Riffing on Memes and the Attention Economy
I’ve been riffing a bit again on crypto. Less on the side of “I want to be involved with trading“ but more in the way that I know a lot about it since I’ve done so much.
When I started higherrrrrrr I didn’t know anything about memes, pump, or meme trading. Once the election happened in November and there was some clarity, I immediately jumped in the deep end without understanding the ecosystem. I learned a bunch about what I like, don’t like, and frankly, can’t stand.
In a very positive light - memes are being regulated like trading cards and the exchanges that help launch and trade them are classified more like card stores than regulated financial exchanges (at least to my understanding). We built for that, and it actually went really well. I didn’t understand the customer though, and wow, we learned.
There are roughly three types of participants buying these collectible, entertainment coins:
Passive speculators, folks who see it and think it’s funny and hit buy (majority of retail, 95%)
Active traders, folks who make it their business to trade these assets (4.5%)
Bad actors who will manipulate, threaten, and lie to make money (0.5%)
What I didn’t expect being fully doxed is that some of the bad actors are so bad, that they’ll dig up whatever personal information on you, and use it as a threat. When we tweeted something about higherrrrrrr being a safe place to trade, or how other coins might be unsafe, my cofounder who was anonymous would get all sorts of weird twitter inbound, and I’d get random accounts following me with underhand threats towards me but more importantly my family.
I couldn’t do it, so to my behest, I stepped away personally in March and let some of the team run comms, development, and distribution. Frankly, I was fearful of that unknown factor of how bad some of these actors might be. I’ve seen a lot of the stories so I wanted to make sure my family and friends were physically safe before anything, even if that meant taking a backseat to the platform.
Since then, we’ve learned more and I’ve updated some of those priors. First, I’ve prioritized privacy for myself and my loved ones so that those threats are harder to make. Second, a lot has happened in crypto including 20+ much more successful launch pads etc. At higherrrrrrr we even helped some of our friends launch the same concepts on Solana, and it worked ok. Lastly, I took some time personally to focus on a health issue over the summer and am feeling better. For me personally, I just am too gunshy of that market to do another launchpad. We tried to do our best to make our platform safe, but we didn’t realize how threatening a worldwide market can be to something like higherrrrrrr and the people who work on it.
That said, I still own the IP, domain, and X account for higherrrrrrrr. We announced and wound down trading in March / April. I’m considering pivoting to instead of helping launch coins, helping do something that we’re good at, really good at, which is research for the emerging category of attention assets, collectible coins that trade on the more successful platforms like Pump, Believe, and Zora. Sort of like a Messari for memes.
Wanted to get feedback on this idea? I think some of the team might be interested in content. As always, anyone who wants support with their non-custodial assets that were displayed on the higherrrrrrr frontend during our fun collectibles era can email support@higherrrrrrr.fun for support with that process.