As you may have seen, we're in a hot and slightly feral pursuit of a dramatically more interesting internet. In the spirit of dogfooding more interesting internet toys and onchain distribution, we have officially migrated away from the comfortable embrace of web2 publishing platform behemoths and are now publishing onchain on Paragraph. Hiii. You can now mint these posts/ highlights and comment using Farcaster !!!
A reminder that we opened up applications for SC07: Consumer Crypto last week and you can learn more here. It's very obviously going to be a banger and you have until Feb 16th to apply bb.
You have 23 days, young visionary
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Internet Explorers is a weekly rundown live stream where extremely online individuals broadly explore (romanticize, even) new consumer internet experiences. Live every Friday at 10amPT/1ET.
Funding Creativity with Artizen
Artizen (SC05) funds creative breakthroughs through a unique mechanism where projects release NFT artifacts representing their mission. During seasonal competitions, projects sell these artifacts, with Artizen matching funding and awarding prizes. In their 3rd season, over 110 ETH has been raised for various projects, such as sustainable 3D printing for shoes, supporting Detroit musicians, and much more. Founder Rene Pinnell shared insights on their innovative funding model on Internet Explorers.
Crypto: The Game just launched!!!
Crypto: The Game is a multiplayer internet survival competition where participants vote each other off until one remains and wins the pot. With tribes, chat rooms, immunity challenges, and a bunch of twists, the game aims for 1,000 participants, presenting intriguing strategic dilemmas like voting off influencers or leveraging clout. As part of the broader trend of designing onchain products around viral ephemeral experiences, the game's potential success could lead to livestreams, prediction markets, and game-related memecoins in future seasons. See you in the arena.
$DEGEN is taking over (???)
$DEGEN, a prominent memecoin in Farcaster, serves as a compelling case study, showcasing the potential integration of memecoins into social product experiences. Unlike previous attempts like $POINTS, $WOWOW, and $FARTS, $DEGEN gained significant traction by distributing tokens based on /degen channel activity, fostering community engagement and becoming a central point for social interaction within Farcaster. The success of $DEGEN has led Farcaster builders to conduct various experiments on top of it and utilize it as a de facto rewards system for their products, emphasizing the importance of creating engaging contexts for consumer crypto transactions.
We had Wake on the show to get the inside perspective on what’s happening and dig into what’s making it so successful. This man is a poet and it’s worth listening to.
We need more compelling social contexts for minting...
The exploration of meaning in minting and onchain media raises questions about its potential as a widespread consumer behavior. While Zora emphasizes the ideological benefits for creators, such as preserving a pure internet and revealing economic demand, bridging the gap for collectors requires imaginative and intentional creation of meaningful social contexts. As Fred Wilson suggests the idea of building personal owned data sets for AI training, the broader utility of onchain data extends beyond minting, offering potential integration into various network activities, contingent on establishing compelling social contexts for user transactions.
And if these networks can build meaningful social contexts that people want to transact with, “why mint?” will have some obvious answers…
Pushing 
oints models onchain
Graeme (Stack founder) and Katie (Archetype) dropped a post exploring the benefits of onchain points, which Graeme is building a solution for with Stack. The discussion highlights the natural fit of blockchains for point systems, citing the success of gamification in web2 consumer experiences and emphasizing the potential of onchain points, offering benefits like programmatic distribution, auditability, and composability while maintaining flexibility for adjustments in early-stage products. As transaction costs decrease, the design space for points broadens, and the article delves into tradeoffs. Points aren’t going anywhere – they work and have been around for decades – so it’s great to see people pushing on new models and building infrastructure to bring them onchain.
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Watch the latest episode to dive deeper:
ICYMI: We have a Seed Club channel in Farcaster. We’re stoked to experiment with it more and integrate into some upcoming stuff we’re working on. Come say hi.
Backdrop's Build V1 and V2 helped launch hundreds of projects and distribute $140k+ in grants. It’s time to run it back. Welcome Build V3.
Non-Fungible Plants: Grow Your Own Cloud (SC04) is focused on storing data in plants with the audacious goal of being able to turn server farms into carbon absorbing data forests. Wild. This week they announced Non Fungible Plants. They’re taking the addresses of all collectors of the edition, creating an artwork with them, and storing the data of the artwork in a real plant. Learn more.
On the latest episode of Building At The Edges, Jess chats with Nick Grossman, Partner at Union Square Ventures, to explore USV's investment theses. They delve into how USV tackles significant markets undergoing transformative pressures, spanning social networks, vertical networks, crypto, and climate in order to identify opportunities at the peripheries where change is most promising.
Boys Club is getting ready for /brandnew, a summit on consumer crypto and digital culture. They’re gathering the brightest tech optimists to cast a vision of what’s possible for the new internet. We’ll be partnering with the boys for the event and Jess will be speaking! Join us on March 12 during SXSW!
Way way way back to the early days of web2.0.
Feeds were the new thing and social graphs were open.
Products like Spotify, Yelp and Zynga all leveraged this open social layer to grow massive user bases and billion dollar valuations.
Then the social networks…
1 YEAR Today marks one full year of my daily journey.
Here's what I've learned about creativity and consistency
We littered it with ads. We paywalled breaking news. GDPR banners on every page load. We let disinformation run rampant, and allowed social media giants to run elections. We put subscriptions on infinitely expanding content catalogs. How does…
TestFlight Club is the best place on the internet to get high quality feedback from over 100 highly curated early adopters. Avoid the Airdrop hunters and get your pre-launch product in front of real humans who give real, valuable feedback. Submit your product here.
The core focus is to support founders with high-quality early usage, feedback, and insights. Most recently we’ve shared early looks at … Crypto The Game, Seam, Revel, CoLinks, Sperm Game, newcoin, t2, Sona Stream, Daylight, Focus Tree, Receipts.xyz, DrawTheChart, Lore, Yup, Gallery, Revise, and more!
Want to join the Club? We're slowly opening the doors to new members.
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