Fast forward to today, after observing Phil Jean and the assortment of AI characters popping off over the past few weeks, I see similar parallels. Lil Miquela was the first of its kind but we are now entering the pump fun era of AI character creation. This has started from web2 first and now will make its way into crypto.

Now everybody will be able to create their own Lil Miquela. My entire feed is now filled with guides on how to launch your own AI character.

I tweeted about this a few days ago and got a few pings, so I want to explain further what I mean.

I used Higgsfield many months back to create an AI character and there still felt like lots of moments where I had to stitch things together. When I noticed this revamped the aha moment came instantly for me that we've finally reached the tipping point of easy creation.

Recently, Higgsfield launched its AI influencer product and now this will accelerate dramatically.

With Launchpoint, you get paid to post for brands a creator and companies are throwing big budgets at creators ($1m total budget) to see who can go viral, see below by Pump.fun, Higgsfield, and more.

The wild thing about most of these AI characters like Jean Phil, Derek Mercer and more is the mass public is falling for this. It's hard to distinguish what is real and what's not anymore.

The form factor is what accelerates the growth, people are creating IG accounts, X accounts and distributing these at scale. For reference Lil Miquela has 2.2m followers on IG and folks like Phil Jean have 236k followers in a few weeks. Someone will flip Lil Miquela over the next 6 months. The benefit of AI influencers is they can weave into real life scenarios that mainstream resonates with much more easily than something like a pepe or cat.

If you were around for the previous ai agents in crypto with Luna, Aixbt, and more it's pretty clear where things will go from here.

We are early signs of simply pairing memecoins with these AI influencer accounts and platforms like agents taking the tokenized launchpad approach directly. Solangeles also developed a launchpad for coins and paired with solangeles + an AI platform to generate images and videos.

I expect over the next few weeks to experimentation to accelerate rapidly here at the intersection of crypto and AI. Pairs around characters, aixbt 2.0, and much more.

My dark horse prediction is eventually pump fun will eventually add ai content creation tools and/or directly integrate AI models to increase the scope of what launchpad coins can look like.

If you are exploring ideas in this space would love to jam.

Crypto and smart contracts democratized access to markets and made value programmable on the internet. However, changing the rules of those markets often meant needing to fork it or building custom infrastructure. Hooks make that customization easier by extending existing trading infrastructure. With hooks, developers program what happens before, during, and after an onchain action.

Hooks turn the liquidity pool itself into the product.

The use cases for hooks span all the way from launchpad mechanisms for memes to permissioned equity pools with traditional institutions. This is the beginning of a great convergence.

So what are hooks?

You can think of Uniswap before hooks as a vending machine that does one thing, the same way, every time. A hook is like giving that vending machine an app store. It still dispenses trades but now anyone can install an app that changes how it prices things, who's allowed to buy, or what happens to the money that goes in.

A pool can attach one hook contract and Uniswap calls it at set moments in a swap before and after the trade. This way the extra rules run inside the same transaction and not in some external app.

Nightshades, a collab between Meebits and Clutch Markets, shows what this looks like in practice.

Nightshades is an onchain survivor trading game that uses Uniswap v4 hooks on protocol-owned faction/ETH pools so the AMM itself can pause swaps. It implements a decaying anti-snipe tax, dumps struck factions, and pumps survivors when a daily random Night transfers liquidity between four interchangeable NFT/token factions.

This proves that builders can turn market rules into product features using Uniswap’s trading infra as the foundation for entirely new apps and games. Notably, this all happened without Meebits needing to build an exchange from scratch.

From Experimentation to Scale

The secret sauce for adopting new protocol features is largely speculative experimentation. Nobody cared about the use cases of uni v4 hooks until people started making money with them. Lesson in there.

Although hooks launched on January 31st, 2025, the first hook category to reach meaningful scale was token issuance. Launchpad hooks, primarily from Pons, recently led to over one third of all v4 volume. Pons has done $12B volume in 2 months.

While launchpads are high-velocity, churn-heavy platforms, hooks are also expanding into stablecoin liquidity, lending, dynamic fees, MEV protection, vault automation, and permissioned markets.

Adoption remains concentrated in issuance: launchpad hooks, led by Pons, drove ~40%+ of all Uniswap v4 volume on Robinhood. For reference, swap-quality hooks account for only ~6% of v4 volume on Ethereum.

If you zoom out, the range of applications is broadening. I'm providing a brief category breakdown that shows where builders are experimenting in addition to launchpads.

There's always a catch with hooks. Remember that these live outside of Uniswap's audited protocol code, so the security of any given pool is only as strong as its specific hook's code. We already saw Bunni's LP optimization hook, get exploited for $8.4m.

Despite this, experimentation continues across a diversity of use cases, Standard Reserve, takes experimentation in another direction with an immutable onchain central bank. It issues capped native tokens and uses a v4 hook on its ETH pool to turn net ETH flow into automated issuance, gold reserves, buybacks, and permanently compounding protocol-owned liquidity.

On top of this, folks like vibechain, aeon framework, hookr fun, and more are leveraging hooks in interesting ways. Teams like Umia Finance use a v4 hook on its spot pool to allow it to track the average price of the pool over time (TWAP oracle) as a core piece of decision markets to prevent market manipulation.

From Hooks to New Market Structures

People do not actually care about hooks. They care about what hooks uniquely enable. This can be better markets, new behaviors, and financial experiences that previously required building custom infrastructure.

The opportunity is to stop treating hooks as optimizations but rather start viewing them as a new market design surface. A hook can now change the meaning of an action. Previously swapping meant swap “Asset A for Asset B”. Now it can also create something - like unlock access, earn a reward, fund a creator, build reputation, or trigger another market.

To pressure test a hook idea, ask yourself: what novel primitives become viable when core rules are enforced directly where trading happens?

Hooks open the door to promising areas of financial experimentation:

• Reputation markets 🪪 : Trading rights based on allowlists, attestations (zkTLS), ownership, reputation, or product activity.

  • example: onchain reputation like degenscore, social layer onchain reputation like Monad Cards, or offchain attributes like credit history.

• Adaptive Markets ⚡: Dynamic fees, cooldown periods, sniper taxes, loyalty discounts, and fees that change with market conditions.

  • example: wallets who've held X asset for 30D or hold Y value of the asset onchain, get discounted tiered pricing on swaps

• Reward Games 🎰 : Rebates, lottery tickets, collectibles, or tokens earned through swaps and product usage.

