Does Anyone Care?
It's been a while, friends. First of all - everyone has been and will be comped (more) subscription time. My attention has been elsewhere (building) and a newsletter hasn't been in the cards for about a month. Don't worry, you won't pay for my dalliance away from Paragraph.
This week I've been wondering: who cares?
I often think that young men care, after all most people I know in Crypto are young men between the ages of 18 and 40. Recent polling shows that even these guys don't really care, crypto ranks below every other issue listed in terms of importance to young male voters.
Why am I surprised by this? Maybe just because crypto has been in the news so much lately re: politics, with polymarket dominating the Nate Silver news vertical, and big spending by crypto billionaires in the election. From within the bubble it can feel like while we may not matter culturally, we matter enough in the market to pull some attention our way in other arenas like politics, finance, or startups.
But no, we aren't truly cared about. Also interesting, though, is what else people don't care about: political correctness, regulations, Israel and Palestine, cancel culture, transgender issues... all topics that have received outsized media attention over the last decade. Topics that feature prominently on tiktok, X, that are subject to enormous intra-culture debates. Apparently Libs of Tik Tok tweet views actually don't translate to people giving a shit, or not young men at least.
Crypto should take heed - as we enter more into politics, let's not fall into the culture war trap. Just because a podcast can sustain itself on viral clicks about sensationalist topics, or by leaning into deep partisan divides, doesn't mean people will..care more. Big feelings, low signal. Really what our culture wars seem to drive is just more content consumption. People talk a lot about crypto needing to "solve real problems," but maybe we should start by being associated with problems that really matter first?
On the other hand, young men not caring is probably driving most volume this cycle: its all about memecoins, the nihilists are winning.
Today I noticed the "cat-themed" category on Coin Gecko, which did not inspire a lot of hope. We'll need more than just early adopters and a cultural vanguard (milady-posting meme-token trading twitter addicts, and venture funds buying NFTs at the top). We need to build away from safe, stable areas where post-2020 crypto adoption thrived and into the vast unknown all around us.
@woj
woj has been shipping hard with supercast, to the point where I may add yet another subscription to my already heavy monthly-payment bags. Made me happy to see @superanon get some wins, the first proxy studio experiment was a frame for posting anonymous confessions via a "shared" account of sorts @experimentguy. People like to share juicy stuff anonymously, it makes sense! More products that make sense would be fun, though I'm not sure if they'll make money - which means they don't make sense?
Ignore me and everything I say! But don't ignore Woj, alt-clients will matter when we crack the onboarding puzzle. Or maybe they'll matter by cracking it.
anonymous posting on farcaster, available only from supercast
in less than 2 weeks:
- 2k followers
- multiple viral posts
- ~100 new customers
doubling down and iterating on the feedback
38
Farcaster as Launchpad
I talk a lot about Farcaster being small, or people not caring about crypto: and I think these are serious topics worthy of discussion. But let's not be overly negative. One way that Farcaster has really mattered is by providing the launchpad for a number of successful, widely-adopted tokens. DEGEN, HIGHER, MOXIE, TN100x among them.
Existing launchpads are token first and community second. Farcaster channels are community first.
/degen $124M
/moxie $2.5M
/higher $21M
/yup $1.35M
/points RIP
This in spite of a sharp cultural backlash on the network - especially among some of the most-popular, admired users that were early and highly engaged before DEGEN took off. But the 'FC as launchpad' narrative matters simply because we won't grow by not growing. This is one thing that the network has proven useful for, commiunities have formed naturally, they've sustained over time, and leveraged FC-native tech like channels, frames, FID addresses, social distribution to do so. This is the only thing that really has gotten a bunch of uninterested outsiders to take interest, so far. We shouldn't fade that, nor should we be lazy in attempting to replicate that boom.
People have put a lot of faith and hope in the idea of an emergent Consumer Crypto market segment that will bring growth to our empty-ish arena, our overlooked industry segment (decentralized social? I prefer thinking of Farcaster itself as a segment, a vertical, a network of economies. I'm skeptical but also interested - I want apps that are simple, easy to use and grasp, that abstract away unnecessary technical jargon and features in favor of fun experiences.
