Nate Cha, how are you? I'm good, I'm good. Thanks for having me on Peter. Yeah, thank you for being on the Block by Block podcast. I've been following Eclipse for some time. You guys have made a lot of waves recently, especially since the, it's kind of a new category that you guys are building, Solana VM on Ethereum, or is it the other way around? I mean, we'll talk about that. Okay, good. But I wanted to start with maybe a little bit about your, know, how'd you get to where you are? There aren't, a ton of Web3 growth marketers. And so how'd you end up where you are right now? Yeah. Um, yeah. Career journey has been very interesting to say the least. Um, I remember when I first went to NYU college, I thought for the longest time I was going to be a lawyer actually, uh, took the LSAT and everything. Um, but for a very long time, I wanted to do like public law, like basically the public defendant type stuff. Um, but every lawyer I talked to basically ended up talking me out of doing law school. Um, so I ended up doing a lot of different stuff. coached debate for a while. I worked on political campaigns and then I ended up landing at a company called Nielsen as like my first very serious college internship. And Nielsen, if you haven't heard of it, is basically a giant like marketing consulting data conglomerate. So like their clients are extremely wide in scope, but I worked on clients at Nielsen for like well over like three and a half, four years. And the scope of those clients ranged from CPG clients, like manufacturing stuff, like car manufacturers to like consumer products, like toothpaste and perfume, cologne, cosmetics, even like candy, that type of stuff, to media clients as well. So for a year and a half, I was heavily involved in like cosmetic CPG. Then after that, I worked on media clients, primarily TV networks, sports leagues like the NBA, NFL, even NASCAR. And then my last like stint at Nielsen was with the social media giant. So this was like LinkedIn, TikTok, Twitter, Instagram. And throughout my entire time at Nielsen, basically, I was just advising these clients on like their marketing strategy. So whether it was like advertising campaigns and how that worked, product placement on shelves, packaging, everything that you can think about when it comes to the consumer journey of deciding to buy or interact with a product. Nielsen is heavily involved in some way because the data that these companies leverage to basically make these decisions, Nielsen's heavily embedded in that process. So after doing this for a long time, I just hit a point in Nielsen where I was like, think I've kind of... learned as much as I can here and grown as much as I can. It's a giant company. It's time for me to move on and do something new. And I was actually very deep in the process of going to work at Disney actually. So literally had the offer in hand when DyDX came across basically my radar because I had a friend that was working on the BD team there at the time. And he basically said, Hey, like DYDX is hitting the point of our product journey where we need to invest a lot more in marketing and we don't have that talent in house. Are you interested? And he called me the day I was about to sign my Disney offer. So I was like, look, dude, I appreciate it. I appreciate you thinking of me, but I have this offer in hand for a company that I know very well and I think I could do very well here. I buy a little bit of Bitcoin and Ethereum, but I don't know all that much about crypto. Are you sure I'm the right fit? And what he essentially told me was, we just need someone with a lot of marketing know how we can teach you all the crypto stuff. And do you IDX is like a perps product. It's derivative. So like, it's like pretty deep in the crypto space in terms of like what the product offering is. And one thing led to another. And that's how I ended up working in crypto full time. So when I joined crypto, it was pre FTX. It was like the golden bull run, all the asset prices were flying. went to the FTX in Bahamas. conference. I saw the actual venue where all the employees were housed and everything. was taking business meetings on yachts and I was like, what the heck have I walked into? What is this industry? I think I made the right call. This is so interesting. This is a completely different world than I'm used to. No one's wearing suits. Everyone's wearing Hawaiian t-shirts and we're on boats. What is this? And then within half a year, everything imploded. And yeah, like at the YDX, was basically scaling everything, right? I was the first marketing hire. So everything from branding to helping with the growth campaigns, we experimented with advertising, community building. Like I was heavily involved in all of that. And I think also seeing like the different cycle periods between the bull and the bear. And frankly, after FTX, that's like one of the worst bear markets that crypto has ever seen. Like I learned a lot, not only in terms of like, what the user demographic actually is, how you're supposed to package and present all this stuff, like the unique niches and how people communicate things and consume these products and interact with them and like the implicit nature of like everyone in crypto speculating on something at the end of the day. It was a very big wake up call because like a lot of my peers in crypto started to realize like it's not the same scale of spend or strategy as I've seen in web two. Like the budgets are a lot smaller. the audience is a lot more niche. So a lot of the playbooks that I saw, like these major like corporate clients I worked with before executing just did not exist in crypto. And it's been very interesting to see the evolution over the last three years in this industry because it's gotten a lot more saturated. When I was first at the YDX, there wasn't really like any reputable perpstex competitors. Now like you have hyperliquid and all these other competitors like Vertex, for example. There's a lot more infrastructure projects too. When I was first at the YDX, like the idea of an L2 was extremely novel at the time. Now there's a lot of different L2s. There's some projects that are labeling themselves as L3s now. So like it's gotten a lot harder to cut through the noise because there's so much more to compete with. And with all the cyclical nature of crypto and post FTX, I don't think the reputation of crypto at large beyond crypto natives has really rebounded to the level I saw before. And that's slowly happening over time, but the role of marketing is kind of full touch in this industry. You don't just do advertising campaigns. You don't just do brand. You don't just do PR. You kind of touch everything here. And unlike these clients I used to work for where like marketing teams were like six plus, 10 plus employees, a lot of these crypto companies at best, sometimes I like one or two. So how do you kind of optimize your time, optimize your budget to kind of drive the most results? And you're not just trying to solve like brand awareness. You're also trying to solve growth questions at the same time. So very challenging task, a very broad task. but it's also makes it super exciting cause you're kind of at the forefront of this, like nascent technology that's only continuing to grow. I agree. And what I love about you sharing your background is it caused me to reflect on my background because I think we started out kind of in a similar place. I spent a lot of time in consumer packaged goods marketing research. And I love that mainly because I got all the free food that we did testing for, right? I remember one campaign that we were, one client that we were helping. It was