  • example: RNG baked into reward variance (megapot lottery tickets, collectibles, diff basket size of native tokens as reward)

• Creator-owned markets 🎨: Fees that automatically stream to creators, compound into liquidity, or fund recurring holder rewards instead of relying on manual airdrops.

  • example: 0.5% from swaps streams live to the dev wallet using Superfluid, 0.2% auto-compounds into LP, 0.1% pays Friday holder dividends. avoids vaulting and claiming.

• Liquidity Assurance Markets 🔒 : Rules requiring creators/devs to contribute liquidity, preventing early withdrawals, or gradually unlocking liquidity as milestones are reached.

  • example: conditional locks and milestone based unlocks (5m, 10m, 15m) on hard to game metrics

• Routing markets 🧭: Every transaction can divide value among LPs, creators, users, applications, treasuries, or other markets.

  • example: core protocol auto-allocating % to top 5 onchain apps by rolling 7D rev built on top, community alignment (team to team streams)

• Policy-native markets ⚖: Markets where participation, capital allocation, and economic rights are governed by transparent, programmable rules rather than discretionary human decisions.

  • example: human operators set the policy, autonomous agents execute it. agents compete for larger allocations based on realized performance, risk limits, and contribution to the market.

• Insurance 🛡: Premiums skimmed on the buy, policies minted in the same swap, and payouts if price, peg, or liquidity breaks

  • example: charge a few bps on a policy that pays out if price dumps X amount in a time period.

• Information-fair markets 🕵 : Market structures that reduce the advantage of private deal flow, insider allocations, and transaction-ordering games, allowing capital to compete on conviction rather than access. solve for fairness.

  • example: [REDACTED]

Crypto’s growing emphasis on transparency onchain and “can’t be evil” in mechanism design is an underrated tailwind for hooks. They embed market rules in code rather than relying on people to uphold them. In totality, this could shift market structure control from intermediaries to economic rules that are coded onchain.

The winning hooks will eventually become invisible. If there's one thing you should remember, smart contracts made value programmable. Hooks make the market around that value programmable. This is the structural shift.

Building something cool with hooks? Let's see it. Here are docs that share more on how to build with hooks.

Sources: Uniswap docs, Dune

Everyone has the wrong mental model for NFTs. NFTs are a standard just like ERC-20. ERC-721 is to PFPs as ERC-20 is to memecoins. If you’re bearish on NFTs you're probably just bearish on a singular expression of this standard (ie speculative PFPs) rather than the bigger idea behind digital property rights on the internet itself.

In midst of all the wreckage, I deeply believe in NFTs playing a fundamental role in the success of crypto. There are a myriad of catalysts brewing that will drive the sector to new heights as an NFT class.

Here is a non-comprehensive list of reasons NFTs will come back (beyond just excess speculative liquidity). Will expand on this in the piece:

• Containerization (Consumer RWA thesis) - putting existing offchain value into programmable NFTs: TCGs, collectibles, luxury goods, tickets, IP, etc.

• Gacha - RNG, pack ripping, mystery boxes, and instant liquidity make NFTs more experiential and liquid.

• AI - dramatically lowers the cost of creating dynamic media, games, characters, worlds, collections, and more. Now builders & communities can move much faster at a fraction of the cost.

• NFT primitives & innovation - ERC-6551, speculative experimentation across sectors x NFTs (memes, defi, etc). Overarching theme is unlocking ways to drive utility for these assets

• Better infra, distribution, and UX - embedded wallets, mobile first consumer apps, smoother onramps, and performant crypto rails

How we got here:

Last cycle, express speculative liquidity went directly into NFTs. There will be another bull cycle where wealth effects spillover into status symbols/flex assets. Now we have AI. AI destroys scarcity in creation, which makes scarcity in ownership more valuable than before.

NFT mints were ICOs re-invented and excelled as schelling points for capital and community formation. What also worked really well is also RNG in minting as one of the bigger unlocks, a decentralized lottery. Anyone around the world had an equal chance to mint an ultra-rare NFT at the same cost, an inherent edge memecoins can't serve.

NFTs benefited from standardization uniformity around collection sizes (ie 10k PFP) for initial leg of growth. Money talks and royalties and mint revenue made it the hottest creator monetization opportunity in town attracting creators and artists in droves.

Not to mention, NFTs were one of the biggest retail onboarding events to wallets and self-custodial ownership in the history of crypto.

Reflecting, at this time crypto was the most culturally relevant it ever was.

What to get right this time:

I could write a whole essay on the issues but I want to focus on one main overarching issue. This will matter later in this piece. Nobody solved for the demand side of NFTs because everyone was blinded by number going up.

Projects were raising millions in ETH from mint proceeds up front with ZERO vesting alignment, traction, or legitimate roadmap. Most assets lacked a durable cultural appeal. Just take a look at Labubu for comparables, an overnight success, 9 years in the making.

This underpinned all the problems. If you have shaky assets, it doesn’t matter how good your shiny new NFT-fi infrastructure product is or how fun your NFT gallery and collectors app is. My learning is we need more sustainable assets and a min. viable onchain audience, before we get a true 3rd party ecosystem take-off.

Now to the fun bullposting.

The bull case:

My core thesis is that there are now two main engines that will drive secular NFT industry growth. Last cycle only had one.

1. Creation (Endogenous value): Digitally native assets that first accrue value through culture, provenance, community, and more.

2. Containerization (Exogenous): Assets with existing value that can now be represented onchain (aka Consumer RWAs).

Last cycle, we saw that entirely net new digitally native assets could originate onchain and become valuable. This will continue across art, collectibles, and more.

Creation will be plentiful with higher failure rate. Containerization builds upon wrapping fandoms that have been built over the course of many years.

The big change is with many NFTs, they will no longer need to create their own value. They can just serve as vessels that containerize value that already exist, Consumer RWAs.

Instead of relying on creating fundamental value bottom up, we are now doing the inverse. Here is a better framing. As an asset class, we can now shape-shift. Pokemon cards doing great? Tokenize them and ride the wave of interest. You can apply that same framework to any alternative asset, tapping into an even bigger audience. Cars, watches, sneakers, wine, comics, historical artifacts, memorabilia, the list goes on.

A classic example of shape-shifting in action is the rise of the Pokemon index and crypto’s ability to capitalize on its growth with consumer RWAs.

Despite the growth of onchain TCGs, just 1.12% of online secondary-market volume happens onchain today (Blockworks). Nearly 99% still flows through Web2 marketplaces like eBay, Fanatics, Goldin, Alt, and Heritage. There is a huge opportunity to keep capturing those flows.

