why do tokens have to make everything so emotional

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

Here's what I found interesting this week...

Brian from Unlonely (a livestreaming platform) got a bunch of attention this week for his post announcing that Unlonely was moving from Base to Solana. His reasoning was primarily that Base culture is less supportive of the types of speculative games and token-centric experiences they’re focused on creating, while also mentioning the recent support he’s received from the Solana team.

So many thoughts here, and I’m going to skip past all the hyperbole and the fact that they’re still just trying to figure out how to create compelling content. 

First, targeting Solana is obviously the right move for Unlonely. Product-ecosystem fit is a prerequisite for product-market fit (probably not forever, but true of the tribal crypto world of today). You need to incubate your product within the community that is most primed to care, and for Unlonely that’s Solana. Easy. Surprised it took this long. It’s obviously not going to be a silver bullet and fix anything fundamental, but it’ll bring them closer to an audience more primed to care.

Second, all the maxi energy on the timeline these days is tiring. It’s creating unhelpful silos and distracting in-fighting at a time when we should be trying to learn as much as possible from each other and expanding the pie. It would have been great if Brian could have just gone cross-chain, integrated Solana in addition to Base, and had creators creating content for both ecosystems. But that wouldn’t have gotten the manlet attention and support that loudly bailing on Base did.

Third, Base is in an interesting position. We just got back from a week in Singapore where Solana, Berachain, and Monad dominated. They’re each actively building distinct cultures and communities that are becoming prime breeding grounds for the weird, novel, uncomfortable projects that will lead to real breakthroughs. These things are increasingly not getting incubated on Base. Maybe inevitably the success stories end up on Base as they saturate these ecosystems and target the mass market, but they’re losing mindshare with the people living on the edges.

Moving past this specific story, these are considerations all crypto builders need to make. What ecosystem is the best culture fit for the product you’re building? How do you get the attention of the community? Do you build and talk to a specific tribe or go mass market / crypto-wide? 

It’s tough to navigate, but net net I think having a bunch of people really primed to care and advocate for your product is a blessing. 

Jess and I spent the week in Singapore to take advantage of the density of builders, investors, and everything in between that were there. We largely avoided the conferences and big side events, and focused on intimate gatherings and meetings so we could have real conversations, build relationships, and maybe learn a thing or two. Here are some takeaways.

Getting together IRL is so good. It’s hilarious actually being at a conference and then seeing the negative twitter discourse around it from people not there. Sure a bunch of it was ridiculous, but everyone was experiencing and enjoying it in their own ways. The truth is that you just can’t beat suddenly being in the same place as thousands of people from around the world who are obsessed about the same things as you. 

There was surprisingly little memecoin talk. Obviously it still existed, but it wasn’t as central as I expected. They’re here to stay and are going to grow, but people are looking for the next thing. There was way more excitement around DePIN, AI x Crypto, DeFi, and (somehow still) new chains. NFTs and gaming also seemed to take a backseat. 

Maxi energy is alive and well. It’s shocking to me how zeroed in people get into a single ecosystem and ignore anything that’s happening outside of it. I had many conversations where I’d be talking to a founder and mentioning interesting related experiments that are happening in other ecosystems that they had no idea about. There are so many insights hiding in the unique emergent activity of each ecosystem if you stay curious and open minded about them.

The space is bigger than we realize. I’m very (too) plugged in but was still frequently hearing about new chains and products I hadn’t come across yet. It’s more important than ever to pick a lane and build a network of people in other lanes to tap as needed. You can’t possibly keep up with everything anymore.

Solana, Berachain, Monad crushed. We’re entering a new era of culture-first chains and these guys are leading the way. They’re realizing how much leverage will come from being an obvious breeding ground for weird, novel, uncomfortable consumer products so are all in on creating great social contexts and distribution into the right audiences for them.

The Network State Conference was eye opening. We’ve had a front row seat of this through our work with Cabin, but attending the conference made it very clear that this has transitioned from a fringe idea to a very real and growing movement. It had by far the most interesting cross section of people (crypto people, climate activists, longevity researchers, governance nerds, etc), and the after was nonstop presentations from people who are actively building out network states.

Longsolitude from Zee Prime shared a great post yesterday talking through the unique properties of crypto, how they’ve unlocked the opportunities for the breakout products we’ve seen to date, and how to find good startup ideas that leverage them. The TL;DR is that crypto isn’t a panacea to every world problem, and all sustainable use cases have leaned into the financial properties of blockchains. These two core properties are permissionless capital formation (and by extension the distribution of tokens), and global consensus over a distributed ledger of financial assets. DeFi, Memecoins, Prediction Markets, DePIN are all uniquely enabled by these. 

