Bread from the MegaETH team, welcome. Hey, what's up, man? Thanks for having me on. Yeah for sure. Now do I call you 0xbreadguy or just bread? Yeah, you know, it would be just bread is good. I've actually been trying to go for the bread handle and the guy who has it just has had it on lock for years and I cannot get it from them. But it's really hard. It's like I'm slowly working all of my things to eliminate the zero X and then try to get rid of the guy and just bread. But it takes a while to get those. Yeah. Is he asking for a ton of money or just ignoring your... he he ignored it. So there's two there's bread like the handle bread and that's just like on private hasn't been touched in forever. And then there's bread guy and I've actually contacted that dude. He's just some dude in in like, he's in New York, literally just like a baker doesn't do anything on Twitter. And I found his I found his stuff and I reached out to him on Facebook and he just didn't say anything. I was like, bro, I'll pay you for this thing. Nothing. He's a literal baker. He's like literally just the bread guy like literally. But I can't he won't listen to me. That's funny. You almost don't want to take it from him because he's like he's actually a That's funny. picked this name and now I got to kind of own it. That's hilarious. Well, so I really wanted to talk with you because you and the MegaETH team are putting on a clinic on how to do really, really amazing community management. And in all areas, think of growth marketing, community management, especially in crypto is probably one of the hardest things. It's just really hard. And you guys have done just an amazing job and want to learn from you. And so if we could maybe begin, like, how'd you get into crypto and how'd you especially get into like this world of like community management and growth? Yeah, I guess I'll preface all this stuff for people who are listening and don't know who we are or what I am or whatever. So I'm on MegaETH. It's an L2. the titles are kind of nebulous. But I'm head of growth. I was brought on specifically several months ago to try to help tell the story of what MegaETH is just in the broader crypto Twitter conversation, basically. So yeah, so my history specifically, and maybe this is why I've gravitated towards this community stuff, I come from a technical background. I went to school for computer science, that stuff. I got involved in crypto initially back in 2017. Just nerd sniped. I had friends that are technical, so they got involved with the CryptoKitties stuff. And they told me about stuff, just rumblings through work. And I started digging into the tech. I pilled on, oh, this is what this could unlock. Mostly on the utility side, like vChain and supply chain, all this shit. Not really just the pure decentralization, just public access to information. That seems important. So got pulled, whatever disappeared for a couple of years, came back in 2021 and got involved again that time on like the product side where I was helping. I had technical friends not involved in like the actual crypto conversation, but they were just, they like tech, they like building things. They like doing stuff. I was involved in the conversation. I saw where market opportunities were. We built some products like just related to NFTs, launch pads, stuff like that. Just like help people do dev work because there was a lot of social, um, conversation around crypto again, NFTs. artists, all that stuff, but no one had the technical chops to really put anything out. So we just, did some of that stuff fast forward a little bit. Um, that was all on like a nascent little smaller chain V chain. The one I mentioned earlier, we ended up selling off the business just because ecosystem was dying. I I lost faith in like the actual chain leadership itself, all that stuff. So we sold it off. Um, we ended up moving on. Uh, they team just kind of just like waited in the wings and myself while still doing my professional job, which was, um, I was in healthcare, it as a consultant for a really long time. And I was always the interface between, super technical teams. People like writing code for like the backend stuff with these systems and then clinical staff. like people that just like had no idea whatsoever about like what was going on in the background. So I like 10, 15 years, I guess probably 12 in the end of having technical conversations with non-technical people and trying to get the point across of like what we need from you and like what we're trying to do and like what this like. and then giving that information back to the technical teams. And I kind of just brought that to crypto, frankly. I spent about a year, my contract ended the end of 2023, I guess it was. And I just said, OK, I'm just going to go full time Web3. I'm going to try to see what I can do in this space. I don't have a product I was building. didn't have anything I could do. I just had some runway on my bank and was like, I want to be able to give full energy to this without being distracted by my day job. and frankly, not having a balanced life, like working full-time at the day and full-time at night. I know a lot of people are still doing that. So I did it. And I basically just cut up the last year trying to do the educational crypto angle. I was writing articles. I was doing long-form thoughts. I was drawing pictures. I was doing a lot of that stuff of just like, this is what's going on. This is what it means to you. This is like this technical topic. You've heard people say the buzzwords of it. But this is what it means in practical terms. And I've kind of gained a following with that. I think I got up to like 20, 20-something thousand followers. And then I actually, that's how I got involved with Megayeth. They came along. I saw their arrays. I was writing about them anyways just because they technically, on a technical level, interest me very much. And I was writing about that. And I reached out to them. was like, hey, how can I contribute? I have time now. I'm available. Shoot my shot. Can you bring me on board? They rejected me being frank. said, I can't join our discord. You could be a mod or something. I was like, ah, that's not for me. can't, I can't do that again. did discord trenches in 2021. Um, but I kept writing about them, kept doing my educational stuff. And eventually they saw that I could command a pretty good conversation or tell a good story on crypto Twitter. And that was something that they lacked. Um, frankly, so they came back around like, okay, yeah, like we need, we need you specifically are your skillset anyways. Um, and then they brought me on full time as head of growth community. core team, first day in like early November. That's awesome. And I can see like from the, the, early years and the, kind of the patterns that, that you started with when you first joined crypto, you, you you created this educational content and like, and then you, you, you made it relatable to the reader. Like, here's what it means for you. And I can see that now, you know, when I look at some of the, the writings that you have on X as well as on the blog on MegaETH, it's like, I can see that. Like I can see it's like how relatable it is and Maybe we can go to MegaETH really quick, talk about the product, kind of what's unique about it, and then go into like how your, how your, you know, it's positioning and then the messaging to its target audiences, because what I found really unique about MegaETH, it's a highly technical product, yet it's very relatable to normal people. And that takes a very special kind of set of skills. That's like really hard to do because on the one hand, you've got technical team that probably really want to lean into the, we're faster, we're safer, we're this, we're that, we're better than all the other L1s and L2s, et cetera, right? That doesn't necessarily speak to people, but it may speak to their peers and probably other technical founders. And