cheerio,
i hope everyone has been well and enjoying my silence as i enjooyed a little no screen euro time. i'm now rested, rejuvenated, and entering q3 armed with nothing but a delusional degree of conviction, a glass of chilled white spanish wine, and my trusty babushka.
68
xx c
Internet Explorers got a cute little rebrand and now has its own twitter so make sure to give us a follow! Trump tapped absolute chad JD Vance as his VP, which reignited main character syndrome from a ton of VCs. Etherscan launched blockscan, a simplified and more consumer-friendly version of their flagship product, and Dora announced their $5.5M raise. TON Blockchain will release a new L2 based on polygon tech. The recent ZKsync 3.0 upgrade introduced Elastic Chain, an interconnected ecosystem of L2 networks designed to overcome liquidity fragmentation. Songcamp launched Audiato, a hub for music on Base.
Orb added support for tips. You can now discover and mint Paragraph articles directly on Interface. Stripe will roll out support for USDC on Base. TITLES announced its latest protocol version, optimized for creator earnings on mints and attribution of sampled media and AI models. The Skill Issue team released a product that lets users deposit SOL and vote on which token should receive the entire pool, with the highest-voted token being allocated once a 25 SOL or 24hr threshold is reached. This aims to address the attention and liquidity dispersion issue in the market. Notcoin announced a Telegram gaming accelerator. Raydium flipped Uniswap in weekly fees.
we are starting to fire up the engines over here - if you've been following along with @seedclubhq's livestream internet explorers, you should give our new account a follow
if you're been looking for the right time to tune in, now is actually a great time
more soon:tm:
psychology behind liking the best kind of brainrot
weirdcore content disrupter png sticker maxxing aesthetics. signs of you are blessed by the internet.
if you're been looking for the right time to tune in, now is actually a great time
more soon:tm:
psychology behind liking the best kind of brainrot weirdcore content disrupter png sticker maxxing aesthetics. signs of you are blessed by the internet.
Internet Explorers is a weekly rundown live stream where extremely online individuals broadly explore (romanticize, even) new consumer internet experiences.
Live & online Fridays at 10am PT / 1pm ET.
Product Spotlights: Zora Mobile, PartyDAO, Grass, PER.MA
I’ve been recklessly minting and collecting on the new Zora mobile app (beta) and it’s lowkey amazing. You can buy mints with apple pay, double tap to mint, and scroll a feed of creative content as comfortably as you scroll instagram. The current mobile experience is so well done that there are really no UX or wallet barriers to anybody using the product, but there is still a huge cognitive barrier. We're interested to see what the onboarding arc will look like for the next influx of users into onchain social. How do you convince a creator or avid social media user with no prior experience with crypto to care enough to pay $3 to collect something? There's also a ton of room to add in some lower intent actions that could be beneficial to have alongside collecting (likes, tipping, mint comments, profile curation, etc.) Excited to see where the zora team brings this app next.
The Party team introduced a new creator tool aimed at enhancing onchain media by incorporating liquid secondary markets and perpetual transaction fee capture for creators. Each mint is priced at 0.00005556 ETH with a supply of 10,000 tokens, split into 4,500 for sale, 4,500 for a liquidity pool, and 1,000 for the creator. Once the collection sells out, a liquidity pool is set up on Uniswap, and creators receive a 1% fee on all subsequent transactions. Although marketed as a creator tool, its design suggests it may be more effective as a memecoin launchpad. The entire onchain creator ecosystem hinges on collectors wanting to collect, and liquid secondary markets makes the collecting game way more fun. More collecting, more money for creators, more creating, flywheel activated.
Grass is a cool new product that lets users earn tokens by sharing their unused internet bandwidth for website scraping, which contributes to building AI training datasets. Users can participate by installing a browser extension, and Grass recently released a dataset of 600M Reddit posts + comments collected from 2M nodes worldwide. The main challenge is determining the data's unit value and ensuring it's enough incentive for continuous data capture, but combining this model with games and consumer products might enhance its appeal. All in all, DePIN is a continuously growing category and tokenized marketplaces like these are expected to be highly disruptive, touching everything from health data, to mapping data, to noise pollution data, to car data.
PER.MA is the first product from the creators of the ERC6551 standard, which basically lets NFTs function as onchain agents. It's a photo exchange network inspired by the 1960-70s Fluxus movement, aiming to connect analog film photography with digital ownership. Users receive a roll of film (a 6551 NFT) to take photos, and the photos you take are all minted as NFTs contained within the account of the roll. Each photo you take also gets sent to 3 other random people, and 1 goes to the “international memory bank” which is a collectively owned archive of all photos on the network. It's a fun experiment and they’re officially going live in a few weeks at FWB Fest. If you want to take it for a spin today you can sign up with the code YOLO.
The Hot Start Problem
Mason's latest article "The Hot Start Problem" was interesting -- he talks about how tokens effectively overcome the cold start problem by generating initial activity, but they create a short window to achieve organic traction and PMF before incentives run out, leading to project stagnation.
Apps launching with tokens or points systems leverage financial incentives to bootstrap new networks but face the hot start problem which presents its own tradeoffs, such as obfuscating organic traction (aka PMF) , pre-maturely spending the proverbial bullets from the growth gun, and adding friction for accomplishing operational tasks because of the challenges of DAO governance.