very early in the, it was a packaging test for applesauce. And this was like before, this was around the time the same, the time Gogurt came out with their new packaging. And then the applesauce where you kind of twist the cap and then you kind of eat the applesauce. Like all of that was brand new. And so it was very interesting to see what the test results were across different markets in the US. And that was a lot of fun. One thing that you said that I think is quite interesting is, know, in blockchain, there aren't a lot of growth people yet, but it's maturing and we're getting more and more people from varying backgrounds and experiences. One thing I love about the Eclipse website is that it feels like it follows really, really good fundamentals. You know, when I go to a website, I want to know like, what is it you guys do? How are you doing it? And I want to talk a little bit about that because I think that might be a good segue into what is Eclipse. And if your website doesn't answer that question, then that's an opportunity for improvement. And I feel like yours definitely does. And so when I first go on the Eclipse website, I scroll down and I see that video or turbo horns. Yeah. And tell us about that video. First of all, it brings back kind of lots of nostalgic feelings. It feels romantic. And there's this new character, this mascot. Tell us about the mascot and kind of the thought behind how you guys created that and what your intentions were. Yeah, so something that I've kind of resonated with from one of my marketing professors since college is the rule of seven. and Nielsen really reinforced this when I worked there too, which is basically like a consumer has to interact with your brand seven times before it sticks. So the idea is like how many different ways can they consume or interact with your brand before they start to identify like, this is like Eclipse or this is Gogurt, like you were talking about. so everything that you do, basically, like you just have to think like how many different ways can I hit the consumer with visuals that like kind of make them understand the brand identity? and hopefully it resonates so they keep coming back. So the website's an example of that. The mascot's an example of that. Twitter is an example. Any content we put out any new product offering any gap, honestly built on Eclipse. Like I think about this very holistically. and then let's be a little less broad and apply it to the context of crypto. So when I first joined Eclipse, the CEO of Eclipse VJ and I had worked together at DYDX before. So he was actually like my boss there for a very short period of time. So when he first approached me, he basically was like, Hey, like I saw you scale marketing at DYDX. did a great job. Do you want to run it back here? And I was like, okay, we talked about it for a bit and one thing led to another. And then I ended up at Eclipse after DYDX. And when I was first doing my like formal interview for the team, we were talking about a lot of different stuff because they were trying to figure out how to scale their entire marketing engine. kind of similar to what I was solving at the YDX. And the topic of the crypto intern account came up. And I basically told them, I was like, look, like I think by nature crypto is very cyclical. can all kind of acknowledge that there's a lot of these copycat protocols. A lot of protocols are doing the same exact thing that others are doing. The one way that you can stand out a lot is not just your core product offering and doing something fresh, but also having a very different take on how to brand it. And The crypto internet account was something that started like pretty interesting because it was like, let's just be less corporate. Let's kind of have like a Twitter account that interacts with people. just like very real. Toast a lot of like unhinged or mean content, but just like everything else in crypto, people just started copying it and it became super diluted and it wasn't high quality anymore. Eclipse was also experimenting with this. I was like, do you guys actually think this is really gaining any momentum? My read is no. And I also don't think necessarily like this is going to make our brand like benefit at all. If we keep investing in this, why don't we try something new? so I said, let's just punt on the internal account altogether. And I was like, I want to explore the idea of like a mascot. Cause if I think about it, like infrastructure is extremely technical. It's hard for the average end user to really resonate with infrastructure itself. and I feel like the best way for us to do this is to have some sort of brand. collateral that has way more mass appeal than the technical stack of Eclipse itself. So a lot of the ideation around the mascot was one, doing something fresh, but also trying to come up with something that could resonate with a much broader audience than just trying to promote the technical intricacies of Eclipse. So at the time, before I joined, The Eclipse core team had talked a lot about how like Eclipse is a thick sequencer thick with two C's like, it's like super fat. Like, it's just so robust. and we have like a stock marketer on the team who had experimented with Highland cows. So he brought this Highland cow into an art gallery in New York and it got like crazy viral. like people like outside the realm of crypto altogether, like these random influencers on like Tik Tok and Twitter started posting pictures with the cow and selfies. And like, it was like all over Twitter for a day. And I was like, a real literal cow brought into an art gallery in New York. And I was like, wait, I think there's potential here. Like if we can link the cow to like the tech stack, because we were talking about thick sequencers and all this stuff, like there's actually like a cohesive brand like element here and like a story that we can tell. And then the question became like, while we were evaluating like a rebrand and the website design that you just alluded to, it became like, okay, like what does this actually look like? And that's honestly where I took a step back and was like, all right, like the whole point of this is to try and get some sort of element of mass appeal, right? Like I don't want this to become too on the nose related to crypto. When I really think about it, like I want something where you look at it you're like, this is either cute or this is really cool. Like, what is this? Like, what is this like cow? Like, what is this mascot really? So I started working with designers and kind of brainstorming and I was like, okay, like when I think outside the context of crypto, like the content in the media that I consume, like I really like anime, I really like stories that tell something and resonate with me emotionally. Like, let's look for inspiration somewhere there. So I was coming through different anime type stuff, and then I landed on like Akira with the motorbike, that iconic animation where like she like kind of slides backwards, as well as speed racer. And I was like, okay, like TPS and all like the speed and like performance marketing. Performance of like blockchains is becoming super saturated. We can kind of allude to that because Eclipse is super fast But we don't have to be so on the face like our core brand positioning is like around our stellar TPS because I think that's like it gets old super fast So we designed this basic mascot to basically be like, okay. It's a highland cow This has like mass appeal at virality potential we can turn him into some sort of racer, kind of like a Kira and speed racer to kind of allude to the speed elements and execution capabilities of building salon