hello,
While this weekend provided perfect weather for bottomless mimosas, we were instead treated to a sobering array of bottomless charts. You know it's bad when Eth devs fall into deep public existential despair and the ceo of intel starts tweeting prayers. Last week, I bought ETH at $2900 only to find it at $2200 the next day. I don’t care about money—this is about betrayal. Which is something memoirists often write about. So I took my existential confusion and turned my attention to focus on more whimsical things. Like drinking chilled red scrolling through the eth orderbook and posting photos I took with my shattered iphone camera to Zora's app. It's taken a lot of crafting to piece together my shattered psyche.
enjoy
xx c
Uniswap dropped a collab with KidSuper. A new memecoin launchpad allows anyone to create a memecoin from a single tweet, integrating directly into the distribution channel where there is attention and social context, and it quickly gained attention from prominent figures like the Nansen founder and the Raydium account. Smort launched a lossless prediction market on Solana using Sactum to create a 100% commission LST called smortSOL, with the yield going into a weekly prize pool. Players use smortSOL to participate in prediction games, where winners share the prize pool and losers only forgo their LST yield, offering a fun, risk-free alternative to traditional degenerate gambling.
Telegram launched its in-app browser and mini-app store, natively integrating support for crypto. Kraken introduced Kraken Labs, an experiment in crypto data visualization & analysis. Internet Explorers is launching a collection on the mother chain (bitcoin)-- drop us your addresses to get involved. Moshicam has adopted Sparks. Subvert is a new Bandcamp successor that is collectively-owned and controlled. Bankless did a dive into which L1 and L2 protocols are actually making money. Kizzy is building a social media betting product centred around creators with passionate fanbases and is launching on Monad. A fundamental protocol upgrade is coming to Zora....(soonTM, maybe today).
Internet Explorers is a weekly rundown live stream where extremely online individuals broadly explore (romanticize, even) new consumer internet experiences.
Live & online Fridays at 10am PT / 1pm ET.
Arweave
Sam from Arweave joined us on the show last week to dive into decentralized storage infrastructure, why it's important, The AO Protocol and Arweave Name System, fully decentralized AI powered mmo gaming, Llama Land, and more. Super insightful convo thats worth a watch (or two).
DMs are open @nnnnicholas @joshcrnls if you want to try out ArNS for yourself or Seed Club
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Distribution is all that matters
These are my favorite examples of how founders got their products into the hands of users
Alana shared a thread on effective distribution strategies and two core approaches: meeting target users where they are and creating unique, viral content. Examples include Barstool’s street marketing, PayPal's integration with eBay, Blackbird's restaurant partnerships, Tinder’s campus strategies, AirBnb activating around the democratic national convention, alongside Michelin’s restaurant guide and Blendtec’s viral videos. To get their products in front of users, companies leveraged personal engagement at conferences and on the streets, shared economics through referral links and in-app rewards, creating viral content via entertaining videos and strategic partnerships, and developing adjacent products that incentivized usage. The more you spend time studying how the breakout products of the past got their early attention and usage, the more you realize how much better we need to do with distribution tactics into well defined wedges in consumer crypto.
Farcaster marketing & expanding beyond crypto
There's an ongoing debate about whether Dan and his team should actively market Farcaster and its affiliated clients beyond the crypto space. While Dan has been outspokenly against this, believing non-crypto audiences have no reason to use Farcaster in its current form and are better served by existing social networks, many in the community disagree. The strategy to justify Farcaster's recent $1 billion valuation focuses on a long-term vision of growing within the crypto space, creating unique features, and getting more developer legos out there over the next decade. Despite concerns about declining activity, Dan argues that broad marketing efforts would be ineffective until Farcaster becomes more compelling to a wider audience. Instead, he suggests focusing on increasing engagement among crypto-native users and attracting communities like Solana. The success of this strategy hinges on building a sticky user base with compelling and novel feature set. So it's not your more common consumer crypto oriented growth strategy whereby you try to nail down epic growth very quickly. The team’s gradual growth approach has been quite methodical, and now the challenge remains in finding what will make Farcaster indispensable to both existing and new users.
While Telegram offers unique advantages to bring web2 users, Farcaster stands out as a foundational layer for Crypto Consumer apps.
Let's dive deeper into the Farcaster ecosystem:
Watch the full episode:
ie. every friday. 1pm et. this week with Hedrin from Ordinal Genesis!
Now, I try to ask the question – how could this business become an exchange? For certain businesses it’s very clear, but for others, it requires some imagination.
Let’s talk about exchanges, and where to find them
After countless threads and hours of research from others.
it's time to compile everything into a comprehensive landscape.
Let's dive in:
(And most importantly, the ultimate resource at the end)
Hype is not community. You can build a big brand and still not have a community.
Because community is not what you give to your users. It's what your users give to each other.
