blessed awakenings,
status: semi-liquid
location: manhattan
mood: ambient capitalist despair with hopeful undertones
the agony of our corporeal selves tethered to a global monetary system that many of you assure me is in the process of complete structural realignment. and yet, the bills persist. i pay and pay and still they reappear. and what does one get for all of this torturous effort? new kitten heels? a summer tour with 6 stops in southern europe? no, it’s all ephemeral things like liability insurance and electricity.
i’ve been thinking a lot about attention: how it’s spent, who profits, and what it means to go outside simply because an app asked me to sign in with email. sometimes i like to remember that i thrive in cities, onchain economies, and emotionally fraught group chats. i was raised in the attention economy and professionally trained in narrative manipulation, of course i’m going to invest in a token named after a snack.
the markets are up, or maybe down (this analysis is free). michael saylor is bitcoin bulking. i’ve been trying to stay grounded by reading books with unreliable narrators and making small, cinematic decisions that redirect the course of my life. all of this is to say: i’m still here. vaguely solvent, and dangerously online.
so fetch your tinctures, your rituals, your browser extensions and join me for this week’s excavation of digital culture and financial tomfoolery.
enjoy some mostly accurate reportings below
xx, c
Noice launched as an economic engagement layer for Farcaster, basically productizing the Amps and Tipn experiments into a different app experience. You configure micro-tips for organic engagement and set prices for paid engagement requests, all denominated in whatever ERC20 you want. People are tipping in $Zora, various clankers, even launching personal tokens specifically for this.
The token hit shot up pretty quickly, but what makes this interesting isn’t just the speculation. It’s the behaviors that emerge when social interaction becomes programmable. Some people are farming. Others are treating it like a form of lightweight patronage. It avoids the pressure of full-blown creator coins while offering more structure than just tweeting for free. It gives users a way to assign value to attention without turning it into a full-time hustle.
Noice also showed how quickly this kind of product can come together on crypto-native rails. Farcaster’s infrastructure made it possible to launch payments and social features without having to route through a dozen third-party systems. That speed alone points to something bigger. When the tools align, crypto apps don’t just compete with web2. They start to move faster than it.
We're watching the slow-motion collapse of L1 investment logic in real time. L1 tokens aren't businesses to be valued on cash flows, they're competing to be money within their digital economies. The problem is that opportunity might have already closed for everyone except Bitcoin, Ethereum, and maybe Solana.
Here's the brutal math: every successful application will eventually launch its own token and denominate their markets in that token instead of the underlying L1. When pump dot fun launches their token (and economic incentives guarantee they will), suddenly the app that drives the majority of Solana transactions is operating with its own unit of account. Multiply this across every significant application and you end up with L1s becoming expensive settlement infrastructure rather than monetary assets.
The Kamagotchi/Initia example is a good one - a relatively small game running on its own app chain generates more fees than many billion-dollar protocols. This suggests the real value accrues at the application layer where users actually interact, not the infrastructure layer that just processes transactions. L1s are pricing themselves as if they'll capture application-layer value, but applications are increasingly designed to capture that value themselves.
We're seeing chains generating $300 in daily fees while maintaining billion-dollar valuations but at the end of the day it's not really about fees - it's about whether these protocols are building digital economies or just hoping someone else builds them. Most are betting on the latter, which feels increasingly naive as successful apps demonstrate they don't need to share value with their underlying infra.
Cookie's $COOKIE token surged 80%+ following the launch of Snaps, its creator network platform. The rally has traders doing some comparisons between Cookie's ~$125M vs. Kaito's ~$550M market cap, both operating in the "InfoFi" space. Cookie's differentiator lies in its "mindshare" tracking, essentially quantifying how much mental real estate each project or poster occupies in public discourse. The platform gamifies this through Snaps, which rewards creators not just for posting frequently, but for demonstrating actual loyalty and alignment with specific projects over time. Think of it as the evolution from "engagement farming" to "conviction farming," where your takes are weighted by consistency, sentiment quality, and whether you're genuinely invested in what you're shilling versus just carpet-bombing every trending token. Whether this closes the valuation gap with Kaito or creates an entirely new category of "social analytics" is tbd, but the market seems generally interested by the possibility that authentic opinions might actually be worth more than generic hype posting.
Mike Bodge launched AUX as his take on collaborative internet curation. The concept is simple: post links you'd share in a group chat, vote on what deserves attention, winner takes the front page for up to four hours. It costs five attention tokens to post, every upvote sends someone a token, links live for 48 hours in the curation market.
The early content is interesting - deep cuts, obscure PDFs, music mixes, art finds. People seem to get the assignment: curate for taste rather than engagement farming. The constraint system (limited front page time, posting costs, finite voting periods) creates natural scarcity that prevents endless scroll problems.
1/3
What's smart about the token design is how invisible it is. You get 100 attention tokens to start, build your stack through participation, never see wallet UI. Mike's explicitly positioning this as an internet attention machine, not a crypto app. the tokens function like arcade credits rather than investment vehicles.
The product works and feels genuinely useful for discovering stuff you wouldn't find otherwise. Whether it scales beyond the current user base of crypto-native internet culture enthusiasts is TBD. Mike's planning other experiments in the same ecosystem, so this is more proof of concept than final destination. It's a solid example of crypto mechanics enhancing rather than overwhelming the core product experience.
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https://paragraph.com/@seedclubhq/youre-in-the-top-001percent-of-my-mindshare?referrer=0x82Fe8C393d063cB23631Dbc8216d4aDF941adC9e
https://paragraph.com/@seedclubhq/youre-in-the-top-001percent-of-my-mindshare?referrer=0x82Fe8C393d063cB23631Dbc8216d4aDF941adC9e
ngl that headline tough