so that requires probably some internal dialogue and maybe debates. And so I'm curious about that and how you've been able to make MegaETH into something super relatable. And by the way, I love the name. Like I used to be a MegaDeath fan, so. Nice. Did you see that we have some logo types that are are mega-deaf like for the hats and stuff? Yeah. Yeah, I don't even have that one. That's that's the holy grail. no, this will actually age me, but I saw Megadeth at Monsters of Rock a long time ago. So that was, yeah, with Slayer. That was a blast. Hell yeah. Yeah, like that's, that was, those were given out before I even joined the team. And like everyone asked me like, like those, those hats are the thing. I think there's like 15 of them in existence that were made and like, yeah, I don't, I don't even have one. I've never even seen one in person. I don't think I hung out with Mullen and Chiang Mai, but I didn't actually know. guess I was seeing the Al McCadden one. Yeah. Okay. So broadly, I think some of that stuff that you're talking about, there is just a confluence of events, like just stuff outside our control, right? Timing of the market, right? Like There's this general sentiment that Ethereum needs to do something to bring it back to the forefront. One, there's a little bit of hopefulness just in what we're aiming to offer to the market and being able to compete with someone who is seen as a very direct competitor and stealing the shine from Ethereum. Ethereum's always got this liveness, decentralization, all the stuff that is really... There are strong properties. They're kind of what this space is built on. people are starting to wonder, we over index on maybe how decentralized something has to be, how, you know, permission is something has to be versus just like salon has come to the table and they just got great UX, right? They're fast, they're performing, they're focusing on the customer kind of as Google versus Apple like debate going on. And, know, this team, this team came along and just saw what was going on. And I mean, the project's been around for three years, so like it's, this isn't a recent development that like they saw us a lot. And so let's do this stuff. This was something that. Yilong and Lei, again, they've been doing this for several years now. They made a decision after seeing the original roadmap of Ethereum that they going to go down this path of really optimizing this stuff and maybe not having a lot of the same, what's called alignment baggage is what I've referred to it as, a lot of the design decisions that have been made in this space have been based on what everyone has always assumed has to be in place. So therefore, they just do the next thing. They don't really question all the fundamental stuff. And this team just like straight up looked at it said, if I was going to build the biggest, baddest thing, this is how I do it. And it would be an EVM. And therefore it's been cooking in the background. Now it's coming forward and it's giving an opportunity for a lot of people in the Ethereum ecosystem to like be proud of something, like to compete on something that is directly challenging them. So again, that's not some of that's out of the control timing of the market and all that stuff. But the other stuff is just like, um, yeah, trying to, trying to talk about what, what benefit it actually has for the ecosystem. And you had mentioned, OK, so what's the edge that MegaEat has? What's the separator? Why are people getting excited about it? the person is why I reached out to the team to join it, because I was actually pretty critical of the Ethereum roadmap recently, and eventually started coming at the idea, yeah, maybe what Solana's doing with this one giant. blockchain that just kind of envelopes the world. Like that's where value accrues. That's how this stuff is worked. That's what users gravitate towards. And like, you know, maybe we over-indexed on some of this other stuff. And I saw, like, I saw what the other chains were doing, the other L2s in the Ethereum roadmap. And I was like, man, this doesn't, like, it just feels like they're just reintroducing a lot of stuff that is causing problems, that were already causing problems on the L1. And it's just not really meeting users where they are. Um, this team came across and just said, total opposite direction. We're just going to make one giant L two that, that has some performance benefits that like really leans into the architecture that's enabled by being an L two for those who aren't familiar, like basically just the design, the singular thing that is, that is, um, unique to an L two is that, uh, there's a sequencer that builds all the blocks, right? It's always been seen as this like, um, thing that everyone should be afraid of and they should decentralize it and they should be ashamed. And like, it's always been made fun of, but they were just like, no, Let's own the thing. Let's make it the best thing. And it became like this conversation of me, at least in my head of like, instead of, instead of trying to compensate for this thing, they turn the thing into a superpower and like that unlocked unique things that were, could only be done because it's an L2 as opposed to like constantly trying to like work backwards to like what other chains can do. So that opened a very, very small slice. I mean, this is where the related like relatability stuff comes in. It opens up a very small slice of what can be technically achieved by an L2. And that small slice is what we're terming as real-time application that we can actually give to applications. And that's just because, again, we're an L2, because we no longer have to deal with consensus, which is an absolute requirement of the L1s. You submit a transaction, and it goes out the network. And everyone has to sit there and agree on it. And then once everyone agrees on it, then it exists. It's final. It's official. but there's a little bit of lag time in that, right? It takes time, whether it's, just because like everyone has to come into agreement, like just decision making, but then also time because it's in raw, raw distance. takes for messages to car for, for things that communicate to each other. Right. So if you have a bunch of nodes all talking to each other, it just literally takes time for stuff to go from, from, Singapore to China, to Oregon, to Texas, back over to New York, right? It takes time for this stuff to go back and forth. And that's not a limitation that you can do with, Code that's just like it takes time for that stuff to go places. So that's fine But that's an absolute requirement of an L1 right of these things that have these distributed node sets Which means that whenever you as a user? Submit something to the chain all of that stuff all these messages going back and forth creates lag in the responsiveness of the things that can be created on your chain, right? So if you just use an example, like I like the one I always use that's pretty practical for everyone If you're NFTs or even trading right you submit a bid Right. The time it takes for that bid to be true and for someone to accept that bid. then for the accepting of that bid to go to be true on the chain, the time it takes for that, the lag time between those, those two actions, is increased just because again, the speed of light travel, all this shit. And because we don't have that, we don't, or we don't have to have that. we're leaning into just like creating this stuff as fast as possible and creating like a streaming, basically a streaming blockchain, blockchain. the lag time is, infinitesimally small, like we're squeezing it down to a couple hundred milliseconds, right? So now that same, that same act that took place in all these other chains again has to happen on the L one and some of the L twos are moving this direction. We're going in the opposite direction that, that, the feedback loop of that stuff, the transaction life cycle is, is basically zero. So you