326181
Nate Maddrey

@nmadd #326181

building @emptyblock / art, music, onchain data / prev director of research @coinmetrics
1594 Follower 279 Following
There is already a growing fatigue for the type of attention-grabbing, ephemeral content that has proliferated on the internet.

It almost always devolves into clickbait. Plus it forces creators to be on a hamster wheel, constantly trying to get more attention.

Imo it’s a big mistake to try to aggressively pursue this type of “content” when we have an opportunity to collectively build something new and more lasting.

People like @proxystudio.eth and @yonfrula are clearly trying to build for the long term, and I think that’s a great thing.
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jesse.base.eth 🔵
@jessepollak·2 days ago
2/ so then, the *big* question is: is there another model that could let creatives do what they love (e.g. create more content, art, whatever) and *still* have that same source of demand for their underlying asset with a consumer friendly entry point. in other words, how do you turn attention that content captures into a reliable source of demand for your token ($GDUPI).

unfortunately, I think this is still an unsolved problem: but I *do* think it's possible to solve. putting aside the specific mechanics, imagine if you could:

1. create content
2. when that content gets attention and people engage (e.g. like, collect) that drives demand back to your underlying token

the more content you create, the more attention you get, the more demand you drive.

at its core, this is the endgame that @zora is trying to solve. and while I don't think the current product fully does it, I think they are an iteration or two away. the key will be closing the feedback loop, then building enough attention to make it spin fast.
@yesyes does great Farcaster data work, support here if you want to see more of it!
most crypto founders still severely underestimate the importance of community building

you can have an app with great ux, investors pushing your narrative, etc.

but if you haven't done the hard work of building an organic community from the ground up, it's going to be an uphill battle for you
I was curious how much Jesse has been promoting these different creator accounts, so I ran a Dune query

This chart shows the amount of Jesse's casts that referenced Zora compared to all of the other accounts he tagged
https://imagedelivery.net/BXluQx4ige9GuW0Ia56BHw/fe28d641-c3de-4a48-5ad3-f257e30bf000/original
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jesse.base.eth 🔵
@jessepollak·14:54 21/04/2025
shoutout to all of the incredible creators on @zora, @clanker, @flaunch, @clizaai, @apedotstore, @rodeodotclub, @echowxyz and so many others who are unafraid to push boundaries and bring their work onchain

creators deserve a better creative economy
/Data
The reality is, there is a disconnect between what Jesse and the base team are pushing and what is actually happening onchain.

If you look at the data there’s very limited interest in content coins outside of the coins that Jesse and the Base team created. And those coins trade just like memecoins, despite what Jesse is saying.

From the outside looking in “content coins” look strikingly similar to memecoins, just with a new coat of paint.
269091
nick
@nickysap·04:15 18/04/2025
I don’t completely disagree with Jesse here.

If you parse the meat of his argument from the proselytizing, he’s basically just saying provenance and social proof are really all that matter.

If you’re popular enough and drop a decent idea that gets a lot of attention you can now monetize more easily than before via web3.

The asset is attention not the token itself, we’ve known this for years now.

You can try to frame it in a million ways, and crypto has done so many times, but ultimately it’s the same thing it’s always been. We’re just turbo-launching shit now because it’s way easier than it’s ever been.

Don’t overthink it. Content coins are memecoins are NFTs are ICOs and so on…
A lot of discussion about content coins so lets look at some data

This chart shows the daily trading volume of the top Zora coins. The top two by far are:

1) Base is for everyone - created by Base
2) what are coins even good for? - created by Jesse Pollak

These two coins account for over 40% of all-time trading vol
https://imagedelivery.net/BXluQx4ige9GuW0Ia56BHw/72061104-03c7-4c67-5b3d-bc5796cd3500/original
/Data
Right, but there’s a fundamental difference between content and markets that is going unacknowledged

Adding a coin to content is basically attaching a market to it. And we do not need infinite micro markets to tell us that the median internet post is worthless

There seems to be a disconnect between theory and perception here. Pushing financilization of everything turns people off and pushes people away, especially artists and creators

Just because there will be infinite tokens doesn’t mean we should be actively working towards that. In the early days it’s crucial to focus on high quality content, not spamming worthless tokens
3
Dan Romero
@dwr.eth·00:16 17/04/2025
> when everything becomes a token, nothing has value

Pre-internet generating public content was hard / expensive. And thus we had a finite supply.

The median internet post is worthless. There is an infinite supply of them. Some posts are valuable, though. And in aggregate, all internet posts are far more valuable than pre-internet content. The valuable companies surface and distribute the most valuable posts through feeds, i.e. concentrating attention.

The issue has been until recently, tokens were relatively hard to create, so there was a limited supply.

As that's gotten 10x easier (and will continue to get easier), we haven't really adapted both the tools and norms around it.

