Trading memecoins is as easy as tapping Bolide app on your phone, talk with founder Oxana

Trading meme coins is where many retail users start their Web3 journey, outside of centralized exchanges like Coinbase.

Today, I talk with Oxana, the founder of the Bolide app. Bolide is a meme coins trading supermarket in your pocket. We discuss (as always) her journey into the crypto world (spoiler: she was early!), previous projects, and how they all led to the founding of Bolide. We also touch on why she likes meme coins so much. 

Oxana shares insights on user experience, onboarding new users to Web3/crypto, and the growth strategies for Bolide. We also touch a little on future plans for Bolide, like including AI integration and enhancements to the app.

Interesting Highlights

- Bolide was created to simplify trading meme coins for retail users because that's where many start their Web3 journey, outside of centralized exchanges like Coinbase.
- Onboarding new users is crucial and the Bolide team focuses on social media like Twitter and TikTok.
- The app has seen significant growth with 62k downloads and 4k active users weekly.
- Bolide team wants to support new tokens and provide marketing assistance to developers. Just reach out!
- The app is designed to be mobile-first, catering to the needs of retail traders.
- Future features include automated investment options and improved transaction speeds.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Oksana and Bolide
09:33 Focus on Meme Coins and User Experience
16:48 Onboarding New Users and Distribution Channels
22:46 Current User Base and Growth Strategies
30:45 Enhancements and Features in Development

MY GUEST LINKS:
Oxana's X (Twitter): https://x.com/Oxxbid
Oxana's Farcaster: https://warpcast.com/oxb
Bolide's website: https://bolide.fi
Bolide's X (Twitter): https://x.com/bolide_app

Transcript

Pete (aka BFG) (00:00)
Hello everyone and I'm back. You're probably surprised, know, new year and already a second podcast. Call it Renewed Energy. And today I'm here with Oksana. Do you want to be called by name or should I say OXBIT?

Ox Bid (00:19)
No, name. I'm okay.

Pete (aka BFG) (00:21)
Perfect.

And you guys will see very soon why I Oksana. First of all, she's, I would say, a big friend from Farcaster and maybe almost Farcaster OG because she's part of the organizing force behind the Farcaster meetups in London. And there are not that many regular meetups of Farcaster folks. So that's impressive. And second of all, it's a meme coin season and she's the founder of the app

which lets you trade meme coins very easily called Bolide. So Oksana, welcome.

Ox Bid (00:57)
Yeah, thank you very much, Pete, for having me. It's a pleasure to call the new year with an amazing conversation with friends. I feel like Farcasta is an amazing app, but the main value for me is actually I found so many people who are very similar to me because we're all building something and we all want to achieve something. And we are so supportive and that's a cool.

whole bunch of cool friends. So yeah, nice.

Pete (aka BFG) (01:31)
There

you have it. It's a FarCaster advertising and for free. So if you're not on FarCaster, come and join us. Come and join us. You see, we are friendly. And let's jump right into it. So Oksy, how did you get to crypto? What was the journey?

Ox Bid (01:37)
Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

Yeah, so I'm in crypto since 2012. One of my, like it's actually my friend and my partner, he became like a crypto trader because he heard about Bitcoin from one of the forums, which was very popular back to that time. And I started to trade together with him and then it was Ethereum.

Then it was a bunch of altcoins and then decentralized market created. And I guess in terms of the overall innovation, the decentralized market, which we call on chain right now, right? So it's the same innovation as Bitcoin was created because... So I'm from...

Pete (aka BFG) (02:41)
Yeah.

Ox Bid (02:51)
Like very traditional markets before I was working for British American tobacco for the non-companies. And in those like traditional companies, can literally see the, know, how everything depends on everyone and the crypto. was, think the first market where you literally can interact with another person directly without any middleman's and all transaction happens.

The key, I think, the key important part for me was that you can achieve that person, you can reach that person no matter where this person is. And that's the biggest innovation after internet. Yeah. And that's cool.

Pete (aka BFG) (03:40)
Okay.

So basically you are like a trading family.

Ox Bid (03:47)
Yeah,

exactly. Like I'm into trading for a lot of time. I won't say I wish I traded less because in this case I would have a bunch of bitcoins and never dox myself. Yeah, but...

Pete (aka BFG) (04:01)
Yeah, that

happened. I guess it happened to 99 % of people actually, unless you totally forgot about it, you definitely sold somewhere along the way. So, okay. So basically we know you are kind of blockchain OG, which started early. So how did you, is Boli the first app you are building on blockchain and how did that start?