push the button, it's in, you click the button, it's in. So you put in a bid, bid is accepted, accepted, and then it comes back to you. A practical example inside of an application that we have is like Euphoria, which is like they pioneered this tap trading idea. In web 2 world, in what you're used to in just like a regular app, if you tap a button inside of these games that you play, any of stuff, if you tap your button, it's instantly there. It's usually a couple hundred milliseconds. It's in place. But it's Discord, Telegram, all that stuff. You send a message, it pops in. It's there. It usually operates in this window of a couple hundred milliseconds. If you use the time scales that are available in most of the L2s today, and especially in the EVM world, the fastest it can process that stuff is like one or two seconds. So you take this tap interaction that you're used to in the Web2 world and all these applications that are spread all over the place, and you extrapolate that or you apply it to base, for an example, two seconds. If you were to tap, and then one, two, bing, your thing, it actually happened. You get the response like, that's not a good user experience. And that's because of the design decisions that you guys are making to go down this. decentralized consensus path. So we went the other direction where you can tap a button and instantly it's on chain, it pops in, it's operating in this instantaneous window. So we're really leaning into just leveraging the architecture so that we can have this very small slice of only literally possible as an L2 applications and then trying to let people dream on that. We have a couple examples of that but yeah, we're tagging this real time and I think that's resonating with some people. I think it does and what I love about your explanation is and you also see this on the home page You don't even say that it's an L1 or an L2 it's just the first real-time blockchain and I love that because Normal people don't know what L1 or L2 is and they don't care. They just they just need something You know, they they're thinking for themselves About themselves. They have a goal. They want to meet that goal and they want real-time feedback for whatever application they're using. just, they want to get in and get out. I worked at Amazon for a while and Bezos was really big on this convenience idea. You he always talked about price, convenience, and there was one other thing. But he said of all of those, like price, you know, is competing on that goes to zero. Like that's a quick way to get to zero. But convenience is like a human need. Like, everyone needs convenience and you just want things easy. And once you have convenience, you kind of almost don't care what the infrastructure is behind that. just kind of, you want to just get going on with your life. And I love that, at least from what I see on the positioning on the homepage, it's not L1 or L2. It almost doesn't matter. It's the first real-time blockchain. And I think that's pretty neat because you're also kind of positioning it as like the first in this category. There is no other category of real-time blockchains until now. And so it's like, that's pretty unique. Yeah, think as time goes on, and you're starting to see some people tweet this out, people are just in the infrastructure social layer, that all these lines that are being drawn between the technical structure of these chains is really going to continue to get blurred and eventually just go away and we're look back and laugh at how you're defining stuff as an L2 versus an L1 versus whatever. I think a lot of that stuff is just a proxy of like, trying to guess where value is going to accrue, which I think is like, that's an important component of all this stuff, right? Everyone sees, and I think that's part of the frustration of like the Ethereum roadmap broadly is that there's, everyone sees there's so much energy and time and work and good faith being put into like furthering the Ethereum roadmap, you know, Ethereum, but like it's not necessarily resulting in Ethereum price appreciation directly. And that's frustrating for a lot of people because that is a proxy for success in this industry. So. I understand the desire to say L1, L2, whatever. But I honestly think the lines are going to start being drawn around high velocity chains and low velocity chains. They're just fundamentally different things, right? The Solanas of the world, the high performance, so we'll be in that category. Monad's trying to come to market and do the same thing. It's like there's chains that have these ecosystems that are really, really user-facing. and really, really enabling consumer apps and can handle the scale that it's demanding of that. And then you're going to have other things that are a little more resistant, a little more censorship resistant, a little more stable, a little more live, like the Ethereum's of the world. And I think ultimately we'll start seeing stuff like that in the constructions themselves. It's going to be whatever. Yeah, I think the key there that really consumer facing apps, and we haven't really seen that. we've, know, Ethereum is known for DeFi and some of that is consumer facing. A lot of it's kind of foundations that are, you know, transacting and as well as individuals, but real consumer facing apps, you know, now like that's going to be possible on MegaETH as well as others. Let's talk about how, you know, you joined MegaETH and I guess what was your first kind of, as you did an assessment on the brand and its positioning, what led to your approach of making it relatable? Because you could have gone the approach of, let's make it a pissing contest, which chain is faster and safer, et cetera. But instead, it's still quite technical. And it's important to get the technical pieces right so that people can make comparisons, especially developers. but there's also a really kind of cultural aspect to it that's really really relatable. Yeah, tell us about that. Yeah, there's a few elements to it. for me, the things that I was really working to make sure get enabled is mostly just the brand proliferation stuff, as opposed to controlling the messaging myself. Because the team actually did pretty good. By the time I came on, Rose, who's our new designer, everyone universally loves her and her art. it's retro, futuristic stuff. A decision was made by the team to give her basically full creative control. We've just learned over time, we need to continue to lean into that as opposed to playing the stereotypical intern vibes of just post a Wojak with some colors and then whatever. We've seen a lot of that. Just do it blue, gray, purple, whatever. So we saw the community's perception to her specific art style, lean into that. So that allowed for just a uniqueness unlock in people's minds. It stuck to them because it was so different. So one was just straight up design. And that's all credit to Rose. The second one is just making sure, and this is more around community building, you need, there was a real big weakness in iconography and I would say enshrined things for people to latch onto. One, if you're going to have presence in CT, you have to be able to give people the ability to show affiliation or enjoy your brand by giving them as many things as you can to wear themselves. And there's a couple examples of that is like, one, trying to unify the team a little bit around, whether it's backgrounds on their PFPs or making sure that their banners have a little bit of the flair from the actual brand design. Some iconography, like you might see in my name, I have little bunny ears, like little sigma bunny is what we're calling it. So having that out there is something that people can wear. Again, choosing colors, mascots, something that now we have the fluffle. trying to continuously push this enshrined, these are the things that we're associated with, and then let people pick and choose the things that resonate with them the