Most coins are moment coins.

Whether they are memecoins, appcoins, creator coins, or otherwise, they have their moment, and then they usually die. Occasionally they have another moment, but even if they do, they usually die after that.

Most moment coins have the same moment, in terms of the timing of that moment at least. That moment is, roughly speaking, at "launch". For most moment coins, the "launch moment" happens literally when the token launches. That "moment" may last minutes, hours, days, or weeks, but it very rarely lasts longer than 1 month.

Occasionally, the "launch" moment is not literally when the token launches but sometime later when a token which launched quietly receives attention from some major catalyst simulating a situation which is comparable to a "launch moment". It doesn't happen at the literal launch of the token, but it tends to play out essentially the same.=

If you agree with this premise, from what you have observed "in the trenches", it becomes natural to ask the question, "why don't any of these coins survive?" Beyond one, two, or at most a few moments I mean.

I would argue the answer is actually simple: attention.

More specifically, the fact that human attention is fleeting. When was the last time you thought about the Coldplay concert meme which annoyingly took over everyone's feed for a few days this summer? Probably not since this summer. There are countless examples of this. There is a "current thing" and then it is no longer the current thing. People move on to the next thing. Whether it's on X or a DEX, that's how attention works.

So, 10 months ago, I had an idea for a solution to this problem which essentially every token faces, and only an extremely rare few survive. In a world of moment coins, I had an idea for a persistent coin. We would address and attack the problem at its root. Attention is fleeting. No one thing can hold people's attention in perpetuity. So rather than trying to keep people's attention on one thing forever, we would change the thing to which drive attention every day. We would not try to be the next current thing. We would try to be like X, the place you go to see the current thing every day.

Now I wasn't going to to try to centrally determine what that thing should be every day. One of crypto's great strengths is that it enables things to happen in a more decentralized fashion. So we created a daily auction inspired by and originally forked from the Nouns auction, the most successful daily auction in the history of crypto (we have since made a number of changes which I believe are improvements). Instead of winning an NFT, the winner would win the ability to determine the link of the day to which we would be driving all of the attention we could until the next auction ends.

I launched the $QR coin and our daily auction for attention @qrcoindotfun in an effort to create a coin that could never die. When I say "could never die", I don't mean that it is impossible for it to die. Of course, that is possible. I just mean that it actually seems logically possible that it could never die. That there is logic to support its persistent survival. So far, it has been 290 days with 290 auctions going for an average of over $600. Our mini app remains top 3 trending on Farcaster almost every day and our coin remains a top 10 clanker from over 500,000 deployed. Hundreds of coins have momentarily surpassed $QR in market cap and then proceeded to fall below it as the attention moves on.

I'm not going to lie and tell you I know this is going to work. I don't. But what I do know is that where i don't understand the argument for most moment coins to survive long-term, $QR actually makes sense to me.

We call it the onchain attention machine because we believe it has the potential to compound attention over time and drive that attention to a new link every day. The more attention we can drive to our auction winners, the more valuable it becomes to win our auctions for attention, the more we can make in revenue from the winning bids, and the more we can buyback $QR, fund incentives for users (who we pay every day to check out the winning link from our daily auction), and do other things we believe can be good for the project and $QR holders.

I believe it is still extremely underestimated how early we are into this whole crypto thing. Maybe not the part where we are simply migrating the existing systems from TradFi over to DeFi and bringing offchain assets onchain, but the more interesting parts (in my opinion) where we actually don't know how things are going to play out, where crypto can actually change the world.

I don't know if $QR is that important, in the scheme of things, but it is different, and it is interesting, to me at least. Sometimes in pursuing something you are interested in, you end up doing something important.

I've been following my interests for years and it's led me here. I don't know why, but I have found myself oddly obsessed with delivering a coin that does not die.

We'll see how it all works out.

Thanks for reading.

Most coins are moment coins.

Whether they are memecoins, appcoins, creator coins, or otherwise, they have their moment, and then they usually die. Occasionally they have another moment, but even if they do, they usually die after that.

Most moment coins have the same moment, in terms of the timing of that moment at least. That moment is, roughly speaking, at "launch". For most moment coins, the "launch moment" happens literally when the token launches. That "moment" may last minutes, hours, days, or weeks, but it very rarely lasts longer than 1 month.

Occasionally, the "launch" moment is not literally when the token launches but sometime later when a token which launched quietly receives attention from some major catalyst simulating a situation which is comparable to a "launch moment". It doesn't happen at the literal launch of the token, but it tends to play out essentially the same.=

If you agree with this premise, from what you have observed "in the trenches", it becomes natural to ask the question, "why don't any of these coins survive?" Beyond one, two, or at most a few moments I mean.

I would argue the answer is actually simple: attention.

More specifically, the fact that human attention is fleeting. When was the last time you thought about the Coldplay concert meme which annoyingly took over everyone's feed for a few days this summer? Probably not since this summer. There are countless examples of this. There is a "current thing" and then it is no longer the current thing. People move on to the next thing. Whether it's on X or a DEX, that's how attention works.

So, 10 months ago, I had an idea for a solution to this problem which essentially every token faces, and only an extremely rare few survive. In a world of moment coins, I had an idea for a persistent coin. We would address and attack the problem at its root. Attention is fleeting. No one thing can hold people's attention in perpetuity. So rather than trying to keep people's attention on one thing forever, we would change the thing to which drive attention every day. We would not try to be the next current thing. We would try to be like X, the place you go to see the current thing every day.

Now I wasn't going to to try to centrally determine what that thing should be every day. One of crypto's great strengths is that it enables things to happen in a more decentralized fashion. So we created a daily auction inspired by and originally forked from the Nouns auction, the most successful daily auction in the history of crypto (we have since made a number of changes which I believe are improvements). Instead of winning an NFT, the winner would win the ability to determine the link of the day to which we would be driving all of the attention we could until the next auction ends.

I launched the $QR coin and our daily auction for attention @qrcoindotfun in an effort to create a coin that could never die. When I say "could never die", I don't mean that it is impossible for it to die. Of course, that is possible. I just mean that it actually seems logically possible that it could never die. That there is logic to support its persistent survival. So far, it has been 290 days with 290 auctions going for an average of over $600. Our mini app remains top 3 trending on Farcaster almost every day and our coin remains a top 10 clanker from over 500,000 deployed. Hundreds of coins have momentarily surpassed $QR in market cap and then proceeded to fall below it as the attention moves on.

I'm not going to lie and tell you I know this is going to work. I don't. But what I do know is that where i don't understand the argument for most moment coins to survive long-term, $QR actually makes sense to me.

We call it the onchain attention machine because we believe it has the potential to compound attention over time and drive that attention to a new link every day. The more attention we can drive to our auction winners, the more valuable it becomes to win our auctions for attention, the more we can make in revenue from the winning bids, and the more we can buyback $QR, fund incentives for users (who we pay every day to check out the winning link from our daily auction), and do other things we believe can be good for the project and $QR holders.

I believe it is still extremely underestimated how early we are into this whole crypto thing. Maybe not the part where we are simply migrating the existing systems from TradFi over to DeFi and bringing offchain assets onchain, but the more interesting parts (in my opinion) where we actually don't know how things are going to play out, where crypto can actually change the world.

I don't know if $QR is that important, in the scheme of things, but it is different, and it is interesting, to me at least. Sometimes in pursuing something you are interested in, you end up doing something important.

I've been following my interests for years and it's led me here. I don't know why, but I have found myself oddly obsessed with delivering a coin that does not die.

We'll see how it all works out.

Thanks for reading.