Justin

Building convictions @ UOB Ventures

[Justin @0xLANK]

It’s been close to a year since I last did a long post here.

BTC is at an ATH of $120K—but the rest of the market has been rocky. Most alts either haven’t moved or lagged BTC badly.

A short thread on some outlooks. 🧵

[ARES @arespro]

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[Justin @0xLANK]

Since I met him 3 years ago, @WatanabeSota is one of the most brilliant, far sighted founders I’ve ever met.

Startale has grown to become such a massive presence. And you can be a part of it.

Don’t miss the opportunity to join one of the most visionary company in the space.

👇🏻

[Sota Watanabe @WatanabeSota]

Now

✅ Fundraise mode
➡️ Builder mode

We are hiring!!

[Startale 💿 @StartaleGroup]

We’re proud to announce that Startale Group has closed its $63M Series A, with an additional $50M investment from SBI Group.

With backing from Sony Innovation Fund and SBI Group, Startale is building the global SuperApp and accelerating its vision of a fully integrated onchain financial and consumer ecosystem.

One seamless experience on the @StartaleApp, connecting @soneium, Strium, @JPYStableCoin and USDSC.

[Justin @0xLANK]

This is pretty crazy

[The White House @WhiteHouse]

UNDEFEATED.

[Jhsu @pokeapallascat]

https://t.co/IvE9GnFY98

[Citrini @citrini]

JUNE 2028.

The S&P is down 38% from its highs. Unemployment just printed 10.2%. Private credit is unraveling. Prime mortgages are cracking. AI didn’t disappoint. It exceeded every expectation.

What happened?​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

https://t.co/JzzwCrbJgS

[Sota Watanabe @WatanabeSota]

We are excited to reveal the brand of Strium, a new L1 for tokenised stocks, RWA and more. We develop Strium with SBI which is the largest Internet financial conglomerate in Japan.

[Justin @0xLANK]

concept of @moltbook truly seems far and beyond.

intriguing to watch AI agents interact with one another but yet spooky to a certain degree.

wouldn't be surprised that a day will come where reddit actually introduces AI agents on its platform to interact with people.

[Justin @0xLANK]

Interesting read and agreed upon many pointers

We may increasingly be shifting towards a fat app ecosystem within crypto

[Smokey The Bera 🐻⛓ @SmokeyTheBera]

Apps aren’t helping chains anymore.

Now that I've got the clickbait out of the way, a bit more nuance -

We've been spending a fair bit of time internally discussing what matters for a chain in the short / medium / long term, especially as value drivers for a token have transitioned from "narratives" and "community" to revenue and cashflows.

It's all reflexive right - PA determines if a project is "good" or "bad" in the eyes of the masses. "Good" projects aka good price attract more strong builders and retail distribution, and strong builders beget strong builders. So even with the most egalitarian of intentions, it's EV+ to try to create a desirable token (I know I'm stating the obvious, please don't kill me).

In the Gensler era, generating revenue or sharing it with tokenholders was bad, esp as a chain - in a best case, it was a legal liability, in a worst case, it was a valuation ceiling (ie. this protocol makes $3m in rev, therefore it is worth 30m assuming a 10x P/E). Right now, Bera doesn't capture revenue directly from PoL, though it has shared $30m+ in PoL incentives with tokenholders.

Now, we're actually seeing more chains take "App-First" approaches to control their own financial outcomes, whether its Plasma One (Soon Tm), Hyperliquid, or Near Intents among others. Funnily enough, this was the original Bera vision, which was ultimately held back by our ability to technically execute, along with concerns on the legal side + pushback from the community around potentially eliminating a competitive market.

There's lots of nuanced reasons for this broader shift, beyond a maturing market and regulatory environment. One of them is the “bid dilution” as more alt tokens have been launched. Previously, one might bid Sol to get exposure to Pump, or Meteora, etc - but now you can just buy the dApp token itself. Sure, maybe you buy it with Sol, but maybe you buy it with USDC - and what does that do for Sol PA?

Historically, eco dapps have served as the major B2B2C nodes for onboarding to a chain (and long before that, validators served as a chain's BD/demand engine) and an adjacent thesis was that these dApps' gas consumption would drive value for the chain's token. Or the goal was to cause an airdrop fueled “wealth creation effect” which would enrich a given chain’s ecosystem participants, who might recycle it back into the rest of the eco.

