Conviction Over Hype: Building Real Products in Web3 with Chinmay, Percs & Basket.farm

Summary
What happens when a dev agency founder becomes a Web3 believer, builds tools for Fortune 500s, and ends up creating one of the most exciting products in Farcaster land? Find out in this candid and idea-packed episode with Chinmay, founder of Percs and Basket.Farm.

We go deep on:
- Chinmay’s journey from agency life to building in crypto
- Lessons from building with Budweiser, Playboy, Coinbase & more
- The rise of token baskets and what they unlock for creators
- Behind-the-scenes look at Basket.Farm’s product strategy
- Why Farcaster Frames might be the future of onchain UX
- His controversial take on whether Basket even needs a token!

Chinmay shares rare insights from years of shipping in crypto, experimenting during bear markets, and building through conviction, not hype. Whether you're a Web3 founder, creator, or just crypto-curious, this one’s full of gold.

Stick around to hear how Zora, Base, and meme coins might collide in a new type of curated art portfolio — and why the best thing Basket could do is not launch a token… yet. (at least I hope!)

Chapters
00:00 Introduction to Cinmai and Farcaster
01:31 Cinmai's Journey into Web3 and Blockchain
03:45 Transitioning from Agency Work to Product Development
09:56 The Birth of Perks and Product Development
16:04 Building the First Product: Token Gated Shopify
23:00 The Evolution of Ideas and the Concept of Baskets
29:15 Demonstrating the Basket Creation Process
32:40 Understanding Token Limitations
34:49 Exploring Zora Coins and Art Portfolios
38:57 Optimizing the Basket Creation Process
45:12 Business Model and Market Strategy for Baskets
53:10 Debating the Need for a Token

MY GUEST LINKS:
Chinmay on X (Twitter): https://x.com/chinmaydoteth
Chinmay on Farcaster: https://warpcast.com/chinmay.eth

Transcript

Chinmay (00:00)
if you don't have conviction or strong opinions, you don't really move forward. You just go, you're just going in circles and not really achieving anything.

Pete (aka BFG) (00:07)
everybody. Welcome. today I'm going to talk with Chinmay and I know Chinmay from Farcaster. and he has a super cool new product,

Chinmay (00:17)
title.

Pete (aka BFG) (00:20)
Welcome, super happy to have you.

Chinmay (00:23)
Thank you so much, Pete. I really appreciate you having me here. We are doing rounds right now to podcast. And when you responded, I'm like, yay, it's going to be fun. this is a few of your previous conversations as well. You go in quite deep. You get some of the answers that are really hard to get out of some people. thanks for giving us an opportunity to talk more about us and our products.

Pete (aka BFG) (00:31)
You

Yeah, well, I'm looking forward to it as well because, you know, I think there have been several, you know, things coming out of, well, basically coming out at Farcastor land from you. So I sort of lost track, but I'm, glad we can, you know, touch on that history a little bit. And then, you know, we can talk about the basket farm, So let me start with the obvious question.

Chinmay (00:54)
Bye, Castro.

surfing.

Pete (aka BFG) (01:06)
which I ask everybody, how did you get to like web3 and on chain? What was the journey and when was it?

Chinmay (01:12)
Yeah, no, this was back in 2016, 17. I have been a developer for more than a decade. I was running a consulting dev agency at that point. We were doing like very niche API development, microservices architecture, those kind of stuff, like fun, hardcore technical stuff. And one day one of my friends comes to me and says, hey, I'm having this problem with like solidity language. And I'm like, I have no idea what that is.

Pete (aka BFG) (01:29)
Okay.

Chinmay (01:40)
So he comes to me, we start talking, we start researching, we start debugging over the weekend, we solve the problem. Because again, most programming languages, as long as there is an error message, you can fix it. So we fixed that problem. But it got me into that rabbit hole of what is this solidity? What is Ethereum? Why people are doing this? What is happening? And I have heard about Bitcoin before, but again, I was not too much into it. I kind of discarded it as a...

scam coin, but at the same time, I liked it as a technology. But when I saw Ethereum, it basically piqued my interest in terms of, mean a database that is terribly slow, a database that is super expensive to use, but immutable, means nobody can really override it? That sounds interesting. Nobody can edit. That sounds interesting. There are specific use cases that we can enable. And so we started doing a lot more.

We were doing all the agency work. So we opened up our agency work to some blockchain development work and we started getting some fun clients. That was our entry point into blockchain. And 12 months later, we were doing most of the blockchain related work and nothing outside.

It's a standard blockchain story.

Pete (aka BFG) (02:46)
I see.

Standard blockchain story. Once they get you, they never let you go.

Chinmay (02:53)
Exactly.

For me, literally, like generally people come for tech, sorry, come for money and stay for the tech. I actually came for the tech and stay for the money. It's the other way around.

Pete (aka BFG) (03:01)
Yeah, that

So you've been around the blog for quite some time.

Chinmay (03:07)
I've been lucky, yes.

Pete (aka BFG) (03:08)
Okay, so what was the journey through the chain then? Because, you so you started with Solidity, but I'm sure you've, you know, did the rounds around other chains, maybe other languages. Yeah.

Chinmay (03:20)
Yeah.

