During the first year of the pandemic, the number of sweetshops in the UK grew by 73, according to the Local Data Company. About 1 for every city. That’s not a huge number, but it’s pretty significant given the broader Covid context; the total number of clothing shops fell by 1,236 in the same period. The sweetshop near me was set up in September ‘21. It begs the question: what’s so special about sweet shops?

I spent my Saturday morning at Waterstone’s buying some books, at the sweetshop questioning the shop assistant, and now I’m writing about it on Mirror. In days gone by, I would have bought my physical items at Tesco’s and, in comparison to today, when I have my Mirror and my main website, all my digital publishing would be through the same technology stack (probably Wordpress).

Sweets are nice, but the real difference is the existence of a shop that will focus all of its resources on their specific niche product. I bought some weird caramel chocolate flakes that defy description, but they were excellent. I certainly paid a premium, but next time I want sweets, I’ll go there again because they know their product; I just bought what the shop assistant recommended. At Waterstone’s, I picked up Train Dreams because I told the manager I was after contemporary fiction; similarly, I use Mirror because it’s built for writers. What makes these businesses special is that they serve niche markets in which they can give people much deeper value.

Generation Niche

It’s not just me. In fact, Generation Z is defined by its pursuit of tailored solutions. Tailored products over mass solutions. Authenticity over scale. Deep belonging in a few places rather than surface engagement across many. BeReal over Instagram. The end result of scrolling TikTok’s vast array of clips is for the algorithm to find the handful of niches that you care more about. “Whether you’re into science, upcycling, cosplay, astrophysics, parkour, or journaling, there is a growing community on TikTok ready to welcome you with open arms,” writes Aime Hunter.

TikTok knows this as well. Their campaigns online and in-person emphasise ‘find what’s for you’ and ‘TikTok taught me’. The idea is whatever you want to do, ‘do it with TikTok’. And, given the offer of an algorithm that can sate your most unique desires, much of Gen Z is. TikTok users spend about 10% of their waking hours on the app.

TikTok is but one component of the Generation Niche toolkit. As bi-directional as a remix is, a feed is not built for conversation. Seeking that, Gen Z have pursued – and found – niches communities on subreddits, Discord servers, and video games, and with in-person events to match. A great example, writes Yusuf Ntahilaja, is the visual artist Slawn:

“Who’s taken the art world by storm. Slawn created ‘The Slawn Club’ - a community that lives on Discord and a private Instagram account - with the intention to have direct access to his fans, connecting and collaborating with them through different schemes. Slawn’s rapid rise is largely attributed to how much he values his community, often rewarding them for partaking in challenges, gifting merch and tagged pieces, even if they do not win the ultimate prize.”

As Ntahilaja puts it, “niche culture defines a generation.” Having grown up amidst social media’s nascency and being, in my view, the only generation worth calling ‘the internet generation’, Generation Z has responded to a decade of inauthenticity by becoming a cohort that craves its opposite.

In 2017, Protein, the trends organisation, suggested that “the concept of authenticity is increasingly deemed inauthentic.” Toby Shorin argues that this phenomena runs even deeper: “what we are witnessing is the disappearance of authenticity as a cultural need altogether.”

Concluding that 2018 essay, he hinted at what was to come. “Trust in business can no longer be based on visual signals of authenticity, only on proof of work.” Indeed, individual alignments to brands, memes, and subcultures today are based on what lies beneath the surface. In his 2022 essay, he introduces the example of the Triple Sphere Hiking Club. “It started and remains a community: an excuse to get people together, to be in company and to perform the practice of hiking.”

Like The Slawn Club, there are barriers to this community; you have to commit and engage to access it. For example Slawn’s merch store is password-protected — as Shopify’s adoption of tokengated marketplaces indicates, this is part of an overarching trend towards memberships that you cannot fake. As Julie Rice puts it, co-founder of SoulCycle and former CMO at WeWork, “connection should be its own product.”

The 1,000 True Fans thesis eventually manifests

In 2008, Kevin Kelly wrote one of the most seminal contributions in tech culture, “1,000 True Fans”. The founding editor-in-chief of Wired wrote that, in the internet age:

“To make a living as a craftsperson, photographer, musician, designer, author, animator, app maker, entrepreneur, or inventor you need only thousands of true fans.”

A thousand dedicated fans who love your niche. Sound familiar? What took so long?

Kelly hoped that the internet would be the ultimate matchmaker. But the price for this matchmaking was almost everything: Facebook and Instagram take almost 100% of all the revenue creators see on their platforms; YouTube takes 45%; Spotify paid an average of merely £700 to each of its 8 million artists last year. These monoliths did the matching, but rendered creating or community engagement virtually unaffordable.

It was a vibe shift, not a technological one, that struck the first blow to this impoverished model. Twitch, Kickstarter, Patreon, Substack, amongst many others, are all services built for creators to cater to the dedicated fans of their niche; all built amidst the community-centric vibe that began in the late 2010s.

