11/20 - 12/24: Changing of the 'Tard 💸🌙
Next steps, with $BTC passing $100K, $CRV above $1...
Frens + Fam…
WMI!
(aka We Made It!)
Bitcoin touched above $100K!
Curve is holding strong over $1!
It may all collapse to rubble tomorrow, but all the same, what an achievement to even be here. Truly amazing milestones dropping before the new year.
As we enter a new era, it’s also time for us to shake some things up…
TL/DR: Going forward, about 80%+ of our newsletter content will be paywalled.
It’s not just because I’m a greedy b🤬tard…. we actually think it’s the best way to support Curve. The full rationale to follow…
The Way We Were
Thinking back to four years ago makes us weirdly nostalgic. It was a magical time where mass hypochondria freed us of all social obligations, and plane tickets were cheap with the middle seat usually unoccupied.
In this era we published our first newsletter on Substack. Can you spot any differences between then and now?
Much like Curve, this newsletter has been in a constant state of flux, growing and gradually improving as conditions changed. We’re pleased to have successfully persisted through an entire boom-bust cycle, providing near daily insights into Curve’s evolution through it’s earliest phase. Grandpappy Bitcoin was never so blessed with such a thorough historical chronicle. When $CRV inevitably flippens $BTC someday, we hope our hagiography provides archaeologists a valuable resource.
When we started our unofficial fanzine, $CRV price was ~$1, on the back of fewer than a dozen StableSwap pools. From these modest origins, Curve has innovated in ways that would have been unthinkable in 2020… CryptoSwaps, Dynamic Fee NG pools, crvUSD and lending markets. After all this innovation and the most bullish regulatory circumstances for DeFi finally materializing, $CRV price is, supposedly, back to just ~$1.
You all can judge for yourselves if you believe $CRV and all DeFi tokens are fairly priced or not…
We launched this newsletter in 2020 as an afterthought, a way to bring a little attention to an analytics site (curvemarketcap dot com) with ambitions to start with scraping slippery Curve stats and grow towards supplanting CoinMarketCap. These ambitions died, but the newsletter surprisingly survived and kept growing, justifying continued attention.
Maintaining the newsletter’s relevancy and growth has required constant adaptations to keep pace with the vicissitudes of the market. We often conducted minor experiments that required no announcements, phasing them in gradually.
The result was this newsletter evolving into a very different product. Compare the article we linked above, versus what we publish today.
For our next evolution, we’re shifting from mostly free to mostly paywalled content.
Since not getting free handouts tends to infuriate the extreme left of the IQ bell curve, we feel we owe you a thorough explanation.
Eff You, Pay Me!
We believe this newsletter originally gained traction because it was so difficult to find high quality information and updates about Curve, a complex protocol with sparse documentation at the outset. We did the best we could.
More recently, however, it’s become obvious that the limitations of the newsletter’s format and resources only made it, at best, a stopgap solution to this initial problem. It worked well in the early days when the resources were scattershot and Twitter posts about Curve were dominated by trolls.
Specifically, we believe early use cases for this newsletter have been outdone by two fast emerging resources:
The Curve News site has relaunched in glorious fashion, providing more reliable coverage of Curve updates, with the unparalleled benefit of being able to speak officially and authoritatively on behalf of Curve.
The ascent of Leviathan News, which uses an innovative incentive structure and decentralized bot to crowdsource fast and accurate headlines, providing a superior distribution mechanism for information and updates about Curve, the broader flywheel, and well beyond.
We’ve been thrilled to work with both projects, so in a fashion we’re being outcompeted by ourselves. If we were asked to imagine an endgame for how our newsletter might hope to evolve, we’d argue both projects have already exceeded our wildest ambitions. Better yet, they both have a better shot at securing the resources and structure needed to continue in a more sustainable fashion. I alone could obviously never replicate these collective efforts. The crypto ecosystem is far richer for their emergence.
It also puts us in an unusual position, in that our blog is at risk of obsolescence if we don’t adjust. It would be silly for our newsletter to try and keep pushing in a direction where we’d be, at best, an inferior competitor to these resources. It benefits nobody if we’re, say, competing to release scoops, or rewriting official news updates into a more vernacular tone. We’ve contemplated how the newsletter can best adapt itself to boost Curve in the present environment.
Our conclusion is that our best opportunity is to refocus on our paid subscribers, to allow more breathing room in the public sphere for these emerging new projects to thrive, chiming in publicly only where we might add significant value.
