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1/ Been thinking a lot about token design lately. Made a tier list of token designs and organized some thoughts on tokens that stick out to me. Also have some way-to-early predictions for next cycle’s blow off top 🧵

Ekubo: Starknet’s Golden Child DAOs are dead, AMMs are dead, fair launches are dead. Ballooned valuations, bloated foundations, and deceptive points programs are the new meta. Consequently, fundamentals have been overshadowed by

How does the Zora flywheel work? The term "flywheel" is overused in crypto, but Zora's tokenomics model is worth a closer look. Zora is engineered around a simple 3% fee on every trade: 1% to the creator, 1% to Zora, and 1% to the Liquidity Positions (LP). Every asset on the platform is directly or indirectly paired with the $ZORA token. Content coins are paired with creator coins, and creator coins are paired with $ZORA. This gives ZORA two distinct value accrual forces: fees and sinks. As the ultimate base pair, half of the fee to LP (0.5% of every trade) is effectively a buyback of $ZORA to be added to the liquidity pool. Since Zora and creator rewards are distributed in ZORA, all fees flow through and impact ZORA in one way or another. 2.5% of each trade results in immediate ZORA buy pressure. To understand why this design is so robust, we can look at Virtuals which inspired this model. Virtuals also had a powerful flywheel, but it was dependent on the initial launch and "graduation" of new agents from its bonding curve. Once major agent tokens matured, liquidity became fragmented and moved to more capital-efficient pools on Uniswap v3 or against other assets like USDC. This weakened the token sink aspect of the flywheel. Zora learns from this by routing trading volume through its official, canonical pools, preventing the liquidity fragmentation that Virtuals experienced. The result is a persistent token sink for $ZORA over the entire lifecycle of a creator's coin, ensuring that ongoing volume fuels the flywheel. Some may argue that a 3% swap fee is too high to sustain volume. However, there is precedent for this. During its peak, the NFT market thrived with $5B monthly volume despite ~10% fees. The Solana trenches all-in fees approach 3%: - Tokens graduate into 1% fee pools - The refined consumer-app interfaces (Phantom/Photon/Axiom) charge a 1% fee - Poor liquidity conditions, MEV, and socialized losses from snipers likely amount to 1%+ At its bear case, Zora is just a repackaging of the trenches with better tokenomics, distribution and branding. Zora brings hidden costs to the forefront and retains the value within the ecosystem. Trading volume of Zora coins will be the key metric to watch as the flywheel gets going.

I’m thinking something like this for $MON... - premarket traders, apparently. I did premarket trading for the first time to long MON under $6B. Here’s my mid-curve thesis: Do you really think they raised $250M, took 3 years to rebuild Ethereum from the ground up, hired CTs top social media gurus, went super polished overkill on every shred of public-facing material they’ve put out (monad cards, validator graphics, box opening animations, even managed to prevent all the copycat account phishing bots)… ...You think they did all this to run a vanilla 8% airdrop low float, high FDV TGE? Really? Monad view themselves as a legitimate competitor to Ethereum. They want to appear decentralized, neutral, make people happy, and lay a foundation for their claim as heir to Ethereum. I think the MON airdrop will be more generous than expectations (~20%) and have some additional mechanics: - Day 1 boxes are your take the MONAD and run amount - Day 2 boxes are some other variable - Day 3 boxes are by far the biggest and you get it by aligning yourself with opt-in vesting or something Monad is a parallelized EVM L1 with SSF. It supposedly offers Solana's throughput with Ethereum’s engine. Meanwhile, Ethereum is slightly vulnerable. The rollup-centric roadmap thesis is recovering—mostly thanks to Rabby and Tom Lee—but it’s not out of the woods. Beam is going to take 1.5 Monad development cycles to finish, while the EF is battling incentive alignment and commie culture. Can’t decide if they wanna build for Raspberry Pis to survive a world led by Karl Marx or to enable Karl Marx. So what if Monad avoids CEX listing stuff that leaks activity. They unleash absolute madness day 1 onchain, demonstrate their claim as an ultra-performant EVM L1 while acquainting everyone with their ecosystem apps. Nothing breaks, the community is happy and ready to go to war for Monad. They talk shit about Ethereum haha ur chain is slow, talk shit about L2s for existing, talk shit to Solana haha you have to push this 4D underwater chess metric to compensate for lacking the EVM’s academic moat.. MON is trading at $6B FDV premarket. So somewhere around $2B implied circ. Comps: - MegaETH (assuming 33% circ)- $1.5B/$4.4B - Avax $8.3B/$9B - Solana $106B/$120B - Ethereum $480B - Sei $1.2B/$2B - Sui $9B/$25B - Aptos $2.4B/$4B - Arbitrum $1.8B/$3.3B I'll take my chances at $6B. The big uncertainty is the apps. Sure Monad has apps, but every ecosystem has apps. Unclear if they have chad GMI Monad-native flagship apps. Disc: I qualified for MON Airdrop and am long premarket perps.