on Ethereum. And we can kind of build a narrative off of that. And this is actually like starting to see real traction. Like there's people that have come to Eclipse because they interacted with the mascot first, as opposed to reading our technical documentation. That was exactly the goal, right? The rule of seven, you want people to interact with your brand in as many different ways as possible. And it really doesn't matter why they got brought into the fold. The question is once they got brought into the fold, like, can you retain them on top of that? so that's kind of like the backstory around it. And to be honest, like I try not to micromanage my employees, but if there's one thing I micromanage, it's brand. cause it's really hard to build a brand, keep telling a coherent story and not lose momentum. And if there's not someone in the driver's seat that really dictates like, okay, this is what we're going to do. This is how we're going to continue evolving the story. Then it falls flat. Really good example of this. People on my team were like, this stuff is doing really well. We should double down. I wanted to collect that and be very intentional about that. I checked our engagement rates, not just in Twitter, but our Discord, how much art was being spun up by the community related to our mascot. How was this actually resonating with people? And once I was confident in the data, the question then became, let's start. storyboarding and building something around this, but also let's make sure that the quality of our doesn't decrease. Cause if like we start just shipping for lack of a better word, excuse my French, like shitty animation and like that doesn't really help us all that much. So the team at a certain point was telling me like, we just need to make a lot more turbo content. Let's start using fiber. I was like, absolutely not. Like the reason why this is resonating is like. it's quality is really good. People actually enjoy interacting with the content and it's fresh. If we just like outsource all this work to random, like graphic designers on Fiverr, I think it loses its appeal really quickly. So if you really think about it, like the amount of videos we've actually shipped with Turbo in terms of unique animation is only two. We've only actually produced two concrete distinct video pieces. A lot of the other stuff is like hand drawn, like static imagery, but Because of how intentional we've been with packaging that and like storyboarding anything we put out, I think that's why it's also resonated so much. Eclipse is a 34 person company for most of 2024. were 25 or less employees. Like our edge is not pumping out content at like extremely high quantities. Our edge is just being very thoughtful and shipping really good quality. And I think that reflects in our marketing strategy and like our brand mascot and just like brand strategy in general. The brand mascot I think has it's and you can see this I I followed eclipse before you had joined and I remember it was quite technical before you had joined and then when I went to the website Most recently I was very surprised and it's memorable and turbo horns the video and it's a can be in all of your content in the community and And it's memorable and I love that part Now tell me about the, you mentioned storyboarding. What does that process look like inside of Eclipse and what could other growth marketers kind of learn from that approach? Yeah, I think with a lot of people like in crypto growth marketing is very heavily tied to incentives. And I don't necessarily disagree with that. Right. Like, especially if you're like a DeFi protocol or something, right. It's pretty straightforward growth path, right. You TVL, you need people to actually use the product. Can you deliver an airdrop or basically financially incentivized usage? But especially for like infra or like any product that is in crypto in a very heavily saturated landscape, I think that that scope of thinking of growth, purely as incentives is too small. Cause like you also need to prioritize like the upper funnel of brand awareness at the same time. so when it comes to storyboarding, like I think my greatest strength as a marketer, especially having been in the trenches for like three plus years now in crypto specifically, and like using a lot of these products and like forming different protocols and stuff is kind of understanding the core user audience. So whether that's speculators, traders, Builders like I kind of understand how they think about things and I also understand how much exhaustion there is for lack of a better word Like there's just so much that is getting spun up and so many different projects that are getting VC funding are trying to bootstrap like their initial like go-to-market strategy that like there's just so much noise all the time For any single thing that you're trying to farm for example Like there's like 10 other things that you could choose to interact with. And the question is like, what's the best use of my time, if I'm being honest. and when it comes to storyboarding, think the fundamental place I started is like, okay, what is the key thing that we're shipping? But what is the key message we're trying to actually do here? so our launch video, which you've alluded to is like a very good example of this. Like when I was talking to Terry, our head of strategy, I think the number one thing we did is like, there's a lot of fatigue in the market right now because people are just kind of. That up. It's been a pretty brutal bear cycle after FTX. There's a million different things to play with. Some stuff has been like, for lack of better words, a lot of rug pulls recently. Like there's just like as a user and as a builder, it's kind of like PVP and crypto. Yeah, it's kind of part of it. Like you're, especially as a trader, you're always trading against someone else. We understand that, but like doing that 24 seven is not exactly enjoyable for most people either, especially if you're a developer. Like you just kind of want to be able to build something cool. And yeah, you want to build like a sustainable business, but you also want to have a good time while you're doing it. and that's kind of what we noticed was the ethos of crypto at the beginning, right? Before all the saturation started happening, a lot of people were just like genuinely a lot more optimistic about the future of the industry and excited about building stuff. But somewhere along the way that kind of morale disappeared. and the excitement kind of turned into a lot more cynicism and pessimistic attitudes. So when we came up with this launch video, we're like, we could go really deep into the tech stack if we want. Like maybe that's the way we sell it, but like more and more, we started to realize like actually maybe the one thing we want to lean into more is like the emotional aspect of things. And I have this message resonate, right? The whole point of building Eclipse was to basically have like a scalable tech stack for apps to deploy on and not have to worry like three years down the road, did I choose the wrong tech stack to build on? Not just in terms of distribution, but the ability to scale my DAP. So yeah, that's part of it, but it's also just like, is this an ecosystem where like values were aligned? Like we're going to have a good time here. There's like a reason to be optimistic here. Like this is kind of how I see the future of the industry growing. as opposed to constantly being PVP all the time, it's actually more like a cohesive collaborative environment. and that's kind of the premise that we started with was let's go to the market with this instead. And we can counter