# Best of variant.fund on Kiwi News Page: https://news.kiwistand.com/source/variant.fund 10 stories from variant.fund have been shared on Kiwi News since 29 May 2023, with 26 upvotes and 1 comment in total. The latest was shared on 1 October 2024. They are listed below, most upvoted first. Summaries are AI summaries of the linked article. ## 1. Variant Fund's Requests for Startups: Crypto Projects We’d Like to See in 2024 - Kiwi News: https://news.kiwistand.com/stories/Variant-Funds-Requests-for-Startups-Crypto-Projects-Wed-Like-to-See-in-2024?index=0x65a53d97e1dd0c7abea9c828436fc922d5e53714c01ef967b86e07a653dd58c01db976c6 - Source: https://variant.fund/articles/crypto-requests-for-startups-2024 - Shared 15 January 2024, 8 upvotes, 0 comments Variant Fund published its 2024 requests for startups, listing crypto project areas it would like to fund, including payments infrastructure, institutional-grade DeFi, information markets, and onchain reputation systems. The fund's partners and data scientists describe each area, such as Alana Levin's proposal for issuing verifiable subdomains from trusted parties, which could help prove charity legitimacy given that the FTC estimates hundreds of millions are lost in charity fraud each year. Mason Nystrom proposes marketplaces for crypto AI agents, and Derek Walkush points to Uniswap V4 hooks as a new frontier of DeFi mechanism design. ## 2. Investing in Farcaster - Kiwi News: https://news.kiwistand.com/stories/Investing-in-Farcaster?index=0x664cf77e3125c0187d99cf9413c124743612cf1bea7889ed8fd29f6d20a4b4b313b5e0f3 - Source: https://variant.fund/articles/investing-farcaster - Shared 21 May 2024, 5 upvotes, 0 comments Variant, a crypto investor, explains its investment in Farcaster's Series A, which it made alongside Paradigm, USV, and Haun, arguing that the network's core team, developer ecosystem, and user base reflect the best of crypto. The article describes Farcaster as a decentralized social protocol with identity tied to crypto wallets, native payments, and distributed data hubs. It says about 400k users have onboarded, mostly through Warpcast, the first client built on the protocol, which Merkle operates. It also cites frames, interactive mini-apps, as a notable use case, and names Botto as a project using them for significant auction volume. ## 3. Crypto and Net-New Marketplaces - Kiwi News: https://news.kiwistand.com/stories/Crypto-and-Net-New-Marketplaces?index=0x666448c02d9b2393413424ab8c01ed71aa902683940b48b128b4e47b6e18a3d09aaf04b3 - Source: https://variant.fund/articles/crypto-net-new-marketplaces - Shared 8 June 2024, 3 upvotes, 1 comment Crypto marketplaces can be built to serve demand that web2 marketplaces have left unaddressed, using three capabilities: token incentives for scale, onchain reputation, and crypto payments. The article argues that token incentives let marketplaces grow supply first, citing Helium and Hivemapper, which bootstrapped their supply sides with token rewards. It also says portable onchain reputation could remove the duplicated background checks that siloed platforms such as Uber and Lyft each run, and that crypto payments let marketplaces reach global users from day one. Farcaster is offered as an early example, with Bountycaster showing headless marketplaces that use portable social data. ## 4. Tokens Are Products - Kiwi News: https://news.kiwistand.com/stories/Tokens-Are-Products?index=0x66222a6d4e9c9e12370ad092ca10e73d444db3ad24f12932e28970b06cc04502fcd7c3b4 - Source: https://variant.fund/articles/tokens-are-products - Shared 19 April 2024, 3 upvotes, 0 comments Tokens should be designed like software products, with their success measured by a great ownership experience (OX) that addresses real user needs. The article draws the parallel to product craft, which covers engineering, design and go-to-market, and says tokens should be grounded in understanding user needs in the same way. It cites Nouns and Shibuya, which let owners shape the project's course, as addressing the need to be heard, and Friends with Benefits, which gives owners access to exclusive communities and events, as addressing social belonging. It says many existing tokens were launched without considering the user, and that the token design space remains nascent. ## 5. App-Specific Rollups: A Trade-Off Between Connectivity and Control - Kiwi News: https://news.kiwistand.com/stories/App-Specific-Rollups-A-Trade-Off-Between-Connectivity-and-Control?index=0x64b270014801004a6f09a48ae599b658383d2a50f108fe8ab8f9ea02a5443084258eb440 - Source: https://variant.fund/articles/app-specific-rollups-trade-off-connectivity-control - Shared 15 July 2023, 2 upvotes, 0 comments App-specific rollups trade connectivity for control, and the article argues that whether an app should launch its own chain depends on how much connectivity it can afford to lose, mainly attention and capital. Apps that control their own user attention, such as Mirror, Zora, Manifold, Sound.xyz, and OnCyber according to the