So let me walk you through our thesis, right? So I am very skeptical. I'll tell you a couple of anecdotes around the journey, which basically gave me more and more conviction every single time. Naturally, I'm like, if somebody gives me something, I would ask a thousand questions before I adopt it in my philosophy. Like very similar to Dan, like hard, strong opinions, loosely held. I think that's the philosophy he talks about, right?

So I have strong opinions about things, but they're loosely held. Like if I ask, if you answer a certain question, then I can change my strong opinion to something else. But they have to be strong opinions so that that conviction is required to move something forward. Otherwise, if you don't have conviction or strong opinions, you don't really move forward. You just go, you're just going in circles and not really achieving anything. same mindset. So because of that mindset, like when I got into crypto, my biggest question was,

Yes, as an agency I can make money because people want this service. So I'll start with that. But where is this really important? So back in 2018, we came up with like a chart when to not use blockchain. Everyone talks about when to use blockchain. And I'm like, these are the reasons why you should not use blockchain. And that's like 99 % of the use case everyone was talking about. So I'm like, you have this idea? No, that's a terrible idea. I don't think it'll work.

I didn't gain a lot of popularity because of that, but I definitely made a lot of good clients because of that. Let me put it that way. Whenever somebody comes into that 1 % bucket, we did some amazing products, projects, and some amazing innovative work during that time. And one of the work that we did was around, if you know what mixers are and what tornado cash is, we actually got grant from something called Moloch DAO, which was like the first major DAO at that time.

Pete (aka BFG) (05:03)
yeah,

of course.

Chinmay (05:04)
Perfect. So

we received the first grant to build something similar to tornado cache. It was another mixer. We built it. We didn't go live with it. We are like, this is too risky. I live in Canada. I should not go live with this. that was the, yeah, we had the code and everything ready. So that, I don't think it's needed. think Vail is doing a pretty good job in my opinion.

Pete (aka BFG) (05:18)
really? Let's go live with it now! Now is the time!

Probably, yeah.

Chinmay (05:31)
and actually bought the Veil coin But point is that, one point I to make is like we were doing ZK knowledge stuff back in 2018, 19. We were building decentralized exchanges back in 2018, 19 on top of zero X protocol.

Like, so we got super lucky with some of the opportunities we had that time. At the same time, there were not many agencies doing any blockchain related stuff anyways. So being in a prime location like Toronto, which has access to the whole North America, Europe, and at the same time, not having many agencies in the world, we got some amazing clients and projects at that time. So we built a lot of cool shit along the way. But that's an agency world where my motive was to make money for me and my team in that context.

Pete (aka BFG) (06:03)
Mm-hmm.

Chinmay (06:11)
That doesn't mean I was convinced. had a conviction that yes, blockchain is going to be something big, right? Like there are two different paths, right? So my conviction in blockchain became super, super solid when I heard about MakerDAO. I think it was still late of late 2018, something like that. And I'm like, this is amazingly mind boggling. Like you can have a currency that is pegged.

Pete (aka BFG) (06:34)
Mmm.

Chinmay (06:39)
and it is not like stable by definition, but stable based on the incentives that is just amazing. And first time I understood that tokenomics, I'm like, I've learned like, know, when you learn something extremely complicated and you feel like you achieved something that was my feeling for months because I'm like, I think I nailed this. Like I understand this and I nailed this. And, I was still minorly skeptical in terms of Black Swan event. And they also talk about Boxman event quite frequently and it happened.

Pete (aka BFG) (06:54)
Right.

Chinmay (07:06)
Like I think it's a drop like 30 40 % in a matter of like a day or two and stable point remained stable. The $1 USD to one die that remained as is it moved like a sent here and there from that day. I'm like blocking is going to be here. Blocking is going to survive. There's no other way. I'm a believer now. Like whether I believe what individual things are not, but B5 is here. Stable coins are here.

Pete (aka BFG) (07:25)
Believer.

Believe or not.

Chinmay (07:34)
this incentive mechanism work, the pricing mechanism work, the open smart contract mechanism work. This is better than the rule of law in some cases. This is better than like auditing big fours easily. This is better in so many forms, or so many fronts that I want to spend every single month of my professional career and some cases private career, a private life on crypto. So that's when we basically became all it.

Pete (aka BFG) (07:45)
Yeah, definitely.

Chinmay (07:59)
So that's what we're doing back in 2018, 19. I think that's when the conviction happened fully. But we kept doing agency work until 2021. But agency work is very tiring, as I can say. It's a hamster wheel. It's a hamster wheel where every three months, you start from scratch and you get the client on board. And then you go through the weekly or biweekly sprints. And then you deliver the project. 90 % of the time, although you deliver exactly what they ask for,

Pete (aka BFG) (07:59)
Mm-mm.

It is. Yep.

Chinmay (08:25)
It's not what they were expecting, right? Like there is a major problems around that. Standard agency related stuff. And yes, it's great money. By the way, I would suggest anyone who has technical abilities to start with an agency if they just want to start something. But at the same time, it's not fulfilling. Plus it gets tiring. Plus I had my first baby in 2021. Sorry, 2020. Shit, my wife's gonna kill me. I missed the wrong year. But the point is that when I had that particular moment, I'm like, I need to spend more time.

Pete (aka BFG) (08:27)
Yeah.

