head of herbs & spices @skycastle
14603 Followers
in the business of creating productive assets
I got a B on my 2025 $WINGMAN Grade Card! I'm The Tokenomics Bar Philosopher, Designing token economies like a research fund, posting like a shitcoin degen, and still somehow finding time to over-optimize a sandwich. Get yours, only for $WINGMAN holders!
lil weekend hack job; six splinters later
we built a casino & now wonder why no one wants to stay longer than a night every single launch follows the same soul-crushing pattern. doesn’t matter if it’s announced or stealth. big float or thin. presale or fair launch. the same mercenary snipers extract control in the first few blocks, then we all sit around complaining for days while the token bleeds 75%. then we just… move on. next launch. same cycle. same people. same outcome. and somehow we can’t connect the dots. the entire point of everything we do here has devolved into mindlessly launching tokens one after another until we’ve churned through every last user. then we have the audacity to complain about not having users. the cognitive dissonance is staggering. as a user not interested in extracting from my friends, this is beyond exhausting & i not alone. we have real projects here. real teams who’ve been grinding for years. projects generating actual revenue. projects with real flywheels that recirculate value back to their users. real products solving real problems. and they’re drowning in a sea of garbage. this market is screaming for consolidation. for alignment. for someone, anyone, to actually defend what’s working. i’ve been calling for this for years. now coinbase is finally waking up & moving—but not for you. they could protect builders. they won’t. look at the batch winners. look at the new leaks. look at the acquisitions. are we serious? look at the blatant fragmentation from the very top during the exact moments when support is needed most. a creator coin under the guise of a flywheel that isn’t even launched on a native platform sucking liquidity from builders as their tokens collapse 25% day-over-day? malice or not. you, as a builder, needs to wake up. it’s more spotlights. more assets. more notifications. trust me: one more shitter will solve the problem. this entire premise has fucked us at every single step of the way for years now. how do you not see this? roll up. consolidate. defend your winners. or forever hold your peace. if your winners go down, YOU go down. a smart friend told me something that should chill every builder to their core: “coinbase has no intention of pushing coinbase users to base. the entire point of base is to push base users to the exchange.” they’re finally waking up. they’re going after the entire stack. and guess what that means for you, the builder? you’re just an idea to rip off & a roadblock to run over. you mean nothing. no one is going to defend your project. no one is going to help you reach distribution. no one cares if you go belly up. it’s more sweet nothings; more throwing shit at the wall; more ignoring the 100+ builders who’ve been here since day one, fighting tooth & nail to make base special. what’s the gut feeling being relayed from the builders in BA? it’s to get off base. this is alarming. i’m tired of writing these. we all are. we were supposed to be different. instead, we chose to destroy ourselves. for a year now, we’ve had a free pass to build the future of consumer. instead, we built a paradise for traders. we spent years incentivizing the wrong people: traders with zero holding periods, snipers extracting millions & controlling substantial supply on day one, kols who dump right after shilling your project, launchpads that work with manipulators because “snipers are inevitable anyway,” other pads that openly manipulate price & sell into their most loyal users purposefully. in the name of “experimentation.” it’s capital first. product last. completely ass backwards. this is who we are. we created this environment. we built it for these exact people. and now we’re shocked they’re the only ones left? we’re now in a place where thousands of distorted traders sit around judging projects thirty minutes into launch. people who’ve never even opened the app, complaining about what the team should have done differently. who are you? you’ve never used the product. you contribute nothing. half the time you can’t even read an order book properly, but you’re mad that a team owns too much of their own token? they’re trying to control their fate. trying to protect themselves from people like you who only want to flip & extract. why would any founder give a fuck about traders who are just here to make a quick buck? to hurt them. the token isn’t an exit—it’s DAY ONE (another idiom that’s completely lost its meaning). it’s meant to find product-market fit, to drip over time to real users who actually care about the product, not the chart or the liquidity or the float. this has nothing to do with you. we’re not building tokens for you to flip in seven days. we’re trying to build real apps that last. that we can sustain over years. you are actively working against that vision. if you’re worried about where the price will be in two weeks, don’t buy it. don’t even come around here. we don’t want you. you’re not adding value—you’re just complaining because you’re not making enough money. money you don’t even deserve. money you’re extracting from real founders trying to build something meaningful for their passion, for their livelihoods. go play in real gambling markets. options. whatever. why are you here? the apps that actually worked in 2019-2022? the ones that brought in real users, sparking intelligent conversations, building serious primitives? we abandoned all of that for quick flips & financial engineering. every “experiment” today is just repackaged garbage we already know doesn’t work, but we’ve convinced ourselves it’s novel because we added a yoyo pairing & trading competition. here’s the truth: this isn’t about finding more users or hockey stick growth or even if we need more consumer apps. it’s about quality over quantity. you need one good