SC07: Consumer Crypto Demo Day

When I heard Seed Club would be hosting another Demo Day last month I made sure to clear my calendar for the event. It was a great experience participating as an audience member in the previous cohort’s Demo Day, so I knew I couldn’t miss this one. And as expected, it didn’t disappoint.

If you missed the event but want to watch the recording, check it out here.

What’s Seed Club?

Seed Club is part accelerator, part venture DAO (like a VC fund with decisions made through onchain voting). They invest in and provide resources to startups in the space. As the industry landscape evolved, Seed Club shifted its focus from DAOs to the broader Consumer space.

Promoting SC07

In the spirit of continuing Seed Club’s creative and unconventional approach to promote Demo Day, the team created a hilarious survey that determined which ‘crypto scenester’ you are. Sorta like Harry Potter’s sorting hat or a Buzzfeed quiz, but all the houses are different degrees of turn-off 😂

The quiz is intentionally low-quality while highly entertaining. After answering the quiz, you get stereotyped into a persona that is simultaneously exaggerated and hits close to home. These personas are all mintable on Zora as well.

Making the Demo Day interactive

Being an audience member was a participatory experience. Audience members had to connect their wallet to view and chat with everyone else, and if you minted your results from the survey you could tip the Demo Day participants in $ENJOY.

Each audience member who minted from the survey received 55,555 $ENJOY (~$5) as a tipping allowance and could distribute it however they see fit to the projects.

Have you taken a quiz before? If so, share or subscribe!

Who was in SC07?

In order of appearance:

Chipped: Crypto-powered social hardware for girls

• NFC chips are embedded into press-on nails, allowing wearers to share links, social info, notes, and content

• Building a social aggregation protocol and native app, incorporating PIRLS (Proof of IRLs), creating an additional datapoint for proof of humanity

• 10 vending machines rolling out by the end of Q3, starting in NYC. The product will also be expanding into APAC in the year

Bracket Game: Creating a 100x experience for sports fans through real-time social markets for sports & live events

• Started with March Madness, and has expanded to other sporting events such as The Masters, NBA, NHL, and EURO 2024

• Prize pools went up to $500k and the app has seen $1M+ in monthly transaction volume

• Bracket Game is expanding horizontally (across sports) and vertically into smaller environments, eg: a family reunion cornhole event or a beer pong tournament at a frat party

Fora: Marketplaces for niche communities

• Platform for communities to create and manage their own marketplaces starting with Discord

• Created a tool that parses and recreates Discord ‘buy/sell/trade’ channels into a more efficient and effective P2P marketplaces

• Transaction dispute resolution responsibilities shift from payment processors (Stripe, Paypal, etc.) to qualified community members who understand the nuances of the goods and community

XHIBIT: AI-enhanced style discovery platform

• Social platform (mobile app coming soon) that allows creators to create digital twins and generate different looks

• Features clothing brands ranging from luxury brands to indie labels, expanding the possibilities of who a user is and could be

• Creator Protocol follows the content and IP they generate, ensuring creators are compensated for their likeness and work

Sidequest: Using tokens to reward physical world actions and gamify reality

• Computer vision (AI that identifies real-world activity in real-time) has improved to the point where gamifying IRL can be rich and seamless

• Can tie achievements based on activity and integrate them into daily life

• Quest —> capture activity and achievement —> reward

• Note: The team shared a Discord link, mentioning that they will provide early access and ~50 people joined within a few minutes

LISA Foundation: Democratizing fine art ownership and bringing it onchain

• Focused on changing how people experience, collect, and own digital art

• Collected 6 pieces of art worth $270k over the past few months and releasing it to the community

• Like Masterworks, but better (particularly on the community side)

Ponder: Curating the Internet and rewarding the curators

• Native to Farcaster

• Legacy information platforms are stale and sometimes irrelevant. Algorithmic information platforms (social media) are great but also have a lot of crap

• Started with polls to create insights, and just launched curation across 3 topics: Founders, VC, Base Chain

Unofficial: Creating generative social experiences and communities from open social graphs and data layers

• Building a discovery layer from open social graphs (eg: Farcaster)

• Also building a client that incorporates personalization (what you love today) and discovery (what you will love tomorrow) more accurately

Enjoy: The next stage of infrastructure tokens and memecoins

• A Seed Club incubated project!

• 3k weekly tippers, 12k creators tipped, 30k ENJOY holders

• Plans to integrate into other ecosystems and marketplaces. Simple example of this is the Demo Day tipping experience I mentioned earlier

Takeaways from SC07

Active > Passive participation

This one is obvious, yet hard to pull in certain situations such as an online Demo Day. Seed Club continues to set the bar on drawing in a genuinely interested audience, creating an environment that encourages active participation, and applying active participation before, during, and after the event:

• Before: Fun survey

• During: ENJOY tipping, connect wallet to view chat and join the conversation

• After: Mint project logos as a way to support the projects and enter a raffle

This approach is generally still regarded as unconventional, yet highly enjoyable and memorable.

Pre-qualifying early users

The demo day was a great opportunity for projects to get in front of an audience of early users, investors, and enthusiasts. IMO, the project and moment that seized this opportunity the best on the early user side of things was Sidequest, when they shared the Discord link and mentioned ‘everyone in our Discord will be the first to get early access’.

And just like that, Sidequest just got 50 more highly qualified early users within a few minutes.

Looking beyond the hype horizon

Honestly, SC07 was what I needed as my timeline has been predominantly filled with airdrops (and associated complaints about them), memecoins (and drama about if a Trump family member really created the $DJT), and crypto price predictions.

Those are all fine and help to provide insight into the pulse of the space, but Demo Day was refreshing.

And more importantly, it shows how rich and exciting the future of consumer will be in this industry. We’re still getting started 🌱

Other interesting things

• Bitwise aired their first national TV spot for Ethereum. It’s straightforward and good. You can also mint it as a NFT, with 50% of the proceeds going to Protocol Guild and 50% going to the actors.

• The Vatican Library is exploring NFTs

• The Pudgy Penguins pudgykindness TikTok account went viral after they supported a Twitch streamer, helping them go from near 0 followers to 263k

See you next week!