Jesse Walden Profile picture
@variantfund
Ted Leung Profile picture O Profile picture 3 subscribed
Jan 21 8 tweets 2 min read
Headless Marketplace: a market leveraging global (onchain) identity, money, and data while distributing locally, wherever a users wallet already is (e.g. inside a Telegram group chat or Farcaster feed) Most marketplaces are destinations: users have to travel to a website or open an app, signup for an account, put in a credit card.

With headless marketplaces, the destination is wherever the users attention already is—and increasingly, thats where their $ will be too...
Nov 4, 2022 16 tweets 2 min read
Will Web3 end up like traditional open source, where (application) protocols end up as open source commodities, and products capture all the value on top?

🧵 Last year I argued protocols that capture fees should buck against that future, and offered a strategy on how to do it:
Aug 24, 2022 8 tweets 2 min read
New post: Tokens are Products
variant.fund/articles/token…

👇 + 🧵 Products and tokens both require:

- Engineering: How does it operate?
- Design: How does the user navigate and experience it?
- Go-to-market: How should it be distributed?
Aug 4, 2022 6 tweets 3 min read
We've been longtime supporters of @Uniswap and its ecosystem growth @variantfund.

~2 yrs ago, we co-authored the first succesful gov proposal that led to the creation of @uniswapgrants.

Why I'm supportive of this proposal for a Uniswap Foundation as the next logical step👇 @uniswapgrants has successfully deployed $7M+ to >120 projects, helping add 4K new LPs, fund meaningful research, etc: mirror.xyz/kennethng.eth/…

But as noted in the original proposal, it was always meant as an MVP for something bigger.

If approved, that something could be UF.
Aug 2, 2022 13 tweets 4 min read
Achieving sufficient decentralization is a goal of many projects in web3, but how to do so has remained mercurial.

Excited to share a playbook for founders and lawyers, written by @boironattorney, advisor to @variantfund and Chief Legal officer at dYdX

variant.fund/articles/suffi… First, some backstory. “Sufficient decentralization” was coined by the SEC’s Williams Hinman. In 2018, he argued the Ethereum network had become sufficiently decentralized because no single, identifiable, coordinated group drove the protocol or value of ETH.
Jul 28, 2022 15 tweets 6 min read
Announcing Variant Fund III🚀

We’ve raised $450M in total across 2 new funds:

At $150M, our third seed fund is sized for the dedicated focus of backing founders at the earliest stages + our $300M opportunity fund supports projects as they grow.

variant.fund/articles/intro… I'm proud of this milestone for @variantfund which marks the time from our launch two years ago.

From inception, we've been driven by a simple thesis: that the networks of the future would grow bigger, faster by making users owners.
Feb 16, 2022 11 tweets 4 min read
Pumped to share that @variantfund invested in @ceramicnetwork ‘s $30M Series A.

If DeFi is money legos, and NFT are media legos, Ceramic enables data legos.

But what is it actually? 🧵 Ceramic is a decentralized data network that makes data composable across applications.

If networks like @ArweaveTeam are Web3's hard drive, @ceramicnetwork is its database, where you read/write/query structured data for applications.
Feb 15, 2022 6 tweets 2 min read
DIMO is building a user-owned IoT platform that allows drivers to collect and share vehicle data, earning ownership in the platform's marketplace for their contributions.

If you like Helium and have a car, you'll like @DIMO_Network.

We are proud partners @variantfund DIMO’s marketplace allows developers to build applications that consume these driver-provided data.

Relevant use cases include battery optimization for electric vehicles, insurance, vehicle sharing, financing, and utility grid management.
Dec 13, 2021 11 tweets 3 min read
DAOs superpower is fluid, hierarchical leadership.

🧵 Historically, the most successful member-owned orgs— like co-ops, mutuals and credit unions—converged on hierarchical decision making, similar to that of corporations: a management team appointed by shareholders.

DAOs can learn something from this.

Nov 30, 2021 24 tweets 6 min read
~20 years ago, @spolsky coined a phrase describing one of the most impactful strategies of startups and tech giants:

"Commoditize the compliment"

This strategy is looking even more potent in Web3

📝New post: variant.fund/writing/balanc…

🧵 Cereal/milk
Printers/ink
Gas/cars

The core idea of commoditizing the compliment:

The lower the price of your product's compliments, the more useful your product, the more demand and value to capture.

OP: joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/str…
Nov 12, 2021 10 tweets 3 min read
DAOs are the future of work.