Paywalling was, in truth, an early objective of our newsletter, but it fell by the wayside. The reasons we prefer a paywall, and recommend paywalls to other writers, and tend to pay for subscriptions whenever writers heed our advice:
People don’t value what they get for free.
Free projects are not sustainable
Revenue is the best scorecard for tracking success or failure.
Optimizing for revenue will produce a high quality newsletter, whereas optimizing for impressions is doomed to push content towards its lowest common denominator
Restricting content creates a valuable “bartering chip,” like granting allies the right to redistribute paid content.
It’s more freeing, in that more controversial thoughts and opinions can’t always be shared with a larger audience, and are better kept to a smaller, pre-vetted crowd.
We would vastly prefer to attract 10 “high quality” readers than 1000 “low quality” readers.
Time for tough talk: If you have trouble affording a nominal subscription fee, you have zero business playing around in crypto and should not be reading our newsletter anyway.
With Bitcoin around $100K and $CRV above $1, we expect many of you are in fact able to afford a whopping $10. If you’re financially able but still unwilling to pay for good content, then we really don’t see why we should work tirelessly for your amusement.
The bear market had a nice effect in that it filtered out the toxic “get rich quick” trading types, so there was a natural sorting effect. Most people who stuck around were very high caliber individuals. With hints the bull market may be resuming, we’d almost forgotten quite how many idiots swarm into this space. We’re honestly not emotionally prepared for it just yet.
Throwing up a paywall serves as the ideal filter against the teeming hordes, providing the purest signal to know if we’re on the right track.
So if we like paywalls so much, why didn’t we have a paywall for all these years?
Look Out for Number One
We’ve been touting the benefits of paywalling our newsletter, and yet the past four years we’ve largely ignored our own advice. About 80%-90% of the content has been free. Why?
Bear Market Things: We wanted to acknowledge and respect the struggle. We knew other protocols and members of the community were suffering through even harder times. Since we could afford to operate the newsletter at a loss, we were happy to effectively subsidize its release throughout the crypto Great Depression.
Morale: When Curve went through its darkest days, it felt tonally inappropriate to charge readers. As one of the most prominent public Curve maximalists, we inexplicably felt it was an important signal to grind out the bear market with consistency, to help showcase the resilience and continued functioning of the Curve ecosystem.
Public Good: Most importantly, we put all our articles through a basic filter before publishing, something like: “does this article serve a public good for Curve, in terms of providing educational content for readers.” We felt most articles did meet such a standard, so we felt it important to push wider distribution.
These factors all reversed over the past month. Curve toughed out the worst of the bear market… hacks, liquidations and death spiral00rs… and it’s emerged far stronger. Morale is high and bullposting has resumed. Our offensive and flippant tone only risks distracting from the high quality content now being generated by the team.
In current conditions, we therefore no longer see any justification for keeping the bulk of our content free. We intend to use our existing platform’s free tier to amplify the official Curve content, content from Curve allies, and content from Leviathan News. Otherwise we’ll keep the bulk of the newsletter content focused on the paying elite.
When the next prolonged bear market inevitably hits, we aren’t ready to repeat this process throughout the duration. So we’re “locking in our gains” in a manner of speaking… while times are good we want to reset expectations so we don’t stumble into the same pitfall next time.
In the bear market, when we prioritized free content for all the reasons expressed above, our north star metric shifted from paid subscribers towards eyeballs. As long as unpaid subscribers kept growing, we felt justified in investing time into publishing at a regular cadence.
Miraculously, we managed to grow throughout the entire bear market, albeit slowly at times…
However, this growth came at the direct expense of paid subscribers. As the saying goes, “Why buy the cow, when you can get the milk for free?” A number of people who churned expressed this exact sentiment, why should they pay when it was all made public anyway?
Had revenue been our most important metric, this newsletter would have pivoted or ended over a year ago. Growth had disappeared. The bear market was inflicting max pain. Users were churning from crypto en masse. We should have packed it up and closed shop. But oh well, we’re still here.
We always tried to keep the newsletter appropriately compartmentalized in our work flow. We wanted to treat our unofficial blog as a “hobby,” so it wouldn’t overwhelm our various dev responsibilities that demanded the bulk of our time. Tasks like preparing the various coding tutorials we produced for Curve take way more time to get right — weeks of work, not mere hours. However, even though it has a smaller built-in audience, we ultimately believe it adds a great deal of tangible value to the ecosystem.