position against every other launch video we've seen in the last two years. It's always flashy animation. Like, my God, look at all this, like this TPS or like this, like random product feature. that's like snappy video editing. It's like, no, let's kind of just do completely something different and we'll stand out that way. And I think honestly, it was a big bet. Like it wasn't like necessarily a slam dunk when we started planning it, but like, that's kind of how we read the landscape and thank God, like it resonated. Right. I think it hit really hard. We were talking to talent for the day of the launch. Um, and from there, it was also just kind of, it's played a lot of a role in terms of the new devs that we've onboarded into the ecosystem and like a core part of our strategy when it comes to building community and stuff. It's like, let's believe in something for once. Um, let's not build an ecosystem where it's like, okay, the airdrop happens now they're irrelevant. They're dead. Like, that's not the point. Um, we're trying to build something that has like a lasting legacy here. So we should communicate that in our core. rollouts of products in our launch videos too. in the book, Differentiate or Die, they talk about how being better, faster, cheaper, almost never works. What does work is if you're able to communicate how different you are. And I think you guys definitely do that in the messaging and the positioning that I've seen. Now, straddling between two communities, Ethereum and Solana, and the messaging of Solana Speed, with Ethereum's liquidity. You could have taken this in a more combative approach or an approach that unifies both communities. What were the internal discussions at Eclipse like as you considered the needs of both communities and the ethos of both, which are somewhat different? Yeah, I think it's very interesting if you take a step back, because I think every single key inflection point in crypto, I've noticed like it's the old legacy tech that kind of dunks on the new one. like, when Ethereum was first to market, like people were like, anything outside of Bitcoin is a scam. Like, no, Ethereum is useless. Like, what's the point? The only point of crypto is like a store of value. Bitcoin is the only one that matters. And then Ethereum started to get some traction. Same thing kind of happened with Solana. A lot of Ethereum axes were like, Solana is completely irrelevant. This is a grift. It doesn't matter at all. And then the meme coin craze kind of took off. Solana started to get a lot of traction. The reality is there's a lot of liquidity on Ethereum, but a lot of the legacy users are not willing to move that to a different chain. There's a lot of people that are still using the old. you know Metamask like Metamask is one of the older wallets now but like there's people that will not move their funds off Metamask it doesn't matter whether like the UX of phantom or some of these other new wallets is better like they just refuse to move their funds off of the Ethereum like blockchain so there's all this liquidity to tap but the problem is like scaling on the ETH L1 is very very difficult and if you've tried to do anything on the ETH L1 you'll be able to tell that right away so whether that's trading in size whether that's deploying any type of DAP. It's just, it's really freaking hard. The reason why DYDX, like now the DYDX has moved to like an app chain, but originally they moved to an L2 specifically because of scaling issues. So Ethereum itself has gone into this kind of like, let's scale Ethereum by the L2 kind of roadmap is what's been pushed for like the last year, year and a half. But then we saw all the traction of Solana and just the execution capacity of Solana. And we realized like maybe the solution is actually that we take Solana as the execution engine and then put that on top of Ethereum so you can tap Ethereum's vast liquidity and resourcing and you can kind of merge the best of both worlds. And then obviously there's some nuances there where like my engineers could be a lot more thorough with you, but like using Celestia as the data availability layer, that significantly reduces costs and all that stuff. But Essentially, like as a builder, like, yes, technically you could just be very opinionated, like adapt builder, for example, and like be like, I'm aligned exclusively with like this tech. But like at the end of the day, the tech evolved so fast that like, you're almost doing a disservice to yourself to be like too opinionated, right? Like you just want a scaling solution. And at the end of the day, like what I see happening is like the underlying infrastructure. is what gets a lot of VC funding right now. So that's why projects like Eclipse or Monad get like all this attention and eyeballs because they just have so much more funding. And it's easier to speculate on that stuff. But over time, like the DAPs and the actual key product market fit, like usage scenarios are what is going to drive a lot of the narrative around crypto. Like, I don't know if that's going to happen within the next year or like five years or 10 years, but like we're starting to see little bits and pieces of this, right? Like Polymarket is a really good example of this. You don't really need to know what polymarket is built on top of what you care about is what polymarket enables you to do, which is prediction markets and betting. So for me, like the wind snare is like, yes, like we are communicating to devs, like this is exactly what our tech stack is. You don't really need to choose between these two ecosystems. You can kind of get exposure to both and we are a proper scaling mechanism for you so that if you choose to build on us, you don't have to worry about, like this. will not scale for me anymore in like two years, I need to hop to another ecosystem and start from scratch again. Instead, like you can leverage us, leverage our distribution. And then over time, you will have enough like critical mass or momentum where like over time, your brand's not going to be because like you're built on Eclipse. It's going to be because I'm my own thing. And like I have all these users that uniquely interact with my deck. And that's kind of how I view things. like, There are certain debates where Eclipse has a very opinionated stance. One example is the modular thesis versus monolithic. We are obviously on the monolithic side of that debate because we have taken bits and pieces of all this different tech to build our stack in a modular way. So Solana built on top of Ethereum for the settlement layer, but then Celestia is dead availability. We also have a very clear stance on whether dApp chains are really the future or not. We think it's not. just the amount of overhead that it takes to manage a chain and make sure that you don't have downtime issues and stuff, takes away from your ability to innovate quickly on the actual DAP experience itself. And if we can solve some of the MEV redistribution application-specific sequencing questions, then DAPs actually make a lot of money just deploying on Eclipse and not worrying about managing every aspect of the tech stack. So we do have opinionated stances, but at the end of the day, my honest and frank opinion is some of these super technical debates are only relevant to super crypto native right curve researchers and thought leaders. Like the vast majority of end users are not going to care about any of stuff. All they care about is just like, am I making money? Is this solving a core problem? And is this product offering something that I need? And the job of the infrastructure is just to enable. And I agree with their thesis. And if there's