Using Zora rewards for DAO entry. Curating partnership drops as an invite-only founding mechanism. And now, tooling that allows interested parties to create media, art, content, etc in the same location - permissionless, with rewards splits, and on route to properly leverage the previous two installments.

Built by Uplink

A startup funded by Nouns:

Uplink lets individuals, brands, and decentralized orgs create rewards systems to amplify their reach and co-create masterpieces with their most passionate supporters.

They’ve also helped us build the mintboard.

Mintboard

A DAO, project, etc, creates a board. Anyone can post (mint) on it. All posts adhere to the price, duration, and edition size set by the board admins. For context, we have free, three day duration, and open edition at Based Management.

This streamlines the minting process to upload → submit → sign tx. And it has ensured that all relevant mints, from all third parties, are discoverable on one page.

Time to mint

A Collective Canvas, Onchain

Within our specific project, we’ve found a way to let members join the DAO through cultural capital. Thanks to Zora rewards, anyone whose amasses 1000 mints can join the DAO without going to the auction floor.

Before the mintboard, things were fragmented and not at all permissionless. Interns had to submit their files to a deform page and wait for us to manually mint them.

This tool allows all content to be in one location. It guarantees the work is on their own contract, earning rewards for each mint. It handles the .000111 reward split for the DAO treasury. And it allows for context-fermentation.

*

Decentralized Creation

Onchain orgs struggle to curate their decentralized inputs. Leaks in momentum and concerted effort are a common occurrence.

Instead of trying to limit that creative freedom, we hope to channel it. The mintboard was originally designed for our internship program. But it’s available to any DAO that sees benefit in creating an onchain version of Are.na, Pinterest, etc.

• Zora rewards splits for creators and treasuries

• Sovereign contracts with a unified browsing hub

• Simplified time to mint experience

Imagine a mintboard for Nouns, Energy, or Purple. A place any creator can go and know their work is being discovered, collected, and shared, by the exact demographic they’re interested in.

Imagine those mints helping pay creators and fund treasuries. For members to have a dedicated spot to browse emerging talent, media, and ideas.

The mintboard is a collective canvas (h/t Leighton). And it’s officially live!

Here’s the first:

Rabbit Inc has released an ai agent designed by the illustrious Teenage Engineering.

companion devices

Here’s the keynote video:

Opinions are properly divided, proving that we have something of interest. From “it looks really nice but I don’t see why this isn’t an app” to “TAKE MY MONEY!!”

It was brought to my attention yesterday. Immediately after watching the keynote I purchased one. And now I’m writing about it (feeling like a try hard bag threadooor).

But whether or not people enjoy this particular iteration of ai agents is not the concern of this essay. It’s how the future of this tech may enable independent internauts.

The Age of AI

Within crypto and other tech-dominant circles, artificial intelligent is common. Open AI’s board drama was a typical afternoon of live commentary on ct.

Using chat gpt, midjourney, or stable diffusion are already part of our workflows. Yet, when venturing into normie circles most of my friends haven’t heard of midjourney. At most they know what chat gpt is but have never touched it.

We seem to be at a rare moment in human innovation. One where two life-changing technologies exist, are accessible, and will continue to develop simultaneously. My intuition says that artificial intelligence will be the headliner though.

Until now it has been:

• stone age

• bronze age

• iron age

• middle ages

• renaissance

• industrial

• age of electricity

• atomic

• space

• information

People more in the know than me seem quite confident that cryptocurrency will be the medium of exchange for ai agents as well. If true, it seems likelier that we are entering the ai age than say the crypto age.

Creativity Ergonomics

Being a creator has changed dramatically when comparing web1 to web2 tech. The Youtuber, streamer, Substack writer, IG model; these are new sectors of industry enabled by tech progression.

While I’m not sure if ai is classified as web3, the tech again progresses. (you can vote here within 24 hrs)

A mental model I’m currently thinking through here is ergonomics.

the application of psychological and physiological principles to the engineering and design of products, processes, and systems. Primary goals [being engineering to] reduce human error, increase productivity, and system availability..

For independent creators, internet-tech is the yang to creativity’s yin.

Mr. Beast does not materialize without YouTube. Zora does not happen without Ethereum. If we channel this line of thinking toward ai agents, a new world awaits.

Reducing Lag

Firstly, here’s some of the uses I have planned for the device:

• vision → recipe improvement

  • currently I type all the ingredients I have into chat gpt and ask for new ideas

• writing assistant → reduced tabs/phone distraction

  • definitions, quick double-check search, etc when writing so I can stop getting as distracted by socials when in flow

• voice → reduced memory lapse in ordering lifestyle products

  • amazon integration is the main area of interest here (not sure if compatible)

  • reminders would also be of interest

The first two alone would be significant value add to my ergonomics. As I enjoy working within the ‘creators are athletes’ meme, it’s the small percentage points I’m looking to improve on.

