✨ Stars Align

GM GM, and welcome back to The Drop.

Today is a big day, because it’s the start of the Permissionless conference. 

Whenever I return to NYC I get a flashback to when I lived here six years ago in a wildly overpriced and rather shabby student housing apartment. There was a woman who loved playing her violin loudly downstairs, and exterior brickwork endlessly hammered into my brain for the entire two years I was there.

It was very New York.

ANYWAY, if you want to come check out my panel today at Permissionless, you still have a couple hours to find it! We’ll be talking about onchain gaming. 

What does it look like today, how important is it to consumer crypto, and how can devs catch a W with product, funding and PMF?

Abstract, Sequence, Ronin and Blockus builders will be on it. 

It’s gonna be a deep dive.

Today’s reading, however, is a shorter one. Scroll for the latest!

— Kate Irwin

A wild Star appears

Another new crypto-powered launchpad platform is setting up shop — but this one’s for the devs. 

Star.fun is like a crowdfunding site, but with tokens and for startups. It uses Solana, plus Meteora’s liquidity pools. 

“I'm super passionate about the idea that you can build a business and raise money for it all from your laptop without needing intros to VC[s],” Star founder Adam Bergeman told me in a DM.

Instead, Star is a way to bring startup investment opps to the crypto-native masses by letting traders invest in projects simply by buying a startup’s affiliated token.

The site isn’t fully filled out yet, and may add a leadboard soon. Star is starting with its own namesake token to fundraise, and plans to add others’ projects to its launchpad next week. 

The Star team plans to use AI to review all founders’ code on GitHub as part of its vetting process. You can probably expect some vibe coders to appear on Star, as well.

The native STAR token will be earnable by referring founders, and can also be purchased as an access token where holders can enter exclusive funding rounds and see more project data, according to its website. 

As of Tuesday morning, STAR’s raised $3,600 of its $2.5 million goal. The team is aiming for a fully diluted valuation of $12.5 million via the STAR public sale, according to a pitch deck viewed by Blockworks. The sale began on Monday, and will continue until June 30 next week.

Star plans to commit some of its trading volume revenue to buying back and burning STAR. A quarter of the token’s allocation is being reserved for the team, and another quarter is being reserved for the Star ecosystem.

Like pumpfun, Star-launched tokens will have to graduate in order to have access to bigger liquidity pools. Projects can also raise USDC on Star, too.

While asking around at Permissionless Tuesday morning, Star drew some immediate comparisons to Echo, another next-gen ICO platform for investing in crypto startups. There’s also Legion.

Star reminds me a bit of Stars Arena (RIP) and Friendtech (also RIP), which were mainly about “investing” in people and trading “shares” of their influence via crypto.

Star has two affiliated Wyoming-based LLCs, with one being OpCo LLC and the other being TokenCo LLC, a DAO that oversees the token. 

STAR appears to be available to anyone in the US regardless of investor status, as myself and another US-based Blockworks teammate were able to connect our wallets to the site.

Thousands are headed to Brooklyn.

Infra, token design, AI, Bitcoin, and $100K+ in hackathon bounties on day one. Hackers get in free. Everyone else? Clock’s ticking.

📅 June 24–26 | Brooklyn

Does it matter if no one knows?

Ludwig and Mizkif, two well-known gaming influencers in Twitchsphere, were paid to play the Improbable game Jitter. The casual social game with Fall Guys vibes integrates Twitch accounts and sets up Somnia crypto wallets on the backend — but I’m not sure that’s really a win for crypto gaming.

“1000's of web2 consumers, playing with a major web2 streamer. All with wallets and their interactions on Somnia. Not even knowing they are onchain. This is the future blockchain as transparent infrastructure,” Somnia founder Paul Thomas wrote on Monday.

Jitter tracks players’ activity, including respawns and Twitch activity on Somnia.

This makes me wonder: Is there even a point in adding blockchain elements if no one knows they’re there? 

Some players might feel like they’ve been tricked into engaging with crypto when they may have otherwise opted out — which doesn’t necessarily help crypto’s image problem among gamers.

Proponents, however, might argue that the tech in and of itself is worthwhile, especially if it’s a more decentralized setup where players can move their assets elsewhere should they choose. 

Like the ethos of Base and Zora, mass onboarding and crypto “for everyone” is the goal — though some decentralization and “first principles” may be lost in the process. 

The main excitement factor here, at least for crypto natives, is that more players equals higher numbers. Even if those players never know they indirectly used blockchain tech, they created growth numbers for the chain used. 

Maybe you see that as superficial, or maybe you see this level of consumer adoption as the future of our industry. 

And yeah, crypto gaming really needs some affirmation right now.

It’s probably still too early to say that an alt szn is coming, but SEI just jumped 40% in the past 24 hours.