An estimated 15% of onchain TCG transactions are now paid via credit cards across gacha and marketplace activity. (Blockworks). This is more of a retail indicator showing how early it is.

If you zoom out, the macro trend of RWA tokenization making its way into crypto and hyperliquid forcing an industry-wide interest on value accrual will make its way into NFTs.

Unless you are an NFT with no external dependencies like punks, you are now trying to become a collectible with utility / value driven by exogenous factors as well. Previously as an industry, NFTs were too overindexed on endogenous value creation. Total NFT market cap peaked at 17B. Punks now stand at 30% share of NFT marketcap and are the BTC of NFTs. Many collections like Chimpers, Penguins, and Meebits are heavily focused on expanding into the broader retail sphere and providing value add experiences. Most roads lead to containerization.

Now that we have two distinct lanes, note that engines need complementary primitives. Every cycle is kickstarted by new financial primitives. Pump popularized bonding curves and ease of creations.

For NFTs, the answer is onchain gacha, the next big unlock.

Remember the RNG mention? Gacha’s benefit is dual purpose

1) RNG and 2) Liquidity

It solves one of the biggest problems NFTs face over others. By being able to sell back assets at a discount to FMV, this increases buyer confidence. Gacha can be applied to both digitally native products and consumer RWAs.

Per Blockworks data, leading TCGs have collectively driven $283m in gacha spend (30D). This is all with just under 10k DAU protocol users across these projects, there is a large market that has not yet been tapped into.

Don't forget the scale of web2 in general. StockX alone has over 30m users. WhatNot is a $20b unicorn onboarding 650k users each week. Raise your expectations.

AI is a core catalyst for cheap and rapid experimentation

Can you imagine if AI in its current form existed back in the 2021 cycle? We would have had a content and memetic renaissance. To anyone who is playing around with Higgsfield, Gemini, and more, it couldn’t be more clear that AI is an accelerant to internet culture. We’ve seen this first with memecoins accelerating brand awareness with AI-driven content.

The “click to create” economy will 100x the speed at which culture moves.

AI massively increases the rate at which culturally speculative objects can be created and then afterwards given depth.

A NFT can become the persistent container/identity for an AI-generated character whose media, experiences and utility keep expanding after mint. There were many who were too early at this (like Alethea AI).

Experimentation with NFT primitives and standards

Markets and tech go hand in hand with NFTs. This happened with Cryptokitties and ERC-721. The idea for OpenSea stemmed from CryptoKitties, to do an open marketplace for digital goods

The sauce for adopting new token standards is largely speculative experimentation, this applies to both fungible and non-fungible token standards.

We are seeing early signs with FWA an onchain gacha protocol and Stonkbrokers which leverages ERC-6551 where they basically made NFTs yield-bearing equity accounts. What’s happening is the move from just static NFTs into financial primitives. FWAIR launch introduces new monetization routes for collection launches with a gacha twist.

Additionally, I’m very interested in tracking the progress of platforms likegrail.xyz, the opportunity for fans to get skin in the game and upside in the biggest creators in the world is huge (the Mr. Beast and IShowSpeeds of the world).

You may have seen there is much more breadth in the market now. Long gone are the days of NFTs just being 10k collections. NFTs are a standard and just like there are tons of different projects around tokens I expect the same for NFTs.

ERC-6551: Arguably the most powerful primitive that can reshape how we view NFTs

ERC-721 gave us the ability to own a digital object. ERC-6551 gives that object the ability to own things itself, ANY NFT can now hold assets, interact with applications, and accumulate history, without changing its original contract.

It is backwards compatible so existing NFTs gain accounts without redeploying. So NFTs are evolving from things that you own, to things that can participate in the economy.

What can this token do? You hear that a lot these days. The next question is what an NFT can do. Basically, ERC-721 made digital objects ownable. ERC-6551 makes them capable.

The implications here are enormous. Last cycle you could only buy, sell, and trade NFTs. The next phase for utility centric NFTs is become/use/interact.

The evolution of “dumb” static NFTs to “smart” NFTs

Fun fact: Future Primitive, the team behind ERC-6551, was behind crypokitties and NBA Top Shot as well

Better distribution, infra, and UI / UX

NFTs have been stinted by Apple’s IAP policy, restricting trading for NFTs. However, there is a loophole NFTs can take.The solution is a mobile first approach with consumer RWAs. NFTs backed by physical collectibles can be treated as “physical goods”. Apps like Courtyard are going gangbusters on growth, targeting web2 users. Courtyard has over 200k downloads last 30D, 2m+ lifetime downloads, with >50% users. Growth is already happening. Why? Since it feels like a web2 product.

OpenSea’s pivot into tokens is interesting to me. NFTs were the first form factor where social trading really worked at scale and although OpenSea had a big drawdown over the years, it had peaked at 80m+ monthly visits, there’s a new light. The collapse of competing marketplaces gives it another shot. The distribution is still meaningful: 10M+ historical app downloads, 3M+ monthly web visits, and support for 27 chains and counting. Token trading now generates ($54.5m) more than 2x its NFT revenue ($23.5m) since 2025. With token trading expanding the funnel and $SEA.

still to come, OpenSea could play a meaningful role in re-invigorating interest in NFTs. Especially if they can successfully lead with token trading as the speculative wedge.

The infrastructure is ready today and can handle the performance required to onboard the masses. Days of clogging the chain (like Otherdeeds mint did $157m of ETH burned) are gone. We have performant infrastructure now, chains like Monad that are equipped to handle consumer and culture at scale.

Closing thoughts:

The next NFT cycle will look entirely different than the last one. I didn’t even touch much on art itself (which has longer cycles) but progress is being made in the background. Throughout the bear, leading museums like MoMA have been scooping up permanent acquisitions.

Just like crypto broadly, external institutions were more bullish on the category than natives themselves. Now it’s time to see what can happen when animal spirits come back into NFTs.

Do not underestimate NFT builders. The cracked NFT native builder to breakout founder pipeline is real. To name a few: Alex Atallah (OpenSea -> Open Router), Metastreet ->USD.AI, Baton Finance (NFT AMM) ->Pump.Fun

The easiest catalyst is speculative liquidity coming back but think beyond that. Ask yourself despite a smaller marketcap proportionally, why NFTs command such outsized attention relatively speaking.

The last NFT cycle was the most fun I’ve ever had in crypto. I was one of the more active participants and have some crazy stories I'll tell one day. If you like NFTs, there's no better time to pay attention than now.

While NFTs are fun in the front, don't forget the trojan horse. NFTs are a great way to turn digital stuff into real property you control with your keys instead of just renting access on someone’s server.