Chinmay (08:54)
on the product and less on the agency work. And actually, whenever I decide something, I of course reach out to my friends and like professional career and everyone, very everywhere, professional network and anywhere people are willing to do something or talk about it. So I reached out and say, hey, I want to do more product work. If you have some product ideas, let me know. One of my friend happens to work at Shopify at that time and he was about to get started with a lot of blockchain projects. He reaches out to me and say, Chinmay, you have experience with

Ecommerce for the first 10 years of your career for last five years. You have been in crypto We have some clients who wants to go on chain using Shopify so they want to sell NFTs they wanted to token getting NFTs and everything fun and I'm like, I don't believe in NFTs At that time which is Same thing right? Like I don't think I believe in an empty but I think there is an angle where we can build some amazing products here and some amazing experiments to be done so

Pete (aka BFG) (09:38)
Again!

Chinmay (09:48)
He's like, you know what, that's not my problem. If you like talking to a client and if you can solve that problem, technically they would be more than happy to pay you. Let me make an intro. They make an intro to Budweiser. They make an intro to Superplastic. They make an intro to Playboy and all the fun ones. And I'm like, you know what? I've been looking from product opportunity. I may not have full conviction on the product, but I have full conviction in the demand. I think I can build something here. So got together with the team. We have actually five co-founders, which is very rare.

but I've known most of them for a long time. Like I've been to three of their weddings and one person I came recently know, but the trust level like hit it off like 80 % plus from the literally from the first conversation. So I'm like, look, I think it's very important that we start with a big team and a trustworthy team. So with that, we started the company. had Superplastic was our first client.

We built the product for them. We charged them product rates and not the agency rates, which is a big risk, but it paid off 12 months down the road when we had some big licenses coming our way. And we made some money. We made some revenue based on that. We raised money as well. And we're off to the chart. So after the good start. So that's the starting of Percs.

Pete (aka BFG) (10:56)
Okay.

I see, I see. So basically 2021, start of the products.

Chinmay (11:05)
Exactly. So that's

are here.

work

is really like if the person is competent, then agency is a super easy entry to anything, right? whatever you want to do, agency and consulting work is the easiest to get started with. I like, I prefer agency over consulting work because consulting work generally doesn't translate the value. In coding, it's very easy though, because at the end you're building a product and

like delivering that, that is clickable and usable. So big, difference.

Pete (aka BFG) (11:33)
That's

Big difference. Okay, so let's just continue with the story basically. So what was your thesis when you actually saw that, okay, there is a demand, we can do products which are maybe not ours, but we can do them for the clients.

Chinmay (11:52)
Okay.

Yep.

Pete (aka BFG) (11:55)
But when you were raising money, I assume you had some idea of products which you would like to build for yourself, right?

Chinmay (12:02)
We had ideas, but we did not have conviction. But we told each and every investor. So we told investors that, we have gone through two bad cycles in the past, like individually and as a team as well. We have built together. Some of the co-founders have founded companies in the past as well. So given that, we know that whatever I build right now and whatever I raise money on top of, like whichever product, it's not going to exist in two, three years. Period. Like that's how crypto works in most cases.

So with that idea, we told them that, look, I'm giving you a vision based on if this product works, this is what we can do, but very high chances this product's not gonna work in the bear market. So in that case, I need to rebuild the thesis. And the reason I'm basically raising money right now is so that I can build the team, I can keep the team, I can keep training people. And then when the time comes, I can build the right product and then go back to the market and then like have the same exponential growths. We have proven that we can

Understand the market we have solved we can solve the problem we can so we can identify the problem and then solve the problem and then extract value out of the solution as well by making money and being profitable within a matter of like two months So we have done that in the past. I'm pretty sure we can do that again when the right product opportunity comes

Pete (aka BFG) (13:13)
Okay.

Chinmay (13:18)
So that was the thought process behind it and some investors backed us.

Pete (aka BFG) (13:22)
Okay, impressive. And so what was the first product you guys built?

Chinmay (13:27)
So Percs was the first product with this token gated Shopify. We are still the biggest and largest token gating app on Shopify. It's amazing. Yeah, thank you. And we probably sold the most amount of NFTs through Shopify as well. We roughly 10, $15 million worth. That was a lot as well at that time. quite a few success stories there through our clients.

Pete (aka BFG) (13:32)
Okay.

wow, didn't know that.

Chinmay (13:53)
And eventually, basically expanded, we created like some thesis around, hey, this is where the market is going to go. Now I'm talking back in 2022, we came up with some of the thesis as in like, let's not waste our time on any L1s, sometimes including Ethereum, because L2s are going to take over. And our guess was Optimism and Arbitrum, which still are kicking. And at the same time, when Base came out, I'm like, shit, this is all Base now, there's no way to look at.

anything else and it may sound like oh yeah hindsight is 2020 believe me this was the first day email to my team as soon as i saw the Base announcement i'm like this is a win because for the last two three years whenever we've tried to onboard any client major client like Budweiser Playboy anything the first question they ask is chain and the answer is Ethereum and then that answer is the high gas prices

Then you will be like, then I don't have trust on anything else, maybe Polygon, but not really. And they'll be like, then what companies we should trust. That question answer happens every single time. Now I can confidently say it's Base as the answer and I can, they can buy it. The compliance team can buy it. The CFOs can buy it. The legal team can buy it because it's associated not backed by, but associated to Coinbase, is an S&P 500 company, roughly speaking. So, or.

