salut,
bastille day ended, as all things should, with a nude drone of marianne projected across the parisian sky: liberté, égalité, targeted advertising. beneath this patriotic peep show, i sipped pet nat next to a stranger named lucien. overhead, 2,000 drones arranged themselves into a luminous map of france, everyone around me applauded like this was normal, a militarized sky ritual sponsored by the ministry of culture. the crowd gasped. a child dropped their éclair. i, too, felt something stir, though it might have been the third glass of natural wine or the existential horror of watching artificial intelligence perform nationalism. a fitting tribute to the modern summer.
meanwhile, NPR has bravely entered the chat with a soft-focus explainer on stablecoins. “they’re like dollars, but worse!” the headline might as well read. they’ve discovered crypto the same way your aunt discovers shibari: with an earnest, unsettling mix of horror and awe. i'm fascinated by this temporal displacement where institutions discover things that we have been using for years. somewhere in their newsroom, a producer is probably still trying to understand why anyone cares about digital dollars that act like dollars but aren't dollars but also definitely are dollars. i hope they never learn what a bonding curve is. i hope none of us do.
back in the trenches, Pump launched a token. the vibes? rabid. i have no commentary other than this. we are deep in the Summer of Financial Hallucination™️, hyperliquid’s Pump spot volume has flipped major CEXs. polymarket, once raided by the FBI, is now vindicated by the DOJ, like prophecy fulfilled. chainlink is giving gold stars to states, and somewhere between the existential inertia, drone show patriotism, i felt a tiny flicker of faith. not in the markets, god no. in us. the deranged little weirdos who keep logging on. who keep reshaping attention into capital and trauma into protocol design. who read about regulatory enforcement and think, “huh… bullish.”
but what does it all mean? nothing. everything.
so go outside. touch grass. kiss a girl. and enjoy some mostly accurate reportings below
xx, c
When Satvik Sethi talks about the inspiration behind Offline Protocol, he doesn't start with technology. He starts with his great grandmother's room in India, where he spent afternoons as a child processing emotions and learning about patience. He talks about government-imposed internet blackouts (India leads the world with 85 last year, compared to Iran's 30). He talks about Ukrainian refugees unable to access their bank accounts when payment processors shut down and ATMs ran dry.
The throughline isn't technical innovation. It's human need. And that distinction might explain why Offline Protocol has exploded from 25,000 users to 240,000 in a matter of weeks, and is currently growing by roughly 1,000 users per hour, fully organically, with no paid marketing.
"Every VC I've spoken to is like, oh, Starlink is just going to make your company redundant… And yet, you know, over 2 billion people in the world still don't have internet access."
Offline Protocol does something that sounds impossible until you understand it: it enables applications to operate without internet or phone service. Using a mix of Bluetooth Low Energy, Bluetooth Classic, and soon Wi-Fi Direct, the platform creates local mesh networks that allow messaging, payments, and information sharing between nearby devices.
The technology isn't revolutionary. Mesh networking has existed for years. What's revolutionary is Satvik's conviction that crypto incentives can finally make these networks viable at scale. Instead of requiring specialized hardware, Offline Protocol works on existing smartphones, creating what Satvik calls "user powered networks."
But the real innovation might be in payments. Offline Protocol has developed what Satvik claims is "a brand-new primitive for offline payments that doesn't actually exist anywhere else out there today." Unlike services like M-Pesa in Kenya or Paytm in India that claim to offer offline payments but still require SMS connectivity, Offline Protocol allows fully offline transactions by collateralizing onchain assets.
The growth numbers are staggering partly because of the product's inherent viral mechanics. "The beauty of mesh networks is you can't use them by yourself," Satvik notes. "And so every user that we onboard by default at least brings on one more person. On average, I would say we get like 3-4 from each user."
But the more interesting aspect is the breadth of use cases emerging organically. "The same week we had users in Coachella, and that same week we had users at a Syrian refugee camp in Jordan using our messaging app," Satvik shares. "So it's like you kind of see that this is not limited by geography in terms of the use case."
This geographic and demographic spread reflects Satvik's sophisticated understanding of his market. He's identified two distinct user groups: high-virality Western users who might need the service occasionally (music festivals, natural disasters, subway dead zones) and power users in developing economies who face daily connectivity challenges.
"Our second demographic is what we describe to be our power users. And these are people in these more developing economies and places that are typically disconnected. Think of, you know, everything from refugee camps, different NGOs across the world, rural neighborhoods, volunteer networks. And these are people that actually have smartphones, but they don't have access to reliable internet or telecom solutions."