Extend this model to app integrations, conglomerate backing (think Apple, MSFT, etc), or other niche hardware specs and we continue to reduce lag.

Speculation

The R1 is a one-time payment of $199. A pleasant twist to the perpetually subscribed market we find ourselves in. It does make me believe its ‘day in the sun’ is limited however.

The conversation has gotten more interesting thanks to it. Some questions I want to explore are:

• what is the value-mean of reducing idea → action lag with ai agents?

• what will train your own model products use as payment model & medium?

• will personal data become tokenized and transferrable in the ai age?

• what, if any, new sectors are on the horizon similar to YT, IG, Substack, etc?

• what are the 2-3 most ideal form factors of these ai agents?

Based Management

An excerpt from our introduction essay:

Based Management is an experiment currently being led by Leighton Cusack and myself. Taking insights from Nouns and Purple, it’s a new type of onchain organization that leverages free NFT drops, memetic remixing, and the latest Nouns Builder tooling available on L2s.

Since launch we have:

• amassed a treasury of $23,000

• established an invite only model while still using nouns builder

• found a way to use zora rewards for entrants to "create in" instead of "buy in"

• created an onchain are.na/pinterest board that splits rewards to the creator and dao treasury (mintboard)

• simplified the mint ui (2 clicks)

• created an onchain suggestion box using comments founded by @fascinated

Management has also hosted partnerships with TITLES, PartyDAO, Uplink, UFO Club, The Yellow Collective, and dropped a song with world touring musician Reo Cragun.

Still, less than six months into the project, we are far from escape velocity. The Mintboard is being developed further, plans for the $23K in the treasury are being discussed, and the goal of emergent-fun + accelerating Base L2 adoption is still priority.

Enter Blue

Sparing reiteration of already published ideas, the mascot thesis by @0xLawLiette has been at top of mind since I read it. Beyond memecoins, most of crypto twitter operates on mascots when taking a step back.

Cat, wolf, frok… the silly upon first impression, dove tails with $80B mcap coins of dogs to reveal that mascots are more potent, enjoyable, and approachable for internet based markets.

Think of wojak and pepe the frog. Then expand to crypto:

• mfer → stick figure

• mog → cat with pit vipers

• doge, shib, & bonk → shiba inu

• wif → pink beanie

• zora → zorb

• nouns → glasses

In a world (online) unrestrained relative to the physical world, imagination plays a pivotal role in our communication. This reality extends to legitimate financial movements, infrastructure, and organization.

Blue is our attempt at integrating this principle into Based Management.

Blue

https://lght.mirror.xyz/

111 Minted

Globe as the head & a blue body. The intent is for Blue to be easy to remix and yet resonant to BM’s memetic footprint.

There will be many versions of Blue hopefully. However, the majority of Blue’s potential success is outside of our control.

Giga Blue

https://lght.mirror.xyz/

111 Minted

Blue must be identifiable first. When seeing him, Based Management must be intuitively a part of it. Next he must be configurable with relative ease.

Few want to spend serious time crafting their memes. People want:

• expressive

• emotional versital

• easy to overlay with

• distinct

Terra Blue

https://lght.mirror.xyz/

111 Minted

At BM we have three distinct identifiers:

1. Globe

2. The B explorer

3. #1254ff shade of blue

Time will tell if we’ve found something resonant here.

Additional Disclosure: I own some, but not all, of the coins mentioned in this essay. In no way is this endorsement or financial suggestion that one should purchase them.

Speculation

the forming of a theory or conjecture without firm evidence

Speculation is deeply integrated in the human experience. Mindshare for the term has fallen largely on notions of degeneracy, gambling, and addiction however.

Without overextending the idea, speculation in this context could be rebranded as:

• prediction

• intuition

• imagination

• thinking

Outside of investing, speculation covers who you choose to mate with, where you work, the home you raise a family in.. down to the art you make, beverage you drink at lunch, and shows you decide to watch at night.

Memecoins

a picture is worth a thousand words. A meme is worth 10,000 pictures ~ Balaji

Look at what happens when we add speculative-tickers to something “worth 10,000 pictures.” We get $DOGE reaching an $85B market capitalization. For further context, this put $DOGE in the top 100 most valuable companies on the planet.

This, along with $SHIB reaching a $40B mcap, is largely written off by the world. But I’m starting to feel that reaching top 100 mindshare, with zero product, utility, services, etc is not elementary or a fluke.

If we speculate on research/thoughts (words), film/tv/sports (pictures), and ownership-stock (memes), maybe these coins start making more sense than they logically should.