Uniswap, the most successful DeFi protocol of all time, with notorious alignment issues and governance charades, finally makes things right, helps establish a new standard for tokens and signals a hospitable legal climate to do so vetoken people: How can we make this about us??

Haseeb is literally dead wrong here. Gwart is correct. Gwart points out 2 flaws in the following statement: traditional incentives work; ergo, crypto incentives work. 1. Web2 is incentivizing real products people want to use, unlike crypto (correct) 2. Web2 incentives have a cost, crypto incentives do not necessarily (also correct) What Gwart is saying is intuitively true. Haseeb uses lots of words to nitpick, but Gwart's point stands. Haseeb says #1 is wrong bc he worked at Airbnb and his friends at uber said they had to shut down in china bc fraud. And fraud is pervasive in incentives. Sure, but this misses the point and also proves the point. Everyone knows how uber came up. The taxi model was outdated. Uber vastly improved payment flow, matchmaking, removed counterparty risk and cut costs by removing downtime. There was a massive edge, nothing proprietary, and a value to blitzing the discovery process by any means. China market incentives were far different than the global model. less sustainable, more of a subsidy-war. 0 spread or even negative spread on fares. Along with the driver milestone incentives, it’s very easy to see how this could be abused. It was a calculated moonshot to win a massive market, and Gwart obv wasn’t talking about the Chinese market. Web2's actual crypto analogue is SPELL. There was a proven behavioral phenomenon (CDP lending), a weak incumbent (Maker), an improved successor (yield bearing collateral). As a result, Spell issued token incentives, tapered off incentives and used revenue to buyback the token. Eventually, revenue surpassed incentives, neutralizing cost and suggesting the incentive program succeeded. Haseeb says #2 is wrong bc “in web2: equity => sell for cash to private investors => give cash to user => user gets cash web2: tokens => give user tokens => user dumps tokens => user gets cash… it's the same damn thing.” No it’s not. The user doesn’t “get cash,” they get compressed margins on goods they were already searching for. McDonalds isn’t giving out $6 coupons for $5 menu items. This doesn’t work unless you’re in crypto and your name is [REDACTED]. Re VCs: in web2 there is no guaranteed liquidity event, so there’s more accountability. In crypto you can just raise and trust that people will farm and dump at a higher val. Or just not raise and not pretend to have a product and mint tokens. TLDR gwart wins. His point is that web2 incentives are sweetening the deal on existing behaviors, which is why it works. There is also an opportunity cost of time that serves as proof of stake in the transaction. Crypto incentives are largely undifferentiated regurgitations of the same products. The product has become the incentive program itself.

