greetings and good morning,
I'm tired of people trying to fud ethereum and I really do believe vitalik should be the face of Balenciaga this season. I've been having lucid dreams about small kids draining my wallet lately. This week I paid someone in SOL for a HydraFacial (thats pmf baby). The timeline this week has been extremely lit so I'll get into it.
186
xx c
We're hosting an AI event live in Berlin and online this Friday, alongside some amazing speakers to explore a future of healthy human-AI interdependence. ETH ETF filing process saw some sudden progress as the SEC returned comments and requested updated filings from issuers. Trump is accepting tokens for his campaign and absolute chad, RFK Jr. is aping into Gamestop. Farcaster announced a $150M raise, and they'll be using it to focus on growing DAUs and adding dev primitives. Meanwhile Scale AI secured $1B funding at a $14B valuation (!!!!!!). The purported Pump.Fun hacker claims to be in the hospital after arrest and release. Zora added support for custom profile layouts, giving us Myspace era nostalgia. Oscillator also giving us some FB era nostalgia with a new poke app, letting you choose your 8 fav artists, match with internet friends, and poke them. Rainbow now has an in-app browser. Art Blocks launched Art Blocks Studio. If you paste the URL of any Boost, it will appear as a frame and can be completed in-frame. Orb's 1-slide mint now works with Zora, Pods, and SuperRare. There are some truly wild and wondrous things to behold within the CryptoPunks community rn.
"i need a beautiful woman to explain the low float high fdv debate to me like i'm 8 years old...."
ok i got u.
FDV: fully diluted valuation of a token. Total supply * price. This takes into account ALL potential tokens that could be issued in the future through mechanisms such as token sales, vested tokens, team allocation, future airdrops, etc.
Float: refers to the # of tokens that are liquid within total supply. It's important because it affects liquidity and supply-demand dynamics. A larger float means there is more liquidity available, which in turn dampens a token’s volatility because people need to buy (or sell) in meaningful size to impact the price. By contrast, a low float means there is less liquidity available, which can lead to wild price swings, even with low trading volume.
What's happening now is new tokens are dropping but teams only release a small % of total supply, making it seem like the total valuation is a fucking billion dollars. Retail money buys in at that high price and over time, buyers (usually VCs) who had early exposure to these tokens dump all over them and the token gets yeeted into the sun.
ELI8: Imagine you're playing a game where special tickets represent candies, but most of the candies are kept hidden while only a few tickets are given out. People trade these tickets, thinking they're super valuable, but then the ones who had tickets from the start sell a bunch, making the candies seem less special and prices drop. This makes newcomers who bought tickets at high prices feel disappointed. The problem is, when there are only a few tickets available but it's said there could be so many more, it's hard to know the candies' real worth. Some suggest making sure everyone gets a fair share from the start, where everyone gets an equal chance, avoiding feelings of missing out or overpaying.
The reason this dynamic is frustrating and a topic of convo is retail buyers don't really have an upside. Cobie’s point is that most of the successful coins out there have let retail in at a low valuation (bitcoin, eth, solana, etc), so the open question is how to launch tokens in a way that’s actually fair for retail buyers and not just vcs and big whales in private markets blah blah blah. Some point to $FRIEND as a good example of this: 100% community allocation, fair distribution. More on this later.
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.
0xDesigner - yearning for consumer's killer dapp
Last week's show opened with 0xDesigner, renowned for his daily Design Everydays, where he explores and mints a new crypto user experience concept daily. He’s been doing it for almost 500 (!!!) straight days. The convo explored the ongoing challenge of onboarding normies to crypto, and why we need products that are elegant and understandable enough to not scare users off while maintaining the novelty that actually motivates people to try something new. Despite recent advancements in tools and infra, this gap remains and there's a palpable yearning for killer onchain apps.
They also talked about the emotional aspect of onchain experiences, noting the current lack of self-expression and emotional resonance in most products. People talk about how mainstream adoption hinges on integrating social contexts and emotional fulfillment into crypto interactions. The lads talked about bundled apps, amalgamating various protocols into cohesive products, and the potential for communities to craft tailored apps for their members (with BoysClub being an example). The notion of multiple "super apps" customized for different communities challenges the notion that such apps wouldn’t work in the Western market.
WorldPvP, Country coins, Memecoin supremacy
Last week, we explored the concept of "productized memecoin consensus building" with rug.fun, digging into their struggle despite the fun factor of their games. This week, WorldPvP emerged as another memecoin-centric game, leveraging the country-coin meta. Countries compete to achieve the highest market cap, with periodic nuke attacks funded by ETH transfers. Despite generating over $700k in fees, mostly through trading fees, the game's extended duration, expansive social dynamics, and existing consensus memecoins make it an interesting experiment. The attention and potential victory of $USA could shape the landscape of post-game memecoin supremacy.
Moar thoughts on attention
Delphi released an insightful report this week reflecting on the future of attention economies, analyzing attention markets in both web2 (ads) and web3 (tokens). They highlight the disruptive potential of chat and voice-based AI on ad-based business models, with crypto emerging as a novel distribution channel that has immense attention-generating capacity. They give a bull case for crypto as an alternative method to engage consumers and monetize attention, such as the role of memecoins as new ad units or brands launching tokens to incentivize and reward participants within their communities.
Can everyone stop fudding ethereum
Solana outpaced Ethereum in daily economic value generation for the first time, resulting in heightened SOL/ETH prices and renewed concerns in Ethereum circles. Jess & Josh talked about its struggling narrative on IE last year, but people seemed to stop worrying about it as it ripped alongside everything else in the following months. Obviously this stuff is reflexive as hell and number going up makes everything better, but Ethereum feeling less cool is a genuine problem for the ecosystem, especially considering the importance of consumer products in driving future value. The Ethereum Foundation's call for marketing reflects a recognition of this, but like......idk man, ethereum marketing is pretty goated imo.
Obviously there’s no singular reason but there are some obvious ways to improve
Meanwhile, most people who matter or once mattered either stay in their Farcaster ivory tower or…
Watch the full episode:
We're assembling to empower builders, researchers, creators and investors exploring positive futures and protocols at the intersection of AI, crypto and creativity. Join the livestream on May 24!
....
and tune in to internet explorers every friday @1pm et (live.seedclub.xyz)
Scale raised $1 billion
Farcaster raised $150 million
Suno raised $125 million
Footprint raised $13 million
Anduril rumored to be raising $1.5 billion
Venture capital is dead
- be purely integrated into the social / experiential layer, no treasuries or governance
- launch early at a low fdv, not be overhyped, and give early community time to earn and accumulate
- be distributed over time by rewarding core scene…
(links below)
