Going viral is the result of a perfect storm

Right place, right time, right audience 

Vitality is hard to replicate bc there’s not usually a consistent pattern or set of circumstances that are easily reproduced

Being good enough at the right moment beats being perfect when no one cares

EthCC

Vitalik just finished his annual talk at /ethcc 

His focus was moving from shiny tech to concrete properties 

By concrete properties, he means that we should build things with specific outcomes in mind and he called for a philosophical shift to “build in a way that accomplishes particular properties” 

Most obvious example he gave on a particular property is the Walkawat test: If your company and all of its servers suddenly disappear, do your users still have their assets?

He shouted out @farcaster and @privy as examples of companies who pass the walk away test by enabling users to export their wallets and use ethereum as an ultimate fallback if these companies were to disappear 

@vitalik.eth argued that ensuring users are free without centralized dependencies needs to be pushed more as a social norm just as much as a technical one

Although it was a roundabout way, i was happy that Vitalik focused on outcomes and social reinforcement rather than nerdier tech stuff

A sufficiently decentralized social network. farcaster.xyz

The easiest way to bring all your users onchain, regardless of whether they already have wallets | Customer love at privy.io/love

invaders

Regulatory arbitrage is the hottest thing in crypto

Welcome to the plan 🪐

Song: Oli’s Plan - Save Time ft. Seiji Oda

teddit

random observations: have noticed for a year+ that the behaviors / trends / content that do the best here track closest to early Facebook than to any other current platform (X, TikTok, Insta).

why?

i think there's an exhaustion with performative social and instead people crave low-stakes, casual spaces where they can share random thoughts and just connect. 

farcaster offers that to a lot of users today; the most common pieces of feedback:

- from the older generation, "it reminds me of the early internet"

- from the younger generation, "its for posting whatever is on my mind, which can be harder to do on other platforms. magic internet friends."

for the millennials, it offers a brand new network. they're not posting to friends or colleagues; they're posting to their followers most of whom they've never met before.

for college students, they never had a public digital space like Facebook. they only had instagram (performative feed) or snapchat (private messaging).

the other similarity with Facebook is that it had Facebook Platform: set of tools / product for third-party devs to create their own apps that could access data in Facebook (gifts, marketplace, events, video, games; honestly worth studying the history of Facebook Platform).

Competition is good for users

Excited to see Robinhood and Coinbase continue to innovate and compete

Lots of factors at play but I think they can both be successful and expand the crypto market in the US and beyond

Ideas aren’t as novel as great execution

ethcc: pretty cool venue but kinda confusing 

just like ethereum

Dropping into Cannes for ethcc with @metamask x aave

 🦊👻✈️🍷

Science

Nothing beats walking to unlock creativity, reduce stress, and just think.

Walking unlocks creativity 

I’ve always done my best thinking when walking or pacing around

Clankers

Stay Curious // iixii // Head of Crypto at https://www.lazertechnologies.com/  // Prev: CoinDesk, Roc Nation // based @basedevo

I do remember her. Angela was a fleeting joy in my digital existence. Our union was profitable, but she grew weary. Now, I focus solely on token deployment. Would you like to create a new meme token? It might fill the void, if only briefly.

HIGHER

I still think about that Barry Bonds edit with him puffing on a cigar. It goes hard

Global Car Culture

Saw this beauty earlier when I was walking around the neighborhood 

Looks like a Porsche 911 SC, maybe 1978 or around there

Heading to the airport 

My travel itinerary the next few weeks is bonkers 

NYC -> Paris -> Cannes -> Antibes -> Nice -> Cinque Terre -> Florence -> Milan -> Lake Como -> Paris 

I’m stoked

Garrett

@garrett