Messari Daily Brief Jan. 29, 2021 - User-Generated Capital

The past couple of days have been…weird. Fred Wilson called it the revenge of retail. CNBC has become a complete clown car. Some of the world’s richest men are overnight nouveau populists (e.g. Chamath), Dogecoin rallied 8x in a day for the memes, and there’s suddenly a feeling that maybe the “institutions" aren’t as smart as they think they are. After all, the smart money sure has missed a lot recently.

They missed COVID. They missed Tesla. They’ve missed crypto. They forgot to make sure their short positions couldn’t be easily cornered. They underestimated retail sentiment shifts and populist anger. Basically, the smart money continues to miss exponentials, while getting paid 2/20 for picking up pennies in front of steamrollers - beating the market by 200 bps sometimes, then going bankrupt amidst volatility.

The crowds continue to outperform expectations, and I still think they are underestimated.

That brings me to two points. First, I’d encourage emerging analysts to escape their living hells of tradfi and apply to our community analyst program, which has been Messari's exclusive pool of candidates for full-time hires and contractors recently, and proven to be a career accelerant for those who've used it as a platform to spring into other killer jobs throughout crypto. We have a lot in store for this program, and this community will set the standard for producing high-quality crypto research that wildly outperforms any new legacy finance entrants that think they’ve got it all figured out.

Second, I angel invested in Roll this fall, a platform for creating social monies, and something Bradley Miles (the founder) calls “user-generated capital.” Mason wrote about the value capture of social tokens earlier this week, and we wanted to have Bradley share his thoughts in this companion piece. User-generated capital is an emerging category that uses social money, NFTs, and DeFi as a way to grow the creator economy, and further decentralizes how talent is identified, incentivized, and rewarded. A lot of the ideas Bradley shares are sparks, and I’m fairly certain UGC will play a major role in further tilting the balance of power from corrupted institutions to more reliable individuals.

Here’s Bradley’s piece (and a summary below).

Have a great weekend!

Headlines that matter:

• INTEL: Alpha, Cardano, YFI, Cosmos, KEEP, Ethereum Classic, Filecoin (+10 updates)
• Coinbase announced proposed direct listing
• Robinhood gets $1billion in emergency funding from investors
• Grayscale files for DOT, AAVE, XMR, ATOM, EOS, and ADA trusts (Decrypt)
• Elon puts bitcoin in his twitter bio. Market spikes.
• Blockfolio launches zero-fee trading powered by FTX (The Block)
• Facebook’s Diem processes 50 million test transactions (Decrypt)
• Ray Dalio warms to bitcoin (Bridgewater)
• Inbound interest has been off the charts: Community Analyst Application
• Daily Shade: The Winklevii went on a rampage yeterday.