Are Ethereum L3s Real? Degen Founders Jacek and Will Papper

bankless Nation are layer 3es real well at least some people are trying to build them dgen chain is a layer three built on top of base chain the layer two using dgen the token as its native currency and unit of account a chain built by Deens for Deens apparently the Genesis story of Deen is one for the ages and one you're about to hear firsthand from the man who started it all from idea to token to farcaster tipping to base layer three working to make a first class experience for all the Deens out there

both Crypton native and Crypton novice Deens because apparently djen culture transcends crypto today on the show you're going to hear from yasik the creator of Deen and will popper of Syndicate who's the main service provider of this new dgen layer 3 why a layer three what's what's a layer three why settle on base are layer 3's even real or is the ethereum world Jumping the Shark what's next for DJ is there a road map how did this thing go up 2,000% in 30 days let's get all of these questions answered right now from The Source but first a moment to talk about

some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible bankless Nation excited to introduce you to will the co-founder of Syndicate what Syndicate an infra provider for devs who want to build onchain experiences will it's been a while welcome back to bankless thank you yeah last time was loot it's great to be back yeah last time it was the whole loot phenomenon almost a full entire cycle ago a lot of things has happened uh ever since then joining will here on the podast podcast today we got yasik founder of djen yasik Welcome to Bist yeah hey nice to be here so there's going to be a number of different

conversations that I think are going to be immensely interesting as we pull out of this conversation here YK first just setting the agage here is the D chain the chain for Deens like what's the deal here what's dgen chain uh yeah it's absolutely the chain for degens I think this is the place you want kind of want to be um or at least that's kind of the the idea you know kind of long term is there anything you want to kind of know about the D gen chain or in specifics or something like that yeah so dgen chain is like piercing through a frontier that

I think a lot of people didn't realized didn't realize existed uh maybe there's two things to pull out here first it's a layer three so it's a another blockchain kind of like a layer two except at instead of settling down to the ethereum layer one it's settling down onto base chain so that's already an interesting design Choice also the other interesting design choice is that it uses dgen as it money so denominates in dgen like runs on dgen and so it's a layer three uh with its own unit of account own native currency which are two very interesting

design choices that we haven't really seen explored yet and so like I think the crypto industry the ethereum world the broader broader conversations are like is there really a there there like or are you just doing weird stuff with technology I think this these are kind of some of the questions that I I'd like to like kind of run through but like first what's your reaction to that I'll talk a little bit about why layer 3 is make a ton of sense for dgen and a little bit about why layer 3es make sense in so with d gen D gen is a community starting from existing token the existing token is on base that means

that the audience is on base so the question for the Deen chain is okay let's go where the audience is let's make sure they can bridge in and out easily let's make sure they can enter and exit this chain very easily and very cheaply the answer for layer three in that case was very clear um because the layer three allows you to bridge in very cheaply interact on chain incredibly cheaply a millionth to a billionth of a penny per transaction and Bridge out um very cheaply whenever you're ready so that lowcost experience allows for a ton of

experimentation that's why we're so excited about D gen what happens when gas fees or a millionth of a penny or a billionth of a penny what kind of experimentation does that unlock can you start giving tips as micro payments can we start to get back to some of the original visions of crypto that DJ has been pioneering on top of farcaster on top of warcast on top of the the onchain social ecosystem um layer 3es are a huge enabler of creativity ultra low gas fees for both bridging and for interactions really enables that and yeah that's why I'm so excited about the sack that we chose D gen chain is a little bit at

least in my mind right now kind of like the Lost Vegas of blockchains and actually I think a lot of people kind of think about it also in just terms of well you know crypto is kind of like the Las Vegas of Finance almost uh to to like a lot of people who are outside of crypto but inside crypto for me it kind of is that sort of experience I don't know if like in particular with gambling let's say like I know dgen and like all that kind of stuff is kind of associated with that um but I think like will was kind of saying it does offer a sort of

