Jake Gallen's Guest List · Jake Gallen

334 | Migration Cohort 7 | Plowed, Dotcom, Backyard Bandwith

March 8, 2026·55 min·5 clips
Jake Gallen kicks off Migration Cohort 7, revealing four projects moving tokens in a bear market.
The episode opens with hosts Jake and Chris welcoming listeners to Migration Day for Cohort 7, noting it is the seventh migration event in the platform's history and that 70 teams have migrated over the previous five to six months. They note the current bear market but frame it as an ideal time for meaningful structural changes when only committed believers remain. Migration progress is tracked live, with Root leading at various points during the episode. Mr. Wizard represents Y2K, a project built around tokenized nostalgia focused on 90s and 2000s cultural touchstones. He describes Y2K's content strategy of regular creative posts including 3D videos and nostalgia-based engagement posts, and explains the Shills platform he developed separately, which is a community rewards system that manually approves posts before paying out token rewards, addressing the gaming and bot problems that plagued InfoFi. He articulates a theory that the 20-25 year nostalgia cycle explains why 90s and 2000s aesthetics dominate current culture. The Ploud team, represented by Farmer and Lindy, describes a blockchain board game inspired by snakes and ladders and Monopoly, where players move across a board, buy plots of land that earn rent paid in the Root token, and can sell plots freely. They explain that the original Ploud token was built for different purposes and is incompatible with the game's token economy, making migration necessary. Taruki, founder of Backyard Bandwidth rebranding to Innova, explains that he built a private AI service running on five self-owned server racks to eliminate the privacy risks of co-located data centers. He describes the proprietary Edge Vault technology, which stores LLM conversation context as an encrypted cookie on the user's browser, auto-deleting on session end, contrasting it with Venice and other providers. He mentions the platform runs tens of thousands of LLM requests per day and also offers VPS, S3, and VPN services. The hosts discuss the nostalgic cycle theory in depth, with the conversation turning to which assets will generate nostalgia in five to ten years, including a discussion of Minecraft's perpetual nostalgia loop. Post-migration plans discussed include creator fee capture, community treasury building for Y2K, ANOVA token integration into Innova's LLM with staking and DEX trading signals, and short-form video content for Backyard Bandwidth's data center story.

As heard by us

A loose migration conversation where infrastructure choices and timing matter.

This episode follows founders comparing notes on migration, ownership, and what it costs to keep building when the market feels rough. The talk moves between self owned infrastructure, VPS, S3, and VPN products, with a useful reminder that different teams migrate for different…

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Why you'd press play

A live migration room for teams weighing timing, conviction, and what it means to move in a rough market.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →
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