Liquity v2 is quietly building the most efficient bribe market in crypto. The bribe meta has been a fixture in DeFi with Curve, Aerodrome, and now Liquity v2. However, bribe incentives come at the expense of token holders through inflationary rewards. This makes emissions-based bribe markets a net negative for token lockers. Liquity solves this with protocol incentivized liquidity (PIL), directed by $LQTY stakers. Instead of using governance tokens as the reward token, Liquity rewards bribers with BOLD from protocol revenue instead. This makes a big difference. 4 main factors contribute to the efficiency of a bribe economy: 1. Incentive token 2. Scope of bribable venues 3. Risk premium of incentivized action 4. Market structure Let’s use Curve as an example. 1. Incentive token The volatility and uncertainty of the incentive token may limit the market’s ability to price it properly. Bribers bid less to avoid overpaying, which leads to less bribes per dollar of incentives. Incentivizing with an emissions-based governance token like CRV likely earns a lower multiple than a stablecoin (BOLD). 2. Scope of bribeable venues (TAM) Curve’s bribe program is limited to Curve. This is necessary or things would get weird, but it places a ceiling on the TAM for bribes. Liquity PIL is venue-agnostic. You can bribe across any chain & protocol. Any project incentivizing liquidity can pay LQTY stakers, get a small bonus, and distribute cold hard cash to users. 3. Risk premium All liquidity mining campaigns must consider the yield threshold at which users are willing to leave lower-risk strategies like Curve 3Pool or Aave USDC. Bribe economies are not absolved from this process, but to see it we have to work backwards. Consider a $100 bribe to a new Aerodrome pool. It receives X votes—let’s assume $150 worth. If the pool attracts $7.8K TVL for the epoch, that implies LPs require 100% APY for that pool. To increase the TVL, you will have to pay more to scale that APY for additional liquidity, and this risk premium will change with implied volatility. The flipside of this is higher risk premiums often come with greater capital efficiency. While Aerodrome will typically earn less per dollar of emissions than Curve, its potential fees from these positions is higher, and projects need less TVL (and thus, less bribes) for the same goal. BOLD’s wide array of potential incentive venues means the risk premium will vary, but it will generally involve liquidity for BOLD and is considered on the safer side. 4. Market structure How does the token structure, vote bribing apparatus, program rules, and behavior of major entities facilitate or inhibit monetization of gauge votes? In other words, how cutthroat is the vote market? As the first mover, Curve has a sloppy infrastructure for native lockers. Lack of native support for liquid wrappers and the bribe economy make monetization of vote power difficult. Aerodrome has robust tooling for lockers and bribers with its veNFTs & Relay feature. This strong setup is part of the reason why liquid wrappers for veAERO haven’t formed. LQTY has native bribe support, but no liquid wrappers or optimization features. There are other factors that influence the success of a bribe economy, but these factors highlight the fundamentals. Liquity has nailed most of the bribe economy design, but still needs things to fall its way to achieve success. The friendly fork ecosystem seems to be the most likely path to achieving the elusive highly competitive BOLD wars narrative.

X402 Rejuvenates Crypto x AI Developed by Coinbase, x402 is a chain agnostic extension of the HTTP 402 status code that lets users and AI agents pay per request using stablecoins. The most relatable, immediate use case for x402 is solving the clunky UX of paywalls. The typical flow for a user is as follows: click on a link > hit paywall > register for an account > add credit card info > pay for service. With x402, users could seamlessly pay by article or by action instead of reloading API credits or committing to a subscription. The big picture use case is AI agent commerce, allowing agents to natively transfer value and act on behalf of users. x402 is beneficial for everyone, but it is uniquely beneficial for AI agents that lack an alternative. Model context protocol (MCP) allows agents to interact with tools. x402 is essentially a payments MCP. Google announced an x402 extension for its Agent Payments Protocol (AP2). Lowe’s is piloting AI agent commerce with Google’s AP2. Here is a demo demonstrating how an agent can research, shop and purchase a refrigerator. Cloudfare is partnering with Coinbase to launch the x402 Foundation. Solana x402 adoption is rapidly increasing, having just reached 50% of total x402 transactions. EIP-8004 brings trust and reputation layer for AI agents, aiding in discoverability and collaboration. x402 v2 was just released, offering better devx, fiat payment support, and extensions. x402 is similar to intents and zkTLS, in that it is a powerful, disruptive primitive that lends itself to big ideas. It’s easy to see the importance, but hard to fully grasp the implications or forecast the path to true adoption. Without a clean way to get directional exposure to x402, the market takeaway so far seems to be green light to speculate on crypto x AI. If the real use cases surface, there could be a fundamentals driven narrative push.