different experience and I'm kind of thinking that okay base is the home chain this is where we kind of created the token and then people might like Bridge onto like this Las Vegas like djen style chain um and it's kind of like going to Vegas and having like 500 bucks in your wallet and saying all right you know I'm going to spend this at the poker table I'm going to spend this uh you know for a nice restaurant or something and if like if I lose my money whatever it's fine but maybe I come home with like an extra 500 maybe a couple thousand I got lucky and so maybe like people come back from the dent

chain onto the base chain uh you know with full bags or maybe not but at least the main focus that for me is that people are kind of having fun on this chain so whatever the experience is is hopefully people are building kind of like apps uh that are sort of like fun experiences maybe also like cross-section of Social and there's a lot of benefits Beyond just the technology so if you think about like just a token just in general um I mean it's fairly easy to maybe like launch a token but it's also not that easy

there's a lot of like legal implications um you have to find like a liquidity pool if you're trying to get bigger maybe like a market maker you have to get into like exchanges there's all these like different things that I've figured you know I didn't know about and like I'm kind of doing doing now um you know like how do you create a token and how do you create this community and so maybe if you're like a um I don't know like an indie app developer or like a small startup or something maybe you don't want to focus on innovating or creating a token and

maybe you do I don't know but um maybe it's worth just using like the Deen token and then essentially kind of bootstrapping your project this way and maybe you grow out of that maybe you keep dun kind of like as uh like a historical token or it's like a key token cuz the community is still there and then you create your own token and we've seen a couple projects that do that um like Pearl for instance is a big frame on a foraster that's using D gen um and things like that so I think it's a cool way for people to to kind of like almost bootstrap in a way or kind of

like use djen as a tool as a platform um in a sense and also of course like the super low gas fees um it's a roll up on a rollup essentially is what an L3 kind of is and um and that does allow for some kind of gas cost savings like I'm not super knowledgeable at the blockchain level as to like why uh some of that is and I do have some questions myself like like if the congestion gets super high and things like that what if we get I've heard people say dun chain is going to get more popular than base

chain which uh to me kind of seems crazy but it also kind of seemed crazy to me that people would Bridge like uh 30 plus million dollar in like uh like 24 hours or something to the DJ chain with nothing built on it um essentially uh at launch time really I mean there was there were people building and there people are building but I I thought it was going to be much more gradual and like we would introduce tools tooling for developers developers would build that stuff um so anyway those are kind of like my uh like like different thoughts and also one more thing I kind

of wanted to add is like I could also see like um visibility being a cool thing where you have this specific Community like one thing about the deun community that I think people kind of know instinct L is that these people will take large sums of money like you could you saw in French or whatever and they'll just like throw it just they'll just throw it in they'll just ape in like a few million dollars or something into like these apps that nobody like knew about like maybe a few days ago or something and they're willing to give them a try and then they of course

they'll also like basically liquidate and like take their funds out just as quickly but they're willing to they're almost like VCS like they're willing to like give things a try where other users are like there's no way I'm going to put my funds uh on this weird app that just launched um so I think there's a lot of benefits uh Beyond just like the tech but like the tech is also part of it there's like two main pillars of conversations that I'm seeing here there's like the L3 conversation uh and then there's the app layer of dgen conversation as well uh is like what is

the culture of dgen what is the unique properties of dgen block space you know uh what and there's also the connection between these two things right like so what about the fact that it's like layer three makes unique properties in its block space and and is like actually a conduit to like whatever DG culture is whatever is like the unique uh application layer around uh around like the D gen layer 3 uh well well I want to go back into like the layer three conversation just kind of like um at a conceptual level like you said like uh

dgen uh started on Bas uh and so base was the settlement layer for D gen uh and so like just like as a as a hypothetical right as like a a conversation starter here maybe just like a thought experiment isn't actually DJ a layer two where Bas is the layer one and like ethereum is just like totally irrelevant here like it's just like ethereum is like not a player in this story and so like like what is this a valid like perspective like B like DJ's actually Layer Two and Bas is a settlement layer so I think there's two

