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. 53 replies
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we spent the last 2.5 years building for builders and that continues to be the vast majority of our resource spend today. this shows up in our work scaling the chain (need to do more!), supporting builders with programs like batches, running basecamp, supporting hackathons all around the world, and so much more. we will continue supporting builders as a P0 priority. it's also worth noting that zora is a very critical builder — they consume ~10% of base's gas today, which is more than basically any other standalone app.
on why creators: i believe that creators are the next important segment for us to onboard to bring the world onchain. that's because there are 250m creators around the world (~10x more than builders), they create a massive amount of value for the internet of today, but they are deeply underserved by the existing system. if we can build tools that help creators win, not only can we onboard those 250m people — but they will also onboard *everyone else* because they create the content and narratives that the rest of the world consumes. furthermore, onboarding creators unlocks a very valuable segment that builders can then build for. creator coins are a prime example of this: i'm already talking to tons of builders who are building tools and products for creators to better leverage their coins. it's a whole new platform!
lastly, on the idea that we're "pushing unvalidated concepts from the top", we've been iterating on models to unlock creators onchain for literally 5 years. from 1/1s to open editions to OEs that convert to coins to the latest creator + content coin model. the idea that this is some made up concept that got dropped out of nowhere is not accurate. is the model perfect? surely not. but the only way we get to greatness is by taking all the learnings and iterating. that's what we've been doing for and will keep doing. 3 replies
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