🔨 Make ur own market

This week is blazing by like a car on fire, though the markets really aren’t looking so hot right now. 

CS2 skin traders are losing their minds, and their colorful digital knife portfolios, as Valve makes the most Valve decision ever.

This should be surprising to no one. But it appears to be causing a meltdown among a slew of guys who put four- to six-figures into a centralized shooter game’s virtual items, I guess.

In the crypto markets more broadly, prices are fizzling as BTC, ETH, SOL and other top tokens remain down from a week ago.

Limitless, however, has seen more dramatic price action since its TGE yesterday.

— Kate Irwin

The limits of Limitless

Limitless, a prediction market that uses Base, is facing some controversy around the launch of its token yesterday.

Shortly after TGE, LMTS peaked at a $95 million market cap before quickly falling to $40 million within two hours. 

As of Thursday morning, its price remains down 31% in the past day, at a $34 million market cap with an FDV of $264 million, per GeckoTerminal data.

Within minutes of TGE, however, a wallet that has since been tied to the Limitless team began selling the token. 

Limitless co-founder and CEO CJ Hetherington said that the team-affiliated liquidity wallet intended for market-making is being used “to ensure two-sided liquidity” and token buybacks.

That wallet contains about $1.9 million in crypto assets on Base, with about 85% of that being in the LMTS token and about 15% in USDC as of Thursday morning.

Hetherington said that the wallet “will maintain range trading and two-sided liquidity with both BUYING and SELLING.”

Some traders are either unsure about this strategy, or don’t trust it. 

Hetherington nevertheless emphasized that Limitless is playing a longer game here. 

It’s an uphill battle to convince anyone in crypto that selling your own token is ever not bad, even if you say you’re planning to buy more of it back at some point.

At what point does “market-making” become price manipulation? 

And, perhaps more importantly, at what point does crashing out on the timeline impact your reputation and trustworthiness in crypto? 

Crypto tends to reward the feverishly passionate. But such an aggressive defense isn’t the best way to convince people that you’re doing the right thing.

Zoraganda

In their current state, Zora creator coins don’t have inherent utility beyond acting as a donation vector or being flipped for profit.

But a channel dubbed @propaganda, which was granted early access to Zora’s livestreaming feature, has built out a simple trading game of sorts using their creator token and livestreams. Ex-Base employee Bobby Thakkar is behind the project.  

Traders can “enter” the game by buying or selling Propaganda’s creator coin. Each trade counts as an entry into a raffle that happens every 10 minutes, where one lucky trader is sent 100 USDC. The last four digits of every Propaganda token trade is a ticket number. The game continues until the pool of funds is gone.

The stream yesterday featured an endless loop of tickers below an endless loop of 90s ads that really were a sight to behold. I forgot that ads used to be so joyful, funny and strange, and not just blaringly loud and overly manicured like they are today. But yes, 90s ads were also blatant propaganda for America and its cultural values, too.

The Propaganda game doesn’t shy away from the quick trading aspects of Zora. Instead, it adds an extra layer of stakes on top because you’re incentivized to trade the token and you can also maximize your chances of getting a bonus through a basic probability-based raffle.

It’s a fun premise that uses mechanics traders already understand, but I probably wouldn’t have written about it if there hadn’t been all those hilarious ads. 

Crypto’s consumer layer does need to do more than just give traders money. It needs to entertain us, too.

The token’s market cap hovered around $5.7 million during the stream on Wednesday, and it’s now the second-biggest creator coin on the platform, at about $5.1 million.

If we’re being honest, the stream is ultimately propaganda for Zora, whose aesthetic hinges heavily upon pushing Y2K nostalgia ironically for Gen Z. 

Gen Z’s interest in the 90s and early aughts continues to surprise me, considering they weren’t even an idea in their parents’ minds at the time. I was also an idea/infant/child for most of the 90s, but at least I actually used CDs and remember the first time low-rise jeans were cool. 

Y2K nostalgia + gambling + mild entertainment = Zora.

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