Polymarket, pump.fun, Zora, Lens, Farcaster, Jokerace, Fantasy Top, TYB

• Polymarket, the world’s largest prediction market, continues to break its own records. In July, Polymarket surpassed $380M in monthly betting volume across 43,000 active traders. Total value processed since the platform’s inception has officially exceeded $1B. Polymarket, built on Polygon, is responsible for 6% of Polygon PoS transaction fees.

• Solana memecoin launchpad and marketplace, pump.fun, reached an all-time high in daily protocol revenue ($2.31M) on July 30, even beating Ethereum in 24h revenue ($2.29M). Cumulative revenue has surpassed $80M USD and over 1.5M coins have been deployed.

• ENJOY, the first tradable ERC-20 token on Zora Network, has surpassed 50,000 holders. The current number of holders is hovering just below 55,000, with nearly 7M transactions processed to date.

• 💦🔬 Tx-Level Alpha: "Dollars have cents, Bitcoin has satoshis, and right now Ethereum's smallest unit is wei. Wei is one quintillionth of an ETH... We need a new unit for everyday people to use in both name and number." Zora has launched Sparks — one millionth of an ETH — as a new unit of measurement for Ethereum. The Sparks symbol is open source, onchain, and available to mint (nearly 29,000 total mints so far).

• Polymarket is the world's largest prediction market (built on Polygon and Safe's tools). It has gained mainstream attention as a "more reliable" indicator of public opinions and events that could happen. It has generated over $1B in betting volume through 5.6M bets since 2020. The hottest topics that had contributed to its recent monthly ($387M) had been primarily the Euros, US elections, and crypto ETFs.

• A key component of Polymarket's success is Safe, where it acts as an non-custodial wallet for traders to deposit and withdraw on Polymarket. To date, there are 109k safes, and currently $14M sits in these safes – a 134% monthly increase. This increase suggests further growth in betting volume.

• The biggest markets so far had been around the theme of US elections, with US president Joe Biden showing up in 210 markets, and amassing a total of $48M in betting volume. 11K bettors also bet $24M on non-politics topics like crypto ETFs.

• 💦🔬 Tx-Level Alpha: One of the biggest bets in the prediction market made was worth $140k by this particular owner of the Safe. It was on the question of whether Ethereum ETF would be approved by 31st May.

• Lens has grown DAU by 3x in the last 3 months. Starting at 10k, and now hovering 30k. Posts have had a similar pattern, growing from 20k to 100k per day. As a comparison, Farcaster has grown 1.25x. Starting 3 months ago from ~40k and now at ~55k DAUs. Posts started at ~990k, and are now at 660k posts.

• In terms of internal competitive Landscape: Phaver (53%), Hey (32%) and Orb (9%) dominate 94% of the DAUs. But, it changes when we look at high quality users: Orb (40%), Hey (13%) and Phaver (28%) dominate 85% of high quality users. Orb's mobile and creator first approach has paid off.

• Lens Protocol has generated 674k in revenue: Lens profile mints represent 98%, while paid collects fee (5%) represent the remaining. Around 1k of the 100k daily publications are collectible. ~13% of them are paid, and over 50% of these done through BONSAI.

• 💦🔬 Tx-Level Alpha: This post is the studio version of the single "Una causa perdida" by Oswaldo Torres. It was posted as a collectible with 5 editions on Lens for 2000 BONSAI each (~$20 usd). In the text portion of the post, the artist shares that the song was recorded and produced in Barquisimeto, Venezuela. It will be part of a 5 song EP to kickstart his career as a soloist. It has not been collected yet. 5% of the revenue will go to the Lens treasury, the rest to the artist.

• Following the farming and speculator exodus that was noted in ON-242, Farcaster's activity bottomed out in June 2024, stabilizing through July. Daily casts dropped from a May peak of 1.2M to a steady 600-700K in July, while DAU remained strong at 70-100K. This resilience suggests that despite waning speculative activity, a core user base remains regularly active. However, the stable DAU alongside decreased activity indicates a shift towards more passive user behavior on the platform.

• Farcaster's daily revenue averaged $11k from May-July, declining since late May. Recent revenue mainly comes from new users renting storage, as FID regs. closely track storage rentals in June-July (1-3% diff.). May's wider gap (+20%) shows higher spending by existing users during peak speculation.

• Farcaster's engagement landscape shifted towards lower interaction. Posts with 0 reactions increased from 48% to 80% between April 1 and July 30, while other categories declined, with 1-5 reactions falling from 44.4% to 16.6%. Frame transactions mirrored this trend, with monthly totals plummeting 83% from 44,696 in April to 7,647 in July.

• Fantasy is a SocialFi Trading Card Game where players use crypto Twitter influencer cards to play online, monetizing their social capital and research expertise. Since Fantasy Top's launch 4 months ago, the card economy was designed to prevent inflation by burning 5 cards for an upgrade. Initially, total cards stayed below 215k, but since July, the number has exceeded this and is rising and most new cards are minted for free, devaluing and increasing the abundance of lower-tier cards.

• One incentive for Fantasy Top heroes was earning profits from Fantasy Top trades. They earned around 800 ETH. However, after the initial hype, profit growth for heroes stalled. With increasing numbers and declining overall revenue, their motivation has noticeably waned compared to the first month.

• Fantasy Top has reached 35k active users, an impressive milestone. Interestingly, 29.5k joined in the first week of launch. Despite developing new features, the Fantasy team has struggled to attract new users but has successfully built a strong base of fans.

• 💦🔬 Tx-Level Alpha: Data shows that Fantasy trading volume has decreased since the initial hype but remains economically viable, with users still making good profits. 40% of Fantasy Top users have profited, 29% have lost, and 31% are unclear. For example, this user earned 290 ETH by selling only 15% of purchased cards. And this user made 12.5 ETH in the last two weeks.

• TYB is an onchain community rewards platform for brands such as Glossier, Rare Beauty (by Selena Gomez), the Outset (by Scarlett Johansson), Juneshine, Cult Gaia, Ouai, and more. Users complete challenges, co-create with brands, and earn rewards that can be redeemed for direct discounts or exclusive opportunities. A total of 100K+ new wallets have been created using Magic’s embedded wallets. Most of these users are brand new to crypto, making TYB their first onchain wallet. In July, these users completed 260K challenges and earned 23M brand coins.

• Community ROI is real. The average TYB user spends 10.2% more than non-TYB members. All-time order frequency for TYB members is 26% higher than for non-TYB members. Thus far in 2024, TYB members have spent $2.7M across all brands within the ecosystem, redeeming $60K+ in discounts from the platform.

• On July 25, Glossier (the OG community-led brand) launched its “G Collective” with 14K users claiming a Glossier NFT within a week. The first 500 members received a “proof of fan” collectible that came with a physical keychain. On the TYB app, users climb the leaderboard by engaging with challenges. Currently, user “eliserosee” sits at the #1 spot after earning 4,800 Glossier coins.

• 💦🔬 Tx-Level Alpha: This is the onchain wallet featuring recent transactions from user “urihamas.” She's an active member of the Saysh, Pitaya Foods, Eadem, and The Skinny Confidential communities. You can also see her recent activity on her TYB profile. Over the last month, she has redeemed $510.72 worth of tokens across 20 transactions. She redeemed her brand tokens for discount codes that were directly applied on Shopify checkout. By contributing to the brands/communities they love, users are getting rewarded in the form of tokens, which can later be swapped for more than just discounts.

• In Jokerace, you can create an onchain contest where contestants submit submissions, and voters select a submission. As a creator, you can give out prizes to winners as well, or just use it for voting. Jokerace has two revenue streams: a submission may be paid in order to enter a contest; a vote may be paid in order to vote for a submission. Since monetization launched, Jokerace has held 275 contests (41% paid) and generated $15k in revenue, which is split 50/50 with the contest creator (81 unique).

• A core metric is the amount of votes and voters. Last week, there where 396 unique voters, and 660 votes, the highest this year, but not as high as the December peak with 896 voters and 989 votes. 72% of the voters are one-offs, signaling a need for cross-pollination of contests within users.

• Jokerace's flywheel: Convert voters into creators, retain creators. There's 86 creators, 17 where voters first, and their median conversion time was 120 days. Creator retention is struggling: There's an avg of 10% M1, and 11% M3. A couple of cohorts have retention at 0%. How can creators stick?

• 💦🔬 Tx-Level Alpha: The highest grossing contest was ratifying the fictitious wedding of two onchain crypto influencers. 17k votes were cast, each at 0.0001 ETH, totaling $5.3k. The two following contests are Base's meme contest ($2.5k) and Greenpill's podcast next season theme ($1.6k). These 3 contests have generated 82% of the revenue. Why? Creators leverage their social reach to build hype around it, and... entertain. Yet another display of the value of entertainment in crypto.