guten morgen,
i ended up third place on the Farcaster leaderboard this week, which is, by all diagnostic standards, a symptom of mental illness. for those not familiar, Farcaster is where you go when Twitter isn’t crypto enough. it’s social media with integrated wallets, portable social graphs, embedded mini apps, and an undercurrent of cult energy. if you're wondering how i got there, i was posting with the fevered intensity of a Victorian child dying of artistic consumption, and the algorithm rewarded me with internet points that felt both deeply important and completely meaningless.
congrats to Henri, who took #1 after selling his company to Stripe. a righteous ascent. you deserve rest. you have now entered the soul-siphoning ritual that is the FC leaderboard.
shaw came in 2nd. his origin story involves being banned from twitter, which in this economy counts as both credibility and character arc. hes now manic posting like his waifu depends on it. (she does.) I fear for him.
and me? i held the #3 spot. not out of ego, but obligation. i do not post to be understood. i post to be witnessed, misinterpreted, and filtered from layers of horny semantic drift.
competitive casting is deeply edifying practice, but it takes its toll. maintaining one's place is a deeply corrosive art, a game of stamina, sacrifice, and spiritual erosion. my fingertips are calloused. my wrist hums with a psychosomatic curse. my screen time is down to a modest 22.5 hours a day. my friends have stopped texting. my mom says she barely recognizes me anymore.
still, I endure.
for the leaderboard. for the graph. for the culture.
for the few brave women who look at a crypto social network and think: i can fix him,
and by him i mean the protocol.
anyway, enjoy some mostly accurate reportings below
xx, c
As you may have noticed, Seed Club's Internet Explorers went dark a couple of weeks ago. After nearly two years of weekly streams, we decided it was time to start something new. It's not time for internet explorers, it's 11AM with Seed Club.
tune in at seedclubhq everyday at 11am est and catch the latest on the business of crypto, hosted by Jess & Josh
Catch the latest episode here.
this week on 11am, our inaugural guests delivered the kind of market commentary that makes you genuinely excited about building the future, even if it looks nothing like what we expected.
Here's a run down of some of the most salient news this week.
Twitter decided to nuke a ton of accounts without explanation, sending degens like Shaw scrambling to farcaster like refugees fleeing a digital dictatorship. Jess speculates that everyone was scraping twitter data to build trading bots, and elon's $50k/month api pricing forced creative workarounds that apparently crossed some invisible line. Dan Romero's observation about "decentralization not mattering until it matters" suddenly feels prophetic, when your livelihood depends on a centralized platform's whims, alternatives like farcaster stop being ideological luxuries and become practical necessities.
Apix, our gaming oracle, dropped the spicy truth that there are successful crypto games making $50 million annually but never penetrate CT because they're too busy being profitable instead of posting banger threads. The real problem isn't lack of success stories, it's that even winners remain invisible to crypto natives because they're built by web2 focused studios in asia who don't care about our discourse. This creates a fascinating blind spot where the crypto gaming category appears dead to insiders while quietly thriving in markets we don't monitor. Meanwhile, his stealth trading card game "project o" promises to capture that pokemon pocket dopamine hit that generated $600 million by exploiting humanity's pathological need to open digital packs. But he's not just building another collectible card game, he's threading the needle between "left curve" fully onchain degen games and "right curve" mass market games with abstracted crypto, avoiding the deadly "mid curve" trap of building normal games that only market to CT's tiny audience of yield farmers who fundamentally don't care about gameplay.
The man understands something profound: most crypto is already a game. Airdrop farming, yield chasing, token speculation, they're all elaborate point scoring systems with financial rewards. The question isn't whether to gamify finance, it's whether to acknowledge that finance is already gamified and build better games around it. His observation that indie crypto gaming teams (onchain heroes, fishing frenzy, kamagotchi, etc.) emerging from the trenches with clear scaling visions feel more exciting than bloated studios reveals the real opportunity. These small teams understand crypto native behavior because they lived it, unlike massive studios spending $500M and hiring 10,000 employees to build games for an audience they've never met. When you have more employees than daily active users, you've fundamentally misunderstood the assignment. The future belongs to builders who recognize that crypto's killer feature isn't just enabling new business models, it's creating new ways for players to have skin in the game that goes beyond entertainment into actual economic participation.
Kolten from aave/avara delivered the most sobering take: sustainable growth actually matters. Aave quietly became the biggest defi protocol (surpassing even lido) by focusing on boring things like revenue generation and user education. This isn't just about being conservative, it's about recognizing that unsustainable growth strategies have created a graveyard of protocols that burned through treasuries chasing mercenary capital. His growth marketing philosophy centers on education over hype because he's witnessed the real problem: people lose money not from hacks but from fundamental misunderstanding of what they're buying. When users don't grasp the risks they're taking, they think they're getting x result and end up with y, losing half their money in the process. This creates a vicious cycle where bad experiences drive people away from defi entirely.
His vision of the "magic button" app, literally just a deposit button that gives you great yield, feels obvious once stated but represents a massive philosophical shift. The family wallet doubles down on this future: clean interactions and specialized apps that solve specific problems rather than general purpose tools that overwhelm normies with complexity they neither want nor need. We're apparently one simplified ui away from bringing defi superpowers to normal people, which is both wildly ambitious and completely achievable given how much better crypto rails actually are than legacy finance. The challenge isn't technical, it's packaging value propositions without forcing users to understand fractional reserve banking mechanics to use a simple savings account.
