actually believing in something looks good here

gm to everyone except the handful of operatives who conspired to eliminate me from crypto:the game,

under last night's waning gibbous, I found myself staring blankly at what can only be described as democracy's darkest hour. a leaderboard of betrayal. a hit list disguised as a game. at the top? my name. next to it? a sea of little red numbers. wiped from the game in a brutal culling. being voted out with more votes than anyone else feels less like losing and more like winning at being a perceived threat, a peculiar achievement.

meanwhile, earlier this week, my Uber driver vibe coded an entire app while driving—one hand on the wheel, the other furiously arguing with ChatGPT like it was a junior dev on a performance improvement plan. by the time we reached my destination, he had generated more lines of code than some L2s have transactions, mapped out the entire architecture, and gave me five stars—the only voting system where I’m apparently not a divisive figure.

which all just goes to show: the journey matters more than the destination, especially when the destination is a public execution by my peers. in the writing world, we call that a hero's journey.

anyway, enjoy some mostly accurate reporting below.

xx, c

Seed Club invested in Kamigotchi. Chaos Labs introduced Chaos AI, promising to bring institutional-grade crypto intelligence tools to individuals. Transient Labs is partnering with SuperRare and RareDAO to build an end-to-end network for digital artists that prioritizes creative value over speculation, backed by a $2.5M investment in $RARE tokens to create better opportunities for artists in the cryptoart. Robinhood partners with Kalshi to launch prediction markets hub focusing on politics, economics and sports. dripster dot fun is bringing token launchpad mechanics to the fashion and physical product world. Megapot is reimagining the traditional lottery with crypto-native mechanics. Coinbase has introduced Verified Pools, a new feature leveraging Uniswap v4 for onchain trading.

CTG Breakdown: The Survivor of Crypto

Let's do a little deep dive into Crypto:The Game in honor of the season 3 finale today. CTG S3 ("Resurrection Island") is a 10-day crypto reality competition similar to Survivor or Squid Game, where players buy in for 0.1 ETH and compete for a pot of over 71 ETH. Players are organized into tribes, participating in daily challenges while voting each other out nightly until only one player remains.

Since its humble beginnings when Dylan hoped "a couple dozen people would see my tweet," CTG has grown into a cultural phenomenon with the current season featuring 716 players competing for a 71.6 ETH prize pool (~$150,000). The success of CTG just goes to show the potential for tokenized experiential products, with each season introducing new mechanics that keep the community engaged through evolving social dynamics.

The game operates like an onchain version of Survivor - players are divided into 10 tribes and participate in daily immunity challenges and tribal councils where they vote to eliminate competitors. Challenges varied widely, from puzzles requiring teams to decode clues leading to Best Pizza in Williamsburg, finding encrypted wallets tied to twitter profiles, to arcade games like Pinball and Brick Breaker. At one point, players experienced "The Merge" when tribes dissolved and the game became every player for themselves. Hidden immunity idols became crucial as the competition intensified, with some especially creative challenges requiring players to find specific words in site code or arrange colored orbs in a particular pattern. Many well-known crypto personalities were targeted early, suggesting staying under the radar was advantageous. By the final days, spreadsheet coordination became a form of cyber warfare with sabotage and last-minute vote sniping common. All in all, the game balanced individual skill with social dynamics, where even the strongest players needed allies to advance.

Also worth noting, last summer after S2, Uniswap Labs acquired CTG, allowing the team to both continue running CTG seasonally while also creating onchain activations between seasons such as projects like the Unichain launch site with Easter eggs and interactive elements. The acquisition represents an interesting alternative path for crypto builders. As Dylan noted, "Not every great idea has to be a venture scale business," and the acquisition provided an elegant solution for a team that had bootstrapped a viral product but wasn't necessarily seeking to build a platform or raise VC.

Its time to Build Believe in Something

Ben Roy dropped a thoughtful piece examining the current state of disillusionment in crypto, asking the fundamental question: "What do you actually believe in?"