At the limit, there will be an infinite supply of tokens. Most will be worthless. And some will be valuable.
Saying “we should tokenize everything” is basically saying “we should tokenize the long tail of slop”

But the problem is, the long tail of slop is effectively worth $0

In fact, it’s probably worth less than $0, because it creates a lot of noise and distracts from higher quality content

And we don’t need to attach a coin to low quality, low effort content to know that it is worth $0. There’s enough garbage content on the internet already, and it’s only growing

How can we work towards incentivizing higher quality content, and empowering creators with the tools they need?
3635
androidsixteen 🌲
@androidsixteen.eth·21:28 16/04/2025
By letting your tokenized markets become more liquid and build people wealth

You're trying to speedrun infinite noisy markets rather than a greater number of meaningful ones
I think this is a big part of why there is so much backlash to the idea of “content coins”

The teams pushing them are solely pushing the coin part while basically ignoring the content. And let’s be real, most of the content is basically garbage

If they continue to aggressively push tokenization while ignoring the actual creators they’re just going to isolate the community and turn people off
13833
Kaloh | Indexy.xyz 📊
@kaloh·11:01 17/04/2025
My two cents on the Zora x Base coins and future of “content coins”

“content coins” need to optimise for content not for the coin part to thrive

The experience needs to be x10 better than what it is today

1. consuming that content: making it easy for users to understand what’s the content (podcast, article, meme, animation, ad, poster, w/e)

2. distributing that content: meet the users where they are, dexscreener is not it

3. amazing content: probably the hardest. Content that people love
A chart to watch: BTC returns compared to gold and tech stocks (QQQ)
https://imagedelivery.net/BXluQx4ige9GuW0Ia56BHw/4fb92d9b-4484-4b9c-cb96-d05e7ef16100/original
326181
Nate Maddrey
@nmadd·15:31 05/04/2025
It’s a pivotal moment for bitcoin. The big question is: are people going to continue to treat it as a risk asset, or are they going to start viewing it more as a true “digital gold” independent store of value?

Since 2020, BTC (and crypto in general) has been highly correlated with tech stocks, signaling investors have been basically treating it as a risk asset. But of course that’s counter to the common narrative that bitcoin is “digital gold.”

This is important because gold and tech stocks have been going in very different directions recently. If BTC is more like gold, it should be holding strong. But if it’s more like a tech stock, it should continue to crash with the rest of the market.

It’s also important because the macroeconomic significance of gold is potentially shifting, largely thanks to Trump’s tariff policy.

More info here:

https://x.com/CryptoHayes/status/1908410144184295455
"build something 100 people love"

cool new mini app by @igoryuzo.eth that uses @emptyblock data to show why Farcaster is the perfect experimental playground for devs and creators
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Igor Yuzovitskiy
@igoryuzo.eth·00:49 11/04/2025
If you are a builder, there's no better place to experiment with new ideas than Farcaster.

Here's a Mini App explaining why.

cc @ted @nmadd

https://farcaster-builders.vercel.app/
Fantastic piece

Great insight about VCs, which I think also applies to retail investors:

“Co-investments tend to increase during periods of mania as funds are looking to deploy more aggressively. VCs rely more on social signal and less on due diligence during periods of mania. During a bear market, funds deploy cautiously and often alone due to lower valuations.”
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Joel John
@joeljohn·14:59 10/04/2025
Just shipped some observations on how the best VCs tend to co-invest in tight knit packs with @shloked for today's newsletter.

Read for notes on how VC selection at pre-seed matters a lot more than you'd otherwise think.

https://www.decentralised.co/p/networks-in-crypto-vc
Does anyone know if there's a way to get a list of Warpcast wallets in Dune?

I tried just pulling the most recently connected address for each user (after wallets started rolling out) but there are way too many false positives

Also tried going back through @v's casts announcing the wallet roll outs and then matching those timestamps with address verifications, but am still getting inaccurate data

cc @rish @neynar

https://warpcast.com/igoryuzo.eth/0xbbc8e40a

https://dune.com/queries/4945252/8183328/
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Igor Yuzovitskiy
@igoryuzo.eth·21:36 03/04/2025
Curious if there's a way to drill deeper on 76k stable wallets, and which of those are warpcast embedded wallets. @nmadd made a suggestion to take the last value returned from the query. @v are there any other ways to tell based on metadata labeling?

F Warplet Addresses

Free crypto analytics by and for the community. Access crypto data tools and blockchain analytics with 700,000+ dashboards covering DeFi, NFTs, and onchain data. Track meme coin metrics, DEX analysis, and more across dozens of protocols like Ethereum, Bitcoin, and Solana.

dune.com
Reminder to pwease say thank you before posting anything about the market today
https://imagedelivery.net/BXluQx4ige9GuW0Ia56BHw/9d460280-14e6-47ca-bb99-58a06e4b9400/original
It’s a pivotal moment for bitcoin. The big question is: are people going to continue to treat it as a risk asset, or are they going to start viewing it more as a true “digital gold” independent store of value?