breakthrough with real purpose & real value. otherwise it’s just a carousel of the same 2,000 people saying the same stupid shit, ending up in the same place over & over while 10 people eat & lie through their front teeth about being good stewards. think deeply on this: how many people are truly in your corner? now consider how many are trading against you in an anon wallet. the number would shock you. it starts with the traders but goes all the way up through our leaders & vcs. you built a playground for thieves & now wonder where it went… we need to completely flip the script. price out snipers entirely. kill the trader-first mentality. build for meaningful holders with real timelines. we want investors who believe long-term. we want actual users of the product. there’s no reason to have you in the holder base if all you do is complain about your own greed after buying a token you did no research on, for an app you’ve never even used. this is what we’ve incentivized for years. this is the perverse reality we’ve created. founders everywhere now have to deal with thousands of traders who think everything is being built for them to make a quick flip. it’s completely backwards. morons in their dms perpetually harassing them because YOU said this was this way. how much longer do you expect builders to deal with this? back good ideas from good founders, not just anything that comes along. stop throwing shit at the wall. fuck your push for asset issuance. start from zero if you have to & build something that actually matters. drop to zero liquidity if needed & rebuild with the right people. or watch it all go to zero anyway. the choice is ours. we get the users we deserve & right now, we deserve nothing. right now? we have nothing. so where are the users? they don’t exist. and they are not coming back. you incentivized traders to actively work against them & they lost all of their money LISTENING TO YOU. now WE get what YOU deserve.
i love this place but it’s not getting any better. i talk to four or five builders every single day, and over the past few weeks, the tides have started to turn. almost everyone i’ve spoken to who’s trying to build a real, scalable product with the intention of surviving across cycles is seriously questioning the direction of base & exploring alternatives. it’s heartbreaking. nobody — not a single person i’ve spoken to — wants creator coins. not one. the only people building in that vertical are the ones trying to fix the very problems they created. we’re perpetually pushing ten people on zora all with deep coinbase relationships. what does this have to do with base blockchain? half of them aren’t even builders & more than half of them won’t be here in a year. can we be honest about that? it’s not even because they’re bad ideas, but because they launched on a creator coin launchpad that makes zero sense. are they creator coins? are these projects? why is there a trading competition? none of this makes sense. why are we forcing a square peg into a round hole just to sustain a broken narrative that doesn’t make sense? do you know what builders really want? they want a faster chain. they want gas stability & sponsorships. they want $10k checks. they want to build on YOUR blockchain, not build around it, not forced into an app chain or elsewhere. you ARE the blockchain. build the blockchain & support the folks building on it. that’s all they want. that is your only job. instead, we’re throwing invalidated shit at the wall — doubling, tripling, quadrupling down on failing, directionless projects while real, multi-person teams with momentum & traction get ignored. we hide behind greed, ignorance & inertia, pretending not to see what’s happening right in front of us. talk to the people. this isn’t good. they are not happy. they are leaving. you think i’m loud for clout on a 100 person network? i am loud because these builders are my friends; because i am building with them. i’m loud because they don’t care to be: they are ready to throw in the gloves. we’ve learned nothing from the lessons that came before — from friend tech, from virtuals, from zora x5, from farcaster, from tba, from crypto itself over the last eight years — why are we ignoring all of it? why? do we really not see this? again? for the nth time? this only goes ONE way. please, can we be real? farcaster tried to build for creators for THREE years & got NOWHERE. what about lens? what about every single attempt before? what about the last 5 zora models? cmon, man… these are people’s livelihoods; these builders have families, children, spouses. they quit their jobs to build on YOUR chain; to strengthen YOUR network, to make YOU money. why are we doing this? and now, we’re about to push another unvalidated model as if Jesus came down from the heavens & wrote the code himself — one that lets founders dump FIFTY PRECENT of their token on their holders, with zero connection to fundamentals, revenue, product, or users. just another attention game, another cycle of manipulation… zero validation, yet we’re rolling it out across multiple pads, multiple teams, as THE model that will feed the hungry, pushing it top-down. come on. we laughed at binance for asking 8% for a listing. the whole base community joined in: “how absurd! we don’t want the largest exchange in the world dumping on us!” and yet here we are, pushing creator coins with fifty percent insider ownership whose ENTIRE purpose is to be dumped on their own communities… launchpads with fifty percent insider ownership whose ENTIRE purpose is to be dumped on their own communities… it’s just sad. genuinely sad; and it’s painful to hear the same thing, every day, from people who’ve been here for years. i just don’t get it anymore.
perpetually exhausted; breaking, but immensely grateful; this place saved my life, gave me a home & now provides me with purpose everyday i get to work with some of the smartest folks i’ve ever had the privilege to meet; everyday i get to learn from the best i don’t know what i did to deserve this but you have my word: i will get healthy so that i may give it all back when that day comes