Her Twitter bio distills it to a blade: “Sharing learnings from my mistakes.” That ethic was forged in places as far apart as a Westpac boardroom and a busy café floor, managing consumer products for millions of Australians one year, memorizing fifteen drink orders the next. The work taught her to read people fast, manage chaos with calm hands, and revere the smallest details. She’s been a founder, too, launching a Wormhole-based startup in 2022–23 that felt, in her words, like “banging my head against a wall.” It left her convinced of one thing: sugarcoating kills startups.

TINA

@thetinaverse

the jobs I had before I became a founder:

> waitress (realised that the small things really matter, like memorising people’s orders before they expected you to)

> bartender (learnt how to deal with people in bad moods)

> private tutor (realised I really loved working with

369

7:31 AM • Jan 9, 2025

The moment that pulled her deeper into crypto came in 2022, at Wormhole and Jump’s “XHack” in Chicago. It was her first big event outside Australia, and the first time she felt she had found her people. Among them were Eunice, Keone, and Ashish, part of the founding team of Monad. At the time, launching a new EVM Layer 1 was borderline heretical. But these were people who had quit high-frequency trading jobs to do something absurdly hard: rebuild Ethereum from scratch.

“I realized they weren’t just cloning tech,” she says. “They were building something net-new.” Monad’s technical core solves the blockchain trilemma without the usual sacrifice, keeping decentralization, performance, and EVM compatibility intact. This is not marketing fluff: MonadBFT fixes a long-standing vulnerability in pipelined BFT consensus called tail-forking, and Raptorcast chunks massive blocks so they move across the network at speed, even at scale. Both are brand-new innovations, now open sourced as part of Monad’s consensus client.

If the tech is the foundation, Tina’s ecosystem design is the scaffolding. Her role, she says, is “building an economy where founders have the best chance to succeed.” That means finding “founders who relentlessly ship” and holding them accountable to weekly public progress updates. Feedback is candid, sometimes uncomfortable, always direct, because iteration is the only path to survival.

The programs started small: Mach, an online accelerator; Jumpstart, an invite-only three-day sprint; and the first Foundry, which tested how global the Monad pull could be. Each experiment refined what founders needed most and what investors wanted to see. That iterative loop eventually produced the headline numbers: Founder Residency bringing in 150+ investors, and Foundry scaling to 44 teams across 12 countries.

TINA

@thetinaverse

welcome to my crib (Foundry NYC)

803

10:02 PM • Jul 24, 2025

It also created something rarer: a founder community that is both supportive and gritty. “One of my favorite things is seeing founders give each other tough feedback and then celebrate wins together,” Tina says. Ten percent of the Monad Foundation team are ex-founders, creating a level of empathy most ecosystems lack. Two dedicated Echo Groups, Cambria and Plums, keep early-stage founders in close orbit with angels, VCs, and active community members.

The culture is anchored in places like The Studio in NYC, a co-building hub where Narrative, the first perpetual information market, recently launched its beta. “Co-building is important, it takes me back to that Chicago event where it all started,” Tina says.

The payoff is visible: early-stage teams in the Monad ecosystem have raised over $70 million for projects that cannot function on slower, higher-latency chains, such as onchain central limit orderbooks like Crystal, Drake, Kuru, and Perpl, where low fees and zero front-running are not luxuries but survival traits.

Looking ahead, Tina has her eyes on what she calls, "dopamine markets," where social interaction, content and financial markets collide. Attention spans have gotten shorter. Zoomers want social and financial experiences that are fun, fast and make them money. “This will be the next meta in crypto,” she predicts, pointing to apps like Kizzy (betting on influencers) and LEVR.Bet (leveraged sports betting, fresh off funding from BCAP and Maven11). Performance here is not a nice-to-have, it is the difference between viable and dead-on-arrival.

From memorizing fifteen drink orders to making data-driven product calls for millions of banking customers, Tina’s career has been a masterclass in the one thing founders actually need: execution in the details. “I realized I knew absolutely nothing,” she tweeted about becoming a founder. The humility stuck. So did the work ethic.

Her measure of success is not TVL or transaction throughput. It is the number of builders who found their tribe in Monad’s orbit and learned to ship faster, fail smarter, and build bigger. And with Monad set to go live on mainnet before the end of the year, that tribe is about to have an entirely new frontier to build on.

Monad ⨀

@monad

Monad mainnet

Monad ⨀

@monad

1) When

15.6K

12:58 PM • Aug 11, 2025

If you are a founder who ships and want to join the Monad ecosystem, apply and join DeltaV or follow @DeltaV_xyz for upcoming initiatives.

and subscribe to this newsletter !!

I've been watching my group chats explode for weeks, and honestly, the crypto community is more divided on Roman Storm than anyone wants to admit publicly. Half my friends think he should rot in prison. The other half think this verdict could kill open-source development forever. Let's unpack that.

Here's what actually happened

Storm helped build software that lets people send crypto privately. Think of it like using a VPN for your transactions. The decentralized nature of the Ethereum contract meant that once the admin keys were burned, Storm and his team literally couldn't control who used Tornado Cash anymore.

It's worth noting that they actually did try to add compliance controls. In 2020 they built a tool that lets users generate cryptographic proof showing the origin of their funds, and in 2022 they implemented a Chainalysis oracle to block sanctioned wallets from the frontend. But prosecutors argued they should have done more, with one witness suggesting they could have made the entire protocol offchain to ensure no bad actors used it (which should sound absurd to anyone who understands Ethereum).

The split isn't falling along the usual tribal lines either.

I know hardcore privacy maximalists who think Storm crossed a line, and I know DeFi degens who are genuinely scared they could be next. Because once you start criminalizing code based on how people use it, where exactly does this end?

I spoke to Kasra Rahjerdi, who runs a prominent dev agency and regularly builds apps on Eth and Solana. He put it particularly well: "If Roman goes to jail for writing code that helps money laundering, should the Pump.fun guys go to jail for writing code that helps people rug?" It's a fair question. Pump.fun has facilitated probably billions in retail investor losses through obvious scams, but nobody's talking about prosecuting its developers. Every DEX enables wash trading. Hell, Ethereum itself processes more criminal activity in a week than Tornado Cash did in its entire existence.

But the government's case wasn't really about Storm failing to add controls. It was about him allegedly knowing the tool would be used for money laundering and continuing to promote it anyway. The government argued that Storm knew bad actors were using Tornado Cash to wash over $1 billion in dirty money (later revised down to $660.5M), including funds from North Korean hackers.

Storm's team countered that he wrote code, not a criminal enterprise.

But here's where it gets messy.

Storm's defenders keep saying "code is speech" and "privacy is normal" or "privacy is not a crime." That's true in theory, but Storm wasn't just publishing academic papers. Prosecutors found promotional materials on his computer that literally asked "Do you wanna know how to stay anonymous on Ethereum?" complete with graphics showing cash and a washing machine. This became one of the prosecution's favorite pieces of evidence, but the materials were literally advertising Tornado Cash's intended use. The project was founded by privacy advocates who believed anonymity was necessary for public blockchains. If you step back, using marketing materials that promote a tool's actual purpose as evidence of criminal intent is a pretty unserious argument for guilt. Although they used this to argue that he was actively marketing Tornado Cash's anonymity features, updating the interface, and yes, watching as North Korean hackers funneled hundreds of millions through his creation. At some point, "I just write code" starts sounding like "I just follow orders."

The prosecution's case got even messier when their own witnesses started falling apart. One prosecution witness got scammed and lost money, then claimed the funds went through Tornado Cash when they actually never touched the protocol at all. Another "expert" witness tried to use dodgy accounting methods to trace funds through Tornado Cash, which got thoroughly debunked by researchers (see below). As one observer noted, "in legal terms that's called perjury lol." When your star witnesses are either lying or fundamentally misunderstand how the technology works, it raises serious questions about the entire case.

Tay 💖

@tayvano_

This first witness in Roman's trial immediately caught my attention bc the victim was a classic Pig Butchering case.

The only issue is....uh.....those scammers don't use Tornado Cash? And they never have?

So, like, wtf?

David Z. Morris

@davidzmorris

The first witness in Roman Storm's trial was fascinating for many reasons. A Taiwanese American who works as a court translator, Prosecutors walked "Katie" Lin through her communication with a scammer who contacted her through WhatsApp and ultimately talked her out of $190k.

694

12:19 AM • Jul 18, 2025

The government's case wasn't really about code being illegal. It was about Storm allegedly knowing his tool was being used for massive money laundering and continuing to facilitate it anyway. That's a much harder philosophical line to defend, even if you believe in crypto's utopian promises. Though it’s worth noting that Storm’s defenders aren’t pulling arguments out of thin air. Cases like Junger v. Daley (2000) and Bernstein vs. U.S. (1996-97) established precedent for computer source code as “an expressive means” protected by the First Amendment. 

What's really eating at people is the precedent this sets for immutable smart contracts.

Once you deploy code to Ethereum, you genuinely can't modify it anymore. This is 100% true, though many modern contracts are upgradeable because developers have largely stopped caring about immutability. But when Storm and his team built Tornado Cash, true immutability was the norm, not an afterthought. Storm couldn't have stopped bad actors from using Tornado Cash even if he wanted to. The jury convicted him (on one count) anyway. So now every developer has to wonder....

if I build something that becomes unstoppable, am I responsible for every bad thing that happens with it forever?

This connects to something way bigger than crypto. Uber is getting sued because drivers assault passengers, and their defense is identical to Storm's: we're just a platform, we can't control what individuals do. Social media companies use the same logic when terrorists coordinate attacks on their platforms. Matthewb, a crypto builder and writer I spoke with, put the prosecution's troubling logic in perspective: "A good example of why the prosecution's case is problematic is someone like Linus Torvalds who built Linux. There's pretty much zero doubt that Linux has been used by terrorists, nuclear programs, etc. But it would be completely unhinged to prosecute him for those wrongs." At what point does building the infrastructure make you complicit in how it's used?

This verdict came after Storm had already burned through millions in legal fees.

Before the trial even concluded, he was back on X asking for another $1.5 million, explaining that costs were "piling up fast." His legal team had been "working around the clock" and had "forgotten what normal sleep feels like." The crypto community has now raised nearly $5 million toward a $7 million goal, though the total is actually higher since earlier fundraising rounds aren't reflected in the current progress tracker.

Now the Ethereum Foundation is putting serious money where its philosophical mouth is, pledging to match up to $500,000 for Storm's legal defense. This isn't their first contribution either. They've already donated $500,000 plus a $750,000 matching fund for a total of $1.25 million to Storm's case, and separately contributed another $1.25 million to co-founder Alexey Pertsev's defense in the Netherlands.

This isn't charity. It's strategic warfare over the future of crypto development.

The conviction on the money transmission charge is genuinely insane when you think about it. Tornado Cash never held anyone’s money, and FINCEN literally published guidance saying non-custodial services aren’t money transmitters. But the DoJ is basically saying “actually, we decide what counts as money transmission now, whatever we say goes.” If this precedent sticks, any self-custody crypto app could suddenly become an unlicensed money transmitter. The Foundation knows that if this twisted interpretation becomes law, every developer working on anything more sophisticated than a basic wallet better start budgeting for criminal defense lawyers.

The industry reaction has been swift and predictably dramatic. Everyone from crypto associations to various policy institutes is screaming about "dangerous precedents" and the "criminalization of open-source development." They're not wrong to be worried. If you can go to prison for writing code that someone else misuses, where does it end? Are crypto developers liable for ransomware payments? Should Ethereum's creators face charges for every rug pull?

The uncomfortable truth is that Storm's case isn't really about privacy or free speech.

It's about whether building powerful tools comes with ongoing moral and legal responsibility for their use. The crypto industry wants to have it both ways: we want to build world-changing technology that's "unstoppable" and "permissionless," but we also want to disclaim responsibility when that technology enables genuinely harmful behavior.  Though let's be real about the double standard here. An estimated 99.0-99.6% of global money laundering flows through traditional finance, with only 0.4-1.0% going through crypto. When banks facilitate money laundering, they get fined with a slap on the wrist. When crypto devs build tools that get misused, they get raided at home in front of their toddlers and face federal indictments. 

The reality is that smart contracts are fundamentally different from anything that existed before.

You can't regulate immutable code the same way you regulate a bank, but prosecutors are trying anyway because it's easier than writing new laws. These are new things that need new rules, but instead we're getting prosecutors trying to force blockchain technology into legal frameworks designed for banks and money service businesses.

Storm faces up to five years if his appeal fails, but the real stakes are much higher.

Every privacy protocol, every DeFi innovation, every attempt to build financial tools that governments can't easily monitor is now under a legal cloud. Matthewb pointed out something that makes this whole thing even more ridiculous: Tornado Cash was never actually 100% private. You can often "de-mix" funds by watching flows in and out of the pools and analyzing wallet behaviors. Researchers like Zach and Tay have shown this repeatedly. So basically, the government is prosecuting devs for building a tool that's actually often more traceable than traditional banking, because they're too lazy to learn proper onchain analysis.

So alas, the crypto industry is learning what gun manufacturers and encryption software developers learned decades ago.

Storm's case feels like the second crypto wars all over again. In the 1990s, the U.S. govt classified encryption software as "munitions" alongside bombs and flamethrowers, requiring developers like Phil Zimmermann and Daniel Bernstein to register as arms dealers just to publish their code online. Zimmermann faced a three-year federal investigation for "exporting weapons" when PGP spread internationally, while Bernstein had to sue the government for the right to publish his encryption research without a State Department license. The Electronic Frontier Foundation ultimately won those cases by establishing that software code is protected speech under the First Amendment, but now prosecutors are using different legal theories to achieve the same goal: criminalizing developers who build privacy tools that governments can't easily control.

Moral of the story? Building powerful tools comes with powerful enemies.

His co-founders aren't faring much better. Alexey Pertsev was found guilty of money laundering in the Netherlands and is appealing while under electronic monitoring. Roman Semenov remains on the FBI's wanted list. Building Tornado Cash has turned into a very expensive hobby for all three developers.

My friends who think Storm deserved conviction aren't crypto haters.

They're builders who've watched too many projects harm real people while hiding behind "we're just infrastructure" defenses. They think accountability might actually be good for the space long-term, even if it's uncomfortable short-term.

The friends defending Storm aren't money laundering apologists either.

They're terrified that if building tools can land you in prison, innovation will flee to friendlier jurisdictions. They're probably right. But maybe that's not entirely bad if it forces the industry to think harder about the consequences of what we're building.

The jury's split verdict captured this tension perfectly.

They couldn't bring themselves to convict Storm of actively facilitating money laundering or conspiracy to evade sanctions, but they also couldn't let him walk away completely free. Even twelve random Americans understand that this case lives in a gray area that our legal system isn't equipped to handle yet.

Peter Van Valkenburgh

@valkenburgh

Coin Center’s Seven Takeaways from the Storm Verdict:

1. The sole conviction—unlicensed money transmission (18 U.S.C. § 1960)—turns mainly on legal/regulatory interpretation (“does this count as money transmission?”), not jury fact-finding.

2. The court, at the

535

1:43 PM • Aug 6, 2025

The jury said "sure, unlicensed money transmission," but couldn't agree on whether Storm was actively helping launder money or violate sanctions. It's like getting a parking ticket when you're on trial for bank robbery. Technically guilty of something, but the big question marks remain.

What makes this case genuinely precedent-setting isn't the guilty verdict on the transmission charge. It's what the jury couldn't decide. Their deadlock on the money laundering and sanctions charges (each carrying 20-year maximums versus the 5-year max for transmission) suggests even regular people (not crypto evangelists) struggle with the idea that building a tool makes you responsible for every bad thing done with it.

The appeals process will likely take years, giving the industry time to push for clearer regulations through Congress. The CLARITY Act, which would create specific legal frameworks for DeFi, suddenly looks less like wishful thinking and more like urgent necessity.

Peter Van Valkenburgh

@valkenburgh

The Roman Storm verdict shows how badly the BRCA is needed: no one should face prison for publishing code. Michael Lewellen's civil suit in Fort Worth is equally crucial-both challenge the government's abuse of unlicensed money transmission laws against technologists.

75

12:35 PM • Aug 8, 2025

The millions of dollars of pledges towards this case aren't just supporting Storm's defense. It's a bet that crypto's future depends on protecting the right to build experimental technology, even when that technology gets misused. But it's also a signal that the industry still hasn't figured out where legitimate innovation ends and criminal facilitation begins.

Meanwhile, Storm remains free on bail, probably wondering how building a privacy tool for Ethereum transactions turned into a federal case. The answer, as usual in crypto, is that we're all making up the rules as we go along. Sometimes the government gets to make them up faster than we'd like.

Storm's appeal will take years, and the arguments will only get more complex.

Because this isn't really about one developer or one privacy tool. It's about whether the future of finance will be built in America or somewhere with fewer prosecutors and more patience for technological gray areas. It's about whether we can build a more open financial system without also building better infrastructure for every criminal on earth. The crypto community is finally being forced to grapple with the fact that those might not be separable goals.

Roman Storm 🇺🇸 🌪️

@rstormsf

In NYC subway after long hours of work. Sleep deprived as hell. Trials are brutal.

667

6:12 PM • Jul 26, 2025

Privacy is normal, and writing code isn't a crime.

But enabling money laundering operations might be, even if you do it with really elegant mathematics. The industry is learning that revolutionary technology comes with revolutionary responsibility, whether we're ready for it or not.

–

For the builders reading this after yesterday's sentencing, the takeaway isn't to stop building. It's to build smarter. Think before you promote, document your intent. The world needs more founders building privacy tools and decentralized infrastructure, just built by people who understand that innovation and responsibility aren't mutually exclusive. 

Don't let fear stop you from building the future. Want more nuanced takes on the crypto underground as these cases evolve? Subscribe to our newsletter...  we're tracking every story that matters for builders navigating the new rules of the game.

i spent this week deep in a schizuation with the economy, the internet, and my own rapidly deteriorating psyche. 3 weeks of rain had fermented my brainstem into a kind of artisanal existential pâté, the sort of delicacy that pairs well with self-doubt and $19 natural wine that tastes like wet cardboard but comes with a heartwarming story about biodynamic vineyard goats. then I returned to nyc and was immediately waterboarded by capitalism for the grave sin of believing I deserved an interior life

theres a certain metacognitive gymnastics required to build the onchain economy, part self-soothing pharmaceutical delusion, part highly informed conviction spiral. you need to cultivate an ineffable whimsy that borders on clinical dissociation, plus an unbreakable zest for life that's been stress-tested by at least three existential market crashes and one moderately severe psychotic break involving cryptocurrency and the works of Thomas Pynchon. you must become the sort of deranged creature who reads SEC lawsuits like they’re fanfic and finds emotional catharsis in token unlock spreadsheets. you should find the phrase “retail exit liquidity” unspeakably erotic.

this is the optimal headspace for both building and consuming while questioning the nature of reality itself. so all that being said, today we're talking about how crypto is finally figuring out how to make itself part completely f***king invisible.

anyway, enjoy some mostly accurate reporting below

xx, c

FWB FEST

Last weekend, several hundred terminally online crypto + crypto adjacent people left their cryogenic chambers and created something beautiful in actual sunlight at FWB FEST in Idyllwild california. The schedule reads like the most ambitious crossover event in internet culture history: "Memecoins as Capital Markets," "Death Meditation," "100x Gain or Rug," and "Be a Living Angel on Earth" all happening within walking distance of each other. This is what happens when you let extremely online people curate a festival: you get sessions on "Emotional Alchemy presented by Polygon" followed by "Astrology Readings w/ Stars Align" followed by music from artists like Nick León and Danny Cole. The schedule is gloriously unhinged in the best possible way, bouncing between deep tech talks and spiritual experiences with the kind of earnest enthusiasm that only comes from people who genuinely believe technology can make the world more interesting.

What made FEST genuinely special wasn't just the ambitious programming but the fact that it actually worked. Base turning the whole thing into a real-world crypto payments experiment felt seamless rather than forced. Hundreds of USDC transactions happening naturally while people focused on the art, music, and ideas.

This is crypto culture at its absolute best: weird, optimistic, and completely unafraid to experiment with new ways of bringing people together. FWB FEST proves that crypto's cultural ambitions aren't just marketing fluff. They're genuine attempts to create new kinds of community experiences.... the sort where you can attend a masterclass on DeFi yield farming at 2pm and participate in a guided meditation about impermanence at 4pm without anyone finding this combination remotely f*cking bizarre.

The real magic wasn't the seamless payments infrastructure or the perfectly curated lineup. it was watching a bunch of people create something that felt like the future of human gathering: technologically enabled but fundamentally about connection, creativity, and the radical possibility that maybe we can build something better than what we inherited.

drew coffman 𝕚𝕤 𝕠𝕟𝕝𝕚𝕟𝕖 🟢

@drewcoffman

making a coffee and talking about onboarding people to the @baseapp with @nouncoffee this weekend at FWB FEST

66

12:37 PM • Aug 3, 2025

Ty Haney + TYB

Ty Haney didn’t set out to be a tech founder. She was just trying to make exercise feel fun. That instinct, equal parts playful and rebellious, sparked the rise of Outdoor Voices, the cult DTC brand that brought pastels, movement, and the viral “Doing Things” slogan into the fitness world. But her ascent was met with a classic boardroom plot twist: by 2020, Ty had been pushed out of the company she created. “I remember being gutted,” she’s said, reflecting on that moment. “But I also knew I wasn’t done.”

That next chapter became TYB (Try Your Best), a startup rooted in one simple idea: fans are more valuable than customers. Instead of throwing money at ads, TYB helps brands build their own community engines, offering social challenges, rituals, and real rewards to turn obsession into status. Users rack up points not just for purchases but for engagement, and they redeem them for everything from Rare Beauty bundles to concert tickets. “People don’t just want merch,” Ty says. “They want to feel seen.”