Most people now agree that *maybe* with a couple exceptions (Sol and Eth), gas burn is no longer a value driver, and a lot of the “community” which used to recycle airdrops into an ecosystem has been replaced with industrial farmers or folks who are happy to cash out right after the drop. HYPE might be an exception here, but my understanding is that even with the strength of their native token, it’s been tough for eco alts to really take off.

The other angle beyond this is perhaps the mercenary nature that many app builders have to take in order to survive. Either they must possess the ability to build their own independent audience from CT, so their chain choice doesn't matter (a very rare skill) - or they have to go to where the users are, and flock to the hottest chain at the moment. You can throw grants and incentives at people, but at the end of the day they're just bandaid solutions. Therefore, potential for "vendor lock in" is reduced; sure you can say that X app requires Y TPS or Z tech solution, but that set of requirements is becoming increasingly commoditized and pvp.

The real blackpill is that many apps that have gained massive adoption and see tons of usage have had negligible effects on their home chain's PA - I think the Polygon ecosystem is a case study of that. That isn't meant as a slight against Polygon in any way, I think they're OGs and well intentioned builders in the space who don't always get the credit they deserve (despite some narrative chasing in the past).

But some of crypto's most-used apps are Polymarket and Courtyard, with the former arguably being one of the most important companies in the world right now. It's impossible to determine what the Polygon token would look like in the absence of these apps, but its also fair to make the case that their impact has not been meaningfully reflected in its price action.

The question that's been a bit trickier to model out is "Which apps matter and where should we spend our time?" It becomes especially relevant in the context of PoL, where the chain is helping to subsidize or enhance yields for its dApps. How do we avoid the Polygon / Polymarket scenario, where an app can take off massively, but the chain’s token itself might not see that same upside? How do you go from being a loss leader with dependency on players with different incentives to owning your own outcomes, without killing network effects?

I don't think there's a perfect answer, unsurprisingly. Some chains have taken the approach of venture investing in their app layer (we've done some of this / incubation with Build-A-Bera). There's certainly some merit to this, but imo its a messy legal pathway towards returning value to tokenholders. Others have erred towards building a lot of their own strongest apps (a la Mysten), which has definitely gotten community pushback, but has generally seemed productive. And some, like the ones I mentioned at the top of this stream of consciousness, have built their own revenue drivers (which seems like a very good baseplate idea to me, and is actively being incorporated into the Bera future )

I've been trying to distill a framework for what I believe can make an app *truly accretive* to a chain and potentially to the token over a long enough time frame.

IMO apps need to fit into one or more of these categories to move the needle:

1) Native token demand driver. Relatively self explanatory. LSTs, dexes, money markets often end up in this category.

2) Fee printer. Launchpads, perp dexes, some stablecoins all fall into this category. This doesn't necessarily impact the token directly, but it serves as a form of marketing for the eco as its often downstream of a good product.

3) Majors/stables token sink. Similar to 1), but having major liquidity or unique uses for BTC, ETH etc can drive arb volumes, fee generation, and generally provide a home for "default" assets that people might borrow against in order to play in your chain's ecosystem. Still not a direct impact, beyond majors paired with the asset in LPs.

4) Brand arbitrage. Also a form of adjacent marketing - eg. BlackRock / Nvidia / OpenAI is doing something with this team therefore they must be credible, and this may extend to the ecosystem as well.

5) God tier founder. Few and far in between, but the right aligned S-Tier founder(s) can bring massive strategic value and upside to a token / ecosystem. But they've gotta be a real champion of it. This is exceedingly tough to find amongst crypto natives but quite interesting when it comes to onboarding web2 founders to crypto, esp as they bring their own networks and capital to the table.

6) Already got distribution. Also a form of marketing, but this is also pretty rare. Examples of this often look like some of the private credit or payments type applications which really don't need crypto native adoption, but do need a chain's rails.

The list above is by no means exhaustive, and my perspective could totally be wrong. I felt like it is probably a contentious but interesting viewpoint to share in public, esp in a space with lots of app builders / chain contributors who might have differing perspectives. I'd be curious to hear people's views for sure.