most, and then go forward with it. And then the other side is just the raw technical stuff. And I think most of that just comes from, one, I like talking about stuff, so I go to explain it. And two, I actually believe in what I see. being open to discuss that stuff. think doing relative numbers and comparing, like, you know, you talk about like the pissing contest stuff. I'm guilty of that occasionally because like that's genuinely part of what I'm excited about. So it's a little bit of that. try not to do it over the top too much because, it's really hard to compare without being seen as combative, in this industry. And that's not exactly the vibe I want to go at. There's just like, everyone else sucks. Look out, look how big our bar is. Basically it's just say like, this is what we're trying to do in good faith. But also you can be excited about other people like doing the same thing. So I think, that resonates a lot. frankly, like this founder led marketing of like having the conversation in, in open public of just like, this is what we're trying to deliver. These are the pros. These are the cons being honest about both of those things. And then being willing to have that conversation with other people about their products too, because then it shows you participating. It shows like where you can come in your general thesis on. on the landscape, right? Because whenever you lay out your thesis of why you do or do not agree with someone else's stuff, then it allows other people to say, yeah, that resonates with me. Yeah, I agree with that. Yeah, that makes sense. Or this guy's dumb. Either one of those two things. dumb, but I can see his thesis. He's clearly thought this stuff out. And having that stuff out in the open allows people to rally around that and embrace it or take it on themselves, maybe tweak it a little bit. You just have to constantly make sure that you're, you're putting out the information so that other people have the ability to pick and choose the thing that makes the most sense for them because they don't ever, they don't really know what they don't know. And they're not as close to the metal as the actual team itself. So it's something that I've been harping on pretty hard within the team. just like, you know, we have to continue to create content for others to see and choose what they like or don't like, whatever. And then it allows other content creators and stuff to create stuff with their own spin on it, tell a story, do all this stuff. it's honestly just a combination of those two things, like the visual, artistic side, and then just the raw data side of just letting people be adults, do whatever they think for their own stuff, and just making sure that content's available to them. If I could maybe probe a little bit on two things. You mentioned about the team. So what you're describing is kind of becoming known now as like team-based marketing. How do you deal with a situation where a team member might have a large following and they don't necessarily want to associate their personal brand with their employer's brand? I've actually seen that situation. And so how do you deal with that? Yeah, so for me, I haven't seen the situation of people don't, I think what you're talking about to or referring there is people are afraid they're gonna be seen as a shill, right? Is that kinda? Well, this situation specifically is that this person's personal brand is bigger, much bigger than the project's brand. And this person kind of became like a KOL and actually started getting paid. And so he didn't want to necessarily associate his brand with his employer's brand without getting paid for it. So, I mean that's fair. So I joined the team, right? So before I joined the team, I was doing the KOL stuff and I had a couple of sponsored posts trying to make it as honest as possible where my angle was educational stuff. So I would work with projects of like, you want me to educate on your protocol and it's something that interests me and maybe interests my fan base, which is just like our following count, which is people that genuinely are intrigued by the tech and sometimes want to read that stuff. I think there's a way to do that pretty easily where you just like are honest and transparent of like, I'm working with these guys to do this stuff, whatever the, the transition to from like sponsored stuff where like your brand is maybe bigger than a protocol and they're paying you to talk about it versus like in a one-off instance versus I am an official, like I'm on the payroll and I'm part of the team and like it, it behooves me to grow this brand. Like I think those two things are separate. And in that second category, which I find myself in now as I came onto Mega, like the balance I'm trying to strike is just that I think there's two elements to promoting something. One is just like one raw interest that you have in the protocol and want to talk about stuff. also Twitter is a game, and I'm going to speak primarily about Twitter because that's where like a lot of the brand growth is in crypto. Primarily with Twitter, I think it is incredibly important that brands do not isolate themselves to their brand. And what I mean by that is like, as a founder, if you're constantly just talking about your brand, you kind of turn into a billboard, right? People don't see you. There's like, anytime I know I see you on the timeline, I'm just going to keep scrolling because it's just going to be the 97th time I see you talk about Mega ETH or Nillion or whatever, right? And it's just like, I'm not in for it. Like, there's nothing going on there. And you create a little like echo bubble of yourself and just like the people that are trying to basically farm your protocol, right? Those people are going to keep interacting with you. Some people have genuine interest, but like largely just like you create this little isolated bubble and that's not good for growth, both for the brand or for you. so what I encourage and what I like, what I practice is one, there's no way these people, these people being people affiliated with brands are only interested in just their brand. Right? If you're in this industry and you only give a shit about your protocol, like I question whether or not you actually care about the tech. I'm here. I'm helping build Megadeth because it's genuinely something that I'm interested in. But I'm also interested in just L2 scaling, value accrual, data availability, Solana as an L1. I'm interested in so much shit here. And it's important to me to, one, continue to talk about that stuff because it interests me. And that usually comes through in your content. And then, two, that's key to growth. So if you think about how Twitter works, if I Or you or anyone interacts with a post right whether it's a like a retweet to follow like whatever or just you stop to read it for a little bit you're likely to be fed more of that stuff in the future from that account whether or not that count that content is related specifically to your brand so like For me again specifically like I had a post over a couple weekends ago a couple of them, right? I saw a debate between Solana and Cardano and I hop in the middle of it and I drive the conversation by doing a research of the two comparing the two saying this this side's dumb this side smart whatever, give my opinion on it, right? And through that interaction, because I'm now in a conversation that is outside of my little brand bubble, I get interactions from Cardano people because they agree or disagree with me or whatever, they value my stuff. I get likes and retweets from Solana people because they see that stuff. And so when I get a little bit of followers from those, I get interactions from all those people, whether they're actually interacting with me directly or responding to my comments. And then later that day, you know, I make a post about Mega. And because those people touched my, my thread in some capacity, now they're being fed mega