Blockchain is a game-changer for this dynamic

The significance of blockchain becomes clear upon investigating why Facebook, YouTube, et al. can force such high take rates on creators. One side is discovery: you rarely find creators on Patreon. This happens, still, on big social networks. Everyone is on these platforms (well, not Facebook) and when you consume on these platforms frequently, they’re experts in figuring out what content you’ll click on next; big data, Markov chains, etc. There are some problems with this, mainly that you get served addictive content rather than niches that you want to engage deeply in, but generally they do this job pretty well, and web3 techs don’t hugely change this.

But there are many platforms for discovery — this isn’t the competitive moat it once was. People use Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, Pinterest, and much more. Creators could do the same by moving to the discovery network which takes the smallest cut. Apart from one thing: they can’t. Everything you’ve ever uploaded to Spotify and all the followers you’ve earnt on Insta: the discovery platform manages this, and you can’t take your community with you. So it’s impossible to leave without starting all over again. And hence discovery networks squeeze creators for revenue.

Hence, the game-changer. Because just like with your cryptocurrency, you can store your writing, your music, your art, your videos, your followers, on a distributed ledger, or “on-chain”. As LBRY puts it: “LBRY does to publishing what Bitcoin did to money.” Sites like Spotify and Instagram don’t manage your songs and your followers because these songs and follower relationships are stored on-chain, and Spotify is reduced to one of many organisations competing to merely display this content in the best way, and help you discover new content as well. Creators are not beholden to any of them – neither is their community.

So now the community economy is fully on the way because, finally, dedicated participants in a niche community can meaningfully support their creators. When people are deeply engaged in something they care about, even the original consumers become contributors, and we’ll start to see vibrant ecosystems form around niches and creators. Greg Isenberg explores the Loot ecosystem, an NFT project upon which creators have built myriad different ideas; Jenkins the Valet is a great example of community-led storytelling, which will become a category-defining cultural genre in the 2020s, on par with ‘art’ and ‘literature’; Joma Tech, a YouTuber with 1.5m subscribers, sold a collection of 2,500 ‘Vaxxed Doggo’ NFTs to fund his videos. Jadyn Violet, a musician, told me that “I’ve never got this much interaction on my art before.” He's been spending his time building new ideas to engage his community, spending time speaking with his fans, and making more music — this is what his fans love him for. Consumers get dedicated community and deeper value in a niche they care about; creators are finally rewarded fairly for their work.

An exciting future, not an Exciting one

In 1999, Excite was a $6.7bn search engine, but collapsed soon after the 2001 dotcom crash. Google was only just getting started, but after aligning with the niche market vibe shift of the 21st century, it became the favoured search engine of billions.

Joe Kraus, the founder of Excite, explains why: Excite had been a 20th century company, targeting revenue from the top ten American companies, as media businesses had been doing for decades. Meanwhile, Google focused on attracting advertisers — and millions of them. Why did this work? “The 20th century was about dozens of markets of millions of consumers. The 21st century is about millions of markets of dozens of consumers.”

Web3 Challenges Today

The biggest challenge facing web3 is the way in which web2 has shaped consumer behavior and expectations.

The mobile and social gold rush was spearheaded by businesses that focus on generating revenue by keeping consumers on their platforms. In doing so, they created apps that we spend hours on, but with minimal privacy and no true ownership of our activity on their platforms.

When addressing the flaws of this model, we risk affecting the experience we have all come to love. Due to this, wallets and seed phrases can be overwhelming for the average consumer. The strong precedent set by web2 applications only makes consumers more reluctant to try new things.

Introducing Forum…

Instead of creating a platform that requires investment clubs to come together in a group chat, Forum enables group chats to become investment clubs.

Any friend group wanting to invest together only needs to download the Forum application, without the need for multiple applications that have become standard for investment clubs or investment DAOs.

The folks at Forum are also aware of the UX imperative, and have made their app extremely simple to use. They have even done away with the tedious requirements of managing seed phrases and private keys altogether.

A Novel Approach

The Forum application uses ERC-4337, which allows for wallet setup using Face ID instead of a seed phrase. This does not imply weaker security or diluted decentralization.

The wallet setup uses Face ID (which is stored only on the device), providing the same level of security as any consumer-grade mobile banking application. This can even be more secure than conventional wallets. Face ID is used to create a passkey, a new type of credential encrypted and stored in the device, used to create signatures verified on-chain on the ERC-4337 contract.

This method eradicates the possibility of phishing attacks since there is no way to give away your seed phrase. The passkey is designed to work only with specific applications, and there is a guardian-based recovery method that allows account access recovery from a fresh device.

Consumer: The Final Frontier

Forum has made strong progress, championing the cause of account abstraction with their work on ERC-4337, contributing to the broader Ethereum ecosystem. They have an iOS application with a simple portfolio tracker and the ability to create groups and add friends.

They aim to ship the chat and in-built trade execution commands soon, along with Android and a web application later this year.

The Symmetrical is excited to partner with Decentralised.co for this grant, and we can’t wait to see the impact Forum will have in onboarding the next wave of web3 users.