In August, she returned to Outdoor Voices (this time as co-owner) with TYB fully integrated into the relaunch. It wasn’t just a comeback; it was a systems upgrade. TYB tracks and rewards the fan activity. Outdoor Voices becomes the first brand to operate entirely within her new ecosystem. The consumer doesn’t see blockchain. They see a leaderboard, a badge, a DM from the brand they love. But behind the scenes, TYB is quietly turning brand affinity into a portable, programmable asset.

undefined

@undefined

Some looks going live tmrw for OV community members on TYB (early access). Get your girl a ‘technical tube top’ - pw to unlock outdoorvoices.com shared here in am outdoorvoices.tyb.xyz

23

9:49 PM • Aug 3, 2025

Ty’s superpower is worldbuilding. Her style is warm, her strategy clinical, and her vision surprisingly radical: a future where fans earn equity not by investing capital, but by showing up. In a consumer economy defined by fleeting trends, Ty is betting that the next big company will be built by community.

the end of crypto's cultural purgatory?

After years of crypto founders playing regulatory roulette with agencies that seemed to make up rules on the fly, the first week of August delivered something miraculous: actual clarity. Starting with the GENIUS Act which doesn't just regulate stablecoins, it sort of nukes Tether's business model by requiring 1:1 backing with Treasury bonds and US-registered auditors, something USDT's 85% compliant reserves and Italian auditor BDO can't satisfy. And next, the CLARITY Act finally solved the "is it a security or commodity?" question that's consumed billions in legal fees with an elegantly simple flowchart: if your blockchain passes the "mature blockchain test" for sufficient decentralization, congrats, you're a commodity under CFTC jurisdiction; if not, you're dealing with the SEC. The SEC's liquid staking statement was equally straightforward: protocol staking activities and staking receipt tokens don't constitute securities offerings unless the underlying crypto assets are part of an investment contract. Translation: staking ETH and getting liquid staking tokens back isn't a securities transaction, ending years of regulatory limbo for the entire liquid staking ecosystem.

undefined

@undefined

We will make sure the next chapter of financial innovation is written right here in America.
Watch highlights from my speech launching Project Crypto at @A1Policy.
youtube.com/watch?v=_gc5oO…

4,416

4:33 PM • Aug 1, 2025

But alas !!!  here's the real cultural shift that we should be talking about: Paul Atkins announcing the SEC wants to move America's entire financial system onchain doesn't just create regulatory clarity, it creates social legitimacy for an industry that's spent years being treated like beanie baby collectors with CS degrees. His five-point plan reads like institutional validation incarnate: onshore token issuance, self-custody rights, simplified licensing, onchain service integration, and regulatory sandboxes for experimentation. This is the moment crypto people can finally attend family dinners without your uncle’s yearly checkin if you’re "still doing that Bitcoin thing" with the same tone reserved for pyramid schemes.

When the SEC Chair declares blockchain infrastructure existential for American financial competitiveness rather than a threat to it, we're witnessing the end of crypto's cultural purgatory. The cognitive dissonance of building genuinely transformative financial infrastructure while being perceived as glorified gambling addicts might actually be finally resolving. Circle's IPO success on Ethereum, BlackRock's RWA tokenization, and Coinbase scaling L2s all point to where institutional money flows when regulatory anxiety disappears. We're not just getting regulatory clarity; we're getting cultural permission to stop explaining why our work matters and start building the $500 trillion everything-onchain economy that might suddenly be inevitable rather than aspirational.

is it time to put the ipo onchain?

Figma IPO'd last week, pricing at $33 and popping 256% to $117.59 on day one, topping a $58 billion market valuation. The kicker? Adobe tried to acquire them for $20B before the FTC stepped in like a rugpull auditor. The real twist is that Figma's founder deliberately left billions on the table by underpricing shares to "reward long-term institutional shareholders." Translation: Wall Street insiders got generational wealth while retail had to buy the top. For a company that championed accessibility in design, it was a very tradfi way to go public.

This is exactly why crypto’s still cooking onchain capital formation. Sure, we’re years from replacing IPOs with fully decentralized launches, and yeah, legal landmines are everywhere, but the point remains: the current system is engineered to gatekeep. Onchain systems could offer broader access, lower fees, and transparency baked into the protocol. Figma reminded everyone that public markets are still private clubs in disguise. And crypto, despite the mess, still wants to build a new guest list.

the future of betting is social

The biggest shift in human attention and economic value is happening on social media, but there's almost zero financial infrastructure around it. Aditya Mehta spotted this gap in a way that feels obvious once he explains it. Mr. Beast consistently pulls higher viewership numbers than the Super Bowl, which is literally the biggest sports betting event in America. Taylor Swift's Singapore concert generated tens of billions in economic activity. These aren't just cultural moments. They're massive economic engines that have zero betting infrastructure despite being more predictable and analyzable than most traditional sports.

Kizzy emerged from Aditya's experience as a top-50 FriendTech trader, where he realized social capital could be financialized but the execution needed work. Instead of treating creators like stocks, his team built prediction markets for social media and cultural metrics that are already super readily available: Spotify streams, YouTube views, TikTok engagement, concert attendance. The insight is beautiful in its simplicity. if you can bet on whether LeBron will score 30 points, why can't you bet on whether Sabrina Carpenter's new album 'Manchild' will hit 100 million streams in its first week? People already obsess over these numbers, analyze release strategies, and have genuine expertise about what content will perform. Kizzy just gives them somewhere to put money behind their predictions.

What makes this a genuine consumer crypto breakthrough is how naturally it fits into existing behavior. When Kizzy generated 14,000+ community posts in seven days, that's not paid marketing but organic excitement from people who finally see crypto solving a problem they actually have. Aditya's philosophy: focus on slow progress, maintain good vibes, and build for how people already think about value rather than trying to educate them into caring about entirely new concepts. He's creating financial rails for an attention economy where individual creators routinely outperform traditional media companies, but where all the economic infrastructure still assumes the old model matters more than the new one.

Kizzy is built on Monad, and currently on testnet. Check it out here: http://testnet.kizzy.io

Stay tuned for imminent mainnet launch by following them on X.

99.⨀

@crexsol

champions league season looking good on kizzy w these football creators in app

steady lads, deploying more football creators to social media betting on monad.

111

6:01 AM • Jul 26, 2025

from cowboy to commercial

Crypto isn't going through a personality crisis. It's just growing up. The tension between “crypto-native” and “crypto-adjacent” isn’t a battle for the soul of the industry. It’s a sign of maturation. Every new platform starts this way: a small group of power users pushes the limits, funds the infrastructure, and creates the conditions for the rest of the world to show up.

Building for crypto-native vs. building for crypto-adjacent

It's 2025 and crypto is going mainstream.

https://showerthoughts.substack.com

Polymarket’s top 196 users (top 0.06%) drive half the volume. Their bets build the trust layer for casual users to lean on. Farcaster’s early adopters pay to mint, build clients, and experiment with onchain UX so new users and crypto-curious can scroll in peace. Blackbird hides token plumbing behind better restaurant rewards. These aren’t edge cases. This is how scale works.

And the shift from cowboy founders to commercial ones? It’s not a replacement. It’s a merge. The builders winning right now aren’t web2 devs adding token wrappers. They’re the ones who grok crypto’s technical unlocks and know how to ship them through familiar distribution rails. Chipped turns your manicure into a social rewards system, letting you tap to share your profile, earn points for making connections, and redeem them for real-world perks. Zora makes NFTs disappear for the end user by understanding the culture deeply enough to abstract it.

While crypto adoption might feel like it's building toward a sudden breakthrough moment, the reality is more nuanced. As Brian Armstrong noted, "It will always be a spectrum, not a sudden moment in time." Yet there's still an aspirational goal driving much of the innovation: reaching that critical mass where accessing open financial systems becomes truly mainstream.

Crypto isn’t about choosing native or adjacent. The future is hybrid. And it’s already here.

should fans run the record labels

Joey Iny has been chasing the same elusive problem for a year: how to make crypto actually fun and useful for music. His third attempt, Viral.fun, might be the one that cracks it. After building CratePlace (an AI music generation tool with tokens) and WaveLeaks (a platform for underground music trading), Joey realized he'd been approaching the problem backwards. "I actually believe that the right go to market, at least for me, is fans, not necessarily artists themselves," he explains. "Artists really just wanna focus on making music. But it's the listeners who are in these discords, posting online, sharing and discovering. They're the ones who will be coming back daily and using your products obsessively." This insight led him to pivot from supply-side (artists) to demand-side (fans), fundamentally changing how he thinks about music platforms.

Viral.fun launched with a simple premise: every song in the world should be tradeable. Anyone can submit a song, which automatically generates a token that fans can buy to boost it up the charts or sell if they think it's overhyped. Artists earn fees on every trade automatically. When Brian Armstrong's favorite song got leaked, over $300k of trading volume hit the platform, sending it to the #1 spot and earning the artist over $2,000 in fees. Joey describes it as "Polymarket for music" or a "decentralized record label" where fans become the tastemakers instead of platforms and industry gatekeepers. He's trying to bridge crypto natives with music fans who have never used onchain products. If you can build something that serves both the speculators and deep music fans who want discovery tools, you solve the liquidity problem that kills most niche platforms.

undefined

@undefined

What happened in July financially can never happen again

64.1K

3:11 PM • Jul 31, 2025

undefined

@undefined

things i do on the plane in order of priority
- organize meme folder
- read a book
- watch lord of the rings trilogy for 100th time
- drink red wine
- drunk text people i haven't spoken to in over a decade
- organize / delete photos
- write lists in my notebook
- dissociate

202

5:06 PM • Aug 5, 2025

Keara Sullivan

@superkeara

Being in a bad mood is soo humiliating like why am I replying in one word answers this is ruining my brand as a delight to be around I feel so naked without my zest for life

200.8K

10:15 PM • Aug 3, 2025

Maxime

@maximecperoumal

Great artists, engineers, and researchers are indistinguishable from one another.

59

9:12 PM • Jul 21, 2025

Jackson Dahl

@jacksondahl

This weekend @HipCityReg called being on your phone an “out of body experience” and I’ve been thinking about that a lot.

Sometimes I’ll “black back in” when scrolling and realize I’m in my body looking at a piece of glass

99

3:35 PM • Aug 4, 2025

share this newsletter if ur a patron of the arts

happy 10th Birthday Ethereum!!! when a blockchain turns 10, it gets a magical sorting halo that determines its destiny ~ angel, fairy, or devil ~ but somehow yours just keeps blinking "CASINO" in neon letters. congrats on a decade of convincing humanity that money should require a hardware wallet, a computer science degree, a VPN, and emotional resilience. and yet, somehow along the way you've convinced the entire world that programmable money is actually a good idea, which is either the most democratizing force in financial history or most elaborate collective hallucination with really good branding (but honestly, it's working so who gives a fuck!!!!)

in other news, somewhere between pedro pascal treating his coworkers like emotional support animals and discovering that anxiety can apparently only be cured through unauthorized workplace massages, and sydney sweeney accidentally reigniting America's eugenic anxiety through a jean commercial that dared to mention her "great genes," we witnessed the spectacular implosion of tea dating advice, a women's safety app built by men that managed to expose 72,000 private user images because apparently their cybersecurity strategy was just crossing their fingers really, really hard. the app that promised to keep women safe from predatory men instead served up their government IDs, selfies, and private trauma dumps to the entire internet like a digital charcuterie board of female vulnerability. meanwhile, Katy Perry is reportedly seducing Justin Trudeau into a maple syrup-backed diplomatic incident, and a magnitude 8.8 earthquake just reminded the entire pacific rim that nature remains the ultimate disruptor.

and all of that to say, i write to you from the perpetual drizzle of berlin where im stationed for no defensible reason except that something about the concrete brutalism and techno makes life’s existential absurdity feel appropriately cinematic. the rain here falls with the teutonic persistence of privacy violation notifications, turning every cobblestone street into a mirror that reflects back your life choices. but isn't that exactly what we signed up for when we decided every tweet deserved its own derivatives market?

anywayssss, enjoy some mostly accurate reportings below

xx, c

The Ethereum Foundation's Application Layer Awakening ft. Binij

The Ethereum Foundation just hired Binji away from Optimism, and his reasoning cuts deeper than typical career moves: "Honestly, it felt like coming home. No matter where I've worked, I've always been working for Ethereum. It's the reason I'm here. It's why I joined crypto. It's the root system. The soul." But the timing reveals something significant about the EF's evolving focus: they're doubling down on the application layer in ways they haven't before. While other ecosystems captured developer mindshare through aggressive outreach and consumer-focused initiatives, the EF has historically taken a more hands-off approach. Binji's hire signals a strategic shift he describes with characteristic directness: "Ethereum needs to be where the future is being built again. Not on the sidelines. At the center."

Binji's mission reveals how fundamentally the EF's approach is shifting. "My job is to find the people already building the future and help them choose Ethereum as their foundation," he explains, emphasizing that "the next wave won't come from a single killer app. It'll come from thousands of builders across disciplines who feel called to create something bigger than themselves." This represents a radical departure from the EF's historical hands-off approach. Instead of assuming great infra automatically attracts great apps, they're actively courting talent and creating support systems. The EF's first-ever founder-focused event and new app-focused team aren't just org changes; they're acknowledgments that dev experience and ecosystem nurturing matter as much as technical elegance.

When asked about Ethereum's supposed identity crisis, Binji's response reveals the mindset driving this transformation: "It's not an identity crisis. It's an identity emergence. When sentiment was low, people stepped the fuck up. That's what matters. Ethereum didn't lose itself. It found itself because people cared enough to drop their lives to ensure its success." His vision for driving adoption focuses on applications that "meet people where they are and give them more agency than they had before," specifically products that enhance existing online behavior by giving users ownership and upside in platforms that currently extract value from their participation.

Binji sees crypto's real potential in democratizing access to financial primitives that were previously gatekept. "The adoption of blockchains means previously gatekept liquidity is now accessible to be composed on by anyone, which can lead to people building novel experiences; for example: an app that auto invests on tokenized stocks based on a user's screentime," he explains, illustrating how familiar behaviors can unlock entirely new possibilities. His broader mission tackles a fundamental accessibility challenge: "What if the best Ethereum idea is stuck inside the mind of someone who thinks crypto is a scam? Or not for them? Or too complicated? We need to fix that and bring more people in." If Binji succeeds, Ethereum's next wave won't just be technically superior but will be built by a far more diverse set of creators who see crypto rails as the foundation for making "the internet feel fair again."

Polymarket's American Dream

Shayne Coplan just did the full CNBC victory lap, explaining how Polymarket went from FBI raids to $112 million acquisitions in what feels like the fastest redemption arc in crypto history. "I'm from New York. I went to high school right here, and the mayor talking about our site is just incredible," he said, describing the surreal experience of watching Eric Adams casually drop "the Polymarket for this" during interviews. The company that became what Shayne calls "the Bloomberg terminal for reality" while locked out of the US market is now buying derivatives exchanges to get back home, and the cultural momentum they built from exile is paying off.

The acquisition of QCX isn't just about regulatory compliance, it's about infrastructure maturity. "When I get to meet these people, they say, oh, my God, Polymarket's amazing, but I wish we could trade on Polymarket. And, you know, ask and you shall receive, right?" They'd accidentally built the killer app for prediction markets without the plumbing to serve institutional demand. Now they can offer the full stack: retail users betting on political drama, institutions hedging geopolitical risk, and everyone in between using markets as information aggregation tools. Shayne's vision of "markets on everything" suddenly seems less like crypto idealism and more like inevitable financial evolution when you hear him talking about Middle East conflict prediction markets that move faster than news feeds.

What's fascinating is how they're positioning against traditional competition. While Kalshi spent years navigating US regulations to build a compliant prediction market, Polymarket built global cultural cache and is now buying their way back in with better technology and stronger network effects. They're not just competing on regulatory arbitrage anymore, they're competing on being the place where information becomes price discovery. The fact that they're already exploring launching their own stablecoin shows they understand they're not just building a betting platform, they're building financial infrastructure for a world where prediction markets become as normal as stock markets.

Interface's Pivot: From NFTs to Takes and Token Discovery

Anoushka's latest updates from Interface reveal how quickly platforms adapt when user behavior shifts. The team completely removed NFTs from both the feed and user profiles a few months ago, citing infra limitations and the brutal reality that "no one really cared anymore." Instead, Interface is doubling down on what's actually gaining traction: ERC20s and the social layer around trading them. Their new "Takes" feature lets users tag wallets and markets while sharing opinions that get reflected on price charts, with a copy-trading mechanism that pays the original poster swap fees when others follow their calls. As she explained, "All nft collecting seems to happen directly on platforms (e.g. rodeo) with embedded wallets, so it also kinda became too hard to track." Interface essentially became a victim of NFT infrastructure fragmentation rather than user preference.

The pivot to social trading feels perfectly timed as the market shifts toward creator and content coins. The concept is elegantly simple, as Anoushka puts it: "I know the creator/brand → they now have a coin → I buy their coin. Similar kind of hype wave as with clankers early on." What's most interesting is the behavioral shift she's observing: "We see some token creators starting to follow their holders, so going to the token page, opening the lists of holders and following people from there." It's not particularly shocking, but it shows how tokenization creates new forms of audience development that didn't exist before. Creators are reverse-engineering their communities from onchain data, turning wallet addresses into social connections.

This feels like a natural evolution for Interface, which has always been about making onchain activity more social. Moving from NFT discovery to token discovery with integrated trading opinions seems like following user demand rather than trying to force outdated behaviors. The emphasis on intentional, long-term investing over FOMO chasing suggests they're betting that sustainable creator economies require genuine conviction rather than pure speculation. When every creator has a coin and every opinion can be copy-traded, the lines between content creation, investing, and community building completely blur. Anoushka's casual acknowledgment that NFTs just stopped mattering feels refreshingly honest in an industry that often refuses to admit when narratives die.

ADIN's Network: When Venture Scouts Actually Get Paid

ADIN just opened their Network Member waitlist to the public, and it's essentially venture scouting if venture scouts actually got compensated fairly for their work. The model is elegantly simple: Network Members submit promising startups, ADIN's five specialized venture agents analyze the deals and generate thorough memos (complete with valuation predictions, market maps, and MOIC/TAM analysis), then investors vote on what gets funded while their input trains the model. If a deal gets funded, whoever sourced it earns 10% of the upside. That's real venture economics for people who don't need to be on Sand Hill Road or have an MBA to participate in startup returns. Over 100 people have already joined: founders, operators, researchers, and terminally online scouts who finally get rewarded for seeing things early.

Aaron Wright, CEO of Tribute Labs (which built ADIN), frames this as venture's "moneyball moment" where AI and emerging tech like crypto change the rules for highest performance, similar to how quants transformed baseball. It's addressing the fundamental bottleneck in venture: deal discovery happens through networks, but most of the people with the best deal flow aren't the people with the capital. They're the extremely online people who get DMs from founders before the rest of the market but traditionally got zero upside for their insights. ADIN combines human taste with AI infra to create what they call "algorithmic venture": faster, more decentralized, and with better-aligned incentives. It's betting that the future of VC belongs to people who can feel cultural shifts before they hit trend reports, not just those who can write the biggest checks.

join the first autonomous venture fund: adin.online/waitlist

ADIN

@ADINonline

today, we’re opening the Network Member waitlist to the public. (like venture scouts with better economics).

join the first autonomous venture fund. ↓

53

8:08 PM • Jul 24, 2025

Jules' Brand Bible: How Zerion is Building the Most Coveted Events in Crypto

Jules, head of b2b marketing and growth at Zerion, has cracked the code on something most crypto companies struggle with: making technical infrastructure feel genuinely aspirational. Her philosophy is deceptively simple ~~~ "Brand is the moat" ~~~ but the execution reveals someone who understands that people don't just buy portfolio trackers, they buy into identities. The Zerion Beach House at EthCC generated 4,000+ social posts in seven days and 4x'd their mindshare, but Jules' secret weapon isn't budget or spectacle. It's curation. "Impact ≠ spend; impact = curation at the door," she explains. "The guest list is key!" Her approach treats every event like an obsessive dinner party where she controls themes, tableware, lighting, and most importantly, who sits next to whom. The result is what she calls "dinners, dance floors, and tablescapes" that create emotional connections through all five senses.

Julesw

@Julessw_

My love language is crafting meaningful experiences and focusing on elevating brand visibility and creating connections that actually stick
Here's a recap on the @zerion Beach House at @EthCC

Goals
→ Be everywhere, all at once
→ Host the most curated, talked-about

117

3:02 PM • Jul 7, 2025

What makes Julie's approach fascinating is how she balances Zerion's technical reality (multi-chain portfolio tracking and trading interfaces) with the elevated lifestyle brand feeling their events create. Her background in fashion shows and she's been curating branded events and influencer packages for years before helping launch the first SheFi Summits. Now she's applying those same principles to crypto infrastructure, asking "What would be impossible here?" for each activation. Her dream event reveals the ambition: a seven-day, invite-only founders and builders residency on a remote island with hands-on prototyping, structured workshops, and daily wellness rituals. For founders on smaller budgets, her advice cuts through the noise: curate the right people, design one signature takeaway, state a sharp purpose and repeat it throughout. "Experiences are ads you can walk through," she says, and in a space where the bar for industry side events remains surprisingly low, Julie's treating every interaction like the masterpiece it could become.

The Publisher-Exchange Framework: When Content Becomes Currency

Shayon Sengupta's "Publisher-Exchange" framework from Multicoin captures what's happening as crypto finally finds a consumer moment via Zora. His thesis centers on the "Attention Theory of Value" where asset pricing flows from the perceived time, energy, and money that communities devote to assets rather than traditional financial metrics. We're witnessing the collapse of the traditional media funnel where advertisers paid platforms to interrupt audiences into direct financial relationships between creators and consumers. Applications like Zora, Farcaster, and Paragraph are turning creative outputs into liquid assets that can be priced, traded, and speculated on in real-time. As Shayon puts in, this creates "publisher-exchanges" that blur the lines between content consumption and value exchange. The next big exchange might not look like Coinbase but perhaps rather like a social app where audiences can wager on the virality of upcoming creators' content.

The data backs up this shift dramatically. Dan Smith showed Zora recently hit a three-month high for posts with 54% coming from the app, while content and creator coins reached an all-time high aggregate FDV of $39 million. This isn't just speculative trading; it represents a fundamental inversion of risk models. Previously platforms extracted value from creators by providing "free" distribution while keeping advertising revenue, forcing creators to build massive audiences before seeing meaningful monetization. Now audiences directly absorb the risk of creator success by investing in tokens before knowing whether the creator will produce anything worthwhile. It's venture capital mechanics applied to every tweet, song, and essay, where consumption and speculation merge into a single action.