Tokenomics

Another term marred by grifters, tokenomics simply means ‘fiscal design’.

The Ethereum Name Service ($ENS) token is designed differently than the Ethereum token ($ETH). Not only are supply, allocation, vesting, burn, inflationary v deflationary, staking, etc part of tokenomic design; the core philosophies of these tokens differ.

A brief overview of different tokenomics:

all memecoins

Recently there are two new memecoins with unique philosophies underpinning them.

$SWAG

A coin created and led by an independent artist named Bosch. It’s being used to engage with the artist’s personal art ecosystem.

Recently he auctioned off physical merchandise for the currency (13,000 $SWAG as the winning bid). He also gave preferential utility in his Little Swag World nft drop.

Holders were given:

• allowlist privileges

• one free mint

• reduced price on public sale

If you remember $BLOOT, Beanie’s infamous pasta should resurface. Ironically enough, we are seeing ‘history rhyme’ with $SWAG (not the rug part).

A memecoin open to public speculation, while simultaneously showing signs of tight integration with a creative’s discography.

$DEGEN

The first ‘successful’ memecoin launched by Farcaster natives. Success here means currently avoiding the archetypal pump and dump chart. ↓

pour one out for those waiting for their dust to bounce

$DEGEN could be conceptualized as a community coin (like $BONK). It exists solely because of Farcaster users. It has a community-oriented tokenomic’s structure (see more). And it is using the points meta for people to earn it rather than purchase it.

Additionally, it has chosen Base’s L2 for deployment - a separate experiment with cheaper gas fees and fragmented liquidity outside of Mainnet.

Meme Money

This essay is not a soft shill in buying a particular token. Nor is it an endorsement in the soundness of any potential investments (most will go to zero).

Instead, it’s a bubbling curiosity in my observations of memecoins:

• evolving

• reaching deeper attention pockets (see Franklin Templeton tweeting about memecoins)

• retaining liquidity

• and possibly being the most battle tested utility in crypto

It’s common place to say “memecoins are a feature not a bug” in crypto. I’m wondering if there are ‘software updates’ on the horizon that turn them into something more.

Seeing these coins experiment with their philosophies, tokenomics, get meme’d relentlessly, sky rocket to billions of dollars, etc leaves me wondering what we may be missing here.

What is **meme money **if Jacob is correct - that crypto unbundled traditional currency?

Memetics

“A picture is worth a thousand words. A meme is worth a thousand pictures.”

If crypto is the internet’s native payment and verification system, memes are the internet’s native language model. The cold, detached-embrace of words on a screen, pales in comparison to a gif, mp4, or properly captioned jpeg at the right moment.

Memetics are an incredibly immature soft-science at present. And therein lies the opportunity to examine its rawest form. Words, visuals, emotions; what combination of the intimately personal will we effectively scale onto the digital substrate?

Marketing

Market-ing, as a verb. As in, your behavior inherently causal with anything market related.

When digging deep into the forces of market currents, identity pops up in nearly every scenario. Why choose a car to buy? How about the house or apartment? Or dinner tonight?

The market is a nervous system for shared identity manifestation. We are social animals. And the market is our sandbox.

JPEG Summer

When focusing specifically on web3 it seems that identity products are reprioritized. Still incredibly early in the industry’s development, 2024 looks to be a big year for this sector.

When reviewing the ‘21 NFT bull run:

• pfp communities

• cc0 cryptoart collectives (thinking Nouns specifically)

• membership clubs, etc

were all the fanfare. Cryptopunks, Bored Apes, Gutter and Cool Cats, The Links, DeLabs, and more, dominated liquidity to the tune of eight-figures consistently. People jumped multiple socio-economic rungs off tokenized jpegs. Off of identity assets.

Identity Assets

At the heart of these entities was the promise of community. A place for identity to nestle in, ferment, and propagate. Speculation of where majority-mindshare would choose to identify could be argued as the main driver of capital flow in this sector.

Thinking along the lines of once popular narratives:

• BAYC is where the streetwear, influencers, and new gen crypto wealth will go

• Punks are where the crypto ogs will go

• Nouns are where the crypto builders and giga brains will go

This could even be extended to the chain level in ‘23-24:

• Zora is where the cutting edge creators will go

• Base is where the big business and coinbase consumers will go

• Solana is where the degens and DeFi protocols will go

When playing with this concept, identity assets, it becomes evident in the undercurrents. We are, in part, sorting out what digital identity is made of.

the mascot thesis

Brilliantly put by L, memecoins have been one of the main drivers of onchain activity for years. It begs for further inspection.

A memecoin is just a crypto stock. And when you think deeply about the market (read on that topic here) stocks are just tradfi memecoins.