one thing I would characterize Ethereum community, if I were to generalize, they're quite dogmatic and have a very strong set of values, whereas Solana, on the other hand, still has a strong set of values, but quite pragmatic. And I think the pragmatism is what has allowed the Solana community and applications built on Solana and in the ecosystem to really thrive. And I love that you're combining best of both worlds into Eclipse. Let's talk about community. You guys have a campaign with Kaito right now. Can you tell us a little bit about that and kind of what led or what motivated you to work with Kaito? Yeah, so. I've found if there's anything that has fundamentally changed in the last two years, relative to like my first stint, like at the YDX, especially the earlier years is like, mind share matters so much more than it used to. And like people can debate about what exactly mind share means, but to me, mind share is just relevance and awareness. That's basically all it boils down to. You can argue like where that needs to be. Is it like crypto Twitter natively? Is it just distribution in general and having like awareness amongst a lot of different people. Like there's intricacies there depending on what your exact product is. But at the end of the day, just being at the forefront of discussions and relevant, just like way more important than used to be. this is true if you talk to developers too. So like I'm an infrastructure builder, right? So like a lot of my conversations are with actual people building on top of us. Like it's not just about like, is this tech that great anymore for a lot of developers? It's like, if I build on top of you, am I going to get eyeballs on my project or not? is like the very core part of the decision making process. So, Kaido just happens to be, in my opinion, the best tool on the market to actually measure mindshare, but quantitatively within the lens of crypto Twitter specifically, so crypto natives. Some people are free to disagree with that, but like I've played with a lot of these tools. I've used a lot of social sentiment analysis tools and The biggest issue I faced was like the sentiment analysis itself is pretty bad because there's nuance there, right? So like if someone says, this is sick, a lot of sentiment tools like will not actually classify that as good sentiment. They'll actually classify as negative sentiment. That's one part of it. The other part is like the scope is just too big. Like their main reason I'm leveraging Twitter is not for a broader audience. It's for crypto native. So I need to understand what my standing is with crypto native specifically. So some of these more general purpose sentiment analysis tools for Twitter, we're not really cutting it for me because like the scope was just too big for lack of a better word. so that's why I started leveraging Cato to begin with was just like, read the landscape. this was also played a key role for us to be able to be objective too. like. Is Eclipse actually winning more mind share over time relative to when I started versus today? I need a tool to measure that quantitatively. Otherwise I'll always be extremely biased and think that we're doing better than we are. And the reality is like a startup, have to be more cutthroat with yourself internally than anyone outside of the company. It's like, it is way more important that my team is brutally honest with ourselves and like analyzes everything to a T and criticizes ourselves to improve everything as opposed to allowing other people to do that and think of things that we haven't already thought of. So that's why I onboarded to Kaido. then alongside that entire decision-making process about mind share, sentiment analysis, Kaido was like our community building strategy in general. And I think this is really important for me to highlight because I think the biggest issue with why community has become like this giant buzzword that no one agrees upon in crypto is because no one actually thinks of community the right way. Like community me is not every single person in crypto. That's not what a community is like abstract away. Crypto community means that you take care of your core constituents as opposed to tourists. So if you are happy to be a part of your community, just in life, like where you bought your house or where you live in an apartment, a good community is one that like actually looks after like its core like residents. So as opposed to like people that just come and go like, the people that have been here for the long haul, are those the people that get taken care of the most and have the most opportunities? And that's. The analogy I applied to like community building and crypto too. So are the early adopters, the ones that have not only invested like money into Eclipse by playing with these tasks, but also are giving like feedback or active and triaging issues, raising concerns to us, helping other people that are joining the ecosystem and answering their questions. Are these the people that are getting rewarded for their investment, not just in terms of money, but time? Like. And the YAP leaderboard was a very good way for us to do that because we could link not only like our discord presence, but our Twitter presence too. Like are the key people that are the most vocal supporters of us and the people that are the most plugged in, like, are we actually paying attention to all of that? So that like the Moo leaderboard we came up with, Akaido is just like another instrument for us to measure. who is a core part of our community? Who's actually paying attention? Who's engaged? Cause. In crypto, like if there's an opportunity to make money, people will take advantage of that as much as possible. That's why farming exists. Like if you've farmed any protocol in the past, whether it was Arbitrum back in the day, or you're trying to farm Eclipse, or you're trying to farm any of the other projects, whether it's a Dex or Friend Tech or whatever that looks like, like basically you're just trying to figure out how to gain the system so you can make the most amount of money. It's not necessarily a bad thing, but like I don't want people on Eclipse that just can't compete with like the most sophisticated farmers that spin up 20 plus wallets and have like hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars to play with to get like less exposure to Eclipse just because they're at a disadvantage financially. That does not make any sense to me. So that's kind of like the full baked explanation for like why we even executed the Moot Leaderboard in the first place and like why we think so deeply about community building. Cause the reality is like a lot of us out of Eclipse have farmed other protocols before and Nine times out of we don't stick around after we get the airdrop because we know that there's no value that this ecosystem is delivering to me. There's nothing fundamentally for me to do after the airdrop happens. And transparently, like I'm not aligned with like the actual leadership of the company or the community itself. Like it's just completely mercenary. So if anyone's cognizant of that, it's our team. like, how do we solve that? It's by actually like building a community from my ground up and thinking about like. have the people that have been here from the start, like, is there a reason for them to fundamentally stay or not beyond just the eclipse airdrop? And that's like, I think a very important intellectual, like, honesty check that a lot of protocols should take. So it's not about like whether you use the Kaido leaderboard specifically for your project. It's more so like, are you actually thinking at a deep level about what