I hard agree with the post and have been talking this book for a while, but it’s still the exception to hear pitches that have a clear insight into how to leverage these properties in unique and consumer-empowering ways.

People hear this though and think it means the opportunity space and impact crypto will have is limited. But this isn’t necessarily true at all, and you could have reduced the opportunities that existed in the early days of the internet in a similar way. New (and increasingly less financial) opportunities will continue to emerge as more people have growing onchain identities, as stablecoin adoption grows, as more people are earning tokens via DePIN, as memecoins permeate mainstream culture, as we get regulatory clarity, etc, etc.

But in this period of going 0 to 1 with consumers, it’s the financial and speculative use cases that are the most understandable and obviously differentiated from anything the world has seen before. 

Imagine trying to pitch social media to someone who hadn’t used the internet yet. Easily accessible newspapers and encyclopedias made way more sense. The ultimate big and world changing opportunities emerged once people understood the internet and were on it daily. Think it’ll be the same here, but with financial wedges into people’s lives instead of informational wedges.

This post on Agentic Protocols is a few months old, but it was making its rounds again this week and it’s crazy to think about so I’m resurfacing it. The core thesis of the post is a contrarian view that the AI revolution doesn’t actually benefit today’s innovation economy, but completely replaces it. It talks through the idea of “Agentic Protocols”, which he defines as self-developing AI driven entities that aim to have no human employees but many human stakeholders, why the opportunity is uniquely enabled by AI primitives moving onchain, and the numerous cultural tailwinds that will swiftly allow them to overtake traditional corporations.

The vision he outlines is insanely bullish for crypto, and insanely bullish for developers that are able to harness these new tools to outcompete incumbents at providing software and services to humans (and eventually other agents). SaaS is dead, as they’re starting to say. 

Who knows what timeframe this will happen, he seems to think it’ll come shockingly fast, but I definitely agree with its inevitable arrival. If you’re long term focused you very clearly don’t want to be building commodity software.

What I find interesting to think about is where the new opportunities for humans to serve humans will arrive. My belief is that in an AI ubiquitous world, real human connection and creation will become increasingly valuable. Agents are going to create everything we need, but what are going to be the new things that we want?

I obviously don’t have the answers, but I think you’re going to want to be as close to the source of emotion as possible. You’re going to want to build brands that are unquestionably human. You’re going to want to build communities where humans are bumping into and serving other humans. You’re going to want to occupy an identity-space that people really care about and find meaning within. 

The days of valuable opinionless software are behind us, and I am once again reminding everyone that it’s time to build things people want to be a part of.

I leave it with this quote from the post…

“It’s actually going to a beautiful place. Where the vocabulary of outlook meetings. Corporate Politics. Bullshit fundraising announcements. Hype cycles. Scams. Exit Liquidity. Becomes archaic and obsolete. Replaced by a new era of real value creation. Where users own and participate in the upside of Artificial Intelligence. Where founders write code, and build something bigger than themselves. Before stepping away to let intelligence self replicate.”

Moonthat is a new memecoin launchpad that launched this week onto ETH mainnet into some pretty meaningful attention. On the platform anyone could submit a coin idea, the submissions would be curated by the team, and one token would go live at a time. Once a coin goes live people have an hour to contribute ETH (restricted to 0.1ETH per address), capped at 10ETH. The first handful of coins ran up to multi-million dollar marketcaps before dropping off, but recent launches have had less demand.

This one captured my attention because I’ve been thinking about the idea of a memecoin studio DAO for a while and thought this might be the direction they were heading in, but alas after a few days of curated launches they opened up the platform and now anyone can launch just like everywhere else.

So let me throw an idea out into the ether. What about a nouns-style DAO but where daily auctions are contributions to a presale of a memecoin that the holders of the DAO curated. All contributions to daily presales earn you governance tokens for the DAO and a % of each memecoin launched goes to the DAO treasury. 

Or maybe each day is just a governance token auction and participants are coordinating to launch tokens on pump.fun directly from the DAO. They can also use auction proceeds to buy blue chips and become a memecoin creation and asset management institution. 

I don’t know, it’s probably not right in a bunch of ways, but maybe there’s something cool that will inspire someone smarter than me to figure out.

That's all my brain can handle this week, thanks for reading.