So as simple as that when that happened, I'm like boom Let's continue spending time more on L2 than anything else

Pete (aka BFG) (15:23)
Yeah, I actually think a lot of people in crypto and outside crypto still don't understand that fact that, a lot of onboarding gets easier just because of Base <-> Coinbase connection. People, people don't see it, but if you ever worked in any corporation, you basically know that whatever else you say, it's basically alien.

Chinmay (15:37)
Yep.

Pete (aka BFG) (15:47)
But if you say Base and then you say Coinbase and everybody's like, yeah, I know that name. Okay. huh. That works.

Chinmay (15:53)
They

Pete (aka BFG) (15:53)
Okay, so I want to hear your thoughts about Polygon, even though it's not really connected to our discussion, but I'm just curious, what do you think about Polygon?

Chinmay (16:03)
Polygon is good.

Polygon is good. It is the technology wise acceptable. I think they did great sales and marketing in the last cycle by themselves. Cheap Ethereum. And they say we are Ethereum like Polygon is Ethereum. I think that was a tagline, which is completely wrong. that is technically it's completely wrong, but their entire marketing and BD was all about

Pete (aka BFG) (16:21)
Look at this.

Chinmay (16:30)
Polygon is Ethereum. We are an Ethereum layer 2 because layer 2 was coming up at that time but not really. They are actually just another side chain.

When the polygon was coming about, I actually believed quite a bit in Polkadot. I still believe in Polkadot's ability to execute technology. Their media team sucks in my opinion.

Pete (aka BFG) (16:40)
Yeah, that's true.

Hmm.

Yeah, so to be fair, I was a big fan of Polygon and big proponent of Polygon in the NFT community in 2021.

at that time it sort of made sense, but since then I am missing the tagline from polygon, which works. I am actually missing the same tagline from Polkadot because I was early in Polkadot. I liked the idea, but then it sort of fizzled out And everything took longer. Right.

Chinmay (17:17)
Exactly. Yeah, yeah,

yeah. I love how Gavin Woods portrays the future and everything at Polkadot. I think that is probably the most concise and clear future of technology that you can draw. He's amazingly like master at that.

Pete (aka BFG) (17:24)
Yeah.

Well, I think maybe the time is running out for some of our friends outside of Ethereum,

Cool. So let's jump into like, how did you get to Farcaster? I think it's a good start.

Chinmay (17:49)
So I will talk about like we built a couple of pieces in the middle of the bear market. One of the pieces was again, L2s are gonna be prominent and not L1. This was again very early. The second prediction was the wallets, like stop worrying about wallet onboarding because there are lots of ways to solve that problem. Like smart contract wallets were there, 4237 was there. There was a lot of things that were like Paskey was just being introduced as potential solution around that. We actually built all of those POCs internally.

to understand how easy or hard it was going to be. And we were sold. We were like, no, this is a solved problem. Let's assume that this is non-problem going forward when we are building future apps. So that was there. And one of the other pieces was social is going to pick up, which I think we are probably more wrong than other things comparatively speaking. Like everything else is more definitive.

Pete (aka BFG) (18:22)
impressive.

Mm-hmm.

You mean decentralized socials,

right? Okay.

Chinmay (18:42)
Like I'm saying decentralized social. So we were

looking at Lens and Farcaster at that time as two of those. I would say everything else became definitely sure. But the Farcaster and Lens social are still in a limbo. Then like it's good, but it's not great. You know, it's not like this has happened or this is going to happen. It's not, is inevitable. We are not in that zone yet for that. So when we made that thesis, we were like, okay, because we are building creator tools with Percs

Let's create more creator tools for creators in the social sense. So we created messaging tools where people can send DMs. We created messaging tools for XMPP on Lens. We created frame building tools. We created frame buildings via Shopify. So click, and Shopify frames can be created. So we created running, they're all those experiments. And some of them were successful. We got some amazing clientele, like Coinbase Shop using us.

was a big win in the recent times and then many more. Yes, thank you. We had Coinbase themselves sending more than 20,000 messages to their on-chain daily messages through us. That was a big win at that time as well. So we had many successful stories along the line, but nothing breakthrough as in like, hey, this is going to be justifiable as a VC backed company. So.

Pete (aka BFG) (19:35)
Okay, congratulations.

Chinmay (19:58)
We were running out of steam. had money, personally, we were running out of steam as in, guys, we are not hitting that mark. Back in last December, November, December, we sat down internally and it's like, guys, we need to build something extraordinary. This time, no limitation in terms of what we can build. So far, we have been thinking from the perspective that we should only build something that correlates to our original thesis at Percs, which is helping creators getting on-chain.

