August 25th, 2024
Dear Subscribers,
Did you know that people still tweet? All day long, too. They don't even have a half-decent token rewards system, its sort of pathetic. Sometimes when I read twitter I think "these losers will follow me when they join Farcaster," and it makes me feel a bit better about my mid reputation & clout outside of the Purple app.
WAGMI
PumpFun is one of the most profitable crypto projects. It feels a bit strange to say that, but its true, traders have chucked >600k SOL in fees into that cracked app.
It's also defined this cycle's meta to the exclusion of basically anything else. Meme tokens, and in particular the ferocious volume of meme tokens on Solana are the big news. You feel it on the feed, across chains, and see it influence the products that are launching today. In this way, Pump has defined what crypto signifies in 2024.
You're probably wondering: what happened time? I'd forgive you for hoping this was a newsletter item about blinks, but no, our wonderful little launchpad managed to produce the following headline, and I have to rant about it a bit.
'Crack Head Dev' Smokes Drugs, Fakes Death, and Dreams of Making Millions With Meme Coins
Before said rant, let me preface: what more is there even to say at this point. I'm tired.
▼ACTUALLY I HAVE MORE TO SAY
I thought that other pumpfun livestreamer guy lighting himself on fire, suffering third degree burns was the lowest of the low, but Decrypt covered a story about anons (KOLs?) bribing a kid to livestream a bender, turning his addiction to various hard drugs & penchant for self-destructive content production into $ by - you'd be shocked to learn - launching some Pump tokens. I guess specifically launching tokens while smoking crack.
I won't go too deep into the weeds, but long story short: some anons used this drug-addicted kid as the hook for a meme coin, the livestream devolved & Trev OD'd on fentanyl mid livestream. People (reasonably) thought he was dead. What did the anons do? Obviously they convinced Trev (who was not dead) to fake his death, complete with 'mom' posting a tear-filled social media announcement, and all to pump another token.
Eventually, Trev felt like he'd been ripped off by the anons who'd approached him, connected with ANOTHER trench-dweller with token-deploying experience, hired a stripper and churned out a third pump launch. This time the livestream included both drugs & sex in addition to a zooted Trev asking a sex worker: "do you actually care about me?"
“Trevv’s a drug addict—mostly fentanyl, but also dabbles in coke, heroin, and other substances. He’s got a small following of 2,000 people on Instagram, where he mostly posts goofy videos of himself for attention”
I sound so old & shakes fist at clouds writing this, but I really found this whole spectacle disgusting.Maybe just embarrassing.
Can’t believe that’s a real sentence
This cycle is weird
103
Crypto gets a lot of unfair criticism about being a vehicle for the financialization of every facet of our lives. I think tradfi is plenty good at that sans blockchain, but this is the kind of thing that relegates us to the cultural backwater in the mainstream: crypto is just online gambling with big promises. Thats how probably a majority of the world sees us.
Is this our real world use case? Lacking any answer to America's raging opiate epidemic, the best crypto can offer is a few hours of cringe dopamine-hits and lowest-common-denominator debauchery? For what? All so a couple grifters can make $15k here, $5k there. I know volumes are at an all time high for bonding-curve launchpads, but I'm really convinced that you don't walk back from this kind of ledge. You fall off , and you die. Or your culture does.
We're not going to be trading pump tokens forever. If this is what is required to capture a couple hours of attention from a few thousand active SOL meme token traders, no wonder we can't get anyone to use our normal, non-insane consumer crypto apps. Plus, who wants to use an app if the other users might be the 'I-bribed-a-junkie-into-livestreaming-his-binge-to-make-quick-money-on-meme-coins' people?
The internet is full of niche communities addicted to shock & awe: porn, violence, crime, its all the same shtick at the end of the day, and honestly its so boring. I remember in middle school, or highschool, a certain kind of kid would send around some gross link, and trick you into opening what would inevitably turn out to be some disgusting internet meme. The joke was sort of funny when I was 12, it was part of an emergent online culture. But I don't sit around googling "blue waffle" today, I don't want to make "two girls one cup" part of my routine. We can Google these kind of videos any time we want, watch some fucked up ISIS torture film, a police shooting, a drone drop a grenade on a Russian soldier in the Donbas, but even those of us who have a morbid curiosity aren't typically so gauche as to try and make money from promoting their incognito browser searches.
People don't mind trading memes, a good chunk of people enjoy holding some vapor every once in a while. But any culture that leads inevitably to bribing a kid to OD on fent so some operators can make money off other traders speculative degeneracy, well that culture is beyond saving. We shouldn't even try.
We should just spend our time building another culture. There's no reason that Crypto has to be that, and we shouldn't let ourselves get complacent. It's bad, we should shun it.
