. But I think it's fair to say that that move is what saved Ethereum. It allowed the community to recover its funds to continue building out the ecosystem and now create this robust, super decentralized ecosystem. So I think when evaluating that decision, you really need to think about the time component and at what stage is this chain in its development cycle. So I think for Blast, that's something that we definitely would have looked at very heavily. But in terms of what the answer would have been, I can't say just because we haven't done enough. We never got to that point.

😇 SMART PEOPLE ARE HYPER CRITICAL @jenndefer: And you tell me if I'm wrong, but when I look at you, I see someone who is very young, very driven, has clearly, you push yourself. And I feel like in order to do that, because not everyone can do it, you're probably highly critical and very reflective of the things that you do. I would love to know, looking back at the past few projects, and specifically Blast, where do you feel like the areas of improvement are? And then what's your North star that you're building towards? @PacmanBlur: Yeah, that's a great question. I really like that question because I feel you're a very highly critical person. That was so apparent as soon as I walked in and you were adjusting the camera. So that was awesome. Actually, what I've noticed is typically people that execute at a high level are very critical. So I like that question.

🫵LAST MINUTE ALPHA @wardaddycapital: Last-minute alpha, anything that you want to share, the floor is yours, anything that you feel is important to share. This is your time. @PacmanBlur: This is touching on my previous point, but something that I really want to see less of the most is when you see, uh, dapps farming the users. That's a really negative outcome because the users are the lifeblood of the ecosystem. And it creates an adversarial environment. I think that for users, it's very hard to put the onus on them to study these things in depth. And then also for a lot of these dapps, if they have opaque systems and can change them and rug at will, it's very hard to put that onto the users. But I think something that I would stress the most is that if the user can try to think about for each dapp, if they have an incentive system or not. If you just look at the dapp and you can try to evaluate, okay, are they aligned with the user on the same time horizon, right? So is the dapp only getting rewarded when the user gets rewarded? Is the dapp only succeeding over a long time horizon because that's how the user is going to get rewarded as well? Is the dapp transparent in their communications? I think if the users paid attention to those signals more and diverted attention away from the teams that are not really playing fair, I think that ends up creating a better systemic outcome because now the dApps that should get the attention get the attention and the dApps that shouldn’t get the attention don’t get the attention. So if there’s one thing I think it’s just for the users, basically just really try to pay attention to that and try to lean into the dApps that are being fair and transparent.

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