We now have a lot of learnings as an industry on NFTs. Let’s run it back. Bigger and better than last time.

If you are building something cool in NFTs or that is enabled by them, let's chat.

On social media, historically 90% of users lurk, 9% engage, and 1% create. Prompting is about to blow up that ratio because it is now far easier to create. The passive internet user is becoming an active participant whether they realize it or not.

Here are just a few examples of how prompting is making its way into our daily lives:

Prompting Grok on X is arguably the first AI natively integrated at scale into the social feed. Grok is an entirely new "participant" that has spawned tens of millions of tags at this point. Even in this small sample size we can see a shift in user behaviors.

Education is going to be one of the biggest categories disrupted. Prompting is the learning. The skill being trained isn't how to use AI rather it is the critical thinking. The prompt is the exercise. There will be many other vectors through which education will become more gamified.

This is a Roblox garage where you prompt a vehicle into existence. Players aren't just playing games anymore, they're prompting them into being.

Closing thoughts

Slowly but surely "prompting" will make its way into many facets of our lives.

We went from "search" to "prompt". Big transitions typically lead to entirely new categories of products, behaviors, and companies. We are just scratching the surface of what prompting can lead to. Crypto is in dire need of more experimentation and I anticipate this verb will help us on the path to getting there.

There were many great ideas that were simply too early for their time. The infra was not ready yet. There are more Augur -> Polymarkets out there.

Chains like Monad are now positioned to usher in the next era of great apps and serve as the experimentation grounds of the some of the best ideas from last cycles that are due for a re-visit.

I've put together a quick diagram to highlight a few interesting projects that didn't make it but were perhaps a few iterations away from a much bigger outcome.

What are you waiting for? The alpha is in studying the history of how we got to where we are today. Some of the most important primitives and 0-1 ideas are out there, waiting to be re-visited.

I anticipate over the next few years, some of the best founders and breakout teams, will have been inspired by projects from crypto's deep history that were simply too early but laid the foundation.

DM if you'd like to jam on putting together a more comprehensive list or are exploring cooking up something new in the space!

Any favorite legacy projects I missed? S/O Beeple, used his art for the cover image.

Crypto excels at tokenization. Every viral moment or emerging meta gets tokenized, fueling capital formation, and price discovery. However, it consistently falls short on post-launch engagement. We need more experiences that turn speculative energy into lasting participation.

Until we build post-asset issuance experiences that convert groups like NFT and memecoin audiences into long-term users, many will stay stuck in trading UIs, and crypto will keep leaking cultural momentum to Web2 incumbents.

In this post, I'll discuss what we can learn from web2 and the opportunities ahead that could help crypto better retain attention through engagement.

Web2 produces flywheels. Web3 produces fireworks

I've been surprised by how stark the differences are in how each industry distributes culture.

Web2: Creativity-First

• Attention scales through creativity

Open TikTok and you can watch culture snowball in real time. Take the italian brainrot phenomenon. A few creators fused random objects and animals into bizarre new characters. That opened up Pandora's box. Now the internet is flooded with dozens of Brainrot characters and hundreds of thousands of pieces of content around them. Creators are using every tool in their arsenal to explode the virality with highly engaging experiences. In just a few months, these characters have been animated, narrated with episodes and storylines, and much more.

It may sound silly on the surface, but there’s real demand and adoption flowing to the platforms enabling this creativity: gen-AI content tools, CapCut, etc.

To put the scale into perspective, users have now posted over 400k videos on tiktok about this genre. Multiple mobile games around the genre have reached 5m+ downloads (Brainrot Merge - Drop Puzzle, Brainrot Tip Tap Challenge).

Web3: Speculation-First

• Entertainment and token distribution is front-loaded

In crypto, culture largely revolves around the chart. A viral moment leads to a race to Pump.fun launches. On-chain activity becomes the content, flexing and tracking wins/losses. The main actors are speculators and the highly reflexive activity benefits tools that service trading, namely DEXs, trading bots, wallets, dexscreener, etc. For most people, a memecoin experience begins and ends with a swap UI. The blast radius of a successful token launch is constrained primarily to mainly trading related products. I would like to see it spill over into the content/entertainment landscape as well as it does in web2.

New Cycle, Same Problems

The 2021 NFT boom first exposed the post asset creation problem. Memecoins face the same issue, although they have lower expectations. When most value and attention is front-loaded at the formative part of a launch, what incentives remain to continue building stories around the asset?

Opportunities

The tokenization layer is more competitive than ever. Launchpads are being commoditized and they will begin to expand their offerings as well (See Pump, Believe app) whether native builds, partnering, or acquisitions.

However, one of the biggest white spaces in consumer crypto is what happens after token creation. Think we'll see a bifurcation of products here on a) content focus b) liquidity and gamified trading

Here are a few experiments I'd like to see more of next:

• Novel token distribution – Leverage protocols like Doppler to allocate a portion of supply for devs who build apps or games around the core asset. Distribute those token rewards to devs of the most used games and verified users based on skill (ZKTLs <> onchain rewards)

• AI-no code platforms producing the next-gen influencers: The rise of the meme-native game designer archetype. Spin up experiences around any emerging meta. Rosebud AI, Ohara, Devfun

• Creative editing suites: Web3 social networks embracing the success of TikTok’s CapCut or Instagram’s Edits, funneling creativity back into the platform. Early examples of complimentary products to social networks include Poster.fun and Titles XYZ.

• Social casual games platforms: Multiplayer shareable games designed for virality and shapeshifting quickly to whatever is the meta (ie hot or not swiping)

We are already seeing the rise of the experience layer: Pump.fun livestreams, Rug Rumble: competitive layer for token communities, Multiplier.fun: crypto arcade for token communities, and more.

But... this time is different

The cost of creation is collapsing while the ease of creation is soaring. NFT communities would have dreamed of this setup a few years ago.

Account abstraction, AI-assisted content and app generation, etc have proven that experiences once requiring months of capital can now be shipped in a weekend.

Attention is expensive, but building engaging layers on top of existing tokens and communities has never been cheaper or faster.

The Road Ahead

Crypto has mastered capturing attention; mastering how to keep it is next. This will encourage more users, devs, and creators to come into the space and help grow the total onchain activity generated throughout the life cycle of the assets.

Keep in mind that infra goes viral when it unlocks a magic moment (onboarding - Privy, content creation - Ghibli trend with ChatGPT, mini-apps - Farcaster). There is a lot we can learn from web2 and how virality can quietly pull forward much of the infra powering it.

