Hey everyone!

I just wanted to thank the community for coming together to participate in the higherrrrrrr launch. The team really appreciates your support and excitement.

Here’s what we’re building:

History of Higherrrrrrr

I started chewing on this idea when a group of friends approached me with the idea for HARDER. I was tied up at the time so only hacked on it for like a weekend. Seemed like a pretty good meme, but at the time there wasn’t open source stuff on bonding curves and fair launch mechanics so the build was more than a couple of days.

Recently I had more free time so I circled back on the idea. The concept of a single meme turned into an idea for a whole new protocol and platform where we could make memes dynamic and evolutionary. The analogy would be going from static images to gifs. The design space significantly expands when you and evolutions.

I started working on it about two weeks ago (yes only two weeks). Threw up that lander and viral marketing campaign and it hit a chord. People didn’t know what we were building, but they were excited.

The way I build is just to put things out into the world and ship as fast as I can to get feedback, so that’s what we did. Over the past week and a half we authored the protocol, built a team and community, had tons of people visit our web properties, wrote about the importance of this form of social organization, and had fun making a lot of memes. To build the right product long term, I need to feel it out in users hands. I have a long history as an engineer and founder both inside and outside of crypto, having worked at coinbase and worked on a bunch of startups. I bias just towards shipping imperfect software, so the launch that happened on Tuesday was just that. Imperfect, but got the kernel of what this is down.

In terms of building, I spent *a lot* of time getting the protocol right. Working on security, understanding the incentives and mechanisms, writing thousands on thousands of lines of solidity. The app that we built on top of it actually has only come together over the second half of this last week (about 12 hours of sprinting to get something basic done), and there’s still a lot to be desired. That's what we’re working on next along with figuring out how to ace viral marketing mechanics to push these coins higherrrrrr.

Where we are today

We have the following:

• Brand new onchain primitive for dynamic and evolutionary memes

• Pushed through millions of dollars in volume on our protocol, and 10s of millions of volume on the uni pools these tokens trade on

• Web app that has become more stable over the last 24 hours

• Web properties that have generated millions of views

• Thousands of community members and traders, including hundreds that belive in the technology

• Team of strong crypto OGs advising the project (coinbase, large L2s etc), including me pushing the product

• Good demonstration tokens

All of this was done in under 10 days. We’re just getting started and we’re going to keep shipping faster to bring more features and attention to the product. If there’s one thing I do really well it’s ship fast, and I hope I’ve demonstrated that.

The way I like to think of launches like this is that there’s a ton of hype, and you usually end up settling somewhere below the peak expectation. That settle point is roughly equivalent to the substance you bring. We have a lot of substance. A net new onchain primitive. A community of thousands.

Where we’re going

This is a brand new design space for memes. There isn’t another project like it on any blockchain. That uniqueness will make it prone to being misunderstood, but it’s also powerful because once people get it, it will really fly. There are a ton of builders excited about what we’ve built. There are also some haters. That’s natural.

The thing I’m most concerned with now is improving the platform in two ways:

1. The social layer, how do we effectively promote these tokens through the community and empower creators with the right tools to make that happen (ie imagine if every token on the platform could have that viral moment we had at the very start)

2. The trading experience - just getting us to par or better than the other meme platforms. We want to be the best meme coin trading platform on base.

Base had the most inflows ever today, and we’re going to be the marque platform for memes on base

I’m going to ship extremely fast to help make this happen. I think that a tech-enabled approach to the social layer, starting with $HARDER as our test token is a good one. We need to communicate to a broader audience through our community what this is. This is things like farcaster integrations, AI bots for creating tokens, viral marketing mechanics. We’ve only just started scratching the surface.

We want your input, so we’re opening up our roadmap to suggestions from the community. You can add suggestions and input here:

In no particular order, here’s some of what we’re looking to add:

• AI Bot for Deploying Coins

• Better Share Cards

• Farcaster Frames

• Image Evolutions

• Image Support

• Sentiment Analysis

• Cross-Chain Liquidity to add more traders

• Conviction NFTs for Non-Higherrrrrr Assets

• Support Trading Other Base Meme Coins

• Community Driven Development

• Live Chat on Trade Page

• Telegram Bots

• Capsule (MPC) Wallet Support for google OAuth signon

Rough timeline on completion for these things is middle of December. In the meantime we’ll be shipping new social mechanics that promote the tokens currently on platform and engaging creators. We’re going higherrrrrr and we’re excited for you to join us!

Questions

Aren’t there haters?

Of course.

I just told an ecosystem built on VC funding and KOLs that I don’t need them and that we can just do it with just the community. The hate (and FUD) mostly comes from jealously. 99.9% of VCs and KOLs couldn’t execute on something like this the way we have. They wish they could, and they’re scared that we can do it without them. They don’t want us to, and it’s our job to prove them wrong. It’s a privilege to be able to ship like this. Fuck the haters.

What’s going on with $HARDER prices?

It’s consolidating and finding a bottom after an initial launch spike. There are a ton of builders and true believers that are bought into the token that aren’t selling. The floor is where the faith is, and there’s a lot of faith in this project. If it goes lower, just a better entrance point to buy. It’s one of the greatest onchain memes on the market right now.

How was the $HARDER CA leaked?

The honest answer is I don’t know. I gave some of the core team access to the platform before launch to do some quick QA and I’m guessing it was one of them. I couldn’t really control that it leaked but I could control my reaction. This was the first I knew about it:

When I saw that message 5 minutes later, as soon as I knew the price was moving, I tweeted it so that the launch could be as fair as possible:

It definitely wasn’t me buying, but this optic will hurt us long-term. I’m sorry. I should have just kept the keys to myself until everything was trading. I thought it was ok to trust the folks helping. I’m actually cutting what I consider and share with the “core“ team down to just a handful of people now so that this doesn’t happen again.