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Dark StarThe Consumer Crypto Paradox
Saw this tweet the other day laying out how Zuck thinks about launching products at Meta. He simplifies it in a way that makes sense: Step 1: Spark Step 2: Retention Step 3: Growth and Scale the Community And then, only then, comes Step 4: Monetization The last part hammered a feeling I’ve had about consumer crypto products for some time: by measuring an applications success by volume, fees or revenue from the get, a product is choking its ability to capture a larger customer base. Basically,...
Dark StarBuild for Humans, Not Hashrates
Optimizing for users — not bots, vanity metrics, or protocol worship — is the only way this works. Behavioral economists often state that markets are made of people, not rational agents. Human factors like emotion, biases, and social influences impact our investment choices, which breed irregularities and inefficiencies. We experience this daily, even outside of markets. It creates perfect imperfections and keeps the world interesting. Crypto markets are no different, in that Housecoin can pu...
Dark StarAmerica Onchain: "You've Got Scale?"
press “play” before you begin… It’s not very helpful to make direct comparisons between the evolution of technologies. Other than broad similarities in the way new inventions evolve and are adopted, the unique way a technology interacts with a culture at a particular moment in history is so specific that such comparisons likely miss more than they predict. But there is something resonant in analogies between the dissemination of the ‘original’ Internet (in, say, the 1990s), the social compone...
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Dark StarThe Consumer Crypto Paradox
Saw this tweet the other day laying out how Zuck thinks about launching products at Meta. He simplifies it in a way that makes sense: Step 1: Spark Step 2: Retention Step 3: Growth and Scale the Community And then, only then, comes Step 4: Monetization The last part hammered a feeling I’ve had about consumer crypto products for some time: by measuring an applications success by volume, fees or revenue from the get, a product is choking its ability to capture a larger customer base. Basically,...
Dark StarBuild for Humans, Not Hashrates
Optimizing for users — not bots, vanity metrics, or protocol worship — is the only way this works. Behavioral economists often state that markets are made of people, not rational agents. Human factors like emotion, biases, and social influences impact our investment choices, which breed irregularities and inefficiencies. We experience this daily, even outside of markets. It creates perfect imperfections and keeps the world interesting. Crypto markets are no different, in that Housecoin can pu...
Dark StarAmerica Onchain: "You've Got Scale?"
press “play” before you begin… It’s not very helpful to make direct comparisons between the evolution of technologies. Other than broad similarities in the way new inventions evolve and are adopted, the unique way a technology interacts with a culture at a particular moment in history is so specific that such comparisons likely miss more than they predict. But there is something resonant in analogies between the dissemination of the ‘original’ Internet (in, say, the 1990s), the social compone...
Share Dialog
Share Dialog
there will be many hot takes on what is going on in crypto land. people love it. people hate it. like everything in today’s world there is no middle. but regardless of how you are observing the memecoin markets (valued now at > $60Billy), you know about it through media-- the tweets, the memes, the namesakes and soon, the Sphere.
media folks definitely hate this. they also hate that I would dare to call memecoin’s a media business. but that’s exactly what it is. with memecoins, you have a bunch of people coordinating around timely pop culture topics (existing or newly created), building real markets around them, and then socializing the fuck out of them. but unlike traditional media where you create content to drive attention and then try to monetize it, memeland does the opposite-- the signal of a topic worth discussing is dictated through “dollars” and once big enough, holders of these coins create media around them to drive more awareness. this, in return, (hopefully) drives the value of their holdings up. rinse and repeat.
“but how is this media? and this isn’t my culture?!?” if you look at the top memecoins traded in volume over the past 24 hours on Solana, many are topics you know quite well. You have Doland Tremp versus Jeo Boden. This morning, Chadimir Putni jumped into the mix. Doge, the forever internet meme, is now wearing a hat (and it’s mad cute, too). Portnoy is commenting on memecoins someone built around him and his rescue pup, Miss Peaches. This has become an ecosystem of its own far from the comprehension of what mainstream media could cover. but as we know, media loves covering media so it will be accelerating through the trades soon enough.
so yes, this does not look like traditional media. and you may hate it for that. but if the role of media is to entertain and inform, ask yourself this-- “when people are showing you where they are spending their time, attention and money, do you ignore it? or do you lean in?”.
there will be many hot takes on what is going on in crypto land. people love it. people hate it. like everything in today’s world there is no middle. but regardless of how you are observing the memecoin markets (valued now at > $60Billy), you know about it through media-- the tweets, the memes, the namesakes and soon, the Sphere.
media folks definitely hate this. they also hate that I would dare to call memecoin’s a media business. but that’s exactly what it is. with memecoins, you have a bunch of people coordinating around timely pop culture topics (existing or newly created), building real markets around them, and then socializing the fuck out of them. but unlike traditional media where you create content to drive attention and then try to monetize it, memeland does the opposite-- the signal of a topic worth discussing is dictated through “dollars” and once big enough, holders of these coins create media around them to drive more awareness. this, in return, (hopefully) drives the value of their holdings up. rinse and repeat.
“but how is this media? and this isn’t my culture?!?” if you look at the top memecoins traded in volume over the past 24 hours on Solana, many are topics you know quite well. You have Doland Tremp versus Jeo Boden. This morning, Chadimir Putni jumped into the mix. Doge, the forever internet meme, is now wearing a hat (and it’s mad cute, too). Portnoy is commenting on memecoins someone built around him and his rescue pup, Miss Peaches. This has become an ecosystem of its own far from the comprehension of what mainstream media could cover. but as we know, media loves covering media so it will be accelerating through the trades soon enough.
so yes, this does not look like traditional media. and you may hate it for that. but if the role of media is to entertain and inform, ask yourself this-- “when people are showing you where they are spending their time, attention and money, do you ignore it? or do you lean in?”.
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