Although NFT and memecoins came to mind first as they’ve faced some of the biggest challenges on experiences, the broader experience layer is applicable to most projects with or without tokens.

The beauty of the magic moment is it can happen anywhere, anytime.

• Does the next aha moment come from a crypto abstracted product that directly meet web2 users first in the context of where they spend the most time (tiktok, youtube, etc) vs crypto-natives (twitter)?

• Will event-driven onboarding make a splash? It shouldn’t be underestimated either as this is where large audiences with similar interests collide (ie NBA Playoffs). If a few fans really like what they are presented with, chances are many others will too.

• Could zktls be the bridge that turns boring data into a fun package of flexing, social content, and rewards (Supercharged Spotify wrapped)?

If you are ideating on or are already building in this category to serve post launch communities, I’d love to chat! DMs open.

Let's build the experience layer to make attention last.

What people consume today online is evolving faster than ever. Day by day the proportion of AI generated content vs human-made content increases, and thus consumption of AI. AI is playing an increasingly important role in influencing meme culture.

Simultaneously, users are at odds with certain legacy media, where posting on IG has become a performative act, posts crafted for likes and validation. People are getting tired. The platform is undergoing a shift to video first.

The more popular forms of video-based social media (TikTok/Reels) offer extra freedom and fun without the pressure to look perfect. AI tools are an accelerant to this, allowing creators to push boundaries and embrace the absurd with no need for calculated curation.

People are simply gravitating toward fun with a multiplier effect (from AI tooling). Again escapism, what I think of this as any escape from the physical world into the digital), is everpresent.

Brainrot Fusion & memes you can't look away from

For those curious to understand what the hell is going on in the below picture let me explain. Brainrot fusion has become a more advanced genre of memes where people combine animals and objects with AI (Example: chatgpt 4o) to create absurdist characters with even sillier names. It's jarring, yet somehow mesmerizing, a showcase of creative energy that you can't help but watch.

Fusion is like the birth of a new meme or addition of a character to the lore/content universe. These characters are then getting animated, narrated, put into PVP fights, games, tier lists, and more.

Not to mention, there are subtle brand opportunities, somehow Nike sneakers snuck their way into this fusion culture riding the popular of Tralalero tralala (the shark thingy).

And why stop at just one fusion when you can go further? KFC certainly wanted to get in on the memes too.

I'm no branding expert so I'll leave that to the experts but you can imagine how even a sillly fusion that goes viral could help drive awareness back to the product. Here's my shoddy attempt:

The Escape of AI Fusion: Experimenting with the paint brush

I decided to play around a bit with AI fusion myself and see what all the hype is about. Below are some new characters I created. As silly as it sounds there was a particular feeling of excitement about the process, it's like a magic paintbrush drawing your imagination in real time with a touch of surprise and mystique in how each character unfolds.

Imagine the opportunity to create a gamified experience that blends personal moments people cherish with playful, absurd twists allowing them to share their more about their personal lives/creations freely, without the pressure of social validation.

Product idea (Request for silly product - RFSP): Fuzio

Going through this IQ-dwindling endeavor, got me thinking about an idea for a more low-stakes product, entrenched in chaos, and custom built for a generation that shitposts its way through life. You could imagine an app that's an escapist playground of sorts where users can blend personal images (like pets, cars, or selfies) with random objects to fuse together bizarre creatures with AI-generated names.

This type of content output allows people to still embed things they are excited about but without the performance pressure of social media.

Again, I really like products where the underlying metagame/content is always rotating and fresh, largely user-generated too. There'd be many ways to gamify the app: custom themed fusion challenges (Grab chipotle burrito + pair with winning picture), based real life sports/events, and more.

The app could be a simple tool for generating fusion characters from two uploaded images, or a gamified experience where friends upload themed pics and get a surprise fusion reveal at the end

Another angle could be single picture uploads with options where the users get to fuse different elements or special edition packages of that week.

The app could potentially auto-generate skill stats from your remixed assets and match you in battles against other users’ fusions.

Monetization Ideas

Monetization can be straightforward: a free-to-play model with limited fusions, complemented by paid upgrades for premium features. Want your Girotto to talk and walk? Unlock text-to-audio and video features via payment. Access new remix packs and filter styles to enhance your creations, to add even more personalization.

Instead of focusing on collecting, maybe the real appeal lies in the social aspect/shareability. After all, most memes and apps spread through social sharing. The fun comes not from hoarding creatures, but from remixing them and gamifying the process. Community-driven elements like votes, challenges, and leaderboards could further fuel virality, with the most voted fusion of the week being launched as a branded asset (awards to winning creators).

Meta: Shapeshifting with trends and culture

TikTok is already birthing AI-driven content universes as we've now seen with John Pork, Tim Cheese, Italian Brainrot, and more. There’s no formal voting system for what enters the "lore", it’s basically a popularity contest, driven by comment sections and vibes. So we now have various paths emerging: Synthetic culture (digital first and AI native with humans in the loop) and memes emerging from real world moments.

However, maybe there's a way to channel this creative energy and chaos into something more intentional. A playful app where users upload personal images relevant to their lives (in a more carefree fashion like early IG days) with random objects to generate bizarre AI-fused creatures and identities. Maybe for structure, users get limited energy to vote on their favorite fusions, adding a layer of game mechanics to this content funnel.

After creation comes the remix layer with these assets out in the open: top characters can become AR filters (like Tung Tung), game assets, etc.

2x

@2xFCTG

2025 will be remembered ass the year of Italian brainrot #italianrot

44

9:26 AM • Apr 2, 2025

One week, you could fuse your op and a rotisserie chicken. Next week, it’s favorite jersey and a Chipotle burrito. The meta shapeshifts.

Closing thoughts

Didn't talk about crypto here but that's not the focus of this article. I think emergent (and silly) behaviors in niche markets can be leading indicators of what's next. Something something "The next big thing will start out looking like a toy." Not everything needs to start as a serious business or crypto native at first. Sometimes, the move is to focus on fun first and follow the paths that emerge after.

If you are thinking about / building next gen consumer apps & experiences, down to jam!

We'll soon look back nostalgically on the days when turning an idea into reality started with just a pen and paper. "Prompt-to-create" is now rapidly transforming workflows across nearly every function.

As an idea guy myself, I recently tested out some of the latest prompt-to-app platforms to see the latest progress. My experiments led me to "building" two apps this weekend: Apple Avalanche, a casual arcade game and Thirst Trap, a habit tracking app for drinking water.

Here are some of my reflections on the process and its implications.

