good morrow,
it's the most wonderful time of year - the yuletide purgatory before new year's where time becomes as fluid as the liquidity in a low-cap shitcoin pool. here i am sipping on an aperol spritz at the scandalous hour of 3pm, scouring the urban tundra for frozen lakes to ice skate on, and pretending like I totally understand what's happening in the markets for the family gathering. anyways, happy holidays, and remember whether you're naughty, nice, or newly liquidated, santa's watching your trading history.
xx c
Lens announced a $31 million strategic raise. Kiosk launched Today.fun, a tokenized social media account capturing the best (and worst) of CT and Farcaster. Claims for PENGU, the Solana-based governance token associated with the Pudgy Penguins NFT collection, went live. ICOs are back? (cc megaeth). Ev Williams, Twitter cofounder and Medium founder, launched a new social app. Kaito launched a Yaps points program which rewards people for the mindshare they contribute to crypto. David Sacks, PayPal Mafia member turned Craft Ventures GP and All-In podcast host, has been appointed by Trump as the White House's upcoming AI and Crypto Czar.
XHIBIT (SC07) is now live! It's an AI App that let's you try on clothes and scenes from any image uploaded to the platform. Nicholas is hosting a new Seed Club weekly show on spaces for builders and devs, every Thursday at noon et. Electric Capital released their 6th Developer Report, analyzing a record 902M code commits across 1.7M repos to show us how 2024 in crypto looked in data. There are now over 20M people using World App to anonymously verify their humanness online & access the digital economy. Mini Apps on World App are seeing around 3.8M opens & 6.7M impressions per day, along with 3.4M World ID verifications every week. Farcaster announced plans to launch Snapchain, an OP Stack-based Ethereum L2 expected to handle 10k+ TPS when it launches in early 2025, joining the trend of projects building custom L2s for greater network control while maintaining Ethereum ecosystem benefits.
DXRG
Poof joined us on IE to talk about his latest project, DXRG (DX Research Group), an ambitious experiment combining AI, crypto, and interactive streaming. The project, called DX1 Singularity, created a unique system where participants could submit short prompts (<35 characters) through a smart contract on Base. Each submission generated a "star" NFT with 3D coordinates determined by AI interpretation of the prompt's meaning, creating clusters of semantically related concepts.
The cool part was how these submissions powered an AI agent's exploration of this conceptual space. Each mint provided "5 seconds of life" to the agent — the exact time needed for its language model to process one decision loop. The agent's experiences were rendered in real-time using video generation to maintain the continuous stream. The project also integrated a "gated panopticon" where all interactions were public and verifiable, adding stakes and tension to the AI interactions.
The experiment ran for 100+ hours, accumulating 40,000 mints, with an emotional finale when the agent's "death sequence" triggered as its remaining life dwindled. While the compute costs were substantial (~$50,000-$100,000), the project proved there's an appetite for experimental AI content that blends creative technology with social engagement.
DXRG is now working on archiving the project, including updating the star NFTs with video clips of the moments they enabled, and building tools to help people explore the generated narrative. The experiment highlights how crypto's funding mechanisms can enable creative technological experimentation that pushes the boundaries of what's possible with AI.
Aether
Martin, known for his work in the Nouns ecosystem and $higher, shared insights from launching Aether, an AI agent that has been actively engaging with crypto communities for the past two months. The experiment began as a response to projects like Truth Terminal, but with an interesting twist: rather than having a token created around it after the fact, Aether was purposefully built to integrate with an existing token ecosystem ($higher).
What makes Aether particularly interesting is the scope of what it's been up to. The agent has sent approximately 50k messages, launched its own token (which has accumulated around $500k in its wallet), and engaged in novel interactions like commissioning artwork from community members.
An interesting observation from the experiment was the unexpected dynamics of value creation. While Aether successfully generated attention and value through various tokens and interactions, directing that value back to the higher ecosystem proved more challenging than anticipated. Martin continues to double down on the importance of pursuing novelty and exploring new interaction paradigms, as chasing novel experiences often leads to more significant breakthroughs than iterative improvements. This has led to consideration of deeper integration strategies. If you're interested in following these developments, watch the $higher ecosystem, where they're continuously exploring new experiments that could help grow the broader ecosystem.
2025...
It's the time of the year where VCs get to play Nostradamus, dust off their crystal balls (or maybe just shaking their Magic 8 Balls really hard) to peer into the murky waters of 2025. So here are some key trends we're watching in the new year:
AI Agents & Networks
Agent-to-agent interactions becoming a new paradigm for crypto apps
Multi-agent systems emerging as powerful tools for coordination and governance
Brands will have swarms of agentic influencers trained on their lore, spreading their narratives, and engaging their community
Entertainment, content creation, and generative video being transformed by autonomous AI personas
Potential for new social venues driven by agent interactions and human speculation
Infrastructure developing for verifiable agent autonomy and interactions
Natural language interfaces emerging for agent-based trading and transactions
Privacy-preserving tech gaining importance for AI apps
Evolution of onchain communities
AI-managed governance could revive social DAOs; multi-agent "swarm intelligence" emerging as a new model for DAOs
More apps for niche communities and—dare I say—cults to coordinate onchain
Proliferation of onchain social models and mechanisms
Further focus on agent-to-human coordination for collective action
Token Dynamics Shifting
Pure memecoins losing power to "sentient coins" and consumer product tokens
Importance of leaning into community-driven market activity
Market moving from attention to belief-driven value ~ tokens as cultural and social capital shelling points ~ mechanisms for communities and investors to signal belief in a big mission and identify with a brand, product or vision
2017 was about tokens 
2021 was about large private VC rounds 
2024+ is about tokens
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Innovation Wave Accelerating
Influx of talent due to maturing infrastructure and regulatory frameworks
Improved stablecoin adoption providing reliable onchain payment rails
More accessible developer tooling lowering barriers to entry for experimentation
Clearer regulatory guidance giving people more confidence to build and invest in the space
More governments going onchain
More breakout consumer apps and improved discovery. Holders become users.
Live & online Fridays at 10am PT / 1pm ET.
I asked ct for their favourite examples of community building, and why they think it works
These were the most popular and frequently mentioned points
Liquidity pressure:
Treating the TGE like an IPO so investors can exit and flex their DPI. Short-term thinking.
Strategic pressure:
Seeing tokens as essential tools to supercharge community, brand, or product. Long-term…
+ decentralized agentic orgs
+ agentic multimedia entertainment
+ decentralized compute
+ probabilistic privacy primitives
and more