Forum is actively fundraising right now. If you or anyone you know is interested in funding promising web3 projects, we urge you to reach out to them on Twitter.

Our mission at The Symmetrical is to find and support the projects that will fulfill our vision of connecting web3 to 1 million GenZ. Follow us on Twitter for regular updates, and apply here to receive a grant.

During this transition, we lost one thing — the control over our identity, and thus, our personhood. While the interactions of the past afforded us the ability to decide what information we gave to whom and under what circumstances, today, we are forced to give up a lot of our information just to enter the gates of digital society.

This is not the future we imagined.

Forgot Password?

Those who are more conscious of their privacy make a point to use a password manager to manage their credentials associated with various applications. Others may use the same password everywhere, or forego this hassle altogether by logging in using their Google or Facebook accounts.

But ask yourself this: do you really need to give, or even link, your house address, email address, phone number, date of birth (and credit card information in some cases) just to read a 600-word article or get some discount coupons? We think not.

It’s Disco Time!

Disco.xyz is a web3 startup that makes identity management secure, easy, and fun. In a nutshell, they enable you to own your identity and let you decide the conditions under which your information is shared.

So imagine a profile that stores all your credentials and is connected with the applications you use. Except you have full autonomy in managing this profile. For example, you could link your Twitter account to your profile and make your DAO membership credentials always public, so people can come and verify your membership, and therefore, your commitment to the DAO’s cause.

However, you could selectively reveal your college degree to, say, prospective employers, or banking institutions.

Disco enables such profiles by giving users data backpacks that store credentials. Think proofs of employment, a college degree, cute badges that an ex gave you, club memberships, etc.

The credentials in a data backpack are wholly owned by its owner, and the owner gets to decide what credential is revealed when and under what circumstances. On the other side, Disco also enables individuals and entities to issue these credentials to one another.

In this way, it takes advantage of arguably the best feature of blockchains — managing the accessibility of data and its provenance — while avoiding arguably the worst part of blockchains — all data is being visible to everyone.

Under the Hood

DIDs and VCs are at the core of Disco’s functionality. DIDs stand for decentralized identifiers. Think of it as a globally unique identifier that identifies you and your identities across the internet. These DIDs have identity details, authorization keys, and other information associated with them in their respective DID documents.

What’s most interesting about DIDs is that their integrity or truthfulness can be verified by third parties cryptographically without needing to interact with centralized authorities.

While DIDs are associated with entities or individuals, verifiable credentials are objects that these DIDs give to each other. For example, your university could use its DID to provide a credential that says “college graduate” to the DIDs of all the students that attended that college.

Or your DAO could use its DID to give a verifiable credential to the DIDs of all its members. You could even use your DID to state that your sister is the best by encoding that information on a credential and sending it your sister’s DID. The possibilities are endless!

A cool edge-case is giving yourself DIDs. For example, If I want people to know that my favorite color is blue, I could issue myself a credential that states, “this person’s favorite color is blue!” and make it public. That way, people can know that my favorite color truly is blue, since they can cryptographically verify the credential and know it’s from me.

While this may seem like a silly example, the cool part about this is the ability to use the magic of “reusable” data, meaning having the ability to connect my wallet and prove that my favorite color is blue to any number of apps, people, or experiences, without needing to repeat myself over and over again.

The Infinite Possibilities of VCs

Verifiable credentials are the technical term, although they could be used for practically any kind of claim, attestation or information. These VCs also come in different types.

I might be alright with people knowing my favorite colors, but I may not be comfortable sharing other information. In such cases, verifiable credentials could be encrypted so that only the issuer and the recipient can access the data. For example, your doctor can send blood test results as an encrypted credential issued by their DID to your DID. Now, only the two of you can see this data.

This way, your DID has all these credentials that you can choose to make public or private. And if you decide to make them public, anyone seeing them can check their integrity because the VCs are signed by the original issuer. So if you share your education credentials with a prospective employer, they could verify it’s integrity since the credential would be signed by the University’s DID.

Conclusion

Disco currently uses the Ceramic Network to store these credentials. This means that the wallet associated with your data backpack can be used to access the credentials associated with your DID.

Since Disco is in beta, currently you can only link your Twitter and Discord handles, as well as domain names to your data backpack. However, in the future, Disco will add support for more types of credentials, different types of credential storage and more ways to connect public identifiers to your data backpack.

To get started, you can visit app.disco.xyz to request beta access. Setting up a data backpack takes minutes, and you receive a neat Disconaut credential upon completion.

While Disco has a long way to go, it has made promising progress on a rather old concept and shows no signs of stopping. Disco envisions a world where you reclaim full ownership of your information. In fact, putting it that way, it feels weird that we live in a world where this is not the default.

At The Symmetrical, we are huge fans of Disco and everything they do. View this video by Disco’s CEO to get a better idea of the potential of DIDs and VCs, and checkout their website here. It’s time you own your identity. It’s time you become the shining center of the party.

With 35 members and a goal to pool capital to invest in on-chain assets, share knowledge and resources, and make friends along the way, we launched our first 6-month season in April 2022.