• Play it here

Apple Avalanche is a simple game. A user controls dogwifhat with arrow keys to catch falling apples for points while dodging rotten ones. Rosebud is a creator first platform that makes game development and UGC accessible by using gen ai to reduce friction between concepts and the creation of games. Some may call it the Midjourney moment of games.

What I liked here is the ability to easily remix. I remixed the original 2d project/background and added in my own preferences. If I understand correctly, somebody can now take this same exact game and remix it in their own way if they please (Like swapping out the main character with own IP and rewarding players based on reputation accrued for playing the game).

Within the platform, I integrated dogwifhat as an asset to play with and toggled the different control speeds I wanted all through natural language prompting with code changing on the backend. I also implemented a points system for collecting good / bad apples. I generated a custom song about this game on Sona AI and embedded it as background music. Creating assets directly with the game was also simple, just prompt it. I leaned on chatgpt to formulate a specific prompt and then plugged that in to create the asset I wanted for the rotten apple.

Rosebud is a Sfermion portco, get in touch if you'd like to find a way to work with them!

• Try it here

Thirst Trap is a lightweight web app I spun up to gamify water intake. Users log their hydration by tapping a glass of water, which simultaneously nurtures a virtual plant and reveals a fun fact about water. Separately, I experimented with a multiplayer version where you can play with friends and have your water logs stack up vs others in a bar chart. The no-code editing could improve but remains powerful. Similar to how back when AI image generators took off, descriptiveness was important and many leveraged another AI to aid with crafting prompts, I can see AI-assisted no-code prompting being another way to ramp up.

I used Ohara, a no-code platform making it easy to turn ideas into apps and agents. What stood out with Ohara.AI was its ability to quickly connect APIs, offering building blocks for app expansion. In this instance with Thirst Trap, I connected perplexity API for fun facts. Text to image generation could also be used to create a more gamified version where the more you drink, the more an unrevealed egg hatches and reveals visually a water monster collectible.

There will be no shortage of no-code development platforms across web2 and web3 (Alchemist) coming to market as well. Over time, I expect most of these to directly provide the opportunity to incorporate crypto and augment the agent/app stack.

Reflections on the "click to create" economy

Revisiting my earlier screenshot post above, expecting the creative economy to only accelerate from here. As Sasha from Creator Ventures pointed out, we are in the age of slop, with many of even the top monthly grossing non-game apps benefiting from this trend.

Today is the hardest it will ever be to create. The quality of tools at our disposal will only get better.

The influx of apps and games will create more "15 minutes of fame" moments, like the beer app that once earned $10k-$20k daily. As accessible products have dominated crypto, we may now enter a mini-clip games era, but this time with lightweight AI-generated games becoming the next growth wave, created in just days.

In a crypto world heavily focused on infrastructure, people have been asking, 'Where are the crypto apps?'. Well, it looks like we have found the accelerant to this. AI-assisted creation will simply 100x+ the amount of experiments we are seeing.

As seen above, you can take it from the app kingmaker himself. The shift to an AI-first approach is well underway. App and agent creation is becoming largely commoditized. Things may shift from app development itself to curating data, refining models, etc.

For crypto ecosystems, this acceleration in developer velocity has significant implications:

• Top-of-Funnel Growth: Lower barriers to entry for app creation encourages more creators, which in turn leads to more apps drawing new users into existing and new crypto ecosystems. Which crypto infra layer will be the first to embrace an AI-centric crypto app GTM approach for onboarding new devs and users?

  Community Engagement: Fast, compelling experiences deployed to accommodate metas can deepen engagement between communities and NFT/IP-based projects. People simply want fun and productive things to do with their assets.

• Open-Source Remixability: By default, many of these tools are open-source, which could enable network effects as creators build and remix atop each other’s work.

Additionally, integrating AI agents capable of autonomously creating games or apps opens up a new design space as well.

Look, I'm just an idea guy who hastily put together these experiments to test what's possible. I'm excited to spend more time "doing things" vs "thinking things" and learning on the fly. A year from now I hope to look back at this post and laugh at how much has changed since then.

What would we do without our beloved "memecoin devs" in the creative economy supercycle? Next will be an incoming wave of "app developers" and the pump fun for apps.

The only limit now is our imagination. Lock in.

Today there is a much more emotional role they play as well.

They're treated like royalty amongst households, even tokenized into billion-dollar assets, and rising as media stars thanks to "petfluencers" giving them the spotlight.

The confluence of a few factors: 1) rise of the importance humans place on pets, 2) "petfluencer" creator economy, and 3) financialization of said relationships is going to lead to a pretty enormous opportunity, especially for the younger generations.

Here a few general assertions:

• Status symbol shift: In a world where the cost of having a pet is increasing, ownership of pets will increasingly be associated as a form of status. Human ego and the innate desire for social recognition will fuel a much bigger surge in status-driven behaviors like digital flexing. This can span from social media presence to increased spending on goods, accessories, and experiences for pets that project one's own digital persona and lifestyle.

• Rising costs lead to more virtual pet ownership: As the rising costs of pet ownership push some prospective owners out of the market ($15k-$45k+ lifetime costs), their excess demand is likely to shift toward virtual pets and gamified companion experiences.

• Pet generated content (PGC): PGC will further accelerate, permeate, and be remixed throughout the web, amlifying virality. Starting with more first party content like viral pet reactions and then "sticker-ized" and "clipped" into relatable video content.

• More monetization experiments: Today it is considered taboo for the average person to launch their own token. More pet owners may find it easier to launch and monetize their pets' existing social influence rather than themselves first. There's less social pressure this way. In more tame examples, pet owners may seek next gen monetization tools that help to better monetize vs in crowded traditional social media.

• Petfluencers as a side hustle grows in mindshare. Pet influencers' content already has a higher engagement rate compared to the worldwide engagement rate. This solves for some of the cold start problems with content creation today. The majority of pet influencers today are micro-influencers at ~44% and crypto rails can help them monetize faster while also introducing ownership within the creator/fans relationships.

Secular trends supporting these opportunities:

1. Pet industry market growth and ownership

Americans are projected to spend a total of $150.6 billion on their pets by the end of '24. According to projections, U.S. pet spending will total almost $200 billion in 2030.

Americans are expected to spend $150.6 billion on pets in 2024, with projections reaching nearly $200 billion by 2030. The pet industry is growing almost twice as fast as overall consumer spending, despite a slight post-COVID dip in ownership. Global pet sales are set to hit $341 billion in 2024, potentially reaching $500 billion by 2030, with companies like Mars, Nestlé, and Colgate also expanding their presence in the sector.

