Thursday links: Is crypto back? Already??

NFTs that own stocks

The 0xResearch newsletter notes that the floor price of StonkBrokers NFTs has surged from less than $400 a month ago to $13,000 today.

The NFTs are represented by pixelated stock brokers. But the artwork is not what’s made them the second-most valuable NFTs on OpenSea (behind CryptoPunks and ahead of Bored Apes). 

Instead, it’s because each NFT is also a wallet that can hold crypto assets, including tokenized stocks. 

Each NFT receives a randomly selected tokenized stock when it's minted (SpaceX, say, or Amazon). When it’s also “activated” (for a fee, paid in the StonkBroker token), it receives additional stocks that the protocol buys with the fees it earns. Holders can also send stocks they buy themselves to the NFT’s wallet. (I think. It’s kind of complicated.)

When an NFT is sold, everything in the wallet moves with it.

0xResearch describes the mechanics as an attempt to connect “NFTs, tokenized equities, a liquid token, a launchpad and an exchange into one financial ecosystem.”

I’m not sure it will work — so far, the pixelated stock brokers appear to be priced entirely on their speculative value and not the assets they hold (the interesting part).

But it’s fun to see something new and ambitious happening with NFTs.

Also, it got me to look at OpenSea for the first time in about three years. (I was kind of surprised it was still there.)

Is this what an NFT comeback would look like?

Maybe!

Are memecoins back?

Another ambitious new project in crypto is fomo.family — a trading app that aims to become a social media platform by bringing people together over their love for memecoins.

I am not one of those people. Like most, I had written memecoins off as a case of temporary, bull-market insanity. But fomo appears to have reinvigorated them by making memecoin trading both social and competitive: everyone’s trades are public and linked to their account, there’s a leaderboard, there’s copy trading.

It’s working. Despite launching in a brutal bear market, fomo has hosted over $4 billion in trading volume and attracted 1.3 million users in just over a year.

Some of fomo’s most successful traders have amassed over 100,000 followers each. Fomo is currently a top-10 app in the “finance” category of the Apple App Store. Perps might now be catching on. RWAs could be next.

“Fomo is the breakout application of this cycle,” Carlos Gonzalez Campo wrote for 0xResearch.

Investors seem to agree. The company recently raised $75 million in a Series B at a valuation of $550 million (there’s no token, sadly).

Co-founder Se Yong Park pitches fomo as a way to make money: an extra $100 a week can be life-changing money for 99% of the world, he noted on X.

Some people make much more than that: The account @Rowdy has made nearly $1 million on fomo, almost all of it in the last week, and almost all of it in a single Chinese memecoin (with a market cap of just $61 million).

Most do not. A Dune dashboard finds that only 6% of all traders on FOMO in the last 90 days were profitable. The creator of the dashboard, @MidCurveMortal, also estimates that of the 6% of traders who are profitable, 88% have made under $100. Only 25 out of 292,531 wallets made more than $10,000.

(Note: Dune dashboards are not always correct.)

Collectively, MidCurveMortal also estimates that, collectively, fomo traders have lost a kind-of astonishing $1.26 billion.

(For the fomo suggestion box: Make it a prediction market so they’re at least losing money to each other.) 

These kinds of loss ratios are not unique to either fomo or crypto. 

A 2014 study found that 82% of retail investors lost money trading contracts-for-difference (a way to make leveraged bets on stock prices and popular in the UK).

And yet, CFDs have been booming ever since.

If insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result, traders are truly insane.

The memecoin business is perhaps a low-risk bet that they always will be.

(Wen fomo token?)

Is pump.fun back?

85% of the memecoins traded on fomo originated on the pump.fun launchpad, where business is surprisingly good: pump.fun collected $2.1 million of revenue yesterday.

That’s still far below the January 2025 peak of $7 million, but going in the right direction. (Or wrong, depending on how you feel about memecoins.)

Also making a comeback: earnest takes about intrinsically silly things.

“Memecoins and the Creator Economy are the two most notable representations of determining the dollar value of attention,” memecoin evangelist Ansem said on X. “The Creator Economy alone will be a $2 [trillion] industry by 2035.”

As evidence, he points to the eponymous ANSEM memecoin. Launched on pump.fun in June, the ANSEM token has a $100 million market cap.

Few memecoins manage that kind of valuation anymore, but Ansem believes there’s more to come. “We are still at peak lows for volumes and activity onchain,” he added.

I’m not sure what a “peak low” is, but it sounds bullish.

Are airdrops back?

Arthur Hayes is back and promising an airdrop of a token with a buzzy idea: flop.finance is “food for your AI agent,” its website says.

The project does not have a whitepaper — it’s just a website and an idea.

But Hayes wants you to be excited: “More details to come, but expect a massive airdrop in Q4.”

It’s hard to imagine now, but there once was a time airdrops occasionally gifted crypto natives tens of thousands of dollars worth of tokens. “Pudgy Penguins just dropped me a BMW” is a thing people would say.

I’m skeptical we’ll ever hear that kind of thing again.

But if nothing else, Hayes is returning some much-needed bravado to crypto: “Let’s build the agentic economy’s currency together fam and get fucking rich!” he said on X.

Sell your AI tokens for crypto tokens

A new app lets you sell your unused credits for compute from an AI lab like Anthropic or OpenAI for USDC.

In short, it’s a decentralized broker creating and pricing a market for excess AI tokens without taking possession of anyone's API keys or crypto.

I tried it. I created an API key on my Anthropic account — where I had $6 of token credits leftover from vibecoding a fantasy baseball app — and copy/pasted it into tokensto.cash.

It worked! Within a couple of minutes I had sold all $6 of my spare tokens — for $2.35.

I guess there’s a way to set a minimum price, but I couldn’t immediately figure out how. Anyway, I then had $0 of credit on my Anthropic account and 2.35 USDC in a crypto wallet the app had created for me. I sent those to another wallet just to make sure I could.

You can also cash out to an app like Venmo using peer.xyz, a peer-to-peer way to offramp crypto to fiat. Connect your wallet and enter the amount of USDC you want to exchange and then your Venmo handle. 

The app puts your USDC in escrow and finds someone who wants to exchange a Venmo balance for USDC. It then sends their fiat to your Venmo and your USDC to their wallet.

By the magic of zk proofs, the app confirms the USD is in your Venmo account (by checking your email, I think) before releasing your USDC from escrow.

Very neat!

If it works. The peer.xyz app itself is in beta and I haven’t gotten it to work for me yet. But it looks useful.

Could crypto use cases be back, too?

Miscellany

Also this week: The SEC proposed safe harbor exemptions for crypto builders (as discussed yesterday); the FASB said it's considering making stablecoins cash-equivalents for accounting purposes (big, if true); a sitting president of the United States said “Hyperliquid” in public; and Treasury Secretary Bessent may have begun yield-curve control (aka the ultimate bull case for bitcoin).

Whew! 

For better (new use cases!) and worse (memecoins, ugh), it feels like crypto might be back.

— Byron Gilliam