Notes on Consumer Crypto | April 12, 2024

What up!

Here's what I found interesting in the world of consumer crypto this week...

We kicked off the show this week with LGHT, “an artist, designer, writer, and technologist based in the Eastern Standard Timezone”. We’ve been bumping into him a bunch recently with his work on Higher and Based Management, but he’s been a prolific onchain creator for years.

We spent most of our time talking about $higher, how it started, his contextualization of it as a “brand token”, and what comes next. You can listen to our chat here. 

The conversation also got me thinking about how useful token brands and the ability to price things in branded currencies are to constraining and directing onchain creation. Previously when everything was priced in eth and targeting everyone it was much easier to ignore or disregard as a passive collector. But when something is priced in a branded currency that you care about it tells you that this was made with you in mind, and I find this to be a pretty strong motivator to collect. The success of Matthew Chaim’s enjoy anthem is a great example of this.

We also had Colby on the show who’s building mmERCH. mmERCH is a fashion label that combines generative art, NFTs, and physical goods into a novel consumer experience. Their first drop is happening next week.

It’s a series of ~900 1/1 hoodies that are generatively created from hundreds of possible traits and materials. Buying one gets you an NFT of a character wearing your unique hoodie, a physical hoodie, and “receipts” that act as community tokens with art created by die with the most likes.

We got into why she’s so interested in generative fashion, the 2 year journey she’s been on building the company, how you manufacture 1/1s, rejecting the homogeneity of fashion, and a bunch more. 

Listen to our chat with Colby here.

Alright now for the topic that has had my head in shambles.

We’ve been talking a lot about scenecoins, and I finally dropped a little post describing the opportunity I see with them. But what I want to talk about here is the experimentation around social token distribution that’s emerging alongside them.

Core to the success of scenecoins is getting the token into the hands of as many aligned people and potential members as possible. Some are of course going to dump, but many won’t. And you’ll be creating a broad attention base in the process. 

An initial airdrop is a great big bang way to do this for retroactive contributions, but it only looks backwards and lasts for a brief moment in time. And going immediately from that to trading being the core token experience is not very compelling for the majority of people.

Tipping (giving community members the ability to allocate tokens) is proving to be an incredible way to continue this over time. It generates huge amounts of attention, encourages and rewards core scene building activities, creates consistent and fun participation opportunities, and ultimately reveals scene reputation.

$enjoy for example is a scene of onchain creators. All members of the scene receive a weekly allowance of $enjoy to hand out to other creators in context with their contributions (in mint comments), with the amount based on their scene reputation. 

It has ignited the scene. People are creating, collecting, and socializing more than they ever have, they’re self-coordinating to allocate tips in impactful ways, and everyone is making money for the now tangible value they’re creating. 

There’s so much more design space here. $DEGEN is focused on the farcaster scene so is doing this with casting. $ONCHAIN is a scene of blockchain lovers and is doing this through onchain competitions. A writer scene could tip great paragraph or mirror posts. A gamer scene could reward high scores in onchain games. A skate scene could reward skate videos. 

Empowering the community to seamlessly reward the defining actions that people in the scene do to distribute ownership feels big and important.

Nouns is getting a scenecoin.

A plan was dropped this week to create $nouns, a Noun-backed fungible token. Noun owners will be able to deposit their NFTs to receive 1M $nouns tokens in return. 

The core intent behind the proposal is to make nouns access affordable and in turn scale the number of people that are a part of the project.

It seems pretty obvious now with the success of memecoins, and increasingly scenecoins, how restricting NFT-based or governance-focused network structures are. In this world of attention assets you want as many people as possible to as easily as possible own, coordinate around, and care about the asset. I’m pretty convinced at this moment in time that this is best done with fungible tokens with social distribution mechanisms.

This is a step in that direction so ultimately great for nouns. It’ll be pretty interesting to see the price and trading dynamics between the fungible tokens, the daily auctions, and secondary marketplaces. Theoretically the arbitrage opportunities and market forces should bring them into equilibrium, with the demand for the fungible tokens probably being the top of funnel and ultimate core driver of prices.

Two things this week got me thinking about how tokens fit into the future of entertainment. Andrew Kang tweeted about the Mr Beast flywheel and how it relates to memecoins, and Unlonely continues to FAFO with new memecoin mechanics within the context of livestreaming.

Let’s look at Unlonely. A couple of months ago they ran a week-long token-based dating show where viewers would determine how long the date lasted and the ultimate outcome of it by trading a memecoin. This week they dropped a new experiment called the 30 minute token.

The way it works is a streamer jumps onto Unlonely, creates a token, and has 30 minutes to attract enough buys to reach a predetermined threshold. If they do, the token gets another 24 hours of life and the game gets played again the next day. If they don’t, the remaining liquidity in the bonding curve goes to the streamer. Brian earned $6k on over $160k trading volume in the first few hours of kicking off this game with $TOFUCAT. 

They’ve been progressively tightening the feedback loop between speculation and content, and this one goes pretty much all the way. It’s definitely not the Mr Beast style content that Andrew was asking for, but the learnings coming out of these experiments are really useful data points towards what that could look like.

I also think a pump.fun x unlonely collision could be very interesting where streamers go live until their token reaches the required market cap for it to graduate from a bonding curve into a liquidity pool. The meaning that could be imbued into a token during a stream could propel it into breakout territory if done well.

I’m sure we’ll see that from one of the teams soon.

The Future of Culture is Tokenized
The Friend.tech Redemption Arc
Memecoins vs NFTs (1,2)

Maybe next week…