This time, no pieces. Let's build something amazing. Let's see what we want to build. We came up with a lot of ideas and one of my team member goes in and says, hey, let's build baskets, token baskets. And I'm like, you know what? That makes sense. Personally, for the last few months, I've been buying and selling meme coins. every time researching is a problem. Every time I have like a list of those and finding the right

token at the same time, finding the right address for the token is a problem. Researching is the problem. So there are lots of problems. If somebody has already done all the hard work, I'm happy to just give up 1 % of my like purchase as a fee to that particular person who has that research, right? So let's just make that platform to start with and then we can have fully indexed funds and everything in the future if really need to. So that was the idea. Plus there are other precedences like if you remember in 2019,

something like Crypto20 came about, which was index funds of top 20 crypto tokens on Ethereum. They came in 2019, it went in 2020 already, it was not successful because I think Aspie suggested too much at that time. It's just not sustainable. Plus the legal landscape was big uncertain at that point. Then the index co-op is something amazing as well, in my opinion. They have...

Pete (aka BFG) (21:27)
yeah, yeah, sure.

Chinmay (21:47)
a list of pre-created baskets or indexes that people can really work on top of and then something, then the reserve.org is another one as well. Those are good ones. Reserve.org just made a big announcement yesterday, which is in my opinion, that's perfect. I think it's gonna create more competition for us, but more competition is more validation at the same time. And I actually like working with smart people. If they're on the other side, it creates like fire on our asses to...

Pete (aka BFG) (21:58)
Yep.

Chinmay (22:14)
improve, right? So it's a good problem in my opinion. So there are all of them, but the problem that I personally think they all have is they are still extremely curated, extremely limited, and sets a very high bar of entry for anyone to create a basket. Like I've talked to a few people, creating a basket can take roughly like two to three weeks worth of work, which is a lot of work. And then

Pete (aka BFG) (22:15)
yeah, yeah.

Chinmay (22:42)
If you put in that much work, then your expectation is that I'm making 10,000, 50,000, 100,000, $500,000 money, right? Like if you putting time and effort, the expectation of return is pretty high. So we are actually thinking plus their marketing cost becomes big problem and every yada yada yada. I think what we need to do is we need to probably create a plethora of baskets, but we can't create all of them.

Pete (aka BFG) (22:54)
Yeah.

Chinmay (23:08)
So we are like, let's just community do anything and everything they want with it. We don't want to be the judge of what is good, what is bad. If they think that their basket deserves to exist, then who are we to judge? Let it do it and let people decide whether it's good or bad. As long as it's not fraud and we don't know how to capture the fraud right now, but hopefully in the future we can get there. But right now, if anyone can basically consume any one's basket, then now we are creating a proper marketplace of this.

Pete (aka BFG) (23:24)
Mm-hmm.

Chinmay (23:38)
and the best ones will automatically float up to the top. So that's the direction we are going with. And instead of like that two weeks worth of one to two weeks of research and creating a basket, we are trying to bring it down to like half an hour or probably sometimes half a minute of like just tag an agent and get the basket up and running. That's the angle that we are taking. And that's why we are not even like trying to optimize our purchase flow right now. It works, but it breaks as well in many cases.

Right now our main focus is let's optimize the creation flow as many baskets you want to create. If you want to create 50 baskets, go and do it. I don't care. That's what you should.

Pete (aka BFG) (24:16)
Okay, cool. Do you want to show how the basket works? We can do it. You can share the screen and we can have a look at it and then we can continue the discussion if you are okay with it or... Yeah.

Chinmay (24:26)
Absolutely. So I

can basically let me find a basket that is already created.

and we can take a look. All right.

Green, Chin May, there we go.

Pete (aka BFG) (24:40)
So for anybody who is watching and is not familiar with this, you are looking at the Farcaster. we are going to be looking at the frames which are only available on Farcaster, but, they might be coming somewhere else. Yeah, sorry. Just wanted to do the intro.

Chinmay (24:56)
No, that's perfect.

Thanks for the setup. So right now we are making it super simple. So you can just tag over agent called basket.farm all spread out on podcast and then tell the agent your breakdown and then it will automatically just create the basket for you. So here is an example where I'm saying, hey basket.farm create Hello World Basket with Anon at 50 % and Clanker at 50%. This is the simplest of examples. Then

It will basically say, please verify. So basket will respond back saying, please verify so that I can continue. It will say the name of the basket. will tell you the coin that you have selected. And they will give you the smart contract as well, which is a good thing to verify before you do anything else. And then the allocation. So yes, there is some validation check required because, again, you don't want to connect with the wrong one. It's an AI on the other side that we have trained.

which is not perfect. Once you do that, once basket confirm, like gives you the option, all you have to do is respond back by saying, let's go. It now creates the basket. Once you do it, basket will respond back with a frame where you can buy the tokens and the basket right there in front of it.

So I can, as you can say, I can connect my wallet. connect wallet. For some reason, this connect wallet on the web frame doesn't work. I don't know what the problem with Farcaster right now is, but let's assume that it works and they will be able to buy the basket in one click and do it. And they can promote and then other people can buy it as well. And you as a creator can start earning passive income.

Pete (aka BFG) (26:26)
Hmm.

So

So is there any limitation on which tokens I can include in the basket? I assume any Base token would work or?

Chinmay (26:48)
theoretically any Base token will work. We actually ran into some problem with agent where agent is hallucinating in terms of which token you really want. So we have hard coded some of the tokens to make sure that people are getting the right one and not the duplicate and the fake ones, but it is not a hundred percent. So that's why the verification step is very important where you have to check if that smart contract is correct or not. As long as you do that, everything else is automated.

