blessed awakenings,
i spent this week deep in a schizuation with the economy, the internet, and my own rapidly deteriorating psyche. 3 weeks of rain had fermented my brainstem into a kind of artisanal existential pâté, the sort of delicacy that pairs well with self-doubt and $19 natural wine that tastes like wet cardboard but comes with a heartwarming story about biodynamic vineyard goats. then I returned to nyc and was immediately waterboarded by capitalism for the grave sin of believing I deserved an interior life
theres a certain metacognitive gymnastics required to build the onchain economy, part self-soothing pharmaceutical delusion, part highly informed conviction spiral. you need to cultivate an ineffable whimsy that borders on clinical dissociation, plus an unbreakable zest for life that's been stress-tested by at least three existential market crashes and one moderately severe psychotic break involving cryptocurrency and the works of Thomas Pynchon. you must become the sort of deranged creature who reads SEC lawsuits like they’re fanfic and finds emotional catharsis in token unlock spreadsheets. you should find the phrase “retail exit liquidity” unspeakably erotic.
this is the optimal headspace for both building and consuming while questioning the nature of reality itself. so all that being said, today we're talking about how crypto is finally figuring out how to make itself part completely f***king invisible.
anyway, enjoy some mostly accurate reporting below
xx, c
Last weekend, several hundred terminally online crypto + crypto adjacent people left their cryogenic chambers and created something beautiful in actual sunlight at FWB FEST in Idyllwild california. The schedule reads like the most ambitious crossover event in internet culture history: "Memecoins as Capital Markets," "Death Meditation," "100x Gain or Rug," and "Be a Living Angel on Earth" all happening within walking distance of each other. This is what happens when you let extremely online people curate a festival: you get sessions on "Emotional Alchemy presented by Polygon" followed by "Astrology Readings w/ Stars Align" followed by music from artists like Nick León and Danny Cole. The schedule is gloriously unhinged in the best possible way, bouncing between deep tech talks and spiritual experiences with the kind of earnest enthusiasm that only comes from people who genuinely believe technology can make the world more interesting.
What made FEST genuinely special wasn't just the ambitious programming but the fact that it actually worked. Base turning the whole thing into a real-world crypto payments experiment felt seamless rather than forced. Hundreds of USDC transactions happening naturally while people focused on the art, music, and ideas.
This is crypto culture at its absolute best: weird, optimistic, and completely unafraid to experiment with new ways of bringing people together. FWB FEST proves that crypto's cultural ambitions aren't just marketing fluff. They're genuine attempts to create new kinds of community experiences.... the sort where you can attend a masterclass on DeFi yield farming at 2pm and participate in a guided meditation about impermanence at 4pm without anyone finding this combination remotely f*cking bizarre.
The real magic wasn't the seamless payments infrastructure or the perfectly curated lineup. it was watching a bunch of people create something that felt like the future of human gathering: technologically enabled but fundamentally about connection, creativity, and the radical possibility that maybe we can build something better than what we inherited.
Ty Haney didn’t set out to be a tech founder. She was just trying to make exercise feel fun. That instinct, equal parts playful and rebellious, sparked the rise of Outdoor Voices, the cult DTC brand that brought pastels, movement, and the viral “Doing Things” slogan into the fitness world. But her ascent was met with a classic boardroom plot twist: by 2020, Ty had been pushed out of the company she created. “I remember being gutted,” she’s said, reflecting on that moment. “But I also knew I wasn’t done.”
That next chapter became TYB (Try Your Best), a startup rooted in one simple idea: fans are more valuable than customers. Instead of throwing money at ads, TYB helps brands build their own community engines, offering social challenges, rituals, and real rewards to turn obsession into status. Users rack up points not just for purchases but for engagement, and they redeem them for everything from Rare Beauty bundles to concert tickets. “People don’t just want merch,” Ty says. “They want to feel seen.”
In August, she returned to Outdoor Voices (this time as co-owner) with TYB fully integrated into the relaunch. It wasn’t just a comeback; it was a systems upgrade. TYB tracks and rewards the fan activity. Outdoor Voices becomes the first brand to operate entirely within her new ecosystem. The consumer doesn’t see blockchain. They see a leaderboard, a badge, a DM from the brand they love. But behind the scenes, TYB is quietly turning brand affinity into a portable, programmable asset.
