GM Seedphrasers 👋 Buckle up, amigos, because in the world of meme coins, the only thing crazier than the names are the market caps.

📓 Today’s Agenda:

• 🔥 Hot Headlines

• 🐸 Create Your Own $PEPE

• 🚌 Bring On The Masses

• 🪙 Historic Bitcoin Moment

• 🪄 A Manifesto

🔥  HOT HEADLINES

📈 Market Headlines

• Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, makes it clear Florida will not have be using a CBDC - Watch this

• The ETH burn chart goes wild as speculators are spending their ETH on meme coins - Take a look

• Synapse now supports instantly bridging $PEPE to Arbitrum - Read more

🖼 NFTs

• BAYC sellers continue to sell their apes before floor to buy more $PEPE - Take a look

• Pudgy Penguins have something brewing. The team posted a picture of some penguins with a Trojan Horse and a message saying mass adoption is coming May 18th - See more

• NFT Worlds officially rebrands to ‘Topia’. Here’s a thread summarizing the rebrand

🐸 CREATE YOUR OWN PEPE

It’s become impossible to ignore the $PEPE momentum at this point. Over the weekend, it became a top 45 coin with a market cap of $1.2B. (we’re all still coping with that).

What might be more interesting is the meme coin revolution that $PEPE has sparked. If you log on to CoinGecko right now, you’ll find a full section devoted to meme coins:

Loopify, a popular NFT influencer, posted a video on Saturday about how to create a meme coin in 27 seconds. The wild part of his post isn’t the 11k likes. It’s the 15k BOOKMARKS! People have been calling for the end of meme coin season but it’s tough to expect it to be ending anytime soon with numbers like this.

It’s not up only though. Other meme coins like $BILLY, $NGMI, and $SALTY are down close to 100% from their peak.

So why do some meme coins succeed while others fail? In a word, community. The PEPE community was strong before the token was created. That was an essential part of their success. People are familiar with the meme so it’s easy for the token to gain momentum.

Takeaway: Buying a meme coin should be seen as gambling. PLEASE do not put any money into a meme coin unless you are willing to lose it all. With that being said, there are RARE cases where meme coins can last long term. Just look at Dogecoin. It was created as a meme and now it’s a top 10 coin with a market cap of $10B.

🚌 BRING ON THE MASSES

Let’s face it, onboarding new users into crypto is hard. Never mind the terminology, just think about the various steps we all had to take to buy our first coin.

Open an account with an exchange, fund the account, purchase crypto, set up a non-custodial wallet, then pray that you set up everything right and send your crypto from the exchange to your wallet (I still remember refreshing about 1,000 times before my crypto showed up the first time I went through this).

The Good news? Stripe (a financial services software company) is making this process a whole lot easier with their fiat-to-crypto onramp.

With this new software, Web3 companies can now direct customers to a Stripe-hosted onramp to buy cryptocurrencies.

Example: 1inch, a DeFi dApp that aggregates liquidity across various protocols will integrate the new Stripe onramp into their product. Users will be able to easily and quickly start funding their DeFi wallet without needing to go through a centralized exchange.

Why it matters: Stripe is one of the largest fintech companies. They’re a trusted service provider by many of the largest Web2 brands. For brands that already use Stripe, this would be an easy add-on to allow customers to purchase/send crypto.

Seedphrase Take: Reducing friction is one of the most important goals we should have as an industry. Amazon does this better than any other company. Think about how easy Amazon makes it for us to buy a product. We can purchase almost anything we can imagine in just a few clicks. That’s what we should aspire to for crypto and this Stripe onramp gets us one big step closer.

🪙 HISTORIC BITCOIN MOMENT

What happened: Block 788695 marked a historic moment for Bitcoin and it marked a major win for the long-term viability of the network. The transaction fees due to the high demand for block space have exceeded the mining subsidy.

What does this mean? First, we need to understand that Bitcoin runs as a proof-of-work consensus mechanism. Miners are rewarded for solving complex problems that secure the Bitcoin network. This reward is broken into two parts, the block subsidy, and the transaction fees.

Critics of Bitcoin will argue that once the block subsidy runs out (after the 21 millionth bitcoin is mined), miners will no longer be incentivized to secure the network because the transaction fees aren’t big enough. This could present a massive problem for the Bitcoin network.

That’s why this moment is such a big moment for Bitcoin. It’s only happened once before in 2017.

What caused the spike in transaction fees? Just like we all would have guessed, JPEGs. No, seriously, the spike in demand was caused by Bitcoin Ordinals. Inscriptions of Ordinals have skyrocketed over the past few weeks as it doesn’t look like they're going away anytime soon.

Tldr: The biggest risk Bitcoin faces is miners won’t continue to secure the network after all of the Bitcoin has been mined. The way to avoid this is for transaction fees to be valuable. This weekend, the transaction fee was more than the block subsidy for block 788695 because of the increased number of Bitcoin Ordinals. We’ll see if this trend continues or is a flash in the pan.

🪄 A MANIFESTO

​​With the news cycle dominated by meme coins, it sometimes makes us ask “what are we doing here?”

To answer that question we need to make a trip all the way back to 1993 when the Cypherpunks published their manifesto.

The who? The Cypherpunks were a group of individuals who advocate for privacy-enhancing technologies in order to create social and political change. The group was originally formed in the 1980s and kept in touch through a mailing list.

One member of the Punks, Wei Dai, is credited with creating a cryptocurrency system called b-money. (Fun fact: The smallest subunit of Ether, the wei, is named after him.)

Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin, was also a Cypherpunk and referenced the ideology frequently as he was creating Bitcoin.

We’ll end today’s newsletter with a thought-provoking excerpt from the Cypherpunk manifesto. If you’d like to read the full manifesto, you can find it here.

“Information expands to fill the available storage space. Information is Rumor's younger, stronger cousin; Information is fleeter of foot, has more eyes, knows more, and understands less than Rumor.”

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DISCLAIMER: None of this is financial advice. This newsletter is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. Please be careful and do your own research.