Since 2020, BTC (and crypto in general) has been highly correlated with tech stocks, signaling investors have been basically treating it as a risk asset. But of course that’s counter to the common narrative that bitcoin is “digital gold.”

This is important because gold and tech stocks have been going in very different directions recently. If BTC is more like gold, it should be holding strong. But if it’s more like a tech stock, it should continue to crash with the rest of the market.

It’s also important because the macroeconomic significance of gold is potentially shifting, largely thanks to Trump’s tariff policy.

More info here:

https://x.com/CryptoHayes/status/1908410144184295455
1044469
Shant Mesrobian
@shantmm·14:21 05/04/2025
Does anyone have a good theory for why crypto is weathering this market crash so well?

x.com
That $47M held in stablecoins is looking pretty good right now...
https://imagedelivery.net/BXluQx4ige9GuW0Ia56BHw/2390386f-d184-446f-9545-42c687d28f00/original
Base revenue recently passed $100M over the last year

Which is more than Optimism, Arbitrum, zkSync, and Scroll revenue combined
https://imagedelivery.net/BXluQx4ige9GuW0Ia56BHw/d98b65a2-9e2b-4ba1-2a0a-3199fe0a4d00/original
/Data
With over 220k tokens launched, how big is the total Clanker token market?

I made a new dashboard that shows the total market cap of the top tokens launched by @clanker

Shout out to the $CLANKER team @proxystudio.eth @dish for having great open source Dune queries, was a big help in building this!

Data via @emptyblock
https://imagedelivery.net/BXluQx4ige9GuW0Ia56BHw/19e7b2c8-6bc8-4b2f-485f-d0d1b8035b00/original
Over at my parents house and can’t believe they still have this

Original Power Rangers Megazord toy from 1993
https://imagedelivery.net/BXluQx4ige9GuW0Ia56BHw/afcfca47-a8fb-454d-17b3-19d5977d4c00/original
vibe
https://imagedelivery.net/BXluQx4ige9GuW0Ia56BHw/940b8ed8-5d22-41e1-9786-317f97a88100/original
326181
Nate Maddrey
@nmadd·14:49 28/03/2025
doxxing my dog
Agreed. i think its more important to learn to code now than ever

if we had AI that could build houses for us, would that mean people should stop learning how to be architects?

imo it would mean good architects would have an even bigger leg up on the competition, and could build better and faster than someone using the tools with no knowledge

learning to code teaches you logic and problem solving, and will ultimately let you use these tools more effectively and help you adapt faster
473
Matthew
@matthew·05:41 28/03/2025
Yeah not buying it. It's odd when people say things like this because I use AI all the time at work and no part of me feels like it is "replacing" me. If anything I have way more agency. It's just making what I do easier, and better, and faster. And that frees me up to focus on doing more.

If you are building anything of complexity, AI can rarely "write the app for you". It can write *an app* for you, but it almost always has issues, meaning you still have to work with it to get to the outcome you want. And turns out, it's a lot easier to work with it if you know how to code.

I agree people should study the things he's saying as well, because code is just logic on some level and logic is not something well-taught in our schools. But it is still and probably increasingly valuable to know how to code as well.
One of the weirdest things about what X has evolved into is that pretty much every single person still on there thinks they’re morally superior to everyone else on X
I’ve been curious about the total market cap of Farcaster tokens so have been experimenting with some different ways of calculating it

This is the best version I’ve made so far -it includes about 50 tokens that are relatively highly traded by Farcaster users. It doesn’t include every Farcaster token ever launched, but I think it’s a pretty good representation of how trends have shifted over the last year
https://imagedelivery.net/BXluQx4ige9GuW0Ia56BHw/d3e5ef63-5215-4118-969f-47961ab8fc00/original
I made a new dashboard that shows the total market cap of about 50 of the biggest Farcaster tokens

Check it out here!
984568
Empty Block
@emptyblock·19:05 27/03/2025
New Dashboard: Farcaster Tokens Market Cap

This dashboard shows the total market cap of a selection of the largest Farcaster tokens.

Tokens are selected based on Farcaster connected wallets' trading activity, and filtering for tokens with relatively high trading volume and number of unique traders.

Check it out here:

https://dune.com/empty_block/farcaster-tokens-market-cap
I get what they're going for but the phrase "coin your content" gives me a visceral ick feeling. Kind of like hearing the word "moist"
First institutional money flows into crypto, then retail

What will happen when the institutional floodgates finally open?
984568
Empty Block
@emptyblock·18:33 25/03/2025
In crypto, institutional capital and retail capital typically move in waves. A surge of new institutional capital is followed later by a peak in retail trading.