Join Farcaster, I guess, believe in something. But really, we are thankfully a little isolated from those trenches, let's dig our own. Gatekeep it, make it cool. Hell of a lot of upside in being cool, not that I know how to do that. I write a crypto newsletter, after all.
Innovation
Maybe we need to add more permissions to meme token launchpads. We could consider banning a ton of users? Turning their wallets to “transfer only” mode. I used Claude to spin up a possible solution, what i call "Pump.LinkedIn." You can only deploy a token after sharing your CV and gathering a few references.
I just need someone to integrate the contracts and we'll have fixed our aimless speculative trading culture issue once and for all.
Trump's Talented Boys Fix the Finance Industry
Donald Trump Jr. & Eric Trump announced an upcoming entire DeFi protocol, if their telegram chat is to be believed. The announcement tweet also made me a bit sad, they couldn't even get a Trump tweet to pump it, they had to screenshot a Truth Social post.
DJT Jr. offered a refreshing pitch for the project - details are scarce at the moment - promising that the protocol would help democratize access to finance. This is a new idea, extremely promising!
'These banks and the elites who run them want absolute control but that ends now."
another sign our culture is on life-support: even our genuine pitches, stuff some of us actually believe in are ripe for tourists to use to grift from politically-aligned retail.
I may not align with Trump's politics, but that man has a wide range of talents: not for nothing but he's probably the funniest man alive. He's a marketing genius, understands the power of language, and has leveraged a brand about as far as one might assume possible: straight to the oval office. He also has good intuition for what people care about, which sounds mundane but is pretty unique when you spend most of your life 50+ floors above the milling crowd. Which all makes me wonder: what happened with his sons turning out to be such losers?
JokeRace Raised $3m
I might just like the founder, David Phelps' twitter, but I was really happy to see this. JokeRace is one of those projects I always thought sounded cool and assumed would simply never be able to raise. Seeing "JokeRace, the onchain competition platform used by Polygon, Farcaster and Bankless, raises $3 million" in The Block felt like a win for the little guy, a W for all the esoteric consumer crypto projects out there.
we're using it to hire for growth marketing (more on that below).
and, oh yes, to build the future of onchain social finance with a new primitive:
contests.
let's explain:
1/
What is JokeRace? In essence, its a no-code platform for onchain contests, hackathons, grants & anything else that incentivizes communities.
▼Contests 101
explain: think about what AOL chat rooms did in the 90s, tumblr in the '00s, and reddit in the 2010s—supercharging community growth with new tech: contests
what was missing was the ability to: make money, earn reputation, plug into other services, build businesses.
we solve these. Just as twitter created a new social primitive only possible in web2 (140 characters), we've created one that's only possible in blockchain: a contest.
contests include hackathons, grants, awards, debates, even reality tv shows—for people to submit and vote on entries. contests are used by millions of people everyday—so why hasn't there been a platform for them until now? because it wasn't possible. blockchains let contest creators earn money, submitters earn reputation, and voters earn social communities of people who share their tastes.
Source
I like that JokeRace couches all this kind of behavior under the casual title of ,well, jokes! The internet is fun, its gossipy, its casual and natural. We should build products that help people feel that, even if they're doing serious stuff like building a community around a decentralized protocol.
Are we bullish DAO tooling again?!
EF $100m Budget
Ethereum Foundation has a budget of $100m / year .Thats the story. I know what you're thinking: that sounds like a lot, but a bunch of thought leaders promise me its actually not very much money, all things considered. I’m sure they’re spending it on cutting edge cryptography research and not an endless stream of conference sponsorships…right?
Jokes aside, let the nerds do their thing, our entire industry stands on the backs of Vitalik & random cryptography papers that, honestly, I'm too impatient to read.
Dune + Zora
Dune.Analytics introduced minting. Is Dune a social app? It sure feels like one, what with its trending dashboards, discovery tools, and more real-time content popping up. Dune is an indispensible part of the onchain creator stack, and now you can mint your favorite dashboards, commemorate the best queries.
onchain transactions are social content, we just don't typically interact with that kind of data in social contexts. This is changing, across a bunch of apps, and Dune has played a big role in surfacing stories from the nodes.
Zora continues to place itself on the cutting edge. They're one of the projects that best expresses a coherent ideology, a comprehensive vision for what life & culture & making money onchain actually means.
SunPump
SunPump (I’m so sorry) on Tron is on fire. Rotation is one thing you can always depend on in crypto. It's still dwarfed by PumpFun, but I’m shocked that people actually bridged to His Excellency’s chain, given the steady stream of FUD Justin faces from haters and losers everywhere. I mean, sure he may be a serial, large-scale scammer, but Tron is the second largest blockchain by TVL, behind only Ethereum.