mental models for thinking about layer 3es um uh and this relates to how we scale compute and so you can think about it as essentially scaling vertically we have you know layer one we have Layer Two we have layer three at each layer the gas fees get lower scaling gets higher the block space gets more dedicated you could think about it as that mental model but the other way which you're proposing is you can think about it horizontally we have a whole bunch of blockchains and they connect in various ways and how

they connect and in what way they connect doesn't really make a huge difference what matters is that these are independent blockchains with their own ways to be customized and they bridge in and out of another chain that's another way to think about it where you have Bas and you have D gen and Bas and D gen are bridging back and forth but you could have ethereum you can have D gen and they could be bridging back and forth and in this case it would be more scaling horizontally the more block space the better the more we can scale um and that allows us to get all kinds of creativity that would

be impossible on a layer one um my own personal belief is that what the chain settles to whether we call it a layer two or a layer three that doesn't really make a huge difference you can get equivalent gas fees for layer twos and layer 3es for most things besides bridging um but what really matters is are we adding more block space to the ethereum ecosystem to the evm ecosystem can someone write solidity contracts and start to do more and have their smart contracts be cheaper easier faster to

interact with if the answer is yes that's a net good for the evm that's a net good for ethereum even if eth is not being used as the gas token um that helps the whole ecosystem scale um because all the block space that previously would be crowded is now spread out nicely among all these different chains that are bridging back and forth what advantages would a layer three like dgen have to specifically onboard like consumers is there anything like unique to the dgen layer 3 that it can do to produce like a consumer ready

experience that like a layer two can't do yeah so um the the vast majority of layer 3es so far settl into base the reason why is that base is very accessible for consumers you can Bridge really easily in and out from coinbase it's very easy for people to move funds in and out um and as a result it's kind of become the de facto chain for crypto onboarding that is where the layer three element comes in is that if base is very easy to onboard to and Deen is very easy to onboard to the bridge is quite simple

to interact with you don't even need D gen when you start interacting with the bridge it can help you it can help you get D gen um at that point um you can onboard onto dejen in essentially two steps Bridge from coinbase or another um exchange to base Bridge from base to DJ and you're good that's all you have to do I think eventually we'll start to see the world become more and more multi-chain where D gen has and other l3s and other chains have also

direct bridging in and bridging out right now that's quite logistically difficult for most the centralized exchanges so you see the shelling points around ethereum mayet around base as bridging points for briding in and out but why do you need a layer three why can't you just take whatever we're doing on the dgen app layer and just do it on base like why do we need a layer three what's like the unique uh properties that are being built here yeah so um if you wanted to transact on base you're looking at 1 cents to 10 cents if you're

look want to transact on DJ you're looking at a billionth of a penny to a millionth of a penny um that is a massive massive Improvement because you could start giving out tips that are 1 cent you could start to take part in these experiences at very low dollar amounts if you're playing a game like every game every hand and poker every action you take can be onchain affordably um in a way that allows you to exper M that property of low gas fees which is enabled by modular data availability like Celestia like arbiture many trust um uh that ability to have um

ultra low gas fees is not possible on an L2 that is settling data and um bridging and and and funds to an L1 but it is possible on a layer three that is settling funds to the layer 2 and um settling data to either the layer 2 or modular availability layer okay also also want to kind of add to that that um like there is certain customizability that we could potentially add in there and obviously um you know I'm not

familiar with exactly you know all the customizations that we potentially could do but but it is possible and we were talking about like forast forecaster native pre-compiled rather than calling out to a Smart contract that you deployed um to interact with I don't know signing forecast or casts or whatever needs to be done like at the technical level you could probably make that more native to the chain and that could offer some benefits and that you know some developers are asked uh for that customization and so maybe it's worth thinking about like how can we

customize this experience at the technological level without maybe innovating too far like into I don't know like I don't think we like particularly right now I can I don't see us as doing something like blast where we do like I don't know like this native yield like a huge technological shift huge rework of like uh you know I think they took like months and months of of time to basically rework the chain and like maybe that is like in our future but right now I think just doing those customizations helping out the developers uh build their experiences