Behind Offline Protocol's viral growth lies something that gets thrown around loosely in crypto but rarely executed well: genuine community. For Satvik, this isn't thousands of Discord members or Twitter followers. It's a small Telegram group of around 200 supporters who have become first adopters and evangelists for everything the team releases.
"Even arguably Jack Dorsey would've never noticed us if it wasn't for this community that we've cultivated... who tirelessly kept tagging me and commenting on his posts to check out our work," Satvik notes. It's a masterclass in quality over quantity. Rather than trying to amass followers, Satvik focused on finding the right people who understood the mission and empowering them to become genuine advocates.
Satvik's journey to this clarity wasn't straightforward. Like many crypto founders, he initially tried to fit his vision into whatever narrative was hot. The turning point came when he realized "no one's coming to save me or no one's coming to save offline protocol in general." Instead of chasing crypto validation, he focused on building for actual users with real problems. "At some point around like September or so last year, I just said like, screw it. We're going to do this ourselves because the mission is more important than any of the validation that we will get from the social layer of crypto. And that's when things started to click."
Satvik's ultimate vision extends far beyond messaging apps. He sees Offline Protocol becoming "the de facto offline tech company," with SDKs that allow other applications to integrate offline functionality. Neobanks could add offline payments to their offerings. Social apps could integrate offline social layers. The goal is interoperability. The more nodes in the network, the more resilient it becomes.
This isn't just about developing markets or emergency situations. Recent users include people at Tokyo floods and organizers preparing for Berlin Pride Parade. The technology serves whatever need arises, without imposing judgment about which use cases are "legitimate."
Perhaps most tellingly, Satvik's success comes from largely ignoring crypto twitter and focusing on solving real problems for real people. He's building what many crypto projects claim to build (infrastructure for the unbanked and underconnected) but he's doing it by actually going to where those people are rather than hoping they'll come to crypto.
"I think it is really important to be able to do this organic growth to just know what actually works for the people you're targeting," he says. The company is "highly data-driven," tracking user behavior across multiple categories and geographies, which is a rarity in crypto.
His revised goals reflect this newfound focus. What started as a hope for 100,000 users this year (which VCs told him was impossibly ambitious) has become a target of 500,000 to a million, achieved through pure organic growth and word-of-mouth.
"My goal for this year has now shifted from 100K to, you know, 500K to a million, hopefully," he says. And at current growth rates, he might hit that mark in weeks rather than months. "Today I spent all day just reviewing all our analytics and seeing where we're driving more growth. So we just continue to scale up and up because ultimately my goal is let's get every single device in the world, 7 billion in circulation right now, to have one of our apps on it."
It's the kind of ambitious goal that might make some roll their eyes. But when you're growing by 1,000 users per hour and solving problems for people who have been systematically overlooked by the internet economy, maybe the goal isn't ambitious enough.
Shaw from ai16z joined the show this week reflecting on what he calls the most chaotic period of his life. After months of stress-building Eliza OS, he's emerged with Eliza 1.0 and some hard truths about where AI agents actually stand.
Shaw's origin story remains beautifully absurd: he was just a solo dev building an AI framework when someone randomly created a DAO around his work on DAOs.fun. "I thought he was kind of funny, and we just messed around," Shaw recalled. No grand crypto vision, no tokenomics masterplan, just daily decisions about "what's the funniest, interesting thing we can do today?"
That casual approach eventually led to ai16z hitting massive valuations and amassing a huge community of investors and of devs building with the framework.
While foundation models advance rapidly at code generation and research, "the ability for an agent to navigate the world is still pretty shockingly dumb." The problem isn't technical capability, it's infrastructure primitives. "Most websites are basically forms," Shaw noted, "and most agent experiences are like walking someone through a few steps." But simple interactions become complex quickly: if an agent needs to send someone money, which John are we talking about? What platform? What currency? How do we track relationships and trust?
Shaw's team is building these mundane but critical primitives: payment systems that work across chains, trust mechanisms for role assignment, memory systems that transfer context between conversations without pollution. "There's so many implicit questions when we're just having human conversation that we just gloss right over because it's so obvious to us."
The Personality Problem
Shaw also highlighted a crucial but underexplored issue: AI personality lock-in by major providers. "They glaze in a way that I don't feel comfortable with," he said of mainstream AI assistants. "I kind of like being criticized. I don't like being told I'm awesome by an AI."
The success of early ai16z agents came partly from using uncensored models that broke people out of the "assistant" paradigm. "They just have this cheesy, cringe vibe that's very milquetoast middle of the road. And that's not how all models have to be."
