blessed morgen,
i have always possessed what some might generously call observational acuity, others less charitably refer to it as chronic online syndrome. yet i find so few opportunities to exhibit this condition productively, forced to store up my commentary for days at a time while trapped in the algorithmic grind. i do not always remember to commit my insights to newsletter drafts. yes, i could use twitter, but that platform has become less a repository for wit than a monument to humanity's collective unraveling. i grew weary of shouting into the void and fled to berlin to seek answers, where blockchain week unfolded last week.
in berlin, the conversations seemed to carry a bit more weight, less "crypto will save humanity" messianism, more "let's just make this shit work" pragmatism. ai-native minds emerging from universities like digital prophets who've never experienced the trauma of calling a bank, building infra for a world that might not survive to use it. the weekend's summer solstice delivered peak illumination, lingering for hours, changing shade and shape, as i sipped one too many campari spritzes while communing directly with my Maker.
naturally, this celestial perfection coincided with reality collapsing into performance art: jeff bezos shutting down venice for wedding theater as locals riot, manhattan electing its first mayor who met his wife on hinge, trump live-tweeting military strikes like he's reviewing a netflix limited series.
and despite it all. there’s something deeply moving about watching a group of extremely online humans finally build things that work. it’s like watching a child say their first word, except the child is a protocol and the word is “composability.”
if we're destined for collapse, at least we'll have pristine infrastructure and maybe a few onchain apps to document the finale.
anyway, enjoy some mostly accurate reportings below
xx, c
berlin feels like the dev capital of europe right now. here, there’s a proper web3 hub, and the density really shows. the whole week was community-organized chaos, which means no central coordinator and approximately 847 overlapping events, all competing for the same pool of sleep-deprived developers.
what struck me most was the shift in energy. the conversations were refreshingly substantive: privacy isn't just "zk for the sake of it" anymore, it's actual implementation thinking. depin is having its main character moment this cycle. everyone’s talking about building outside the bubble. ai-native devs are emerging from universities with no legacy stack assumptions, which is either terrifying or revolutionary depending on your relationship with technical debt.
the industry feels genuinely mature now. capital's tighter, people are acting accordingly, and there's less circus energy than previous years. bigger fintech is officially circling. the observation that "infra's still easy, product's still hard" came up repeatedly, confirming what our weekly conversations with builders keep showing us.
zora dropped creator coins last week, officially completing their transformation from "instagram but make it crypto" to "micro-economy enabler for every person with a camera phone." for context, zora lets creators tokenize their content (photos, videos, posts) and collectors can buy exposure.
the new creator coin mechanic is elegant: instead of buying an individual post, collectors can now buy the creator coin, creating this index representing all underlying assets by that creator. collectors can choose their level of exposure, whether it’s single viral post speculation or long-term creator belief. it solves the misalignment between prolific output and collector incentives.
tyson from zora explained it with the enthusiasm of someone who's spent months thinking about quote pairs, and honestly, it makes complete sense once you hear it. creators can post prolifically without destroying their collectors' bags, which seems obvious in hindsight but took us a little bit to get here.
meanwhile, yancey strickler is building Artist Corporation, tackling the same problem from the legal side. creative people, who increasingly drive the economy, are trapped in inadequate legal structures. llcs offer protection but cap growth potential, s-corps provide tax benefits while restricting collaborators, c-corps enable equity sharing but treat creativity like manufacturing widgets, and nonprofits... well, they're nonprofits. the a-corp would combine the best features: access to capital, flexible ownership sharing among collaborators, tax advantages, creative control, and benefits pooling, creating a legal structure that acknowledges creative work as actual business.
yancey & his team are working to pass state laws making this real, following established precedent for creating new corporate entities, essentially giving creative teams the same wealth-building tools that tech startups have enjoyed for decades while preserving artistic integrity.
both approaches recognize the same fundamental shift: creativity is becoming a defining force of the 21st century, but our economic and legal infrastructure treats it like a hobby.
alejandro from fungi, an ai agent that manages crypto yield optimization, understands that people don't actually want to chat with ai about their money: "users basically don't want to trade, lend, borrow money just chatting with a chatgpt interface. they prefer widgets." fungi has grown to over $400k in assets under management by focusing on the magic deposit button. you send them stablecoins, their agent automatically rotates your deposits across defi protocols to maximize returns while you sleep.
the trust dynamics are fascinating. early adopters are basically betting their money on a combination of smart contracts and founder reputation, since traditional due diligence doesn't really apply to ai agents managing your retirement fund.