that's probably a big value add to a lot of people and also I think visibility is kind of like another thing where definitely if you're Building on Base or you're building on optimism of course they have like grants programs and like like all this kind of stuff but if you're a smaller developer like a mid-tier developer um it's definitely harder to gain visibility and also I think like a lot of these grants programs a lot of these other things they they less revolve around like fun stuff and more about like these serious like I don't know these serious big applications and like

you know are you VC funded or like like potentially you know are you going that direction and like that's that's really cool but then like there's also this other side of like let's just like build something that's also fun it could ALS it could also like like Blossom and become a huge app I'm not saying that you know D gen isn't for like uh people who have ambition or anything like that but I think it's just a more fun space to build in um which is also and also that visibility aspect of uh it is a little bit smaller right now than let's say optimism or Bas or something else so

we would like to maybe like highlight those people who are kind of building there and so if you're kind of like early now like it's kind of you know the beginning I think uh building on there also makes sense and uh and I hope we do support like the Indie crowd like the mid kind of tier crowd and and I always kind of think of Dogecoin as like obviously they're in L1 uh if they were kind of evm compatible and they kind of had their own uh like ecosystem I mean I mean personally as a developer I'd probably go and build there or at the very minimum I'd go to the Dogecoin App

Store and check out like what is the top Dogecoin app um and I think for d genen uh chain I'd like to do like an app store style model where you have like several metrics like I don't know uh weekly transac actions um maybe foraster likes like a little algorithm that kind of takes into account different things and and that's kind of like your ranking for the week uh where Google play or some like other stores may be Tak in account downloads but um anyway that's that's kind of how I I there's there's a lot of different um reasons why you

might want to choose Dean chain yeah part of your answer that I'm hearing is that like deun just has um space to be far more opinionated than um any of the layer twos right so Bas still is trying to be like as credibly neutral as possible trying to like mimic ethereum uses eth as his currency uses the evm like all this kind of stuff like a lot of the layer twos are like kind of playing in in the same field optimism bass arbitrum all going for like ethereum equivalents right um Bas isn't

doing that Bas is more opinionated and and directional and specific about what it wants its application layer to to look like maybe you could talk a little more about just like uh bases or D gen's room to be more opinionated um yeah so I think that just kind of goes back to the customizability uh where like let's say bass probably won't do certain things they probably won't like add the forecaster native pre- compiles or things like that uh so they're not trying to orient themselves towards like one application or something but I think

for us it does make sense to orient ourselves to more to maybe like a specific application in the sense that maybe it's it's you know like a broader in a broader sense that maybe other people also want to do that and we also tie ourselves to like forecaster in like in a large sense right now maybe that will grow who knows but I think having that ability to kind of like be able to interact with the developers and offer like and offer like this experimentation layer that I think like bass or some of the bigger l2s I think they're less willing to maybe experiment with some

like specific features or like like they're they're probably I think with the risk profile is a little bit different like we're able to like probably do a lot riskier things and just like totally mess with the customization and things like that and like if it doesn't work out then whatever like maybe revert it maybe add something else like do something that's kind of wild uh in a sense and then whereas base might kind of look at that or like some other L2 chain might kind of look at that and say like well that's that's a little bit too much or that's too specific or something like that so I

think that part could be pretty impactful and it's kind like I don't know how far we want to go into that like do we want to innovate at the blockchain layer and the customization layer um to the degree that let's say like Blast has done where you know they've innovated quite a lot or do we want to just offer those smaller customizations which are still impactful um that other chains just won't do because it's too specific or something like that so I think on that front there's a lot to potentially do and I think uh will would probably know a

little bit more about this since he's been kind of implementing uh some of that stuff but um I also kind of want to get into the weeds and and do some more coding in that space But but yeah absolutely yeah that customizability is really important when you can start to add your own code to a chain you completely change what it can do um ethereum transactions can only do so much computation before they run out of gas you add a precompile as it's known and you can insert custom code in the