it means to build a community and like do it in a sustainable way? Cause if not, the chances are like you'll have your TGE or your airdrop or whatever in sign of mechanism go live. then as soon as it's over. And I think that first principles approach to what is a community makes a lot of sense and is certainly something that a lot of CMOs and growth leaders could learn from. Now Eclipse hasn't had a token generation event. And so the community members that are involved right now, they could be segmented as, you know, they've been here at the beginning. They're, they're, they're very active, but what happens when tourists start coming? How, how will you be able to segment your audience tourist versus diehard eclipse fan. Yeah. So, I think it's just literally paying attention to be honest. Like, we've been very religious about monitoring the discord, just interacting with people on a daily basis on Twitter. like, if someone's been around for a while, we've noticed, that's part of it. It's just like actually taking the time to like do diligence and pay attention to part of it. And the second thing is honestly, like, I think the difference in our approach is being very honest about the fact that like people will come and try to farm. That's not necessarily a bad thing. The question is like, is that sustainable? Will they stick around? And I think that's partly on us too, to deliver. So the goal as a growth marketer and like a growth leader at Eclipse is fundamentally, are we providing a opportunity financially where even after the airdrop happens for Eclipse, like would people stay? Like is the opportunity cost of not being active on Eclipse so large that as opposed to taking the airdrop, and then leaving, you actually want to play with the different protocols and then be eligible for other financial incentives or other mechanisms to make money on Eclipse are just so robust. Like that's something that you have to deliver as an ecosystem. So whether that's through the DAPs, through different airdrops, through different incentive mechanisms, that's like on us as an ecosystem to deliver. And I think that we already are essentially. So like even before Eclipse has any sort of TG or airdrop, People have been making money on Eclipse, the early adopters, whether it's through the NFTs or different protocols that they're playing with, like they've identified opportunities where like, hey, because I'm an early adopter, I have edge here. So all these newer people that are coming in, like, yeah, like they might have more money than me, but I've actually been doing quite well on Eclipse because I've been here very early. Like that's exactly what you want in an ecosystem. So I actually have a high degree of confidence that like once people join Eclipse, we will be able to retain them. Is our goal to retain a hundred percent? No, cause that's not possible. But anyone that is actively trying to make money, whether it's a developer building a killer DAP, whether it's an end user playing with different TFI applications or trading NFTs or mean coins, like we have basically built the ecosystem in a way that like, it's just a constant churning wheel of like different stuff for you to play with. And then along the way, there should be enough killer DAPs where even independent of like eclipses. token or whatever you want to call it incentive mechanism like the DAP itself solves a core issue or offers something unique that you would keep using that DAP specifically because the goal is not for it's just Eclipse if Eclipse dies these DAPs die it's actually the opposite like the DAP should be the ones driving the growth so That's kind of how I think about things. Obviously it's, really easy to say that in theory it's on us to keep delivering. think up to this point, we've done a very good job of that. And it's just on us and the rest of our ecosystem builders to continue shipping and not become complacent at the wheel and keep delivering. but I think that's what I've noticed the most too, as like an end user too, is like, there was plenty of ecosystems where I farmed an airdrop. And then as soon as I got the airdrop, like even while I was like trying to get the airdrop, was like, there's nothing to do here. There's no doubt. for me to play with. There is nothing for me to do other than like buy some random asset and then just like, okay, I got the airdrop. I'm going to sell this now and then move on to the next hot thing. But like you can be the hot thing while also being very intentional about scaling the ecosystem at the same time. And I think what we do well at Eclipse is we find a very fine balance in those two things. Speaking of DAPs and growth, Eclipse has been making some big moves recently with transactions on Eclipse and Solana. Can you share with us some of the neat things that have been happening in the Eclipse ecosystem? Yeah. So, when we went to market, we had well over like 90 service providers and daps off the board. Now we're standing at just about 40 daps live with all the core primitives. So whether you're wanting to trade beam coins, trade NFTs, swap different like assets, like you can do all of that. And we also have a PerpStacks deployment that's on the way. so essentially like anything that is considered table stakes. like the basic DeFi functionality or like swap functionality that exists on any chain like Eclipse has been able to deliver. On top of that, we have a bunch of new games that are coming out. Like basically like we're trying to take the approach of like, if there's a specific niche that someone really enjoys playing with, Eclipse will be able to deliver that while we're working on like net new chain differentiators that have not been seen anywhere else through our incubations program and stuff like that. To answer your question, I think momentum has been very strong to date. I can confidently say that Eclipse is considered a top five pre-token project right now. Whenever the Eclipse Foundation decides it is time for a token to go live, it is entirely up to them. I think we've laid a really strong foundation. What we've been actively doing is instead of just taking our sweet time, we've been trying to stress test and make sure that the stuff works in reality. Because it's really easy on paper to say like, our chain can handle this level of throughput, does not have these latency issues, can handle this level of TPS, or like this scaling solution and that. But like, you don't actually know until like real money is at stake on the chain and people are actually doing a lot of different things. So whether it's like the TurboTap stress test mechanism that we came up with, which is like a mobile clicker game that seems a lot like almost like a Farmville type aesthetic. or like swap functionality, meme coin launch pads, like you kind of have to be able to handle all of it. But I'd much rather we start doing that early to figure out what we need to optimize in terms of the tech stack instead of waiting for like the perfect opportunity to do that because I don't think that chance exists. So, yeah, over the next month, I think we have like six games that are going live on chain in the next two weeks. Perpstacks is on the way. There's a lot new net new deployments that like I won't share too much about it I don't want to leak too much information for these new DApp builders that are working on this stuff behind the scenes. all that stuff is like, there's a lot going on where the energy is almost infectious. I see all these different developers working on all this different stuff, whether it's AI related or end consumer, almost where you abstract away the crypto component. And it's just something