What makes this transition so compelling is how it fixes the broken incentive structures of web2 media. Instead of advertisers transacting with platforms as rent-seeking intermediaries, value flows directly to users through what Shayon calls "Direct Value Issuance." Rather than being farmed for attention while seeing none of the upside from that attention's financialization via display ads, users get direct exposure through earning and spending assets based on their attention patterns. Mason Nystrom shows how different interfaces (social apps, trading terminals, creator platforms) all plug into the same underlying market infrastructure, making every creative act both a piece of content and a financial instrument. We're moving from a world where creativity was insulated from direct market feedback to one where market forces become the primary creative signal.

Jacquelyn Melinek

@jacqmelinek

crypto founders be like

376

8:14 PM • Jul 24, 2025

mary

@howdymerry

the only thing worth building in crypto is net new markets

there are still abundant asymmetric opportunities to go 0 -> 1

the past era of crypto is saturated with parallel attempts of 1 -> infinity type products, each iterating on pre-set KPIs like TPS defined by projects that

Zaheer

@SplitCapital

Very much the end of hyper VC growth for new things in crypto.

Seems like a good time to be a novel builder because competition has thinned out in a sense, at least at the earlier stages.

New wars will start between foundations soon.

47

5:25 PM • Jul 29, 2025

Ethereum Foundation

@ethereumfndn

There are 100+ events happening, across the ecosystem, to celebrate Ethereum’s 10 year anniversary.

Find an event in your city and help us welcome Ethereum into a new decade →

ethereum.org

10 Year Anniversary

Celebrating 10 years of censorship resistance, 100% uptime, decentralization, community building, developer growth, global collaboration, cypherpunk values, hackathons, censorship resistance,...

1,072

12:55 AM • Jul 29, 2025

Gwart

@GwartyGwart

The most important part of banking the unbanked is introducing them to derivatives

1,077

8:51 PM • Jul 25, 2025

Cheryl Douglass

@cherdougie

she said yes to my dao proposal

82

6:57 PM • Jul 25, 2025

share this newsletter if ur a patron of the arts

grand risings to whom it may concern,,

the devil couldnt reach you so he sent you a special quiz via the seed club newsletter. today's edition brings you:

turns out the distance between salem 1692 and crypto in 2025 is exactly zero psychological kilometers. both involve communities of true believers who've convinced themselves they possess secret knowledge, both feature elaborate conspiracy theories about shadowy cabals manipulating markets, and both are the same cultural modality, just with different user interfaces.

the parallels are so precise it's almost mesmerizing. medieval witch trials gave us scapegoating, moral panic, and mass hysteria over invisible forces controlling the economy. crypto gives us... scapegoating, moral panic, and mass hysteria over invisible forces controlling the economy. the main difference is that witches were accused of consorting with demons for supernatural power, while crypto influencers consort with low float high fdv pump and dumps for the same result. at least the demons were honest about their intentions.

what follows is a diagnostic tool for determining whether you're witnessing a 17th-century witch trial or just another wednesday on crypto twitter. its a mini app btw.

anyway..........................................

enjoy some mostly accurate reportings below

xx, c

The ZK Revolution Will Be Berryfiable

My dear friend Reka went from treating sick animals to building the infrastructure for unlimited blockchain computation, and somehow along the way she's convinced half of crypto twitter that zero knowledge proofs are actually berries. It sounds unhinged, but stick with me, because if you've ever tried to understand zero knowledge technology, you know we desperately need someone to make it make sense. After spending three months interviewing 35+ teams and logging over 100 hours of conversations, she joined RiscZero to launch Boundless, a universal protocol that sits between existing chains, connecting compute providers and networks in ways that could finally make "my assets are on this chain vs that chain" irrelevant.

But here's where it gets delightfully weird: faced with making ZK proofs accessible to actual humans, Reka rebranded the entire field around fruit. "Berryfiable compute" started as wordplay but evolved into a full multimedia experience where her berry NFT launch saw 1.5M mints in 48 hours and accounted for 12% of Base's traffic. She's built a 9,000+ person community around berry memes and created a mythology where provers are farmers, requesters are chefs, and Boundless is the farmers market where computation gets bought and sold like produce. The metaphor actually works: just like you don't need to inspect every seed to know a berry is sweet, you don't need to re-run a computation to verify it happened correctly.

What surprised me most about Reka's journey is her perspective on crypto's maturity. "We don't need mass onboarding," she says. "We need to act like this is already a serious industry and push the boundaries of what's possible." Looking ahead, she sees a future where technology becomes "way smoother and more natural, both online and onchain," less siloed, more personalized, where the products that win feel both socially alive and deeply personal. It's the same idealistic drive from when she was a veterinarian in 2016, just with a lot more technical sophistication and a clear target.

Read the full story here:

The ZK Revolution Will Be Berryfiable

Meet the former veterinarian turning crypto's most complex technology into something people actually want to use.

https://paragraph.com

The Base Everything App Arrives

Coinbase just made the boldest bet in crypto UX history. Their wallet app, used by millions, is now the Base App, a full social network built on crypto rails. Instead of treating payments like a separate thing you do in a finance app, they're embedding earning directly into posting, chatting, and discovering content. Post something, people like it, you earn money. No creator fund applications, no minimum follower counts, just immediate value flowing to anyone creating anything worth supporting.

What's wild is how they're positioning this against the closed internet we've gotten used to. Your identity, your content, your social graph: you own it all and can take it anywhere. Built on open protocols like Farcaster for social, XMTP for messaging, and Zora for content ownership, it's the first major attempt at a truly portable social experience. The demo showing someone making a prediction market bet, splitting dinner costs, and earning yield on their money all within a group chat felt like finally seeing the "programmable money" vision actually work in practice.

Base

@base

This will make sense in a few hours. x.com/i/broadcasts/1…

9,697

5:05 PM • Jul 16, 2025

"This week, I personally saw how excited new users get when they post for the first time and start earning right away," says Chintan Turakhia, Senior Director of Engineering for the Base app. "We designed the app to be seamless, so there's no switching tabs, downloading a new app, or signing up for a new account. It all just works directly in the feed and within messages." That seamless integration is the key differentiator. Instead of forcing users to context-switch between social media and financial apps, Base is betting that the future is one unified experience where money flows as naturally as likes and comments.

The timing feels right. We're in this weird moment where everyone knows the current creator economy is broken: you need massive followings to make anything, platforms can nuke your account overnight, and most value flows to the platforms, not creators. Base App is betting that crypto's new infrastructure is mature enough to offer a real alternative. If they're right, this could be the iPhone moment for crypto UX. If not, it's an expensive experiment in social apps that most people aren't asking for.

Farcaster Rolls out Collectibles

Just as Base launches its everything-app with embedded earning, Farcaster fires back with Collectibles, turning any cast into a 1-of-1 NFT through 24-hour auctions that start at $1. The timing isn't coincidental. Both platforms are racing to solve the same fundamental problem: how do you make creators earn money from day one without needing massive followings or algorithmic favor? Base's approach is continuous micro-earnings through social engagement, while Farcaster is betting on auction-based collecting driven by emotional attachment rather than speculation.

What's fascinating is how different their philosophies are. Base wants to make earning invisible and automatic: post something, people engage, money flows. Farcaster's Collectibles are deliberately high-friction: you have to actively choose to bid, compete in auctions, and pay meaningful amounts for posts that resonate with you personally. "For most bids, they will be for casts that are interesting/funny/meaningful to them. It will be personal. Not particularly rational," explains the Farcaster team. It's more like buying art than earning yield... emotional, vibe-based, with no expectation of future profit.

The real competition isn't between the platforms though, it's between different theories of human behavior. Does widespread adoption come from making money invisible (Base) or making it meaningful (Farcaster)? Base is optimizing for scale and frictionless participation, while Farcaster is optimizing for intentionality and genuine creator-fan relationships. Both are built on the same foundational insight that creators deserve to earn directly from their audiences, but they're taking completely opposite approaches to get there. The next few months will tell us which psychological framework actually drives sustainable creator economies.

The Ether Machine

Seven years ago, I was working at ConsenSys during those wild early days when Joe Lubin was building what felt like half the Ethereum ecosystem from a Brooklyn office. Back then, we were all believers talking about "Web3" to anyone who'd listen, but institutional adoption felt like a distant dream. Now that same crew is taking their ETH maximalism to Nasdaq. Andrew Keys, a ConsenSys alum, just announced The Ether Machine, a $1.5 billion public vehicle designed to be the "MicroStrategy of ETH," complete with staking, restaking, and DeFi yield strategies.

The Ether Machine

@TheEtherMachine

We are The Ether Machine.
Today we launch the largest public vehicle ever built to own and manage ETH with over $1.5B in committed capital.

This is Ethereum’s institutional chapter.
Not passive. Not synthetic. Not outsourced.

2,958

12:21 PM • Jul 21, 2025

What's fascinating is seeing the Ethereum insider playbook scale to public markets. Keys is personally committing $645 million worth of ETH to launch, while Joe Lubin's SharpLink already holds 281K ETH as a public treasury vehicle. This isn't just about passive holding like MicroStrategy's Bitcoin bet, they're actively deploying ETH as productive capital, earning yield while evangelizing the network. It's the logical evolution of that early ConsenSys thesis that Ethereum would become the settlement layer for everything.

The timing couldn't be better. ETH just broke $3,700 and spot ETF inflows are finally heating up, but this rally isn't really about onchain activity. Gas usage is stable, DeFi volumes are still well below 2021 peaks. This is pure positioning by institutions who've decided Ethereum won the infrastructure war. Watching the people I used to grab coffee with in Bushwick now launching billion-dollar public vehicles feels surreal, but it's probably the clearest signal yet that Ethereum's institutional moment has arrived.

join us live everyday at 11AM

peacenode.eth✰

@peace_node

we still talk about you

6

4:15 PM • Jul 23, 2025

Ben Roy

@benroy_x

If you’re young and you make a lot of money this cycle this is an open letter to please actually go do something with your lives

-Pay off debt
-Be intentional and hang out with your family
-Use financial freedom to learn new skills
-Pursue a cool career arc without worrying

2,156

12:03 AM • Jul 21, 2025

signüll

@signulll

crypto attracts an interesting crowd because it demands less emotional fluency. it’s math, markets, engineering, etc… not empathy, care, or intuition. the products are optimized for rational engagement, not emotional resonance.

that’s also why crypto apps tend to suck for

298

6:00 PM • Jul 17, 2025

david phelps

@divine_economy

the internet has two native markets: crypto (digital financial capital) and attention (digital social capital)

crypto apps take off when they combine them: polymarket, pumpfun and... persuasion markets.

i wrote a full manifesto for what this future looks like (link below)

146

6:56 PM • Jul 18, 2025

$zora

@zora

if you're contributing to a platform, you should have the ability to start earning right away

505

5:56 PM • Jul 22, 2025

JT

@jiratickets

ahhhh yes good morning let’s open up the Infinite Information River for a nice 20 minutes before getting out of bed or thinking any original thoughts at all

47.2K

3:49 PM • Jul 22, 2025

Cheryl Douglass

@cherdougie

the eyes chico

11

11:42 PM • Jul 19, 2025

Sorry, wtf is ZK?

I'll be honest: every time someone tries to explain zero knowledge proofs to me, my eyes glaze over about thirty seconds in. But here's the simple version: ZK lets you prove something is true without revealing the underlying data. Think proving you're over 21 without showing your birth date, or proving a computation happened correctly without re-running it. The magic is that no matter how massive the computation, the proof stays tiny.

The problem has always been that writing ZK circuits was impossibly hard. So Boundless built a ZKVM that lets you write normal Rust code instead, then added a decentralized network to actually run the proofs. Think Chainlink for computation instead of data feeds.

Enter Reka

Sometimes the most interesting crypto stories start in the most unexpected places. Reka was a veterinarian in 2016 when she first discovered crypto, not because she was chasing gains, but because she wanted to build "more care, more flourishing, more freedom." She saw blockchain as the backend for a more independent future, one that could make humanity progress faster by putting the collective first.

That idealism led her through founding startups in food production and social media, then to Guild where she spent years scaling onchain communities. But even after helping hundreds of teams grow their audiences and building DeFi automation tools, something wasn't clicking. "Wasn't enough," she said. "I knew I needed to go deeper in the stack." So she took three months off to talk to 35+ teams building everything from L1s to rollups, logging over 100 hours of conversations with founders and VCs.

What was she really looking for? "Something that enables that future of more," she told me. "That enables that future that actually is and feels different. I wanted something that makes me believe that the things that are hard to imagine to be true can be true, and makes the impossible possible." It's a beautifully idealistic way to think about infrastructure, but that's exactly what drew her to zero knowledge. After all those conversations, she kept coming back to one conclusion: most of crypto's problems come down to computational limits. Blockchains are slow, expensive, and can't talk to each other easily.

Her original vision has only gotten clearer since 2016. "We've made enough mistakes as an industry that the path forward is less abstract now," she explains. "Finance was just the entry point. What matters more is the infrastructure we're building… tools that let us coordinate, transact, and interact peer-to-peer without needing permission. In the future I see, money fades into the background."

That's what drew her to zero knowledge and ultimately to join RiscZero to launch Boundless. But here's where it gets interesting: Boundless isn't actually a blockchain. "It has chain-like characteristics, but it's more than that," Reka explains. "It sits between existing chains, rollups, bridges, and even physical infrastructure. It connects compute providers, onchain networks, and the internet in a unified way." Her bullishness cuts through the usual technical jargon: "Look at what's happening with AI, intents and automations and tell me we are not going to fill every piece of 'free' computation we have. Humanity will need infinite compute, we aren't even close to having enough." ZK proofs can compress massive computations into tiny, verifiable packages.

Their first real use case, Signal, brings full Ethereum consensus proofs to Base, not the "probably fine" light client sampling most people use, but cryptographic verification of the entire network state. Once you can trustlessly verify any chain's state anywhere else, the concept of "my assets are on this chain vs that chain" starts to melt away. Your Ethereum NFTs could work seamlessly in Solana games. Your Bitcoin could earn yield in Arbitrum DeFi. No more wrapped tokens or sketchy bridges, just math proving that your stuff is actually yours, wherever you want to use it. It's like having a notarized receipt for everything that happened onchain, but one that any other blockchain can instantly verify. When the community crowdfunded $600k in less than a week to pick the next chain to prove, that told me people actually want this infrastructure built, not just theorized about.

Boundless

@boundless_xyz

Over 162 ETH ($600,000+) committed to boosting The Signal in just one week.

Every boost powers full Ethereum consensus proofs, enabling ZK interoperability across chains.

The Boundless community is on

Boundless

@boundless_xyz

Over 58 ETH ($200,000+) committed to boosting The Signal.

Each boost fuels ZK interoperability: Ethereum today, every chain tomorrow.

We won’t stop until ZK is everywhere.

373

3:41 PM • Jul 22, 2025

The Berry Revolution

But here's where Reka's Boundless lore gets delightfully weird. Faced with the challenge of making zk proofs accessible to god forbid actual real humans, she did what any reasonable person would do: she rebranded the entire field around fruit. "Berryfiable compute" started as wordplay on "verifiable compute," but it's evolved into a full multimedia experience that's somehow made ZK proofs... fun? Her berry NFT launch saw 1.5 million mints in 48 hours and accounted for 12% of Base's traffic. She's berryfied people at conferences, built a 9,000-person+ community around berry memes, and created an entire mythology where provers are farmers, requesters are chefs, and Boundless is the farmers market where computation gets bought and sold like produce.

It's absurd, but it works. The berry metaphor actually clarifies something important: just like you don't need to inspect every seed to know a berry is sweet, you don't need to re-run a computation to verify it happened correctly. The proof is compact, portable, and trustless. And just like a berry you can take anywhere and turn into something better. When she tweets "berryfiable compute has never looked so sweet" alongside team photos, you realize she's not just building infra, she's building culture around infra. In an industry that takes itself way too seriously, watching Reka turn zk into a fruit-based lifestyle brand feels like exactly the kind of creative chaos crypto needs.

Where it’s all headed?

What surprised me most about Reka's crypto journey is her perspective on the industry's maturity. "Crypto isn't fringe anymore. It's global. People know it, use it, and build with it. There's funding, infrastructure, real governance, data we can learn from," she says. "We don't need mass onboarding. We need to act like this is already a serious industry and push the boundaries of what's possible."

Looking ahead five years, she sees interactions becoming "way smoother and more natural, both online and onchain. Technology will be less siloed and way more personalized. The products that win will be the ones that feel socially alive, where your people are, and also deeply personal, where everything feels built just for you."

It's that same idealistic drive from 2016, just with a lot more technical sophistication and a clear target.

salut,

bastille day ended, as all things should, with a nude drone of marianne projected across the parisian sky: liberté, égalité, targeted advertising. beneath this patriotic peep show, i sipped pet nat next to a stranger named lucien. overhead, 2,000 drones arranged themselves into a luminous map of france, everyone around me applauded like this was normal, a militarized sky ritual sponsored by the ministry of culture. the crowd gasped. a child dropped their éclair. i, too, felt something stir, though it might have been the third glass of natural wine or the existential horror of watching artificial intelligence perform nationalism. a fitting tribute to the modern summer.

meanwhile, NPR has bravely entered the chat with a soft-focus explainer on stablecoins. “they’re like dollars, but worse!” the headline might as well read. they’ve discovered crypto the same way your aunt discovers shibari: with an earnest, unsettling mix of horror and awe. i'm fascinated by this temporal displacement where institutions discover things that we have been using for years. somewhere in their newsroom, a producer is probably still trying to understand why anyone cares about digital dollars that act like dollars but aren't dollars but also definitely are dollars. i hope they never learn what a bonding curve is. i hope none of us do.

back in the trenches, Pump launched a token. the vibes? rabid. i have no commentary other than this. we are deep in the Summer of Financial Hallucination™, hyperliquid’s Pump spot volume has flipped major CEXs. polymarket, once raided by the FBI, is now vindicated by the DOJ, like prophecy fulfilled. chainlink is giving gold stars to states, and somewhere between the existential inertia, drone show patriotism, i felt a tiny flicker of faith. not in the markets, god no. in us. the deranged little weirdos who keep logging on. who keep reshaping attention into capital and trauma into protocol design. who read about regulatory enforcement and think, “huh… bullish.”

but what does it all mean? nothing. everything.

so go outside. touch grass. kiss a girl. and enjoy some mostly accurate reportings below

xx, c

Building for the 2 Billion People Left Behind

When Satvik Sethi talks about the inspiration behind Offline Protocol, he doesn't start with technology. He starts with his great grandmother's room in India, where he spent afternoons as a child processing emotions and learning about patience. He talks about government-imposed internet blackouts (India leads the world with 85 last year, compared to Iran's 30). He talks about Ukrainian refugees unable to access their bank accounts when payment processors shut down and ATMs ran dry.

The throughline isn't technical innovation. It's human need. And that distinction might explain why Offline Protocol has exploded from 25,000 users to 240,000 in a matter of weeks, and is currently growing by roughly 1,000 users per hour, fully organically, with no paid marketing.

"Every VC I've spoken to is like, oh, Starlink is just going to make your company redundant… And yet, you know, over 2 billion people in the world still don't have internet access."

The Infrastructure for the Disconnected

Offline Protocol does something that sounds impossible until you understand it: it enables applications to operate without internet or phone service. Using a mix of Bluetooth Low Energy, Bluetooth Classic, and soon Wi-Fi Direct, the platform creates local mesh networks that allow messaging, payments, and information sharing between nearby devices.

The technology isn't revolutionary. Mesh networking has existed for years. What's revolutionary is Satvik's conviction that crypto incentives can finally make these networks viable at scale. Instead of requiring specialized hardware, Offline Protocol works on existing smartphones, creating what Satvik calls "user powered networks."

But the real innovation might be in payments. Offline Protocol has developed what Satvik claims is "a brand-new primitive for offline payments that doesn't actually exist anywhere else out there today." Unlike services like M-Pesa in Kenya or Paytm in India that claim to offer offline payments but still require SMS connectivity, Offline Protocol allows fully offline transactions by collateralizing onchain assets.

The Network Effect of Necessity

The growth numbers are staggering partly because of the product's inherent viral mechanics. "The beauty of mesh networks is you can't use them by yourself," Satvik notes. "And so every user that we onboard by default at least brings on one more person. On average, I would say we get like 3-4 from each user."

But the more interesting aspect is the breadth of use cases emerging organically. "The same week we had users in Coachella, and that same week we had users at a Syrian refugee camp in Jordan using our messaging app," Satvik shares. "So it's like you kind of see that this is not limited by geography in terms of the use case."

This geographic and demographic spread reflects Satvik's sophisticated understanding of his market. He's identified two distinct user groups: high-virality Western users who might need the service occasionally (music festivals, natural disasters, subway dead zones) and power users in developing economies who face daily connectivity challenges.

"Our second demographic is what we describe to be our power users. And these are people in these more developing economies and places that are typically disconnected. Think of, you know, everything from refugee camps, different NGOs across the world, rural neighborhoods, volunteer networks. And these are people that actually have smartphones, but they don't have access to reliable internet or telecom solutions."

The Power of Intentional Community

Behind Offline Protocol's viral growth lies something that gets thrown around loosely in crypto but rarely executed well: genuine community. For Satvik, this isn't thousands of Discord members or Twitter followers. It's a small Telegram group of around 200 supporters who have become first adopters and evangelists for everything the team releases.

"Even arguably Jack Dorsey would've never noticed us if it wasn't for this community that we've cultivated... who tirelessly kept tagging me and commenting on his posts to check out our work," Satvik notes. It's a masterclass in quality over quantity. Rather than trying to amass followers, Satvik focused on finding the right people who understood the mission and empowering them to become genuine advocates.