But what does consumption actually mean in crypto? Besides Blackbird, Chipped, some girl scout cookies here or concert tickets there, we've really only had users who want to buy tokens. We should lean into that, and lean into making tokens more relevant and vital outside financial contexts. Inherently this will be a social process, and Farcaster is leagues ahead of anywhere else to linking token acquistion and communication, expression, connection.
Bullish? One day soon, without a doubt in my mind.
X Dunking
I won't even share the tweets, but they are dark - people are dunking on us for Farcaster's low revenue after a headline-grabbing raise in May. I don't pay much head to dumb people on X shitposting about Farcaster for cheap likes, but I do think that as a network we're facing serious headwinds. Not new, every single newsletter I've published since like April has mentioned this to some degree. What's next? Who's onboarding? Every time the whole network get's excited about a single new user joining (cc: Murtaza of dropsitenews) I get a bit nervous. It just reminds me of how small we are. I'm a medium sized man, so can't fit in spaces that are too small - I get claustrophobic. Save me, new users, please!
DEGEN
Jacek's Coinbase Listing announcement was hype enough to get our beloved OG network token to pump 120%, but as a few people posted: it may have been a buy the rumor, sell the news event. Whether you agree, it appears thats what the market did - we're headed south again, and Woj is calling L3's out as a mistake.
I'm a DEGEN believer, I like the token, I like Jacek, and I like what it represents on Farcaster. I like projects that build on it: microsub, degen jeeves, ATH, proxyswap (hehe). I just do! They're old friends, familiar companions. But we (myself included) need to shake things up.
Tipping is automated, people are buying tip-to-dump-tokens on DL3 - which is fairly dead though showing a few recent signs of life. I hope that something...anything can shake up what's become a bit of a stale experience. Degen caught my attention because I could build on top of the token in a way you rarely see, they had the users. Degen users don't feel as monolithic these days, a glance at mint.club will show that - who are all of these people tipping degen for dead DL3 tokens? I don't see them in my feed, where do they post?
LAYER 3 EXPERIMENT
My own contribution to spicing up the L3 was to launch an algo-stable manually backed by USDC and DEGEN tips on the L3, called test_degen_dollar, which has been modestly successful. In large part because there is so little liquidity and volume on DL3 that it's actually not so hard to be pretty successful if 35 people take interest in your token.
I do have a thesis though, about what DEGEN needs to grow again. I began to lay it out in this post, and think that doubling down on a degen-denominated, L3 native token could contribute to the revival. Any revival will be made possible also by DEGEN's shockingly prominent place on Base, the hottest ETH L2. A Farcaster token is consistently ranked in the top 10 assets on Base, right from our little network! Kind of wild.
In the absence of many new buyers, we need to return to the core principle of any token community: faith. Linking faith to tips and L3 adoption feels like a kind of insane idea post-downtime, which is why I think it could move the needle more than basically anything else. Well, that and better products.
More on both these themes in the week ahead...
HIGHER
1confirmation bought more HIGHER, and is now holding 3.5% of them total supply after acquiring an additional 23m tokens from Salvino, Martin, and the Tokepad multisig*, 5m from Salvino, 3m from Martin, and 15m from Tokepad. Looking into this onchain I noticed a fun Higher fact: Zinger, lght.eth, six, and Martin all received HIGHER tokens during deployment.
HIGHER pumped on this news, and has been down mostly since. Liquidity remains thin, and there are unfortunately many Farcaster users who do not believe. I do! Just like with DEGEN I truly think that HIGHER is one of the best risk/reward propositions we currently have, semi-liquid and waiting for us to buy.
The higher account on x.com has been much more active recently, which is the right direction. Time to bring another Farcaster x Base meme to the masses, and do a lot more with the potent material (the meta-brand, that is) we've been so freely given.
Price volatility really doesn't tell the full story - the fact that Higher has trended upwards and remained relevant in a pump-fast, die-quick market without funding, bootstrapped by good memes, good writing, and smart, dedicated contributors tells me all I need to know.