CT is wrong about content coins. Base is withholding any real vision here and is naive in their comms. Two things can be true. Attacking the content tokenization model itself is short-sighted. Stablecoins are crypto's darling narrative and they're merely tokenizing fiat. So how is tokenizing content a dead end? Attacking content tokenization is like saying airtags and lightweight saddles on pigeons is a dumb idea. It’s only dumb until you teach them to be little carrier pigeons. But even before that, it expands the pigeon's skill tree. The current reasons everyone is mad about content coins: - Nick Shirley didn’t make enough money on his post. - 24 hr markets for content coins = pump and dump. Nick Shirley ~only~ made $6K bc content coins are barebones and unfinished, and Base should stop marketing the current state as a remarkable victory. If content coins are just going to be this bait-and-switch rhetoric where we correctly assert content is valuable, but wholly replace the value drivers with speculation… then yes, Base’s implementation of tokenized content is cooked. But if you’ve been in crypto long enough, Crypto is basically just BTC, stablecoins, perp dexes, and unfulfilled promises. Who cares if we have another L. Go for the biggest promise. Right now, the biggest promise in crypto is content coins: a spot market for the most granular unit of the attention economy. low effort napkin math on Nick Shirley's post: X makes ~$1.7B ad revenue annually, ~$4.7M/day. 100B impressions/day. > Suggests CPM user-side is $0.046 This is much lower than the $1.00-$2.00 CPM ballpark advertisers pay, but only a small fraction of posts have ads. So if there is $2 advertiser CPM, only verified impressions count, low ad fill rate 2%. We tie out around $0.046✅ 126M views suggests Nick’s post would be worth ~$6K, i.e. Nick’s post made up some portion of the timeline that generated a total revenue by housing xyz ads. Disclaimer this is weak math, just illustrating the relationship. Oh wow, $6K is what he made in creator fees on a platform with orders of magnitude less users where the content was cross-posted. maybe this isn't embarrassing. Interesting coincidence here, not anything to brag about by Base though. Nick’s speculation-driven creator fees are not the end game and should not be celebrated like it's some incredible feat. But it suggests maybe this isn’t an egregiously low number for a brand new barebones model, and could become a material supplement to real value if it emerges. If this $6K implied value above were the property of the content coin, and the market cap was below $6K at the dividend record date, all owners made a profit (assuming no real trading, just buying), and they can dump at ex dividend for scrap. There’s some weird quirks here since content coins are bought from the bonding curve and so market cap =/= aggregate cost basis of holders, so this is technically flawed but I digress. For most content that doesn’t go viral, this entire process will commence and conclude within 24-48 hours, which could be where the controversial post’s rhetoric is derived. This isn’t a “pump and dump,” this is a natural characteristic of social media content, which is what we are building around.. This is how we arrive at an organic value of speculation. If you believe Nick Shirley’s post will go viral and hit 126M views, you can buy at 10K views and $500 market cap or whatever knowing there is a legitimate basis for follow-up buyers, not just speculation ponzi. Nick derives earnings through ownership of his content, which earns off of the revenue it generates and from other users speculating on its virality potential, because the value of virality is democratized and accessible. This value passively flows to his creator coin, which is an index of his content and allows the more chill users who are wary of 24 hour markets to opt for this instead. At scale, this looks something like users calibrating their viewing experience, earning for their attention rather than paying attention, and distributing this value to the content (and creators) that make up their timeline. This is sustainable even at low adoption levels. Some little 50-person town in Nebraska onboards to Base and shares town gossip. John Deere pays good money to run ads in this lucrative corner of the social graph. Bob the farmer is paid to post memes. We are obviously a long way from this, but this is what we should be striving for and talking about: crypto disintermediating what should be a p2p marketplace. I know nothing about law but some LLM research suggests this form of content coins could be interpreted as an unregistered security. The draft Clarity act which seems to be floundering had a classification for digital commodities, which content coins appear to qualify as. A Clarity act could allow Base to be more direct in communicating this vision. For now, it seems they are just trying to avoid overpromising, but they are trying to drum up excitement for what is frankly an unfinished and naked stack, which is having a problematic effect on CT. CT needs to be more pragmatic in our pushback to Base and not discard the potential of content coins. Base appears to be taking a crack at disintermediating one of the fastest growing and most societally-relevant marketplaces. Whether they succeed or not, it is worth discussing earnestly, and tokenizing content is clearly not a dead end.

Liquity continues to innovate on both mechanism design and token design while staying true to crypto ethos. LQTY is almost fully diluted, has a viable path to value accrual in v2, and offers a direct link to protocol traction.

You don’t have to be bullish on crypto to be bullish on crypto. Web2 is incompetent and complacent, relying on regulations & other forms of gridlock to stifle innovation. Every inefficient market that exists today is an opportunity for crypto to infiltrate and improve society. Here’s some takeaways from my recent report:

zkTLS: Unlocking Crypto Consumer Apps Crypto has always had the mindshare, talent, and funding to change the world, but has often lacked the means. Most of the real-world crypto successes to date are at the behest of Web2 powers. We are

1. Most advanced AMM tech-wise 2. Most dominant dex on any chain 3. Strong chance it settles to Bitcoin in ~ 1 year via OP_CAT (best growth prospects of any dex) 4. Active fee switch w revenue distribution (only dex to have) (I think) (best income play of any dex) 5. Book value roughly 30% of mkt cap (best value multiples of any dex) 6. Fairest launch of any token since YFI barring stuff like FT 7. Fully diluted (sellers have less tokens than any other dex) 8. Optimistic rollups struggling to execute, Starknet = much improved. Market is underexposed to most scalable rollup tech bc of bad PR. (Most hated rally of any dex) (bullish) 9. Cairo-VM, foreign block explorer, DAO owned contracts, proprietary contracts + licenses = biggest moat of any dex. 10. Despite all this, cheapest no. 1 dex on any chain 🤔 Bottom line: microcap uniswap v4.5 on Bitcoin + Ethereum w cracked solo dev and real cash flows on a chain that doesn’t suck anymore but everyone fading nfa