Pete (aka BFG) (27:00)
Okay.

And so the frames are sort of ephemeral. Where am I gonna find my basket after that? If I don't save the link, obviously.

Chinmay (27:21)
Yes.

So, goodbye.

That's a very good point. So right now we are working on like adding a share button here. Some of the frames, some of the baskets already have it. It's just an old, this is an old one. This is three weeks old basket, but the new ones will have like a share button here where I can just click and share it again or get the copy URL.

Pete (aka BFG) (27:36)
Okay.

Okay, got you. I think there is a website, basket.farm, right? Can I connect my wallet there and see my baskets or not?

Chinmay (27:52)
Yes, so it's one of the recent features. So let's see if it works here. Let me open it up and share my screen. So yeah, this is the Basket .farm website. Here's the same basket details and everything. I can connect my wallet here and then go from there.

Pete (aka BFG) (28:01)
Mm-hmm.

Right, got you. Okay, cool.

Chinmay (28:10)
So now you can share

this particular page, like your basket page outside of FireCastor, it will still be able to get people in.

Pete (aka BFG) (28:18)
Okay, nice. let's come back to our chat. So the reason why I was asking about the tokens and which type of tokens is because just past probably two or three days, there was a lot of discussions in the artists community about the new Zora coins.

Chinmay (28:39)
Mm-hmm.

Pete (aka BFG) (28:39)
Basically

you publish anything on Zora, whether it's content, video, pictures, art, whatever. you kind of get tokens like coins. And it automatically sort of graduates to Uniswap v4 and it's basically DeFi for art kind of.

Chinmay (28:51)
Excuse me.

Pete (aka BFG) (28:57)
But I think the idea is not DeFi for art, it's more like DeFi for content, but it doesn't matter that much. People are hung up on the word coin because we have a lot of negative connotations. But the thing which came to my mind when we talked about it was that there should be somebody like a curator of art who would be creating what we normally in finance call portfolios.

Chinmay (29:06)
down.

Mm-hmm.

Pete (aka BFG) (29:21)
Right. So, you you do portfolio of your stocks or your tokens, whatever, but you know, you, you would do portfolio of art pieces, but through the tokens, which they emitted. and I thought that it just clicked for me that baskets would be like a good place for it because it's the easiest way to make it. You know, it's just like, I don't know about any other easy way to like create a portfolio of things and share it with people, honestly.

Chinmay (29:32)
Mmmmm

That's actually not a bad idea.

Pete (aka BFG) (29:48)
So that was just the idea behind it.

Chinmay (29:52)
That's actually not a bad idea, like a simple portfolio of your own coins on Zora. We are not live on Zora chain, but this can work out once we go there.

Pete (aka BFG) (30:02)
Zora does the coins on Base. So the coins, the art coins are on Base.

Chinmay (30:04)
really, I didn't know that.

Sure, okay, I'll have to listen and read more about the coins then. If they are on Base already, is there a ticker associated with it? Is there a token associated with it?

Pete (aka BFG) (30:12)
you

yeah.

So basically for every thing which you mint on Zora now, you, there is a billion coins. This would be basically ERC 20s created. 10 million goes to the person which created it and they can buy more and everything else is in the Uniswap pool sitting basically as a liquidity thing. And when people buy art, they basically just get coins.

And there is some pretty finite amounts.

Chinmay (30:45)
so they basically doing

what a clanker does, right? In that case.

Pete (aka BFG) (30:50)
Right. Yeah. Pretty much just for the visual stuff. right now, there is a problem that you buy a coin for some art, but the art is not really showing on any viewer when you see the coin. So it doesn't show in the wallet the art. It basically just show some name of ugly coin.

but I'm sure they're working on it. And then it would be pretty cool because I can imagine like a nicely curated portfolio. The thing which Foundation had like early on and they called it Universes or whatever was the name for that. But you you could curate like your art sort of exhibition from different people, from your art. And I think it's a big like...

Chinmay (31:13)
interesting.

Yeah.

Pete (aka BFG) (31:35)
A lot of people do it, but they don't have the tools to do it in a way that's shareable. So I think it might work. Just my thinking.

Chinmay (31:41)
Wow. Okay, you know what, I'm going to take for,

I'm going to go and figure out how that works. And maybe there is a way to create a portfolio of coins on Zora. And if that works, then like, is there a ticker associated with it or is there a smart contract? So every coin has a ticker associated with it.

Pete (aka BFG) (31:58)
Yeah. yeah, yeah. Every

coin has a ticker, every coin has a smart contract. So it's basically like a lot of coins and contracts.

Chinmay (32:06)
I should I should read more. I

should have read more of this. This is good. Thank you so much

Pete (aka BFG) (32:11)
No

problem, no problem. Okay, so, so, abstracting from Zorath stuff, which was basically just my pet peeve, which I wanted to talk about. What is the plan now with the basket?

Chinmay (32:19)
That's perfect.

So basket, we see it as a marketplace. In a marketplace, generally standard marketplace problem, you have buyers and sellers and you need to basically bring them together. In this case, there is creators and buyers. So creators are basically people who research, analyze and everything, people who create the baskets and buyers are who wants to use those baskets to participate on those that mean coins or whatever the basket is made of.

