CT is wrong about content coins.
Base is withholding any real vision here and is naive in their comms.
Two things can be true. Attacking the content tokenization model itself is short-sighted.
Stablecoins are crypto's darling narrative and they're merely tokenizing fiat. So how is tokenizing content a dead end?
Attacking content tokenization is like saying airtags and lightweight saddles on pigeons is a dumb idea. It’s only dumb until you teach them to be little carrier pigeons. But even before that, it expands the pigeon's skill tree.
The current reasons everyone is mad about content coins:
- Nick Shirley didn’t make enough money on his post.
- 24 hr markets for content coins = pump and dump.
Nick Shirley ~only~ made $6K bc content coins are barebones and unfinished, and Base should stop marketing the current state as a remarkable victory. If content coins are just going to be this bait-and-switch rhetoric where we correctly assert content is valuable, but wholly replace the value drivers with speculation… then yes, Base’s implementation of tokenized content is cooked.
But if you’ve been in crypto long enough, Crypto is basically just BTC, stablecoins, perp dexes, and unfulfilled promises. Who cares if we have another L. Go for the biggest promise. Right now, the biggest promise in crypto is content coins: a spot market for the most granular unit of the attention economy.
low effort napkin math on Nick Shirley's post:
X makes ~$1.7B ad revenue annually, ~$4.7M/day.
100B impressions/day.
> Suggests CPM user-side is $0.046
This is much lower than the $1.00-$2.00 CPM ballpark advertisers pay, but only a small fraction of posts have ads.
So if there is $2 advertiser CPM, only verified impressions count, low ad fill rate 2%. We tie out around $0.046✅
126M views suggests Nick’s post would be worth ~$6K, i.e. Nick’s post made up some portion of the timeline that generated a total revenue by housing xyz ads. Disclaimer this is weak math, just illustrating the relationship.
Oh wow, $6K is what he made in creator fees on a platform with orders of magnitude less users where the content was cross-posted. maybe this isn't embarrassing. Interesting coincidence here, not anything to brag about by Base though. Nick’s speculation-driven creator fees are not the end game and should not be celebrated like it's some incredible feat. But it suggests maybe this isn’t an egregiously low number for a brand new barebones model, and could become a material supplement to real value if it emerges.
If this $6K implied value above were the property of the content coin, and the market cap was below $6K at the dividend record date, all owners made a profit (assuming no real trading, just buying), and they can dump at ex dividend for scrap.
There’s some weird quirks here since content coins are bought from the bonding curve and so market cap =/= aggregate cost basis of holders, so this is technically flawed but I digress.
For most content that doesn’t go viral, this entire process will commence and conclude within 24-48 hours, which could be where the controversial post’s rhetoric is derived. This isn’t a “pump and dump,” this is a natural characteristic of social media content, which is what we are building around..
This is how we arrive at an organic value of speculation. If you believe Nick Shirley’s post will go viral and hit 126M views, you can buy at 10K views and $500 market cap or whatever knowing there is a legitimate basis for follow-up buyers, not just speculation ponzi.
Nick derives earnings through ownership of his content, which earns off of the revenue it generates and from other users speculating on its virality potential, because the value of virality is democratized and accessible. This value passively flows to his creator coin, which is an index of his content and allows the more chill users who are wary of 24 hour markets to opt for this instead.
At scale, this looks something like users calibrating their viewing experience, earning for their attention rather than paying attention, and distributing this value to the content (and creators) that make up their timeline. This is sustainable even at low adoption levels. Some little 50-person town in Nebraska onboards to Base and shares town gossip. John Deere pays good money to run ads in this lucrative corner of the social graph. Bob the farmer is paid to post memes. We are obviously a long way from this, but this is what we should be striving for and talking about: crypto disintermediating what should be a p2p marketplace.
I know nothing about law but some LLM research suggests this form of content coins could be interpreted as an unregistered security. The draft Clarity act which seems to be floundering had a classification for digital commodities, which content coins appear to qualify as. A Clarity act could allow Base to be more direct in communicating this vision. For now, it seems they are just trying to avoid overpromising, but they are trying to drum up excitement for what is frankly an unfinished and naked stack, which is having a problematic effect on CT.
CT needs to be more pragmatic in our pushback to Base and not discard the potential of content coins. Base appears to be taking a crack at disintermediating one of the fastest growing and most societally-relevant marketplaces. Whether they succeed or not, it is worth discussing earnestly, and tokenizing content is clearly not a dead end.