At the time of our launch, the crypto market was booming and many projects were seen as the future of the industry. Solana was the new ETH, Axie Infinity was the future of Play-to-Earn, and Decentraland and The SandBox were the future of the metaverse. It was a time when the possibilities of crypto seemed endless.

However, the market took a turn for the worse with interest rates rising and the crashes of Luna and 3AC further exacerbating the downturn. Despite the challenges, we remained focused on our goal and adapted our strategy to stay ahead of the curve.

We didn't yet know the full extent of the market downturn, but we knew that we needed to be extremely cautious and conservative when deploying capital. We made the decision to invest in projects with strong communities and compelling use cases, deploying smaller checks in order to minimize risk.

Among our investments were $LOOKS, $LRC, $HNT, $ETH and $MATIC. Our biggest bets, which have proven to be our biggest winners, were MATIC (+15%) and ETH (+25%). While we are currently down on some of our smaller investments, we remain optimistic about their future potential once market conditions improve.

We launched Season 2 in October and still maintain a cautious approach. After investing in tokens, we spun up an SPV for Disco, the data backpack for the metaverse. By doing this, we took the next step in our DAO’s strategy and invested in startup equity.

As we continued to evaluate the market, we came to the conclusion that our niche was web3 x consumer. GenZ is the first digital native generation, making it obvious that we are a huge consumer for web3 products. Because we are made up of now 60 genZ members who are users of these new products, The Symmetrical is a powerful tool for product feedback.

This is why we have expanded our offerings to Consulting, GenZ Consulting to be precise. Not only do we offer product feedback but also talent hiring, research, promotion, community building, and fundraising support. We help startups reach product-market fit. Read more on GenZ Consulting →

Overall, the first season of The Symmetrical was a challenging one, but we are confident that our conservative approach has set us up for success in the future. We will continue to monitor market conditions closely and adjust our strategy as needed to make the most of every investment opportunity. With 80% of our treasury ready to deploy, we are poised to take advantage of the next bull run. Join us as we continue to shape internet culture for a new generation.

• If you are web3 x consumer product looking for an investment, DM us on Twitter.

• If you are an early-stage web3 x consumer product looking for a grant, apply to be considered.

• If you are a web3 x consumer product looking for help from genZ, DM us on Twitter.

We are a diverse group of genZ with many broad experiences: VCs, consultants, engineers, founders, and college students.

Our vision is to define internet culture for a new generation. We do this by:

• Investing in the most compelling and innovative ideas (NFTs, tokens, and startups)

• Working with web2 and web3 consumer brands

• Giving grants to web3 x consumer startups to be up-to-date with the latest products

• Hosting fireside chats with thought leaders in the space

• Socializing online and IRL

GenZ is the first digitally native generation, and we are quickly becoming one of the driving powers of the economy of the future.

Need in The Market

Businesses face an unprecedented mix of challenges associated with growing their brands:

• Many brands’ customers are genZ consumers. They need access to the genZ perspective

• In order for brands to stay relevant, they must adapt to genZ's move to web3 technology

• The macroeconomic downturn severely impeded investors’ interest in new projects

Opportunity to Help

Through informal work with brands, we’ve identified a clear opportunity for more structured consulting work. With diverse entrepreneurial capabilities and broad industry networks, we are well-positioned to help brands grow their ideas into mature businesses.

As a result, we established GenZ Consulting. Because of our organization’s diversity, we are able to help with:

• Research: Research from students and alumni from top research schools on any topic of choice (e.g., genZ insight)

• Fundraising Support: Direct contact to 200+ angels, VCs, and syndicates worldwide

• Talent Hiring: Access to the best and brightest talent in the world through our university associations

• Product & Beta Testing: Early product feedback from 60 genZ consumers on functionality, UI, customer needs, and suggested improvements

• Promotion & Community Building: Thorough content research and detailed strategic approaches for promoting content guided by your brand’s marketing objectives, KPIs, and goals

Who do we work with?

We work with any web2 or web3 brand that needs support in the areas listed above. We are also open to customizing a solution based on your brand’s needs.

If you would like to partner with us, please DM @erika_echaniz or @jakub_rusiecki on Twitter.

Follow @TheSymmetrical on Twitter

web2 social → web3 social

Advertising is a major driving force behind traditional social media. These platforms are typically optimized for ads through their ad-centric algorithms, which often prioritizes advertising at the expense of user experience.

Web3 social represents a new era in social media where users have more control over their data and more options to choose from when it comes to different applications and algorithms on the protocol, while still being able to maintain their profiles, follower lists, etc. As a result, more advanced social media marketing tools have started to emerge on top of these web3 protocols.

This is where Wav3s comes in.

What is Wav3s?

Wav3s is a marketing tool that allows creators to reward users who "mirror" (e.g. retweet) their post on Lens. From the Wav3s application, users can convert a post on Lens to a "Super Reach" publication or directly create a new one, which is similar to running a campaign on traditional social media platforms.

