AP

Never a passenger

[AP @preach_that]

Been waiting for Wispr Flow on Android? Win stuff on this 🎰 waitlist: https://t.co/Y843vlfIRG

[AP @preach_that]

@abacusai Thanks - what's the best email?

[AP @preach_that]

Hey @abacusai — I hit 75% of my token threshold; the policy keeps the last 25% for the final wk. Every time I add credits that 25% grows, forcing more top-ups. I can't test my script despite being in credit. Is there support I can speak with?

[Grant @Grantblocmates]

i know it is silly and doesn't mean anything, but this has made my day

the truth is, every team on here is incredible

people have no idea how difficult it is to create consistent high-quality research and/or media

the industry is also not big enough for competition (yet)

[blocmates. @blocmates]

Everyone was printing when @pumpdotfun launched, but the game’s changed now and the easy money’s gone.

In this one @Grantblocmates gives us a quick number-talk reality check, gets into the airdrop weeds, and analyzes if it’s still worth sticking around.

He also maps out where the real opportunities lie right now, where smart money’s headed, and what plays could save your bags.

Links to @YouTube in the next tweet. 🫡

[AP @preach_that]

@lukeblocmates @blocmates The best memes too. Fully approved by my teenage son.

[AP @preach_that]

@PhilMrlo @danblocmates @ag_dwf @DWFLabs 100% absolute monster hiding in plain sight

[Grant @Grantblocmates]

I’m going to say what a lot of people are thinking…

Despite the immense institutional adoption, Bitcoin almost certainly being on track to becoming a reserve asset globally and stablecoins shaping up to be the de facto unit of exchange in a few years, the industry feels a little jaded.

I know a lot of people are crashing out, leaving the industry for good and questioning the last three years.

The bear market was absolutely fucking brutal. If you experienced the fallout following FTX, UST and even the USDC depeg and you are still here you deserve a medal, or putting in a psyche ward… same thing.

Anyway, as if that was bad enough, the 18 months that followed us coming out the depths of despair were, for some people, equally as brutal.

Some tokens have never seen their previous all-time highs and never will. Some tokens that are fundamentally great assets on paper are so cucked it is unbelievable. This alone has contributed to what feels like a three-year bear market for some people.

The problem is, the perceived sensible and rational thing to do is buy good assets at great prices. As a one-liner that sounds great. What it doesn’t explain is a deeply rooted issue with these assets.

There is an oversupply problem across the board which isn’t going away until these ideas stop getting funded.

- We have way too many products compared to actual users.

- Despite this, ideas from incompetent teams continue to get funded.

- There are more L1s than people on earth.

- The L1 premium blueprint has been figured out and exploited to death.

- Thankfully, this looks like it is reverting to the mean (which I can only assume is orders of magnitude lower than here).

- The second-order effects of more adoption is that people want products that are better and not worse than their off-chain counterparts.

- This is generally not the case yet.

There is a general shift away from decentralisation maximalism towards some hybrid permissionless system that is more pragmatic.

You can’t expect the same TAM for purely decentralised products vs products that leverage crypto rails but still have centralised components.

DAOs categorically do not work and are a waste of time, money and resources.

Funnily enough, there is a reason we converged over tens of thousands of years to having an elected system that has overarching say when it comes to decisions.

And what? Now, some idiot who is unemployable in the real world by any other means gets to sit behind a laptop with no social, technical or business skills and decides how billions of dollars get spent? Behave…

The best projects do not need a token, and the best tokens do not need a project. Both can coexist, but let's not confuse the two.

If a token is for governance only, then what are we doing here?

It is detrimental to everyone other than early investors and team members (and maybe really skilled DAO treasury raiders) to have a token that is under the guise of decentralisation.

Let’s just call it pseudo-equity and excessive runway, a treasure chest for anyone who wants to stay long enough to ensure that the initial people who sold the token don’t go to jail for fraud.

Tokenisation is great and I really love it, but let’s also not pretend we need to tokenize everything because we never need to do anything to everything.

The world is complex and we should understand that talking in absolutes makes people think you are crazy, probably quite rightly so too.

Now, my main issue…

Venture capital firms that get paid a standard 2% yearly management fee on the notional sum plus a 20% performance fee on any profit raise way too much money.

A16z has raised over $7.6bn alone since 2018 to invest in this space. They also charge a premium 2.5% management and 30% performance fee. 2.5% of $7.6bn is $190m per year…

Show me where any fund can effectively allocate that amount of capital in the private crypto markets. The short answer is that it can’t. And this is just one firm, which I like and respect a lot, but it is still an issue.

This is also known by many charlatans who have figured out that the funds raising way too much money have to actively allocate their LPs' funds. If not, people will come knocking and ask what they are actually doing with their money.

This results in extremely over-competitive rounds with super-inflated market caps and way too much concentration in the hands of the funds. It also results in competitor funds that didn’t get their allocation taking the idea to dev shops and “incubating” this new novel idea they didn’t make the table on.

It is a great response to any investor who asks why they didn’t get allocation to the next big innovation in the crypto space…

So, yeah I am not naive enough to think this doesn’t happen in other industries too. The issue is when you sell people the dream of disrupting some of the largest total addressable markets in the world and you are doing it through a novel L1 that just so happens to have a token that every man/woman on the street can buy—that is a recipe for disaster.

People get so jaded by the “good assets” that are only inflated so highly in the private markets because the big dogs need to eat. They don’t come back for more each subsequent cycle.

This is why we had/have memecoins still catching a bid before everything else.

Where will the funding come from?!