“I own TSLA because of [xyz].”

“I’ve purchase six figures worth of NVDIA because of [xyz].”

These are identity driven purchases as much as “I bought Dog wif hat because of [xyz].” The current apex of my curiosity resides in the what-next.

The Identity Market

If you spend any time of crypto-twitter, you see the relationship between speculative assets and content, media, art, self expression. From memes about chains, coins, and current events, to protocols using waifus in their corporate memos.

At the guttural level it feels like generations x,y, and z are rebelling against white-collar, suit and tie, id badge systems. Even when working on serious technological, economic, and social innovations.

So the questions at top of mind are:

1. what makes digital id different than physical id (in the same manner that memetics are a form of linguistics but exist in a different form)?

2. what is the value gap for user generated identity assets compared to luxury, designer, or third party generated?

3. is there a next leg of innovation related to memecoins and tokenized mascots? if so what does that look like short term and then long term?

4. where do prediction markets fit into this?

5. who will be the first protocol or chain to expand their org chart into memetics targeted at this market?

Bull or Bust

Money is how we best aggregate value exchanges. How else would you agree on the exchange needed for buying an iPhone vs. buying insurance for it?

At scale, money is the markets life force. It synthesizes offered and acquired value for net positive value creation (ideally).

many coins that we want number to go up

Generational wealth has taken on new meaning to me in recent convos. Traditionally understood in terms of the market will transfer me enough wealth for future generations - I now see a cycle of wealth emergence at the generational level.

Here are the different vehicles of wealth for past generations.

1. Bartering: Direct exchange of goods and services

2. Commodity Money: Objects with intrinsic value like gold, silver, or salt used as money.

3. Metal Coins: Small, standardized units of precious metals.

4. Paper Money: Notes issued by governments or banks, representing value.

5. Fiat Money: Currency that has value by government decree, not backed by physical commodity.

6. Digital or Electronic Money: Representation of fiat money in electronic form.

7. Cryptocurrency: Decentralized digital currency using cryptography for security.

And here are their respective wealth-emergent asset classes.

1. Bartering: Goods and services themselves were the assets.

2. Commodity Money: Precious metals (e.g., gold, silver) not only served as money but also as stores of value and investment assets.

3. Metal Coins: Land and physical property could be bought with more transportable and divisible money.

4. Paper Money: Enabled larger scale and more diverse investments like government bonds and banknotes.

5. Fiat Money: Expansion of stock markets, allowing shares of companies to be bought and sold more easily.

6. Digital/Electronic Money: Further facilitated global trade, online stock markets, mutual funds, and derivatives. Real estate could be more easily transacted through digital transfers.

7. Cryptocurrency: Introduced new assets like Bitcoin and Ethereum. Enabled the creation of entirely digital assets like NFTs and decentralized finance (DeFi) services.

Leading me to an intuition that crypto and the ensuing DeFi markets are generation x,y, and z’s assault on the boomer/silent-gen’s wealth vehicles.

Sure, there are some wholly constructive, public goods type initiatives birthing alongside this. But in an economy where the new generations can’t afford real estate, are at the tail end of NYSE’s bluechip 100-1000x’s, and social security hits its planned obsolescence window - a parallel portrait of what stock markets did to land assets begins to form.

Market Primitives

“The market is efficient” one proven earner says. “It’s always right” chimes another.

It’s heralded, and equally detested, all in one 24/7 geo-continental ball of threads; that must orchestrate a way for our demands to be met by someone else’s supply.

What does the market even mean? Supply and demand of what precisely?

Objects, information, activity, privacy; these things are abstractions that must contort into tangible things; hopefully arriving in two or less business days if not instantaneously.

Goods & Services

I’ve narrowed it down to these three things:

1. Entertainment

2. Status

3. Wealth

At least one, and many times all three, underpin what is fundamentally supporting goods and services.

Goods:

• Electronics

• Clothing

• Food

Services:

• Healthcare (doctor visits, surgery)

• Education (schools, tutoring)

• Hospitality (hotels, restaurants)

And while consensus would agree that it’s the goods and services that change with each generation, I’m beginning to think, on a longer time cycle, it’s also the value-vehicles we use to exchange said market items.

Internet Money

To me, crypto is the internet’s native payment and verification system. Why use fiat paper currency, or even gold bars, to interact online? Why not use a digitally native, verifiable, ai compat- blah blah blah you get the point.

And when you start using this programmable money. In an always online, globally liquid market, experiencing payments, grants, protocol rewards, and numerous 10-1000x’s on crypto’s version of stocks…

It becomes evident that you don’t have to play the game entirely in a market dominated by generations before you. If there’s enough of you, you can just create a new one. Like metal coiners did to the barterers.