g to the m (i hope your m is g),
Tokens I sold yesterday went up a lot today for no obvious reason, and tokens I bought are now down a bunch for no obvious reason, this market analysis is free.
Enjoy a week in consumer crypto below (i don't believe in optimal times to deploy a newsletter. my subscribers receive my truth when it comes to me)
xx c
80
Biden decided to put a hard stop to all the fun crypto has been having in the highest courts by vetoing a bill overturning SAB 121. This was a major blow to the hopes people had for clearer regulation around US crypto companies. Another week, another batch of new chain announcements. A Galxe L1, Aave / ENS / Friend.tech L2s, and word of 20 more coming soon to the superchain. You can now text 100+ tokens on Base to anyone, anywhere (babe dont worry im not talking to anyone else im just texting you Base God on Coinbase Wallet). You can log in via email on Warpcast and Team accounts are live on Yup, so now you can give your intern access to a farcaster account without having to perpetually wonder if and when they are going to disappear to the cayman islands with your private keys. Thanks to Coinbase, you can create and use a crypto wallet through Touch ID without having to ever touch a chrome extension. Highlight shipped ranked auctions and referral rewards. 750k+ memecoins have been launched on Pump.fun and on a single day last week they raked in $1.5M in fees. They just announced native livestreaming, a brainrot behavior they've seen emerge naturally with twitch streamers launching tokens, meaning that raw entertainment value is likely to go up and to the right. SC07 Demo Day is on June 20th and you need to register to attend!!!
meet the 9 projects building category defining consumer crypto projects on june 20th.
link to register below
@thattallguy @joshcrnls
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: Crate & Superfluid
Last week we welcomed Joey Iny from Crate. Crate is a songcoin launchpad similar to pump.fun in that tokens operate on a bonding curve, and transition to a liquidity pool when a threshold is met, but the platform uses songs instead of images. You can either upload your own song, or use AI to generate a song on platform. They generated $300k in volume over the first week with just AI songs before allowing uploads last week. The platform represents a meaningful evolution in music NFTs with fun additions of speculation, AI creator tooling, and memetic value capture.
We also welcomed Vijay from Superfluid, a protocol for money streaming ie getting PAIDD every second, in real time, without needing to manually claim or distribute. They're working on a protocol for more seamless streaming payments of salaries, token vesting, and grants distribution. There are a lot of real-world implications for being able to pay employees legitimately in crypto and this protocol solves a lot of issues around it. One tangible example of a socialfi app built using Superfluid is AlfaFrens. You can start a gated chat, post content, then earn $ALFA every second — a token you can use to stake on creators. The more staked on a creator, the more $ALFA issued to subscribers. Staking on a creator earns you revenue share from that creator’s subscription income. It's the largest Superfluid streaming app to date, with 6k+ users streaming, and 210k+ subscriptions to creators.
@vijaymichalik of @Superfluid_HQ explains how it works on internet explorers
mom can you pick me up the DAUs are dropping and im scared
Fantasy.top had been cooking alongside pump.fun over the past month, but it looks like things have dramatically slowed down as their revenues are down 99% from the peak (rip). It's obviously still very early and we're in experimentation mode but the overall story is most socialfi apps are struggling to convert financial capital to social capital and keep users engaged.
Of course there are many things Fantasy could do to grow from here, i.e. launching new game types, expanding to other platforms, letting smaller accounts be heroes, focus on new categories, etc. so we're not calling it dead, but the overall trend (which looks similar for Friend tech rn) brings up an interesting question around building lasting consumer/social products in this industry.
It’s so easy to add speculative incentives to get a ton of users to try a product, but keeping those users around is a challenging undertaking and building lasting, sustainable products means catering to the broader desires of future user demographics beyond the current novelty-seeking audience. The transient nature of consumer crypto products suggests a need for intentional ephemeral designs that capture value during moments of high attention. I'm excited to see the next iteration of these socialfi apps integrating more social contexts, leveraging social graphs across all the different places people are participating onchain, and using tokens to encourage scenes to form and proliferate. Mason said it well...
Builders can create compelling social-financial games and networks by taking a unique approach to how app monetization and financialization impact their apps. The exchange-first approach is easier since it doesn’t necessarily rely on creating new consumer behaviors; people already want to trade attention. But a discovery-first approach where a platform controls eyes is historically more defensible than one that only controls orders (e.g. transactions). The primary goal of the discovery- or social-first approach is to iterate quickly, testing new consumer behaviors and social-financial dynamics until users showcase their revealed preferences that have the potential to grow into large social networks. I’m confident that the most successful apps will have opinionated, vertically integrated designs that create liquid marketplaces for new types of assets or marketplaces that otherwise catalyze new consumer behaviors.
I said I would stop talking about celeb memecoins but
Last week a few notable celebrities like Caitlyn Jenner and Iggy Azalea launched memecoins and each had their own sagas which I'll skip over for this sake of my own sanity this morning. Josh argued that celebs launching their own branded memecoins is a terrible idea as there's no opportunity for a real community to form around it, it’s likely to pump and dump, and the celeb will burn trust and lose credibility.
But... hear us out. The idea that some celeb or icon could have a cult of fans create memes about them, promote their work, coordinate and socialize around them, and give fans economic exposure to that celeb's cultural relevance via tokens would be awesome. To do this, you could let the fans create memecoins (think $boden), see which one ends up building social consensus, and support that through proliferating memes and building community. They could also launch a scenecoin related to the identity of their fan base, airdrop it to loyal supporters based on certain attributes (top listeners, tour attendees, etc), and distribute it over time to people contributing to the community, or even integrate it into a product with reputation and social games. This could allow people that want to speculate on celebs to speculate on them, and empower their most hardcore fans to earn a meaningful amount of value from their contributions to the scene. You can’t tell me a global swifties fandom leaderboard and social graph wouldn’t go crazy.
Watch the full episode:
DEMO DAY. DEMO DAY. DEMO DAY. June 20th.
plus.... tune in to internet explorers every friday @1pm et (live.seedclub.xyz)
My latest post explores some of the dynamics at play, including:
- why crypto companies look like scams in their early days
- how tokens are a tool for narrative discovery
- tokens replacing venture capital
And a whole lot more:
Never take the shape of this newsletter subject line