I’m thinking something like this for $MON... - premarket traders, apparently. I did premarket trading for the first time to long MON under $6B. Here’s my mid-curve thesis: Do you really think they raised $250M, took 3 years to rebuild Ethereum from the ground up, hired CTs top social media gurus, went super polished overkill on every shred of public-facing material they’ve put out (monad cards, validator graphics, box opening animations, even managed to prevent all the copycat account phishing bots)… ...You think they did all this to run a vanilla 8% airdrop low float, high FDV TGE? Really? Monad view themselves as a legitimate competitor to Ethereum. They want to appear decentralized, neutral, make people happy, and lay a foundation for their claim as heir to Ethereum. I think the MON airdrop will be more generous than expectations (~20%) and have some additional mechanics: - Day 1 boxes are your take the MONAD and run amount - Day 2 boxes are some other variable - Day 3 boxes are by far the biggest and you get it by aligning yourself with opt-in vesting or something Monad is a parallelized EVM L1 with SSF. It supposedly offers Solana's throughput with Ethereum’s engine. Meanwhile, Ethereum is slightly vulnerable. The rollup-centric roadmap thesis is recovering—mostly thanks to Rabby and Tom Lee—but it’s not out of the woods. Beam is going to take 1.5 Monad development cycles to finish, while the EF is battling incentive alignment and commie culture. Can’t decide if they wanna build for Raspberry Pis to survive a world led by Karl Marx or to enable Karl Marx. So what if Monad avoids CEX listing stuff that leaks activity. They unleash absolute madness day 1 onchain, demonstrate their claim as an ultra-performant EVM L1 while acquainting everyone with their ecosystem apps. Nothing breaks, the community is happy and ready to go to war for Monad. They talk shit about Ethereum haha ur chain is slow, talk shit about L2s for existing, talk shit to Solana haha you have to push this 4D underwater chess metric to compensate for lacking the EVM’s academic moat.. MON is trading at $6B FDV premarket. So somewhere around $2B implied circ. Comps: - MegaETH (assuming 33% circ)- $1.5B/$4.4B - Avax $8.3B/$9B - Solana $106B/$120B - Ethereum $480B - Sei $1.2B/$2B - Sui $9B/$25B - Aptos $2.4B/$4B - Arbitrum $1.8B/$3.3B I'll take my chances at $6B. The big uncertainty is the apps. Sure Monad has apps, but every ecosystem has apps. Unclear if they have chad GMI Monad-native flagship apps. Disc: I qualified for MON Airdrop and am long premarket perps.

How does the Zora flywheel work? The term "flywheel" is overused in crypto, but Zora's tokenomics model is worth a closer look. Zora is engineered around a simple 3% fee on every trade: 1% to the creator, 1% to Zora, and 1% to the Liquidity Positions (LP). Every asset on the platform is directly or indirectly paired with the $ZORA token. Content coins are paired with creator coins, and creator coins are paired with $ZORA. This gives ZORA two distinct value accrual forces: fees and sinks. As the ultimate base pair, half of the fee to LP (0.5% of every trade) is effectively a buyback of $ZORA to be added to the liquidity pool. Since Zora and creator rewards are distributed in ZORA, all fees flow through and impact ZORA in one way or another. 2.5% of each trade results in immediate ZORA buy pressure. To understand why this design is so robust, we can look at Virtuals which inspired this model. Virtuals also had a powerful flywheel, but it was dependent on the initial launch and "graduation" of new agents from its bonding curve. Once major agent tokens matured, liquidity became fragmented and moved to more capital-efficient pools on Uniswap v3 or against other assets like USDC. This weakened the token sink aspect of the flywheel. Zora learns from this by routing trading volume through its official, canonical pools, preventing the liquidity fragmentation that Virtuals experienced. The result is a persistent token sink for $ZORA over the entire lifecycle of a creator's coin, ensuring that ongoing volume fuels the flywheel. Some may argue that a 3% swap fee is too high to sustain volume. However, there is precedent for this. During its peak, the NFT market thrived with $5B monthly volume despite ~10% fees. The Solana trenches all-in fees approach 3%: - Tokens graduate into 1% fee pools - The refined consumer-app interfaces (Phantom/Photon/Axiom) charge a 1% fee - Poor liquidity conditions, MEV, and socialized losses from snipers likely amount to 1%+ At its bear case, Zora is just a repackaging of the trenches with better tokenomics, distribution and branding. Zora brings hidden costs to the forefront and retains the value within the ecosystem. Trading volume of Zora coins will be the key metric to watch as the flywheel gets going.

