My yearning for a no screen summer is entangled in a tumultuous battle with my insatiable need to remain chronically online. Writing the seed club newsletter is a deeply edifying role, but it takes its toll. I have lost the ability to communicate in non-newsletter form, and I was unable to look my bartender in the eye as he brought me my third lychee martini. at least I was able to subscribe him to this newsletter. I’m told that my witty, weekly roundups of consumer crypto news allowed him to feel more confident in his current bearishness about crypto, generally. Cheers brother.
anyways, do you ever get the urge to mercilessly roast everyone you know? this happened to me, so we made a quiz. make sure to take it and mint your result to unlock a special treat at DEMO DAY TOMORROW.
xx c
The SEC closed its investigation into Ethereum 2.0 and will not bring charges alleging that sales of ETH are securities (slay). As part of Onchain Summer, Blackbird launched Bar Blackbird, a club for those who understand the uniquely magical pairing of sun and multiple beverage (differentiated). Zapper introduced Zapper Protocol, an open protocol to incentivize people to interpret and contextualize onchain info. It’ll be powered by $ZAP, which will be used to reward contributors for their interpretations and as payment for data access.
zkSync unveiled the details of their token airdrop of 3.6B tokens to early users. PleasrDAO is suing Martin Shkreli for copying and sharing the $4.75M Wu-Tang Clan album Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, violating a forfeiture order. The album, which initially sold for $2M and later for $4M, is now being offered as an NFT for $1 by PleasrDAO. Each purchase accelerates the album's original release date from 2103 by 88 seconds. Hamster Kombat, the game on TON (The Open Network), which is integrated with Telegram, has amassed 150M users. TON is best known for its games but also offers liquid staking, lending, and trading, and the overall ecosystem is gaining traction rapidly. Crypto:The Game got an Emmy nomination. Carlos' latest drop is far terminal, which lets farcaster channel owners easily launch tokens for their channels in a few clicks. It did $1.5M in the first 24 hours of being out in the wild. SC07 Demo Day is TOMORROW !!!
Internet Explorers is a weekly rundown live stream where extremely online individuals broadly explore (romanticize, even) new consumer internet experiences.
Live & online Fridays at 10am PT / 1pm ET.
Product Spotlights: Sanko
Sanko is a diverse ecosystem of products (slash multimedia conglomerate) including an NFT project, social network, gaming platform, a token, and now chain with the recent launch of their L3. Their games, such as the dream machine, are very 80s/90s nostalgic and they've continued to incorporate new experiments into their world over the past year. A core part of their strategy has been to do fair launches of their tokens ($DMT) early and treat them as iterative products. They've also made sure to focus on starting with culture rather than tech, believing that dominant ecosystems will emerge from tokens that first aggregate communities and then build tailored applications and networks. Aggregation of these communities allows them not only to build a valuable identity layer but also a suite of consumer products that otherwise might not be successful as standalone ideas. Overall the chat on IE with Smoovie WIlliams was super interesting and worth a watch (below).
funding onchain discovery and distribution
Layer3 announced a $15M Series A raise last week, bringing their total funding to $21M. They’ve been on a journey over the past couple of years evolving from a DAO bounty platform into the attention and token distribution network they are today. Layer3 aggregates user activity across all chains and apps and is now a full stack solution including token distribution mechanisms, identity/credentials, and targeting.
We invested in Layer3's seed round in Fall 2021 and have invested in every subsequent round since
1/ Let's run through what Layer3 does, their journey, and why we are so fucking excited
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They're a top 5 product across Arbitrum, Optimism, and Base, which speaks to the demand for better opportunity discovery and the need for distribution on the product side. We imagine that a common path for new entrants into this space will be getting pulled in by a killer crypto product that serves one of their core needs, and then later becoming intrigued by what else might be out there. The likelihood of this happening increases as the discovery and distribution marketplace continues to expand, with Layer3, Galxe, Boost, Daylight, and Launchcaster all growing and each offering unique capabilities depending on the type of transactions they're trying to drive.
One interesting thing to consider, as a recent article from zee prime capital pointed out, a significant portion of usage of many of these platforms are coming from bots.
Consider that every onchain use case is dominated by bots. Most of the token trading is done by bots. Crypto games are played by bots too, for they’re still heavily driven by financial incentives. NFT market-making is done by bots. AI agents (smarter bots) are beginning to participate in onchain economies. Even our socialfi darlings are heavily botted, making socialfi more asocial. Crypto is about incentives and resource coordination, and, so far, bots have proven to be excellent target users for harvesting onchain incentives.
On one hand, it raises questions about their effectiveness in attracting genuine, high-quality users for socially and culturally driven products, but on the other hand, the core customers of these platforms are protocols and networks that are focused on attracting liquidity and driving transaction volume. Ultimately, it’s not important whether users are bots; what’s important is how much of economic activity there is, and how much value could be captured as a protocol or an app. So the bots can stay I guess.
a new release for chronically online gambling addicts
We had worm emoji on the show a couple weeks ago when he was first launching rug.fun, and this week they launched their V2. It's a token launchpad and game where tokens compete for liquidity to aggregate attention and build social consensus around specific memes. The first major change is the deployment of Uniswap liquidity pools for all tokens as soon as they meet a presale threshold, allowing tokens to be tradable and have volatile prices earlier. Additionally, instead of allocating rugged liquidity from 2nd - 9th place tokens to deploying liquidity for the 1st and 10th tokens, it now goes to buying and burning them, which enhances the game's speculative nature. Only 20% of the liquidity is immediately used, with the rest deployable via a "bump" button. With all these changes, you get more liquid tokens and in-game price volatility, and the winning reward of buying and burning is way more attractive and speculative than additional liquidity. Their challenge going forward will be attracting more better tokens that create strong communities rather than just creating purely short term ephemeral betting games.
Watch the full episode:
1. experience another lockdown
2. defend crypto to my extended family at thanksgiving
3. retake drivers license test
4. watch hobby horsing in the blazing sun
5.…
So what does the next big wave of crypto adoption look like?
Applying…