But there's some bosses to beat:

1. Compensation
2. Coordination
3. Compliance

In that order (I think!)

🧵 Internet products *owned* by their users.

thats the ownership economy.

thats also DAOs....aspirationally.

but there are bottlenecks for DAOs to buidl internet scale products
Nov 9, 2021 10 tweets 2 min read
Music NFTs are where digital art was in 2020:

About to redefine the value and (100x) the business model of the medium forever. 🧵 Music is the most criminally undervalued and under monetized media-type relative to its consumption.

I am increasingly convinced that 1-of-1 song NFTs are the wedge that will catalyze a dramatic shift in how artists make money and fans value music.
Feb 21, 2021 5 tweets 1 min read
Love to see old friends experimenting on the bleeding edge.

This NFT includes publishing rights to the song.

This is the idea that sparked my journey from music to crypto.

Soon all IP will be onchain, direct to creators, and we'll obviate copyright w something better. publishing royalties are part of the legacy music copyright system. they are rights for use of the song *writing*, which is different the recording of that song.

(e.g. a song can be performed/recorded by multiple artists)
Feb 15, 2021 20 tweets 4 min read
Crypto will be the "port of entry" for all internet media.

My thoughts on NFTs, finally in one place (on @viamirror) 👇

variant.mirror.xyz/T8kdtZRIgy_srX… This post strings together a bunch of disparate tweetstorms and thoughts I've had over the years.

Quick summary:
Jan 13, 2021 4 tweets 2 min read
We all have A LOT of work to do to help ppl understand crypto.

Simplest explanation I’ve found works:

“Imagine if users like you owned the platforms and products they use everyday online...crypto tokens = user ownership.”

- BTC : banks
- ETH : compute
- XYZ : more apps 🔜 @ChrisLyons we gotta do a follow up on the ownership economy
Dec 23, 2020 6 tweets 3 min read
NFTs are awesome.

Today I sent a unique, programmatically generated artwork to people who supported me in getting @variantfund off the ground this yr.

A token of appreciation.

artblocks.io/project/5 I worked w @jeffgdavis and @artblocks_io to create the limited series "Variant Plan F01Y20."

A randomized hash string determines a unique layout and color placement which makes each NFT the recipient's own.
Dec 18, 2020 5 tweets 2 min read
Very excited to grow the team @variantfund!🌲 @spencernoon has stewarded (and backed) an incredible community of builders by championing data driven insights, and creating venues for builders to do the same through @OurNetwork__
Dec 7, 2020 8 tweets 2 min read
NFTs are very early in the irruption-installation phase of Perez' hype cycle.

I'm optimistic they are going to work with mainstream audiences, but what is the wedge?

If I had to guess, it'll play out as follows 👇 1/ Irruption becomes frenzy alongside the backdrop of a crypto bull market. Digital artworks sell for $MMs, grabbing headlines, creator and collector attention.
Dec 7, 2020 6 tweets 3 min read
A few thoughts on @mirror_protocol:

1/ Being able to "invest in whats in the fridge"—brands whose products and services are used or recognized globally—is now globally accessible, as it should be.

Buy $mAMZN, $mTSLA, $mGOOGL from anywhere. All synthetic assets created on Mirror are "reflected" on Ethereum, tradable via Uniswap:

eth.mirror.finance
Dec 3, 2020 6 tweets 4 min read
📢 RFC/POLL: Uniswap Grants Program v0.1

A proposal for funding @UniswapProtocol ecosystem development with grants from the UNI treasury.

Authored by @VariantFund (me) + @nkennethk (EF grants coordinator)

Please comment and/or poll yr feedback!

gov.uniswap.org/t/rfc-uniswap-… tl;dr

The mission of the UGP is to provide valuable resources to help grow the Uniswap ecosystem.

The plan is to start small by, for example, sponsoring hackathons—but with an eye to growing impact over time (with renewals approved by gov)

Eventually, fund core dev work!
Dec 1, 2020 15 tweets 5 min read
Minimizing governance is a goal of crypto protocols, but for necessary & subjective inputs/decisions, leadership can be more efficient than voting.

@c_spelliscy & I explored how crypto founders might continue to lead, alongside compliant user ownership.

variant.fund/leadership-in-… tl;dr

Where a network is sufficiently similar to a cooperative, its possible a team can launch a token and decentralize ownership, while continuing to lead their project—without fear of violating securities regulations.