Ty’s superpower is worldbuilding. Her style is warm, her strategy clinical, and her vision surprisingly radical: a future where fans earn equity not by investing capital, but by showing up. In a consumer economy defined by fleeting trends, Ty is betting that the next big company will be built by community.
After years of crypto founders playing regulatory roulette with agencies that seemed to make up rules on the fly, the first week of August delivered something miraculous: actual clarity. Starting with the GENIUS Act which doesn't just regulate stablecoins, it sort of nukes Tether's business model by requiring 1:1 backing with Treasury bonds and US-registered auditors, something USDT's 85% compliant reserves and Italian auditor BDO can't satisfy. And next, the CLARITY Act finally solved the "is it a security or commodity?" question that's consumed billions in legal fees with an elegantly simple flowchart: if your blockchain passes the "mature blockchain test" for sufficient decentralization, congrats, you're a commodity under CFTC jurisdiction; if not, you're dealing with the SEC. The SEC's liquid staking statement was equally straightforward: protocol staking activities and staking receipt tokens don't constitute securities offerings unless the underlying crypto assets are part of an investment contract. Translation: staking ETH and getting liquid staking tokens back isn't a securities transaction, ending years of regulatory limbo for the entire liquid staking ecosystem.
But alas !!! here's the real cultural shift that we should be talking about: Paul Atkins announcing the SEC wants to move America's entire financial system onchain doesn't just create regulatory clarity, it creates social legitimacy for an industry that's spent years being treated like beanie baby collectors with CS degrees. His five-point plan reads like institutional validation incarnate: onshore token issuance, self-custody rights, simplified licensing, onchain service integration, and regulatory sandboxes for experimentation. This is the moment crypto people can finally attend family dinners without your uncle’s yearly checkin if you’re "still doing that Bitcoin thing" with the same tone reserved for pyramid schemes.
When the SEC Chair declares blockchain infrastructure existential for American financial competitiveness rather than a threat to it, we're witnessing the end of crypto's cultural purgatory. The cognitive dissonance of building genuinely transformative financial infrastructure while being perceived as glorified gambling addicts might actually be finally resolving. Circle's IPO success on Ethereum, BlackRock's RWA tokenization, and Coinbase scaling L2s all point to where institutional money flows when regulatory anxiety disappears. We're not just getting regulatory clarity; we're getting cultural permission to stop explaining why our work matters and start building the $500 trillion everything-onchain economy that might suddenly be inevitable rather than aspirational.
Figma IPO'd last week, pricing at $33 and popping 256% to $117.59 on day one, topping a $58 billion market valuation. The kicker? Adobe tried to acquire them for $20B before the FTC stepped in like a rugpull auditor. The real twist is that Figma's founder deliberately left billions on the table by underpricing shares to "reward long-term institutional shareholders." Translation: Wall Street insiders got generational wealth while retail had to buy the top. For a company that championed accessibility in design, it was a very tradfi way to go public.
This is exactly why crypto’s still cooking onchain capital formation. Sure, we’re years from replacing IPOs with fully decentralized launches, and yeah, legal landmines are everywhere, but the point remains: the current system is engineered to gatekeep. Onchain systems could offer broader access, lower fees, and transparency baked into the protocol. Figma reminded everyone that public markets are still private clubs in disguise. And crypto, despite the mess, still wants to build a new guest list.
The biggest shift in human attention and economic value is happening on social media, but there's almost zero financial infrastructure around it. Aditya Mehta spotted this gap in a way that feels obvious once he explains it. Mr. Beast consistently pulls higher viewership numbers than the Super Bowl, which is literally the biggest sports betting event in America. Taylor Swift's Singapore concert generated tens of billions in economic activity. These aren't just cultural moments. They're massive economic engines that have zero betting infrastructure despite being more predictable and analyzable than most traditional sports.