chain that can do anything remove from these gas constraints that's incredibly exciting you can start to see these chains be customized where I think over time they will start to look less like general purpose blockchains and more like blockchains with all this custom functionality that's opinionated in a specific way um that space is still early but there's already a number of pre-compile Frameworks coming up so I think we'll start to see blockchains that are as customizable as apps and start to support this huge developer ecosystem where they less so chains and

more so platforms designed for specific use cases in mind we talk a little bit about the Genesis story of uh the dgen token and this whole entire Endeavor was it always the plan to make a layer three um josa can you kind of like walk us through the beginnings of this whole thing yeah so a lot of the things I've been doing uh it seems like a lot of feedback that I get is is that you know the the whole process has been pretty thoughtful and and that's been like a big word that people have used when they've come to be like thoughtful thoughtful and it's like yeah I am

putting in a lot of thoughts and and you know effort into making things like uh you know as smooth as possible but also a lot of things have not been intentional so uh you know I quit my job in november-ish I think yeah beginning of November end of October and then November chilled with family didn't uh just wanted to take some time off and then December I was like okay now I'm starting my startup and I was going to do channels. fun which was going to be basically taking kind of friend te and the whole kind of blur points meta that

they started and blur started the points meta fch kind of started this whole social fine narrative and I was like all right there's something there so I'm going to do that basically with subreddits and combine this kind of like social bonding curve experiment thing so that was my idea but then I was hanging out in the dgen channel on foraster and uh that was actually like one of the least popular channels on foraster because foraster was mostly uh onboarding like the web three developer community so they did like a pretty good

job of that so members right vitalic yeah uhuh yeah anybody who's kind of like in industry and there's some big yeah big players and all that kind of stuff so it was a cool space to be in um but like all these people don't really want to be known as dents or they don't want to show their Dent side so uh but ironically I mean cool it was cool that actually uh the forecaster team they created the original djen Channel cuz you used to not be able to create channels uh only the forecaster team could create channels and so I didn't

really know like what this whole de thing was about but I saw that people were basically posting like Wall Street bet style uh charts and things like that like screenshots uh and I was on Wall Street bets previously so I kind of like that whole idea and like uh I guess I'm a little bit more Shameless in that aspect where I'm fine to like expose that side of myself so uh so I was in there and there was only a couple of us and then in December I kind of saw I kind of saw things blowing up with the points token um that just had like so

much like inflows um in such a short amount of like span of time and I was like wow like how do you get like half a million dollars in eth and just like a few hours uh seems pretty amazing with like pretty low effort you're just like creating a token um so like it felt like there's a spark and there's something going on here and then there was another token and then another token um and then all these tokens kind of fizzled fizzled out in a way um and I kind of create you know I saw this I was like all right well I'll just create a token uh so I

started with a promise of uh just a cast and it was uh you know I'll I'll create a dgen token um it's going to be fairly distributed you know do you guys want something like this and I got like a whole bunch of likes and then once I realized like okay this is like the the biggest post I've ever had on foraster like there was 100 likes which was a lot for me and I was like wow okay so I'm just going to work this day and night I have nothing better to do anyway so so but I also felt the spark like I felt like no like there's like PE

there's a demand here and so like and that's not something well I saw with channels not fun like people were signing up for the invites and things like that but here there was like real demand and I was like all right well if if people want this it seems fun I'll learn a ton so I'll do so I was basically Working Day and Night figuring out tokenomics and like kind of looking at blur kind of looking at Unis swap figuring out um like how smart contracts work exactly CU I I was a developer but on this space uh and trying to do things properly not get hacked and and set things up for long term so for sure my

vision was kind of like longer term and two weeks later January 6th I think I deployed the contract January 8th was basically kind of like the Genesis like all right now the airdrop is out um and everybody kind of gets uh their tokens and the and the whole airdrop was based on the points meta from blur I took I took the blur font I I I like I totally like their design I I I yeah I'm a big fan of kind of the way they gamify things uh but I also didn't want to do it like in a sleazy way so I kind of