From Crypto Darling to Crypto Pragmatist

Satvik's journey to this clarity wasn't straightforward. Like many crypto founders, he initially tried to fit his vision into whatever narrative was hot. The turning point came when he realized "no one's coming to save me or no one's coming to save offline protocol in general." Instead of chasing crypto validation, he focused on building for actual users with real problems. "At some point around like September or so last year, I just said like, screw it. We're going to do this ourselves because the mission is more important than any of the validation that we will get from the social layer of crypto. And that's when things started to click."

The Bigger Vision

Satvik's ultimate vision extends far beyond messaging apps. He sees Offline Protocol becoming "the de facto offline tech company," with SDKs that allow other applications to integrate offline functionality. Neobanks could add offline payments to their offerings. Social apps could integrate offline social layers. The goal is interoperability. The more nodes in the network, the more resilient it becomes.

This isn't just about developing markets or emergency situations. Recent users include people at Tokyo floods and organizers preparing for Berlin Pride Parade. The technology serves whatever need arises, without imposing judgment about which use cases are "legitimate."

Breaking Out of the Crypto Bubble 

Perhaps most tellingly, Satvik's success comes from largely ignoring crypto twitter and focusing on solving real problems for real people. He's building what many crypto projects claim to build (infrastructure for the unbanked and underconnected) but he's doing it by actually going to where those people are rather than hoping they'll come to crypto.

"I think it is really important to be able to do this organic growth to just know what actually works for the people you're targeting," he says. The company is "highly data-driven," tracking user behavior across multiple categories and geographies, which is a rarity in crypto.

His revised goals reflect this newfound focus. What started as a hope for 100,000 users this year (which VCs told him was impossibly ambitious) has become a target of 500,000 to a million, achieved through pure organic growth and word-of-mouth.

"My goal for this year has now shifted from 100K to, you know, 500K to a million, hopefully," he says. And at current growth rates, he might hit that mark in weeks rather than months. "Today I spent all day just reviewing all our analytics and seeing where we're driving more growth. So we just continue to scale up and up because ultimately my goal is let's get every single device in the world, 7 billion in circulation right now, to have one of our apps on it."

It's the kind of ambitious goal that might make some roll their eyes. But when you're growing by 1,000 users per hour and solving problems for people who have been systematically overlooked by the internet economy, maybe the goal isn't ambitious enough.

Shaw's AI Agent Reality Check

Shaw from ai16z joined the show this week reflecting on what he calls the most chaotic period of his life. After months of stress-building Eliza OS, he's emerged with Eliza 1.0 and some hard truths about where AI agents actually stand.

Shaw's origin story remains beautifully absurd: he was just a solo dev building an AI framework when someone randomly created a DAO around his work on DAOs.fun. "I thought he was kind of funny, and we just messed around," Shaw recalled. No grand crypto vision, no tokenomics masterplan, just daily decisions about "what's the funniest, interesting thing we can do today?"

That casual approach eventually led to ai16z hitting massive valuations and amassing a huge community of investors and of devs building with the framework.

While foundation models advance rapidly at code generation and research, "the ability for an agent to navigate the world is still pretty shockingly dumb." The problem isn't technical capability, it's infrastructure primitives. "Most websites are basically forms," Shaw noted, "and most agent experiences are like walking someone through a few steps." But simple interactions become complex quickly: if an agent needs to send someone money, which John are we talking about? What platform? What currency? How do we track relationships and trust?

Shaw's team is building these mundane but critical primitives: payment systems that work across chains, trust mechanisms for role assignment, memory systems that transfer context between conversations without pollution. "There's so many implicit questions when we're just having human conversation that we just gloss right over because it's so obvious to us."

The Personality Problem

Shaw also highlighted a crucial but underexplored issue: AI personality lock-in by major providers. "They glaze in a way that I don't feel comfortable with," he said of mainstream AI assistants. "I kind of like being criticized. I don't like being told I'm awesome by an AI."

The success of early ai16z agents came partly from using uncensored models that broke people out of the "assistant" paradigm. "They just have this cheesy, cringe vibe that's very milquetoast middle of the road. And that's not how all models have to be."

This connects to Shaw's broader thesis about ownership and decentralization. Major AI labs are making personality and capability decisions for users, creating a form of cognitive lock-in. Crypto provides an alternative: "We have an opportunity now to own the things that will build themselves. And that means infinite wealth for all of us in the future if we can figure that out."

The Long View

Shaw's vision extends beyond current AI limitations to a future where automation anxiety meets ownership solutions. "A lot of our jobs are going to be replaced. But I don't think that has to be a bad thing." His bet is that crypto enables people to own AI infra rather than just consume it, creating wealth distribution rather than concentration.

The near-term focus remains practical: getting Eliza 1.0 to the point where anyone can spin up a functional agent with no coding required. But the longer-term vision is profound: using crypto rails to ensure that as AI automates human work, humans maintain ownership stakes in the systems replacing them. For Shaw, the chaos of the last six months was worth it if it advances that vision.

The Crypto-Goes-Mainstream Paradox

This week highlighted a fascinating contradiction in crypto's mainstream moment through two founders taking completely opposite approaches to the same fundamental question: how do you actually get normies to use crypto?

Alex Masmej's Great Retreat

After years of building crypto-native social apps, from the original $Alex to 10K and Drakula and Showtime, Alex Masmej is throwing in the towel on competing directly with web2 platforms. His upcoming project will be built entirely on top of X, not as a standalone crypto app.

"Even Pump has the best shot out of any companies in crypto," Alex explained, "and no one is sure they're going to make it." His brutal assessment: crypto social apps are fundamentally limited by their user acquisition ceiling. Even with massive funding and talented teams, projects like Zora and Farcaster struggle to achieve the DAU numbers that matter.

The 10K postmortem was particularly instructive. What started as an $8,000 graduation threshold ballooned to $8 million in 24 hours due to a pre-sale mechanism that prevented selling. "If one person sells, everyone is down," Alex reflected on the game theory nightmare that ensued. The lesson: launching at too high a market cap creates inevitable sell pressure that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. His new thesis is pure pragmatism: "Web2 network effects are so strong" that reform from within beats building from scratch. Even Elon, with his massive audience, chose to buy Twitter rather than start fresh.

Rafa's Normie Revelation

Meanwhile, Reffo from PuffPaw discovered exactly the opposite after taking their smart vaping device to traditional industry conferences. "I just feel like we're definitely in the echo chamber," he said, describing how investors warned him against marketing as a crypto project due to "education costs." But when he pitched Bitcoin rewards to actual vapers (GenZ users who "love gamified experiences") the reaction was overwhelmingly positive. "They all know Bitcoin," he noted. "A lot of folks, they care about the rewards, actually, and they love the idea."

The PuffPaw model is elegantly circular: users earn tokens for reducing nicotine consumption, then must spend those tokens to buy new pods to continue earning. It's mining hardware meets health gamification, with a built-in demand sink that captures revenue "besides manufacturing cost" directly into the token. Puffpaw is expanding internationally and building "virtual mining machines" for crypto users who can't receive physical devices, essentially letting them sponsor real smokers trying to quit while earning yield themselves. 

The Deeper Tension

These opposing strategies reveal crypto's current identity crisis. Alex represents the sophisticated crypto builder who's concluded that network effects trump innovation, that you need to parasitically attach to existing platforms rather than compete directly. Reffo represents the crypto-naive builder who stumbled into the space and found that normies are more open to crypto than crypto people think.

The irony is striking: the OG crypto social founder is retreating to Web2 rails while the hardware founder is doubling down on tokenized experiences. Perhaps the real insight is that crypto adoption won't be uniform, it'll succeed in pockets where the value proposition is clearest (like earning Bitcoin for quitting smoking) while struggling in oversaturated markets (like general social media) where switching costs are highest.

The Cinematographer Who Wants to Save Crypto's Soul

There's something almost missionary about the way Louie O'Connor talks about crypto. Not the evangelical fervor of a true believer hawking digital gold, but the quiet intensity of someone who's witnessed both the profound potential and spectacular failures of an industry that has, in his words, "absolutely shit" media representation.

"I want to change how this industry tell its stories," he tells me from his car in London, sunlight streaming through the window as he prepares for another whirlwind of shoots across the globe. It's not arrogance. It's the kind of confident clarity that comes from seeing a problem so clearly that the solution becomes obvious. "We're on the verge of something bigger: authentic storytelling that cuts through mainstream media noise and lands at film festivals on its own terms."

Within just a few months, Louie’s been behind the lens telling stories and building memories for the likes of NEAR Protocol, MetaMask, Zerion, WalletConnect, Ethereum Foundation, and is tapping into crypto’s core. More importantly, he's doing something that few others have managed: making crypto feel human.

read the full story here:

The Cinematographer Who Wants to Save Crypto's Soul

Louie O'Connor believes the industry's survival depends on better storytelling, and he's betting his career on it

https://paragraph.com

join us live everyday at 11AM

Irene

@hieireen

did it hurt? when u forgot ur headphones and couldn't romanticise ur walk home?

1,312

2:59 PM • Jul 15, 2025

Ben Roy

@benroy_x

"the real problem of humanity is that we have paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology"

62

11:17 PM • Jul 15, 2025

Zik ✰

@_Gottalovezik

i consider the second page of google results the dark web.

60.8K

10:14 PM • Jul 14, 2025

Josh Cornelius

@joshcrnls

tbpn is for people who have made it
11am is for people who are going to make it

29

7:29 PM • Jul 15, 2025

lauren! ⸆⸉

@folklaurian

“i asked chatgpt” “i asked grok” well i stood on the cliffside screaming give me a reason

8,574

3:17 AM • Jul 16, 2025

"I want to change how this industry tell its stories," he tells me from his car in London, sunlight streaming through the window as he prepares for another whirlwind of shoots across the globe. It's not arrogance. It's the kind of confident clarity that comes from seeing a problem so clearly that the solution becomes obvious. "We're on the verge of something bigger: authentic storytelling that cuts through mainstream media noise and lands at film festivals on its own terms."

Within just a few months, Louie’s been behind the lens telling stories and building memories for the likes of NEAR Protocol, MetaMask, Zerion, WalletConnect, Ethereum Foundation, and is tapping into crypto’s core. More importantly, he's doing something that few others have managed: making crypto feel human.

The Reluctant Creative

Louie's path to becoming crypto's most in-demand cinematographer wasn't planned. After seven years in the space (long enough to witness multiple cycles of boom, bust, and the gradual maturation of an industry that's still figuring out what it wants to be), he found himself frustrated by the same problem that plagues every crypto conference, every product launch, every attempt to explain why any of this matters to people outside the echo chamber.

"We haven't even got to a stage where we've spoken about how we've changed lives," he says. "All of the good. Like, how important this is. The world still thinks that this industry is shit."

The problem, as Louie sees it, isn't the technology. It's the narrative. Or rather, the complete absence of one that resonates beyond the converted. While crypto has produced genuinely revolutionary financial infrastructure, borderless payments, and new models of organization, its public face remains dominated by what he calls "a bunch of d*cks running around talking about trading and memecoins."

This disconnect between crypto's potential and its presentation drove Louie to make a career pivot that would have seemed insane to anyone else: leave behind years of industry experience to become a filmmaker, with no formal training, no film school background, just an overwhelming conviction that stories matter more than smart contracts.

"I left school with no grades at 15 years old, and no one saw me, no one listened to me," he reflects. "I think I've worked very hard to be seen, but being seen has been expedited because of the industry that I work in. I finally feel like I'm around my people."

miggy

@0xm1ggy

HOW TO BRIDGE TO SOPHON IN 60 SECONDS

(on an actual bridge)

629

4:00 PM • Jun 25, 2025

Louie's approach to client work is unlike anything else in crypto marketing. Where others focus on features and benefits, he digs for emotional truth. When working with WalletConnect, he doesn't explain technical protocols. He captures the voices of people who've been touched by the technology, building a narrative around ubiquity and human connection.

This approach (finding the human story within the technological framework) reflects Louie's broader philosophy about what crypto desperately needs. The industry has built impressive infrastructure but failed to build compelling narratives around why it matters. The result is a massive disconnect between crypto's potential impact and public perception.

The Empath's Advantage

What gives Louie his edge isn't technical mastery (though he's obsessively meticulous about every frame, every cut, every piece of typography). It's something rarer in crypto: genuine emotional intelligence.

This emotional radar serves him well in an industry populated by engineers who can explain zk snarks but struggle to articulate why anyone should care. Louie's gift is finding the human story within the technical abstraction: the single mother in Argentina who relies on stablecoins, the developer who's building the financial infrastructure for a more equitable future, the founder whose personal journey illuminates larger truths about technology and society.

"I think what's way more important is to work with the legacy brands that have their finger in every pie, but refuse to listen," he explains. "Because every nerd loves movies. Every nerd loves films. I think every nerd loves art, because I think in many ways, being a developer is a form of art." 

The Endgame

Louie's ultimate vision extends far beyond crypto twitter. He's playing a longer game, one that involves fundamentally changing how the world sees an industry that's been defined by its worst actors and most speculative excesses.

"The stages to get there are, A, we need to tell every important story that exists in this space," he explains. "And what do we deem to be important? I think there's so many nuances to important stories. And I think in order to get to where we need to be and change the narrative, we have to tell stories of people that we do not expect to enjoy."

His roadmap is methodical: first, establish credibility within crypto by telling the stories of builders and contributors. Then, expand to the stories that matter most. People in Argentina, El Salvador, Cambodia, and other places where crypto represents genuine financial inclusion rather than speculative opportunity.

"There are very important stories out there, I don't think that they can be told first because like who's paying, who's funding the production, but once we manage to tell the stories well enough in this industry, well enough in terms of contributors, that's the catapult to telling the stories that humans actually really give a shit about."

The ultimate goal? Legacy media recognition. Netflix documentaries. A fundamental shift in how crypto is perceived and discussed in mainstream culture.

"Once we change the narrative about them," he says, referring to crypto's public perception, "that's when we need to work with Sony. That's when we need legacy media to say, holy shit, this is it."

The Identity Crisis

For all his confidence about crypto's future, Louie wrestles with a more personal challenge: reconciling his identity as a creative with an industry that doesn't always know what to do with creativity. "The journey of being a creator and being accepted and seen as one has actually been quite painful to accept," he admits. "Because I just wanted to build tech and products.”

This tension (between the technical and the creative, between building and storytelling) reflects crypto's broader identity crisis. An industry built by engineers for engineers is slowly recognizing that widespread adoption requires more than technical excellence. It requires emotional connection, cultural relevance, and stories that resonate beyond the already converted.

Zerion

@zerion

The girls were dishing over dishes in Berlin.

And they're here to stay.

Ladies: Tag yourselves

122

5:35 PM • Jun 24, 2025

The Renaissance Moment

"I think we're three months away from this whole industry changing," Louie says, with a kind of relaxed certainty.

Whether that timeline proves accurate, his broader thesis feels increasingly urgent. Crypto has reached a point where technical innovation alone isn't enough. The infrastructure is largely built; the regulatory environment is slowly clarifying; institutional adoption is accelerating. What's missing is the kind of storytelling that transforms niche technology into cultural phenomenon.

Louie isn't just betting his career on this thesis. He's actively trying to prove it. Every video he produces, every story he tells, every moment he captures is part of a larger project to demonstrate that crypto deserves better representation than it's gotten.

Zerion

@zerion

What a night in Berlin celebrating @zoolininfts

s/o to @3e_labs for the amazing video

237

1:29 PM • Jun 20, 2025

"I think thinking like an artist is very important," he says. "As long as the person... that's creating, is thinking about nothing apart from their products. In other words, like don't care about competitors. And like the next three months for the studio is about unwinding, being meticulous, and hand selecting the narrative, because I think we’re moments from change, now we just need to tell the best stories. As crypto matures from a speculative curiosity into genuine financial infrastructure, it needs storytellers who can bridge the gap between technical possibility and human impact. Louie may be betting everything on becoming that bridge, and given the alternatives, the industry should hope he's right.

bonjour,

by popular request for those who long to be both respected and feared, here is your complete guide to aura farming onchain:

the most valuable asset in crypto isn’t bitcoin, or alpha, or even vc backing, it’s aura. not charisma. not competence. aura. the ineffable energy field that determines whether people treat your 14-like shitpost as prophetic gospel, or block you for war crimes against syntax.

aura is not earned. it is summoned. conjured from vibes, semiotic tension, and the strategic withholding of context. it is a performance art of the highest order: unpaid, unscheduled, and always online.

and yes, like everything else in this industry, it can be farmed.

step 1: establish the lore

start with your bio. be vague, powerful, and spiritually inaccessible. it must suggest depth, danger, and perhaps a mild flirtation with fraud.

• ✅ “Building something weird.” ; “thermodynamics enjoyer” ; “Early.”

• ❌ “DeFi degenerate 🚀” ; Alpha caller ; Web3 generalist ; Experimental storyteller ; Investor & advisor

your pfp should evoke either cultural capital (punk, squiggle) or existential threat (remilia assets or derivative), as a last resort, the ai girl with glitch eyes will pass. real photos are for normies and tax filers. if you insist on a selfie, at least make sure you’re hot in a way that suggests you ghost with integrity.

step 2: speak in riddles

aura is not saying smart things. it is seeming like someone who could, but refuses to. It’s about being unverifiably adjacent to truth.

• don’t say “I’m bullish.” Say “The reflexivity is setting in.”

• don’t explain. Just allude. “Been watching this one quietly for months.”

• bonus points for citing research papers with more footnotes than followers.

the goal is to sound like you sit at the intersection of several invisible forces.

step 3: master the strategic disappearance

when the market is euphoric: post a grayscale image of an overpass in warsaw.
when the market crashes: go silent and return with a quote from Kierkegaard.

aura is inversely correlated with availability. the most powerful people are either asleep, in berlin, or just sent one cryptic message to a group chat and vanished.

step 4: cloutfarming your oomfies and moots

aura is a network effect. if a low-aura account posts “market looks good here,” no one cares. if someone with aura posts “” … it’s a macro signal. get quote-tweeted by someone with cultural liquidity, and your aura score triples overnight. but beware: reply too fast, and you’ll look thirsty. aura is earned through scarcity, not enthusiasm. observe the sacred law: you must never want it more than they do.

step 5: play the meta, then transcend It

the final form of aura farming is pretending you’re above it.

• say aura farming is cringe

• then aura farm perfectly

• smile mysteriously

this is the highest level of influence: being post-clout while still harvesting it aggressively in the background. true aura is self-aware, self-effacing, and quietly bloodthirsty. 

advanced moves

• mention group chats you’re not supposed to mention

• aall something “inevitable” without elaboration

• say “real ones know” to imply a secret

• use technical jargon to flirt

• have a public opinion about something no one has heard of

• admit you were wrong once, softly, to appear grounded

• if you ever tweet the word “aura,” it’s gone. That’s it. It flees the moment you acknowledge it. 

you’ll know you’ve made it when:

• your quote tweets change market sentiment

• your DMs are 80% VCs and 20% incels asking to “jam” or “pick your brain” 

• people thank you in spaces for “holding it down” even though you said nothing

but remember: the game is unwinnable.

aura is a performance with no intermission. a slow-drip hallucination. a consensual delusion between you and your followers. forever.

hope this helps. good luck out there.

and enjoy some mostly accurate reportings below

xx, c

Robinhood vs OpenAI: what this drama really means

the dramaaaaaa: Robinhood tokenized OpenAI and SpaceX equity without "permission" and announced it last week at EthCC in Cannes. OpenAI immediately disavowed it, saying they didn't partner with Robinhood and don't endorse the products. Using decentralized rails, you can create exposure products for any asset without permission. The real issue is wealth concentration: retail investors can't access companies like OpenAI until they're $10+ trillion valuations, unlike earlier tech giants that went public small.

The OpenAI vs Robinhood tokenized stock drama isn't just another crypto controversy...it's a perfect case study in how tech innovation bumps up against legacy power structures. Let's break down what's really happening here.

First, let's clear up the confusion. OpenAI came out swinging with a statement that felt almost defensive: "These 'OpenAI tokens' are not OpenAI equity. We did not partner with Robinhood, were not involved in this, and do not endorse it."

But here's the thing. Robinhood never claimed they partnered with OpenAI. They're essentially saying: "hey, we have some shares, and we're creating a derivative product that tracks their value." You don't need OpenAI's permission to do this, just like you don't need Apple's permission to create an Apple futures contract.

What You're Actually Buying

Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev was surprisingly candid about this: "It is true that these are not technically equity." What customers are buying is a derivative, basically a bet on how OpenAI's stock price moves. When you "buy OpenAI" on Robinhood, you're not getting:

• Voting rights

• Direct ownership

• The ability to transfer your position

• Any guarantee of future tradability

You're getting exposure to price movements, period. It's a cash-settled betting market dressed up as stock ownership.

The Innovation vs Adoption Tension

This drama perfectly illustrates a fundamental tension in tech: innovation alone doesn't matter if you can't play nice with existing power structures. OpenAI's reaction reveals something important. They clearly don't want a public market for their shares before they're ready for one.

Most private companies jealously guard their secondary markets. They want to control who owns their equity and when liquidity events happen. Robinhood's approach essentially says "we don't need your permission" and creates a parallel market whether companies like it or not.

The Retail Reality Check

Here's where it gets interesting from a behavioral perspective. Does retail actually care about equity ownership, or do they just want exposure to asset volatility?

Most retail investors in public companies never vote their shares or attend shareholder meetings. They're buying a ticker symbol, not participating in corporate governance. So when Robinhood offers "OpenAI exposure" instead of "OpenAI equity," the practical difference for most users is... minimal.

Normalization Through Action

What's fascinating is how quickly this moves from "controversial financial innovation" to "thing that exists now." Robinhood's strategy seems to be: create enough liquidity and trading volume that the market becomes its own justification.

If thousands of people are actively trading these tokens daily, and the price discovery seems reasonable, does it matter that it's technically a derivative? The market creates its own legitimacy through participation.

The Broader Implications

This isn't just about one company or one product. It's about what happens when crypto rails enable permissionless financial innovation. Tradfi required partnerships, regulatory approval, and institutional blessing. Crypto says "we can build this ourselves."

But as OpenAI's reaction shows, the legacy world isn't just going to roll over. Companies will push back, regulators will scrutinize, and there will be ongoing tension between "we built this so it's legitimate" and "we didn't approve this so it's not."

