Farcaster is the talk of the crypto town this week. But boy is there a lack of understanding out there about what Farcaster is. I’m here to try to clear that up. I want to state right at the top that I know many of you might be incredibly weary of anything in the “decentralized social” (DeSo) and “social finance” (SoFi) areas, especially after what happened with Friend Tech over the last few months. Well, as someone who wrote 5000 words on Friend Tech and told you it would almost certainly come crashing down, I hope I have earned a modicum of your trust and a moment of your time to try and exp ..read more

If you’re just waking up and seeing everyone and their mother shilling you blast.io referral codes and wondering WTF Blast is, this is the newsletter for you. Many people will be aware that Blur season 2 ended yesterday, and there was a lot of speculation around what would happen to the NFT market when it did and what, if anything, was planned for s3 and beyond. Well, let’s just say that I don’t think anyone saw this coming (save for the insiders). Let’s dive into everything that happened and how you can take advantage of what might be one of the most lucrative opportunities over the next 6 ..read more

FriendTech is the talk of the town (square), and you’d be hard pressed to be paying any sort of attention to the crypto space and not be bombarded with FT this, (3,3) that, and all sorts of other chatter regarding the latest craze in this space. Most people are not degenerate gamblers that spend their lives glued to their phones during the depths of the bear so I’ll forgive you if you have no idea what the hubbub is all about - that’s what i’m here for. This is a behemoth of a post so make a coffee and settle in for a long read. What is FriendTech? FriendTech (or FT) is known by many names ..read more

IMPORTANT ADMIN NOTE: Last week my Newsletter (and many other crypto/web3 newsletters) ended up “flagged as dangerous” and wound up in a lot of people’s spam folders. To avoid this happening in the future, please move this email to your main inbox and mark it safe (or you can simply reply “ok” to this email and your email provider will make sure you get all future mails from me). Thank you! When it comes to learning new things in the crypto space, especially technical things, my process usually goes something like this: Hear a thing once, ignore. Hear it again, ignore. Hear it a dozen times ..read more

Note: I am in the process of migrating my Newsletter to a new domain — I am told that this might result in my emails getting sent to spam folders, so just a heads up, please check your spam folders if you notice my emails missing in the coming weeks! ?? Even in a bear market, there are countless things happening at all times in the crypto space. It is really difficult to stay on top of even a fraction of them; I sure as hell don’t, and this is my full time job. I do try and catch the big ones though and Base seems like a big’n, so let’s dive in and see what the heck Base is, why you might want ..read more

I had been planning to write about World Coin this week, as it seems like the thing to talk about. Alas, a bout of food poisoning caught while traveling through India has made the prospect of releasing a vigorously and rigorously researched report entirely.. unappetizing. So instead I am reflecting on the wildness that has been the last 21 months since I launched my first company. A web3 company. An NFT company. An NFT project. A community. A thing. A thing without a roadmap. I have made an astonishing amount of mistakes. This is not a bad thing, nor a surprising thing, though. Mistakes are go ..read more

Aside from some random hamster race thing dominating the timeline over the last 24 hours (seriously, don’t even ask), the story of the week in NFT land seems to be all eyes on ThreadGuy and the Opepens. A lot of people are quick to dismiss this as influencer nonsense, teenage drama, engagement farming, or something of that ilk. I posit that the entire story is a celebration of the creator economy, art, web3, and personal branding, in a truly beautiful way. Let’s look at a timeline of how things went down (this is important), and why this cuts so much deeper than the level 1 thinking of “oh noo ..read more

I was planning to use this week to chat about Twitter vs Threads, but that can wait (the tl;dr though is Threads atm is a decent place to post content & a terrible place to consume content). Instead we’re gonna do something I haven’t done in a long time, a case study on a specific NFT project: Ether. I used to do these all the time. This Newsletter was built off the back of them. From Apymon to Apes, to Gutter Cats, to Pickles, Aliens, and Misfit University (anyone else feeling the nostalgia?) Then it got to the point where when I would write positively about a project it would pump the ..read more

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last week, you’ve probably witnessed a colossal collapse of the NFT market, specifically, for PFP projects. Sure there’s been some recovery, but if we zoom out even further, we’ve been in a downwards death spiral for many, many months actually. It’s probably worth looking why this might be happening and how to put together a framework and strategy for surviving the bear. In this Newsletter I’m going to cover: The NFT Market Collapse Ponzinomics / NFTs as Meme Coins External Dependencies What would I be buying in this market? Mental Forti ..read more

There are two quite significant and distinct categories of people in crypto: the builders, and the speculators. Yes there is crossover and some people fall into both camps, but by and large, the people working on EIPs (Ethereum Improvement Proposals) are not the same people flipping monkey jpegs and shitposting on Twitter. The builders build, through bull or bear, and in comparison to the attention-seeking influencers (myself included), they are the unsung heroes of the entire Crypto space. We would not be here without them. While we bicker, they tinker. While we flip, they code. While we gamb ..read more