Base is withholding any real vision here and is naive in their comms.
Two things can be true. Attacking the content tokenization model itself is short-sighted.
Stablecoins are crypto's darling narrative and they're merely tokenizing fiat. So how is tokenizing content a dead end?
Attacking content tokenization is like saying airtags and lightweight saddles on pigeons is a dumb idea. It’s only dumb until you teach them to be little carrier pigeons. But even before that, it expands the pigeon's skill tree.
The current reasons everyone is mad about content coins:
- Nick Shirley didn’t make enough money on his post.
- 24 hr markets for content coins = pump and dump.
Nick Shirley ~only~ made $6K bc content coins are barebones and unfinished, and Base should stop marketing the current state as a remarkable victory. If content coins are just going to be this bait-and-switch rhetoric where we correctly assert content is valuable, but wholly replace the value drivers with speculation… then yes, Base’s implementation of tokenized content is cooked.
But if you’ve been in crypto long enough, Crypto is basically just BTC, stablecoins, perp dexes, and unfulfilled promises. Who cares if we have another L. Go for the biggest promise. Right now, the biggest promise in crypto is content coins: a spot market for the most granular unit of the attention economy.
low effort napkin math on Nick Shirley's post:
X makes ~$1.7B ad revenue annually, ~$4.7M/day.
100B impressions/day.
> Suggests CPM user-side is $0.046
This is much lower than the $1.00-$2.00 CPM ballpark advertisers pay, but only a small fraction of posts have ads.
So if there is $2 advertiser CPM, only verified impressions count, low ad fill rate 2%. We tie out around $0.046✅
126M views suggests Nick’s post would be worth ~$6K, i.e. Nick’s post made up some portion of the timeline that generated a total revenue by housing xyz ads. Disclaimer this is weak math, just illustrating the relationship.
Oh wow, $6K is what he made in creator fees on a platform with orders of magnitude less users where the content was cross-posted. maybe this isn't embarrassing. Interesting coincidence here, not anything to brag about by Base though. Nick’s speculation-driven creator fees are not the end game and should not be celebrated like it's some incredible feat. But it suggests maybe this isn’t an egregiously low number for a brand new barebones model, and could become a material supplement to real value if it emerges.
If this $6K implied value above were the property of the content coin, and the market cap was below $6K at the dividend record date, all owners made a profit (assuming no real trading, just buying), and they can dump at ex dividend for scrap.
There’s some weird quirks here since content coins are bought from the bonding curve and so market cap =/= aggregate cost basis of holders, so this is technically flawed but I digress.
For most content that doesn’t go viral, this entire process will commence and conclude within 24-48 hours, which could be where the controversial post’s rhetoric is derived. This isn’t a “pump and dump,” this is a natural characteristic of social media content, which is what we are building around..
This is how we arrive at an organic value of speculation. If you believe Nick Shirley’s post will go viral and hit 126M views, you can buy at 10K views and $500 market cap or whatever knowing there is a legitimate basis for follow-up buyers, not just speculation ponzi.
Nick derives earnings through ownership of his content, which earns off of the revenue it generates and from other users speculating on its virality potential, because the value of virality is democratized and accessible. This value passively flows to his creator coin, which is an index of his content and allows the more chill users who are wary of 24 hour markets to opt for this instead.
At scale, this looks something like users calibrating their viewing experience, earning for their attention rather than paying attention, and distributing this value to the content (and creators) that make up their timeline. This is sustainable even at low adoption levels. Some little 50-person town in Nebraska onboards to Base and shares town gossip. John Deere pays good money to run ads in this lucrative corner of the social graph. Bob the farmer is paid to post memes. We are obviously a long way from this, but this is what we should be striving for and talking about: crypto disintermediating what should be a p2p marketplace.
I know nothing about law but some LLM research suggests this form of content coins could be interpreted as an unregistered security. The draft Clarity act which seems to be floundering had a classification for digital commodities, which content coins appear to qualify as. A Clarity act could allow Base to be more direct in communicating this vision. For now, it seems they are just trying to avoid overpromising, but they are trying to drum up excitement for what is frankly an unfinished and naked stack, which is having a problematic effect on CT.
CT needs to be more pragmatic in our pushback to Base and not discard the potential of content coins. Base appears to be taking a crack at disintermediating one of the fastest growing and most societally-relevant marketplaces. Whether they succeed or not, it is worth discussing earnestly, and tokenizing content is clearly not a dead end.
https://x.com/yeak__/status/2005329339534266836
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