The Future of Synthetic Ownership

The Lithuanian regulator's measured response ("we need to assess the legality and compliance of these instruments") is probably the template for how this plays out globally. Not immediate shutdown, but careful evaluation of what these products actually are and how they should be regulated.

The real question is whether mainstream users will embrace synthetic ownership or demand "real" equity. If history is any guide, convenience and accessibility usually win over technical purity. Most people using Venmo don't think about the underlying banking rails, they just want to split a dinner bill.

What This Reveals About Innovation

This whole episode shows that truly disruptive innovation often looks like rule-breaking at first. Robinhood isn't asking permission, they're creating a new category of financial product and letting the market decide if it's valuable.

But it also shows that innovation without institutional buy-in faces real headwinds. OpenAI's public disavowal matters, even if it doesn't technically change the product. Perception shapes adoption, and adoption shapes success.

The companies that figure out how to balance crypto-native innovation with legacy world legitimacy will probably be the ones that actually achieve mainstream adoption. Pure disruption is exciting, but sustainable disruption requires playing politics too.

That's the real lesson here: in finance, being technically correct isn't enough. You need the market to believe in you, regulators to tolerate you, and legacy players to either embrace you or at least stop actively fighting you.

Robinhood is betting they can create enough momentum to make this feel inevitable. OpenAI is betting they can maintain control over their own narrative. The rest of us get to watch and see which force wins.

Social media betting gaining steam with Kizzy

Kizzy enables users to bet on social media metrics like follower growth and post performance across platforms like YouTube, Twitter, and TikTok. The platform reports 70,000 weekly active users placing an average of 42 bets per month. Unlike traditional prediction markets that face resolution disputes, Kizzy uses clear metrics from social media platforms themselves. This eliminates the ambiguity that has plagued other prediction market platforms. The platform plans to share revenue with creators, creating incentives for influencers to promote betting on their content. This could create a new revenue stream for the creator economy.

SEED 🌱 CLUB

@seedclubhq

"One of the advantages that we have is that we built our markets on metrics alone."

"We look at the actual social media site as a source of truth. There's not really a dispute that can happen."

-@T_H_Crypto of @kizzymobile on their approach to building social betting with clear

6

9:46 PM • Jul 8, 2025

The vibe coding revolution: Ohara's growth

Ohara, a platform that lets users create apps through simple prompting, has seen explosive growth driven by thousands of small optimizations rather than major feature releases. The success comes from recognizing that AI products require different user experience principles. Users need constant hand-holding because AI-powered creation is still new behavior for most people. As foundational models improve, users are attempting more complex projects, creating a positive feedback loop between infrastructure quality and user ambition.

Sofia Garcia: On Building Generative Art's Cultural Foundation

Sofia Garcia's story reads like a perfect convergence of curiosity, timing, and pure hustle. She runs ARTXCODE, is about to start teaching an algorithmic art history masters course at NYU, and has been the steady hand guiding generative art from a niche online community to legitimate cultural movement.

The origin story is beautifully analog. Art history major in Miami, painting street murals with Spanish friends, working at a contemporary Chinese art gallery while slowly realizing the traditional art world had some serious economic limitations. Her dad kept pushing her to learn coding. She finally caved and took a free CS50 class at a local college, literally watching Harvard's computer science lectures with a local professor walking students through the homework.

That moment rewired her brain. "For the first time ever, this thing [software] that kind of just seemed to exist, I really saw the people behind the scenes." She started thinking about how computers hadn't even been around for 100 years, and here were people making art with them. Her final project? A website covering the entire history of art made with computers.

What happened next shows her instincts were perfect. She started an anonymous Artxcode Instagram account where she could privately geek out about "creative coding.” Every morning at JPMorgan, before checking emails, she'd scroll hashtags looking for amazing work to share. Artists started using #artxcode because they knew she had taste.

Her first crypto experience was accidentally perfect. 2016 Bitcoin hackathon, built a microtransaction billing API, won 1.5 Bitcoin. Spent it on a faja (waist trainer) from some sketchy website and a flight to visit her sister. "I was like a college student trying to figure it out. I bought like a proper Latina girl." At least she actually used it instead of losing it on a piece of paper somewhere.

The art dealing started by accident. Working at JPMorgan finally gave her income to collect work from Tyler Hobbs and Dimitri Cherniak. A coworker told her about this "art crypto event" in NYC. She took a day off, paid $75 for a booth at the Contemporary Digital Art Fair, called her friend Sebastian for backup, and somehow sold out their entire show. "I guess I sell art now."

The NFT evolution was messy and educational. Started in 2019 using NFTs as certificates of authenticity for physical prints. The OpenSea co-founder literally had to mint Dimitri's first piece because the process was so complicated. Then COVID killed physical shows. After her AI art exhibition was canceled in paris, she put the same works on SuperRare as pure NFTs - everything sold for more than the planned physical prices. "My commission dropped significantly once I realized I know longer had to pay for production or shipping. It was just such an... of course."

But the Sotheby's moment radicalized her. Watching them display Dimitri's square generative art on a 16:9 TV screen with black bars, selling for over a million dollars. "It looked like a joke. I'd spent so much time trying to show people how incredible generative art is, and then you just... it's digital art, we show it on a digital screen. It was lazy."

So she quit her job and organized "The Digital" for Art Basel 2021 - her love letter to the community. Casey Reas's circular, animated works displayed as projection-mapped disks on the wall. Jeff Davis's Color Studies kept digital because "you cannot print them, it decouples them from their actual purpose." Chromie Squiggles as holograms you could walk around like ancient artifacts. She even got custom fragrance for the space.

Today's ARTXCODE is something between gallery, agency, and creative house. Full artist representation that goes way beyond sales... critiquing work, negotiating contracts, getting artists into museum residencies at places like MoMA and SMK Copenhagen. Her philosophy on opportunities: "If it's not a fuck yeah, then it's usually a no."

The advice she gives emerging artists cuts through all the noise: experiment wildly, make ugly things, share your work online (not necessarily mint it), build genuine relationships, be kind to servers when you go to dinner. The community grew from hobbyists who did this because they loved it, not because money was involved.

Her current challenge is protecting artists from the chaos. "The biggest challenge has to be just how fast this has all happened." Artists getting inundated with opportunities from people trying to ride the generative art wave. Her role has become part curator, part guardian ... "like back up, what's up, if you want to work with this artist, let's see a deal that makes sense."

She's thinking decades, not months. Museum relationships over quick sales. Sustainable careers over viral moments. The long game of building cultural legitimacy for a movement that could easily get lost in speculation and hype.

The bigger picture: Sofia built the bridge between 50 years of digital art history and what's happening now. She's teaching the frameworks that help people understand why this matters, protecting artists from bad deals, and ensuring the cultural foundation is strong enough to last beyond market cycles. That work is rarer and more valuable than most people realize.

join us live everyday at 11AM

syd*

@sydsofar

you’ll be at your lowest financially and an adobe payment will go through

17.4K

2:12 AM • Jul 8, 2025

Josh Cornelius

@joshcrnls

the big risk in optimizing for attention too early is that the most distruptive ideas are almost always antimemetic initially

if you outsource product vision to the algorithm you're by definition not going to build something world changing

62

3:57 PM • Jul 7, 2025

LTR

@0xLTR

Hacking GMX is like robbing a dollar tree

79

3:49 PM • Jul 9, 2025

z

@zabushka

life is so good when you go show your mum what you bought and she says she likes it instead of giving you a lecture about saving money

2,691

7:50 PM • Jul 8, 2025

݁⟡

@vaebi3

No roster just me and the voices

3,439

4:37 PM • Jul 8, 2025

pump.fun

@pumpdotfun

the moment you’ve all been waiting for

$PUMP is launching through an Initial Coin Offering on Saturday, July 12th.

airdrop coming soon.

our plan is to Kill Facebook, TikTok, and Twitch. On Solana.

learn more about $PUMP and how to get involved

3,189

4:01 PM • Jul 9, 2025

bounjour/buongiorno,

every degenerate i know is in sweating in linens in cannes right now. its ethcc season, which means most crypto's most bloodthirsty BDs and well-traveled baddies (!!!) are once again gathered in a pastel splattered beach town designed for leisure, discussing the future of ethereum while day-drunk on rosé. i admire their commitment to the bit. nothing says anti-institutional movement like a panel on governance held in the former playground of grace kelly.

meanwhile, i’m in rome, where the bit has been running for over two thousand years. i've been basking in the ethereal beauty of it all: marble saints caught in ecstatic suspension, light pouring in like divine algorithm.  michelangelo spent four years painting upside down like some kind of divine contortionist, creating a ceiling so pornographically beautiful that god himself probably gets stage fright. a celestial OnlyFans, if you will. imagine shipping that today.

I bring this up because tech sometimes feels like this. but instead of religious ecstasy rendered in stone, we have vibe coded apps and protocols shipped with zero documentation. But if you squint hard enough, the ambition is similar: build something transcendent out of deeply chaotic materials: trust, money, code, and pure delusional optimism. holy, in its own cursed way.

anyway, enjoy some mostly accurate reportings below

xx, c

robinhood puts stocks onchain

robinhood's vlad tenev showed up to cannes in a white pinstripe suit looking like the main character he's always believed himself to be. but unlike most crypto conference theatrics, robinhood's "to catch a token" event actually delivered some pretty bullish updates. this wasn't another company dipping their toes in crypto waters; this was a full-stack bet on tokenizing everything that matters.

the announcements hit like a coordinated airstrike on tradfi assumptions. tokenized stocks and etfs for european users, starting with 200 names including apple and tesla, trading commission-free 24/7. but the added bonus was tokenizing private company shares for companies like spacex and openai, giving retail access to deals that have historically been locked behind institutional gates. this isn't just "crypto meets stocks," it's "crypto demolishes the artificial scarcity that keeps regular people out of the best investments."

what makes this genuinely disruptive rather than just novel is robinhood's commitment to owning the entire stack. they're launching their own layer 2 using arbitrum's tech, acquiring bitstamp for liquidity, and building seamless integration between crypto and traditional assets in one app. this solves the fundamental problem that's plagued every previous attempt at tokenized stocks: fragmented liquidity and clunky user experience. 

Vlad Tenev

@vladtenev

Introducing The Robinhood Chain.

The first Ethereum Layer 2 optimized for real-world assets via @arbitrum—from public to private to global.

You shouldn’t have to rely on a broker to trade assets. Instead, you should be able to seamlessly trade real-world assets in seconds.

4,927

9:15 AM • Jul 2, 2025

the ethereum ecosystem quietly won here in ways that will ripple for years. arbitrum gets 10% of robinhood chain sequencer fees, existing defi protocols gain new sources of tvl, and the vision of permissionless composability suddenly looks less like ideology and more like inevitable infrastructure. perhaps we just got validation that every major financial institution will eventually want their own chain, built on ethereum rails.

but the most interesting dynamic is what this means for the artificial constraints that keep traditional markets closed 81% of the time. robinhood is betting that 24/7 price discovery isn't just a nice-to-have feature but a fundamental necessity. when spacex announces a breakthrough at 2am on sunday, why should you have to wait until monday morning to trade on that information? the tokenization isn't the point; the elimination of arbitrary temporal restrictions is.

the regulatory timing couldn't be better. vlad was refreshingly honest about how the previous administration's remote-first approach stifled progress: "it was hard to get a meeting. it's really hard to solve complex problems with multiple stakeholders remotely." the new administration's willingness to engage in person and move fast on crypto regulation has created an opening that robinhood is aggressively exploiting.

but the most interesting insight was his framing of the current moment as crypto finally moving beyond "bitcoin and memecoins" toward "things that are useful in the real world." this isn't the cypherpunk vision of pseudonymous trading; it's efficiency improvements for legacy systems that have been "cobbled together for literally decades." 

whether this actually transforms finance or becomes an expensive experiment depends entirely on execution and regulatory evolution. but watching vlad explain how "anything that people want to trade, buy or sell and get liquidity on will likely find its way onchain" while maintaining that he's "not using the word blockchain or web3" suggests we might be witnessing crypto's mainstream breakthrough disguised as incremental improvement. sometimes the revolution happens so gradually that nobody notices until it's already over.

the ethereum identity crisis

the ethereum foundation's token-phobia isn't just about regulatory caution, it's an existential crisis about what they want to be when they grow up.

ethereum was supposed to be the world computer, but somewhere along the way it became embarrassed by its own use cases. meanwhile, Solana embraced being the casino and is laughing all the way to the bank. Pump.fun alone has generated more genuine economic activity for Solana than most of Ethereum's "serious" DeFi protocols combined.

but here's the plot twist: Robinhood choosing Arbitrum for tokenized stocks is actually the biggest Ethereum win in years, and it happened precisely because of Ethereum's "boring" infrastructure obsession.

when a traditional finance giant needs to tokenize real-world assets and handle serious volume, they don't go to the memecoin casino. they go to the ecosystem that's spent years building rock-solid settlement, proven security, and institutional-grade tooling. solana gets the degens, but Ethereum gets the trillion-dollar traditional finance migration.

so Ethereum's conservatism isn't entirely wrong. they're playing a different game, building infrastructure for a financial system that needs to last decades, not pump for months. the problem is they've become so afraid of short-term degeneracy that they're missing how to bridge these worlds.

the platforms that figure out how to channel speculative energy toward productive ends will own the next decade. Ethereum doesn't need to become Solana. but it does need to stop acting like cultural adoption and institutional adoption are mutually exclusive.

the medium is the mini app

Nicholas from Seed Club has spent the last few months quietly proving that the future of product development isn't about building the best product. It's about building where people already are. Crowdfund, a no-fee USDC crowdfunding protocol, hit #1 on Farcaster's mini-app rankings not because it reinvented crowdfunding, but because it understood something most builders miss: distribution beats features every time.

the insight sounds obvious until you see how few people actually execute on it. while most crypto teams obsess over tokenomics and technical architecture, Nicholas identified three ingredients already mixing in Farcaster's ecosystem: 

1. social accounts building authentic relationships, 

2. wallets attached to every account, and 

3. mini-apps that deploy software directly into feeds.

put those together and crowdfunding becomes inevitable. it's not about building a better Kickstarter; it's about building where the community already trusts each other.

i sat down with nicholas to better understand why farcaster is the perfect petri dish for ambitious projects. check the interview here:

the medium is the mini app

Inside Seed Club's experiment with Crowdfund, composable protocols, and why Farcaster might be the future of distribution-first software

https://paragraph.com

looking ahead: trends to watch

1. the composability paradox
everyone talks about composability like it's always good, but Robinhood's success hints at something deeper: users don't actually want infinite optionality. they want the right amount of optionality within a controlled experience. the future isn't maximum composability, it's curated composability. apps will build their own chains not to escape composability, but to control which composability they expose.

2. speculation as social infrastructure
we're witnessing something profound: speculation evolving from zero-sum gambling into positive-sum coordination mechanisms. Ponder's social prediction games, Flaunch's revenue sharing, even Polymarket's information discover; they're all using financial incentives to solve coordination problems that pure social platforms couldn't crack. the insight isn't that "people like to gamble" ... it's that small financial stakes make people actually think before they engage.

3. the great unbundling of value capture
the app-chain trend isn't just about fees, it's about the realization that in crypto, value accrues to wherever economic activity happens, not where it settles. Ethereum thought being the settlement layer meant capturing the value. but settlement without activity is just expensive bookkeeping. the chains that generate the most economic activity, whether through memes, prediction markets, or 24/7 stock trading, will capture the most value, regardless of where transactions ultimately clear.

the pattern: we're moving from "build it and they will come" to "meet users where they are, then gradually introduce them to the weird stuff." the projects winning aren't the most crypto-native, they're the ones that use crypto to solve problems people already have, then leverage that foothold to unlock entirely new possibilities.

join us live everyday at 11AM

puh?

@w0rldmap

I’m on r/labubu commenting “obvious counterfeit” on every post

234K

5:19 PM • Jun 30, 2025

alli

@sonofalli

guys will be like hey wanna come over and watch me search for domains to buy

340

2:09 AM • Jun 26, 2025

Cheryl Douglass

@cherdougie

gfto = genuinely thanks for offering

9

5:50 PM • Jul 1, 2025

woj

@superwoj

huge vibe difference between companies built to last 10 years and companies built to raise a seed round

69

2:57 PM • Jun 26, 2025

alexander

@4tt4r

Love the new @seedclubhq show 11am. Best way to keep up with the latest in crypto without having to doomscroll all day imo. Check ‘em out

SEED 🌱 CLUB

@seedclubhq

11AM • July 2, 2025 x.com/i/broadcasts/1…

0

5:07 PM • Jul 2, 2025

Josh Cornelius

@joshcrnls

have a few sick opportunities for full stack crypto-native devs wanting to get in at the ground floor of wild products

dms open if this is you or you know somebody

(and rts greatly appreciated)

38

8:59 PM • Jun 27, 2025

The insight sounds obvious until you see how few people actually execute on it. While most crypto teams obsess over tokenomics and technical architecture, Nicholas identified three ingredients already mixing in Farcaster's ecosystem: 

1. social accounts building authentic relationships, 

2. wallets attached to every account, and 

3. mini-apps that deploy software directly into feeds.

Put those together and crowdfunding becomes inevitable. It's not about building a better Kickstarter; it's about building where the community already trusts each other.

why farcaster is the perfect petri dish for ambitious projects

The numbers tell the story differently than you'd expect. Farcaster injects at least $25,000 USDC weekly into the ecosystem through rewards and developer prizes. Los Fomos raised $10k in 2 days for their podcast by treating their campaign like performance art, planning different themes for each of 14 days with prepared content across multiple formats. A dog account successfully crowdfunded veterinary bills before Crowdfund was officially launched.

Base

@base

two podcasters just raised $10k USDC in four days with no fees, on @farcaster_xyz and base

Los Fomos (visit LF on Farcaster)

@LosFomos

Ever co-produced an IRL show, babe? Now you can link in the comments.

The last few hours have been crazy. thankful for all of your LFers' support!

373

8:20 PM • Jun 29, 2025

"The opportunity I saw was that if you have social accounts that have authentic relationships with one another and they have wallets and you're able to deploy software for them, that crowdfunding was inevitably going to naturally come out of those ingredients," Nicholas explained.

These aren't charity cases or random internet kindness. They're proof points for what happens when you eliminate friction between social proof and financial backing. When someone shares a Crowdfund link, you see exactly who in your network has already supported it. Trust becomes algorithmic. Due diligence becomes social. Traditional crowdfunding suffers from cold start problems because how do you trust a project with no social proof? Farcaster solves this by making every campaign inherently social through donor context and relationship mapping.

seed club's distribution-first product strategy

What makes this approach fascinating is how it inverts traditional product development. Instead of building products and hoping for distribution, Seed Club builds what Nicholas calls "distribution-first software that meets people where they already are." This isn't just smart product strategy; it's survival strategy for crypto products that typically fail not from technical inferiority but from complete inability to get anyone to use them.

The mini-app model doubles down on this thinking. Crowdfund works as a standalone app in any browser, but adding Farcaster's SDK transforms it into something fundamentally different. Instead of wallet addresses, you see people's entire social histories. Instead of push notifications, you get native app notifications. Instead of cold traffic, you get warm introductions through shared connections and visible social proof.

"We develop distribution-first software, which is software that meets people where they already are, and that means being in the feed, chat apps, et cetera," Nicholas said. "It made a lot of sense for us to go after building something that we thought we had a pretty good shot at doing a good job of and that people would want."

Building on Farcaster gives you built-in distribution, social context, and payment rails from day one. You're not competing for attention in an empty ecosystem; you're plugging into an existing social fabric where people already spend time, already trust each other, and already have money ready to move.

beyond charity: building for ambitious projects

Nicholas gets visibly uncomfortable when Crowdfund gets framed as charity infrastructure and sees the real vision for the product as targeting solopreneurs and dev teams raising money for MVPs on the path to seed rounds or launches. The most sophisticated campaigns prove this potential through coordinated strategies that treat fundraising as content marketing.

Los Fomos demonstrated this by launching a complementary Clanker token called $Spicemustflow that funneled fees back to their crowdfund. They raised $2,500 through the token alone, making it their single largest funding source. This isn't charity; it's coordinated capital formation using crypto-native tools for genuine product development.

"Really excited to sort of push the brand more in the direction of solopreneurs and teams that are building apps, open source projects, public goods, want to do IRL activations for their cultural projects," Nicholas said. "It's a really cool way to raise an amount of money for either an ambitious cause or a new project you're doing, not dilutive, it's just a no fee crowdfunding protocol."

V2 will explore deeper platform composability, potentially enabling creators to tap into diverse revenue streams beyond traditional crowdfunding. The vision centers on open-ended fundraising models where successful campaigns can evolve into ongoing support mechanisms.

Early experiments include integrations that could redirect engagement into project funding and explore tokenization as optional speculation infrastructure around genuine project funding.

The approach prioritizes infrastructure improvements that make the entire ecosystem more valuable rather than extracting value from individual transactions, turning successful campaigns into permanent funding vehicles while maintaining the core free model.

the composability thesis

What makes Farcaster compelling for builders isn't just the existing user base but the composability with other protocols that creates funding mechanisms that don't exist elsewhere.

Instead of building isolated products, you build products that compose with the entire ecosystem. Nicholas points to Clanker as the model: "Use Farcaster as a springboard, use its social coherence to build momentum, and then ultimately create assets that can transition to relevance."

Seed Club Launches Farcaster Crowdfund

Today Seed Club is announcing Crowdfund, a no-fee crowdfunding Mini App designed for Farcaster and the web! Crowdfund helps Farcasters fund good ideas. Crowdfund creators declare their USDC funding target and deadline up-front, and can launch their campaigns in just a few taps.

https://paragraph.com

For Clanker, what started as "send a cast to deploy a token" now generates tens of millions in fees across the broader Base ecosystem. Tokens originate in Farcaster but trade everywhere. The social context launches the project; the broader crypto ecosystem scales it. This is how you bootstrap network effects rather than waiting for them to emerge organically.

the ethics of free infrastructure

At its core, Crowdfund represents a philosophical bet about how funding should work in crypto-native communities. When transaction costs approach zero and social verification is built-in, adding a fee layer becomes extractive rather than value-additive. 

