In March 2024, Christie’s announced SOURCE [On NFTs], the auction house’s first onchain generative art collection. The sale comes exactly three years after the digital artist Beeple sold a work of digital art through the same auction house for $69 million.  It’s a development that would have likely caught the attention of the 20th-century philosopher and cultural critic Walter Benjamin. Benjamin was deeply interested in the interplay between technology and culture, and how each shapes the other. In Benjamin’s era, the technologies in question were photography and film. Today, they’re t ..read more

Last week, an NFT of Achi, the original dog wearing a hat, sold for 1,210.8 ETH ($4.3 million USD) on Foundation. And just yesterday alone, over 5,000 new memecoins were launched on Pump.fun, each one an asset that encapsulates an idea that others can invest in. These are examples of how crypto translates attention value into economic value—and enables a more efficient attention economy.  Web2 as a failed attention economy The term “attention economy” has gained major traction over the past several years, but it traces its origins to the 1970s and social scientist and Nobel laureate He ..read more

The below was expanded from my screenshot essay on Twitter. Sphere wif hat The next big thing may start out by piggybacking off a popular memecoin. One emerging go-to-market strategy is to draft off a memecoin that is gaining adoption and momentum. While traditional GTM consisted of first building a product, then building a community around it through marketing and memes, this new playbook involves identifying a vibrant community of users around a memecoin, then building a product that incorporates that token. By launching a project that natively integrates with a popular memecoin, the new a ..read more

Recently, we hosted a fascinating discussion about loyalty and points programs at the Variant office. The conversation covered best practices from the web2 loyalty space and how they could be cross-pollinated to crypto; the distinction between points and tokens; what kind of rewards and redemption experiences users care about; and whether to put points onchain. Attendees included a mix of crypto founders across consumer, DeFi, and infrastructure; web2 loyalty experts who have designed programs for American Express, Delta, and other companies; and our Chief Legal Officer Jake Chervinsky. Bel ..read more

Possessed Photography/Unsplash The rise of scaled social platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok has made it increasingly challenging for newcomers to compete directly. Per network effect theory, for any innovation a startup can create, an existing network can quickly imitate and distribute to its own scaled user base. This is evident in the fact that it’s been years since a new consumer social application has scaled, even though their product innovations have propagated across existing social giants (e.g. live audio rooms and ephemeral stories). As a result, startups have shifted the ..read more

[The below expands on a tweet thread (X essay?) I posted earlier this week. Let me know what you think below, and join the conversation on X!] Seemingly overnight, points have entered the crypto zeitgeist as a new tool that app builders are leveraging to enhance user retention and engagement.  Across the landscape, founders are adding offchain points programs to their applications, from Rainbow wallet giving users points for using Ethereum, to Friend.tech building its engagement loop around points, to NFT marketplace Blur’s new L2 Blast incentivizing users with Blast Points for bridgin ..read more

By Li Jin and Jesse Walden We founded Variant on the thesis that the next generation of the internet would transform users into owners through tokenization. Utilizing tokens as a user incentive has worked exceptionally well for bootstrapping infrastructure networks like Bitcoin and Ethereum. However, the application layer has yet to see a proven model for using tokens to grow networks. Rather, there are many examples where distributing tokens has actually impeded sustained growth and retention by attracting more speculators and mercenaries than genuine users, obfuscating product-market fit.&nb ..read more

While “social” is often generalized as a single monolithic category, there’s actually a ton of variance in today’s landscape of social apps. An axis on which I like to analyze social networks is how much they appeal to users’ desire for love vs. fame. Years ago, Kevin Lin, the co-founder of Twitch, told me that there are three dimensions on which Twitch offers value to creators: love, fame, and money. (There’s a YouTube clip of Emmett Shear, another Twitch co-founder, outlining this framework.) For the purpose of this post, I’ll put money—or the prospect of earnings—aside, since that’s an o ..read more

Hi readers, the following is an excerpt from the inaugural issue of the Variant Newsletter, out today. To read the full newsletter, as well as stay up to date on the team’s thinking, subscribe here. To commemorate the newsletter launch, we’ve commissioned a special art piece by generative artist Giorgio Balbi for those who subscribe on Mirror, which you can mint for free (+gas) through June 11. Assets vs. ideology in web3 social networks by Li Jin I see two main approaches to building in web3 social: asset-first or ideology-first.  The asset-first approach focuses on users' desire for ..read more

Hi readers, this is a piece that was published today on Harvard Business Review, about how ownership needs to be felt and received, not just technically granted. This element of "psychological ownership" is a key input into many web2 products' retention and success, and — I posit — is a missing ingredient for tokens and user-owned networks and products in web3. Each year, in early December, social media comes alive with the annual flood of Spotify Wrapped. One of the more ingenious pieces of viral marketing, it requires no paid advertising on Spotify’s end. Instead, users organically s ..read more