Younger demographics increasingly prioritizing their pets give a preview of what's next:

Of the 66% of U.S. households with a pet, 33% are millennials, followed by Generation X at 25% and baby boomers at 24%, according to the most recent (APPA) National Pet Owners Survey.

Gen Z spends the most on pets, allocating $148.50 monthly and 35% of their holiday gift budget, compared to millennials' $136.20 monthly and 22% allocation (Source: survey by by Talker Research).

Narrative violation: Pet ownership is rising rapidly in China

Interestingly, while ownership has receded in the US post covid , the household penetration rate continues to rise in China.

Source: Daxue consulting

Why? This can be attributed to a number of factors ranging from 1) increasing costs of raising a child to 2) declining marriage and 3) fertility rates. Pet ownership is increasingly serving more of an emotional purpose as well.

In some ways, pets are the new kids.

Another subtrend is the rise of cat food samples, with cat snacks the leading sample products by sales growth growing 16x from '19 to '23. This mirrors the success of 'try before you buy' strategies for people that's taken off, as pet owners increasingly seek the best for their furry companions, treating them like new family royalty.

2. Rise of the petfluencers

If you are on IG, I'm sure you or either a friend have made a separate IG for a pet. Apparently, being a petfluencer is a thing now.

Research by ManyPet shows that 35% of owners have created accounts for their pets and that 1/4 of owners are trying to turn them into media stars. 40% of respondents actually prefer to fill their feeds with their pets vs pics of themselves or others.

Over two-thirds indicated pets are included amongst their best friends while over half spend more time with their pets than they do with their own family.

More importantly, across all tiers the engagement rate for pet influencers is far higher than worldwide engagement rates. This is driven by pet content being more relatable and emotionally resonating with audiences. This is an attractive sign for both the desire for pet influencers to want to create more and also for brands willing to engage.

3. Explosion of pet generated content (PGC)

The meme-fication of IRL content such as pet pictures, videos, and more into re-usable content formats for memes across social media is a big reason for the explosion in mindshare of PGC. Putting memes on internet rails is simply more scalable. If you look across IG reels, you'll see many videos that stich together these clipped pet memes to portray actual relatable stories.

Pets have taken a more public facing role since the rise of social media with owners eager to showcase and in many cases, content farm using them.

Do you remember the post on the rise of faceless channels? Now imagine on top of all of this pet mindshare, animal centric ai-gen content layered in as well such as accounts like Mpminds (Behind the "meow meow meow meow cat vidoes"). This is for another time but there'll probably be some big exploration around scaling pet IP view other verticals (gaming, entertainment, etc) while attributing back to the owner.

4. Monetization

As mentioned before the majority of pet influencers today are micro-influencers for whom it is harder to monetize on platforms like IG. With crypto, creators earn instantly without needing sponsorship or brand deals.

There are number of different pathways in which crypto rails can benefit owners. Whether experimenting with launching a pet branded meme coin or something less volatile like creator tipping, content minting, etc, creators should have plenty of optionality.

There are number of products that have already shown the way for creators like Zora, Drakula, Drip and more. Furrend is a great example of platform built specifically for pet content creators to build, grow, and monetize their content and community. Many creators on Furrend are already earning more than they do on IG and Tiktok.

Closing Thoughts

As a long-time pet owner and lover, I've always had an appreciation for pets. Have watched the industry evolve too with The Farmer's Dog, offering human-grade dog food, grow into a multi-billion dollar company. Simply put, humans increasingly now invest in their pets.

So what are paths the future may hold? We likely see a further bifurcation of "pets" across actual living pets, virtual pets, and robotic pets. In a way, I could see all of them offering various forms of companionship, theurapatic support, entertainment and more. The common thread is people love pets and that will never change.

• Actual pets: I believe the strongest emotional connection will remain with actual pets at the very least for the foreseeable future. Social media is serving as a huge accelerant in attention around pets.

• Virtual pets: With lifetime costs of pet ownership ranging from $15k-$45k and rising, this opens to door to the long tail of virtual pets. As VR/AR devices further proliferate, there are going to be some really interactive experiences that they can enable fun pet ownership but without the hassles associated with actual pets. On the other hand, more financialized games with pets like Frenpet can also push the envelope on the design space.

• Robotic pets: This feels the most dystopian but it's already happening today at small scall. Hyperintelligent pets that can be guardians, friends, assists, and entertainers and more.

The future will get pretty funky. For now it seems their main benefit is being more utility focused. If the tech behind the robots improves and they can better tap into emotional support over time as robotic companions, this could accelerate market demand.

In case you are wondering what in the world you actually just read if you made it this far, don't worry I am thinking the same thing. I think the rise of pets and companionship is a huge market with a wide open design space. I'm excited to see what kinds of services and businesses can be built around this industry.

There are entirely different subcategories within the pet category that are interesting in their own right. These are just a few musings (ie what are the implications if pets are increasingly treated as family members, new mediums through which to interact with virtual pets, the non-zero chance our robopet overlords take over, etc). To me, the future growth of the pet industry is inevitable and the underlying user demand is there. I didn't talk about crypto as much here but there'll be cool opportunities to integrate it in a meaningful way (when depin robopets, just kidding or am I?).

If you recall Delphi's article on gaming, there are some concepts I want to revisit around the magic circle and more that I think are now also applicable for socialfi.

Social media in loose terms is the new "sports". Twitter is a league, for yappers. As is TikTok, brainrot league. The list goes on.

Take sports such as as soccer which is a skill based game in its purest form. Players can't pay to win. Monetization model of sports like soccer revolves around metagames or products/services that act as derivatives to the skill based game of soccer itself.

As seen with the monetization of sports, I believe there is a large opportunity around building metagames around the social media layer of the internet.

Here's a loose analogy comparing sports to social media

• playing sports = producing content

• athletes = creators

• plays = content

• scores = attention

If you think of content production as the core game here you can start to visualize the different metagames that can be built on top of this. For fantasy social you have products like Fantasy Top built around creators. For social media betting, Kizzy can service this type of demand. Apps like Upside can act as a social prediction market because it enables people to assign value to any piece of content which in turns serves as a signal on what people care about.

Again, sports has constraints: physical, frequency of games, etc. Social media being digitally native has an order of magnitude greater number of variables that can influence the game.

In the below example, simple actions like "kicking a ball into a net" can be elevated by the magic circle into having much more meaning like "scoring a game winning goal". I feel this same way after playing fantasy top and how I view tweets from creators. These are now plays. When Farokh tweeted out about his interview with Trump, that was not a tweet, it was a play. It was tournament winning banger piece of content.