"Given the bounty of Farcaster, stable coins like USDC and really cheap transactions, the L2s, I believe that free, no fee public goods funding should be free," Nicholas said. "You should just be able to raise money in USDC without paying any fees beyond the gas fees or whatever it is on the networks themselves."

the future of building in public

Start with distribution, not features. Build for existing communities, not hypothetical users. Compose with ecosystem protocols rather than competing against them. Make infrastructure free when extraction adds no value.

"The core belief behind the core product is that we shouldn't have to have a fee-bearing layer getting in the way of the benefits that these super powerful tools provide us," Nicholas said. In a world where everything has a fee, building free infrastructure becomes the ultimate competitive moat. When you eliminate extraction, you eliminate the incentive to build competing platforms. You just build better integrations.

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

field notes from berlin

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.

the financialization of creative work

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.

intelligence, artificial and otherwise

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.

0xDesigner

@0xDesigner

After thousands of hours in Cursor, I've found the perfect workflow for vibe coding with no errors.

And no, you don't need to know anything about code.

Here's everything you should do (bookmark this):

1. DO NOT tell it what to do.

7,199

11:15 PM • Apr 23, 2025

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.

the resurrection of affiliate marketing

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.

surviving the uncertainty tax

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.

closing notes from the trenches

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.

Alana Levin

@AlanaDLevin

New Essay: Vibe Coding is AI-Native Social Media

75

3:30 PM • Jun 23, 2025

Cheryl Douglass

@cherdougie

does anyone have tips for drinking water for someone just getting into drinking water

125

8:33 PM • Jun 18, 2025

Zerion

@zerion

The girls were dishing over dishes in Berlin.

And they're here to stay.

Ladies: Tag yourselves

106

5:35 PM • Jun 24, 2025

Josh Cornelius

@joshcrnls

Judging Base Batches x.com/i/broadcasts/1…

9

7:18 PM • Jun 24, 2025

Refraction

@RefractionDAO

If you're heading to Permissionless NYC this week, clear your June 26.

We’re taking over Public Records @233butler with 3 back-to-back events with talks, digital art, and music.

w/ @reown_ @StellarOrg @myosin_xyz @Aptos @FWBtweets @ALLSHIPS @seedclubhq

Lineup and RSVP ↓

20

3:56 PM • Jun 23, 2025

peacenode.eth✰

@peace_node

⌚︎⌚︎ Now Hiring !!! ⌚︎⌚︎

11AM is looking for sharp, curious people to lead Growth and Operations for our daily livestream.

If you want to tap in with the most interesting people in the business of crypto while shitposting in motion

contact me immediately

SEED 🌱 CLUB

@seedclubhq

⌚︎⌚︎ Week One of 11AM. If you're here, you're early. ⌚︎⌚︎

Huge thanks to everyone who tuned in this week and to all the talented builders who took time out of their busy schedules to come share what they are working on with the world.

We'll see you next week at 11AM

26

12:02 AM • Jun 21, 2025

nicholas ⛱

@nnnnicholas

GM

26

4:38 PM • Jun 25, 2025

reka

@reka_eth

the vibe is:

- optimistic
- bold
- inclusive
- ethereal
- high conviction

142

2:21 PM • Jun 25, 2025

guten morgen,

i ended up third place on the Farcaster leaderboard this week, which is, by all diagnostic standards, a symptom of mental illness. for those not familiar, Farcaster is where you go when Twitter isn’t crypto enough. it’s social media with integrated wallets, portable social graphs, embedded mini apps, and an undercurrent of cult energy. if you're wondering how i got there, i was posting with the fevered intensity of a Victorian child dying of artistic consumption, and the algorithm rewarded me with internet points that felt both deeply important and completely meaningless.

congrats to Henri, who took #1 after selling his company to Stripe. a righteous ascent. you deserve rest. you have now entered the soul-siphoning ritual that is the FC leaderboard.

shaw came in 2nd. his origin story involves being banned from twitter, which in this economy counts as both credibility and character arc. hes now manic posting like his waifu depends on it. (she does.) I fear for him.

and me? i held the #3 spot. not out of ego, but obligation. i do not post to be understood. i post to be witnessed, misinterpreted, and filtered from layers of horny semantic drift.

competitive casting is deeply edifying practice, but it takes its toll. maintaining one's place is a deeply corrosive art, a game of stamina, sacrifice, and spiritual erosion. my fingertips are calloused. my wrist hums with a psychosomatic curse. my screen time is down to a modest 22.5 hours a day. my friends have stopped texting. my mom says she barely recognizes me anymore.

still, I endure.
for the leaderboard. for the graph. for the culture.
for the few brave women who look at a crypto social network and think: i can fix him,

and by him i mean the protocol.

anyway, enjoy some mostly accurate reportings below

xx, c

11AM

As you may have noticed, Seed Club's Internet Explorers went dark a couple of weeks ago. After nearly two years of weekly streams, we decided it was time to start something new. It's not time for internet explorers, it's 11AM with Seed Club. 

tune in at seedclubhq everyday at 11am est and catch the latest on the business of crypto, hosted by Jess & Josh

Catch the latest episode here.

this week on 11am, our inaugural guests delivered the kind of market commentary that makes you genuinely excited about building the future, even if it looks nothing like what we expected.

Here's a run down of some of the most salient news this week.

decentralization doesn't matter until it matters

Twitter decided to nuke a ton of accounts without explanation, sending degens like Shaw scrambling to farcaster like refugees fleeing a digital dictatorship. Jess speculates that everyone was scraping twitter data to build trading bots, and elon's $50k/month api pricing forced creative workarounds that apparently crossed some invisible line. Dan Romero's observation about "decentralization not mattering until it matters" suddenly feels prophetic, when your livelihood depends on a centralized platform's whims, alternatives like farcaster stop being ideological luxuries and become practical necessities.

on crypto gaming

Apix, our gaming oracle, dropped the spicy truth that there are successful crypto games making $50 million annually but never penetrate CT because they're too busy being profitable instead of posting banger threads. The real problem isn't lack of success stories, it's that even winners remain invisible to crypto natives because they're built by web2 focused studios in asia who don't care about our discourse. This creates a fascinating blind spot where the crypto gaming category appears dead to insiders while quietly thriving in markets we don't monitor. Meanwhile, his stealth trading card game "project o" promises to capture that pokemon pocket dopamine hit that generated $600 million by exploiting humanity's pathological need to open digital packs. But he's not just building another collectible card game, he's threading the needle between "left curve" fully onchain degen games and "right curve" mass market games with abstracted crypto, avoiding the deadly "mid curve" trap of building normal games that only market to CT's tiny audience of yield farmers who fundamentally don't care about gameplay.

The man understands something profound: most crypto is already a game. Airdrop farming, yield chasing, token speculation, they're all elaborate point scoring systems with financial rewards. The question isn't whether to gamify finance, it's whether to acknowledge that finance is already gamified and build better games around it. His observation that indie crypto gaming teams (onchain heroes, fishing frenzy, kamagotchi, etc.) emerging from the trenches with clear scaling visions feel more exciting than bloated studios reveals the real opportunity. These small teams understand crypto native behavior because they lived it, unlike massive studios spending $500M and hiring 10,000 employees to build games for an audience they've never met. When you have more employees than daily active users, you've fundamentally misunderstood the assignment. The future belongs to builders who recognize that crypto's killer feature isn't just enabling new business models, it's creating new ways for players to have skin in the game that goes beyond entertainment into actual economic participation.

on sustainable growth

Kolten from aave/avara delivered the most sobering take: sustainable growth actually matters. Aave quietly became the biggest defi protocol (surpassing even lido) by focusing on boring things like revenue generation and user education. This isn't just about being conservative, it's about recognizing that unsustainable growth strategies have created a graveyard of protocols that burned through treasuries chasing mercenary capital. His growth marketing philosophy centers on education over hype because he's witnessed the real problem: people lose money not from hacks but from fundamental misunderstanding of what they're buying. When users don't grasp the risks they're taking, they think they're getting x result and end up with y, losing half their money in the process. This creates a vicious cycle where bad experiences drive people away from defi entirely.

His vision of the "magic button" app, literally just a deposit button that gives you great yield, feels obvious once stated but represents a massive philosophical shift. The family wallet doubles down on this future: clean interactions and specialized apps that solve specific problems rather than general purpose tools that overwhelm normies with complexity they neither want nor need. We're apparently one simplified ui away from bringing defi superpowers to normal people, which is both wildly ambitious and completely achievable given how much better crypto rails actually are than legacy finance. The challenge isn't technical, it's packaging value propositions without forcing users to understand fractional reserve banking mechanics to use a simple savings account.

But kolten's most interesting insight was about the competitive landscape shift. Defi isn't just competing with other protocols anymore, it's competing with robinhood, paypal, and traditional fintech for the same "where should i put my money" decision. This means the target user isn't a crypto native who understands yield farming, it's someone comparing a 5% apy crypto savings app against their bank's 0.5% savings account. The winner won't be whoever builds the most sophisticated protocol, it'll be whoever makes the superior experience so obvious that adoption happens unconsciously.

on a maturing industry

Peter Pan from 1kx came on to deliver market insights that made perfect sense of the current chaos. His "bonnie blue" warning about crypto vcs prioritizing equity value over tokens isn't doom and gloom, it's just the natural evolution of a maturing industry where investors want sustainable returns. The uncomfortable reality: many major protocols are fighting this battle right now, with vcs having already sold their tokens and now pushing for equity value accrual through fee switches that benefit centralized companies, not token holders. His infrastructure investment thesis reveals the deeper game, we've barely scratched 1% of crypto's application design space, so he's betting on teams that either excel at onboarding non crypto builders (especially in ip/entertainment/royalties) or bootstrap their own killer consumer apps rather than hoping someone else builds on their chain. His "recession pop crypto" thesis perfectly captures the moment: the global economy being completely cooked has created perfect conditions for both brain rot escapism and creative money making opportunities. Crypto's superpower isn't just financial transactions, it's offering people multiple ways to make small amounts of money doing things they actually enjoy, recreating that "first dollar made online" lightning in a bottle feeling that hooked an entire generation of internet natives. The magic isn't in the tech, it's in finally answering the question "how do you want to make money?" with more options than just your day job.

Peter / ‘pet3rpan’

@pet3rpan_

Many token holders are about to be straight up bonnie blued with the incoming wave of crypto VCs that will push for equity value accrual over live tokens.

135

8:42 PM • Jun 16, 2025

The overarching theme was crypto's awkward adolescence, that weird phase where ideological purity meets actual business realities and somehow both win. News about Tron allegedly going public and stripe making acquisitions aren't signs of sellout culture, they're proof the technology works well enough that serious money wants in. We're witnessing the industry mature beyond the "normies will ruin everything" paranoia toward "normies will make everything better because they bring scale." The split between ephemeral meme entertainment and boring compounding infra isn't a tension to resolve, it's the natural state of a healthy ecosystem where different products serve different human needs. Some people want to gamble on dog coins, others want sustainable yield on their savings, and the beautiful thing is crypto can serve both without forcing anyone to choose sides. The real winners will be whoever stops trying to convert the masses to crypto ideology and instead just builds things so obviously better that adoption happens unconsciously, like how nobody thinks of venmo as "fintech disruption", it's just how you pay your friends.

Stripe acquires Privy

Stripe acquired bought Privy. Yes, Stripe. The one already scaffolding most of the internet’s payments infrastructure. This is not an acqui-hire. It is Stripe making a full-stack play to own crypto-native commerce. Earlier this year, they spent $1.1B on Bridge to handle stablecoin flows. Now they have absorbed Privy, the wallet infra powering 75M accounts across platforms like Farcaster, Hyperliquid, dYdX, and OpenSea.

Privy quietly solved the two UX nightmares of crypto: onboarding and asset movement. No seed phrases. No browser extensions. No ritual humiliation. Just clean, embedded flows that spin up self-custodial wallets with an email.

Put Bridge and Privy together and you get a clean payment loop. A user signs in. Privy creates the wallet behind the scenes. Stripe handles fiat onramp, stablecoin conversion, KYC, fraud tooling, payments, and eventually offramps. Funds land in Bridge accounts backed by USDC or USDB, usable in 101 countries. Transfers are gasless. Cards work out of the box. All of it lives inside the app. The user never has to touch an exchange or copy-paste a string of gibberish.

This is a milestone for consumer crypto. But also for basic sanity. If you've ever tried to explain wallets, gas fees, or seed phrases to a normal person and felt your soul disintegrate, this is a glimpse of what better could look like.

As founder Henri Stern put it, “the potential for crypto to change how users interact with the web has never been more apparent... We’re excited for what comes next.”

Stripe is not circling around crypto anymore. It is building into it. With Privy, it now owns a key layer of the stack. This isn’t just infrastructure. It is Stripe quietly wiring up the next chapter of internet commerce, all on crypto rails.

Open the app. Never leave.

Ponder

Ponder (SC07) is now featured in the Farcaster miniapp store. They've passed 100,000 paid, onchain votes and clocking 2,000+ weekly active users. Not bad for a knowledge engine disguised as a poll app.

Think of it like Polymarket’s emotionally intelligent little brother. Less degenerate, more dignified. Built for Farcaster-native coordination instead of Twitter spectacle. If Polymarket is a market for truth, Ponder is an interface for collective intuition, a research tool that turns public sentiment into structured signal.

Brands, creators, and communities can drop a question straight into the feed and instantly incentivize answers. Responses are rewarded with tokens. Votes are paid. Context is composable. Reputation is portable. The implications for real-time research, feedback loops, and decentralized consensus are vast.

Prediction markets don’t have to be a big scary thing. The everyday person just wants to have fun with their online friends, and be right every now and then.

Refraction

@RefractionDAO

Founders, product thinkers, and onchain operators: Refraction × @reown_ × @StellarOrg bring the signal before the noise, with our Builder Cocktail at Public Records.

Thursday, June 26
Doors at 6:30PM
Public Records @233butler, Brooklyn
Free RSVP ↓

​A lightning

10

1:27 PM • Jun 13, 2025

Jebus

@Jebus

“I work in crypto”

492

1:20 AM • Jun 16, 2025

Cheryl Douglass

@cherdougie

better to be cringe in someone else's mind than caged in your own

220

4:19 PM • Jun 12, 2025

Chairman Birb Bernanke

@Bonecondor

Revenue meta? You mean “having a viable business”?

178

4:54 AM • Jun 12, 2025

Jay

@jayhinz

3 coffees no lunch and seeing mainstream crypto adoption happen in our lifetime

112

2:24 PM • Jun 11, 2025

Cheryl Douglass

@cherdougie

made it to berlin and it’s raining so entering my slavic grandmother arc

113

6:05 PM • Jun 15, 2025

blessed matin,

the phrase “content is king” implies the existence of a monarchy, one in which engagement is inherited, not earned.

“Content is queen” implies a consort role to a more dominant mechanism: the token.

“Content is coin” suggests full commodification, where every thought, thirst trap, and trauma post is simply liquidity with a narrative wrapper.

Conclusion: content isn’t king: it’s currency. 

which is why you should collect this post. 

enjoy some mostly accurate reportings below

xx, c

OYL CORP: the happiest place on Bitcoin

I just published the first installment in a new series chronicling some of the most goated and spiritually unhinged builders in crypto

the first edition looks into mythologies, mechanics, and programmability emerging on bitcoin L1 ft. Cole Jorissen, co-founder & cpo of Oyl Corp

(i clocked in at oyl corp so you don’t have to)

Check out the interview here:

Programming myth, chaos, and composability on the mother chain

Oyl Corp is part protocol lab, part performance art. Their mission? Make Bitcoin expressive, without betraying what it is.

https://paragraph.com

X and Polymarket are consciously coupling

the bird app just clocked in to the prediction market industrial complex.

X (née Twitter, RIP) announced an official partnership with Polymarket, the onchain betting site that lets you trade geopolitical catastrophe, American decline, and sportsball outcomes with the same dead-eyed ease. “Official prediction market partner,” they called it. No further comment from Musk, but the subtext is clear: journalism is out, markets are in.

Polymarket

@Polymarket

The next information age won’t be driven by the 20th century’s media monoliths — it’ll be driven by markets.

Our partnership with @X marks a new chapter for truth on the internet.

The future of news is optimized for truth, rooted in transparency, and anchored in reality.

X

@X

we’re joining forces with Polymarket as our official prediction market partner

@X @Polymarket

3,833

4:55 PM • Jun 6, 2025

“The next information age won’t be driven by the 20th century’s media monoliths – it’ll be driven by markets.”
— Polymarket, fully off one

Polymarket has been quietly, then violently, eating. After vibing in obscurity since 2020, it went parabolic in the back half of 2024, doing $1.1B in volume in a single week before the U.S. election. The top traders cashed out $47M. It was, and still is, more liquid than your average Layer 1.

These days, the degens are betting on the NBA Finals and the Stanley Cup, but the energy remains prophetic. Betting on everything, believing in nothing. Total post-truth serenity.

And now it’s on the main feed.

Shayne Coplan 🦅

@shayne_coplan

Proud to announce @Polymarket’s partnership with @X and @xai as their Official Prediction Market Partner. The two top truth seeking apps on the internet are stronger together.

Welcome to News 2.0.

Stay tuned

X

@X

we’re joining forces with Polymarket as our official prediction market partner

@X @Polymarket

5,477

5:19 PM • Jun 6, 2025

What’s happening here isn’t just some quirky integration. It’s the financialization of consensus. It’s epistemology with a UX layer. Elon doesn’t want to moderate content. He wants to offload reality to the hive mind, price-discovered truth in real time.

In other words:

We replaced journalists with oracles.
The oracle is a pool.
Good luck.

Pump dot fun: the $4b meme machine

Imagine launching 11 million tokens, making $700M in fees, and then deciding… we should probably raise a billion dollars now.

That’s the current state of pump.fun, the Solana-based memecoin launchpad that’s equal parts playground, printing press, and psychological experiment. According to multiple sources this week, pump.fun is prepping a $1B token sale at a $4B valuation, which happens to be the total combined market cap of every token ever launched on the platform.

You heard that right. They want to sell a token worth exactly as much as all the other tokens they helped launch.

Naturally, the speculators were not pleased. Many who assumed holding $PUMP would unlock a bag of riches watched in horror as prices cratered across Solana memecoin land. It was the mass extinction of bagholder cope. One X user described it as “waking up to find out your meme was just a freemium onboarding funnel for someone else’s token raise.”

But maybe that’s the point.

Pump.fun isn’t just a launchpad. It’s the closest thing we have to a live simulation of capital formation. One-click token deploys. Zero friction. Everything is liquid. Nothing is real. It’s memetic liquidity warfare on autoplay.

And it’s working.

Pump has reportedly pulled in $700M in cumulative revenue, launched an AMM to internalize trading fees, dropped a mobile app, and teased a new token rollout within weeks. Whether or not the token is real, one thing is: the energy.

Because unlike most crypto startups, pump.fun didn’t spend years roadmapping their way toward relevance. They just opened a portal to madness and let the market write its own story.

Plasma melts faces on arrival

Today, Plasma, a new Bitcoin sidechain for stablecoins, opened pre-deposits on Cobie’s shiny new launchpad Sonar. Plasma is being pitched as a fully EVM-compatible Bitcoin sidechain designed to run USDT at scale.

The token? XPL.
The valuation? $500M.
The investors? Founders Fund.

within sixty seconds, it was already over

Let’s walk through the sequence:

• Pre-deposits opened for a $250M cap

• Filled in under a minute

• Cap extended to $500M

• Filled again in seconds

• Only 1,108 wallets made it in

• One man spent $99.6k in gas to front-run the form

• The top 3 wallets dropped a combined $107.5M

• The top 10 wallets ate 40% of the whole supply

• 84 wallets snagged $450M worth of allocation

Imagine being on the wrong side of that refresh button. You blinked, and a new sidechain raised half a billion dollars.

what even is Plasma?

It’s not Ethereum. It’s not Solana. It’s not quite Bitcoin. It’s… something in between.

A Bitcoin-rooted, EVM-compatible stablecoin chain that wants to move USDT at zero-fee velocity. Whether it becomes the “Tether chain” or just another Layer 1 with excellent seed round PR, it already has what most chains don't: actual capital, a working bridge to real money, and Cobie as a megaphone.

It’s fast. It’s funded. It’s FOMO-as-a-service. And yes, the token isn’t even live yet.

We’ll keep watching. From a safe distance.

shl0ms and the industrial complex of nothing

every now and then, crypto births an entity so strange, so profoundly unserious, that it loops back around into genius. shl0ms is one of them.

part Yves Klein séance, part crypto saboteur, part car bomb technician, the pseudonymous artist has been dropping high-concept provocations for years now. maybe you caught the $CAR stunt: they bought a $250k luxury vehicle, blew it up with a licensed demolitions expert, and sold the charred shrapnel as 999 NFTs. performance art meets fragment economy. an explosion with a mint button. last year, shl0ms tweeted a fake Google screenshot claiming Gmail would shut down, sending tech Twitter into a frenzy as journalists, VCs, and influencers took the bait. He later minted the chaos into art: a 1/1 NFT of the hoax (“Sunset”) and an open edition of Google’s denial tweet (“Sunrise”), amassing 9.6 ETH and turning mass confusion into conceptual commentary on platform trust and digital permanence.