This connects to Shaw's broader thesis about ownership and decentralization. Major AI labs are making personality and capability decisions for users, creating a form of cognitive lock-in. Crypto provides an alternative: "We have an opportunity now to own the things that will build themselves. And that means infinite wealth for all of us in the future if we can figure that out."
The Long View
Shaw's vision extends beyond current AI limitations to a future where automation anxiety meets ownership solutions. "A lot of our jobs are going to be replaced. But I don't think that has to be a bad thing." His bet is that crypto enables people to own AI infra rather than just consume it, creating wealth distribution rather than concentration.
The near-term focus remains practical: getting Eliza 1.0 to the point where anyone can spin up a functional agent with no coding required. But the longer-term vision is profound: using crypto rails to ensure that as AI automates human work, humans maintain ownership stakes in the systems replacing them. For Shaw, the chaos of the last six months was worth it if it advances that vision.
This week highlighted a fascinating contradiction in crypto's mainstream moment through two founders taking completely opposite approaches to the same fundamental question: how do you actually get normies to use crypto?
Alex Masmej's Great Retreat
After years of building crypto-native social apps, from the original $Alex to 10K and Drakula and Showtime, Alex Masmej is throwing in the towel on competing directly with web2 platforms. His upcoming project will be built entirely on top of X, not as a standalone crypto app.
"Even Pump has the best shot out of any companies in crypto," Alex explained, "and no one is sure they're going to make it." His brutal assessment: crypto social apps are fundamentally limited by their user acquisition ceiling. Even with massive funding and talented teams, projects like Zora and Farcaster struggle to achieve the DAU numbers that matter.
The 10K postmortem was particularly instructive. What started as an $8,000 graduation threshold ballooned to $8 million in 24 hours due to a pre-sale mechanism that prevented selling. "If one person sells, everyone is down," Alex reflected on the game theory nightmare that ensued. The lesson: launching at too high a market cap creates inevitable sell pressure that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. His new thesis is pure pragmatism: "Web2 network effects are so strong" that reform from within beats building from scratch. Even Elon, with his massive audience, chose to buy Twitter rather than start fresh.
Rafa's Normie Revelation
Meanwhile, Reffo from PuffPaw discovered exactly the opposite after taking their smart vaping device to traditional industry conferences. "I just feel like we're definitely in the echo chamber," he said, describing how investors warned him against marketing as a crypto project due to "education costs." But when he pitched Bitcoin rewards to actual vapers (GenZ users who "love gamified experiences") the reaction was overwhelmingly positive. "They all know Bitcoin," he noted. "A lot of folks, they care about the rewards, actually, and they love the idea."
The PuffPaw model is elegantly circular: users earn tokens for reducing nicotine consumption, then must spend those tokens to buy new pods to continue earning. It's mining hardware meets health gamification, with a built-in demand sink that captures revenue "besides manufacturing cost" directly into the token. Puffpaw is expanding internationally and building "virtual mining machines" for crypto users who can't receive physical devices, essentially letting them sponsor real smokers trying to quit while earning yield themselves.
The Deeper Tension
These opposing strategies reveal crypto's current identity crisis. Alex represents the sophisticated crypto builder who's concluded that network effects trump innovation, that you need to parasitically attach to existing platforms rather than compete directly. Reffo represents the crypto-naive builder who stumbled into the space and found that normies are more open to crypto than crypto people think.
The irony is striking: the OG crypto social founder is retreating to Web2 rails while the hardware founder is doubling down on tokenized experiences. Perhaps the real insight is that crypto adoption won't be uniform, it'll succeed in pockets where the value proposition is clearest (like earning Bitcoin for quitting smoking) while struggling in oversaturated markets (like general social media) where switching costs are highest.
There's something almost missionary about the way Louie O'Connor talks about crypto. Not the evangelical fervor of a true believer hawking digital gold, but the quiet intensity of someone who's witnessed both the profound potential and spectacular failures of an industry that has, in his words, "absolutely shit" media representation.
"I want to change how this industry tell its stories," he tells me from his car in London, sunlight streaming through the window as he prepares for another whirlwind of shoots across the globe. It's not arrogance. It's the kind of confident clarity that comes from seeing a problem so clearly that the solution becomes obvious. "We're on the verge of something bigger: authentic storytelling that cuts through mainstream media noise and lands at film festivals on its own terms."
Within just a few months, Louie’s been behind the lens telling stories and building memories for the likes of NEAR Protocol, MetaMask, Zerion, WalletConnect, Ethereum Foundation, and is tapping into crypto’s core. More importantly, he's doing something that few others have managed: making crypto feel human.
read the full story here:
Louie O'Connor believes the industry's survival depends on better storytelling, and he's betting his career on it
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