Q1 2024: Memecoins & All-Time-Highs
As described yesterday, I’m starting to write quarterly: recapping the previous three months in crypto. Rather than plan this out methodically, I’m just going to yolo Q1 rn and see how this comes out. Here we go.
My Biggest Themes of Q1
🗞️ Back in the mainstream & all-time-highs
🤑 Memecoins, memecoins, memecoins
📣 Farcaster comes into the limelight
🛠️ Ethereum’s Dencun Upgrade
📅 ETHDenver: Bear market seriousness + Bull market excitement
The on-the-surface rundown (what the mainstream is seeing)
🗞️ Back in the mainstream & all-time-highs
Well, it’s been quite a quarter. I wrote in Q4 that:
Whenever I start getting friends & family texting me about crypto prices or scrounging for advice on what to buy, I know something is in the water.
And, well, something was in the water indeed.
The new year started off with a bang, with the SEC in the United States approving spot Bitcoin ETFs — a development that was a long time coming — on January 10th.
With the ETF news and increased institutional demand — not to mention the upcoming Bitcoin halving event — crypto has been in back in mainstream media and, in just the past month, Bitcoin has surpassed its previous all-time-high.
So people are talking.
🤑 Memecoins, memecoins, memecoins
Beyond that, there’s a new craze right now — one that, in many ways, reminds me of the 2021-22 NFT speculative craze — which is “memecoins”, with most of the activity residing on Solana.
Memecoins aren’t new, by any means (nor are they limited to crypto — remember GameStop? 😛) — but the scale and velocity at which they are getting launched and occupying mindshare right now is staggering.
Haven’t heard of the memecoins? It’s just a quick google search away — headlines like this are taking up not just crypto news, but even traditional media:
Jeo Boden, DogWifHat, Bonk… there’s something for everyone.
Beyond the memecoin craze, to round out the quarter on the in-mainstream-media front: after dominating the mainstream’s crypto-related headlines and discourse for the past year-and-a-bit, FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried was sentenced to 25 years in prison on March 28th.
Somehow, I expect this isn’t the last we’ll hear of Sam & FTX — but for now, for the love of god, let’s get back to building.
The under-the-surface rundown (What crypto-natives are talking about)
📣 Farcaster comes into the limelight
Although Farcaster has been around and has been at least kinda-sorta common knowledge amongst crypto-natives for probably a year or so, it finally took off this quarter for crypto-native users in a pretty big way.
I think I’m a pretty classic case of a crypto-native’s timeline here, so here’s my Farcaster journey so far:
March 2023: Received an invite to join, successfully registered @annika as a handle — hell yes — as one of the first 10,000-or-so users. Poked around Warpcast a bit and didn’t see much. Didn’t open it again until 2024.
Late January 2024: Farcaster launches Frames, crypto Twitter goes ham about it
Feb/March 2024: People are actually using Warpcast as a Twitter-alternative and gaining massive followership, and it feels like a place you kinda have to be watching at the very least
Here’s a pretty good TL;DR on Farcaster and why it — and decentralized social media as a discipline — are interesting/important, and I’d highly recommend reading Packy McCormick’s Framing The Future of the Internet piece, which touches more specifically on the concept of Frames, one of several driving factors leading to Farcaster taking off this quarter and consistently hitting new highs.
At this point, I’m finding myself hopping onto Warpcast probably weekly or so — I’m not among the crypto-native cohort that has been highly strategic or proactive with it, but I do find there’s enough activity amongst my peer group & people I admire for it to be worthwhile keeping tabs on.
Other than Frames, though — which are Farcaster-specific and are a unique feature worth dabbling in that can only be experienced by being on the network — I’m finding that:
a) a lot of the content is duplicative with what I see on Twitter and so, today, there’s a level of mildly annoying redundancy as a user in that respect, and
b) I find Warpcast a bit cumbersome UX-wise (totally unsurprising given how new & small it is, when I compare it to something like Twitter — but still impacts my behaviour)
I’m very excited about it, though, and expect that my usage will increase over time as the network matures and more activity ends up living there natively.
🛠️ Ethereum’s Dencun Upgrade
On March 13th, Ethereum underwent a meaningful upgrade — its most notable upgrade since The Merge in September 2022.
The headline for this upgrade is “cheaper transactions”, driven by a component of the upgrade called EIP-4844 (enabling something called “proto-danksharding” — which probably doesn’t tell you anything more than the gibberish that is “EIP-4844” does).
Specifically, this upgrade reduces transactions on Layer 2 rollups — which are quickly becoming where people primarily build & transact on the Ethereum network, and which I talked about in my 2023 year-end rundown.
As an end user, I already see the benefits when I initiate Layer 2 transactions. It’s way cheaper.
As an aside — an interesting parallel experience I didn’t quite anticipate is that during the period since Dencun when L2 transactions have been getting cheaper, Ethereum Mainnet transactions have been painfully expensive — in the bear market, I’d gotten used to lower Mainnet fees, but now that activity is up again, ouch, transacting on L1 is that much more brutal. Makes the L2 change feel even more pronounced.