stuff, just after that. So whether or not they actually know about mega, give a shit about mega, or whatever, that's a separate conversation. The algo is serving me now by feeding my content to those people. Maybe it doesn't work the first time, but if I do it again, and I say in the conversation, because it genuinely interests me, which means my content is likely to be good, it happens again. So now, three days later, I do the same thing. I talk about Solana scaling compared to base. People started interacting with me, doing whatever, because it's general content that interests those people already, because they're in base, they're in Solana, they're in whatever. And then my next post is about, oh, mega-ethyl-illimited gas limits. Like boom, we got rid of it. It's pretty sweet. Now that's fed into their algo. It's going to hit up on their feed. Again, maybe this time they interact. Maybe they don't. But it's still there. It's still brain presence. It's still mindshare that grows for them. So I constantly reiterate, yeah, this founder-led, team-led stuff is important to. One, be human and connect with people. But two, don't be afraid to diversify your content. And don't be a shill all the time. No one likes that. again, naturally, our brain just starts turning off. I notice that of myself. I see other people, and I go, man, I'm just going to keep scrolling. I don't even want to read this, because I know he's just going to go into something about why his app is super cool. And I'm not interested. I'm just not. And for that reason, I don't pay attention at all. I don't even give him the chance to read his content. And I try to remember that and think of, I want to avoid that for myself. And yeah. You kind of you bring up kind of two things that I think are really important. This whole idea of like tribalism, like you don't play into that. And what I see in your description of, you know, being in conversations that are kind of outside of your bubble is genuine curiosity. Like if you have genuine curiosity and you are okay talking to other people and having conversations. And being wrong. I think that's important. yeah. So this idea of being vulnerable and being wrong and that's totally okay. And people see that. And I think that's, I think a lot of probably why you've been so successful in the growth game for mega-Eath is you just, just things you practice that are kind of foundational. you're just, curious, you're okay being vulnerable. You're okay learning from others that are not in your bubble. And you're okay seeing like the good things in other chains and other ecosystems that that others within the Ethereum ecosystem might kind of rub their nose against or not against, but at. And so, and that's awesome. And it comes down. with bots these days, that's even more important, right? You see every tweet comes out, have 65 bots instantly responding with slop, and you're just like, man, I want real people. Yeah. You mentioned about when we were talking about team-based marketing and also content and being adults. Internally, do you guys have a content calendar, content pillars? How do you manage that? What does that look like inside of MegaETH? Yeah, so I'll say we're we loosely pull in the same direction, but it's very fluid. Not like and I think that's also another thing that you can just like play into this stuff. We're like it. I know outside or from the outside. It might look very super structured or like plan like they're know Grand Masters. It's just like pulling strings. They got it all nailed down. It's like. We're just trying to do our best. none of us have like, I, I'm from the tech industry and I tweet a lot. I don't understand brand strategy. have no formal training in like how to, to like do this stuff. just like, I like tweeting. kind of do some AB testing with my, my own work and see what resonates. And then if something resonates, you kind of keep going with it and being open to feedback, right? So like you do some stuff and go, man, that's just not hitting. Why is it not hitting? Like, okay, we need to, being is actually really good at like, sweeping narratives of like, okay, I think we should focus on trying to talk about certain aspects, get a little bit more technical. We feel like our vibe has been a lot of really shitposty lately of like, it feels larpy. Like we're feeling a little larpy, let's see if we can do something to try to recenter. And that'll be the high level goal, again, without specific content strategies outside of like, oh. Mondays we do a shitpost Tuesdays. We do a technical drop Thursday Like we don't like we don't have any like formalized structure on that We're working on it to see if I can build some cadence but mostly it's just like vibes announcements and do the best that we can to juggle all this stuff because none of us are formally trained and we don't like I think whenever you force content like that, it can also come through hollow so like usually when something is relevant or something like feels good being able to like pivot into that or like if you're I'm a big advocate of Whenever something incites emotion in you is when you should really lean into it and, harness that into a post, whether it's a long form post or a short form post, whatever. that's, that's typically when I as a writer most inspired and like my stuff hits the best. and then again, being open that like, yeah, like no one knows. like saying that even is like, you know, I'll throw out tweets every now and then it's like, dude, you're just trying to figure it out. No one knows these answers and there's no template for this stuff. So everyone's just trying their best and people sympathize with that. Yeah, but but nothing formal. No, it's just all kind of go with with what the vibes are. And I like that Bing is involved and gives advice and, we're going too far down this road. Let's maybe try a different way. Does Bing provide that kind of feedback pretty often, or how does that work internally? Yeah. It's honestly just like everyone kind of pitches in like we're it's a, I'm not too prideful to say that like, you know, I don't, again, I don't know what's going on. So usually whenever something happens, like I'll throw out tweets and you know, the team will come together and say like, man, not the vibes we want. Like we've like, maybe this is too antagonistic or this is whatever. And no one is right or wrong in that situation. It's just like, why do you feel that way? Right. So that then we have that discussion and usually that's what happens. Whatever. She brings that forward for, for any of the content stuff, whether it's broad, like weeks on end, like, okay, I think we're too far down this path. Or, if it's just like a singular tweet that happens and we're like, okay, that one specifically, it didn't feel right. she'll say, Hey, that's like, I have a strong opinion on this. Okay. Why do you have that opinion? What makes you feel that way? And I usually do that to dissect, the emotion that I invoked or we invoked through tweets to try to figure out like, how, how the rest of the market might interpret that stuff or, what's going on. But, I would say it's probably a weekly basis that we try to like, we try to just sit down and say, okay, what, what's the best step forward? What do we feel like we're lacking? where can we pick stuff up? That's pretty cool that the founders are involved in that. So MegaETH had an NFT launch recently, Fluffles. And the mechanism design is pretty unique. And I do want to talk a little bit about that. But I believe there was some crisis management that you guys had to deal with, which I would love to hear about the learnings that you guys had. And whenever there's a crisis, that's also an opportunity to. grow the community, strengthen the community, which I think you guys did. And so I'd love to hear kind of from your perspective on kind of like what the crisis was and then the crisis response to it. Like, how'd you guys respond? Yeah. The, so