Personally Online
Nothing written is financial or even general life advice. These essays are for entertainment purposes only --- Godspeed.
Memetics
“A picture is worth a thousand words. A meme is worth a thousand pictures.”
If crypto is the internet’s native payment and verification system, memes are the internet’s native language model. The cold, detached-embrace of words on a screen, pales in comparison to a gif, mp4, or properly captioned jpeg at the right moment.
Memetics are an incredibly immature soft-science at present. And therein lies the opportunity to examine its rawest form. Words, visuals, emotions; what combination of the intimately personal will we effectively scale onto the digital substrate?
Marketing
Market-ing, as a verb. As in, your behavior inherently causal with anything market related.
When digging deep into the forces of market currents, identity pops up in nearly every scenario. Why choose a car to buy? How about the house or apartment? Or dinner tonight?
The market is a nervous system for shared identity manifestation. We are social animals. And the market is our sandbox.
JPEG Summer
When focusing specifically on web3 it seems that identity products are reprioritized. Still incredibly early in the industry’s development, 2024 looks to be a big year for this sector.
When reviewing the ‘21 NFT bull run:
pfp communities
cc0 cryptoart collectives (thinking Nouns specifically)
membership clubs, etc
were all the fanfare. Cryptopunks, Bored Apes, Gutter and Cool Cats, The Links, DeLabs, and more, dominated liquidity to the tune of eight-figures consistently. People jumped multiple socio-economic rungs off tokenized jpegs. Off of identity assets.
Identity Assets
At the heart of these entities was the promise of community. A place for identity to nestle in, ferment, and propagate. Speculation of where majority-mindshare would choose to identify could be argued as the main driver of capital flow in this sector.
Thinking along the lines of once popular narratives:
BAYC is where the streetwear, influencers, and new gen crypto wealth will go
Punks are where the crypto ogs will go
Nouns are where the crypto builders and giga brains will go
This could even be extended to the chain level in ‘23-24:
Zora is where the cutting edge creators will go
Base is where the big business and coinbase consumers will go
Solana is where the degens and DeFi protocols will go
When playing with this concept, identity assets, it becomes evident in the undercurrents. We are, in part, sorting out what digital identity is made of.
Brilliantly put by L, memecoins have been one of the main drivers of onchain activity for years. It begs for further inspection.
A memecoin is just a crypto stock. And when you think deeply about the market (read on that topic here) stocks are just tradfi memecoins.
“I own TSLA because of [xyz].”
“I’ve purchase six figures worth of NVDIA because of [xyz].”
These are identity driven purchases as much as “I bought Dog wif hat because of [xyz].” The current apex of my curiosity resides in the what-next.
The Identity Market
If you spend any time of crypto-twitter, you see the relationship between speculative assets and content, media, art, self expression. From memes about chains, coins, and current events, to protocols using waifus in their corporate memos.
At the guttural level it feels like generations x,y, and z are rebelling against white-collar, suit and tie, id badge systems. Even when working on serious technological, economic, and social innovations.
So the questions at top of mind are:
what makes digital id different than physical id (in the same manner that memetics are a form of linguistics but exist in a different form)?
what is the value gap for user generated identity assets compared to luxury, designer, or third party generated?
is there a next leg of innovation related to memecoins and tokenized mascots? if so what does that look like short term and then long term?
where do prediction markets fit into this?
who will be the first protocol or chain to expand their org chart into memetics targeted at this market?