wanted to do it kind of like Reddit Karma so basically like you're on this platform um and typically you do get points or Karma um and warcaster or farcaster doesn't really have that so this kind of filled that space a little bit I think um it wasn't super intentional but I just kind of it just felt natural like this is something that uh is cool and and kind of catches the eye um and yeah so that was aird drop one and then airdrop two happened and that was focused on tipping so Less on

like your ranking like how many likes you got and more on like do people value you and uh Still Still Still based around the likes like you get a tip allowance and you can tip others and that was actually not so intentional as well in the fact that I actually had a list of things so I had a whole list of like uh things I wanted to do and I wanted to build more of a game like kind of like Farmville for Facebook I thought that was going to be great like I built a like a little plug kind of like now we have frames but I was going to somehow figure that out um but then I went down

this list I was talking to a friend of mine and like down at the bottom was tip tipping and he's like whoa whoa whoa whoa like like wait like like tell me about this tipping thing and he's like how long would it take you to implement I was like I don't know like maybe like you know 4 hours 5 hours or something like really quick like yeah just do that just just just go ahead and do it and so I did it and then like basically the day it came out uh people were just like so amazed by it like I got like all these messages like like people like their minds were blown like like what like

what happened like how did you and I I didn't think it was that crazy I like it just felt like I just felt like this is cool like you know we can tip now but then I started also sinking into me like no this this is a little bit bigger than just like cool um but it's also but then I started thinking wait didn't like Dogecoin do didn't I do this on for like 4chan uh like a while ago like what wasn't this on Reddit and then I it kind of like so a lot of it was kind of like subconscious where I was like I think I was pulling from those experiences I had before and things that I did but it

wasn't like so thought out where I had a sheet of paper and I was like you know this is what Dogecoin did and this is like what Litecoin did or or like something like that it was more like feels kind of cool let's let's give it a try and if it doesn't work then let's go to the next thing um and it just like do it like super fast like let's not wait let's not wait and and build things like months or weeks um and now we're kind of at this point where now there's the L3 chain and yeah and that and the Genesis of that was basically um there's this

Frame called powerbal and uh I think they also call themselves Lotto pgf I don't know if that's like the parent company or I don't know but it's basically a group and they created this Frame where you could basically uh claim a ticket and it's a lot of then you win some D gen and things like that and they came to me and they were basically saying they're spending $300 a day on the base chain cuz they want to do everything on base they have this like this verifiable Randomness technology or something like that and it's all onchain and I I don't know the whole details but I was really trying to convince them

like just go offchain you guys like I'm doing everything offchain uh and then like like you know it's it's it's cool like we like like just make the experience uh you know like frictionless but they really wanted to do it and they just kept coming back in the conversation I almost got like a little bit annoyed cuz they just kept coming back like three or four times and and then after like it kind of sunk in I started thinking about it um and they were really pushing this whole L3 idea that they really really wanted it and so I just thought to myself well if they really want this then let's just give it

a try let's let's build it and if they want it maybe somebody else wants it maybe maybe even I'll I'll start building on it um eventually and so and that's that's been kind of the Genesis of a lot a lot ideas like liquidity mining program and like that was a comment that somebody posted um and I just thought you know it has sunk in a few days later I was like you know that makes sense and so like the way I've been doing it it has been like community-driven like initiatives where some people have been just really like pushing it and I and I just kind of go

for it and like I have nothing to lose I I feel like like let's just try it let's just try it it feels kind of like the motto of this whole entire story let's let's just see if this works yeah yeah yeah totally amazing but but but also like it's not just like a shot in the dark because I mean a lot of this stuff uh like for sure like will and Syndicate like they put in like massive amounts of effort to make this thing work and like like once we decide to do something I think we do put quite a lot of effort into it and then to make it

like the best experience possible so so is there like a road map for this whole thing like what are the next steps or is or is like a road map more or less like anti itical like when does the uh let's just try it stop and actually like a coherent plan is put in place um so I do think like the whole L3 chain is something that's like super important now like I I I was kind of thinking of it like okay like let's give it a try but now it seems like so many people have Bridge so many people are interested in it that this is probably