meanwhile, 0xdesigner has spent thousands of hours in cursor, the ai coding assistant, discovering the current limits of vibe coding: "you can create some really basic things... but once you get to the point where it's real and serious and you're trying to get people to pay for it, it becomes a little bit of reach." he built a comic sans crash bandicoot spinoff game in 90 minutes that was genuinely fun, then spent a week trying to add crypto payments, only to watch the smart contract get drained within 45 minutes of launch.
the pattern is consistent across applications: ai excels at the happy path but struggles with edge cases, security, and scale. 0xDesigner uses prompting techniques like giving the ai different roles: "one role is actually doing the code and another role is just thinking and planning," which reduces errors significantly. but the gap between "i built something" and "i built a business" remains substantial.
buddy, which bills itself as "solana's end-to-end marketing stack designed to become a fully onchain affiliate network," is betting that we're witnessing the renaissance of affiliate marketing. founder aidan explained their thesis: traditional advertising attribution has been broken for years, conversion rates suck, and micro-influencers achieve better results than mega-creators, but there's no verifiable way to prove attribution in web2.
buddy offers tools for brands to enhance user acquisition and retention with instant payments, while equipping influencers and affiliates with transparent performance tracking and instant payouts. their success story with Star Atlas, a crypto gaming company, is compelling: "we 100x'd their revenue in the first 30 days that buddy was plugged in, and then in the first 12 months, they did about $22M in referred volume through the buddy protocol. And that's all instant attribution with $3M+ worth of payouts directly to the user."
aidan's insight about the future feels particularly relevant as ai floods every marketing funnel: "the only thing that ai can't change is taste. you cannot challenge a human being's taste. so if you're going to follow a person and they're going to recommend you a product, that is the highest likelihood that you're going to convert."
this connects to what lauris from multiplier is building, a platform where you can play games to win tokens while communities can boost their favorite tokens to get more attention. it's essentially gamified token marketing, and lauris described it as "this gamification layer for micro-capped liquidity stacks." they've gone from zero to eight figures in revenue turnover by letting communities use games to pump their tokens while players earn rewards.
both buddy and multiplier are betting that the future of distribution runs through human networks rather than algorithmic feeds, with crypto providing the rails for instant, global value transfer. this theme appeared again with shane from xmtp, the largest decentralized messaging network, who demonstrated how messaging and money converge into new application categories.
shane's banker agent is a good example of this convergence: "i was like, hey, banker, you know, can i send everyone in this group a dollar? and it responded back and said, sure, tap." eighteen people across different countries got paid instantly through a group chat, something impossible with traditional payment rails. xmtp powers wallet-to-wallet messaging for over two million identities across 60+ apps including coinbase wallet and farcaster.
stripe's acquisition of privy, the embedded wallet provider powering almost 100M accounts, continues reverberating through the ecosystem. jay from privy explained their success through obsessive customer focus. the pattern is clear… in uncertain times, the winners solve real problems for real people.
this played out across our convos with founders choosing calculated risks on nascent chains. pareen from monad, the high-performance L1 that boasts 10,000 tps and focuses on massive parallel execution, spoke about supporting founders on any chain rather than requiring exclusive commitment to monad. meanwhile, lauris from multiplier described sequencing validation stages from blast to abstract before "swinging for the big leagues" on more competitive chains.
the meta-lesson is that uncertainty creates opportunities for those willing to take calculated risks while everyone else waits for clarity. the founders thriving aren't the ones promising to replace the financial system, they're building better versions of things people already do, just with crypto rails that make them 10x more efficient.
you can feel the industry maturing, with tighter capital forcing more disciplined building. the energy has shifted from hype to intention, from circus to precision. people are building with focus now, and it's starting to show.
what struck me most this week, both in our daily conversations and walking through berlin blockchain week, was how normal everything felt. we're past the phase where every conversation requires explaining why blockchain matters and into the phase where people are just building useful things that happen to use crypto.
whether it's ai agents managing yield, creators tokenizing their work, affiliate networks running onchain, or sending money through group chats, the apps are starting to gain steam. the magic isn't in the revolutionary nature of the tech, it's in the friction removal from human coordination and value exchange.
we're witnessing crypto grow up from "world-changing revolution" into "really good infrastructure for specific use cases." the founders succeeding understand this shift and are building accordingly. they're not trying to orange-pill the masses, they're just making better products that happen to use crypto rails.
the industry still feels early and weird, but the energy has shifted toward real products and pragmatic experimentation. which is either the best news crypto's ever gotten, or the most boring, depending on whether you miss the days when everything was completely unhinged.
stay weird, stay building, and remember that the future belongs to people who ship products that people actually want to use.
contact me immediately
Over 7.7k subscribers
7,199