It’s amazing to me how much more efficient the trenches have gotten. Mere days after the SunPump rotation, there are already several public dashboards on Dune to track “alpha wallets” and a range of tools to help meme token traders from getting rugged on the most embarrassing chain possible. I’ll admit I’ve been forced at gunpoint to acquire some Tron meme exposure. This rotation reminds me of 2021, when I was too snobby to bridge to BSC and faded generational wealth. Follow the traders, ignore minor details like Sun removing USDD’s BTC-backing, replacing it with $TRX.
Stay safe!
I bought a shitcoin, $sunpepe at around ~900k market cap
1Confirmation Letter
1Conf Q2 2024 LP Letter has some good takes, imo, although I’d argue Nick is underselling just how irrelevant crypto's inslurar token-pumping games are to mainstream culture today. Quick reminder: no one cares. Which is annoying, because in other ways people are starting to care (see: PolyMarket). But today we can make lots of money, and if we implode, the best we’d get is a smirk & a snarky headline: either “crypto just made all the scammers really rich" or "we told you so."
If we want to change that, we’re going to have to look within, produce cultural & tech products more people care about. 1Conf has a clear vision for how that is starting to happen, and where meaningful user & mindshare growth will come from.
Farcaster is a Guy's Guy (as a network)
A lot of earnest “but actually Farcaster has amazing women users!” responses to this Lens employee dragging us on X, but I think that misses the point.
Accountless, bless his soul, reminded MP that “there’s a women’s channel” and that “even the influencers are women there - ted," referencing Farcaster's home-town hero, nottedcruz.
Having women on your app isn’t a matter of “do you have human women using your app," its a vibe. Our vibe is product feedback, its extremely wealthy ex-Coinbase founders arguing about communism with random users, its Bored.eth popping back in after a few months off post-raising some ungodly sum for a meme token that went to zero and saying: "whats up, what did I miss?"
Farcaster is guy-coded for now, but that's starting to change I think. Luckily, the solution is probably found in part within those earnest casts: cool non-men continue to show up and contribute to the network. The more that local niches can thrive, the sooner we can celebrate the death of Farcaster’s lingering crypto-bro vibes.
We’ll have to put aside our typical guy combo of inflated-ego, overconfidence plus turning in sloppy homework, though. Farcaster is kind of our fun little social circle today, we get to share the same gossip, laugh at the same kind of memes, talk in depth about the same industry niches and associated design-spaces, but we'll have to get increasingly cool with the idea that people will use Farcaster socially, first, and professionally, second. The day that actually happens is the day we’re all really rich from all the Farcaster tokens pumping, though, so we should be able to handle the change.
Do VC-backed Founders Dream of Social Networks? Not me, too busy gaming out paths to PMF.
As for lens, where MP works? I don’t think they really have enough users to care about gender dynamics yet, but I’m sure they’ll get there one day.
Superchain SHOCKS crypto world...
Announces yet ANOTHER way to reward builders
Optimism announced the Sunny Awards: “The SUNNYs is an awards show designed to honor the outstanding achievements of Superchain builders. Builders from all across live Superchain mainnets are eligible!” Apply here with something you’ve built (you’ll need to have deployed contracts to the Superchain to qualify, btw).
Even if its all a bit over-the-top positive, I really do love how the Superchain supports builders. You can't fake long-term, positive-sum, decentralized ecosystem support. Its simply too complex and too ambitious, its obvious if your RetroPGF doesn't have what it takes. The Superchain's got it, thats for sure. You can just sort of build stuff, and get paid for it. That's so fucking cool. Thank god for $OP, shoutout /base-builds.
BaseNames
Speaking of Base, they launched basenames, basically base.eth subdomains. So instead of proxystudio.eth I could have minted proxy.base.eth. Names were free to mint for most active Farcaster users, although for me that transaction would have cost $50. I personally did not mint, I love Base but I don’t have the stomach for another domain speculation cycle. Let me die alone clutching my ENS, hope this squatter can pay his bills some other way, cause if I'm not paying 2 eth for proxy.base.eth, I doubt anyone else is.
Thanks for reading, subscribers. This week I focused more on general crypto items, probably in part because my Farcaster attention has been firmly focused on building, so I have some catchup to do on FC projects.
Hope you all win this week, especially the beautiful woman reading this, yeah you, hope you win huge.
Best,
Proxy
`
&author=Notes%20from%20the%20Trenches&url=%40proxystudio.eth&avatarUrl=https%3A%2F%2Fstorage.googleapis.com%2Fpapyrus_images%2Fc0989ad357774d9f2a2eb49954139ebb.jpg&featuredImageUrl=https%3A%2F%2Fstorage.googleapis.com%2Fpapyrus_images%2Ff2696ef2dcd535d8b90399bfb089f53f.jpg&size=512)
