g'day,
to be a woman is to perform and lately i've taken the art of performance to another level. in order to elevate and inspire my audience, i have actually incorporated my art into my everyday life. this is something that not even satoshi could do.
all this considered, you know i work myself into a frothy lather every time i see a blockchain use case in the wild. so with all the terrible vibes on the timeline, i've decided to take my existential confusion to video format and start documenting (creating art) around 1) the builders that stay building and 2) cool experiences that traverse the irl and onchain world. starting with my Court Date last weekend.
enjoy a week in consumer crypto below
xx c
Zora App is now open to all. With it you can, double tap to mint, earn when others mint your posts and more, find and follow friends, and easily cash out your earnings. No app switching, pop-ups, or signing required!! US users of Paypal and Venmo can now enter ENS names to send crypto, eliminating the need to copy and paste wallet addresses. a16z unveiled their new cohort of crypto startups. Solana Breakpoint kicks off next week in Singapore.
FriendTech team revoked control over contracts to a burn address, but claims they have no plans to shutter or discontinue the friend tech web app.. Fantom’s rebranded chain Sonic Labs launched its testnet. EtherFi is going to launch a Visa 'Cash' Card on the Scroll network, and will reward 3% cash-back and let users borrow money against their crypto collateral. mmERCH is launching a collab with Christie's, Swarovski, Seedphrase, and Claire Silver. Layer3 announced Launchpad, giving users access to exclusive token launches, ecosystem campaigns, and airdrops. Orb now supports mintable, playable video content from Zora and Pods directly to your in-app feed (thanks to Decent!) DIMO announced a new partnership with Daylight Energy, a unison of two highly aligned DePIN projects that will soon enable every electric vehicle (EV) to connect to the Daylight network.
Product Spotlight: Baseline Markets
Last week's episode kicked off with Boo from Baseline Markets. Their team were previously contributors to Olympus and Yearn and we've been hearing about more and more projects planning to use baseline to launch their tokens.
The general idea is that tokens are broken today, whether it be poor token design, manipulative market makers, or whatever else. Baseline wants to create better token distribution and is doing that by guaranteeing liquidity to buy back the entire circulating supply at the baseline value (BLV). Profits from market making go to increasing this value, ensuring BLV is up only. Liquidity management is built-in to respond to all market conditions.
Wanted to congratulate the team for being bold in an environment where teams are copying each other, afraid to take risks, just doing whatever worked for the last project
- They collaborated with machi even though…
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You might be wondering how Baseline uses fees accumulated from the system to buy back and burn the token. This works through the Afterburner which is basically a a leveraged buy back and burn built into the system that fires randomly every 15 minutes. The chance of firing is 1-99 and every time it doesn't fire, the chance of firing on the next count down increases. It fires 2~5% of the total amount in the afterburner. So if there is $1m in there now, next time it fires, the system will take 200k, borrow against the floor, buy tokens, borrow, buy, borrow, until it cant, and burn all the supply.
Their core insight is that if you fully automate liquidity management, have a baked-in credit facility, and focus fees from trading / borrowing to increasing a floor price for the token, you can provide holders with meaningful price guarantees and drive more sustainable price growth over time from growing attention. We'll keep an eye on this over the next few weeks to see how this works out!
Product Spotlight: Ethervista
Ethervista, the newly launched DEX and token launcher for Eth and L2s, made some people on the timeline go feral when the VISTA token surged over 40x. The no-code token launchpad and creator fee system aims to prevent quick rug pulls, and has seen ~$409K in volume traded since its launch. The AMM has a few tweaks on the Uniswap model, namely fees for swapped tokens being priced in ETH and distributed to both liquidity providers and token creators, as well as some deeper pool customization options. There’s also a 5 day liquidity lock-up period on new pool creations to try and disincentivize ruggers. Poeple are calling it pump on ethereum which we don't get because this feels like way more of a defi product than it does a social memecoin product but ill let people enjoy things.
The Nemesis Guide to Being Early
This was a fun read and has some interesting provocations for brands, narrative, and novelty.
It dives into the cultural and financial significance of "being early." Initially, being early was about discovering niche trends before they went mainstream, offering social clout but no financial rewards. However, with the rise of crypto, earliness became financialized. As the trend accelerates, it undermines itself. Brands increasingly rely on earliness to market their products, but with diminishing returns.
In crypto many use the mental model of the tech hype cycle, but the reality is more like the fashion cycle below, with its shepard’s tone-like dynamics, in which each new thing is supplanted by another new thing, and no linear pattern emerges. Things very rarely reach the plateau of productivity, more often falling straight to Hades through the trough of disillusionment. No one seems to follow up on the hyped project of yesterday.
Some brands give their audiences STATUS, others provide UTILITY (which includes financial gain), some provide ENTERTAINMENT, and more and more, a (PARA)SOCIAL offering is at play: this brand brings me together with others, it's something I want to be a part of. Successful brands will occupy more than one of these categories at once. Upstarts will migrate from providing utility to status or a social bond. Early as a service is arguably all of the above.
Catch up with more consumer crypto updates by watching last week's episode:
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internet explorers every friday, live n online. this week with PuffPaw
also hit us up if you'll be at breakpoint or token2049 !!!
Seed Club is a participant-owned venture network. It’s a bet that doing venture capital from the first principles of a network instead of the first principles of a firm will create…
consistently choose the former
Revenge of the nerds is becoming revenge of the wordcels
taking lessons from aol & app store, crypto is finally at a place where apps should curate the networks. embedded wallets give ease on login and access to a portal of apps, now "marketplaces" should curate experiences for consumers. not the blockchains.
they released their Oncourt Hardware apparel collection, i earned points onchain, and everyone enjoyed
