hi,
I love crypto. In a single day, you can get your wallet drained, join an onchain burger league, uncover the silent majority of our industry who haven’t figured out the meaning of phrase "useful product,” and watch the yen carry trade bring grown men to their knees. There are truly wretched yet wondrous things to constantly behold.
So I might as well take it to the limits of its utility and summarize it weekly for you. sometimes I make typos. sometimes I swear. sometimes I promote myself. perhaps it is unseemly. but you're reading this so something is working.
enjoy
xx c
Boys Club's latest drop goes crazy. Coop Records debuted their new platform. Farcaster launched Explore, a new way to discover apps, actions and frames. Glow became the #1 revenue generating DePIN project globally, whilst still in a beta-guarded phase. Parker wrote a great piece exploring how projects like PuffPaw, BlackBird, TYB, and SkyTrade use crypto primitives to enhance existing user behaviors, making them more appealing, rewarding, and engaging. Substack introduced embeds for prediction markets from Polymarket.
Duper launched its Season 1 gameplay on Arbitrum and announced their total raise of $8.7M. Privy announced Solana support and they also now let you go onchain in one tap on Telegram. Surreal introduced its new Camera feature. Zora launched onchain secondary markets via Uniswap, which creates a liquid secondary market for mints. Blackbird introduced a New York Burger League. Audiato by Soncamp is a front-end client, built on Zora, dedicated to posting, sharing and minting music. While Berachain worked on v2, their ecosystem has continued to pop off.
Programmable Media
Natalie wrote a great article that explores the evolution of media through three distinct eras: Broadcast Media, User-generated Media, and the emerging Programmable Media. She traces media's history from the broadcast era, dominated by large studios, to the user-generated era, where advancements in tech, ubiquity of smart phones, and exponential growth in social media democratized media creation and distribution, shifting power away from traditional corporate studios to individual creators. Now, with programmable media, we're unlocking a new level of interaction and monetization, where media can be personalized, dynamically altered, and directly connected to financial incentives, effectively bridging the gap between creators and their audience. On the genAI side, we’re seeing lots of experimentation with agent-based media, simulations, generative personalization and relational interaction with media. On the crypto side, we've got affordable access to public blockchains which unlock experimentation around user-generated money & value, media with access controls and economic incentives programmed into it, and liquid global markets for media assets.
This article also reminded me of a talk that Holyn gave at Boys Club's /brandnew where she basically talked about how society has had different muses over time, tied to technological innovations. It's followed the path from: 1) the public (newspapers); 2) celebrities (motion pictures), and 3) creators (social media & the internet). Next is bots and AI generated content. People want to use AI to tell stories, to improve their lives, and to experience more (uhhh) companionship. This will lead us into a new era where the internet is imbued into everything we do. All of that combined with programmable incentives collapses the value chain between creators and consumers, allowing for more direct and equitable monetization of creative work, as well as improved profit-sharing, patronage, and engagement.
All this has my head turning about how our craft and consumption behaviors will evolve as these media formats evolve. What new crafts, consumer behaviors, advertising and business models will emerge? Who will be the next modern muses?
Zora protocol update
This week, Zora introduced a meaningful protocol upgrade that launched onchain secondary markets for mints. In short, the new system makes Zora's ERC1155 tokens wrappable into ERC20s so they can be easily bought and sold on Uniswap after mints close. The update also introduced creator rewards for all Zora secondary sales and dropped Zora’s mint fee from ✧777 (sparks), i.e. 0.000777 ETH, to ✧111.
568
What's cool here is that they've taken NFTs, which have historically struggled with robust secondary markets, and made them compatible with Uniswap, the king in secondary markets and fungible liquidity. The upgrade has already led to a fresh surge of activity on Zora and the first drop, 'Limitless' started trading like a memecoin. We admire how willing Zora is to disrupt themselves and shift the narrative of what they're building.
What's also interesting here is the mental model shift: People typically mint for a combination of patronage and profit—they want to support creators and the work they want to see more of in the world, and minting has traditionally been a way to do that, with provenance to prove it. However, there's also the desire to potentially profit from being early adopters, capitalizing on rising demand, and proving ownership of these assets onchain. Yet, the reality of this has been challenging due to the lack of secondary demand, especially with open editions where the supply is infinite. This new approach directly addresses that challenge by allowing patrons to continue supporting creative work through minting while significantly increasing the potential for profit by integrating a liquidity pool. Everyone benefits if there's more secondary volume. Now the challenge for Zora lies in how effective they are in breaking out of their current user experience to truly serve those bringing liquidity into the market.
Building Product-Community Flywheels
Joel John + Siddharth wrote a nice article about cultivating community at each stage of growth with some great examples from their own builder journeys. Heres the high-level overview, but worth the full read!
At seed stages, you should fly under a known, more recognizable flag. Build distribution through collaborating with known players, brands, and creators that are exceptionally well-positioned in the niche you are targeting.
Talk to your users to make them feel seen and heard. Invest in better outcomes for them. This will help create a critical mass of users. Provide avenues for self-expression so that they can interact with the product in a way that ties to their unique identity. When there are enough aggregate users, give them a ranking mechanism for social status and clout.
"Culture" is the final battle for firms to take on as they grow. Build lore. If you need inspiration on building lore, it's time to circle back to the Meltem episode on Internet Explorers.
Culture is often overlooked by many in this space, but it's perhaps one of the strongest moats when it comes to building consumer applications.
You can replicate tech. You can replicate designs.
You can't replicate culture.
Catch up with more consumer crypto updates by watching last week's episode:
Live & online Fridays at 10am PT / 1pm ET.
internet explorers every friday, live n online.
also let us know if you're going to Breakpoint/Token2049 !!!
think it's useful to see these categorized...
things unlocked by global, permissionless, peer to peer liquidity
ex.…
Better to just go to the casino lol.
1.4% of tokens go to ray.
you haven’t touched ur uniswap v4 zyn yet
Founders lose a great deal of sleep thinking about how to build community when they start. So, we spent the past month with the founder of a portfolio company to understand what it takes to build communities to scale.
Our latest…
(very long post -- SICKOS ONLY)
Starting with a little history -- the first big prediction market controversy (and it even made the news) was about a North Korean missile launch in 2006. North Korea launched a missile,…