author, are better positioned to do so, while onchain games are cited as strong candidates. The author hypothesizes that the inflection point for adoption will come at least 6 to 12 months from now, citing early examples like Lattice's OpCraft, while noting that growing infrastructure providers such as Caldera, Eclipse, and Conduit may cause teams to wait before committing. ## 6. A practical guide to geofencing - Kiwi News: https://news.kiwistand.com/stories/A-practical-guide-to-geofencing?index=0x66fbe0d347843fd482840fa62e3f613de9239a8daf66683b5d911578ad494b27e2f9b6ea - Source: https://variant.fund/articles/practical-guide-to-geofencing - Shared 1 October 2024, 1 upvote, 0 comments Variant argues that geofencing, which blocks users in a given jurisdiction from a product, should be a last-resort compliance strategy for crypto companies. Geofencing can take a company outside the territorial scope of U.S. law and is often implemented by blocking a front-end interface or excluding wallet addresses from an airdrop. Variant says companies should first try to satisfy compliance obligations or restructure the product, since geofencing is viable only when neither works. It notes that the geographic reach of U.S. law remains uncertain, and that the Supreme Court's 2010 decision in Morrison v. National Australia Bank set a presumption against extraterritoriality for federal statutes. ## 7. Doubling Down on Botto: Because Everyone’s a Critic - Kiwi News: https://news.kiwistand.com/stories/Doubling-Down-on-Botto-Because-Everyones-a-Critic?index=0x6540ae9d921134c2654832c7868c545643338535562da64e8470b964f4549aab4eed0933 - Source: https://variant.fund/articles/doubling-down-investment-in-botto-decentralized-autonomous-artist - Shared 31 October 2023, 1 upvote, 0 comments Variant, the investor, announces it has doubled down on its initial investment in Botto, which it describes as a "decentralized autonomous artist" and DAO. The article explains that Botto produces artworks, while the human DAO community votes on which pieces go up for auction as NFTs, with proceeds returning to voters and the DAO treasury. Variant argues that Botto is at the forefront of a paradigm shift in art, and it frames the project mainly through open questions about communal artistic legitimacy and whether Botto will ever stop producing. ## 8. Why Bringing Real-World Assets Onchain Is Important - Kiwi News: https://news.kiwistand.com/stories/Why-Bringing-Real-World-Assets-Onchain-Is-Important?index=0x65180e326fe6d0819bb01bc3de05b3f37758b4a7b33e9293555bb5471e0d4005fbcbb5ef - Source: https://variant.fund/articles/why-bringing-real-world-assets-onchain-is-important - Shared 30 September 2023, 1 upvote, 0 comments Variant is optimistic about real-world assets (RWAs) onchain and argues that tokenizing them offers several concrete benefits despite investor and entrepreneur skepticism. The benefits cited include broader access to offchain assets, yield for DAOs that cannot open banking or brokerage accounts, and composability with DeFi, such as using tokenized U.S. Treasuries as collateral to borrow stablecoins. The article also says stablecoins have a market capitalization above $100 billion but little of their underlying yield reaches holders, and it points to Goldfinch, a protocol that channels debt investments to small and medium-sized enterprises in emerging markets. ## 9. Applying Lessons from Web2 to Unlock Web3 Product Growth - Kiwi News: https://news.kiwistand.com/stories/Applying-Lessons-from-Web2-to-Unlock-Web3-Product-Growth?index=0x64dbb58c99d89cd9b41c9c612fc03865b1b086f94794cfe4905d509f1a9d99a3ff6cf7b4 - Source: https://variant.fund/articles/applying-lessons-from-web2-to-unlock-web3-product-growth-casey-winters - Shared 15 August 2023, 1 upvote, 0 comments Casey Winters, a former growth lead at Pinterest and chief product officer at Eventbrite, gave a talk to the first cohort of the Variant Founder Fellowship on tech product growth. He argues that startups should identify a "fire" strategy for sustained growth early, since "kindle" strategies that bring in first users do not scale. He also says that many startups wrongly believe retention comes from adding features, and that retaining users is "the job of onboarding." ## 10. The NFT MEV Landscape - Kiwi News: https://news.kiwistand.com/stories/The-NFT-MEV-Landscape?index=0x6475190adee52556a6568ccf11503c9daed4d45a0f63e7706c4e95a139e94ec2911ecd1c - Source: https://variant.fund/articles/the-nft-mev-landscape - Shared 29 May 2023, 1 upvote, 0 comments The article argues that NFT markets differ structurally from fungible-token markets, so MEV in NFTs takes different forms: fewer arbitrage opportunities and more value extracted during mints. It identifies NFT-specific MEV such as sweeping floors into bid walls, trait sniping, and extraction from inactive listings. It also points to infrastructure ideas, including MEV-aware minting solutions, enhanced pricing data, and bargaining mechanisms to reduce illiquidity risk.