"I am a sick man... I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased."
-- Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground
For the past 2 months, I’ve been underground, in the trenches.
I’ve been wholly focused on understanding the current onchain meta by being a full-time speculator. I’ve been spending most of my time away from the public eye, in hyperactive group-chats.
Why? I had the hunch at the beginning that the ‘future internet’ was forming somewhere apart from where I was. Now that I’m in the thick of it, I realize I was right
The ‘trenches’, whether they be in tg groupchats or tiktok comments are a wild west of new social, speculative behaviors.
As a product builder, I want to build for these behaviors. So I became a user.
Being in the trenches is really fun.
In a previous life, I believed that the ‘onchain gaming’ scene was a likely one to produce new, fun games. I’m now convinced that the most fun one can have online that genuinely uses the new cryptographic technologies afforded us is in the trenches.
I continue to exist there, learning the craft of internet speculation while observing the people around me.
I’m not entirely sure what I’m going to build next, but it’s going to be for the trench-grinder. It’s obvious to me that this is the most active user of blockspace. And they’re immune to the religions of the crypto-intelligentsia; they just follow the fun and money.
This user is both ‘professional’ and ‘retail’. In fact, they’re the closest thing we’ve got to a ‘retail’ user today. Just go check out memecoin Tiktok.
A fact of existing internet/crypto products that’s always fascinated me is that trading and social interfaces remain distinct. Many great traders I know spend more time than I initially would have guessed in telegram and discord. The ‘social’ signal is an important one for the locked in trader.
Two product categories that have emerged in reaction to this fact are social analytics (Kaito et al) and telegram trading bots. These are all great products (I use everything), but I think we’re only seeing the tip of the iceberg of what’s possible there; I’m excited to push on that frontier.
I haven’t lost my passion for bleeding edge applied cryptography. I’ve been following developments in ‘zk’, fhe, mpc, and more recently IO closely; it feels pretty obvious that the most groundbreaking internet products will utilize these technologies to their greatest extent, but this time I’m starting from the user.
Smaller, extremely user-facing ‘closed-beta’ experiments to better understand where to innovate on the social-trading product frontier. I probably won’t post about them publicly until I have sufficient conviction in engagement/growth numbers that I want to throw fuel onto the fire.
When/if the time is right, I know we’ll be able to implement all the hard cryptography necessary to do the cooler, most future-looking stuff. Technology has never been my bottleneck.
I still believe the thesis I wrote for Personae a couple years ago: that as cryptographic material is distributed to more humans (via blockchains), the social uses of advanced cryptography will explode.
Some miscellaneous other observations (that may later become blog posts):
The rise of ‘agents’ that create/capture meaningful value on X has shown me that an agent-based approach to platform disruption might work better than an ‘application’-based approach.
Rather than rebuild X or telegram, why not build background agents that fulfill one’s desires wherever one happens to spend the most time.
Naturally, I’m focusing most on telegram and Discord as these are the places with the highest engagement numbers, but I don’t think it’s fruitful to be platform-dependent.
As Murad put so cleanly this year:
most tokens don't need products
As this fact has permeated the overton window, tokens have become freer to cleanly express nothing more than cultural moments on the internet. This is a wonderful development.
We’re finally seeing, in this memecoin cycle, a very true realization of meme economy. Internet culture very rapidly being packaged into speculative assets that sometimes only have day-length shelf lives.
I’m excited to see what product opportunities arise as these games get played by broader groups of users.
Every cycle, exchanges are one of the best businesses to build. Now that the core primitives for liquidity management (i.e. AMMs) seem mature, the way to capture market share is to move closer to the new user and meta.
We’ve already seen this last bear with Jupiter, who have moved into a position where they can compete in dexes because they started as a dex aggregator.
We’re starting to see this now with bullx and photon, which provide nice trade automation for long-tail assets. They’ve captured a surprising amount of market share of new traders and take pretty sizable fees that aren’t going to the underlying AMMs.