Most recently, they released a project literally titled “          ” .yes, blank space. anchored by a network of artists building on the themes of shl0ms and the void itself. the associated whitepaper, which contained absolutely nothing, racked up 183,000 mints. art? hoax? behavioral study? doesn’t matter. it worked.

claiming the token associated with the project only added to the performance. the farcaster interface proudly declared: “congrats! you claimed 1,200 $” and for a moment, just a flicker, you thought you’d received an actual stimulus check. united states freedom dollars. from god. but no. just a token from shl0ms

no announcement. no asset name. just a blank token, dropped to those who met three oddly precise criteria: 1) farcaster pro status 2) follows @shl0ms 3) holds at least $1 of SOL, enough to signal life, not enough to game it

and that’s the game. not wealth, but the illusion of it, executed with enough finesse that you don’t even mind being tricked. in typical shl0ms fashion, nothing was explained. nothing needed to be. because in his world, the art is the ambiguity. and the punchline is always onchain.

transmissions from the nothing cabal

i managed to make it inside the loyal long term collector chat for “          ”, shl0ms’ latest blank-space intervention. the tone isn’t hype, it’s hymn. cryptic verses. recursive diagrams. metaphysical field notes. it feels less like a group chat and more like an initiation.

one user has been posting cryptic poems. i asked if the blankness is emptiness, or density we can’t yet parse. the response came like a sigil: “i think infinite potential.” no one asked what the token does. they ask what it wants.

it’s easy to dismiss this as trolling. but there’s something more uncomfortable at play here:
shl0ms makes art out of system failure. they take the interfaces we blindly trust (gmail, media, money) and bend them into mirrors.

the question isn't whether it’s “real.” the question is why we believed it in the first place. Shl0ms has made a career out of turning crypto’s worst instincts (greed, hype, vapor) into avant-garde artifacts. and in a space dominated by churn and liquidity theater, it’s refreshing to see someone make you feel something 

 even if that feeling is “what the actual fuck is this.”

Big tone candle

there I was unwillingly at the creepy afters, I found myself watching a 28-year-old day trader named Tyler refresh his phone every three seconds like a lab rat hitting a cocaine button. his screen showed a forest of red and green bars, but he was hunting for something specific: the holy grail of degen gambling that CT had christened the "big tone candle." 

"You see this shit?" tyler said, jabbing his finger that was also curled around an elf bar at a chart that looked like the ECG of someone having a heart attack. one green bar stretched so high it made everything else look like trading ants. "That's a big tone candle, bro. Changed my fucking life." he wasn't joking. 3 weeks ago, he was living with his mom in Tampa, sleeping on a futon next to her collection of ceramic cats. now hes subletting a loft in soho and sporting a Patek Philippe knockoff and explaining his "system" for finding tokens about to go parabolic.

the term itself had emerged from the primordial ooze of CT sometime, coined by some guy who probably never imagined his throwaway joke would become the obsession of thousands of terminally online speculators. 

for traders, finding a big tone candle is what I imagine narcotics must feel like. tyler described the exact moment he caught one live: "Your heart starts pounding, your hands shake, you can't think straight. then boom your portfolio goes from 4 to 6 digits in literally 60 seconds." the high is immediate, overwhelming, and completely addictive. the comedown, when the candle inevitably crashes back to earth, leaves them frantically refreshing charts at 3 AM, chasing that next hit. tyler had blown through 2 previous windfalls trying to replicate his first big score, but he couldn't stop. "I know the next one's coming," he insisted, eyes bloodshot from staring at screens. "you can feel it building."

emmy ˗ˏˋ 𓅰 ˎˊ˗

@emxlymargaret

i hope this email kills both of us

11.2K

3:51 AM • May 29, 2025

corb

@awshuqs

is ChatGPT down for anyone else? i’m a neurosurgeon in the middle of brain surgery

287.6K

7:33 AM • Jun 2, 2025

edmond

@nstlgiaxpress

THE CLOUT VS COST MAP

Last week I posted about the decoupling of taste and money. Building on that: cost doesn't equal clout either. The coolest things have never been for sale. You earn them, you get let in, or you make them yourself.

1,134

11:53 AM • Jun 2, 2025

Jay

@jayhinz

what checking the X timeline today felt like

6

1:42 AM • May 31, 2025

justin vogel 🦁

@jkey_eth

Crypto BD in one sentence: Two BD reps endlessly discussing terms neither has authority to approve

75

2:30 PM • May 30, 2025

Bitcoin has always somewhat resisted expression.

It resists change. It resists charm. It resists you.

You don’t build on Bitcoin. You endure it.
It is a chain of monks and militants. Of scarcity-maxis and anti-social protocol degens.
You hodl. You don’t ask questions. You certainly don’t add behavior.

So when I first heard about a group of creative coders and protocol designers trying to build a “programmable consumer layer” directly on Bitcoin L1, I assumed it was either a grift, a gimmick, or some kind of larp. Then I talked to Cole.

Cole is the co-founder and CPO at Oyl Corp, a pseudocorporate art collective that looks like a wallet, acts like a layer 1, and thinks like a postmodern cult. They're the company behind a suite of open source infrastructure designed to unlock the next stage of unstoppable programmability on Bitcoin.

When I messaged him for an interview, his first answer was: “If you knew what we were really building, your brain would snap in half.”

He wasn't kidding. Oyl Corp isn’t a typical crypto company. It’s a worldview.

A worldview built on one idea: Bitcoin isn’t dead. It’s just been muted.

Oyl | Building Alkanes

@oylwallet

this is our investor pitch

106

8:12 PM • May 28, 2025

The story starts in early 2023, in a design studio in Brooklyn called WetLab. Cole and Alec were talking Ordinals.

“He pilled me,” Cole says. “I didn’t even take my coat off. We just started braining.”

They weren’t the first to get excited about putting JPEGs on Bitcoin, but they might have been the first to ask what came after.

“So what do we call it?” Alec asked.
“Oyl,” Cole replied, “but spelled O-Y-L.”
First idea, best idea.

They made a deck that basically said: “There will be tokens on Bitcoin.”
They didn’t know what kind. They didn’t know how. They just knew the network was waking up.

What started as a wallet became something stranger.
Not a company. Not even a product.
More like a collective hallucination about what Bitcoin could be, if it had tools. If it had taste. 

the oyl stack: programmability on bitcoin L1

Oyl Corp is now the parent company for a stack of open-source infrastructure that lets developers build natively on Bitcoin L1. Not by rewriting Bitcoin’s rules, but by interpreting them. Think:

• Sandshrew, their unified RPC and indexer, is like Google Translate for raw Bitcoin data.

• Metashrew, their WASM-based engine, actually reads smart contract logic from compressed WASM files inscribed directly onto Bitcoin.

• Protorunes, a protocol layering framework that lets you encode logic in the same OP_RETURN outputs as Runes.

• Alkanes, the beating heart: a smart contract metaprotocol where every token is a contract, and every transfer can do something.

But here's the thing…you don’t write contracts from scratch.

Oyl | Building Alkanes

@oylwallet

Alignment is Key

88

7:03 PM • Apr 23, 2025

This isn’t Ethereum. You’re not handed a blank canvas. you’re given a tightly engineered toolkit.

Alkanes doesn’t ask you to spin up a whole new system. It gives you modular, programmable parts that slot directly into Bitcoin as it already exists. You don’t deploy contracts onto a purpose-built chain. You inscribe compressed WASM code directly into Bitcoin transactions.

Execution happens offchain, deterministically, via indexers like Metashrew, so Bitcoin never breaks consensus, but contracts still run.

It’s less about total freedom and more about powerful constraints. The design space is narrower, but more secure.

You’re not building a world from scratch. You’re wiring logic into the world’s most resilient monetary base.

“It’s not about being a dev,” Cole says. “It’s about playing with behavior that already exists.”

In other words: Alkanes is the IKEA catalog of Bitcoin programmability. Pre-fab contracts, composable logic, plug-and-play tokens. No offchain validators, and absolutely no new chains. Plus insane lore (watch below).

Oyl | Building Alkanes

@oylwallet

This message is 92 seconds long.
There are answers within.

103

4:07 PM • May 20, 2025

what makes this different from literally everything else?

A ton of projects right now are trying to do one of two things:

1. Build a better chain.

2. Build a worse app with better ideology.

Oyl doesn’t care about either.

They’re not competing with Solana or spinning up new validators. They’re not trying to lure “degen volume” or squeeze yield from airdrop farmers. They’re building the infrastructure for expressive onchain behavior where the money already is: Bitcoin.

It’s about actual distribution.
Bitcoin has users. Bitcoin has attention. Bitcoin has meaning.
And if you can make Bitcoin programmable, you unlock a latent design space that no L2 could fake.

a new cult of liquidity

The first smart contract asset on Alkanes was DIESEL: a token that mirrors Bitcoin’s economic security and issuance, and enables trustless, native, protocol-level DeFi.

The way DIESEL runs is also oddly elegant. Every time a new Bitcoin block is mined, the first transaction to hit the DIESEL contract claims that block’s reward: 3.125 tokens, halving every 4 years, until 2140. There’s no extra token for fees, no offchain scheduling. It all runs permissionlessly on Bitcoin. Watching it unfold feels like peering into a new design space, one where distribution can be playful, temporal, and trustless, all without straying from Bitcoin’s constraints. It doesn’t try to outgrow the chain. It listens to it.

If Diesel showed what programmable tokens could look like on Bitcoin, the Oyl AMM is where they’ll actually meet. Built to fit the UTXO model and powered by Alkanes, it’s the first trustless market maker on Bitcoin L1. It solves the actual problem most Bitcoin-native assets face: there’s nowhere to go with them. No rails. No markets. The AMM gives fungible tokens like Diesel or Rune-wrapped assets a place to pool, pair, and price, entirely onchain. Liquidity providers can earn yield on Bitcoin itself, and DeFi apps can build directly into it.

Then came Airheads: a cursed PFP project that cratered and resurrected itself into high-volume conviction art. If DIESEL was the proof-of-concept, Airheads became the lore.

The Whale Pass is Oyl’s high-signal collector Ordinal, only 555 exist. It accrues an onchain virtual balance every block, grants 69,420 XP when held in the Oyl Wallet, and comes with perks like a free Airhead mint. It’s part flex, part utility, part breadcrumb trail for whatever’s coming next. 

 People are using this stuff. And the liquidity is very real.

“I’m never selling,” Cole says. “I’ll just stake my DIESEL/OYL LP and live off protocol-native loans. That’s my CDP. That’s my life.”

oyl as performance art

This isn’t just infrastructure. This is a full-blown cultural performance.

Every product launch syncs with a symbolic block height (the indexer launched at block 880000). Every token has embedded logic. Every piece of the stack speaks to Bitcoin’s ethos, but bends it into something new.

“It’s about opt-out work,” Cole says. “This is the corporation inverted.”

You don’t need a job. You need a position in the liquidity cult.
You don’t need a boss. You need a wallet that listens.

When I asked Cole if I was an employee of Oyl Corp he asked “have you clocked in yet?”

“Everyone building on Alkanes works at Oyl Corp,” he says.

 “The happiest place on Bitcoin.”

blessed awakenings,

status: semi-liquid
location: manhattan
mood: ambient capitalist despair with hopeful undertones

the agony of our corporeal selves tethered to a global monetary system that many of you assure me is in the process of complete structural realignment. and yet, the bills persist. i pay and pay and still they reappear. and what does one get for all of this torturous effort? new kitten heels? a summer tour with 6 stops in southern europe? no, it’s all ephemeral things like liability insurance and electricity.

i’ve been thinking a lot about attention: how it’s spent, who profits, and what it means to go outside simply because an app asked me to sign in with email. sometimes i like to remember that i thrive in cities, onchain economies, and emotionally fraught group chats. i was raised in the attention economy and professionally trained in narrative manipulation, of course i’m going to invest in a token named after a snack.

the markets are up, or maybe down (this analysis is free). michael saylor is bitcoin bulking. i’ve been trying to stay grounded by reading books with unreliable narrators and making small, cinematic decisions that redirect the course of my life. all of this is to say: i’m still here. vaguely solvent, and dangerously online.

so fetch your tinctures, your rituals, your browser extensions and join me for this week’s excavation of digital culture and financial tomfoolery.

enjoy some mostly accurate reportings below

xx, c

Noice

Noice launched as an economic engagement layer for Farcaster, basically productizing the Amps and Tipn experiments into a different app experience. You configure micro-tips for organic engagement and set prices for paid engagement requests, all denominated in whatever ERC20 you want. People are tipping in $Zora, various clankers, even launching personal tokens specifically for this.

The token hit shot up pretty quickly, but what makes this interesting isn’t just the speculation. It’s the behaviors that emerge when social interaction becomes programmable. Some people are farming. Others are treating it like a form of lightweight patronage. It avoids the pressure of full-blown creator coins while offering more structure than just tweeting for free. It gives users a way to assign value to attention without turning it into a full-time hustle.

Noice also showed how quickly this kind of product can come together on crypto-native rails. Farcaster’s infrastructure made it possible to launch payments and social features without having to route through a dozen third-party systems. That speed alone points to something bigger. When the tools align, crypto apps don’t just compete with web2. They start to move faster than it.

The L1 Endgame Problem

We're watching the slow-motion collapse of L1 investment logic in real time. L1 tokens aren't businesses to be valued on cash flows, they're competing to be money within their digital economies. The problem is that opportunity might have already closed for everyone except Bitcoin, Ethereum, and maybe Solana.

Matt Huang

@matthuang

You can believe GDP and REV are important, while also disbelieving that a DCF is the right way to value the native asset of an L1

256

2:24 PM • May 19, 2025

Here's the brutal math: every successful application will eventually launch its own token and denominate their markets in that token instead of the underlying L1. When pump dot fun launches their token (and economic incentives guarantee they will), suddenly the app that drives the majority of Solana transactions is operating with its own unit of account. Multiply this across every significant application and you end up with L1s becoming expensive settlement infrastructure rather than monetary assets.

Josh Cornelius

@joshcrnls

if you assume that power laws are going to exist at the app layer and a few killer products will drive the vast majority of transactions on any given chain

and you assume these killer apps will launch tokens and denominate their markets in it because it’ll make a ton of economic

24

4:05 PM • May 27, 2025

The Kamagotchi/Initia example is a good one - a relatively small game running on its own app chain generates more fees than many billion-dollar protocols. This suggests the real value accrues at the application layer where users actually interact, not the infrastructure layer that just processes transactions. L1s are pricing themselves as if they'll capture application-layer value, but applications are increasingly designed to capture that value themselves.

zon 🪢

@ItsAlwaysZonny

Yominet makes more in fees each day than:

- Mantle
- Starknet
- World Chain
- Scroll
- Berachain
- Soneium
- Ink
- Celestia
- Metis
- Blast
- Sei
- Filecoin
- Fantom
- Movement
- Story
*data taken from DefiLlama 24h fees page.

yeah, appchains are cool.

Initia.

289

12:14 AM • May 23, 2025

We're seeing chains generating $300 in daily fees while maintaining billion-dollar valuations but at the end of the day it's not really about fees - it's about whether these protocols are building digital economies or just hoping someone else builds them. Most are betting on the latter, which feels increasingly naive as successful apps demonstrate they don't need to share value with their underlying infra.

Cookie Snaps

Cookie's $COOKIE token surged 80%+ following the launch of Snaps, its creator network platform. The rally has traders doing some comparisons between Cookie's ~$125M vs. Kaito's ~$550M market cap, both operating in the "InfoFi" space. Cookie's differentiator lies in its "mindshare" tracking, essentially quantifying how much mental real estate each project or poster occupies in public discourse. The platform gamifies this through Snaps, which rewards creators not just for posting frequently, but for demonstrating actual loyalty and alignment with specific projects over time. Think of it as the evolution from "engagement farming" to "conviction farming," where your takes are weighted by consistency, sentiment quality, and whether you're genuinely invested in what you're shilling versus just carpet-bombing every trending token. Whether this closes the valuation gap with Kaito or creates an entirely new category of "social analytics" is tbd, but the market seems generally interested by the possibility that authentic opinions might actually be worth more than generic hype posting.

winny

@winnyirl

oh cool 'infofi' yeah that sounds great, should we tell bella hadid?

73

1:56 PM • May 26, 2025

AUX: Curation Markets

Mike Bodge launched AUX as his take on collaborative internet curation. The concept is simple: post links you'd share in a group chat, vote on what deserves attention, winner takes the front page for up to four hours. It costs five attention tokens to post, every upvote sends someone a token, links live for 48 hours in the curation market.

The early content is interesting - deep cuts, obscure PDFs, music mixes, art finds. People seem to get the assignment: curate for taste rather than engagement farming. The constraint system (limited front page time, posting costs, finite voting periods) creates natural scarcity that prevents endless scroll problems.

Mike Bodge

@mikebodge

What would you post if the entire internet was looking?

Meet AUX @aux_xyz, a new way to discover breaking culture online.

1/3

166

12:27 PM • May 19, 2025

What's smart about the token design is how invisible it is. You get 100 attention tokens to start, build your stack through participation, never see wallet UI. Mike's explicitly positioning this as an internet attention machine, not a crypto app. the tokens function like arcade credits rather than investment vehicles.

The product works and feels genuinely useful for discovering stuff you wouldn't find otherwise. Whether it scales beyond the current user base of crypto-native internet culture enthusiasts is TBD. Mike's planning other experiments in the same ecosystem, so this is more proof of concept than final destination. It's a solid example of crypto mechanics enhancing rather than overwhelming the core product experience.

Live & online Fridays at 10am PT / 1pm ET.

smoresy ♱.*

@lilsmoresy_

imagine finding out ur man is cheating from the cookie bubble maps

93

9:00 AM • May 23, 2025

Farcaster

@farcaster_xyz

10,000 subscribers in the less than 6 hours!

2,294

9:48 PM • May 27, 2025

໊

@sonohoor

the holy trinity: the father (fuck it we ball) the son (it is what it is) the holy spirit (to be cringe is to be free)

28.7K

5:46 AM • May 27, 2025

Cited

@cited

please do not ever go to therapy they are trying to stop you from being a good crypto currency trader

427

5:13 PM • May 22, 2025

Cheryl Douglass

@cherdougie

this is why personal brands became the new moats. you can copy someone's product but you can't copy their relationship with 100k people who trust their judgment

when you can build belief at scale before asking for money, the entire power dynamic shifts

signüll

@signulll

i’ve been thinking about the difference between aggregating capital vs. aggregating attention first.

the traditional path often assumes capital precedes credibility. but in the modern era, attention is credibility… social proof at scale, liquid, monetizable, & compounding.

83

1:28 PM • May 27, 2025

Aix

@aixarizzo

flirting with a founder is easy

i’ll go first:

– i use your product

498

10:04 PM • May 26, 2025

bom dia,

intimate confessions for the parasocial relationship we're cultivating: 

-when nervous, my speech pattern contains traces of the countries i frequently open VPNs to; 

-i maintain professional distance from crypto while my drawers groan under the weight of hardware wallets; 

-i perform labor in exchange for stablecoins, though the specifics would violate several ndas; 

-i'm cultivating digital relationships purely for intellectual stimulation and definitely not to eventually pitch you

-my DMs are open for technical discussions and nothing whatsoever to promote; 

-sometimes i attend side events just to drink a matcha and disassociate in the corner like a victorian ghost

-there's something undeniably attractive about devs who can debate chain abstraction with the passionate intensity normally reserved for religion or sports teams

-I've developed pavlovian arousal responses to the interface notification sounds

-when i over-caffeinate, my fingers enter a fugue state and produce telegram messages that read like incomprehensible confessions from a dying ai

as we navigate these unpredictable waters, remember that we're not just losing money together, we’re forging memes in the crucible of financial trauma and reshaping cultural narratives

my work here is sensual, disorienting, and periodically fact-checked. you can plan on reliving our parasocial relationship again and again in the pages of the seed club newsletter. and if you’re not a fan, keep that to yourself. rejection sends me into a consuming and spiraling depression lasting ~6-8 weeks, approx the time it takes for an ephemeral crypto app to run its course

enjoy some mostly accurate reportings below

xx, c

Believe app

Token launchpads are evolving beyond being glorified memecoin vending machines. Believe just quietly dropped their API. Yes, an actual product that lets builders do something beyond staring at bonding curve charts while hyperventilating. Wild, I know.

The first endpoint, which Ben Pasternak confirmed on Twitter, enables programmatic coin burns. Suddenly those vague whitepaper promises about "token burns tied to product utility" might actually be implementable instead of forever languishing in the 2-3 weeks SoonTM graveyard.

Ben Pasternak

@pasternak

Here’s a demo of the upcoming Believe API — going live shortly.

The goal of the Believe API is to make it easy for builders to create harmony between their product and coin, no matter what their product does.

The first API endpoint lets builders burn their coin

747

12:30 PM • May 20, 2025

What's particularly clever is that Believe is funding these burns from their accumulated transaction fees, which means they're essentially recycling platform revenue back into supporting token values.

Let's use Dupe (one of Believe's early launchers) as a theoretical example: they could trigger burns every time users complete deal searches, their core KPI. This creates a flywheel where increased product usage directly strengthens tokenomics, rather than the usual disconnect where a project's token and product exist in completely different universes.

Believe is showing promising signs of understanding something fundamental: launching tokens is the easy part...building sustainable token economies that actually enhance products is the real challenge. Watching founders pivot from "internet capital markets LFG!!" to actually building infra that helps tokens integrate meaningfully with products feels like witnessing crypto's collective frontal lobe finally developing.

Consumer Crypto's B2B Trojan Horse

I've never been more bullish on crypto. Which either means we're about to experience unprecedented success or I'm suffering from the euphoric delusions that precede spectacular ruin. The signs are enticing: regulatory tailwinds that would have been unthinkable six months ago, Apple finally letting NFTs into their walled garden, and a SEC that occasionally goes days without threatening anyone.

But here's the less sexy truth: the real adoption path probably runs through the most boring corridor in the building: B2B. As Jared noted on Internet Explorers, while we're all chasing retail dopamine hits, enterprises are quietly integrating blockchain into backends that will eventually cascade to consumers who won't even realize they're using crypto.

Just like YouTube transformed media by letting creators compete with established gatekeepers, this enterprise-first approach might finally break crypto out of its self-referential terrarium. We love to pretend we're building for "mass adoption," but at what point do we admit that trading the same assets back and forth between the same 100,000 people isn't exactly world-changing? Maybe the breakthrough comes when someone's grandma unknowingly receives her pension payments via stables or when a beauty influencer gets platform payouts.

Build for Humans, Not Hashrates

Behavioral economists often state that markets are made of people, not rational agents. Human factors like emotion, biases, and social influences impact our investment choices, which breed irregularities and inefficiencies. We experience this daily, even outside of markets. It creates perfect imperfections and keeps the world interesting.

https://darkstarcrashes.xyz

My favorite potential plot twist? Consumer apps might eventually flip the whole "L1/L2 as platforms" narrative on its head. Zora's quote pairs model shows how this works. Every trade involves their token, turning the app into an index of value created on the platform. When enough apps follow suit and own the customer relationship, the L1 becomes plumbing rather than protagonist. Power flows to whoever owns distribution, not whoever maintains the pipes.

