I was always focused on the consumer side of crypto, even before the narrative made it popular. I knew that without real users and use cases, we’re just playing with the “cool stuff” we built. A few days ago, I stumbled upon an old unlisted YouTube video of mine, my final project from 2021 for the @Consensys Ethereum Developer Bootcamp. It’s 12 minutes long, and my presenting skills weren’t as good as now, but I still find it cool 🙂 I chose to build a PoC for an NFT e-commerce dApp as my graduation project. youtu.be/8bW5JYhASiA

Among the cool kids @Dragan_ZZ, @imprfekt and @AtanasovskiP 🫡

Getting stronger every day 💪

Just 2 days to go! 👀 See you on Thursday 👇 luma.com/74gqcoew

Don't miss trades just because you're sleeping or taking a shower. You can now automatically mirror every trade made by 220 of the best fomo traders, instantly.

Join the waitlist 👇

9:50 PM, still working on @copycatnow. The day started at 7:30 AM. @colosseum, hope you're ready for what's coming.

Being a first mover has its advantages, but it doesn't guarantee you'll stay relevant in the long run. When Yahoo was already a giant, Google was barely an idea. Look at them now. MySpace was once one of the biggest social networks in the world. Gen Z barely even knows what it is. Those who come later can often reach greater heights because they don't have to create the path entirely on their own. Part of it is already there. As the second or third player in a market, you already have plenty of information about what those who came before you did right and what they did wrong. They had to hit the wall countless times, spend enormous resources iterating, experiment, fail, and try again before figuring out what works. If you're smart enough, a lot of those lessons are handed to you on a silver platter. The only thing you need is to be equally obsessed with your own product and with the products of your "competitors." But you should never really treat them as enemies or be hostile toward them. On the contrary, you should treat them as role models, sources of knowledge, and collections of lessons you can learn from. At @copycatnow, we take this seriously. We're inspired by fomo, Axiom, GMGN, and other projects that fall into a similar category. I don't think we're quite the same project as any of them, but our target audiences overlap, and the broader category, consumer crypto + trading, is similar enough that there's a lot we can learn from them. We've established different processes around this and try to learn from them every day. Of course, we're also learning from our own mistakes, iterations, experiments, and user feedback. That part is inevitable. But there's no reason to learn every lesson the hard way when someone else has already paid the price for learning it.

No cabals, only the Inner Circle. We don't practice dark arts. But trust me when I say: before long, you'll wish you had applied.

New chain, who dis

I haven't been this hyped since I came up with @renfter. It was 2022, and Renfter was a pretty novel concept at the time. NFTs were booming, projects were popping up everywhere, and somehow I managed to stumble upon something really cool. Renfter was the first uncollateralized NFT renting protocol. At least as I'm aware of. I don't claim that I invented NFT renting itself. reNFT was already on the market, but their first version relied on collateral. When I saw it, I remember thinking: okay, this can be done better. Collateral itself wasn't really enough of a guarantee that borrowers would return rented NFTs. So I started thinking more and more about how smart contracts could provide that guarantee instead, how you could rent an NFT to someone while still being sure that, no matter what, it remained yours. Around the same time, @ETHGlobal organized an online hackathon called NFT Hack. I built the proof of concept there in just one day. I didn't win any bounty or prize during the hackathon, but a few days later @TachyonXYZ, the accelerator by Consensys, reached out to me. They told me they had seen my project submission, thought it was really interesting, and encouraged me to apply for their upcoming cohort. So I did. And then I got rejected. Imagine my surprise :D But that wasn't the end of it. A few days after the rejection, they reached out again and told me they really liked the project and wanted to offer me a spot in the accelerator even though the cohort was already full. That meant I wouldn't receive the $100k investment like the other companies in the cohort, but I would still get everything else, the things I actually cared about: mentors, lectures, and, most importantly, the network. Of course, I said yes. That was enough of a signal for me. At the time, I already had a small team working on another project for months. I came in one day and told them we were putting that project on hold and dedicating all our resources to Renfter. Looking back, it was the right decision. Those were such crazy and fun times. In the early days of Renfter, investors were approaching us, and it was the first time I had ever experienced something like that. On the previous project, we were the ones chasing investors, doing cold outreach, trying to get introductions, and going through all the pain only founders know just to get a little bit of attention. With Renfter, it was the other way around. That's how interesting uncollateralized NFT renting was at the time. I worked on Renfter for about two years before eventually deciding to shut it down. We never actually raised any money. It was fully bootstrapped the entire time. The reason we didn't raise is also an interesting story, but that’s one for another time. Still, I learned an enormous amount from working on Renfter, about business in general, BD, marketing, fundraising, and most importantly, what it means to lead a team that trusted your initial vision through a major change in direction, then asking them to believe in your vision all over again for something completely new. And I intend to apply all of those lessons to Copycat now.

hello @arbitrum

Finally! During the Frontier hackathon, I’d see tens of @colosseum related posts like this every day. Really miss that energy this time around.

For the last two years, no matter how much I worked, I constantly felt unproductive and had to power through every day just to stay motivated. Since I started working on @copycatnow, my productivity has skyrocketed. I’m happier, more focused, and actually excited to work every day. Productivity isn’t always about working harder. Sometimes it’s about working on something you actually care about.

You can now trade stocks and pre-IPO tokens within @copycatnow And this is just one of many things we’ve been working on. A lot more is coming soon 🤗

A few months ago, during the Frontier hackathon, @colosseum posts were taking over X for the entire duration of the hackathon. They were everywhere. This time feels different. I barely see any, even though Colosseum went multichain. I honestly expected the opposite. Maybe it’s just the X algo that changed. Anyway, if you’re building something for Colosseum, feel free to share it below. It’s getting lonely here 😅

Congrats @zord4n and the team! Great things ahead 🚀