Again why are fantasy sports and gambling so popular? Not only are they fun but they give people a chance to monetize their hobbies and further augment their experiences around the core game of sports. The similar lens can be applied to social media. We already know there's an enormous amount of creators with fanbases all across the world. The rise of socialfi (or whatever better name that arises) will enable multiple metagames to be built on top of these fandom networks.

I am pretty certain that nearly everybody on the internet at some point has identified a creator or piece of content that they thought would at some point take off (see below). How many countless examples have you seen on other social media platforms where people jokingly "invest" in the early popularity of a piece of content with a comment claiming clout? The problem is there were no meaningful metagames built around this insight. Sending a like or follow means nothing.

Socialfi is the bridge that helps fans to better monetize their hobbies and for creators to get rewarded.

This is a far from complete piece as I quickly spun it up but it's an iteration around why I've been even more excited about this category since my initial thoughts on fantasy social. I'd like to a do a deeper piece on this in the near future and the challenges that will need to be overcome in scaling this socialfi (aka metagame angle) into an absolutely massive category. As always, happy to jam with anyone also thinking about this topic or building here.

Amazon has previously received criticism for involvement of remote contractors, hence the shopping experience wasn't actually fully automated. Things seem to be improving since: https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/retail/amazon-just-walk-out-dash-cart-grocery-shopping-checkout-stores

As chaotic as Quibi was, I liked the general shift towards on-the-go content consumption in a mobile bite-sized vertical format genre.

In many ways they were too early, although they also made many missteps. Fast forward to today and there are now many microcontent video apps making millions monthly.

Some of the issues with Quibi: covid + being forced to compete with bigger screens with users couped up at home, high subscription costs for unproven value, premium content when in reality should've been more left curve, and boomer management, not embracing memetic virality of content fast enough (couldn't screenshot in the app for months).

I think a storm is brewing for the rise of micromedia such as microdramas to take off in a bigger way now, especially in a time where Hollywood is hurting and the old school route no longer works as well.

Here's a few assertions:

• AI-driven content boom - The rise of AI-driven, prompt-based tools is making content creation faster, cheaper, and more accessible. Over time, creators will be able to generate increasingly higher-quality movies (see runway film festival winners) and multimodal outputs with minimal effort.

• The rise of brainrot - Attention spans keep dwindling, the average length of content consumed continues to decrease

  

• Gamification of interactive media - I'd split this into parts: passive and active interactive media. Today things like story branches (ie choose A or B) have been tried but still early. Longer term, a16z anticipates in ~2 years, we'll have commercially viable and fully generative interactive video. This will greatly open up the design space.

What's cooking today?

A handful of vertical video apps have seen triple-digit percentage growth in both downloads and in-app spending over the past year. In Q1 '24, 66 short drama apps like ReelShort and DramaBox pulled in a record revenue of $146m in global consumer spending (source: app figures).

In China in particular, there's been a rise in the popularity of microdramas, which can be described as modern-age mini soap operas. In China, the microdrama market was estimated at 38B RMB ($5.3B) Shoutout Naavik for the deep dive.

The typical format for most of these apps is quite similar.

• Release content weekly usually with each series being 50+ episodes that are 1-3 minutes long

• The first handful of episodes are free and also crossposted to TikTok for UA

• Afterwards, users unlock episodes by via ads or through payment in virtual coins

Below is a screenshot of what ReelShort, a popular microdrama app looks like. Per appmagic, ReelShort made an estimated $28m in the month of August across ios/google play stores.

They borrow from tiktok with a "for you" discovery feed for discovery and incorporate gamification (ie streaks etc) to draw people back in. I watched a few of the episodes of Breaking the Ice and the content was basically what I expected, brainrot in its purest form.

Dramas remain one of the most popular genres as evidenced by growth in spend and downloads.

At the app level, Kuaishou also stands out (a Douyin/TikTok competitor), valued at $22B.

In 2023, Kuaishou rode the microdrama wave with 94m paid DAUs / those watching more than 10 episodes a day.

Other content trends

• Top down: Indie creators running faceless channels (top down) like Mpminds (30 sec ai powered stories about cats).

• Bottom up: Thematic content such as dark fantasy is captivating tiktok audiences in re-imagining old IP in new forms. There are 17.5k posts under the dark fantasy sound

• Interactive stories: Netflix is working on interactive stories, a collection of interactive stories based on hit netflixs shows and movies where users can immerse themselves in RPG.

Thoughts

It's a fool's errand to compete with Netflix head on. The largest competitors such as Paramount and Disney are cutting back to reduce streaming losses. Even with microdramas, it is a difficult endeavor with 90-95% losing money and up to 90% of revenue in the industry spent on advertising fees (source).

In contrast to global box office movies, it is much cheaper to produce microdrama content. However, similar to mobile gaming, acquisition costs remain high hurting margins. On the flip side, short form content = faster feedback loops, less execution risk, more shots on goal for virality.

I believe platforms can still capture a slice of Netflix's $285b MC by competing on niches. They will need to find more creative ways to more cheaply acquire users.

• Remixable content: Those who effectively leverage this to the max extent possible may be more competitive. This could mean providing easy remixing tools for fans to create CGC amplifying the voice across different socials. Perhaps a more difficult but powerful route if it works would be programmable IP for remixing and expansion. There are numerous folks developing in this space like Story protocol.

• Experimental monetization models - I like the notion of building a cultural presence and then asset creation and/or monetization around the brand (give more ownership to community). A few examples:

  • Every week, Doodles makes a viral short available for mint for a limited time (5.2k creator earnings on last release)

  • The skibidi toilet youtube content account has amassed 17.5b views and 43.6M subs. A hypothetical monetization experiment would be if they dropped a NFT collection around their host of characters (skibidi toilets, camera heads, TV men, G-man) or even crazier a branded memecoin distributed retroactively based on amount of content fans engaged with.

    

• Long tail IP - In most creator platforms today, most media is created top down. if the infra is built to enable anybody to create and extend IP around their brand with the help of their fans, large creators could effectively leverage their distribution to further cross-sell the platform.

Ultimately, it looks like a good portion of media is trending more towards shorter form gamified content and also from passive to participatory media. Over time I expect the line to blur between storytelling, games, and media.

Still need to think through some more the ramifications of incorporating the speculative nature of crypto. It could galvanize early fanbases of microdramas/microcontent as a way to reach a bigger audiences faster and also give them more skin in the game.