Flat out... if a lot of mediocre ideas stopped getting funded, there would be adequate capital for the novel, innovative and groundbreaking ideas that never make it to market because of the noise.

Now, I obviously appreciate it is a free market and people can do whatever the fuck they want but until people really begin to crash and burn from this set up, there will be no change.

So, create and don’t destroy and all that...

What do we do about it?

Well, I fundamentally think this comes down to fair access funding.

Without speaking to him, I believe @cobie is addressing this with @echodotxyz. If you continue to peel the layers back of this rather expensive onion, you arrive at the solution being funding.

If we are truly saying, fuck it, everything and everyone should have a token, then there is the other side of that too. People who truly want to invest should be allowed the opportunity to do so on the same level playing field as the fat cats at the top.

This isn’t a “fuck VCs” rage post, it is just an obvious clear issue that needs to be continually spoken about.

The equal and opposite reaction is pumpfun. I am not saying that it is any better, but the truth and resolution surely lie somewhere in between.

This results in a one-dimensional gamified system where supply gets put into the hands of the very few which is obviously dogshit too

Lower allocation/proof of humanity (NOT KYC/AML, probs using zkTLS (I am too stupid to work it out)) plus transparent private, primary and secondary markets for anyone with the privilege to access these deals could be the way forward.

A lot of the issue is that people have no idea when founding members have offloaded the majority of their bags prior to the token going live - I thought we were building a more transparent system? This is actively worse than traditional markets.

If people continue to tell me you need $200m to build an L1 I will point to Hyperliquid every. single. time.

And if you can’t do it on a reasonable budget, then maybe, just maybe… you shouldn’t.

[AP @preach_that]

@jessepollak Check out @blocmates @Grantblocmates @jediblocmates would be great to see you on there

[AP @preach_that]

@Grantblocmates @0xCryptris @blocmates Absolute fire

[Chris @0xCryptris]

Looking for one of the absolute most #outperforming #crypto community?

Join @blocmates (it's for free): https://t.co/7HlS0vwDLv

[blocmates. @blocmates]

Hyperliquid & Chill: Biweekly Recap of The Hyperliquid Ecosystem https://t.co/G5TLDxEgDE

[Grant @Grantblocmates]

@hosseeb There is no second best @blocmates newsletter

https://t.co/nqhx78OTdB

[AP @preach_that]

@563defi @aicceleratedao @TAOTalkPod Another big supporter of @563defi for this!!

[AP @preach_that]

Superb post @Grantblocmates. LOVE to see you guys continuing to grow.

BUT, my God how is @blocmates still so unknown relative to what you guys do.

There's something for everyone, from the sensible to the degen. The industry reports are OP and always ahead of the next meta

[Grant @Grantblocmates]

Getting a lot of messages in DMs on Twitter and across Discord saying people’s lives have been changed in the past few weeks based on what we at @blocmates have put out on Twitter and in Discord.

People finally made it; they could pay for their kids' tuition, help their parents out, one guy paid for his surgery, and finally get themselves a place etc.

This is why I originally started blocmates. This is the whole point — present people with opportunities in the most amazing markets humans have ever seen. Shine a light on amazing teams and make the complex jargon accessible to everyone so they can make better-informed decisions.

These times come and go, so please take the chips off the table if you have finally reached your goals. The one-more 2x will never come.

blocmates as a business is thriving on the media & research side, too… I am extremely grateful for all the teams that we have worked with over the past year; it has been a wild ride. The sponsored content, media productions, ad space (bread and butter media company revenue model) have enabled us to highlight some of the best teams in this space and tell their story so that people can understand what the hell is going on in such a fast-moving space. It has also allowed us to hire some of the best analysts in the space who help us churn out the consistent value-adding content each and every day.

Not a lot of people will know or remember this, but at the end of 2019 or the beginning of 2020, I had no idea what blocmates would be… all I wanted to do was show people the opportunities in this space coming off the back of a great DeFi summer. Making crypto accessible for the average person on the street was the only goal.

I was even stupid enough to take dozens of free calls with randos from all over the world. The OG blocmates site hosted on a $20-a-month Squarespace site had a booking form to my Calendar, and I would jump on talk to anyone for an hour about what was happening and help them. Stupid and naive, but that’s where it started.

Now, with everything we have going on, community is still our main focus. I am really happy the media and research side is thriving, but I see that as a way for us as a 100% bootstrapped company (99.99% sure we always will be, too) to double down on community and continue to show people where the industry is heading and the best teams and opportunities in the market.

I definitely have a chip on my shoulder. I always think we are underappreciated. Hate when we are not part of the conversation. It really really really annoys me given our output, consistency and how we conduct ourselves. But, you also need that as a founder. Complacency and putting yourself on a pedestal is a one-way ticket to going extinct and looking cringe AF.

So, to all the people who have sent me those messages recently, congrats and well done, you deserve it. You have proved my initial thoughts about what we are building here to be true, and I am extremely grateful for that.

And for the 5,757 people in our Discord and everyone else across Twitter, expect much more from us over 2025 and beyond!

[AP @preach_that]

@DJPAULETTE @erolalkan Plenty of us did, that's for sure!

[AP @preach_that]

@erolalkan @DJPAULETTE you two absolutely smashed it last night at the WHP!
Felt just like 30 years ago 😂

[AP @preach_that]

@eddychemical @ChemBros @BuggedOut @drumsheds @erolalkan @modeselektor @2ManyDJs @DJPAULETTE @smdisco @octaveone Any time. Just keep doing what you're doing please 😂💥