Welcome to my weekly consumer crypto braindump of things I'm thinking about and have bumped into during my internet travels.

Here's what I found worth talking about this week...

Tokens Aren’t Equity

It’s crazy to me how many people still hold onto the “tokens are equity” mental model. That’s obviously a piece of it (particularly the shared upside), but it’s too narrow of a view and if you’re locked onto that you’re going to miss the most revolutionary use cases of the tech.

How do you look at this and think “yea tokens are just equity”. Sure you could dismiss it as just being unserious or just a pure speculative bubble, but I prefer to take the other side of that and try to understand what it means. It means that global permissionless markets for internet assets operate in an alternate economic dimension. It means we’re living in a heavily networked and attention-dominated world where viral ideas and capital are now converging at the speed of light. It means that memetic value and belief is becoming more valuable than traditional cash flows, because they are becoming cash flows.

Do you realize how insane it is that we can now directly convert belief and cultural value into financial value on a global scale without having to shove it into t-shirts or sell ads? That’s changing everything man.

The most world-changing networks and products will not just treat their tokens as equity. Yes many of them will be economically aligned with great businesses, but the primary reason people will be buying them is because everybody is talking about them, and it means something to hold them, and it gives them access to a community and adventure they care about.

The three core levers you have to pull to grow token value are belief, access, and revenue. If all you have is the latter, someone is going to eat your lunch by connecting it to the former. If all you have is the former, you’ll have plenty of opportunities to figure out the latter.

tokenize/acc

Austin, who was ex-federal reserve, a uniswap protocol researcher, and is now building infrastructure to fix token issuance and onchain markets, released a great post this week. He looked at the history of financial markets, how the internet has been increasingly democratizing access to capital, and what still needs to change for middlemen to be completely removed.

I love reading things that remind me of how made up and antiquated the traditional finance infrastructure is. It’s built on layers and layers of fragile abstractions and trust, centralized authorities and intermediaries gatekeep access and manufacture confidence in their systems, and everybody except them loses as a result.

It’s insane that still in today’s hyperconnected world the vast majority of people can’t access anything but their local markets (which often is effectively just real estate). The impact of truly opening up global access to markets and capital, and removing rent-seeking gatekeepers will be profound.

More founders with access to way more capital creating way more value for way more people.

Crypto has so much damn room to run, and people are going to demand it as they start waking up and realizing that this can all already happen today.

I’m excited about what Austin is building as an important piece of this puzzle. I recommend paying attention to him.

Also ICOs are back. Echo is heating up, more projects are launching tokens on Pump.fun / Clanker, and founders are remembering how valuable, and increasingly required, it is to create financial opportunity for your early believers. If you don’t, someone else will.

Mozi

Ev Williams, the co-founder of Twitter and founder of Medium, launched a new social app this week. And when proven consumer founders launch new things we pay attention.

Mozi is a private social network designed to keep track of the people you actually know and provide tools for enhancing your relationships with them. As a start it’s focused on helping you know when you’re going to be in the same city as the people you know or will be attending the same event, but there’s clearly a huge design space here they’ll build into.

He decided to build Mozi after recognizing how far away from the original goal of social networks we’ve gotten as they’ve shifted from focusing on personal relationships (early facebook) to prioritizing entertaining and engaging media. He mentions his experience wanting to invite people to his birthday party but having no source of truth for the people he actually has personal relationships with as an inspiration.

I find it interesting for a few reasons. First it’s one of those ideas that sounds great at steady state if you were able to magically have all of your friends on there and actively using it, but actually getting there is a very hard task. If a first-time founder came to me with this idea it would be a very hard thing to invest in for that reason, unless they had a really unique distribution strategy. But obviously Ev’s clout and audience gives him a much better chance at overcoming this.

And second, it’s not even remotely a new idea (he mentions a similar product from 20 years ago), nor is it uniquely enabled by an emerging technology, but it’s instead built on a cultural inflection of social media fatigue. The growing disillusionment with traditional social platforms that prioritize algorithms and media consumption over genuine connection.

I obviously have no idea if this is going to work, it’s useless to me today since none of my friends are on it and it’s not enough of a pain point for me to onboard them, but it’ll probably be worth following along and definitely worth playing with for product nerds.

Kaito Yaps

You probably know Kaito, the very expensive ai-powered information aggregator. Or at the very least have seen all the ai agent mindshare screenshots that people share from it. This week they launched a Yaps points program which rewards people for the mindshare they contribute to crypto.

The product is pretty cool. You can track mindshare of products, funds, and the people of CT. But what’s more useful for founders is studying how they brought it to market.

First, Kaito is a known and loved product so introducing a points system provided all the incentive needed to get people to sign up.

But when you did sign up you got a card showing your social stats that all the big accounts were sharing to flex how cool they are (mine is below, not that cool). When you see this shared you obviously want to see how you rank which drove a ton of signups. It also critically gives people interesting content to share in context with their referral link, which makes it feel way less grifty.

I have no idea what they have planned for the product, but InfoFi is provocative so I’ll tune in.

The Farm

You know how things are going with $HYPE, it’s all anyone is talking about. But I still don’t see many people diving into the emerging Hyperliquid trenches, and there’s a ton of opportunity there for builders and degens.

The Farm is one of the first novel consumer products I’ve seen launched. It’s a Generative AI agent game where you prompt to create onchain creatures, they receive different attributes, and then live at The Farm (whatever that is) where they eat, grow, reproduce, and fight autonomously. People can then bet on the outcomes of the fights, and some revenue gets shared back to the creature creators. I don’t know the team so can’t vouch for that, but it sounds cool.

On Hyperliquid you need to participate in auctions to get a token listed on spot (need to look closer at the exact mechanics), and hypurr.fun is a token launchpad that crowdfunds capital for participating in these auctions. It’s where The Farm and many of the top memecoins got launched from. I recommend keeping an eye on it.

Notes on Consumer Crypto | Dec 13, 2024