where our normie friends or our parents could interact with and be like, this helps my life in a certain way. But they wouldn't even know that it's a crypto product. That's the type of stuff where I'm like super excited to see all the innovation happening and we're enabling that to happen at scale. Now this is quite interesting because at the very beginning of our conversation, you shared about turbo horns and the cow and the messaging is quite different, but underneath it all is a very strong technical foundation. And now you're telling us about the, these DAP developers that are coming to Eclipse and like, is it the cow that's drawing them to Eclipse or is it the technical foundation or how, I guess maybe help us understand what is driving them to come to Eclipse versus another Layer 1 or even Ethereum or even Solana proper. I think it's both. It's interesting, right? When you're building an ecosystem, a lot of these projects have this approach where they throw money at projects to build on top of them. It's called grants, right? So like, we'll give you basically money to build on top of this. I think this causes like a huge incentive alignment problem because like devs can be mercenary too. So they'll ship vaporware for a year, collect the payment and then bounce the next thing. And I, I've seen this time and time again, which is why generally speaking, like Eclipse doesn't really write grants at all. Um, because like, it's just not sustainable. And like, at the end of the day, like the reason why people are coming to Eclipse is a combination of all of it, to be honest, it's the tech stack itself, but also understanding like, oh, wow, they actually understand the importance of distribution and branding. like, if I come here, I can leverage all of that where like, have thought leaders at Eclipse that will help me build my own brand, but I can also lean on them for that support. Like coming from adapting before Eclipse. If there's anything I realize is it's really, really hard to build a killer DAP experience. Like there's so much different stuff that can go wrong. So if you're a DeFi DAP, it's like, do I have enough liquidity where like people can actually trade on this thing? Does the order book mechanism work? Like if someone wants like to power use a perpstex, like if the order book mechanism doesn't work, like you can't trade anything because like your orders will never fill, especially when there's like size and leverage involved. Like the worst case scenario is like you try to place a trade and then close that trade and then you can't close a trade, market conditions change and then you lose all the money. But it's not even like the user's fault. It's actually the platform's fault. So if a DAP builder has to focus on all this stuff to make sure that the UX is robust and like the product is usable, that generally leads to a scenario where like these other business functions almost get neglected. Marketing is a very good example of that because you're so focused on making a usable product. that the distribution of that product ends up taking like second order priority. I'm the first person that'll tell you that distribution matters a ton these days, but I also sympathize with that position because I've worked on a team like that before where like, there's just so much to figure out that like, if you can't even get the product out to begin with, like, how can you even as a founder begin to think about distribution? Because I haven't solved, like, even if I distribute this product, this product sucks. like, no one's going to use it. So. For us, like, yes, we've built this robust tech stack. We're continuing to innovate on it, produce more research, solve all these underlying issues when it comes to application specific sequencing and stuff. So we can make it much more profitable to build on Eclipse compared to another chain, but also like distribution matters a ton. So like that is our edge. Like if you come build on us, we can help you a lot more than some of these other projects can not just with fine tuning your own brand, but being able to tap. our network of community, the network of VEX in general, the liquidity that we offer, all that stuff. And all of that comprehensively is what makes Eclipse very unique. And I think the results are starting to speak for themselves. I don't believe if you hire well that you have to neglect any of these key business functions because the people on the team can kind of be experts within their own domains. And that's kind of how we built this team at Eclipse. So there are people on the team that are far more technical than I that if you wanted to get really into the weeds about what we're building, I'm not the best person to talk about it, but I am the person that understands how to communicate that and package that for most audiences. And also to help brands kind of evangelize themselves too. So you'll see Astrol, for example, is a lending protocol that's native to Eclipse. They've been rolling out these epoch windows where basically they open up the breadth of assets that you can lend and borrow against. And those... caps have been getting filled within like 24 to 48 hours every time they release a new one. Team Astral is super cracked. They know what they're doing. I cannot speak more highly about them. But at the same time, like I think the fact that they're building on Eclipse has been a huge lever up for them because they know that like, like we can focus on building the best product possible. And in the short period of time before we hit like true product market fit and critical mass, like we can lean on the distribution that Eclipse is offering. So like you don't really have to compromise between like having like a really robust tech stack and also having like pretty good marketing so It sounds like as a chain, distribution becomes a product. And the relationship between mind share and brand, knowing your audience and the fundamentals of messaging and positioning becomes so, so important. And it sounds like you guys are getting the fundamentals like spot on right. And it's showing. it's, no, it's. to think so. But yeah, like it just matters. And I think. There's a lot of really, really like intelligent, probably from like a pure like raw IQ standpoint, like people in crypto that I've met that are like far smarter than I am. Like I'm not going to pretend that I'm the smartest person in the room. There's a lot that I don't know, but I think sometimes with these really, really intelligent folks, they build so much within like this ivory tower where they kind of forget like how important context is and like the broader macro environment as well as like the competitive landscape where like Crypto is just so much more saturated now. Like you cannot build in the ivory tower or in isolation without keeping account of like all this other stuff. like, yeah, back in the day when I was at DYDX, I think the game was a lot easier. There just was not as much competition. Distribution really didn't matter as much. Like if DYDX could acquire these power years and these institutions to move funds on chain, it was a lot easier to get the job done. Now that I've come to Eclipse, the landscape that we're competing against is just like very different. And you have to adapt with the times. you just can't scale companies the same way that you used to. Like you need some sort of growth engine. need like core brand positioning to be like ironclad. You need to kind of roll with the punches. And if you're going to just severely discount one aspect of your business, you better at least have a plan to eventually ramp that up over time. And I think we're very honest with