CT is wrong about content coins. Base is withholding any real vision here and is naive in their comms. Two things can be true. Attacking the content tokenization model itself is short-sighted. Stablecoins are crypto's darling narrative and they're merely tokenizing fiat. So how is tokenizing content a dead end? Attacking content tokenization is like saying airtags and lightweight saddles on pigeons is a dumb idea. It’s only dumb until you teach them to be little carrier pigeons. But even before that, it expands the pigeon's skill tree. The current reasons everyone is mad about content coins: - Nick Shirley didn’t make enough money on his post. - 24 hr markets for content coins = pump and dump. Nick Shirley ~only~ made $6K bc content coins are barebones and unfinished, and Base should stop marketing the current state as a remarkable victory. If content coins are just going to be this bait-and-switch rhetoric where we correctly assert content is valuable, but wholly replace the value drivers with speculation… then yes, Base’s implementation of tokenized content is cooked. But if you’ve been in crypto long enough, Crypto is basically just BTC, stablecoins, perp dexes, and unfulfilled promises. Who cares if we have another L. Go for the biggest promise. Right now, the biggest promise in crypto is content coins: a spot market for the most granular unit of the attention economy. low effort napkin math on Nick Shirley's post: X makes ~$1.7B ad revenue annually, ~$4.7M/day. 100B impressions/day. > Suggests CPM user-side is $0.046 This is much lower than the $1.00-$2.00 CPM ballpark advertisers pay, but only a small fraction of posts have ads. So if there is $2 advertiser CPM, only verified impressions count, low ad fill rate 2%. We tie out around $0.046✅ 126M views suggests Nick’s post would be worth ~$6K, i.e. Nick’s post made up some portion of the timeline that generated a total revenue by housing xyz ads. Disclaimer this is weak math, just illustrating the relationship. Oh wow, $6K is what he made in creator fees on a platform with orders of magnitude less users where the content was cross-posted. maybe this isn't embarrassing. Interesting coincidence here, not anything to brag about by Base though. Nick’s speculation-driven creator fees are not the end game and should not be celebrated like it's some incredible feat. But it suggests maybe this isn’t an egregiously low number for a brand new barebones model, and could become a material supplement to real value if it emerges. If this $6K implied value above were the property of the content coin, and the market cap was below $6K at the dividend record date, all owners made a profit (assuming no real trading, just buying), and they can dump at ex dividend for scrap. There’s some weird quirks here since content coins are bought from the bonding curve and so market cap =/= aggregate cost basis of holders, so this is technically flawed but I digress. For most content that doesn’t go viral, this entire process will commence and conclude within 24-48 hours, which could be where the controversial post’s rhetoric is derived. This isn’t a “pump and dump,” this is a natural characteristic of social media content, which is what we are building around.. This is how we arrive at an organic value of speculation. If you believe Nick Shirley’s post will go viral and hit 126M views, you can buy at 10K views and $500 market cap or whatever knowing there is a legitimate basis for follow-up buyers, not just speculation ponzi. Nick derives earnings through ownership of his content, which earns off of the revenue it generates and from other users speculating on its virality potential, because the value of virality is democratized and accessible. This value passively flows to his creator coin, which is an index of his content and allows the more chill users who are wary of 24 hour markets to opt for this instead. At scale, this looks something like users calibrating their viewing experience, earning for their attention rather than paying attention, and distributing this value to the content (and creators) that make up their timeline. This is sustainable even at low adoption levels. Some little 50-person town in Nebraska onboards to Base and shares town gossip. John Deere pays good money to run ads in this lucrative corner of the social graph. Bob the farmer is paid to post memes. We are obviously a long way from this, but this is what we should be striving for and talking about: crypto disintermediating what should be a p2p marketplace. I know nothing about law but some LLM research suggests this form of content coins could be interpreted as an unregistered security. The draft Clarity act which seems to be floundering had a classification for digital commodities, which content coins appear to qualify as. A Clarity act could allow Base to be more direct in communicating this vision. For now, it seems they are just trying to avoid overpromising, but they are trying to drum up excitement for what is frankly an unfinished and naked stack, which is having a problematic effect on CT. CT needs to be more pragmatic in our pushback to Base and not discard the potential of content coins. Base appears to be taking a crack at disintermediating one of the fastest growing and most societally-relevant marketplaces. Whether they succeed or not, it is worth discussing earnestly, and tokenizing content is clearly not a dead end.

1/ Been thinking a lot about token design lately. Made a tier list of token designs and organized some thoughts on tokens that stick out to me. Also have some way-to-early predictions for next cycle’s blow off top 🧵

Ekubo: Starknet’s Golden Child DAOs are dead, AMMs are dead, fair launches are dead. Ballooned valuations, bloated foundations, and deceptive points programs are the new meta. Consequently, fundamentals have been overshadowed by

X402 Rejuvenates Crypto x AI Developed by Coinbase, x402 is a chain agnostic extension of the HTTP 402 status code that lets users and AI agents pay per request using stablecoins. The most relatable, immediate use case for x402 is solving the clunky UX of paywalls. The typical flow for a user is as follows: click on a link > hit paywall > register for an account > add credit card info > pay for service. With x402, users could seamlessly pay by article or by action instead of reloading API credits or committing to a subscription. The big picture use case is AI agent commerce, allowing agents to natively transfer value and act on behalf of users. x402 is beneficial for everyone, but it is uniquely beneficial for AI agents that lack an alternative. Model context protocol (MCP) allows agents to interact with tools. x402 is essentially a payments MCP. Google announced an x402 extension for its Agent Payments Protocol (AP2). Lowe’s is piloting AI agent commerce with Google’s AP2. Here is a demo demonstrating how an agent can research, shop and purchase a refrigerator. Cloudfare is partnering with Coinbase to launch the x402 Foundation. Solana x402 adoption is rapidly increasing, having just reached 50% of total x402 transactions. EIP-8004 brings trust and reputation layer for AI agents, aiding in discoverability and collaboration. x402 v2 was just released, offering better devx, fiat payment support, and extensions. x402 is similar to intents and zkTLS, in that it is a powerful, disruptive primitive that lends itself to big ideas. It’s easy to see the importance, but hard to fully grasp the implications or forecast the path to true adoption. Without a clean way to get directional exposure to x402, the market takeaway so far seems to be green light to speculate on crypto x AI. If the real use cases surface, there could be a fundamentals driven narrative push.

Liquity v2 is quietly building the most efficient bribe market in crypto. The bribe meta has been a fixture in DeFi with Curve, Aerodrome, and now Liquity v2. However, bribe incentives come at the expense of token holders through inflationary rewards. This makes emissions-based bribe markets a net negative for token lockers. Liquity solves this with protocol incentivized liquidity (PIL), directed by $LQTY stakers. Instead of using governance tokens as the reward token, Liquity rewards bribers with BOLD from protocol revenue instead. This makes a big difference. 4 main factors contribute to the efficiency of a bribe economy: 1. Incentive token 2. Scope of bribable venues 3. Risk premium of incentivized action 4. Market structure Let’s use Curve as an example. 1. Incentive token The volatility and uncertainty of the incentive token may limit the market’s ability to price it properly. Bribers bid less to avoid overpaying, which leads to less bribes per dollar of incentives. Incentivizing with an emissions-based governance token like CRV likely earns a lower multiple than a stablecoin (BOLD). 2. Scope of bribeable venues (TAM) Curve’s bribe program is limited to Curve. This is necessary or things would get weird, but it places a ceiling on the TAM for bribes. Liquity PIL is venue-agnostic. You can bribe across any chain & protocol. Any project incentivizing liquidity can pay LQTY stakers, get a small bonus, and distribute cold hard cash to users. 3. Risk premium All liquidity mining campaigns must consider the yield threshold at which users are willing to leave lower-risk strategies like Curve 3Pool or Aave USDC. Bribe economies are not absolved from this process, but to see it we have to work backwards. Consider a $100 bribe to a new Aerodrome pool. It receives X votes—let’s assume $150 worth. If the pool attracts $7.8K TVL for the epoch, that implies LPs require 100% APY for that pool. To increase the TVL, you will have to pay more to scale that APY for additional liquidity, and this risk premium will change with implied volatility. The flipside of this is higher risk premiums often come with greater capital efficiency. While Aerodrome will typically earn less per dollar of emissions than Curve, its potential fees from these positions is higher, and projects need less TVL (and thus, less bribes) for the same goal. BOLD’s wide array of potential incentive venues means the risk premium will vary, but it will generally involve liquidity for BOLD and is considered on the safer side. 4. Market structure How does the token structure, vote bribing apparatus, program rules, and behavior of major entities facilitate or inhibit monetization of gauge votes? In other words, how cutthroat is the vote market? As the first mover, Curve has a sloppy infrastructure for native lockers. Lack of native support for liquid wrappers and the bribe economy make monetization of vote power difficult. Aerodrome has robust tooling for lockers and bribers with its veNFTs & Relay feature. This strong setup is part of the reason why liquid wrappers for veAERO haven’t formed. LQTY has native bribe support, but no liquid wrappers or optimization features. There are other factors that influence the success of a bribe economy, but these factors highlight the fundamentals. Liquity has nailed most of the bribe economy design, but still needs things to fall its way to achieve success. The friendly fork ecosystem seems to be the most likely path to achieving the elusive highly competitive BOLD wars narrative.

