As Bitcoin Stumbles, A New Onchain Creator Economy Booms
Retail just got smoked. Could the next thing that gets retail back into crypto not even be crypto?
Crypto is continuing to lick its wounds after a record de-leveraging event, and more and more analysts are giving into the idea that the recovery won’t be immediate.
Last week, early Bitcoin investor Mark Yusko told us he was worried the ripping out of leverage would leave prices subdued in crypto. Today, despite a tepid recovery to get Bitcoin back above $111,000 Monday, 10x Research founder Markus Thielen said Bitcoin getting anywhere near $180K price targets some had thrown out just a few weeks ago just became “mathematically impossible.”
“It’s really the mega whales that have been selling to the whales,” Thielen told Coinage. “As much as the ETFs can buy, that’s how much the whales are selling.” He describes the current state of the market as a “distribution phase,” where large holders are offloading into institutional demand, keeping prices capped despite continued ETF inflows.
That’s also why Thielen is less convinced by the more euphoric Bitcoin price targets floating around. “It takes a lot of capital now to push Bitcoin higher.” His team calculates that roughly $1.1 trillion in new money has already flowed into Bitcoin’s $2.2 trillion market cap — meaning any further move upward will require exponentially more dry powder.
Still, Thielen doesn’t see this as the end of the cycle. “It’s very difficult to turn really bearish,” he explained. “We might bump around a little bit longer. We might test $100,000. But I don’t think we’re going to go much below that level.”
Beyond Bitcoin, though, the picture looks darker. As altcoins face $60 billion in annual unlocks, Thielen doesn’t buy into the long-promised “altcoin summer.” “There’s no real incentive from the retail investor to really invest in all of these projects,” he said.
The One Exception to the Rule
For now, there is one space that seems to be holding up: Creator Coins on Base.
Last week, we spoke with Base founder Jesse Pollak to unpack why Coinbase is going all in on creator coins. Not only are they listing creator coins for free through the Coinbase app to effectively pressure smaller competitors into not charging listing fees, they are also supporting them through their new Base app.
Base, Coinbase’s Ethereum Layer-2, seems to be courting creators and their fans to experiment with launching their own tokens now to increase onchain activity and get new users onboarded before potentially dropping a native Base token.
But at the heart of it is a bet that is also near and dear to the very reason why Coinage exists as the first media outlet ever built onchain.
“I think we’ve been talking about how do we start to re-platform these legacy systems — whether it’s the financial system or the creator economy — for many, many years,” Jesse Pollak told us. “But it feels like just in the last few months, all of the technology has finally started to come together.”
At the heart of this creator revolution are the same tenets that led to Bitcoin’s rise — merely reformatted to apply to the creator economy. That is, let creators directly own the value of the attention they generate online.
In the legacy system, that would involve a creator posting a video to a platform like YouTube, and getting paid pennies on the dollar for the attention they generate as YouTube sells ads against that video. That has essentially been the engine that has not only fueled YouTube’s rise but also that of Meta or X (formerly Twitter.)
But if memecoins have proven anything over the last few years, it’s that attention can be monetized more directly online. So, why sell ads as a means to an end, when attention as a coin could be the means in and of itself? Coinbase and Base are now betting big on that playing out.
And to be fair, so are we. Coinage has not only tokenized ownership in ourselves via membership NFTs in to co-owning our outlet, but we’ve also been experimenting with our own creator coin.
Just today, OpenSea announced we’re one of the latest coins to earn a page on their site, and it looks pretty cool! Slowly but surely Coinage is throwing ourselves into the arena — and it’s not too late to join as a co-owner. You can use 160,000 $COINAGE to mint a membership at a 30% discount until 100 have been minted.
And we know, we know. It sounds crazy. Can the media model really be invented by a little random group of people on the internet who came together to co-own a media outlet? Maybe…
We're chatting with Netflix co-founder Marc Randolph (who is also a Coinage NFT holder) about disrupting media on our live stream. 12PM ET. Tune in!
