Welcome to the 56 new people who joined the Onchain Letters community since Tuesday!
I'm thankful for all 660 of you and I hope everyone is having an awesome Friday 🔥
If you're enjoying my writing, please share Onchain Letters with your friends in Crypto 🤝
A letter to the Onchain Letters Community:
2024 has been flying by...it's already time for the next roundup!
I wanted to take a second and thank all of you again for being the earliest supporters of Onchain Letters 🙏
I'll be honest, it turns out I don't know how to count. A few days ago when I was planning my post for today, I thought I had finished 10 letters but it turns out my last one was the 9th 😭 So this roundup is going to have one less post.
But! It works out because I have some fun news from yesterday that I wanted to share with you all and it feels better to announce in a roundup post anyways.
Farcaster Channel
Now that I've been working on Onchain Letters full time for two months and momentum has been picking up, I decided it was finally a good time to make a /onchainletters channel on Farcaster!
It's been less than 24 hours since I launched it and we're already crosssed 700 members in the channel 🔥
If you haven't already, join the channel here!
I mentioned this in my Farcaster Arbitrage post but the new marketing meta for founders and creators is to use channels. It's a no brainer if you want to get your work out to high signal people in the crypto space.
Up until recently, the crypto founder playbook was to start a Discord. But now, heading into the next bull market, it should be a no brainer for founders and community managers to start by creating a Farcaster channel.
For me, this channel is going to be my outlet to "build in public" and try fostering a community around my letters.
Some ideas that are top of mind on how to use the channel:
Curating high quality mints & crowdsourcing my weekly "What I minted this week" posts
Using polls to let the audience decide what I should write about next
Doing AMAs with people I've written letters to as well as other onchain creators
Give shoutouts to people working on cool onchain projects
Sharing as many metrics related to Onchain Letters as I can - bringing the community on my creator journey
Of course, there's going to be a ton of experimenting and learning ahead but I'm excited to see how it goes. I was intentionally waiting to start the channel until I picked up some initial traction. Now that I've found a rhythm with my posting I think /onchainletters will be a great avenue to try new things and interact with my audience in unique ways.
Cool, let's dive into the roundup now!
Give me the numbers!
My thoughts
What I'm happiest with in this chart is that my open rate stayed the same even though my subscriber count grew 14x!
Not too happy with the # of post collects - thought it would be way higher
The subscriber count growth has been fantastic. Much credit to the team at Paragraph for launching a frame that makes it easy to subscribe from the Warpcast feed
#1: Farcaster Arbitrage
Farcaster is the next scenius to pay attention to in crypto. High quality community members are actively experimenting, questioning, learning, and having fun while doing it.
Again, the Farcaster arbitrage doesn't mean you need to quit other social medias. Rather it's a chance for you to find new opportunities and feel a different kind of energy that you otherwise would not have been able to on larger platforms.
As Paul Graham said in his Hacker News essay, "the good things in a community site come from people more than technology".
But as the Farcaster community continues to grow, the arbitrage will quickly diminish.
#2: Developer growth through decentralized bounties
A letter to Electric Capital & Balaji
Decentralized task creation will become the primary channel to attract the next wave of developers to crypto.
We now have a sufficiently decentralized social protocol, a bounties marketplace, and a way to link onchain attestations to wallets.
How can the crypto ecosystem ensure that the # of developers continues to grow?
I believe the answer to this is to have a dedicated Farcaster client where the sole purpose is to create a social feed of bounties for developers.
This is the answer to Balaji's request for "earning while scrolling".
#3: Ethereum's Broadband Moment
A letter to Proto, Dankrad, & EIP-4844
Just remember, the name of the game is bandwidth.
The internet only became popular after broadband technology started spreading. Like DSL, blobspace is providing us a new frequency for rollups every single block!
Just as it didn't make sense to have the phone and internet on the same frequency, there's no need to have core Ethereum transactions and rollup transactions running together.
If you partition to different "frequencies", there's a huge bandwidth unlock.
It's like the Ethereum mayor approved a project to build a 6 lane highway to help shorten your morning commute.
#4: Follow the (onchain) data dammit:
A letter to DCInvestor & Onchain Data
The key takeaway is that the crypto industry is unique in the sense that we have access to track way more data than pretty much any other builders or traders out there.
However, if the community doesn't actually dive in and track the numbers, then it's a wasted opportunity to call out weaknesses and grow faster.
In this post, I also curated a list of the top 15 Dune dashboards and a few other websites with great onchain data to follow.
#5: The evolution of the stream: Widgets, Cards, & Frames
This post was different because I decided to make it a frame! So instead of sharing a quote, here's my "framebook" that I published on Farcaster.
#6: E-mails are handshakes, Wallets are portals
Wallet subscriptions serve as a portal to help creators better understand who their community really is.
Being a crypto native creator enables you to build a community, not just a list of e-mails.
It's exciting to me that this kind of opportunity even exists - I'm getting new data that traditional creators don't have access too.
#7: The programmable fintech stack
A letter to USDC, Base, & Daimo
There are two schools of thought when it comes to stablecoins: USDT seems to be leading the Eurodollar use case while USDC seems to be the prime candidate for the fintech use case.
The combination of Base L2 and Circle-Coinbase partnership seems like an unstoppable force. As Base starts to attract more developers, we'll see a huge increase in the number of stablecoin products that work seamlessly like Daimo.
Rollups + EIP-4844 + Account Abstraction is now making stablecoin use possible at a large and efficient scale while abstracting away crypto UX.
#8: The next 5000 days of the web
A letter to Chris Dixon & Woj
What I didn't realize was how popular of a tool RSS was before the social media companies we know today took over.
But YB...if RSS was that good, then why did it lose?
You could build 90% of a FB clone but were missing a crucial piece: a decentralized database
RSS+ (i.e. Farcaster) takes the open web principles that comes with web1 protocols and merges it with pragmatic product development founders implemented in web2.
I know it seems weird to say right now, but I do believe that as the Farcaster protocol and others like it start to grow momentum, it won't be crazy for the next wave of "tier 1 developers" to become indie hackers and run lean businesses for one or maybe even multiple protocols.
I'll leave you all with a quote from Chris Dixon: I believe this is the beginning, not the end, of internet innovation.
#9: Crypto's Everything Store: firing on all cylinders
A letter to Coinbase
This is just the start of the real party for Coinbase. Everything in these first 10 years was more so setting up the infrastructure. By 2030, I can't imagine where crypto will be and how far the applications will have come globally.
Brian Armstrong never got greedy in an industry that is plagued with get rich quick schemes. And though it may have seemed like he had lost his edge from the outside, it's clear that his patience and self-control paid off.
What's incredible about Coinbase is that it's not just responsible for one company. Coinbase has been grooming and inspiring a whole generation of crypto founders that have gone on to do amazing things after their stints at Coinbase.
I'm excited to follow Coinbase's journey both in the short and long term. There's so much to learn from how the company operates and from all of the amazing people that have gone on to build the next big things in crypto with the same pragmatism Brian & Fred have preached since day 1.
That's all for today!
I'll be back Sunday with my weekly "What I minted" segment.
Also, if you received some value and learned something new from any of the letters above, it would mean a lot to me as a creator if you could share Onchain Letters with your friends in crypto!
It could be something as simple as sending them this link onchainletters.xyz/about
I hope everyone has a fun weekend!!
- YB
