
Based: I Need a Dev!
In August I minted Based. “A token for the early adopters.” Open for the whole month, it closed just shy of 46.5K tokens minted and over 33k unique wallets. The most resonant piece in my young onchain discography by many multiples. Immediately I felt understanding emerge in regard to Jack Butcher’s words about his Checks and Opepen projects. Retrofitted for this post, he spoke of the impetus to experiment with each collection (initially just single-piece open editions) coming after seeing the...

The Greenpaper: What it can mean for you to "join Higher"
Co-authored by: Jihad Esmail & LGHT.ETH - Higher is an internet destination: a vibrant network of designers, developers, artists, writers, entrepreneurs, and athletes, leveraging open technology to work ourselves into our dream lives. Higher is a network for your ambitions, for refining your worldview, and creating the world you want to see among people who get it. Every day, we push each other to achieve new heights, explore new ideas, and create new experiences. Members have created athleti...

Concept Markets: Using ERC20s for Concept Proofing & Higher Production Hit Rates
Pre-context for this paper:The commodification of content using ERC20sUsing content interfaces that have memecoin backends to create concept parityRough theory of the funnel:IdeaConceptCoin the metadataGather market cap, trading volume, holder distribution + social media metricsManufacture what has proven demandHere are two examples you can view market cap, volume, and holder distribution:Custom Atlas ATVs.Would be a premium ticket, ultra-high cost item. Requiring tens of millions in market c...
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Based: I Need a Dev!
In August I minted Based. “A token for the early adopters.” Open for the whole month, it closed just shy of 46.5K tokens minted and over 33k unique wallets. The most resonant piece in my young onchain discography by many multiples. Immediately I felt understanding emerge in regard to Jack Butcher’s words about his Checks and Opepen projects. Retrofitted for this post, he spoke of the impetus to experiment with each collection (initially just single-piece open editions) coming after seeing the...

The Greenpaper: What it can mean for you to "join Higher"
Co-authored by: Jihad Esmail & LGHT.ETH - Higher is an internet destination: a vibrant network of designers, developers, artists, writers, entrepreneurs, and athletes, leveraging open technology to work ourselves into our dream lives. Higher is a network for your ambitions, for refining your worldview, and creating the world you want to see among people who get it. Every day, we push each other to achieve new heights, explore new ideas, and create new experiences. Members have created athleti...

Concept Markets: Using ERC20s for Concept Proofing & Higher Production Hit Rates
Pre-context for this paper:The commodification of content using ERC20sUsing content interfaces that have memecoin backends to create concept parityRough theory of the funnel:IdeaConceptCoin the metadataGather market cap, trading volume, holder distribution + social media metricsManufacture what has proven demandHere are two examples you can view market cap, volume, and holder distribution:Custom Atlas ATVs.Would be a premium ticket, ultra-high cost item. Requiring tens of millions in market c...
Share Dialog
Share Dialog


For the past twenty one days I have been obsessed with a decentralized project called Higher. If interested in the origin lore you can read more here.

We launched a channel on farcaster
A community token was created and airdropped to channel members
2M $higher was donated by core members for farcaster rounds
We created a party wallet and raised $70k for LPing and grants
Artists have created/minted for the first time bc of higher
Artists have made more than multiple yrs prior because of higher
Web tools have been created
AI tools have been created
A fashion brand has sprouted
Zora did a mint w rev splits to the collective
Founders of established projects have cosigned the project left and right
The channel sits at around 14k members and the token at 100M mcap
As a seasoned member of many failed decentralized orgs, some recurring patterns include:
intense adoption mania
followed by intense attention exodus
leaving a handful of core contributors
slowly petering out into obscurity due to
lack of resources
lack of positive feedback loops
or lack of progress
This is not uncommon for crypto natives of all interest profiles. DAOs have been relegated to punching bags in many circles. Over intellectualization has been long standing, and auctions lose traction quicker and quicker. Yet, we continue to improve the technology and add to the populace.
Conscious of the shifting meta to “over intellectualize memecoins”, what I am interested here is left curving daos and decentralized brands via memecoins.
When asked about a cast of mine that said, “everyone's talking about memecoins when the real convo is about daos” this was my response:

The motto we’ve been working under is - left curve it left curve it left curve it.
Additionally:
Left curve = instinctually make it simple.
Mid curve = purposely make it complicated.
Right curve = purposely make it simple.
When extending these frameworks toward decentralized autonomous organization, what seems the simplest organizer, is ERC20s as the dao membership, not nfts.
Nouns Builder, Party DAO, and Safe multisigs are all thought of as daos. Higher’s market question however is, what if they were instead financial group chats to work on the ‘real’ dao - the token?
The core idea in this experiment is that using an erc20 as the dao provides:
more wealth effects
more overlap in crypto users
less friction in permless media/infra/tooling/networks
less friction in ‘financial group chats’
At higher, the only thing we all agree on is ↑ as the unicode symbol. Font choices, color ways, media profiles, tooling priorities, all the way down to motivations and tag lines, are unique to the individual members of ‘higher dao’.

