bonjour,
this week i've been deep diving cardboard bedframe durability studies, olympic village situationships, pistol shooting with Kim Yeji, illegal paternity tests, the Parisian art of cigarettes, breakdancing, and swimming in the seine, vitalik's effortless style, and other fun things if you'd like to take a break from crypto this summer season. but this newsletter is just for consumer crypto. so we can come back to all that later.
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enjoy
xx c
Its FWB FEST week to those that celebrate!! Zora invented a new unit of measurement for ETH this week. They called it Sparks (✧) and 1 ETH = ✧ 1,000,000. Two options to short memecoins emerged this week; Dumpy.fun and The Arena (pw: enterthearena) by MarginFi. Founders Fund led an $11 million round in Pudgy Penguins’ parent company. $Enjoy passed 50k holders last week. Abstract, the new consumer crypto L2, launched its testnet. The Ethereum Movie trailer has dropped. Farcaster Frames now support Polygon PoS transactions. Crowdmuse announced its Create flow, marking a significant milestone in the development of its onchain infra and marketplace for creator commerce.
Blackbird wants to scale the "regular" experience across multiple restaurants, and make restaurants more profitable in the process-- Packy does a deep dive. Plus Blackbird's Flynet, the new L3 built on Base, brings a new way to pay that lets diners leave when they're ready without waiting for a check, all while letting restaurants save with lower fees. The California DMV is launching its own chain on Avalanche to try to modernize the vehicle title transfer experience for CA's 39M+ residents (random). Boys Club described the vibe of BTC Nashville last week as "a faith-based community gathering, with the same zeal, ardor, and condemnation of non-believers as a religion....where there is one God (Bitcoin) and one goal (hyperbitcoinization), fiat is “rent seeking” and all taxation is theft."
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.
MELTEM
Meltem came on the show and gave us some utterly rich lessons and mental frameworks to think about everything from....
✎ bitcoin as a religion full of deities, prophecies, lore, rites, rituals, schisms, ideologies, and cults
✎ how humans capture our collective imagination and create and bend reality through storytelling
✎ investing in the absurd; why value lies at the fringes of mimetic movements
✎ why broader markets will come to look much more like crypto in the next 10 years than crypto will come to look like mainstream markets
✎ how to create and maintain strong personal lore
and so much more. Watch the full recording below.
Killer Wedges 
A "wedge" refers to a tightly defined market segment that a startup aims to dominate as a springboard to a larger market. NFX's latest research on "killer wedges" lays out examples for 12 different killer wedges, which they define as a subset of the eventual larger market that let you test your product and gather data + learnings early on that remain relevant as you grow. The opposite of orienting yourself around a killer wedge would be trying to be all things to all people, or trying to intake all types of feedback from a broad market.
Many companies miss this point and get stuck. Crypto twitter is a poor wedge because attention is so scattered and ephemeral and you end up wasting a bunch of time trying to dominate a wedge that is misaligned with your actual target market. Instead, focus on the intersection of crypto-comfortable individuals and the specific user persona that most urgently has the problem or desire they’re building for. For example, a socially-ambitious consumer crypto project looking for a viral network wedge could target tight high-context spaces like college campuses where people are eager to experiment and share new products with each other. Students create extremely viral networks via close geographic proximity, constant social interactions, and high-affinity to related user groups. Iteration cycles are tight. You’ll instantly get a sense if your branding works. If there are problems, you’ll spot them immediately.
But... don't get stuck treating your killer wedge as a final destination. Use it to gather learnings and build a long-term launch strategy. Remain adaptable!
It's not a GTM strategy or PMF, but it sets the direction for both.
It's a critical point that's worth thinking through deeply. NFX has been doing a deep dive into this strategy.
Our findings below:
Prediction markets: Why regularity matters
TLDR - what matters is regularity
Polymarket crossed $1 billion in value processed and is accounting for ~6% of all transaction fees paid on Polygon. Yet, Kyle's thread ^^ raises questions about long-term regularity and repeated usage of Polymarket, a platform reliant on consistent transaction volumes. Prediction markets thrive when they offer regular opportunities for betting. DraftKings and FanDuel, for instance, spend heavily on CAC because high LTV bettors, who make repeated bets over time, justify this expense. In 2020, DraftKings reported an average revenue per monthly unique player (ARPMUP) of $65, highlighting the value of regular engagement. Similarly, sports betting, which is expected to grow by $189B between 2023 and 2028, ensures ongoing engagement due to the frequent nature of sports events, which you don't see with markets like elections. Other platforms like Kalshi, for instance, leverage regular economic events (CPI prints, unemployment prints, will fed raise/lower rates, etc.) to maintain user engagement. Kizzy, a social media betting platform, is promising because of its endless content from influencers, though it must make betting on influencer posts as compelling and consistent as sports betting. Polymarket could thrive as a "professional" prediction market platform that covers all markets and provides a platform that many normie users don’t even realize or care is built atop crypto rails, but to keep growing and sustaining engagement, they need to find a set of regular markets that people can and want to bet on that are currently underserved.
Watch the full episode:
ie. every friday. 1pm et. this week with Sam!
These are my favorite examples of how founders got their products into the hands of users
its incentives unlock this. an added layer.
The due diligence:
