The biggest indicator of where the action is going to be in crypto is where new founder leverage exists.

Uniswap was interesting in 2020 because it allowed a team of <10 to build an exchange that reached volumes comparable to the big exchanges that employed 1000+.

In 2020, Ethereum was clearly a new source of leverage for creative, ambitious founders. In 2024, I think Farcaster is a new source of leverage.

Think about $DEGEN, Farcaster’s biggest success story as a platform. As a phenomenon, architecting $DEGEN on old social platforms would’ve taken considerable effort, time and money. $DEGEN was ostensibly launched and scaled by a team of 1.

$DEGEN is now a unit of account for content payment across the crypto internet.

distribution and tech

Developers often think about leverage purely from a technical perspective. Founders are hardened to think about leverage in distribution and technology.

Smarter thinkers have written at length about this, but Farcaster’s open dataset, wallet at every user, and programmable UIs via Frames are, to us founders, remarkable new sources of distribution leverage.

If you care to follow what’s next, find (or invent!) new sources of founder leverage.