Pete (aka BFG) (32:27)
Okay.

Chinmay (32:49)
So right now we are highly focused on optimizing the creator flow because I think that is the major differentiator compared to anyone else like with Beat Reserve, Beat Index Group or Coin 50, which is by Coinbase itself. Like I want to personally flood the market with so many baskets that it just, whatever you want is there. Whatever combination you want, it's just there.

So you don't have to think and research more. You can just like go through those baskets and say, yeah, this is a good one. want to, I want to take a piece of that. So that's what we are trying to optimize. We are running into some agent related challenges because agents are very finicky and every other agent that I've seen so far is very one command oriented. So be it banker, banker is basically do this on this. It's one command.

Pete (aka BFG) (33:34)
Hmm.

Chinmay (33:38)
Like just launch this coin and then every instruction is one place. And there is no chance of getting it wrong because there is no worry about like, will this 10 coins that I put in my basket will add up to a hundred or not? Or am I able to find this coin or not? So some of those problems that we are running into and we need to figure out how to correct it. Once that creation flow is working and that's why we are running this contest to make sure that we can perfect this flow in next week or two.

Pete (aka BFG) (33:38)
Hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Chinmay (34:06)
Once that

is there, then we're going to start optimizing the purchase flow so that people can see how many people have bought this basket in the past, who are the token holders of this basket, how much the person themselves, the main one, has bought using the basket. So what's their own conviction around that? So those kind of social signals, then the performance tracking will come. Then some of the tools might come in the future saying that

What if I create a basket? How would I have performed in the last three years as an example or three months? Like, what would that look like? Right. So those kind of doing that we can create that will create optimization. But right now, I think it's one thing at a time, which is creation, creation, creation. And then once you optimize the hell out of this creation flow, then go into Twitter and then open that up even further, because now it's going to be even crazy market that we are opening up to.

Pete (aka BFG) (34:38)
Simulation, nice.

Great. Okay.

Chinmay (34:59)
that nobody has seen something like this where you can just create a basket by just tagging. That's our go-to market. And I think that reduced friction is the reason why people will give it a try.

Pete (aka BFG) (35:04)
Mm-hmm.

Okay. it's totally viable strategy. it was definitely, it would be definitely hot strategy if we were still going on with the meme coin craze because I, I have been talking to a number of people and they were like, if I could just buy like a list, you know, in one click, because it's so much clicking. and you know, a lot of.

Chinmay (35:12)
Thank you.

Perfect! Send them all my way. I'm gonna hear them.

Pete (aka BFG) (35:32)
Yeah. And

you know, it's surprising how many people are sort of old school. So they wouldn't want to use a bot to buy, you know, meme coins because it's sort of a game of time. so they, would run the bot, but they would do it manually and all sorts of things.

Chinmay (35:49)
Absolutely,

Pete (aka BFG) (35:50)
Okay, so what's the business model behind the baskets? I know that whoever creates, yeah, sorry, please.

Chinmay (35:53)
So it's simple. Yeah,

no, that's fair. That's fair. So it's very simple. 1 % fees are charged when you buy the basket. And right now, 70 % goes to us. 30 % goes to the creator. Right now, it's comparatively higher than the other person, almost double, because I think we are putting extremely heavy development in this. are putting roughly six people are working on this right now full time. So it's expensive as hell. So I would like to recoup some money.

Pete (aka BFG) (36:02)
Mm-hmm.

Chinmay (36:20)
from this, but in the future that number can change easily.

Pete (aka BFG) (36:24)
Is there any stats you can share? Like how many baskets people created so far? Because it's not that long you guys are...

Chinmay (36:29)
So we are approaching roughly 100 baskets.

So we are approaching roughly 100 baskets creation. Again, I think we're gonna have so many baskets then people would care to like go through all of them. And people will only care about the top ones. So roughly 100 baskets are there. My goal is to have 5,000 baskets by the end of this year. Let's see if I can reach that goal or not. That will be a good goal to achieve. The second one is...

The second one is numbers wise, have roughly like 80 to 90 transactions altogether. roughly we have, perfect, there you go, thank you. I hope you liked it. Perfect. And we basically have like the whole, the fees generated is roughly 12 bucks. So it generally means that roughly $1,200 worth of value has been transferred through the baskets right now.

Pete (aka BFG) (36:58)
I am two of them.

Yeah.

Chinmay (37:17)
And we haven't started promoting the purchase flow at all right now. this week we did a little bit of marketing and then just doubled what happened in the last three weeks. So we can ramp that up very easily, but we just need to make sure that we clear all the issues before we put more time and effort into marketing.

Pete (aka BFG) (37:37)
Sure,

Chinmay (37:38)
can I ask you a question, is that okay? So how was your experience when you basically bought from a basket? Like why did you buy it? What did you buy?

Pete (aka BFG) (37:39)
Sure, by all means.

it's totally fine. So as far as I remember, probably the first day when you mentioned it, maybe second, I had time. I created some small, one small basket. think there were like only two or three coins. And I tried to buy that obviously, because, know, once you create it, you want to test whether it works. If you share it on a timeline, come back to it and see what happens. Right. And,

Chinmay (38:09)
Yep.