As shown in the screenshot above, Daniel's Lenster posts can be converted into a "Super Reach" publication by clicking the "Convert Publication" button. Next, he will need to specify the reward per mirror and the desired number of mirrors.

He can also limit the Super Reach action to users with a minimum number of followers.

The Journey Ahead

The Wav3s frontend already includes a basic campaign manager and tracker. It is currently just built on Lens, but it can be used across all of its apps such as Lenster, Orb, and more.

The product is currently bootstrapped and has generated 34 sponsored publications with a total expenditure of $550 WMATIC in the first two weeks of its launch, indicating early signs of a successful product-market match.

The Symmetrical believes that the first wave of users on web3 social will be attracted to the new and innovative methods of monetization. And Wav3s is positioning itself at the forefront of this trend by implementing a system of micro-transactions as an incentive for members of any social platform, to promote each other's content.

Wav3s will continue to grow stronger with additional features that expand the scope and types of rewards, as well as providing users with more options for filtering the content that is rewarded. There are many possibilities for the growth and development of Wav3s and we are thrilled to be a part of its journey.

Closing

Wav3s is looking to fundraise in Q1 2023. If you or anyone you know is interested in funding promising web3 projects, we urge you to reach out to them at any of the links below.

Wav3s on Lenster | Orb | Twitter | LinkedIn

Our mission at The Symmetrical is to find and support the projects that will fulfill our vision of connecting web3 to 1 million GenZ. Follow us on Twitter for regular updates, and apply here to receive a grant.

Since inception, our mission has been to connect web3 to 1 million genZ (investors, consultants, engineers, founders, and college students). We kicked off Season 1 with focusing on the things we love the most: investing, social events, and fireside chats.

We quickly became the leading genZ DAO and established our vision to be the DAO for genZ x web3. Together, we pooled capital from members and collectively invested in on-chain assets and startup equity (Disco.xyz). We hosted monthly social events (virtual and IRL) and fireside chats with leaders in web3 (e.g. Will Papper, Haseeb Qureshi, and Evin McMullen).

In Season 2, we continued our mission of connecting web3 to 1 million genZ, but we are doing it in a new, exciting way. By focusing our fundraising and grants program on web3 x consumer founders, this will allow us to test the current web3 landscape, promote the ideas we believe in, and give our members access to the forefront of web3.

Introducing The Symmetrical Grants…

The Symmetrical Grants is a team-led program within the DAO that supports up-and-coming founders in the web3 x consumer space. We provide $1-10k checks to fund ideas in gaming, social, and consumer infrastructure.

Aside from capital, our biggest value-add is a suite of operational support tools in our GenZ Consulting service:

• Research (e.g., how to appeal to the genZ consumer)

• Fundraising support

• Talent and hiring support

• Product / beta testing

• Promotion / community building

Why does this matter for web3 founders?

As genZ, we’re the first digital-native generation. We’re the majority user of web3 and have the money to spend on the technology. The Symmetrical plays a critical role in developing web3’s culture and promoting it to mass adoption.

If you are an early-stage, web3 x consumer founder interested in a grant, please apply here.

Airtable | Everyone's app platform

Airtable is a low-code platform for building collaborative apps. Customize your workflow, collaborate, and achieve ambitious outcomes. Get started for free.

https://airtable.com

We are accepting last-minute sponsorships. Please DM @jakub_rusiecki on Twitter to get in touch.

Why Heat Check?

When it comes to consumer engagement, sports is obviously the most active industry. With brand deals, broadcasting rights, video games, and more, the scale at which the industry operates is massive. It is estimated that 15 million people watch the NBA finals alone.

But the problem sports teams have is understanding who their fans are. Ex-core members of Krause House DAO, an ambitious organization set out to buy a NBA team, started Heat Check, an application that rewards fan engagement in a fun way.

Imagine Pokémon Go for basketball fans.

Users create their avatar on the app, view a list of open challenges, then get rewarded for their engagements. These challenges could range from interacting with their favorite sports team by attending matches, hosting watch parties, or buying their merchandise to creating fan content on social media. The genius is that these are engagements fans already do on a daily basis.

So what do fans get in return for completing challenges? Fans receive both digital and physical rewards.

• Digital: wearables, highlight clip NFTs, etc.

• Physical: meet-and-greets, tickets to games, etc.

The sports teams get access to the next level of their community and a platform to interact with brands who are eager to get closer to their customer.

Heat Check’s use case is the ideal on-ramp to web3. It invisibly introduces on-chain principles like item ownership on the blockchain and its product applies to any brand. The team is currently in the process of developing a partnership with a major soccer league.

The potential scale of this product is what attracted us to Heat Check. Their vision aligns perfectly with ours, and we believe Mario and the team will play a significant part in onboarding the next million fans to web3.

How is Heat Check doing?

Heat Check started in Q2 of 2022 and their one-month long Beta with Krause House DAO members resulted in a ~17% increase in fan engagement for sports teams and a ~6% increase in merchandise sales.

Start a challenge now!

