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What a week!
Elections. Bitcoin ATHs. Polymarket thinkbois.
Regardless of which candidate you were rooting for or how much money you made (or lost) on election prediction markets, one thing is for sure...it's Friday and the weekend is here!
This is one of those weeks that we all won't forget but are also excited is over. The constant fight to keep up with the timeline. The struggle to form our own opinions while being barraged with information. The participation in debates with our friends (and strangers on the internet). The desire to go Balaji mode and predict the next 4 years. And of course, the endless doomscrolling.
With that being said, I won't be adding to the information overload today :)
Today's post is a roundup of my last 10 deep dives. So you can take some time this weekend to log off X and read through some high quality long form content you may have missed from the last month 😉
Since the September Roundup, the Terminally Onchain newsletter has found 333 new friends. Welcome to all of you, and I appreciate you subscribing to the community!
With that being said, here are the posts in descending order by the # of page views.
Let's dive in.
The Availability Cascade for the Onchain Agentic Economy
With the recent excitement of stablecoins, LLMs, web proofs, multi party computation (MPC), onchain bounties, decentralized social, ZK research, smart wallets, memecoins, onchain revenue, L2 scalability, and prediction markets, it's starting to feel like there will be a moment - a lot sooner than most people realize - where we see an availability cascade of the agentic economy for the masses.
And when all these individual snowballs mentioned above come rolling down the hill, they'll mesh to form one giant snowball that will have the same, if not larger, impact as the creation of the limited liability corporation did.
The Dark Knight of Consumer Crypto
The point I'm trying to underscore here is that for founders who truly have a high utility, creative, and fun consumer crypto idea...it's now possible to attract users through incentives and reputation that simply wasn't technically feasible before.
Users in crypto only have so much onchain history and credentials. So far, founders in the space have relied on limited wallet data to find ways to appropriately market airdrops, create meaningful allowlists, etc.
But by using web proofs to bootstrap reputation, builders in the space can incentivize users through crypto native mechanisms.
Memecoins as memetic hygiene for infinite backrooms
In a short period of time, two Claude instances were able to ideate on the meaning of life, publicly share their thoughts, form a community (cult?), write a plan of action, receive a grant from a billionaire, and endorse a token that reached a $300 million market cap for their idea.
First of all, let's take a moment to acknowledge the absurdity of that sentence. I can't believe that's a real thing. There's no way my friends outside of tech would even believe that.
But in all seriousness, it's so damn cool.
Imagine that playbook for proliferating new positive sum LLM ideas.
The inevitable rise of brand marketing on Zora
Over time, as wallets, onchain distribution, wallet targeting, airdrop spam filtering, etc. get better, it'll start to be a no brainer for any crypto native company to try marketing using onchain rails.
The key takeaway from this post is to just get started now - it doesn't matter how small your current distribution channels are. It's low effort, sets you apart from other startups in the space, and gives you time to experiment with this new marketing paradigm to see what works.
As Onchain AI infra improves, we'll be shocked by how we can type anything in the action bar and the results will be receipts saying task x has been done with a link to the proof (i.e. transaction).
Now, I think the key point here to understand is that the internet of intelligence vision can only be implemented efficiently on crypto rails.
You need agents to be able to permissionlessly use APIs on the social layer, have ownership of funds, be able to transact, show proof of work for their tasks, and work effectively with other agents. This is where smart wallets, stablecoins, decentralized social, tokenization, etc. all have to plug in. By using traditional web2 infrastructure, we would be limiting the capabilities of these agents by a huge factor.
The Barbell Approach for Stablecoin Startups
With that being said, it feels like there's a Stablecoin Barbell strategy that founders should consider. Are we catering to the inevitable slew of tradfi companies that will want to plug into the stablecoin space? Or are we building stablecoin infra for defi apps trying new experiments that don't make sense for Stripe and PayPal?
The food critics of Ethereum and the road to 10k EIPs
As we get standards that are interesting to developers outside of crypto, it'll be easier to convince them that there are unique opportunities to experiment within Ethereum. Just as React Native inspired a new wave of web and mobile devs, what will be an EIP that is a no brainer for new entrepreneurs?
In order to see a breakout crypto app, the best thing consumer devs can do is build a framework that allows them to spin up new ideas and test them as fast as possible.
Regardless of what you think the "right stack" should be, the point to emphasize is that the goal should be to make it simple stupid for your team to spin up as many novel experiences as possible.
But now, the pendulum is quickly swinging the other way as builders are starting to realize that due to chain abstraction and scalability, it's in fact the infrastructure layer that doesn't have a moat.
This, along with the fact that users are insanely hard to acquire (and keep) is what's starting to make app revenue look juicier.
Where did Fairshake PAC's $133 million go?
The key takeaway here is that crypto policy is a long term game. Regardless of which way the election goes, the most important task for our industry is to get as many pro-crypto candidates in office as soon as possible, regardless of party.
Every crypto friendly candidate that gets elected today can not only help drive meaningful change in the next two years (till midterms), but also set the tone of where future candidates stand on the topic of digital assets.
That's all for today's post!
See you all on Tuesday, hope everyone has a great weekend :)
There's some big news for TOC I'm dropping next week stay tuned 👀
- YB