Pete (aka BFG) (38:10)
It works pretty, I would say pretty smooth. wasn't, to be fair, I wasn't searching for any exotic coins. It was basically just the most common ones like, you know, banker and maybe clanker and, and Degen or something like that. because, I'm not exotic meme trader. but I, you know, I wanted to see how it works and what happens after that because I'm.

Chinmay (38:13)
next

Pete (aka BFG) (38:37)
Always struggling with the fact that whatever happens in a frame, unless I save the frame somewhere, like specifically with some tagging and descriptions, it's basically gone forever because I can never find it. Even if I bookmark it, it's lost.

Chinmay (38:53)
the case.

So we are about to start sending notifications. So this is our wheelhouse, right? Like we build an entire messaging system for like a work cast messaging and everything. So creating a notification system.

Pete (aka BFG) (39:04)
And thank you very much for that. I started

using the DMs. It's nice to see who is coming in. Pretty cool.

Chinmay (39:10)
Yay. Thank

you. I actually use it for myself as well. It's actually very fun to see what are your new followers are because each and every new one receives a welcome message from you, like from me. So that's super handy. So because we have that system, we actually extended that system to notifications itself. So right now, we haven't opened it up to anyone else yet, but I literally as an admin, I have a click click click UI to send people a lot of notifications manually rather than

Like I would write a script to do so. So right now we're going to invest more into sending more reminders, more notification as in like, how's your basket doing? You created a basket, let's say two weeks ago, but like sending more frequent reminders saying that, your basket is performing X percent because you bought it at this time. This is the outcome of that right now. And we'll keep reminding people to come back and share more for their community.

Pete (aka BFG) (40:03)
Okay, that would be very cool, I would definitely enjoy that. By the way, I have one question about the auto DMs for your new followers. How big percentage of people actually reply to you when you send the DM? Do you have like a rough idea? Yeah?

Chinmay (40:08)
Coming.

Sure.

Surprisingly quite a bit. Surprisingly

quite a bit. Yeah, like I don't have the percentage in front of me right now, but every day. Okay, I'm making assumptions here. roughly I get 50 to 60 followers a day, roughly. Okay. Bot spams included. And I at least get one to two people to respond to that a day.

Pete (aka BFG) (40:31)
Sure.

Mm-hmm.

Okay. Yeah, because I was actually thinking, you know, my DMs are now full of bots, but then occasionally, you know, there is a person like, Hey, nice to meet you. I'm like, okay. He's not a bot.

Chinmay (40:51)
Exactly like I

Exactly. Like half of them are not real. But that's not the point. We are here to make community and friends, right? So I think that friendly welcome message goes a long way in building that relationship.

Pete (aka BFG) (41:06)
Yeah, absolutely. I wish we could do it on Twitter.

Chinmay (41:09)
There are ways to do that actually. So there are tools that does DM and everything, but it's not as clean.

Pete (aka BFG) (41:11)
Yeah, I know.

Yeah. Okay. What is the question I was supposed to ask you in my end didn't. What have I forgot to ask? And you actually wanted to get out there.

Chinmay (41:26)
So I basically want to talk more about, or this is more like my question to the community, is in like, I am still debating whether we need a token or not, like basket token itself. I'm not convinced. I have a strong opinion that I don't need one, but they are loosely held and people have to convince me. So if anyone is listening, if anyone has opinion, if you have opinion, Pete.

Pete (aka BFG) (41:41)
Mm-hmm.

Chinmay (41:53)
I want to hear when to launch a token and when not to launch a token. So that's one of the major questions that I'm letting community decide rather than me saying, yes, it's going to happen. No, it's not going to happen.

Pete (aka BFG) (42:05)
Okay, that's a very cool way to do it and a very cool question. I have a strong opinion. It's not actually even loosely held. I think launching a token is basically the last line of defense if you don't need it for your business model.

Chinmay (42:14)
Tell me.

Pete (aka BFG) (42:23)
you know, usually the most successful people who don't really need to take the VC money get the best deal. And so I think it's should work the same way with the token.

Chinmay (42:34)
in general, you're absolutely right. That's the very similar mindset as well.

Pete (aka BFG) (42:36)
Yeah.

Chinmay (42:38)
Right now we have enough money. We have a years of runway left So that's not the number one problem. But I'm hearing you loud and clear. If you need it.

If you need attention, if you need money, then do it.

Pete (aka BFG) (42:49)
I'm always asking, you know, am I going to keep using the product just because I got a airdrop? Probably not. If it's a good product, I would use it anyway. And if it's not.

I'll take the money and leave and go somewhere else. So you basically just lost all the signal about how good your product is once you launch token so if you can hold back on it, it's probably better for you and the product.

and the community as well. Well then, everybody would have a different opinion,

Chinmay (43:21)
I think, yeah, that's perfect. If you need anything else, I'm here. But thank you for having me.

Pete (aka BFG) (43:21)
Cool.

Well, thank you for coming on. I've learned a little bit more about Percs actually and about yourself. I am looking forward to what's gonna be happening with baskets because there is a lot of coins coming basket might be here just in time to capture whatever is gonna happen with the coins flood.

Chinmay (43:44)
Let's hope so.

Pete (aka BFG) (43:45)
Thank you very much, Chinmay Everybody have a nice evening.