Closing

Heat Check is looking to fundraise in Q1 of 2023. If you or anyone you know has an interest in funding promising web3 projects, we urge you to reach out to them.

Our mission at The Symmetrical is to find and support the projects that will fulfill our vision of onboarding the next million genZ to web3. Follow us on Twitter for regular updates and apply here to receive a grant.

Once upon a time, Boomers bought affordable houses, GenX owned Amazon at $18, and Millennials invested in Uber through AngelList. Nowadays, traditional financial markets are no longer providing the stability and security needed to maintain a comfortable standard of living. We are increasingly facing significant challenges, such as burdensome student debt and skyrocketing housing costs. Late stage capitalism has fucked genZ.

Here’s Where We Come In

Our vision is to define internet culture for a new generation. We believe web3 principles such as fairness, global access, permissionless interaction, and constant connectivity will bring better opportunities for genZ than previous generations had. But no one is going to create those opportunities for us, we have to create them ourselves.

Who We Are

We are the first genZ DAO and we have 60 members from 10+ countries representing brands and organizations such as Uniswap, Unstoppable Domains, BlueYard Capital, Techstars, 1kx, Skale, Roll, The University of Texas at Austin, Duke University, and many more.

How We’ll Support You

Our DAO is composed of four teams: Investments, Consulting, Content, Finance & Operations. There are plenty of ways for members to get involved.

Here is a quick breakdown of the opportunities we’ve created for ourselves:

💰 Investments

We source and evaluate on-chain assets, connect members with opportunities to invest in startups, and introduce them to a network of web3 founders. This year, we've started a Grants program to help early-stage teams and founders with their companies.

💼 Consulting

We’ve helped Metaverse record labels create GTM strategies, provided analytics into NFT platforms and markets, and built a roadmap for a proposal-and-funding platform. Members will be able to work on consulting projects for pay.

📍 Social Events

We love hosting social events! From online hangouts to IRL events, there will be plenty of opportunities for members to make friends and connections. In the past, we've attended conferences together, such as Consensus, NFT NYC, Token2049, and ETH India.

🔥 Fireside Chats

We invest in education by hosting token-gated Fireside chats with prominent web3 thinkers. Past guests include Evin McMullen from Disco, Will Papper from Syndicate, Hoseeb Qureshi from Dragonfly, Steph Alinsug and Jess Sloss from Seed Club, and Lata Petersson and Anil Hansjee from Fabric Ventures.

And more…

In the last 12 months, we have…

• Invested in 7 on-chain assets, including $LOOKS, $ETH, $MATIC, $FOREX, $AUDIO, $LRC, and $HNT

• Consulted with prominent web3 projects such as Glass, Mazury, and Station

• Fundraised $70k in just two months for our web3 consumer grants program

• Organized a syndicate to invest in Disco’s pre-seed round

• Received sponsorships from Meta Cartel, Bain Capital Crypto, and 1kx

• Funded Heat Check (from Krause DAO) with a grant

• Attended Seed Club’s (web3 YC) tokenized community accelerator

🤠 Join Our Season 3 Waitlist

We are currently halfway through Season 2. Season 3 will begin in May.

Are you ready to join? We’ve got big plans for 2023.

If you’re genZ and our DAO resonates with you, join our Season 3 Waitlist. You can do this by minting our FREE NFT (scroll to the beginning of our post). A member of the core team will reach out closer to Season 3.

How funny it is to watch theories prove themselves.

This bear cycle has been no exception. Although many institutional players joined the market and the dynamics were different from the previous ones, the market psychology was very similar.

Let's go back in history:

Prior to the current bear market, the summer of 2021 marked the Thrill phase, and following that, the market pushed into the Euphoria phase, leading to the first all-time high. Bitcoin first experienced an all-time high, and ETH followed shortly after.

This Euphoria phase was also when Solana was seen as the new ETH, when Axie Infinity was the future of Play to Earn, when Decentraland and The SandBox were the future of the Metaverse, and when NFTs were the new Eldorado. In short, a lot was happening and changing.

After this crazy rise, a phase of Liquidation followed leading to the flash crash in May. The market managed to bounce back and redirect us to a new all-time high where many people thought we were headed for the famous $100,000 target for BTC, including us.

The fact is that those who didn't rethink their strategy after the actual $69k high for BTC are still biting their fingers today.

Indeed, although we made an all-time high at $69k, it now looks like we were in the Complacency phase in terms of the timeline. Many would think we weren’t in this phase because we made a new all-time high, but that is a mistake. In terms of market psychology and timing, it looks very similar, especially because of the downturn that followed. The market never recovered, and as a result we entered a Bear Market.

The Anxiety phase started with the War in Ukraine and the beginning of a new international monetary policy that was starting to be put in place.

The Denial phase then came with the Luna Crash.

The Anger phase began at the end of the year with the collapse and bankruptcy of FTX, which undermined the entire crypto ecosystem due to its size and sprawling structure.

We are currently close to a bottom (if we’re not currently at one), and we should start the Depression phase in the next weeks/months after these writings, which would be the beginning of 2023.