I remember when Milady finally minted out, and suddenly what had taken over a year for the market to accept became an obvious fact to many, many NFT traders. Higher has the same vibe to me, if not the same associations (some negative, many beloved) of Milady. In retrospect, it will seem obvious, but for now we'll just buy it like religious fundamentalists: faith is a cause in and of itself. Higher!
*I think
announcement of an announcement
Why do I believe in tokens that have failed to regain their dizzying highs from Feb-April? Why do I believe in a network that no one cares about?
First off, I care because Farcaster has cared about me! This matters tremendously, I see Farcaster as a place of personal opportunity, and that justifies putting my attention here, in spite of my somewhat cold, pessimistic view on crypto & farcaster's position in the culture, at present. Anyone can come to Farcaster and build. That is the basic idea, it fuels a ton of my interest, and has been the source - via collaboration - of much of my best work here.
The second bit has been commented on a lot. I agree with 1Confirmation, who recently put out calls for builders working to: "Bridge Crypto and Culture." I want to build at this intersection, to nvest in it, support it with casts, newsletters, off-hand advice, DMs. I want to give feedback on something that will onboard 100k Farcaster users in December, or break through to traditional media in headlines next spring.
How can we make crypto relevant in a global culture actively shaped - whether degraded or inspired - by the internet? We often imagine that crypto is somehow more "native" to internet culture, but today its essentially siloed from what most people experience on their smart phones. We created programmable assets, but programming culture is a lot harder - so instead of measuring our influence or impact, we measure chain TVL, protocol volume. Building on Farcaster confronts us directly with the fact of our own irrelevance, and the opportunity it presents.
This is the problem my brain has landed on as being hard and interesting enough. I'm captivated, and also convinced that where we are weakest is where there is real upside. As a slowly-becoming-technical founder I'm also aware how my non-technical knowledge and skill set maps onto culture and social in obvious ways: this is where I see upside. It's why I care about DEGEN and HIGHER, or Woj's alt-client. All of these projects matter because they have been able to form pockets of community, to generate culture with vitality, whether large or small. We can make young men (and women, and all kinds of people no matter how they identify) care about crypto, but we'll have to make a form of 'crypto' capable of encompassing their cares, too, and not just whatever crypto represents today.
If we don't, then the horizon is quite close. We've perfected hyper-speculation and that has found a micro-climate to thrive, but only as one of many edge-cases of the internet. Crypto is either utopian or nihilistic, depending on prices, and only trending further in those directions. It is rarely relevant, yet, in spite of all the polymarket vs. polls headlines.
Young men online coalesce in discrete networks to share the niche interests, tools, skillsets and motives required to engage in repetitive, risky trading. They do this today to such a degree that a fair-sized industry has sprung up to cater to and profit from these behaviors. Volume is significant, most significant if you look at it in isolation; just as CT once felt like the universe to me because I rarely stepped outside of it. A lot of people work for venture-backed projects building fairly similar projects, competing for that volume, attending conferences, sharing similar memes and jokes. A few NYSE traded equities even reflect the opportunity to build around speculative trading, the growth or decline of their valuation is ever the reminder of how nascent our token-markets are in the grand scheme of things - mostly they just track the big indexes, more reactive to interest rates than the success or failures of SOL memes. We've won big, and not nearly big enough, so really we've still lost. Whether our current state is the end-goal or the starting point for building with internet native assets is largely up to the devs and users who've made a professional life or built an identity in crypto. Whether they (we) can figure out how to meet the rest of the world where it lives, instead of depending on the far more delusional idea that building a different world is all that's necessary to get everyone else to join us.
Don't you crave significance, relevancy? What does it mean to solve real problems if those problems are only felt by a handful of kids hunched over bright screens in dark rooms, annoyed by their dad's questions: are ya winning yet, son?
Are we content, or are we hungry for more? Personally, I want more. This week I've been meeting with potential collaborators. I'm looking for a technical cofounder who shares my interest in building where culture and crypto (or social + token) intersect. I want to go bigger, and I want to do it with a dedicated cofounder with the technical abilities I lack. I think we'd compliment one another really well!
More on this, proxyswap, proxy studio & farcaster next time. Until then, thank you all for the continued support!
~proxy~