Over time, the demands of publishing the newsletter continued to crept upwards. Lately it’s starting to erode our most productive hours, which retards our overall progress. In a time where the “to-do” list of dev work has been steadily growing, the situation needs to be corrected.
Getting this far has proved quite a slog, but we’re amazed to be here and a few thanks are due.
A big thanks to the Llamas, who in August helpfully stepped in to bail us out and gave us our first week of “vacation” from the newsletter.
Unfortunately this bought time that mostly went to finalizing taxes, making our “break” quite a bit more painful than pleasurable.
Thanks also to the subscribers who stuck around through the rough times, I truly value your loyalty. Your support has been a true blessing and strong motivator. We plan to triple down our focus on delivering value for you going forward, so please tell us what you like and where you’d like improvement.
We’ll soon find out if this drop in subscriptions was in fact a symptom of our blurred focus. It may also be the case that insufficient demand exists for our variety of content. If it’s the case that we simply can’t cut it in today’s attention economy, we’d be relieved to cut our lossees sooner.
Unit Griftonomics
By posting the above charts, you can see that we’re not really talking about “life-changing” money. If you run the math on the above charts, the newsletter generated less revenue than a job flipping burgers at McDonalds. Very nice to have any paying users, but are we really likely to 10x or 100x this? Doubtful.
So why charge money? Was it some kind of long con?
When we first launched the newsletter, the money didn’t justify the investment of time, but it did prove crucial in bootstrapping crypto side projects. The initial intent was to fund the PAC DAO project of yore. PAC DAO was an early and poorly named attempt at crypto advocacy. Like so many things, the initial enthusiasm was inevitably subsumed by the bear market. It’s also grown exceedingly obsolete, as the government has flippened broadly pro-crypto this past election without the quiescent DAO’s help.
In the same vein though, while we don’t particularly need the money a subscription might generate, Leviathan News certainly does. The project at present is very much an amalgam of several amazing people’s part-time efforts. Using newsletter funds to subsidize Leviathan’s launch is a great way to bootstrap the nascent project.
We’ve spent more personal funds getting Leviathan off the ground than we’ve ever gotten from newsletter subscriptions, but every subscription helps increase this runway. If you want to support our efforts to build a decentralized Bloomberg, please subscribe!
What Can Subscribers Expect?
In many ways, this past week has been a first draft of how things might look going forward.
On Monday, we dropped a detailed retrospective of our trip to Japan and its crypto scene for subscribers.
We shared the full piece with a few people we consulted in writing it, and they offered rave reviews.
On Tuesday, we were able to leverage our unique position within the Curve ecosystem to try to clear up misconceptions about the Blackrock announcement.
This felt like a quintessential example of the role we might be able to play in the ecosystem going forward. It would have been awkward for the official news channel to issue a correction, because there was no correction to be issued. The original article was accurate, it just took on a life of its own in the imagination of degens.
Therefore, we were happy to leverage our unique platform to try to tamp down expectations, and to do so in a manner that might not come across as pure FUD.
Wednesday, we were able to look into the state of how Curve wrappers fared in the euphoria, a topic that may have been outside the scope of official sources. We could deliver some light education on the subject outside the paywall.
Behind the paywall of this article… well, we never offer financial advice, but apparently some readers found it useful all the same.
Going forward, we plan to continue evolving and adapting the format as we think best, and iterating through the feedback of our new bosses (you, the paid subscribers!)
We’re pitching our bosses (you!) on moving our focus from quantity to quality. That is, we’ll aim for fewer overall articles on a less rigid timeline, while overall delivering more paid articles than subscribers might see at present. We plan to keep quiet when we have nothing interesting to add to the general conversation. We know the consistency and regularity was a large selling point, but we hope to set a new expectation that whenever the article hits your inbox, you know it can’t be skipped.
Otherwise, we’ll be muting accounts that complain about content being paywalled or directing them to this article.
If you’ve already taken profits at the start of this bull run, we’d urge you to subscribe! You’ll be helping gestate Leviathan News until it gains viability. You’ll also get a lot of the type of content you may have already expect and enjoy in this newsletter, and a direct hand in shaping its future direction.
If you want to pay by crypto, just ping us about arranging a donation directly to the Leviathan News multisig. We’re also happy to comp articles and subscriptions for Curve employees, or people who can prove they are secret CRV admirers.
And of course…