The prior bull market was marked by the entry of institutional investors into crypto. The current bear market will have been marked by the subsequent exit of these institutions from crypto.

It's incredible to see that the same players who allowed us to rise so high are now dragging us down so low. All it took was for 3AC to fall for the house of cards to collapse. They were all in cahoots, leveraging each other. We are still dismayed that the greatest analysts on the planet working for these institutions did not anticipate this.

Our catchphrase when talking about crypto investing is DYOR, which stands for ‘do your own research.’ This mantra is especially important in times like these when the supposed analysts who understand the market do not in all actuality.

These financial elites that were supposed to be the SMART MONEY have been very disappointing. Case in point, Tiger Global and Multicoin Capital have lost almost all of their funds in recent weeks after they had been posting their highest returns in the prior years.

Below is BTC’s price chart from 2019 to now, and it follows the wall street cheat sheet very closely. The pattern is very consistent so far.

As described above, we are past the point of anger with the FTX affair and the billions of dollars missing from retail investors. We are now entering the final phase which is capitulation where the largest institutions are closing shop all because of their greed and lack of due diligence. We expected much more from these so-called professional players.

This episode has taught us one thing: they are not smarter than we are. We expect that there will be a period full of dashed hopes, media headlines welcoming the end of crypto, and fears of over-regulation stifling innovation.

Here you can see a chart in which we can compare the price of BTC with the fear and greed index.

Every time the fear indicator went below 10, a recovery was close. But also, the longer the indicator stays close to 10, the closer we are to a recovery.

Make no mistake. This is the time to start accumulating. No matter how anxiety-provoking the social media sentiment is.

We've been through this situation before.

In 2018/2019 the foundations of this ecosystem were not as strong as they are today. It was still possible to doubt. The use cases back then were not very encouraging, and the industry was made up of a lot of money grabbers. Now it is made up builders with so many innovative ideas.

During the previous bear market, we had the same fear because that’s basically what a bear market is made up of — fear and desperation.

How to approach the next period — 2023-2025

Even if, macro-economically speaking, we are very close to the bottom, this does not mean that we cannot go down further. A bear market certainly has the ability to surprise you.

The MVRV Z-Score is a chart that uses blockchain analysis to identify periods where BTC is extremely over or undervalued relative to its 'fair value'.

Each time this ratio reaches the green box, the price reaches a bottom. As with the fear and greed index, the longer the ratio remains in these levels, the greater the probability that the bottom has been reached. In other words, the price has reached levels where there is support from the market.

But once the bottom is reached, we don't go back to brighter days right away. There follows a period of long monotony with low volume and low activity.

What to buy during this bear market to maximize your gains during the next bull market?

Let's take EOS as a case study. The EOS price chart can be seen below.

During the last cycle, EOS raised ~$1B on their new Layer 1, high TPS, scalable and revolutionary smart-contract platform.

From their post-ICO listing of $0.50, they peaked at $22. In each cycle, dino coins always pump less than newer altcoins. This happens for several reasons. One of which is the idea that the grass is always greener on the other side (a psychological principle). There was also another big reason though; there were too many bag holders. A token/coin with so much history, especially after a decline of 97%, is hampered during its rise by all its sellers who want to get out in order to save some of their losses so that they can buy into other projects which go with more of the current narratives.

EOS, like all other dinos, will become more and more irrelevant through the cycles.

Technology and narratives are always evolving very quickly in crypto. A company with one technology can be replaced by a new company with a better technology, or a better go-to market strategy. That's why we always advise against a reckless "hold” trading strategy.

The crypto bubble is often compared to the internet bubble of the 2000s. This comparison is underestimated. Web3 is much more powerful than the internet bubble. It is still an immature market, and you can't expect to hold the next Apple or Google among your favorite altcoins. 90% of them will hold no value in 10, 20 years. The point of this it to say that the purpose of altcoins is to make a profit, sell and move on to the next narrative.

Bitcoin dominance

The BTC.D is a very important indicator, especially for those who are looking to invest well. The historical chart for BTC.D can be found below.

In a market cycle, there is a time for everything: a time to buy, a time to sell. Similarly, there is a time to buy BTC and a time to sell it, just as there is a time to buy altcoins and a time to sell them. Anticipating these trends allows you to minimize your risks and the volatility of your total portfolio.

Having BTC in a rising BTC.D phase allows you to reduce your portfolio volatility and minimize your risk, while maximizing your profits.

The other alternatives

We have very little precedent for this, but the crypto market is now paced by the macro-economy of traditional finance. It is possible that the actions of the Fed or other central banks could slow or accelerate a recovery. Strong regulation would also be one more mechanic that could help or limit mass adoption. We must approach the market with the knowledge of the past but be open to any and all eventualities. The end of this market cycle has been different, and the bottom could be different too. That is, there is a chance that we have already bottomed. This would mean that ETH could recover quickly and strongly.

What happens to miners?

The attitude of miners is always interesting to study because it tells us about important transitions during cycles.

