itsbasil on Farcaster

basil pfp

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.

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Jesse Pollak pfp

@jesse.base.eth

1. i've talked to 100+ creators who like/love their creator coins. it's a powerful model for monetization and community building. just like app coins! coins are good. 2. i think it's good that creators own 50% of their coin (and that it safely vests over a 5 year period). open to any and all feedback on how you think that model could work better. 3. supporting creators is not our only investment — we are massively invested in builders and have been since day one. that's why we are allocating tons of our energy to running base batches (basebatches.xyz) and so many other programs that support builders. 4. i agree attention right now can feel zero sum — that us talking about creator coins means that other things don't get air — but i also believe that comes from the fact that as a space, we aren't growing right now. that's the problem. how do we solve it? by taking more quality shots on goal that can credibly bring consumers onchain. that's my primary focus. thank you for all the feedback. i am always listening, learning, and trying to do better. day one.

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Cassie Heart pfp

Been saying this for a long while, even argued against base in its original form (and the OP fork it became) when I was at Coinbase. I quit over it to go full time building what I thought was the right strategy.

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keccers pfp

Coinbase Cabal answers to Coinbase shareholders not the users. They have fiduciary duties

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ayomide.eth pfp

I don't think it's also a wise thing to keep building things for the same set of technical people. This is one thing that Solana understands in some way. It's time to start building onchain infrastructure for regular people, that's the only way to expand your TAM. Imagine Polymarket or Kalshi just wants to concentrate on people that understand what a wallet address looks like.

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matthew chaim pfp

isn’t the number one thing builders think about when choosing a chain “where can i get the most users”?

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Nounish Prof ⌐◧-◧🎩 pfp

Nounish Prof ⌐◧-◧🎩

Agree with some points BUT clarification—Farcaster did not build for creators for 3 years. This has been dev centered from day 1. They focused a bit more on creators over the past year but still most of the energy & attention go to the devs/builders/mini apps. Besides the leaderboard, which also benefits projects & devs, there’s been very little for creators on Farcaster. Whereas Builders can tap into the rewards, plus mini app rewards, plus various dev support & funds over the years.

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Angel pfp

my optimistic take is that what builders really want (or should want) is more users. And so Base and FC are trying things to attract those users. > do you know what builders really want? > they want a faster chain. they want gas stability & sponsorships. I don't fundamentally agree with this. Hackers and technologists want this. But anyone building a company shouldn't really care or depend on a third party's technical advancements for success. You have to write your own destiny. And if the logic is that we need killer apps to bring those users to base and third parties will build those apps then arguably whoever has such a killer idea that they could bring the masses to base is better off doing it themselves?

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rphgrc.base.eth ↑ pfp

rphgrc.base.eth ↑

Yeah I believe we cast a too large of net when we call people "Creators"

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Jon Commstark pfp

Agreed. Zero people want creator coin zero people want to buy casts There are so many great businesses that could come on chain and some businesses that could start on chain Smh we still havnt solved the onboarding challenges for newbies (I’m currently stuck in a bad transfer from fiat to an onramo)

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MM pfp

too real, basil. too real I think maybe they are just intent on chasing the pipe dream of a coin economy Instagram where the success stories of the top 1-5% of "creators" drive enough interest to attract a broad, largely naive user base. where the target market is influencers and their aimlessly scrolling followers. meaning builders and crypto natives are afterthoughts that's definitely what it feels/looks like to me

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Karsaorlongdong.base.eth pfp

Karsaorlongdong.base.eth

@karsaorlongdong

Creator coins are shit My wallet is just full of crap with no liquidity. Pointless. My base app is full of non liquid casts, just stop! ✋

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あーりー 🎏 pfp

あーりー 🎏

"creator coins" are so obviously wrong i don't even feel like talking about them. the name itself already misleads -- it's just an extraction vehicle

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Adam pfp

Very well said 👏🏻 The takeaway (for me at least) is that the focus for builders should be on the rails it runs on and less on quarterly changing pivots the C-suite foists on the dev and marketing teams. To a large degree its noise. Disruptive and counter intuitive, but noise none the less. When this creator experiment inevitably fails to meet whatever growth metric they're trying to hit, they'll pivot again next quarter. There's always these short sighted headwinds which go up against any long term vision. Not sure if @androidsixteen.eth's comment the other day was in direct response to this Base news, but it will always remain relevant. https://farcaster.xyz/androidsixteen.eth/0x6f70ce03

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helladj pfp

A little dramatic don’t you think? I’m actually excited with the experimentation happening - we don’t know what mainstream adoption will look like yet 🤷 and farcaster is way cooler than it was 2 yrs ago

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Lior pfp

I've shared my concerns about content/ creator coins months back. I dont think they are wrong. I just think they are pre mature and are used incorrectly. If you need someone to take the anger out, happy to jam on this and other stuff anytime 😉 https://base.app/post/0x2520a1803c3469a83da04772e61ee6af1d242a18

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Aaron pfp

What I was saying: https://farcaster.xyz/sickprodigy/0xf0a0e92e

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Liquid Sonic Drop pfp

Liquid Sonic Drop

@liquidsonicdrop

We were on Sonic before Base. And it was the opposite. Hyper focused on protocols without putting any attention on how to attract users. Result is now tons of ghost protocols, 0 on chain volume all powered by probably the most amazing tech of the space. Personally not really liking creators coins either but, I come to accept that what I hate is often the "marketing way" of today. There's simply too much, too many chains. Too many projects, too many everything. There's no more secret formula that just works. Exactly like web2 today, only a tiny % of startups can survive. But for web3 you had a whole layer of mess on top of that ... On top of that you add a token for every project that will drag you down at any underperforming moment like a 1 star google review. What we are hoping is like asking AWS to push your startup because you use their hosting and can't do your own users acquisition. Complicated stuff 🌀 we got to find a way

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Ugwu Chibueze pfp

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Wilson Cusack pfp

Thank you for the feedback! I'm now leading product for Base Platform, so can respond to some of this. - Pushing chain level innovation is very important to us. Right now scaling is our #1 priority, but we're also excited about things like the Solana bridge. Very open to feedback on what you want to see prioritized here. - Base is a big team. The app is one of our product priorities. Just because we are working on the app does not mean the chain is not a priority. We can probably do better making this, and the lines between our products, clearer. - Zora *is* in fact a big chain customer. They drive a lot of blockspace demand. We are prioritizing customers. - We are going to take risks and bets. We think we need to grow the pie 100x. From the Platform point of view, we support the Base app and all our other builders to get us there.

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