Ox Bid (04:07)
Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. So I actually built it previous startups, but they were not super successful. We just were pivoting. I think we started the journey as a team at some point in 2018. So we had an idea to build peer to peer platform because my background was in trading and at some point I traded within local bitcoins. So it was very popular.

European peer-to-peer platform. And the idea was to create the peer-to-peer platform where everybody can trade within top 10 coins, not just Bitcoin. And we always were focusing on a great user experience. So we built like, you know, different flags and as a user PFPs. And we were focusing on the traders.

Pete (aka BFG) (05:11)
Mm-hmm.

Ox Bid (05:25)
reviews and the transparency between trades. So it was cool experience. We actually build an app and launch it, but because it was the first app, so we didn't have enough experience in the market distribution and we just failed this part. it was very hard. Marketplaces are hard. It's always about chicken and that. Yeah.

Pete (aka BFG) (05:50)
They are, yep.

Ox Bid (05:52)
And we were trying to bring like the traders and then we had a problems with like it was makers and takers and that was problems with the people who gonna buy from them. And at some point we were just super exhausted because it was the first experience and we did a break. And then we were building different stuff internally, like optimizing trading experience for ourselves.

different trading bots and on top of the centralized exchanges like Binance, Kraken, those two main ones. And then it literally when decentralized market became a thing, we were thinking that this is the way how we want to work there. And a lot of folks from trading, they move their assets within decentralized market.

into like lending protocols and decentralized exchanges as well because of that they can provide the liquidity and get additional income in yield which was very attractive and that's how we actually started to interested in that space and we began building Bolide as a decentralized application.

Pete (aka BFG) (07:15)
Mm-hmm.

Ox Bid (07:15)
So

we built this AD app by leveraging lends and protocols and decentralized exchanges and provide the final yield on top of the user's assets. So we built the strategies. It was very complex product. We did a lot of audits, which cost a lot of money. And that was very hard to maintain.

Pete (aka BFG) (07:27)
Okay.

Ox Bid (07:40)
We managed somehow to get around $14 million in TVL and without any external support. And that was a very difficult to reach because the market itself was very technical. But again, we were targeting a kind of newbies. We optimized everything and we did a great user experience.

So basically from the user perspective, people who had like a USDT, USDC or any other tokens, can just add their liquidity within our strategies and they can see how much we earn like every second. It was not a huge yield percentage, but it was a good...

good percentage for passive income, would say it was an average 10 % on USDT and without any effort from the user side. that's what we did. And then the market collapsed with ethics news, know, Ethereum created Ethereum staking and it was very hard to compete with that. Yeah.

Pete (aka BFG) (08:43)
Mm-hmm.

Thank

Okay.

Right. Okay.

That makes sense. Interesting that, you know, with so many, I would say, technical jobs, you decided still to focus on like new users or let's say non-technical users. I would expect you guys would start with like OGs and, you know, the real traders. Okay. So how did, so basically I assume Bolide was born out of that experience, right?

Ox Bid (09:21)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Pete (aka BFG) (09:33)
So why

meme coins and why mobile app?

Ox Bid (09:40)
So because of that previous experience with decentralized market, when we had like a very complex product and every time you update the code, basically need to do audits and it takes so much time. when you finish it, you already need to update the new code and do it auditing one more time. decided, and we also like did a user research across all of our journey. And we realized that

Purely, if you want to focus on retail users, so retail traders, the first journey which they face, they literally start trading. So they usually go to centralized market and go to Coinbase, for example, and create an account and buy bunch of tokens. And that's the first actions that they usually do. And we decided that actually wallet,

as the most common product within the space. It's like your key entry point within the any markets. And because we were so in the decentralized market, we don't want to build something centralized. So we were thinking about like on-chain wallet. And that's the first thing which we started to build. we basically just moving, we were moving Bolide as a G app into like

Pete (aka BFG) (11:00)
Hmm.

Ox Bid (11:06)
facing wallet side. So we wanted to be like mobile first. That's the first trend, which we clearly saw. And at the same time, I was in California a year ago, doing interesting accelerator program within Draper University. And I spent some, like I was there for five weeks and doing different stuff and met a bunch of people. So

I did my first four-caster meetup there and I met Matthew who was building events and other OG people. And because of that time, I became very familiar with Bass and Bass was just like three or four months old. And I realized that so many years...

Pete (aka BFG) (11:59)
I remember

that time.

Ox Bid (12:01)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it was amazing time like it was like yesterday, but it's still day one. And back to that time, actually, because I was in the US, so every user who I met, and I was chatting with people like in the bar, restaurants, whatever, and asking them like, what are you guys buying? Do you buy crypto? Every time they told me like, yeah, I bought crypto, I bought it in Coinbase, or I still hold this or whatever.