again, listeners who haven't like, partake in any of stuff, the background is so we're an L2. We've gone through several, several iterations of trying to find ways to get, or to give exposure to the network to, people outside of venture capitalists. Right. So like the, if you're, if no one's familiar with the process, a lot of stuff, usually you start a project, you go through venture capitalists, which is usually a handful of people that give you a bunch of money. And then through that, you spin up the product and maybe you do multiple rounds of this for like the next round. You, you raise even more money at a higher valuation and then you do it again, maybe. And then eventually you come to market and by the time you come to market, uh, retail or just like common users are able to get access to your community or access to your network, whether it's through a token or whatever. And it's usually at a higher valuation, like all the value capture, right? The thing that you're building was valued at a hundred million and 500 million, then a billion and two billion. And then by the time. Normal users get access to it. People that are actually going to like to participate in your ecosystem. It's valued at a very high number and it's very hard for that to stick because of that. All that value capture happening because all the people that capture those tokens have a fiduciary duty to basically sell them on top of you. So. I see me the conscious decision to go the path of trying to give everyday users access to, the network in various capacities. did the initial round, which is a VC round, a couple of people, Joe Lubin. How I drag and fly that did the second round of raises was 10 million from, echo. Echo is a platform for, accredited investors to build it, to invest in projects. Again, $10 million, like 3,200 people got involved. And then the fluffles was another mechanism and extension of the echo round. And it was, it's going to be 10,000, but this first tranches 5,000 NFTs. each one costs one ETH. And we promised like right up front, right? Like the, these things represent a percentage of our network. Right. 5 % with the ability to increase over time. So the team pretty painstakingly went through the regulatory hurdles to be able to say that outright, right up front. Right. So that was the, the goal of this. Um, so that's the landscape. That's what the fluffles represented. Now the implementation of that is the fun part. So I've been in the, I've been in a tech for a long time, right? I've managed a bunch of projects. That was basically my role, even though I was doing technical stuff, I was coding and some stuff in my previous stuff. was. largely project management. Like I had to sit there and, and juggle everyone doing their stuff and track people down. do your shit. with this, we, it was managed by an external team. so a lot of the actual product itself was, was, was built by them. were just overseeing it. and I would say the, the pain point that we had was just that there's, there's very few things that you can do in the pipeline of getting the stuff ready. That, that. hold you to a deadline. And for us, was the tweet, right? The announcement tweet. So firing that thing off with the seven day countdown in the thing means like, okay, we have seven days to get this thing going. So the, where the pain came in is just that. Because the team that we had contracted had a lot of experience. We trusted them. They were, giving us good reports and stuff and then sent out that tweet. and yeah, it just, it wasn't in the shape that we were told. So like going through that process, getting ready for the seven day countdown was realizing like, man, this thing needs a little bit more work, um, to, deliver the experience that we're hoping for and know what was promised in the deliverables. So we started grinding to try to knock that stuff out as fast as we could in that seven day window to try to like, shoot, like shoot towards, um, go live day. Um, and we did the best we could be to pull people from the engineering team, like internally, right? People that are actually like building the chain had to come in, like even our founders. Um, Had to help out. Right. So you long, right. You long had to actually manage the smart contract, some stuff. Right. So we, did what we could to patch it up and get it up to snuff. would say that crisis management situation there and like how we specifically, um, what we learned from it and, the angles that we took was just like one feedback from the community, right? We would say our plans for something and we get a pretty big up or right up front. like bro, you're gonna have a gas war. Like that was the biggest one right up front. Cause it was on main net Ethereum. I'm like, yeah, like We don't want that. have good, good, like the reception was much higher than we thought. We didn't think there would be a gas war with our initial plans, but because so many people were like, we want this thing. We're like, it's my, they do a gas war and we don't want an other side's moment. Cause then you're evaporating money and like for no reason. So we're trying to avoid that. Trying to take good feedback, just listening to people. Like again, people just, like feeling a part of all these processes. So if you can be open to that stuff and like act genuinely be receptive to stuff, genuinely implement these plans, show that you're listening, showing that you're opening that stuff, showing like. Just again, open and being wrong about stuff. people like that. You're, flexible and like, you're not just pigheaded and like stubborn or whatever, right? That, that bodes well for the future. so we implemented some stuff, try to like set them some things to mitigate the actual gas war itself. and then after the fact, two, like just the general learnings from it was like one, yeah, be cognizant of the key events that set off the timers that, that, know, really make you have to like even go into crisis mode. So like one being cognizant of that and making sure that we're really focusing on it and sending that stuff out only whenever it's required. Two is the unexpected brilliance of doing an NFT for this. If you look at our initial post work, the announcement itself, I think it's got 3 million impressions is what it landed at. All right. So it went all over the place. And that is solely because of what it was, the vehicle in which it was meant to be deployed in. Right. So like, again, You hear about what, like what it was meant to represent, which is just an investment opportunity, percent of the network, like all that shit, right? But it was packaged as an NFT collection. And some people just saw an NFT for selling for one Ethan. They're like, these guys are scammers. Like this is who we don't need another PFP collection. This isn't 2021, right? They didn't know there was an L2 behind it. They didn't know there was a, you know, a team of world-class engineers building this thing for three years. just saw bunnies for one ETH. It's a PFP collection scam. And it drove a lot of conversation and It was great because like we pierced so many social circles that we never would have gotten into previously. Right. So like people, just as an example, right. Like, someone from, it seems mad, Ben's mad Vincent. He's a guy from the MadLads community, which is a PFP collection, NFT collection on Solana. Right. He wrote a big old long thread. These guys are scammers. Like all this stuff's going on, like all this stuff. we get this distribution into his entire network. Solana NFTs, right. Ethereum L2 doesn't belong in that conversation, but we're getting distribution into that stuff because he's talking about that shit and like going on his spaces, doing this stuff. then because like there was substance behind our stuff, right? It's like, he's like, I fucked up. He's like, this is actually pretty cool. And it's actually pretty good. And like, there's all this stuff. So it, peeled them or at least