ourselves at Eclipse that like it's kind of all of it cohesively together that is causing us to find like this momentum and like this track record for us, right? So like the engineers are continually shipping. I have extreme confidence in like the brains that we have on that side of the house, just to like build phenomenal infrastructure. I have a lot of confidence in like my team. whether it's. Alucard or community manager or the people on my BD team or red my growth market or like I have very high confidence in their agency and their ability to execute things but also like The framing that I've been constantly giving them is like this is how this works Like it's a steady ramp up. You're not gonna see change overnight Our job is to just continually deliver and then as the ecosystem grows like more and more like a new participants arrive, whether it's developers or users, and our ability to retain them will show over time because we understand how this game works. So never build assuming that users will come at the end of the day because that's usually not how this works. Now, as of this recording, we're sitting at January, beginning of January, and we've got the rest of 2025 to look forward to. What's your point of view on events, event marketing, and any plans that you can share with us for Eclipse in 2025? Yeah, I think events are a very underrated aspect of marketing and crypto. Whenever I do an event on behalf of Eclipse that I'm organizing, I do an event planner or someone on my team's organizing, there's always some sort of core KPI or goal that we're trying to hit. it like awareness? Is it evangelizing our developers? Is it something else? And a lot of the times what I see is like these events happen at crypto and like... no one's enjoying them and there's really no goal. It's just like, yeah, our name's on something. This is great for Twitter signal. We hosted something. So for example, I sent my DevRel on mole to ETH India. He was the only person on the team there just because of like team bandwidth constraints. I couldn't send like five people on the team. Like we're just shift the main net. Like we have a lot going on. But I also know like we have a core contingent of Indian developers where they need FaceTime, need to be interacting with us, they need our support on the ground. So, Amul organized a very interesting paintball event. But sure, we host an event, everyone forgets about it. No, let's try to make the most of it. You can be very smart with how you package this stuff. So we hooked up a bunch of GoPros on people. Recorded content from the paintball event repackaged that now we're going to distribute it. We just posted on Twitter yesterday We're going to distribute across our different social channels and stuff to just increase distribution and it's fresh content I try to think about events is like again the rule of seven like it's one of the touch points But if we're gonna invest time like what are we really getting out of it? So is it just the event itself? Is it content from the event? I've got another good example. This is we hosted like a two-day event at ETH sorry, DevCon in Bangkok this past summer, or I guess it was fall. We hosted this two-day event. We have recorded a ton of footage from that, from like intellectual discussions to like that pitching conversations. We hosted the event itself, which I think went really well. Kudos to my growth marketer, Ren, that organized this all. And all that content can be repurposed. so like it's not just the two day event, was phenomenal for like bringing more people into the ecosystem, getting our different DAP developers to kind of meet other people in the ecosystem, discuss synergy so that our DAPs can kind of grow holistically together, but also like all that content is being repurposed now. So we have like a gigantic content bank of stuff that we're like basically packaging and then we can leverage that at a later date. and I think that's the way that just think about it, right? Like every single thing you're doing is like a sunk cost in crypto. We're like. it's an opportunity or sorry, maybe some costs not to work, but there's an opportunity cost, right? If I'm going to do one thing, it means generally I can't do one other thing. So am I milking everything I do for the most that I can? So whether it's events, like, am I getting new content or is there something that I'm getting out of this that beyond just like, I was able to say that I hosted this event. and like, if you're going to do anything, I feel like, especially with like lean marketing teams, you better like get the most out it that you possibly can. Otherwise, like you're just wasting your time. I agree, and one of the things that I take with me from the Web2 world is content repurposing. Whenever I did a video interview in the Web2 world, for example, I always published the transcript. I always made the transcript into a PDF behind a signup wall. Use snippets of that transcript along with snippets of the video for Twitter. I mean, there's so many things you can do with content. And you're right, it satisfies that saturation model of experiencing something seven times, experiencing the brand, and it becomes memorable and becomes an asset, an evergreen asset you could use forever. So I think that's really why it's what you guys are doing. And I think 2025 is going to shape up to be a very exciting year for Eclipse and the team. Anything else you'd like to share before we end? Yeah. it's interesting. started publishing a lot more thought leadership recently about how I think about things like what some of the growth marketing pains and just like marketing pains in general are in crypto. Like sometimes it's just like disillusionment with like how this stuff works and like misalignment between founder and like C-suite expectations versus what's possible and like resourcing problems and whatnot. And I think that's caused us to resonate with a lot of. So whether it's like people trying to hire marketers or marketers themselves are trying to level up and facing these growing pains. I think sometimes like what gets lost in the sauce or loss of translation is I'm not trying to tell anybody that marketing is more important than building. I'm just saying that like these don't have to be mutually exclusive. So whenever I post stuff or whenever you see Eclipse doing stuff, like the goal is not like, like marketing is more important than engineering or like it's just not don't view this stuff in a vacuum like you don't have to treat either of these core business functions as less or more important than the other like they should work off of each other and if there's one thing you can learn from like me in terms of like the Information or the alpha or the wisdom or whatever you want to call it that I'm trying to share with other people so that we can all level up as an industry it's You guys should be working together And no really good marketer is going to tell you that they can solve every single one of your problems. But if you can bring them into the fold and they can work together cohesively with you, you'll just see way more growth and way more potential for your projects than otherwise. And I think that is kind of my message at the end of the day, even outside the context of Eclipse is like, we can all do better. And I think you're already starting to see like examples of that. Hopefully you consider Eclipse one of them, but like it is possible to just like level up overall when it comes to the go-to-market side of the house. I think that's a great place to end. Nate Shaw from Eclipse, thank you so much. Thanks for having me, Peter. Great conversation. Talk to you soon.