
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
There are two parts to The Obvious Series:
Simple explanations for newer entrants
Abstract wtf are we doing here reflections
A crypto currency open to market speculation.
Sometimes referred to as memecoins, shitcoins can be conceptualized as:
knockoff coins compared to name brand coins like BTC and ETH
market-cap-roulette tokens
community/protocol stock
At the introductory level, shitcoins are high risk, high speculation ‘assets’. Anyone can create one and make it available on a decentralized exchange. Because of this, many are scams, honeypots (buyable but not sellable), and wallet drainers. This is why we call them shit.
They exist because:
the industry is built on no permission necessary
sometimes people get insanely rich off of them
At the more intermediate levels of crypto, you find the conversation on whether all coins are shitcoins. Even the ‘tried and true’ protocol-coins may be no different than $DOGE or $SHIB.
At first it may seem nonsensical, but upon further consideration, you start to see quite a bit of overlap. When comparing $UNI and $DOGE what is really all that differentiating at the coin level?
Clearly the Uniswap project is quite different than the Doge project. There is a team working at Uniswap Labs, a founder on twitter you can talk to, etc. But when examining the coins, what is there beyond speculation, market signaling, and potential profit shares?
Some will say votes in a DAO, which isn’t wrong. However, when you dive deeper into how Uniswap is set up, you see that many of the core infra decisions are made in-house. The DAO almost serves as a community conference center.
This is not a condemning observation either. It makes sense that a protocol, trying to survive numerous bear markets, not leave its future in the hands of degenerate gamblers. What we are uncovering, however, is that the $UNI coin provides much of the same mechanism as shitcoins.
I’m of the opinion that this is not a ‘bad’ thing. In fact, I feel it’s a necessary feature of what we are trying to build here onchain; something we will call meme markets.

Remove your personal preference on where liquidity should flow and let’s examine the above image. What do these two coins represent?
Doge represents:
comedy
counter culture
memes
a fuck you to the system
Uniswap represents:
decentralized finance
free market economy
self custody
peer to peer economics
If you were to ballpark what share of people, out of 100, care more about Doge’s ideas or Uniswap’s ideas… it’s a no brainer why it has more than double the market cap. This is a crucial element of crypto; the Financialization
of meme markets.
Not much different than owing $TLSA stock as way to gain exposure to the companies ideas and potential profit, ‘shitcoins’ are the crypto equivalent. They run much faster, are inhibited to a way lesser degree, and anyone onchain can create one.
Shitcoins are a feature of crypto, not a bug.
There are two parts to The Obvious Series:
Simple explanations for newer entrants
Abstract wtf are we doing here reflections
A crypto currency open to market speculation.
Sometimes referred to as memecoins, shitcoins can be conceptualized as:
knockoff coins compared to name brand coins like BTC and ETH
market-cap-roulette tokens
community/protocol stock
At the introductory level, shitcoins are high risk, high speculation ‘assets’. Anyone can create one and make it available on a decentralized exchange. Because of this, many are scams, honeypots (buyable but not sellable), and wallet drainers. This is why we call them shit.
They exist because:
the industry is built on no permission necessary
sometimes people get insanely rich off of them
At the more intermediate levels of crypto, you find the conversation on whether all coins are shitcoins. Even the ‘tried and true’ protocol-coins may be no different than $DOGE or $SHIB.
At first it may seem nonsensical, but upon further consideration, you start to see quite a bit of overlap. When comparing $UNI and $DOGE what is really all that differentiating at the coin level?
Clearly the Uniswap project is quite different than the Doge project. There is a team working at Uniswap Labs, a founder on twitter you can talk to, etc. But when examining the coins, what is there beyond speculation, market signaling, and potential profit shares?
Some will say votes in a DAO, which isn’t wrong. However, when you dive deeper into how Uniswap is set up, you see that many of the core infra decisions are made in-house. The DAO almost serves as a community conference center.
This is not a condemning observation either. It makes sense that a protocol, trying to survive numerous bear markets, not leave its future in the hands of degenerate gamblers. What we are uncovering, however, is that the $UNI coin provides much of the same mechanism as shitcoins.
I’m of the opinion that this is not a ‘bad’ thing. In fact, I feel it’s a necessary feature of what we are trying to build here onchain; something we will call meme markets.

Remove your personal preference on where liquidity should flow and let’s examine the above image. What do these two coins represent?
Doge represents:
comedy
counter culture
memes
a fuck you to the system
Uniswap represents:
decentralized finance
free market economy
self custody
peer to peer economics
If you were to ballpark what share of people, out of 100, care more about Doge’s ideas or Uniswap’s ideas… it’s a no brainer why it has more than double the market cap. This is a crucial element of crypto; the Financialization
of meme markets.
Not much different than owing $TLSA stock as way to gain exposure to the companies ideas and potential profit, ‘shitcoins’ are the crypto equivalent. They run much faster, are inhibited to a way lesser degree, and anyone onchain can create one.
Shitcoins are a feature of crypto, not a bug.
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