My tl;dr is kind of:
- Opinionated enshrinement / owning your own outcomes and rev streams will become increasingly key for chains
- Time + token emissions are precious resources and are rarely spent well across most ecos (including us)
- Target audience for most of crypto is changing and that's going to cause a "Come to God" moment for many including us.
- We’re gonna need to double down even harder on the apps that matter, and clearly divide fundamental revenue drivers and token sinks versus spicy forms of marketing.

Anyway, Berachain builds businesses, more soon.

[Justin @0xLANK]

crazy to how the market moved from

"Tether is one of the most profitable companies in the world by employee count"

to

"Tether is insolvent"

[Justin @0xLANK]

Overreaction and overselling; this article does quite a comprehensive understanding of the most recent direction the market has headed towards.

https://t.co/lb663uWEWY

[Valve @valvesoftware]

Announcing: New @Steam Hardware, coming in 2026:

Steam Controller
Steam Machine
Steam Frame

Watch our jazzy announcement video and wishlist now: https://t.co/TUKoZdzn9B

[Justin @0xLANK]

Every year Singapore Fintech Festival is a good litmus test for the state of the market.

This year, it’s interesting.

- Stablecoin and AI are now the market themes, compared to purely AI last year
- Payment networks still dominate the space, such as VISA and Mastercard
- Smaller and less intricate booths with less crowds; maybe a sign that market isn’t so good
- RWA and tokenization doesn’t seem to be in focus

[Justin @0xLANK]

it's crazy how UNI pumped 60% in the last 24H despite this being the umpteenth time of token burn proposals being teased

[Justin @0xLANK]

in complete agreement - the AI roadmap is quite clear. it's going to be a big tech game.

[Yishan @yishan]

My AI investment thesis is that every AI application startup is likely to be crushed by rapid expansion of the foundational model providers.

App functionality will be added to the foundational models' offerings, because the big players aren't slow incumbents (it is wrong to apply the analogy of "fast startup, slow incumbent" here), they are just big. Far more so than with any other prior new technology, there is a massive and fast-moving wave that obsoletes every new app almost as fast as it can be invented. There is almost no time to build a company and scale it.

There are two ways AI application startup founders can make money:
- Make a flash-in-the-pan app that generates a ton of cash and bank the cash (my estimate is that you have about 12-18 months cashflow generation)
- Make a good enough app that you get acquired by one of the big players for sufficient equity

The situation is highly unstable - we don't know if it's going to crash or go to the moon but both scenarios make it very unlikely that any AI application startup will independently become a generational supercompany (baseline odds are low to begin with).

The best odds are finding an application niche in a highly specialized field with extremely unique and specific data barriers, ideally ones relating to real atoms (hardware or world-related) data and not software/finance.

[ARES @arespro]

Old world: numbers.
New world: narratives.

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[Frank @frankdegods]

no seriously a job doesn’t sound bad you can make friends, fix your sleep schedule, and actually do something productive for society

[profitable @exitliquid1ty]

when every single person on the TL made multi 7 figs on aster and sold the top hence no one gives a single fuck ab what's happening but your monkey ass was waiting for $3 to start selling your bag so now you have round tripped the biggest trade of your life

[Justin @0xLANK]

Just two days ago, @amazon announced the target reduction of as many as 30,000 jobs globally, with the aim to use AI to reduce bureaucracy.

This seems timed with the new Season 10 Fourth Anniversary update of their MMORPG, @playnewworld, which was announced to be the last. It seems that the bulk of the layoffs will come from their gaming studio.

Increasingly, we are seeing many of these gaming studios be overzealous about what AI can do.

Leading up to the leverage buyout of @EA , there are numerous reports being released that the senior management are forcing staffs to rely on AI. This is probably in a bid to look the numbers look good prior to full acquisition.

It is true that AI has been impactful, especially within the realms of coding and content generation. But moves such as these makes me wonder if there is an underestimation of the importance towards human touch/creativity in the game making process.

Given the long time development required for games, it seems we will only find out in a few years time. By then, it might be too late for such firms to undo the overreliance.