It was always Coinbase, you know, because I think the penetration and the user base are mostly like they all have Coinbase wallet. And I was literally very clear seeing that we need to move into base. But originally we were building Bolide on BNB blockchain because of our experience with Binance.

Pete (aka BFG) (12:50)
Okay.

Ox Bid (12:54)
And we had several blockchains including like Arbitrum, Ethereum and Polygon as well. And we also found a huge lack of ecosystem support. We were feeling like we were building something, but nobody actually cared about us. We were trying to like bring new people, trying to reach retail users. But again, it was very, it was zero support from ecosystem. Nobody ever.

reports our post on Twitter or whatever, and never gave us any grants or any support. And I felt this is a bit different with BASE because I think I started to comment under JCPoL posts and sometimes we went like, send him DMs and he immediately replied. And that was so shocked. Yeah.

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

Yeah, he's very

active. I'm wondering if he had bots which do all the work like a year ago because it seems impossible almost sometimes.

Ox Bid (13:52)
He is very active.

I don't think so. I think his reply was always very, you know, personal. And both can't do that, at least like a year ago. It was completely different world.

Yeah. So that's how we decided to go to base. And then because I became active on car cast, there are Degen talking launched in January. And I was chatting with my friends and telling them story about the Degen, how it was created by the community for the community, how many exciting ideas with this airdrop, which I got the first airdrop and still hold.

Pete (aka BFG) (14:30)
Mm-hmm.

Ox Bid (14:48)
You know, and this is all thing which pushed me to think about like meme coins market being accessible for everyone. like meme coins is also very, I would say attractive for newbies. And I feel like it brought a lot of retail users, even within far caster ecosystem. If you think about it, most of far caster user, they were not crypto-ozie, at least like they were not purely traders. And right now everyone buy.

meme coins, right? Everyone buys something and everyone sells something. And that's the way how meme coins brought them into that space. And I believe like that was also a very clear path for us. We wanted to bring and build something for retail users. And at the same time being like funny and being very proactive in this space.

And we just decided to create like YouTube video and we created proposal and we decided to put like the latest technology, like account obstruction and preview as well. And we showed the way how it could potentially work for retail users. And I got a bunch of DMs about this product and people were very excited and started to ask me how they can trade. And we immediately pivoted and

started to work on Bolides Mimicostrating Act.

Pete (aka BFG) (16:20)
Nice, nice. What's a long story, but relatively short timeframe actually, know, surprisingly short timeframe because we were talking about a year ago and I guess, you know, we can say it's still day one for base, but it's still day one for bull light as well. You so you perfectly captured the meme coin trend. So I have a...

Ox Bid (16:22)
That's a long story.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

Pete (aka BFG) (16:50)
I have a bunch of questions which just came to mind because you were talking about things which I think I was having some exchanges with people on crypto Twitter about. So where do you guys find new users and how do you onboard them? What channels do you use? So obviously you already onboarded everybody who was onboardable on Farcaster.

Ox Bid (16:53)
Hmm.

Mm.

Mmm.

Yeah.

Pete (aka BFG) (17:20)
But what other channels do you use? Because I guess, you know, it's a good start if you catch the wave, but then, you know, the app basically needs to keep growing. So how do do that?

Ox Bid (17:27)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah. Yeah. So it's a great question because I feel like distribution is the first thing which you need to do. And because we were building Voli for three years in total. So we actually have a strong social media and we by building like the app, we build a very strong presence within D bank. I don't know if you heard about this tool, but there are a bunch of whales.

Pete (aka BFG) (18:00)
Sure.

Ox Bid (18:02)
So, and I feel like we were back to that time. were like a top two project within D-Band itself in terms of the numbers of followers. And we still have more than 30k followers there. And we have a great relationship with some of the key whales that started earlier posting within D-Band. And we came to them and asked like, please help us and like try the product, us early feedback.

Pete (aka BFG) (18:10)
Okay.

Impressive.

Ox Bid (18:32)
And we got this feedback from them. And of course, Twitter account as well. We have 34k Twitter followers and we were constantly building our community within Twitter, Farcaster. And we had also telegram channel. We still have a telegram channel and events. So those, I guess, key social media as a distribution channels for us.

And the key traffic is from Twitter, of course. So Twitter is very useful. guess Crypto Twitter is a special bunch of people who are curious about crypto itself. There are of course some like very professional influencers, KPM leaders, whatever, or traders who share the experience, but there are also a bunch of curious people who

Pete (aka BFG) (19:07)
Interesting.