baited them because it was a PFP. was something that resonated with him and then it made him do more work. And then, you know, like a day later, he's like, I fucked up. Mea culpa. Like it's actually really cool. Can I get aloe? Can I get in? Can I get a white list? Whatever. So like we get the whole journey through there and he's just telling that story, which, know, I appreciate that. Like that's amazing for us. Cause like that's someone who was actually willing to like say that and do that stuff. Like that's a good signal for us. It gets distribution. so like, yeah, that was the unintended brilliance of the package that we, did not realize would be so impactful, but it turned out to be really effective. That's awesome. mean, turning a detractor into a promoter is, mean, that journey creates like really, really strong promoters. And that's pretty awesome. And the fact that it was soul bound, that probably created a lot of, you know, lot of controversy, but it's, again, it's like, there's a story behind it. And it, this allowed you to tell that story. Here's lots of communities that you know, that Meghiaeth would normally not be in, like the NFT communities. And so that's pretty awesome. I think that's really, really cool. Yeah. Yeah. Like I said, it was unintentional, but now it makes me think about the future. Cause like, again, I'm not a professional and marketing or doing it brand growth, whatever, but I try to take note of those things. And like, that's something I noted like, okay, how can we, how can we remember that and utilize that in the future? I remember this moment and try to package it. That's awesome. So you have a bunch of questions. But I want to first start with this. You're a pretty humble guy. And I'm going to read this, and this is going to probably put you on the spot. So this is from Alex on chain. He says, every team is going to want to hire their own 0x bread guy. He and the MegaETH Labs team have put on a master class recently showing how deep and impactful community management can be. So we don't know what he's thinking, but. I'm curious to know like what your thoughts are when you see things like that like how does that make you feel? What are your thoughts? Yeah. I mean, so I'm obviously appreciative. the thing that, that, is always tough for me in these situations is like people say, like, I don't feel like I'm doing community growth. If that makes any sense whatsoever. I'm just like, I feel like I, I I'm just trying to be a good person and talk about like the stuff that interests me. Right. And like that, guess is translating to people gravitating towards it. I like the things that I do for growth. Right. Again, I just think it's, being a good person is like, I see people, smaller accounts that are interested in the project. I make sure to reach out to them. I make sure to say, Hey man, I want to make, make a home for you here. let me know if you have any content that you're spinning out that like you want me to review to make sure it's technically accurate or whatever. Like I'm here for you trying to be open, trying to be available, trying to like have that personal touch. like I do some of that. but I don't think that's like a direct initiative to like, grow the project or like grow the community is just trying to be a good person. This person is trying to genuinely show interest in something that I'm, I'm a part of and contributing to. I want them to be armed with right information because one, it behooves me because I want to make sure that the information put out for us is genuinely accurate. Right. I want to make sure that the story is told in the way that I want to tell the story. so one of it's like, it's a selfish endeavor on my part, frankly. and then the other sort of is just like, Hey, there's a lot of good people out here trying to do stuff. just because like, They, didn't write that one viral tweet that got them a bunch of, of follows one day. Like that doesn't mean their quality work isn't, isn't great. So not being afraid to like amplify those people and build some, like some mega native people. I think is, is something that I think all of us can do. and that's actually comes from Bing to Bing's really, really, being actually the whole team, they're all awesome about it. Ishaan Heisenstein has been helping grow the community before I came on. it's just like, trying to go against the grain in the sense of just like the fake farming stuff and just like incentivizing people with, with money or whatever, and trying to incentivize them with, connections with like genuine human connections. And I guess that's going far. so yeah, I'm appreciative, but I still, I don't feel like I'm growing a community so much as I'm just trying to be a good person building something. Well, the outcome is certainly you're growing it. And what I love is you guys are doing it in a non-manufactured way. Your approach of just being a nice person, this white glove approach, that's pretty unique. In crypto, there's a lot of, you get all sorts of people, right? But you don't see a ton of genuinely nice, nice people. And I think people see that in you and they gravitate towards that. And it's awesome. It really is. So you have a bunch of questions from the community. And so I want to, do you mind if I read a couple of these? Okay. Some are marketing related, some are not. Okay. I'd love to hear, let me see this. okay. Mascot in marketing. MegaETH has adopted the bunny as a mascot. It would be great to hear the thought. process in choosing a mascot, what role the brand mascot should play, and how their strategy compares with other projects. Hmm. So the bunny itself actually just comes from lay. So lays with the one of the second technical co-founder, the Yilong started it. Lay came on after that. he just loves bunnies. like, was just like, he just chose it. So like, might see if you're, anyone follows his account, you'll see every now and then he'll just literally just tweet like little rabbits every now and then pictures of rabbits and just like, whatever. So that's honestly just like, one, he liked it. And then two, just lean into it like rabbit speed. Okay, cool. They're fast little things. So it kind of works out. and you just kind of snowballed from there. and then the, we're actually going to like, this is something that I've been working on ahead of the NFT launch. was focused on pretty heavily. It was like, okay. this NFT is going to come right. And we were building out the, the fluffle, right? It's a little bunny BFP. And was like, we like, need to make sure that like the, part of what the community can arm itself with and meme and do whatever feel connection to, whatever we like, we need to arm them with, with our representation of like the brand, like the brand has to. If you understand web three memetics and like how, how all this stuff works, right? It kind of gets into the interning stuff. I told you that we're trying to avoid from the main account, but we're, we're aware of is like, need to have this, you need to let people be able to express themselves however they can, like whether it's audio, visual art, Nick, just in the PFP technical, like all this shit, right? You need to let that give people as much as they can to, to, tool wise to be able to proliferate the character or the the brand itself. So one component of that, one major component of that in crypto, three, for whatever reason, are characters associated to brands, right? So they can take place inside of memes because memes are the dominant form of communication inside of crypto Twitter. Like everyone is making images of doing a bunch of shit and they're funny. whatever reason, they just, they're sticky. So we need to come up with a playful representation of the brand in the form of a character. that other people can inject into whatever they want, whether they're making GIFs or they're just transposing it onto an existing meme, whatever. and with the, the fluffle coming, I was like, we need