Jess Zhang on Warpcast

Dan Romero pfp

Are content coins good? A lot of ink spilled recently about content coins. Here's what I believe: 1. People trying new thing / models / ideas are good! Even if a given thing / model / idea has the potential to be abused, if there's potential for it to be used constructively, worth trying. 2. No one is forcing you to buy anything. You can literally log off and be protected from the potential bad outcomes. 3. Just because norms exist at a point in time doesn't mean the norms can't be changed. Changing norms can be good! 4. If you're getting religious over what is essentially a file format—ERC20, ERC721, ERC1155—you're in too deep. Most people won't care what format it is. What they will care about is what "job to be done" and how they feel interacting with it. 5. If everyone treats content coins as "number go up machines and bail before attention tries up Keynesian Beauty Contest" then yes, most people will have a bad time. However, if through quantity / frequency / norm shifting that change... 1/n

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Jess Zhang pfp

@jess-zhang-ziyue

Are content coins good? Sure, if your bar is doing something new, no matter how hollow. But if you’re building the future of crypto: with access, financial sovereignty, and credibility in mind, this is a cop-out. Here’s why: 1. Experimentation is easy when it’s low-risk. ERC20s with meme slogans aren’t brave. What is brave? Building infrastructure that lasts. Launching protocols that stand up to regulation. Supporting DeFi when it’s unfunded and untrendy. 2. “You don’t have to buy” isn’t an excuse. When a @coinbase exec shills 6-figure microcaps, it is market signaling. That kind of attention warps incentives, draws scammers, and distracts devs from doing real work. 3. Norms aren’t sacred, but some values are. Crypto wasn’t built to become a side-show of attention-grabbing pumps. It was built to rebuild trust, access, and systems. If you abandon that, you’re not edgy—you’re irrelevant.

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Dan Romero pfp

2. That’s a low agency straw man. People are smarter than that and know what game they are playing.

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Jess Zhang pfp

@jess-zhang-ziyue

A lot of talk lately about “content coins.” Let’s be honest: this isn’t innovation. It’s a repackaging of models we already have—books, blogs, paid newsletters. Content is already capitalized. Wrapping it in a token doesn’t create new value—it just adds noise. Web3 was never supposed to be Medium with coins. The real opportunity is in tokenizing what Web2 can’t: – Reputation – Social capital – Trust networks – Coordination at scale That’s where crypto shines. That’s what Base could be. But if the loudest narrative becomes influencer pumps and meme mechanics, it’s a missed opportunity. The infra is solid. The strategy isn’t. We can do better.

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Jess Zhang pfp

@jess-zhang-ziyue

That was the polite version. Here’s the real one: Tokenizing content is stupid. The whole point of tokenizing culture is to formalize and capitalize social capital - celebrities, athletes, public figures. People whose mere existence already moves markets. “Content”? Already monetized. We’ve had books, essays, movies, paid newsletters forever. Slapping a token on top doesn’t make it valuable - it just makes it louder. This isn’t innovation. It’s engagement farming with a ledger. And I don’t think @jessepollak is stupid for pushing this. From the strategy? I know he is.

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Dan Romero pfp

Are you building an alternative?

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