Ox Bid (19:31)
a very, in the very beginning of their journey. And you can always reach them and try to get the early users feedback. But each order, the first hundred users got from Forecaster and I was using Bounty Caster for that. So I created a Bounty Caster and said like, I'm building a new meme coin tab. So come and talk with me. I want to onboard you and give you a free USDC to try the product.

Pete (aka BFG) (19:47)
Okay.

Ox Bid (20:01)
And that's how I onboarded 100 people. So by doing it within Farcasser, yes.

Pete (aka BFG) (20:05)
Impressive.

Nice. So I, I'm going to share what we chatted with somebody on, I think it was on Twitter. It was actually the observation that I have a feeling when I talk to most people who are new to crypto, that they didn't, don't basically come to Twitter or X. They skip it.

And they get on board it mostly from like TikToks and, you know, YouTubes of the world. Totally ignoring crypto Twitter because of the bad rep. And they go straight away to like centralized exchange, obviously, because that's, you where, you know, most of the money actually starts and ends for a lot of people just because they...

Ox Bid (20:46)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Pete (aka BFG) (21:01)
They don't have a brain capacity to actually do more. It's enough as a crypto exposure for them. But I feel that it's like app like Bolide could be one of the first onboarding experiences for people who just want to try some lighthearted trading on the phone. So I don't want to push.

any other channel on you because I know how painful it is to actually run more channels. But it's just an observation which more and more people I speak with basically have that there's a lot of people we are kind of losing in the ecosystem simply because they just jump straight to the centralized exchange from the channels which we kind of choose to ignore purposefully, I think, a lot of us.

Ox Bid (21:30)
Heh.

Mm-hmm.

Pete (aka BFG) (21:59)
least. Okay that's very cool. So how many users does the light have now after a year?

Ox Bid (21:59)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, we have 62k downloads. Yeah, and around 4k active users per week.

Pete (aka BFG) (22:11)
Wow, impressive, okay.

Okay, that's nice.

Ox Bid (22:18)
Yeah. Yeah. And

back to your previous comments. So I completely agree with you. I would say there are two ways how people comes into space. Like I feel like a lot of things depends on friends as well. A lot of people told me that they came because of friends and family. And the second part, YouTube and Tik Tok. Yeah. We experienced with that. We have both channels. We did a lot of content and we're very strong on Tik Tok as well.

We now deleted all previous content about decentralized applications and trying to push more meme coins. And we want to experience and try to do something more, but it takes a lot of time and a very small team.

Pete (aka BFG) (22:47)
There you go.

Right, yeah, it takes time, that's true.

But I think I remember that you guys have some sort of a referral program, right? Yeah, there you go. So TikTok influencers, see, Bolide has an interesting referral program, jump on it so they don't have to do the work. Okay, switching gears.

Ox Bid (23:13)
Yeah, I could do. Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yes please.

Pete (aka BFG) (23:32)
What are the most interesting... Well, okay, let's stick with the application for a brief moment. So what are the top three priorities for the next quarter or two for Bolide?

Ox Bid (23:37)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah. So our goal was always to be the easiest way to trade whatever you want to trade. And at some point we were focusing a lot on meme coins. Right now, I would say, and personally, and as a team, we are very curious about AI and we want to be still easiest meme coins, easiest trading experience ever for any level of users.

Pete (aka BFG) (24:04)
Mm-hmm.

Ox Bid (24:14)
and that no matter what you want to trade. And they will be definitely some AI integrations. And we had a conversation with Clanker yesterday as well. So we're going to do something cool together. And it's not just about launching tokens. It will be more stuff to come. And regarding, I think, the next three months,

Pete (aka BFG) (24:22)
Mm-hmm.

Ox Bid (24:41)
We still want to highlight the best users experience. We want to add more on-ramp solutions to make it super easy for newbies. But at the same time, we want to really focus on discovery. And as we were focusing on meme coins before, our key goal was to discover new, like, alpha and discover new strong tokens, which can make you wealthy at some point.

Right now we want to do the same with more focusing on AI. And I feel like I don't want really divide AI within meme coins. Like I feel this is the same market and AI is meme coins and Bitcoin is meme coin. Everything is meme coin. And in this case, doesn't really make any difference what you're going to discover. We just want to make sure that you will find those tokens early.

and you will be able to hold them and stick with the community as well.

Pete (aka BFG) (25:43)
Okay, so maybe an interesting question for me. So what's the listing process for a token to appear on a Bolide app? What's the process you guys use? Because there's millions of tokens. So how do you choose which ones to actually list?

Ox Bid (25:55)
Yeah.

Yeah.