to have a representation of us specifically, right? Cause there's a bunch of characters inside the fluffle and like, you can't just choose one because it's someone specifically. like, we need to have one that is the fluffle ish and represents us specifically so that people can take that and go have fun with it and just do all this stuff so that the ecosystem can know. This meme, even though it doesn't have a mega branding on it, it has the mega character and therefore allows for our brand to proliferate. So, that's actually going to be revealed this week. we, we have two of those that are going to drop two of them is the secret. like maybe by the time this airs, people will see it, but, it'll be a fluffle character, but we're doing a little Mario Luigi style thing. So it's actually going to be, it's gonna be two of them, like a dominant and passive character. so those will be dropping here this week. I've been working on the background to make sure that like we. Whenever that drops, have a bunch of stickers, have a bunch of emojis, have a bunch of whatever, so it all hits at one big wave and people can just go have fun with it. That's awesome. Last question. What is your favorite tattoo? Have you seen what I got? There's a picture of you and your girlfriend your whole body I think except for like your left leg I think is like fully padded yeah, I'm working on a body suit right now. So like I, uh, my left arm is, is clear, but my right arm has a three quarter and my, both my legs have three quarters and trying to get three quarters all four and plus the full back piece. Um, yeah. So I've been working on it for a long time. I'm hoping to have the, at least the body suit done or the legs done, um, this year. Um, yeah. So like, does it, I guess if it counts as one tattoo, like I'll just say the whole thing is the weird thing that, uh, about having as many tattoos as I do now. Is that there's like certain angles that you like of the same tattoo versus like the rest of it so like I can Like looking down my left leg is just like it looks pretty like looking down like the outer left side of my left leg is pretty and I just like that angle more so than like I don't know if I'm getting a take a shower and I see like the right side of my body just doesn't look I don't like it as much so it's it's kind of weird I can't even tell what it is that just but I like looking down my left leg is my my current favorite Awesome. Well, Bread, this has been so like just a fun conversation. I've learned a ton from you. So I just want to affirm you guys are on the right track. mean, I'm nobody to tell you this, but. Can I ask you what, so you said it kind of resonates with you, like what's, you said like you feel connection, like it's a technical project, but it connects, like what hits for you specifically? what hits for me specifically? So I've been part of lots of kind of technical teams and really technical co-found. I led growth at Harmony, for example, and we were like a sharding thing. but I, what I struggled with at Harmony was, the, the flavor was very technical and kind of the direction was to like even get more technical. And as much as I wanted to make it more relatable, like I just had, it was just very hard to kind of fight against internal kind of. you know, disagreements. They just want to talk about like TPS and you know. TPS sharding. was, I mean, was, you you know. And what I love is that you've been able to kind of break that mold. And, you know, you guys have a bunny, the fluffle. You guys have, are super relatable and active on social, on Twitter especially, but everywhere. And I love how you guys have, you know, and you shared this example with, you know, being part of the conversation in other communities. That's a big deal. because we kind of get stuck in our own tribalism and You kind of ignore that and let's take let's just be humans and let's just have a conversation What I also like is that you do have a point of view, you know, you call it a thesis But in my mind, it's like you have an opinion you share it and then you let people kind of respond to it And that's awesome. I love that and it's kind of not You know, there's this whole debate in the Ethereum community, right and and Amin has kind of talked about like you know, the theorem foundation is credibly neutral. I think we need to have a strong opinion. And then we defend it, we learn, we improve, we update our thinking as we get new information. That's kind of like normal learning. And I don't see that kind of common sense a lot. I see what you guys, what I see in MegaEth is a lot of common sense. And it just resonates. And it's just like, just... It just works. So I don't know if that answers your question, but it just, it's, it's awesome. Yeah. I think the, the commentary that just, everything has broadly been unopinionated and like even, even as simple as, L twos are not competing with each other, right? Like everyone, like the alignment or like the soft stuff is just like, people see a lot of that and they go, man, like, is that's like, it's a, it doesn't feel true. Right? Like you're telling me this thing. like, I get, we're all trying to play nice. The political answers to say we're not competing, but like, is that true? Like you're very, like you are right. And. Not being afraid. But like the reason that people are saying, we're not competing is because it's like seen as like this naughty thing, but like, doesn't even have to be a naughty thing, right? You can acknowledge this thing exists and say like, but we're all better for it. Like we're competing. Yes. But like, good luck. I got to talk to ZK sync. talked to Jesse at base. talked to these guys. I'm like, like bros, like, you know, our theses are different, which is fine. I hope you guys do the best. I hope you beat us because that means that means like, You know, someone was building in the correct direction, but like, I think you're wrong. I'm going to try to prove you wrong. May the best man win. Right. Like, that, like, that doesn't inherently have to be a bad thing. long as you're not misrepresenting each other, as long as you're not like being malicious in any way, just like it can happen. And we'll whatever some of that stuff like blur with competition. get it. Like it's, hard to like always be that way, but like, yeah, man, like this just says like, general malaise that has kind of rolled over a lot of people in the Ethereum ecosystem that's just like, like everyone's trying to play this goody goody stuff. just like, we're ready to kind of win. Like we're ready to try to like, like just straight up say like, I'm, I'm here to compete with Solana with maybe even some of the L twos indirectly, but like, you know, there's, and there's nothing wrong with that. so yeah, I think being opinionated is something we pride ourselves on. had, we're making an opinionated choice in our design saying like, look, man, everyone's going this way. We're going the other way. We think that's the right call. We'll see who wins. Yeah, and just like playing out the playing out the thesis. And I think it'll work. mean, like putting a stake in the ground, having an opinion, a position, defending it, but then like being open to kind of new information. That's just like, you know, like I said, it's common sense and it's also rare. Like you don't see that a lot these days. I see a lot of hedging, like of, you know, we're trying it this way. It may work. It may not. We'll see. Rather than this is our position right now and we think it'll work. We hope it'll work. If not, OK, we'll figure it out. And so I see a lot of hedging versus kind of actual points of view. I like to see more projects with balls. So. Yeah. DeFi dad just did a post with a pod with a Bing and had the same sentiment. We're just like, I'm tired of it, man. I just compete. Yeah, we need that war mood, right? So, Bread, thank you so much, man. This was awesome. Yeah, it's pleasure, man. This is amazing. Thank you.