grand risings to whom it may concern,,
the devil couldnt reach you so he sent you a special quiz via the seed club newsletter. today's edition brings you:
turns out the distance between salem 1692 and crypto in 2025 is exactly zero psychological kilometers. both involve communities of true believers who've convinced themselves they possess secret knowledge, both feature elaborate conspiracy theories about shadowy cabals manipulating markets, and both are the same cultural modality, just with different user interfaces.
the parallels are so precise it's almost mesmerizing. medieval witch trials gave us scapegoating, moral panic, and mass hysteria over invisible forces controlling the economy. crypto gives us... scapegoating, moral panic, and mass hysteria over invisible forces controlling the economy. the main difference is that witches were accused of consorting with demons for supernatural power, while crypto influencers consort with low float high fdv pump and dumps for the same result. at least the demons were honest about their intentions.
what follows is a diagnostic tool for determining whether you're witnessing a 17th-century witch trial or just another wednesday on crypto twitter. its a mini app btw.
anyway..........................................
enjoy some mostly accurate reportings below
xx, c
My dear friend Reka went from treating sick animals to building the infrastructure for unlimited blockchain computation, and somehow along the way she's convinced half of crypto twitter that zero knowledge proofs are actually berries. It sounds unhinged, but stick with me, because if you've ever tried to understand zero knowledge technology, you know we desperately need someone to make it make sense. After spending three months interviewing 35+ teams and logging over 100 hours of conversations, she joined RiscZero to launch Boundless, a universal protocol that sits between existing chains, connecting compute providers and networks in ways that could finally make "my assets are on this chain vs that chain" irrelevant.
But here's where it gets delightfully weird: faced with making ZK proofs accessible to actual humans, Reka rebranded the entire field around fruit. "Berryfiable compute" started as wordplay but evolved into a full multimedia experience where her berry NFT launch saw 1.5M mints in 48 hours and accounted for 12% of Base's traffic. She's built a 9,000+ person community around berry memes and created a mythology where provers are farmers, requesters are chefs, and Boundless is the farmers market where computation gets bought and sold like produce. The metaphor actually works: just like you don't need to inspect every seed to know a berry is sweet, you don't need to re-run a computation to verify it happened correctly.
What surprised me most about Reka's journey is her perspective on crypto's maturity. "We don't need mass onboarding," she says. "We need to act like this is already a serious industry and push the boundaries of what's possible." Looking ahead, she sees a future where technology becomes "way smoother and more natural, both online and onchain," less siloed, more personalized, where the products that win feel both socially alive and deeply personal. It's the same idealistic drive from when she was a veterinarian in 2016, just with a lot more technical sophistication and a clear target.
Read the full story here:
Meet the former veterinarian turning crypto's most complex technology into something people actually want to use.
Coinbase just made the boldest bet in crypto UX history. Their wallet app, used by millions, is now the Base App, a full social network built on crypto rails. Instead of treating payments like a separate thing you do in a finance app, they're embedding earning directly into posting, chatting, and discovering content. Post something, people like it, you earn money. No creator fund applications, no minimum follower counts, just immediate value flowing to anyone creating anything worth supporting.
What's wild is how they're positioning this against the closed internet we've gotten used to. Your identity, your content, your social graph: you own it all and can take it anywhere. Built on open protocols like Farcaster for social, XMTP for messaging, and Zora for content ownership, it's the first major attempt at a truly portable social experience. The demo showing someone making a prediction market bet, splitting dinner costs, and earning yield on their money all within a group chat felt like finally seeing the "programmable money" vision actually work in practice.
"This week, I personally saw how excited new users get when they post for the first time and start earning right away," says Chintan Turakhia, Senior Director of Engineering for the Base app. "We designed the app to be seamless, so there's no switching tabs, downloading a new app, or signing up for a new account. It all just works directly in the feed and within messages." That seamless integration is the key differentiator. Instead of forcing users to context-switch between social media and financial apps, Base is betting that the future is one unified experience where money flows as naturally as likes and comments.
The timing feels right. We're in this weird moment where everyone knows the current creator economy is broken: you need massive followings to make anything, platforms can nuke your account overnight, and most value flows to the platforms, not creators. Base App is betting that crypto's new infrastructure is mature enough to offer a real alternative. If they're right, this could be the iPhone moment for crypto UX. If not, it's an expensive experiment in social apps that most people aren't asking for.
Just as Base launches its everything-app with embedded earning, Farcaster fires back with Collectibles, turning any cast into a 1-of-1 NFT through 24-hour auctions that start at $1. The timing isn't coincidental. Both platforms are racing to solve the same fundamental problem: how do you make creators earn money from day one without needing massive followings or algorithmic favor? Base's approach is continuous micro-earnings through social engagement, while Farcaster is betting on auction-based collecting driven by emotional attachment rather than speculation.
What's fascinating is how different their philosophies are. Base wants to make earning invisible and automatic: post something, people engage, money flows. Farcaster's Collectibles are deliberately high-friction: you have to actively choose to bid, compete in auctions, and pay meaningful amounts for posts that resonate with you personally. "For most bids, they will be for casts that are interesting/funny/meaningful to them. It will be personal. Not particularly rational," explains the Farcaster team. It's more like buying art than earning yield... emotional, vibe-based, with no expectation of future profit.
The real competition isn't between the platforms though, it's between different theories of human behavior. Does widespread adoption come from making money invisible (Base) or making it meaningful (Farcaster)? Base is optimizing for scale and frictionless participation, while Farcaster is optimizing for intentionality and genuine creator-fan relationships. Both are built on the same foundational insight that creators deserve to earn directly from their audiences, but they're taking completely opposite approaches to get there. The next few months will tell us which psychological framework actually drives sustainable creator economies.
Seven years ago, I was working at ConsenSys during those wild early days when Joe Lubin was building what felt like half the Ethereum ecosystem from a Brooklyn office. Back then, we were all believers talking about "Web3" to anyone who'd listen, but institutional adoption felt like a distant dream. Now that same crew is taking their ETH maximalism to Nasdaq. Andrew Keys, a ConsenSys alum, just announced The Ether Machine, a $1.5 billion public vehicle designed to be the "MicroStrategy of ETH," complete with staking, restaking, and DeFi yield strategies.
What's fascinating is seeing the Ethereum insider playbook scale to public markets. Keys is personally committing $645 million worth of ETH to launch, while Joe Lubin's SharpLink already holds 281K ETH as a public treasury vehicle. This isn't just about passive holding like MicroStrategy's Bitcoin bet, they're actively deploying ETH as productive capital, earning yield while evangelizing the network. It's the logical evolution of that early ConsenSys thesis that Ethereum would become the settlement layer for everything.
The timing couldn't be better. ETH just broke $3,700 and spot ETF inflows are finally heating up, but this rally isn't really about onchain activity. Gas usage is stable, DeFi volumes are still well below 2021 peaks. This is pure positioning by institutions who've decided Ethereum won the infrastructure war. Watching the people I used to grab coffee with in Bushwick now launching billion-dollar public vehicles feels surreal, but it's probably the clearest signal yet that Ethereum's institutional moment has arrived.
Subscribe to Seed Club
A Venture Capital Network | Make something people want to be a part of
Over 7.7k subscribers
9,697