As Vitalik argued in a recent post after the upgrade was completed, Ethereum development is now decelerating, with the biggest of upgrades behind us:
As of two weeks ago, the two largest changes to the Ethereum blockchain - the switch to proof of stake, and the re-architecting to blobs - are behind us. Further changes are still significant (eg. Verkle trees, single-slot finality, in-protocol account abstraction), but they are not drastic to the same extent that proof of stake and sharding are. In 2022, Ethereum was like a plane replacing its engines mid-flight. In 2023, it was replacing its wings. The Verkle tree transition is the main remaining truly significant one (and we already have testnets for that); the others are more like replacing a tail fin.
I don’t think people have quite internalized this just yet. Ethereum is quite literally almost there, from a capability standpoint. Now, we collectively need to shift focus more towards building killer user experiences — since, increasingly, we have the technological conditions & building blocks available to us that we need in order for Ethereum to really become a meaningful infra layer for the internet.
Anyway, in summary, this upgrade is absolutely massive — and, as with every massive upgrade Ethereum has undertaken, I’m continually baffled by how these tremendously complex changes in the Ethereum ecosystem tend to go off without a hitch, whatsoever.
Huge kudos to everyone involved.
📅 ETHDenver: Bear market seriousness + bull market excitement
A usual Q1 highlight for me, the ETHDenver conference took place in late Feb / early March. This was my third ETHDenver — and still, in 2024, it really felt like the one conference not to miss.
That said, ETHDenver this year felt even side-event-heavier than in past years — the main conference venue felt a little less buzzy, and I found that the side events were up vs. previous years in both quality & quantity.
It was also an interesting vibe attendee-wise: if 2022 was ‘bull market NFT-pump-and-dump pandemonium’, and 2023 was ‘depths of bear market builders’, 2024 was ‘bear market people but bull market vibes’ — the reason being, I think, that up until pretty recently before the conference, crypto was still on the gradual upswing from being in bearish territory generally… so my sense is that the yolo’ers didn’t quite have time to ape in, and then we had a giant upswing in the week or two right before the conference, so you got the serious people but with borderline bull market/memecoin excitement vibes. The best of both worlds, tbh.
A personal highlight was getting to meet — and, to my surprise, getting the time for a somewhat fulsome 1:1 conversation with — SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce, who’s been an absolute force as a dissenting voice within the SEC with respect to crypto regulation.
During our conversation, she told me the alternate (and somewhat spicy 🔥) title she had for that SEC statement she released in January at the time of the spot ETF approval (i.e., if she hadn’t used the Macbeth-referenced title I complimented her on) — and, man, the alternate is damn good. Ask me 1:1.
Commissioner Peirce wasn’t the only noteworthy political figure there — Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. attended as well and spoke on a panel — encouraging to see representation amongst lawmakers, just one of many signs that the industry is getting more and more serious & consequential in the grand scheme of things.
Other headlines
Book Recommendation: Read Write Own 🟥
a16z partner Chris Dixon’s book, Read Write Own, was released — and it’s the best history-of-the-internet rundown I’ve ever read. If you’re in tech (not just crypto!), I very much recommend it — and if you’re in tech & even remotely crypto-curious, it’s a must-read.
Survivor hits crypto nerds with ‘Crypto: The Game’ 🏝️
A digital version of ‘Survivor’ (yes, the reality TV show) launched, dubbed “Crypto: The Game”. Season 1 was mostly what I called it — “Digital Survivor” — but invoked elements of crypto in its design, and was targeted at crypto enthusiasts like me. I played Season 1 and it was an absolutely wild social experiment.
Binance launched... a perfume?
It was weird. That’s all.
Optimism funds (not-just-)public goods in a big way 🔴
In January, Optimism shared the results of its Q4 Retroactive Public Goods Funding round, which doled out 30 million OP tokens — over $100 million, at today’s market value — to about 500 projects.
Optimism has long been a pioneer of the ‘public goods funding’ space in the Ethereum ecosystem with their Retro PGF program — and this round was no exception. They’ve put their money where their mouth is, committing 850 million OP tokens to the program all-in-all.
In March, they announced a restructuring of the program, and splitting this year’s rounds out by theme.
There has been a lot of dissent and discourse on the Optimism Founation’s restructuring of the program — most notably, the renaming from “Retro PGF” to “Retro Funding”, thereby implicitly funding more than just ‘public goods’ — but I’m personally in favour of their approach, for a number of reasons.
Excited to see where Retro Funding goes from here.
All for now…
There goes my yolo first ever quarter-in-review post. Proud of myself for just shipping it in spite of it being far from perfect — and, if you made it this far and have suggestions, hmu. I’ll likely iterate on format a bunch as I figure this out.
For now, happy Q2! 🫡
Annika