So in the beginning, when we were not super, I would say popular, we were approaching Memecoin staffs and we were asking them, how can we actually help you guys? Because we built quite a big community and we know how to do marketing within this space. So we were helping them to establish like their communities and we were helping them.

to find new markets. And we were approaching them and saying like, come to us, we want to lift you and let's do different marketing activities together. Right now we have Shopify page where you can literally choose services which we provide for MIM coins. And you can buy them directly within this page.

So the process is mostly automated. have a telegram bot for listings with the team. I usually join these channels by myself as well as our intern, guy who like helping and creating a lot of cool stuff. And we chatting with tokens, understanding their targets and

depending on the targets, we suggest the different services which we provide. In a lot of cases, we do a lot of like free stuff because we are very early in the space and we want to support as much people as possible. There are some like marketing budget, which we usually suggest them to spend, but that budget doesn't go to us. So it's goes to our users. And we have a very transparent system. So we usually show like

how many users active right now. So we discuss what the criteria is for that specific tokens. And we like focusing directly on that targets for them and suggest where this budget should go.

Pete (aka BFG) (28:06)
Okay, so how many new coins do you onboard on a typical week?

Ox Bid (28:12)
So usually in average we have between three, five demands per day, new tokens. We have a kind of queue and it depends on the market situation. We see the momentum for some tokens. like willing to support them straight away. It depends on the situation. Some of the devs come to us and say, so I haven't created the token, but I have this idea. So, that's the design.

Pete (aka BFG) (28:20)
Okay.

Ox Bid (28:39)
And we understand that it's going to be further down. It depends. So we have a different system. At one point, the devs come to us and we list them and we do our checks. We don't list everyone. We list only in tokens, which we believe ourselves and buy by ourselves as well. But we also can catch the token from the market by different systems or by ourselves and list them like.

automatically, I would say. So if we see something cool, if I see that some deaths are cooking cool stuff, so we definitely will support it no matter what.

Pete (aka BFG) (29:09)
God.

Okay, so there is no real limit of how many tokens get through the Bolleyead app every week. Okay, neat.

Ox Bid (29:17)
Thank

No, we have

3000 tokens right now, which people can trade. And we also added the feature, we call user added token. So basically all the tokens we just launched within on-chain market in two seconds, you can trade them within Boilite. You just add the contract address within the search section and you can trade them straight away.

Pete (aka BFG) (29:50)
Okay, wow, that's impressive. improvements which are coming up? I'm asking selfishly because I'm lazy. Any improvements which are coming up into the app for like, you know, automated investment, you know, maybe setting up a budget for like daily or weekly purchases and just buy whatever top 10 tokens which come to the app. So I don't have to do it manually.

Ox Bid (30:00)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah. So regarding improvements, we had a long, long journey with that. So we basically were working hardly on making transactions as fast as possible because that's the bottom net for all the trades within the coins market. You want to buy this stocking in this specific moment, in this specific price, and then you want to sell them at this specific moment. So

And a lot, I used a lot of different other like wallets, whatever. And it's so disappointing when you see the momentum and you want to buy this so that the transaction doesn't go through. And that's what we've been improving so much. And right now, in like a 99 % the transaction will go through. And that's the huge point for us. And we were struggling with tokens who have taxes.

Pete (aka BFG) (31:06)
Okay.

Ox Bid (31:15)
Right now you can even buy them also the same way as the other tokens. And that took us a lot of time. In terms of the user's features, so we are focusing right now to bring AI tokens and do the discovery process simply for them. And then we will make sure we have this like important features like limit orders, which I'm personally very excited about.

Pete (aka BFG) (31:21)
Mm-hmm.

Ox Bid (31:43)
I was thinking about like selling tokens by batches, you know, because I have a lot of airdrops by myself as well. And a lot of tokens like price, the total cost less than $1. And I really want to sell them at once at the time. And of course, auto buy, that's all exciting features, which we have in our pipeline, but it's not the highest priority right now.

Pete (aka BFG) (32:11)
Got you. Okay. This was very cool. So is there anything else you would like to highlight or give a shout out for at the end of our discussion?

Ox Bid (32:19)
Good.

think we covered almost everything. Thank you very much for that discussion and the time.

Pete (aka BFG) (32:33)
Thank you too, that was amazing. Well, everybody here you have it. You'll find the links to Bolide app and to Oksana, for Oksana in the show notes, obviously, like always. And thank you for watching and I wish everybody good luck in trading meme coins. Oksana, thank you.

Ox Bid (32:35)
Yeah.

Yeah,

thank you, Peter. And good luck with everything. Thank you.