Ben Roy

@benroy__

A lot of chats that I'm in are filled with people who are trying to figure out if anything in crypto is real/meaningful after all

...whether L1 blockspace is even valuable, whether NFTs were just a grift in the end, whether any apps with crypto rails will ever transcend being…

Regulatory constraints placed on the industry inadvertently created the memecoin mania by forcing projects into tokenization models with minimal connection to underlying value. The challenge is that most crypto activity pre-regulatory clarity wasn't about business building or value creation - it was about market cap inflation. When everyone around you on social media appears to be getting rich by doing the lowest common denominator work, it makes those with deeper convictions feel foolish for not participating in whatever the current meta is.

This creates a cycle where builders and creators get distracted from their original missions. When the speculative bottom falls out, all that remains are the original convictions that brought people into the space. For many early adopters, crypto represented something profound - true global accessibility where geography doesn't limit participation, unlike traditional tech which has historically required presence in Silicon Valley or NYC to make an impact.

The timeline shows signs of this shift - there are more voices speaking about fundamental values and missions today than just two months ago. After years of promises across crypto and beyond that haven't reached the edges as expected, perhaps this moment of disillusionment marks a necessary return to core principles and genuine innovation rather than chasing the next pump.

Cheryl Douglass

@cherdougie

feel like we're witnessing not a failure of the crypto thesis but rather its awkward adolescence, where the primitive financialization precedes and eventually enables the transformative apps that will justify the speculation in retrospect

Fundamentals (or periodic mania)

The crypto industry is approaching a potential turning point between two competing investment paradigms: the fundamentals paradigm and the periodic mania paradigm. The fundamentals paradigm focuses on intrinsic value and sustainable economics, where investors partner with strong teams building profitable businesses in large markets. In this approach, builders prioritize products, customers, and business fundamentals, while tokens trade according to their intrinsic value.

Kyle

@0xkyle__

if you read anything today, read this

well said by @TheiaResearch

In contrast, the periodic mania paradigm assumes a four-year bubble cycle, as observed in 2017 and 2021. This approach expects astronomical valuations regardless of asset quality, focuses on timing markets and narrative-driven investments, and considers fundamentals irrelevant as all assets inflate beyond intrinsic value during bull runs.

Despite some expecting another bubble in 2025 following the established four-year pattern, there's growing skepticism about this cycle continuing. Current market conditions show too many sellers and insufficient buyers for a 2020-2021 repeat. A surprising number of investors still operate under the periodic mania paradigm, and these investors may face disappointment as fundamental strategies outperform narrative tokens in the coming years.

The market appears to be maturing toward value-based investing, with increasing interest in projects generating actual cash flow and performing buybacks. Projects demonstrating real utility, user adoption, and sustainable economics may finally get their moment. The industry appears to be at an inflection point where the fundamentals-driven approach may finally overcome the speculative cycle that has dominated crypto investing historically. Those positioning capital in quality assets rather than chasing the next speculative wave may be better positioned for the years ahead.

Live & online Fridays at 10am PT / 1pm ET.

Erika Lee

@erikaleetv

pov: you sold the bottom after bull posting for two weeks straight

0xDesigner

@0xDesigner

3 coffees no lunch vs 2am existential crisis

venture anthropologist

@0xBalloonLover

crypto journalists listing their angel investments

winny

@winnyeth

rip jk rowling you would have loved solana

Chris Burniske

@cburniske

DeFi (finance), NFTs (culture), and AI agents (automation) have now all gone through their proof-of-concept stage, emerging with a bang in that order (2017, 2021, 2024).

It takes another 5-10+ yrs to evolve towards the real deal, establishing infra, reg clarity, stability, and…

Josh Cornelius

@joshcrnls

we've been heads down on some foundational @seedclubhq upgrades so have been quiet about what's next for our accelerator, but we're still very active and i'm fkn amped on the teams we've backed since our last cohort...

@kizzymobile social media betting
@simcluster multiagent