Despite these issues, the hot start approach is advantageous in highly competitive markets with known demand (red ocean markets) and networks requiring passive supply-side participation. In red ocean markets, tokens help new entrants compete against established players by quickly growing liquidity (ex: GMX and dYdX). In passive networks, tokens bootstrap activities like staking and liquidity provision more easily.
The choice between cold start (struggling for initial usage) and hot start (uncertain long-term engagement) depends on context, but Mason prefers the hot start for consumer products to combat indifference and irrelevance. To mitigate downsides, he advises apps and marketplaces that launch token incentives for active jobs to be done – usage, gameplay, gig work, services, etc – to take extra steps to ensure that token rewards are going towards organic usage and driving important metrics like engagement and retention.
Watch the full episode:
simple, they found the world’s most competent sniper who can intentionally graze an ear with a gun known to have accuracy issues in wind but also willing to die to to boost the odds of a candidate who was already gonna win and was also fine with possibly getting shot in the head
huge day for dudes that met jd once at a tech happy hour and now get to write threads about it for the next four years
this conference feels like the set for a new black mirror episode
Once you realize that blockchains are the end game for coordinating trust in digital environments, you understand why a blockchain-powered consumer internet is inevitable
don't underestimate how valuable a network with 1,000 true fans and 10,000 true speculators can be
he was a warpcast thinkboi, she was a zora enjoooyer they met on an unlonely stream.
We just dropped a new episode of Liquid Culture with @natashaghoskins 
We riff on startups, what it means to be a crypto person, what @BoysClubWorld really is + more
Nat & I both had a lot of fun hosting this interview so def check out the recording below
We riff on startups, what it means to be a crypto person, what @BoysClubWorld really is + more
Nat & I both had a lot of fun hosting this interview so def check out the recording below
A critically acclaimed weekly consumer crypto roundup @seedclub im looking into the hot start problem, block explorers adding context, ton ecosystem, pump kingmaking, Zora mobile, depin, and a bunch of new releases https://paragraph.xyz/@seedclubhq/seedclub-network-news-july-16-2024
the feed feels stale these past 2 weeks with attention on X for trump/biden, lack of anything exciting in crypto (sorry, prove me wrong), ethCC, and general summer offlineness. so plz reply with a hot take or an exciting project or something anything that will give @randomerror.eth’s back a break from carrying us all
seed club email got you today. Lots going on. https://paragraph.xyz/@seedclubhq/seedclub-network-news-july-16-2024
yeah, this @seedclub is consistently good along with @joshcrnls's newsletter. what in here excites you most?
TITLES Protocol V2 💫 - Creator Rewards - Onchain attribution for sampled ai models and remixed media
That new PartyDAO stuff is cool too. Still wrapping my head around it or how I might use it.
and lastly The Hot Start Problem! https://www.masonnystrom.com/p/the-hot-start-problem
My hot take in MSC channel (maybe CW but important nonetheless…) https://warpcast.com/inceptionally/0xe9451192
definitely feels quieter -- but I agree it's just a combo of things. CT is quieter as well except for politics. And I've got no hot takes to share at this time.
@mazmhussain has been delivering too
For Farcaster to be successful there needs to be way more compelling non-crypto content on here
i could not agree more given i have vast interests we ( @nonlinear.eth and i briefly talk about this on a podcast with @dwr.eth re: high quality content that we'll publish later today) not sure what others think
Completely agree with both of you! I've been in crypto long enough to get tired of talking only about crypto, even though I still want to. Our 'crypto community' is much more than just airdrops, new hot token hunting, or new consumer crypto. Let's create great content that people from all markets want to share here. Maybe we should organize a content competition 😅
yep and many of the active dynamics discourage that / encourage churn
say more?
ya we all feel this /stolenfromtwitte is to get more content into the FC ecosystem it starts with jokes and memes but slowly also will bring high qual content
Hard agree https://warpcast.com/alec.eth/0x41953863
actually disagree here there is a very strong culture here, one of optimistic ethereum developers and believers whether or not that's popular culture is a different point that i may not disagree on :) also casting about a status event is inherently low status you get kicked out of high status groups for that
Maybe long-term but there is an entire internet for that already. I enjoy the nook in some of these channels to get into the weeds.
https://warpcast.com/maurelian.eth/0x785a37fc
Summer of Hypershipping by @nonlinear.eth and Co
This. There are so many cool things being built! We’ve made a simple way for founders to increase users by using our storytelling formula to help share WHY people outside of this echo chamber should care about what they’re building Me and @alexhutchi are going to run a pilot with 5-10 founders soon https://warpcast.com/raven50mm/0x37c3c1ae
RAN FOR FARCASTER PRESIDENT we should make a fake election on Farcaster for most entertaining accounts. Maybe a @bracketgame for the best content creators on Farcaster.
If you build your core product on the back of service provider startups that haven't been battle-tested or proven themselves, you shouldn't complain when those startups fail and make your product function poorly And it's your job as a founder and the brand behind the product to communicate throughout its lifecycle
yup, it was 2 months too late. but i'm glad it came at last.
Wait, why? I would prefer the radio silence over throwing your SaaS providers under the bus
Soooo what about building on top of Farcaster?
What whitelabel products are built on Farcaster? Platform risk is a continuum