I was travelling at the end of the week so had to miss internet explorers and wasn't able to curate topics from the week in consumer crypto as I usually do. But I found some time on a plane ride to jot down the token-related thoughts that have been bouncing around my mind recently, so sharing those as the newsletter this week.
They say most great businesses, innovations, scientific breakthroughs, etc come from people taking a simple idea very seriously.
For me, that’s tokens. More specifically, the idea that the internet is going to completely reorganize around them.
15 Token Thoughts
Attention flows are just as real and valuable as cash flows.
Equity is great at capturing business value created from cash flows, but bad at capturing social and cultural value created from attention flows.
Tokens are orders of magnitude better than equity at capturing social and cultural value from attention flows, even in their currently nascent form.
Only a small percentage of the total value created by sports teams, for example, are captured through ticket sales, jersey sales, tv deals, etc.
Sports team related memecoins will be more valuable than the equity value of the franchises.
Thinking tokens need to govern or have exposure to the business value of a protocol or organization to be valuable is a mistake.
Memecoins and scenecoins are proving that people want to consume tokens as products. They like buying them, they like selling them, and they like coordinating and socializing around them.
People buy stuff not just to own a product but to become a part of a story. Tokens allow people to participate in stories better than anything we’ve ever seen.
Having a token but not treating it like a product has killed many projects.
The biggest opportunities are in being the social token network (scenecoins), not the product. You either become the network, or you’ll probably end up getting consumed by one.
Social distribution (tipping) is an amazing network formation and growth mechanic for tokens and will be a new meta.
If FWB used their treasury to buy and burn tokens, dissolved governance, shut down the discord, and released $FWB it into true memeland it would probably be a way more valuable token. (not saying they should do this)
Transaction taxes are an underexplored way of capturing value from token consumption.
The market cap of a token can go so much higher than most people think. We’ll have trillion dollar memecoins.
The correct response to public indifference around crypto isn’t to abstract it away, it’s to actively go build the market for your token.
I'm missing a bunch so may add to this list over time, but hope it triggers some ideas. Would love you to respond with your own or push back on any of these, just here trying to make sense of this new world :)
