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curious gurnoorbeware of tokenizing everything
Chasing the goal of tokenizing every “real-world” asset relegates blockchains as secondary ledgers of truth rather than fulfilling their greater potential as the foundation for the future of internet finance. The attempt to tokenize everything is futile because we are in the business of developing net-new financial products that take advantage of being onchain rather than replicating existing assets. Furthermore, we should tokenize assets that supply some inherent value in being onchain - ass...
curious gurnoorlet's build something people can use
Thanks to the Placeholder investment team and Tim Robinson for the discussions here, our conversations inspired some of these takeaways. Programmable and verifiable on-chain actions should make applications easier, more intuitive, and safer to use for consumers since they remove any ambiguity that is associated with human middlemen. However, we consistently see the opposite result, as is evident by how infrastructure-heavy the industry is. The reason web3 is harder, less intuitive, and percei...
curious gurnoorflexible programmable sequencing
Much of this piece is inspired by and, in part, a reflection of "SoK: Cross-Domain MEV" by Conor McMenamin. There is an obvious rise of shared sequencers, settlement layers, and superbuilders. This shift has brought the concept of cross-chain extractable value to the forefront, challenging us to quantify and mitigate its impact across multiple domains. I wanted to utilize this piece to document and discuss some key learning from Conor’s piece, “SoK: Cross-Domain MEV”. One of the most pressing...
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curious gurnoorbeware of tokenizing everything
Chasing the goal of tokenizing every “real-world” asset relegates blockchains as secondary ledgers of truth rather than fulfilling their greater potential as the foundation for the future of internet finance. The attempt to tokenize everything is futile because we are in the business of developing net-new financial products that take advantage of being onchain rather than replicating existing assets. Furthermore, we should tokenize assets that supply some inherent value in being onchain - ass...
curious gurnoorlet's build something people can use
Thanks to the Placeholder investment team and Tim Robinson for the discussions here, our conversations inspired some of these takeaways. Programmable and verifiable on-chain actions should make applications easier, more intuitive, and safer to use for consumers since they remove any ambiguity that is associated with human middlemen. However, we consistently see the opposite result, as is evident by how infrastructure-heavy the industry is. The reason web3 is harder, less intuitive, and percei...
curious gurnoorflexible programmable sequencing
Much of this piece is inspired by and, in part, a reflection of "SoK: Cross-Domain MEV" by Conor McMenamin. There is an obvious rise of shared sequencers, settlement layers, and superbuilders. This shift has brought the concept of cross-chain extractable value to the forefront, challenging us to quantify and mitigate its impact across multiple domains. I wanted to utilize this piece to document and discuss some key learning from Conor’s piece, “SoK: Cross-Domain MEV”. One of the most pressing...
Share Dialog
Share Dialog
We had a very interesting team research meeting last week centered on intellectualizing memecoins. We could very well be overthinking this framework, and in reality, memecoins exist as a 24/7 global casino, but it's an interesting exercise nevertheless.
We were debating the extent to which memecoins actually represent something - a cultural artifact, a real-time event, a digital meme, etc. While some of us concluded that memecoins serve as a way for people to hold stake in an artifact they align themselves with, Joel brought up an interesting analogy that I agree with - memecoins are the first successful crypto-native on-chain video game.
The core components of any game are goals, rules, challenges, and interactivity. Memecoins can then act as a 24/7 global game played on a multitude of platforms (exchanges and wallets) with these same principles. The goal for any player is to maximize their portfolio balance, and the value of their portfolio provides real-time updates of their performance. The rules of the game are simple: maximize your portfolio by trading a variety of available assets at profitable positions. Traders can develop interesting chart-reading strategies by combining off-chain social and on-chain price movement indicators. The challenges are the volatility of an asset’s performance and the timing of a profitable trade. As for interactivity, the blend of social influence and momentum-driven investing is arguably the most interactive way to engage with such a game.
The reason I agree with this framework more so than the counter is because I loosely believe that memecoins don’t represent something inherently valuable. The conversion rate of people that believe or align themselves with something to those that place financial stake in that thing seems very low. Most memecoins are manifestations of digital memes or real-world events, and a certain set of people may care deeply about these artifacts. However, I believe a majority don’t care enough to place financial value in a representative and volatile token simply to align themselves with that artifact.
While it will remain an interesting space to track and certainly one that isn’t going away, I think it's important not to overvalue a phenomenon that may just be an entertaining, speculative, and successful game that happens to be crypto-native.
We had a very interesting team research meeting last week centered on intellectualizing memecoins. We could very well be overthinking this framework, and in reality, memecoins exist as a 24/7 global casino, but it's an interesting exercise nevertheless.
We were debating the extent to which memecoins actually represent something - a cultural artifact, a real-time event, a digital meme, etc. While some of us concluded that memecoins serve as a way for people to hold stake in an artifact they align themselves with, Joel brought up an interesting analogy that I agree with - memecoins are the first successful crypto-native on-chain video game.
The core components of any game are goals, rules, challenges, and interactivity. Memecoins can then act as a 24/7 global game played on a multitude of platforms (exchanges and wallets) with these same principles. The goal for any player is to maximize their portfolio balance, and the value of their portfolio provides real-time updates of their performance. The rules of the game are simple: maximize your portfolio by trading a variety of available assets at profitable positions. Traders can develop interesting chart-reading strategies by combining off-chain social and on-chain price movement indicators. The challenges are the volatility of an asset’s performance and the timing of a profitable trade. As for interactivity, the blend of social influence and momentum-driven investing is arguably the most interactive way to engage with such a game.
The reason I agree with this framework more so than the counter is because I loosely believe that memecoins don’t represent something inherently valuable. The conversion rate of people that believe or align themselves with something to those that place financial stake in that thing seems very low. Most memecoins are manifestations of digital memes or real-world events, and a certain set of people may care deeply about these artifacts. However, I believe a majority don’t care enough to place financial value in a representative and volatile token simply to align themselves with that artifact.
While it will remain an interesting space to track and certainly one that isn’t going away, I think it's important not to overvalue a phenomenon that may just be an entertaining, speculative, and successful game that happens to be crypto-native.
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