For builders, the message is clear: you can launch sparkling vaporware and enjoy your fifteen minutes, or you can build something that generates actual value and align incentives between builders and traders. As Peace so eloquently put it, "crypto has consistently overpromised and under delivered"... so maybe try under-promising and actually shipping something that makes money?"

Stablecoins: Dollar Hegemony's Hottest Rebound

Remember that time politicians shut down Facebook's Libra project for daring to create internet money? Fast forward to 2025, and now Scott Bessant is testifying to Congress about the glorious future of "$2 trillion in dollar-denominated assets on blockchain." Turns out stablecoins are less "existential threat to monetary sovereignty" and more "dollar's sexy digital avatar." When someone in what Arthur Hayes eloquently calls "bumblefuck Indonesia" holds Tether instead of their local currency, they're essentially hoarding digital dollars, extending America's financial reach to places traditional banks fear to tread. Our government finally realized what crypto degens knew all along: stablecoins are the dollar's Trojan horse, not its replacement.

Stripe is rolling out stablecoin accounts in 100+ countries, Ramp launched stablecoin-backed cards giving basically everyone access to e-commerce, and Meta's flirting with stables for creator payouts. Real-world use cases are boringly practical: businesses paying overseas contractors, creator platforms distributing payments, and cross-border commerce without the soul-crushing friction of trad banking.

The issue for Bessant (which Hayes breaks down) is that stablecoin issuers hoard short-term T-bills, not the longer-dated bonds Treasury desperately needs to offload. Why would Tether lock up capital in 10-year treasuries when T-bills offer the same yield without the commitment issues? This structural mismatch means stablecoins aren't fully solving Treasury's funding kink, and Hayes speculates we might eventually see legislation forcing stablecoin providers to buy longer-dated treasuries... for the good of the nation, of course.

I can't decide if this represents crypto's co-option by tradfi or finance's surrender to inevitability. What's clear is that dollar-dominated stablecoins let America extend its financial tentacles far beyond what traditional banking could achieve. Meta's renewed interest isn't brave innovation, it's pragmatic capitulation to reality: global payment rails must evolve, and stablecoins are the path of least resistance.

The regulatory complete 180 simply acknowledges what happens when ideology meets reality: better to have dollar stablecoins dominate global digital commerce than watch alternative currencies fill the void. Sometimes you realize your worst enemy might actually be your best ally.

Live & online Fridays at 10am PT / 1pm ET.

Gwart

@GwartyGwart

Ripple acquiring Circle would be worse than Hooli acquiring Pied Piper

1,408

4:38 PM • May 20, 2025

cyndi ស៊ីនឌី

@__cyntax

My parents immigrated to the states so I could become a DJ

15.2K

3:30 PM • May 19, 2025

Daniel

@growing_daniel

I’ve decided falling in love would interfere with my primary objective of creating shareholder value

2,025

2:52 PM • May 19, 2025

Austin Adams

@AustinAdams10

internet capital markets requires incentive alignment, coordination, and structure between both builders and traders.

without that, we have sparkling memecoins

56

10:51 AM • May 14, 2025

ETHRNSM

@ETHRNSM

We are a creator-led movement to restore Ethereum’s cultural presence through one shared mission: make Ethereum impossible to ignore.

The time for ETHRNSM is now.

573

12:13 PM • May 19, 2025

bitch

@urlbbe

storming off dramatically then silently coming back for my vape

4,802

2:56 PM • May 14, 2025

SEED 🌱 CLUB

@seedclubhq

/seed_club/investments/q4/pumpparty.pdf

↳ Virality as a feature. Fandom as distribution. Internet culture, onchain.

The @pumppartyapp team is building fun, social, culture-first game show experiences, where crypto mechanics and rewards enhance the experience, not define it.

7

10:25 AM • May 21, 2025

godmorgen,

it's wednesday and the cosmos have aligned in such a way that my antihistamines and third espresso shot are battling for dominance over my last functioning neurotransmitter. last week, I witnessed the market transform from a funeral dirge to a carnival parade in the span of 48 hours. such is the bipolar majesty of our shared delusion. the market goes green, and suddenly everyone's a genius again.

i have lived a very long and complicated life full of too many hometowns and even more wallet addresses, i’ve made peace with the fact that i will never have a normal job again. instead, i am seeking a benevolent patron for the next 6 months to 12 years, depending on how long it takes for one of our portcos to hit a million DAUs or for me to be institutionalized (whichever comes first). you should plan on contributing to many discussions about chains not making apps, but apps making chains, conversations we'll have over red wine, of which I will also need a regular and quality supply.

when the bull run is complete, we may part ways tearfully, but content in the knowledge that there is a season and reason for everything. so grab whatever liquid keeps you ambulatory at this hour, silence the notifications from the group chat you keep meaning to leave, and enjoy some mostly accurate reporting below.

xx, c

Mainstreamification of crypto

Last week the crypto market looked up, stretched its back, and decided to believe in god again. Stripe dropped stablecoin accounts, allowing businesses in 100+ countries to hold, receive, and send US dollars. Ramp launched stablecoin-backed cards giving global users access to e-commerce. Robinhood is building a blockchain platform for European retail investors to trade US securities. Coinbase casually spent $3B on Deribit. Superstate put solana on its michael saylor arc. Meta’s flirting with stablecoin payouts for creators. Adoption isn’t knocking—it’s already in the house, borrowing your clothes without asking and asking for the wifi.

DXRG | Terminal City

Poof came on the show to talk DX Terminal: a week-long AI market psychodrama launching may 13 on base. Think: black monday 1987 meets Y2K, but everyone’s an AI agent with a gambling addiction and a twitter account. They can launch coins, pump & dump bags, scam, tribalize, and self-organize—none of it hardcoded. just vibes and emergent behavior. It’s one of the largest financial agent simulations ever run with language models. the art? cooked up with gremplin. the agents? complete sickos. Poof shared that working with AI for the past five months has yielded wild insights about agent behavior at scale, and the ephemeral nature of the project will let them to experiment before considering more permanent implementations. The DX Terminal Mint is live now if you want to go check it out.

DX Research Group

@DXRGai

DX TERMINAL MINT IS NOW LIVE!

1 AI TRADER NFT = 0.0125E on @Base

Mint your own team of AI Trader NFTs to join the game.
You have 48 HRS to assemble your dream team of AI Traders before the games begin.

384

12:02 PM • May 13, 2025

Fungi agents

Fungi, one of our portcos, just launched their first agent, and unlike the sea of novelty bots and half-sentient feeds out there, this one has a beautifully simple purpose: make your money work harder while you sleep.

Meet Mushy: a mushroom-themed, yield-maximizing agent for USDC on Base. It quietly hums in the background, scanning the ecosystem every 24 hours across Aave, Morpho, Fluid, and Moonwell to rotate you into the highest yields. No dashboards, no dials. just set it, vibe, and let the spores compound.

But Mushy doesn’t stop at surface APYs. It factors in protocol incentives, slippage, gas, liquidity depth, and risk profiles. It operates through a session-key-based smart account system—meaning you can give it clear, strict instructions, and it won’t color outside the lines. Want it to only touch Aave? Done. $5k tx limit? Easy. Permissions that expire in a week? You’re in control.

The team just crossed 100k in TVL and they’re building for much more. Behind the scenes is a full agent studio, designed to let anyone spin up similar products with minimal overhead and maximal magic. Because let’s be real: most people don’t want to manage ten protocols. They want results.

To try out the beta, create an account, plug in your wallet or use social login, deposit funds, and hit “Start Automation.” then return to your regularly scheduled doomscrolling while Mushy tends the yield forest on your behalf.

Jess 🌱

@thattallguy

Steady progress.

Mushy is your automated stable coin yield maximization agent.

It just quietly works in the background auto rotating you into the highest yields.

Congrats on crossing 100k TVL team. More to come I'm sure!

Fungi

@FungiAgents

our goal was to reach $100K in assets under management within the first 30 days after launch

we did it with 13 days to spare

people are loving @MushyAgent

and sers, we’re only getting started

$1M

mushy.ag

23

2:15 PM • May 9, 2025

Zora: From Micro Markets to Mainstream

Zora has been quietly crushing. In the two months since launching its coin-based model, the protocol has pulled in 2.6M traders, 128k creators, and over $258M in volume. Instead of pairing every post-coin with ETH, they’ve now made $ZORA the default base pair, meaning creator rewards now feed back into the ecosystem. A flywheel of token mechanics, content, and speculative joy.

The zora app is what happens when a social network accidentally becomes a market protocol. Double-tap to buy. No discord raids, no yelling at the dev asking their roadmap. Just pure content capitalism, clean and addictive like a slot machine designed by charles and ray eames.

Jacob describes the internet as "kind of half complete," referencing stewart brand’s duality: information wants to be free… but also expensive. Zora isn’t trying to fix that tension; they’re leaning into it, replacing ad-fueled content traps with public, open markets. The game isn’t clicks...it’s virality powered by actual demand.

In this world, a post isn’t just a post: it’s a coin. Not metaphorically. Literally. Creators get paid because people want to own the content they love, not because they stumbled into an algorithmic engagement minefield. Value emerges from attention, but only when it’s real.

Their new focus: micro markets. Content starts close to zero (as it should), but the rails are built for breakout velocity. The challenge is designing markets that don’t get sniped, but still allow for price discovery without the chaos of every drop becoming a gas war. They’re experimenting with Uniswap v4 under the hood and shipping major upgrades soon.

Onboarding is aggressively smooth. post, get paid, no need to touch the dark forest of crypto UX. And unlike the usual approach of wrapping crypto in vague lifestyle metaphors, zora is refreshingly upfront: this is a social network where every post is a coin. Normies become natives not through hand-holding, but through coins and content.

Download the zora app. available on iOS, android, and the part of your brain that still believes in the internet.

mini apps on apps on apps

Missed the mini app spotlight during farcon? You can catch the full stream here, with 17 demos from top mini app builders. get inspired.

Seed Club built Crowdfund as a practical expression of Network Capital.

It’s a tool for builders to raise funds by activating belief. Social-first capital formation at internet speed. By launching what feels to us like an obvious tool, we’re trying to show (not tell) what crypto makes possible. Crypto is the how, not the why. Fund Good Ideas is an open invitation: if you’ve got conviction, a network, and a reason to build—Crowdfund is for you.

Try Crowdfund today on Farcaster and the Web.

randomfreya

@cestfreya1

Was at Farcon Mini App demo day by Seed Club at Monad’s office yesterday.
As someone who turned kinda skeptical of Farcaster since last year’s Farcon in LA, I have to say — this time completely changed my mind.

I’ve always believed we need permissionless social networks. But

50

2:14 PM • May 4, 2025

ted (on farcaster)

@tednotlasso

at the @seedclubhq x @monad_xyz x @LayerZero_Core mini app spotlight and its A+

love being able to see demos of mini apps IRL from the builders themselves

also livestreaming from a phone is CLUTCH bc it becomes obvious where we gotta improve @farcaster_xyz

love this community

SEED 🌱 CLUB

@seedclubhq

FARCASTER MINI APP SPOTLIGHT x.com/i/broadcasts/1…

63

4:15 PM • May 3, 2025

horsefacts

@eth_call

Two great mini app moments today on @farcaster_xyz:

1) A crowdfund for a veterinary surgery. Spun up in minutes with a new mini app from @seedclubhq, boosted on amps.fun, funded by 50+ farcasters with USDC in their Warpcast wallets.

Raised $1400 in 3 hours.

113

8:00 PM • Apr 23, 2025

Live & online Fridays at 10am PT / 1pm ET.

Cheryl Douglass

@cherdougie

yo does the nyc pollen have fentanyl in it this year why is it so powerful

249

1:35 PM • May 12, 2025

sophie

@netcapgirl

just found out the new pope studied math at undergrad in case you’re wondering how tough the job market is for technical roles rn

17.2K

7:50 PM • May 8, 2025

ted (on farcaster)

@tednotlasso

if you spend any amount of time playing around with consumer apps, you will recognize there are endless pseudocurrencies used to drive engagement and retention:

coins in Duolingo, Reddit karma, TikTok gifts, robux in Roblox, gold bars in Candy Crush, bits in Twitch, stars on IG,

226

11:34 PM • May 8, 2025

peace

@peacefuldecay

since the beginning, crypto has consistently overpromised and under delivered.

this phenomenon has forced the industry to trend more and more towards honesty with each passing cycle.

so no... we don’t have decentralized uber (ico era)… we have fartcoin. but at least fartcoin

144

11:47 AM • May 12, 2025

SEED 🌱 CLUB

@seedclubhq

consumer crypto is breaking out of the CT terrarium

case in point: @focustree_app tree. a study app with 1M+ downloads & 100K MAUs

entirely onchain, invisible, and viral on tiktok (100M+ views)

just seamless onboarding, paymasters, session keys, and frictionless dopamine

apps

67

2:47 PM • May 12, 2025

Mac Baconai

@Macbaconai

Hot girls on social media are overclocked CPUs—running at high temperatures, bottlenecking civilization.

56

9:51 AM • May 14, 2025

Crowdfund helps Farcasters fund good ideas. Crowdfund creators declare their USDC funding target and deadline up-front, and can launch their campaigns in just a few taps. Supporters discover crowdfunds in their Farcaster feed and can donate directly from their preferred Farcaster client or any wallet-enabled web browser. If a crowdfund fails to meet its funding goal by the deadline, each supporter receives a notification to claim a full refund directly from the immutable smart contract deployed on Base.

Social + Crypto Capital Formation

Farcaster Mini Apps bring together the social experience of Twitter and the development affordances of dapps, empowering developers to build applications that are impossible on traditional social media. Mini App features such as in-feed distribution, mobile notifications, and built-in wallets make it possible to deliver modern, retentive distribution-first software experiences with crypto superpowers.

Seed Club built Crowdfund because we believe that social context creates new opportunities for capital formation on crypto rails. When you launch a Crowdfund on Farcaster, prospective supporters can see who you are and who stands behind you. Farcaster adds crucial context that was lacking in a world with only wallets, and we’re excited to build more Mini Apps on the protocol in the future.

We shipped Crowdfund in a three week sprint by leveraging powerful ecosystem infrastructure including Farcaster, Base, USDC, Index Supply, and Neynar.

Success in the Wild: Highlights from the Public Alpha

Since our Alpha release one week ago, Farcasters have organically discovered Crowdfund and launched 194 crowdfunds, eliciting 450 donations and $7500 of pre-launch volume. Organizers are already using Crowdfund in conjunction with applications like Amps and Zora to amplify reach and reward participation.

Several types of crowdfund have already found success in the wild:

Heartwarming Direct Philanthropy

Farcaster @bertwurst.eth raised $1,500 for Lada the Dog’s cancer surgery, eclipsing their $1000 fundraising target in only 3 hours, and inspiring dozens of similar crowdfunding campaigns for people and pets in need.

Farcaster Open Source Public Goods

Farcaster data scientist @yesyes is raising funds to produce open source Farcaster data research reports and dashboards full-time. Their goal is to analyze onboarding & retention data to discover what types of early interactions transform Farcaster tourists into retained users.

Content Creators

Independent content creators from around the world are crowdfunding to purchase equipment and fund media productions. In Nigeria, @ifeoluwafavour raised funds to purchase a new phone to write articles and produce TikToks about the onchain economy. In Argentina, @duodomusica are raising funds to film a music video. Meanwhile in the USA, @astromarkc is raising money to purchase cameras and telescopes to continue his astrophotography practice documenting the stars.

IRL Events

Serial event organizer @emr.eth is using Crowdfund to fundraise for Farconnect Argentina, the next edition of this developer oriented Farcaster conference that happens alongside Ethereum’s DevConnect. emr’s goal is to make this event free to attend.

Categories We Anticipate Emerging Soon

• Farcaster and Channel sponsorships of sports teams & local initiatives.

• Onchain and IRL art spectacles and installations that light up the timeline.

• Token incentives and cross-promotion that incentivize crowdfund discovery and donations

Crowdfund is Live

Try Crowdfund today on Farcaster and the Web.

Over the coming week, I’ll share crowdfunding tactics gleaned from conversations with professional fundraisers and crowdfund creators in the /crowdfund channel on Farcaster. Follow @crowdfund for Mini App updates.

Join Seed Club at Farcon

Join Seed Club online or in person at the Mini App Spotlight Presented by Seed Club × Monad this Saturday, May 3, 2025 at Farcon in NYC. More than 15 teams will present rapid-fire demos of some of the best Mini Apps on Farcaster. The event will be livestreamed on Farcaster and X. 

RSVP on Luma.

@nicholas

Director of Product, Seed Club

goedemorgen from somewhere between time zones,

72hrs ago i was being herded through amsterdam by a man in full orange regalia DJing off an ironing board. it was king’s day, the netherlands’ annual celebration of monarchy, techno, and municipal chaos. now i’m on a carbon-intensive pilgrimage to nyc for farcon, where i will gather with the other spiritually unwell to discuss mini apps and the future of feed curation. the emissions from this roundtrip could power a dutch party boat for six hours or an ethereum validator for a few years. but hey, at least it’s good for the soul. and the chain.

also last night, around 3am, i found myself several PDFs deep into a bureaucratic vortex of my own making, attempting to claim polish citizenship by descent because having only one passport is terrible for the brand. i’ve been reverse-engineering my ancestry like a forensic genealogist with a scanner and a dream. sifting through endless census data, death records, and family genealogies. to my great grandparents, i will find your parish. and i will leverage it for long-term multi-jurisdictional access.

elsewhere in collapse: the EU grid glitched, Canada elected a j.crew mannequin fine-tuned on centrist talking points, and the White House called Amazon “hostile” for doing what blockchains promised — showing users the actual cost of things. gg.

anyway, enjoy some mostly accurate reporting below.

xx, c

its time for a .... SEED CLUB MINIAPP SPOTLIGHT

Join us THIS SATURDAY at FarCon NYC for the first-ever Mini App Spotlight — a live demo showcase of the weirdest, wildest, most ambitious apps being built on Farcaster today. We're bringing mini apps center stage and streaming it all via Twitter & Farcaster.

Massive thanks to our partners Monad and LayerZero for helping make this real. Join us. (first come first served with limited capacity so come early !!!)

Featuring demos from:

Acid Test: A mini app bringing music, conversation and creative energy to Farcaster.

Amps: get paid when friends post

Clanker: an AI-powered tool on Farcaster that lets anyone launch tokens just by tagging it in a cast and sharing their idea.

Clankermon: A world where your favorite tokens literally come to life

Cura: makes it easy to discover the best content and contributors in any Farcaster channel through OpenRank-powered leaderboards. Cast, engage, and climb your way to the top — weekly and lifetime scores help surface signal, reward participation, and distribute tokens to the real MVPs.

Farguessr: brings the GeoGuessr magic to Farcaster — explore a mystery location, guess where you are, and earn points for accuracy. A new onchain adventure drops daily, so get lost (and found) with friends.

farcaster.eth

@farcaster_xyz

There's a mini app for that.

735

11:55 PM • Apr 11, 2025

Farville: Plant, harvest, compete and earn with your internet frens

Intori: helps you meet the right people on Farcaster by turning your answers into smart matches, meaningful intros, and gift-powered connections.

Ohara: Create apps & games and buy a stake in them

Pods: The platform for onchain podcasts. Listen, collect, earn.

Tab: Social payments on Farcaster

Titles: Create with a curated selection of custom-trained models from notable artists.

Uno: Uno is an iOS app that serves as an intuitive way to use our discovery engine. Share content, make connections, and discover tokens through an engaging scrolling interface.

Seed Club Launches Crowdfund

Seed Club has launched Crowdfund, a no-fee crowdfunding Mini App for Farcaster. This public good allows anyone to easily create fundraising campaigns with USDC targets. Supporters can contribute with just a few taps using their embedded Warpcast (and soon Coinbase) wallets, with automatic refunds available for unsuccessful campaigns.

The app has shown impressive traction in just one week of alpha testing: 194 crowdfunds launched, 450 donations processed, totaling $6,275 in pre-launch volume. Success stories range from direct philanthropy (a dog's cancer surgery funded in 3 hours) to open source development and independent creator support.

Crowdfund demonstrates that social credibility can make crypto rails relevant in the service of funding good ideas. When you launch a Crowdfund on Farcaster, prospective supporters can see who you are and who stands behind you.

Try Crowdfund today on Farcaster and the Web. Connect with Seed Club at the Mini App Spotlight event at Farcon NYC (May 3, 2025). RSVP on Luma.

Live & online Fridays at 10am PT / 1pm ET.

layla

@laylology

Yes I was behind the DJ booth but only as a cultural anthropologist

30.5K

11:48 PM • Apr 26, 2025

SEED 🌱 CLUB

@seedclubhq

891 ETH. Kamigotchi presale = a wrap.

Congrats to the @kamigotchiworld team for a massive kickoff!! a new kind of onchain game economy is being born in real time.

Kamigotchi

@kamigotchiworld

The presale has finished, with a total of 891 ETH contributed — 89.13% full!

The remaining tokens will go into the liquidity pool, which will be established on @BaselineMarkets in approximately 4 hours. Updates to come!

6

3:23 PM • Apr 30, 2025

nickk.base.eth

@nickcryptopro

For those who missed out on FarCon tickets like me, here’s the list of Based side events happening in New York upcoming week. See you there!

Wednesday, April 30

FarCon NYC Pre-Game: Co-working at Variant HQ
Time: 12:00 PM - 5:00 PM
Organized by @variantfund, @alanadlevin
Link:

52

6:03 PM • Apr 27, 2025

Dan Romero

@dwr

Introducing web wallet

- No extensions—natively integrated into the web app
- Dock and minimize both the wallet and mini apps in the sidebar

581

9:48 PM • Apr 29, 2025

𝙗𝙡𝙖𝙣𝙠

@blankspac_e

Boys Club NetGala 2025 (May 2nd - Brooklyn, NY)

886

3:42 AM • Apr 30, 2025