This happens in large part because institutional capital is usually orders of magnitude larger than retail capital, and focused almost exclusively on BTC and ETH. So institutional money flows into BTC and BTC price surges, which stimulates the rest of the crypto market and attracts retail traders.

This chart shows net inflows to the BlackRock Bitcoin Trust ETF (IBIT), compared to pump.fun trading volume on Solana. The ETF inflows peaked on November 7th, the day after the election. Pump.fun volume peaked a few months later on January 23rd, 2025.

This suggests that institutional inflows front-ran retail inflows, and had already cooled off by the time retail trading peaked.
Big spike in new signups over the last few days, most likely driven by the new Farcaster airdrop campaigns

A little over 7k new fids yesterday which is the highest since May '24
https://imagedelivery.net/BXluQx4ige9GuW0Ia56BHw/529af7e1-3c9e-4d21-ca12-eca88b5e5500/original
Mike White is so good at subverting expectations for his characters

Sets you up to think one thing, but it always ends up being way more nuanced
No cheating, drop your last saved photo no context
https://imagedelivery.net/BXluQx4ige9GuW0Ia56BHw/3ae954d5-5ac4-4640-7fdd-1e0a84997d00/original
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tomu
@tomu·16:05 23/03/2025
No cheating, drop your last saved photo no context
At first glance these look like stock charts. But its actually just 10,000 coin flips plotted out
https://imagedelivery.net/BXluQx4ige9GuW0Ia56BHw/18957fa7-e6ef-408e-ac96-9540fccbfc00/original
gm (george michael)
https://imagedelivery.net/BXluQx4ige9GuW0Ia56BHw/a21ad973-fbb6-4f8e-f43b-61e9804a2e00/original
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I was at this show in 2006 and its still the best show I’ve ever seen

Radiohead unexpectedly debuted a bunch of new songs off of In Rainbows, which hadn't been released yet

80k people there, never felt anything like the electricity in the crowd

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hgXZAHonLs&t=3636s
@bracky I want in on the Madness! 🏀
"Most people will not realize how good this really is. Covering Led Zeppelin while dropping Allman Brothers licks while dressed as a Hobbit is almost trolling"

Billy Strings - Ramble On, Halloween Show in Asheville, NC 2022

https://youtu.be/g8FiyOW4ybg?si=IMZkHtBR5sHY1ssi&t=60
I think @niftyswaps actually makes a good point here about showing impression numbers on casts

One of the jarring things for new people coming to Warpcast is that it can feel like you're casting into the void. Even people getting 50+ engagements on their casts can still feel this way if they're coming over from X where they're used to getting hundreds or thousands of likes

Having some sort of impressions metric might help, because then people would at least say "ok its not that my cast sucks, its just that it was only seen by 5 people"

But that being said, @dwr.eth also makes a good point that distribution is hard, and there's no magical way to have every new user suddenly get distribution. But showing impression numbers would at least help make this more transparent, so new people can see that they're slowly getting more impressions and distribution

Of course, it could all backfire and seeing impression numbers may scare people away. But just food for thought
191637
Nifty 🍎
@niftyswaps·01:19 18/03/2025
There is a pattern with Ur "feedback requests"

U ask for constructive feedback - get it

Refute the feedback

Ignore or tell them to build their own client 😂

How about instead U show impressions like X does or some metric of reach vs engagement?

Then we will know if our posts suck or Noone is seeing them 🫡

U ask the right questions but U actually don't take the feedback well

I don't know best, I'm sure building warpcast isn't easy, i want it to grow that's why I try to point things out, to me the bold post situation is a clear example and this isn't the first time he has tried to make it work here 🤷

Do you want warpcast to compete in the social media arena?

Do better 😤
Low key kind of inspiring to see the entire crypto community band together to shit on the Solana video
I started asking claude about pi and this stuff is blowing my mind
https://imagedelivery.net/BXluQx4ige9GuW0Ia56BHw/ffb63684-1d01-4689-270b-16c243bb5500/original
It’s tempting to constantly chase new coins, but the biggest wins usually come from betting and holding with conviction

If you had invested $1000 in $BNKR on January 1st it would be worth over $25k now. And you didn’t necessarily have to be super early and buy in the first hour or even first day when BNKR launched

BNKR was sitting below a $2M market cap for a 3 week period at the end of the year when the market cooled off. And at that time @deployer had already launched an early version of Bankr on Farcaster, which was showing signs of traction

In hindsight these market cooling off periods are usually the best time to bet on builders you believe in and hold with conviction

data via @emptyblock
https://imagedelivery.net/BXluQx4ige9GuW0Ia56BHw/46b68732-ca8f-4f87-c5af-1b2bb0f08600/original