Kizzy emerged from Aditya's experience as a top-50 FriendTech trader, where he realized social capital could be financialized but the execution needed work. Instead of treating creators like stocks, his team built prediction markets for social media and cultural metrics that are already super readily available: Spotify streams, YouTube views, TikTok engagement, concert attendance. The insight is beautiful in its simplicity. if you can bet on whether LeBron will score 30 points, why can't you bet on whether Sabrina Carpenter's new album 'Manchild' will hit 100 million streams in its first week? People already obsess over these numbers, analyze release strategies, and have genuine expertise about what content will perform. Kizzy just gives them somewhere to put money behind their predictions.
What makes this a genuine consumer crypto breakthrough is how naturally it fits into existing behavior. When Kizzy generated 14,000+ community posts in seven days, that's not paid marketing but organic excitement from people who finally see crypto solving a problem they actually have. Aditya's philosophy: focus on slow progress, maintain good vibes, and build for how people already think about value rather than trying to educate them into caring about entirely new concepts. He's creating financial rails for an attention economy where individual creators routinely outperform traditional media companies, but where all the economic infrastructure still assumes the old model matters more than the new one.
Kizzy is built on Monad, and currently on testnet. Check it out here: http://testnet.kizzy.io
Stay tuned for imminent mainnet launch by following them on X.
Crypto isn't going through a personality crisis. It's just growing up. The tension between “crypto-native” and “crypto-adjacent” isn’t a battle for the soul of the industry. It’s a sign of maturation. Every new platform starts this way: a small group of power users pushes the limits, funds the infrastructure, and creates the conditions for the rest of the world to show up.
It's 2025 and crypto is going mainstream.
Polymarket’s top 196 users (top 0.06%) drive half the volume. Their bets build the trust layer for casual users to lean on. Farcaster’s early adopters pay to mint, build clients, and experiment with onchain UX so new users and crypto-curious can scroll in peace. Blackbird hides token plumbing behind better restaurant rewards. These aren’t edge cases. This is how scale works.
And the shift from cowboy founders to commercial ones? It’s not a replacement. It’s a merge. The builders winning right now aren’t web2 devs adding token wrappers. They’re the ones who grok crypto’s technical unlocks and know how to ship them through familiar distribution rails. Chipped turns your manicure into a social rewards system, letting you tap to share your profile, earn points for making connections, and redeem them for real-world perks. Zora makes NFTs disappear for the end user by understanding the culture deeply enough to abstract it.
While crypto adoption might feel like it's building toward a sudden breakthrough moment, the reality is more nuanced. As Brian Armstrong noted, "It will always be a spectrum, not a sudden moment in time." Yet there's still an aspirational goal driving much of the innovation: reaching that critical mass where accessing open financial systems becomes truly mainstream.
Crypto isn’t about choosing native or adjacent. The future is hybrid. And it’s already here.
Joey Iny has been chasing the same elusive problem for a year: how to make crypto actually fun and useful for music. His third attempt, Viral.fun, might be the one that cracks it. After building CratePlace (an AI music generation tool with tokens) and WaveLeaks (a platform for underground music trading), Joey realized he'd been approaching the problem backwards. "I actually believe that the right go to market, at least for me, is fans, not necessarily artists themselves," he explains. "Artists really just wanna focus on making music. But it's the listeners who are in these discords, posting online, sharing and discovering. They're the ones who will be coming back daily and using your products obsessively." This insight led him to pivot from supply-side (artists) to demand-side (fans), fundamentally changing how he thinks about music platforms.
Viral.fun launched with a simple premise: every song in the world should be tradeable. Anyone can submit a song, which automatically generates a token that fans can buy to boost it up the charts or sell if they think it's overhyped. Artists earn fees on every trade automatically. When Brian Armstrong's favorite song got leaked, over $300k of trading volume hit the platform, sending it to the #1 spot and earning the artist over $2,000 in fees. Joey describes it as "Polymarket for music" or a "decentralized record label" where fans become the tastemakers instead of platforms and industry gatekeepers. He's trying to bridge crypto natives with music fans who have never used onchain products. If you can build something that serves both the speculators and deep music fans who want discovery tools, you solve the liquidity problem that kills most niche platforms.
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