Uniswap, the most successful DeFi protocol of all time, with notorious alignment issues and governance charades, finally makes things right, helps establish a new standard for tokens and signals a hospitable legal climate to do so vetoken people: How can we make this about us??

Imagine the scenes if: - Thursday, Jan 1, 2026, UpOnly returns, marking the bottom - Fed chair announced mid Jan, we start pricing in the printer - Coinbase/Base app Super Bowl commercial unveiling (updated) creator coins for partnered A list creators - alt szn 😃

Haseeb is literally dead wrong here. Gwart is correct. Gwart points out 2 flaws in the following statement: traditional incentives work; ergo, crypto incentives work. 1. Web2 is incentivizing real products people want to use, unlike crypto (correct) 2. Web2 incentives have a cost, crypto incentives do not necessarily (also correct) What Gwart is saying is intuitively true. Haseeb uses lots of words to nitpick, but Gwart's point stands. Haseeb says #1 is wrong bc he worked at Airbnb and his friends at uber said they had to shut down in china bc fraud. And fraud is pervasive in incentives. Sure, but this misses the point and also proves the point. Everyone knows how uber came up. The taxi model was outdated. Uber vastly improved payment flow, matchmaking, removed counterparty risk and cut costs by removing downtime. There was a massive edge, nothing proprietary, and a value to blitzing the discovery process by any means. China market incentives were far different than the global model. less sustainable, more of a subsidy-war. 0 spread or even negative spread on fares. Along with the driver milestone incentives, it’s very easy to see how this could be abused. It was a calculated moonshot to win a massive market, and Gwart obv wasn’t talking about the Chinese market. Web2's actual crypto analogue is SPELL. There was a proven behavioral phenomenon (CDP lending), a weak incumbent (Maker), an improved successor (yield bearing collateral). As a result, Spell issued token incentives, tapered off incentives and used revenue to buyback the token. Eventually, revenue surpassed incentives, neutralizing cost and suggesting the incentive program succeeded. Haseeb says #2 is wrong bc “in web2: equity => sell for cash to private investors => give cash to user => user gets cash web2: tokens => give user tokens => user dumps tokens => user gets cash… it's the same damn thing.” No it’s not. The user doesn’t “get cash,” they get compressed margins on goods they were already searching for. McDonalds isn’t giving out $6 coupons for $5 menu items. This doesn’t work unless you’re in crypto and your name is [REDACTED]. Re VCs: in web2 there is no guaranteed liquidity event, so there’s more accountability. In crypto you can just raise and trust that people will farm and dump at a higher val. Or just not raise and not pretend to have a product and mint tokens. TLDR gwart wins. His point is that web2 incentives are sweetening the deal on existing behaviors, which is why it works. There is also an opportunity cost of time that serves as proof of stake in the transaction. Crypto incentives are largely undifferentiated regurgitations of the same products. The product has become the incentive program itself.

Don’t farm points programs without a predefined season length or end conditions (eg Ethena S2)!! And do NOT, ever, for any reason, EVER, in a million years, buy their YTs. This is a user error. no crying in the 2 year old but people still falling for it points fraud casino

I’ve spent most of my time over the past few months on zkTLS, starknet, and sui. Ez morale hack, 10/10 would recommend

It’s funny to see Base community acting like Zora migration is some ghosting traitor drama, as if Coinbase flip flopping on direction wasn’t a primary driver here? > Falling for it again award I assumed the $100B company peddling a grand onchain creator economy vision actually had an ambitious plan w some tricks up their sleeve, but I was completely wrong. They were winging it the whole time.