Miners who are accumulating tell us that they are bullish on the Bitcoin price because they are buying BTC in addition to what they are mining. On the other hand, if miners start selling BTC, it is usually either for profit taking in a bull market or for loss prevention in a bear market. When the sell-off comes in a bull market and miners start to distribute, it usually indicates that we are close to the end of the bull cycle. On the other hand, when miners sell in a bear market, it indicates a point of capitulation and that the bottom of the market is near or has passed. This is because they need to cash out to prevent losses; in other words, it represents a price floor at which BTC needs to be produced given costs.

What we can see right now is that the difficulty of mining is getting higher and higher, but the price of BTC is only going down. This is because the cost of mining BTC is not profitable with the current price of BTC, and the price of electricity is rising globally. Both of these factors and many others are negatively impacting miners in the current environment.

Miners started their progressive BTC sell-off in August. The Capitulation of the miners could be about to end. Because of this, we might enter a phase of Depression in which miners will not invest in BTC or make very little investment in BTC.

When we see a renewed interest and return of investment of miners who will resume to accumulate BTC, this could indicate a paradigm shift.

We would like to point out that this indicator is not an exact science and that miners have not always made the right choices.

Their move to sell BTC in early January 2021 was relevant and indicated that we were getting close to a market peak.

But as an example of miners being wrong, they bought back too early in April 2021 before the fall and on the fall, but they did sell at the bottom in June 2021.

Conclusion

Although this bear market may seem violent in its form, the substance causing it is not as violent. The previous bear saw a correction of -85%, while in this one we are only at -75%. Additionally, if the bottom is reached, the intensity of correction will have been milder in this bear market. On the other hand, as the dominoes (DCG, Grayscale and co.) continue to fall, it is likely that the market will undergo a new stress test that will have us hit a new bottom on a big capitulation candle.

Nevertheless, in macro terms, we should be past the worst of it, and there is growing confidence that we should start buying now.

What I would do now

Given everything we’ve laid out, I would structure my portfolio as follows. (Note that I am 100% stable)

There are two alternatives depending on your risk appetite and personality:

• 30% of your portfolio divided between BTC, ETH, and 2 or 3 altcoins, or

• 30% on BTC only, to play the bounce dominance, and decrease your portfolio volatility

Once invested, I would wait several weeks. The market, even after a bottom, will not go back up all at once and a period of range will follow. After so much time spent in a bear market, I do not want to burn my stable corners on another big drop. I would be taking my time. There is no rush. There is no need to rush to buy. Select your positions well.

At the beginning of 2023, I will replace another 30% of my portfolio with more exposure to ETH and altcoins.

Still, we believe that BTC will outperform ETH at first once the bottom is reached and the rebound is initiated. But adding ETH to your portfolio will increase the possibility of making a profit as your exposure to multiple coins is increased.

Certainly ETH will outperform BTC eventually, but as we said before, there is a time for everything. ETH is the image of adoption and revolution, BTC is a market leader still today. As long as the latter does not show a recovery, the attention on ETH and its ecosystem will not be as highlighted. This will come later. Especially since with current market dynamics, ETH might not be deflationary anymore.

Take a look for yourself at this chart which compares the dominance of BTC and ETH in 2019:

The green square shows the timing between the market bottom and the market recovery during the rebound. BTC's dominance is clearly stronger, and ETH's only goes down.

Ok great, so what? Not convinced?

Post bottom, BTC rebounded from 3.5k to 12k, or a little more than tripled (3.4x).

Post bottom, ETH rebounded from $130 to $330, a little more than doubled (2.5x).

The difference in returns may seem small, but keep in mind that by making this trade on BTC you are almost 2x more profitable. Because the ETH Dominance at this moment is at its lowest and it is when you would start switching from BTC to ETH, you would be able to accumulate even more ETH.

Important: Note here that we take into account the fact that we have potentially not yet hit the bottom. If we have already hit the bottom, it is important to take into account that in this bear market, ETH has been much more resilient and has held up much better than BTC. An asset that can withstand a downturn better is generally more likely to rebound faster and stronger.

Going back to differentiating the two bear markets, unlike the previous bear, in this one we will be buying some altcoins that have lived through the previous cycle. We will focus on those that have a narrative that we believe will meet the mass adoption of the next cycle (examples: $UOS, $AUDIO, $THETA, $ENJ).

Remember that even if the bottom is reached in the next few weeks and you buy at the perfect time, you will have to take profit on the way up. This is because during a bear, the bottom will likely be revisited at some point (see the example of the bottom at the end of 2018 and then back to the same price in March 2020).

The bottom is not marked with a V reversal (i.e. a bottom during a bear will not go up quickly).

Wrapping up

Now, it is time to remain disciplined, you have come this far, you will arrive at the end of the tunnel. There is no way back. The only mission we all have now is to find the next 100x.

Bear Market Analysis by Thibaud Souchal. Thank you to those who contributed to the analysis. We welcome your feedback. Subscribe to hear more from The Symmetrical.