Best of lisnewsletter.com on Kiwi News
Most upvoted by Kiwi News readers
6 stories from lisnewsletter.com have been shared on Kiwi News since 13 November 2023, with 32 upvotes and 4 comments in total. The latest was shared on 17 June 2024. They are listed below, most upvoted first.
Text under a title is an AI summary of the linked article.
- Memecoins as the new GTM strategy
Memecoins are emerging as a go-to-market strategy: projects build products around a memecoin's existing community rather than building a product first and then a community. The article cites BONKbot, a Telegram trading bot on Solana that originated from the $BONK token and uses part of its trading fees to buy and burn BONK, and says it recently crossed $200 million in daily trading volume. It also cites Shibarium, the Ethereum Layer 2 launched by $SHIB, which uses transaction fees to burn SHIB, and Jupiter's launch of the $WEN memecoin in January 2024, airdropped to over 1 million wallets.
- Love vs. fame products: A framework for social applications; by Li from Variant
Li argues that social apps should be classified along a spectrum from love (deepening connections with people you know) to fame (discovering creators and building reach), and that this split explains why mature networks like Instagram and X have shifted toward fame. Li says the ad-based business model rewards maximizing user attention, while love products tend to rely on subscriptions, and that X's 2023 redesign, which underweights the follower graph and gives Premium subscribers a ranking boost, marks a move from a love platform to a fame one. Li presents crypto as a way for smaller, love-based communities to fund themselves, citing Nouns DAO and FWB shared treasuries and Facebook's dropped group membership-fee pilot.
- AI and the "Why Now" of Data DAOs
Data DAOs, collectives that create, organize and govern data, are presented as a potential way to accelerate AI development by generating new datasets and rewarding contributors who have little economic benefit under the current model. The article says AI development is bottlenecked by data quality and quantity, and that companies which aggregate data capture most of the value, while end users see no economic benefit from licensing deals. It cites Reddit's S-1, which expects its data advantage to remain a key element in training future LLMs. Examples include Hivemapper's dashcam-based map data, a Reddit data DAO that lets users upload their exported data to a treasury, and token incentives for expert RLHF feedback. The article also flags challenges such as gaming, valuing data, verifying authenticity, and the limited revenue per user compared with Meta's $13.12 ARPU in 2023.
- Art in the Age of Crypto Reproduction
Crypto is presented as restoring the aura and cult value that Walter Benjamin described as eroding under mechanical reproduction, with blockchain provenance and community rituals giving digital art a renewed significance. The article notes that Christie's announced SOURCE [On NFTs], its first onchain generative art collection, in March 2024, exactly three years after Beeple sold a digital artwork through the house for $69 million. It argues that tokens can foster community cohesion and collective action, pointing to Pussy Riot's Nadya Tolokonnikova and Shepard Fairy's Putin's Ashes NFT collection, where proceeds went to Ukrainian soldiers.
- Crypto as the next iteration of the attention economy
Crypto is presented as the next iteration of the attention economy, one that turns attention into tradable assets and captures value more efficiently than web2 advertising. The article cites an NFT of Achi, the original dog wearing a hat, which sold for 1,210.8 ETH ($4.3 million USD) on Foundation, and over 5,000 memecoins launched on Pump.fun in a single day. It contrasts web2 platforms, which harvest user attention through advertising, with memecoins, NFTs and tokens that let users own and profit from the attention a given thing attracts.
- Progressive Ownership: A Model for Application Tokens
Li Jin and Jesse Walden argue that token distribution for applications should move from opt-out airdrops to an opt-in model they call "progressive ownership," in which users earn revenue share income and can choose to convert it into tokens representing a proportional share of community revenue. They say earlier token eras, including proof of work, ICOs and airdrops, drew speculators and mercenary users before product-market fit was established. Their model applies only to projects with early product-market fit and revenue to share, and cites Optimism's roughly $30 million in year-to-date revenue, MakerDAO's $16 million in October fees, and ENS's $1.1 million in the past month as examples.