But kolten's most interesting insight was about the competitive landscape shift. Defi isn't just competing with other protocols anymore, it's competing with robinhood, paypal, and traditional fintech for the same "where should i put my money" decision. This means the target user isn't a crypto native who understands yield farming, it's someone comparing a 5% apy crypto savings app against their bank's 0.5% savings account. The winner won't be whoever builds the most sophisticated protocol, it'll be whoever makes the superior experience so obvious that adoption happens unconsciously.
Peter Pan from 1kx came on to deliver market insights that made perfect sense of the current chaos. His "bonnie blue" warning about crypto vcs prioritizing equity value over tokens isn't doom and gloom, it's just the natural evolution of a maturing industry where investors want sustainable returns. The uncomfortable reality: many major protocols are fighting this battle right now, with vcs having already sold their tokens and now pushing for equity value accrual through fee switches that benefit centralized companies, not token holders. His infrastructure investment thesis reveals the deeper game, we've barely scratched 1% of crypto's application design space, so he's betting on teams that either excel at onboarding non crypto builders (especially in ip/entertainment/royalties) or bootstrap their own killer consumer apps rather than hoping someone else builds on their chain. His "recession pop crypto" thesis perfectly captures the moment: the global economy being completely cooked has created perfect conditions for both brain rot escapism and creative money making opportunities. Crypto's superpower isn't just financial transactions, it's offering people multiple ways to make small amounts of money doing things they actually enjoy, recreating that "first dollar made online" lightning in a bottle feeling that hooked an entire generation of internet natives. The magic isn't in the tech, it's in finally answering the question "how do you want to make money?" with more options than just your day job.
The overarching theme was crypto's awkward adolescence, that weird phase where ideological purity meets actual business realities and somehow both win. News about Tron allegedly going public and stripe making acquisitions aren't signs of sellout culture, they're proof the technology works well enough that serious money wants in. We're witnessing the industry mature beyond the "normies will ruin everything" paranoia toward "normies will make everything better because they bring scale." The split between ephemeral meme entertainment and boring compounding infra isn't a tension to resolve, it's the natural state of a healthy ecosystem where different products serve different human needs. Some people want to gamble on dog coins, others want sustainable yield on their savings, and the beautiful thing is crypto can serve both without forcing anyone to choose sides. The real winners will be whoever stops trying to convert the masses to crypto ideology and instead just builds things so obviously better that adoption happens unconsciously, like how nobody thinks of venmo as "fintech disruption", it's just how you pay your friends.
Stripe acquired bought Privy. Yes, Stripe. The one already scaffolding most of the internet’s payments infrastructure. This is not an acqui-hire. It is Stripe making a full-stack play to own crypto-native commerce. Earlier this year, they spent $1.1B on Bridge to handle stablecoin flows. Now they have absorbed Privy, the wallet infra powering 75M accounts across platforms like Farcaster, Hyperliquid, dYdX, and OpenSea.
Privy quietly solved the two UX nightmares of crypto: onboarding and asset movement. No seed phrases. No browser extensions. No ritual humiliation. Just clean, embedded flows that spin up self-custodial wallets with an email.
Put Bridge and Privy together and you get a clean payment loop. A user signs in. Privy creates the wallet behind the scenes. Stripe handles fiat onramp, stablecoin conversion, KYC, fraud tooling, payments, and eventually offramps. Funds land in Bridge accounts backed by USDC or USDB, usable in 101 countries. Transfers are gasless. Cards work out of the box. All of it lives inside the app. The user never has to touch an exchange or copy-paste a string of gibberish.
This is a milestone for consumer crypto. But also for basic sanity. If you've ever tried to explain wallets, gas fees, or seed phrases to a normal person and felt your soul disintegrate, this is a glimpse of what better could look like.
As founder Henri Stern put it, “the potential for crypto to change how users interact with the web has never been more apparent... We’re excited for what comes next.”
Stripe is not circling around crypto anymore. It is building into it. With Privy, it now owns a key layer of the stack. This isn’t just infrastructure. It is Stripe quietly wiring up the next chapter of internet commerce, all on crypto rails.
Open the app. Never leave.
Ponder (SC07) is now featured in the Farcaster miniapp store. They've passed 100,000 paid, onchain votes and clocking 2,000+ weekly active users. Not bad for a knowledge engine disguised as a poll app.
Think of it like Polymarket’s emotionally intelligent little brother. Less degenerate, more dignified. Built for Farcaster-native coordination instead of Twitter spectacle. If Polymarket is a market for truth, Ponder is an interface for collective intuition, a research tool that turns public sentiment into structured signal.
Brands, creators, and communities can drop a question straight into the feed and instantly incentivize answers. Responses are rewarded with tokens. Votes are paid. Context is composable. Reputation is portable. The implications for real-time research, feedback loops, and decentralized consensus are vast.
Prediction markets don’t have to be a big scary thing. The everyday person just wants to have fun with their online friends, and be right every now and then.
Thursday, June 26
Doors at 6:30PM
Public Records @233butler, Brooklyn
Free RSVP ↓
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crypto's killer feature is creating new ways for users to have skin in the game
full edition here https://paragraph.com/@seedclubhq/i-can-fix-him-the-protocol
loved reading this i love the way you write, definitely going to read more of your writings, lots to learn from you, queen
🩷🩷🩷🩷🩷
Hammer dear? 🔨 Come greet this nail by smashing it on the head. 💜Bx
critically. acclaimed. https://paragraph.com/@seedclubhq/i-can-fix-him-the-protocol
guten morgen https://paragraph.com/@seedclubhq/i-can-fix-him-the-protocol
I just want to break top 💯 😮💨
nice inclusion of the babusha baddie™️ pic at the end 😌 also great read
thank youuuuuu 🫶🏼🫶🏼🩷