For example, above is the creative direction currently most resonant to me. Through collaboration with other Higher members (Dom, Isaac, Paff, and Ilya) we have arrived at a fork of Virgil’s famous off-white quotation marks.
I currently work on fashion, media, memes, zine’s, and broader creative direction for higher. What is crucial to note here, is for higher. Not at higher.

This is warranted delineation of roles due to the permless nature of the ‘dao’. Above we have another member of higher, marc, who is working on web tooling for higher.

And lastly we have maty, who is making custom goods for higher.
For being the operative word, due to the structure of this decentralized brand.
To ‘join’ higher you buy $higher. Or:
sell mints on zora in h
build something cool and see if ppl will pay for it
or higher co provides a grant
swap other memecoins for h
etc
The token acts as:
Dao membership (skin in the game)
speculative proxy for the brand (memecoin, ‘stock’ trade, etc)
ecosystem reward (grants, mint rewards)
brand identifier
In this line of thinking, owning 1H (even .1) makes you a member of Higher. From there it is decentralized-autonomous-organization all the way up.
Channel:
Website:
One of the Party wallets:
For the past twenty one days I have been obsessed with a decentralized project called Higher. If interested in the origin lore you can read more here.

We launched a channel on farcaster
A community token was created and airdropped to channel members
2M $higher was donated by core members for farcaster rounds
We created a party wallet and raised $70k for LPing and grants
Artists have created/minted for the first time bc of higher
Artists have made more than multiple yrs prior because of higher
Web tools have been created
AI tools have been created
A fashion brand has sprouted
Zora did a mint w rev splits to the collective
Founders of established projects have cosigned the project left and right
The channel sits at around 14k members and the token at 100M mcap
As a seasoned member of many failed decentralized orgs, some recurring patterns include:
intense adoption mania
followed by intense attention exodus
leaving a handful of core contributors
slowly petering out into obscurity due to
lack of resources
lack of positive feedback loops
or lack of progress
This is not uncommon for crypto natives of all interest profiles. DAOs have been relegated to punching bags in many circles. Over intellectualization has been long standing, and auctions lose traction quicker and quicker. Yet, we continue to improve the technology and add to the populace.
Conscious of the shifting meta to “over intellectualize memecoins”, what I am interested here is left curving daos and decentralized brands via memecoins.
When asked about a cast of mine that said, “everyone's talking about memecoins when the real convo is about daos” this was my response:

The motto we’ve been working under is - left curve it left curve it left curve it.
Additionally:
Left curve = instinctually make it simple.
Mid curve = purposely make it complicated.
Right curve = purposely make it simple.
When extending these frameworks toward decentralized autonomous organization, what seems the simplest organizer, is ERC20s as the dao membership, not nfts.
Nouns Builder, Party DAO, and Safe multisigs are all thought of as daos. Higher’s market question however is, what if they were instead financial group chats to work on the ‘real’ dao - the token?
The core idea in this experiment is that using an erc20 as the dao provides:
more wealth effects
more overlap in crypto users
less friction in permless media/infra/tooling/networks
less friction in ‘financial group chats’
At higher, the only thing we all agree on is ↑ as the unicode symbol. Font choices, color ways, media profiles, tooling priorities, all the way down to motivations and tag lines, are unique to the individual members of ‘higher dao’.

For example, above is the creative direction currently most resonant to me. Through collaboration with other Higher members (Dom, Isaac, Paff, and Ilya) we have arrived at a fork of Virgil’s famous off-white quotation marks.
I currently work on fashion, media, memes, zine’s, and broader creative direction for higher. What is crucial to note here, is for higher. Not at higher.

This is warranted delineation of roles due to the permless nature of the ‘dao’. Above we have another member of higher, marc, who is working on web tooling for higher.

And lastly we have maty, who is making custom goods for higher.
For being the operative word, due to the structure of this decentralized brand.
To ‘join’ higher you buy $higher. Or:
sell mints on zora in h
build something cool and see if ppl will pay for it
or higher co provides a grant
swap other memecoins for h
etc
The token acts as:
Dao membership (skin in the game)
speculative proxy for the brand (memecoin, ‘stock’ trade, etc)
ecosystem reward (grants, mint rewards)
brand identifier
In this line of thinking, owning 1H (even .1) makes you a member of Higher. From there it is decentralized-autonomous-organization all the way up.
Channel:
Website:
One of the Party wallets:
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