The goal of this series is to explain what Higher is and how to participate in it. Below is a history of the project so far, 50 days in. I don’t consider myself a skilled writer, so I’d appreciate your feedback, and will be editing & improving this post as I go.

A Headless Brand

Higher is a lifestyle, an optimistic mindset, a brand being built in real time by hundreds of people on the internet. The word itself was used in crypto for some time, but the idea that “Higher” could be something bigger was kickstarted by LGHT in March. He explains his realizations around the word here.

LGHT created the arrow logo and the /higher Farcaster channel, after a suggestion from Jacob that the unicode arrow (↑) could be the symbol for “higher”. He then made a few memes in this collection.

A week later, I (Martin) created the token $higher (often stylized as ↑HIGHER) on Base. Candidly, I don’t remember exactly why I did it. Mostly, I thought it would be fun, and I thought there was something special about the “higher” meme, especially because I felt extremely bullish on crypto in that instant. I felt like /higher was a better version of /bullposting (my favorite channel at that time) and that a thoughtful, self-referential optimistic token could be compelling in a bull market.

I airdropped half of the supply to members of the Farcaster channel, and put the rest in LP. I used the Tokepad platform for this, and they received 5% of the token as a result. They’ve become great partners, providing additional liquidity and donating 3,000,000 ↑higher to the Higher Collective (more on that later). One downside of using Tokepad at that time is that liquidity was locked (a standard token launching practice) in RocketSwap, which unfortunately is not the most popular DEX on Base. (I believe Tokepad launched before Uniswap even deployed on Base, which is why it was connected to RocketSwap at the time).

The first 48 hours were crazy. There was a lot of spam and bots. But also a sort of creative explosion: the community began exploring what “higher” could be, what it could mean, and how the token might fit into it all. It was clear though that a very real community was being built in /higher.

Very quickly, the community realized talking about the token price would not be conducive to a healthy channel, and started pointing conversations in a different direction. People started making art & memes around higher, primarily using the arrow on top of images became the default “meme”.

Early community members realized that having only the initial liquidity in Rocketswap only would be harmful, and created the Higher Collective on Party to fundraise for increased liquidity. The idea was to fundraise by selling memberships into the Collective, with the resulting ETH being used to 1. Buy ↑HIGHER 2. Provide liquidity 3. Give out grants. The first membership sale surprisingly raised 20 ETH (~$70,000) in a few days. Soon after, Zora launched Based Zorb, with a 60% split to the collective, bringing the wallet another 25 ETH, which was swapped into ↑higher over a few weeks.

Today, the Higher Collective is almost like a mini-DAO, a group of community members focused on growing Higher as a brand and supporting its ecosystem contributors. The wallet holds around $310,000 of assets, despite only raising a quarter of that initially. It also serves as a way to create iconic mints in the Higher community, starting with “Higher, Together”

So what is Higher, really?

Higher is building a new brand, like Nike or Supreme, but in a way where no one truly owns the brand and everyone is encouraged to contribute. A traditional brand controls how people use it, its “official” logos, licenses, etc. You cannot make a Nike t-shirt: they’ll sue you for using their logo. Meanwhile, Higher is built in the spirit of CC0. It’s freely available for anyone to use, just like flags or brands like Bitcoin. You can use them however you want: no one can sue you for using the American flag or using an “unofficial” Bitcoin logo. Everything is official and unofficial. If you’re curious, check out Headless Brands to learn more.

Higher is a community experiment in building a brand together. Especially on Farcaster, contributors are continuously sharing new ideas, remixing each other’s work, building together in a way where everybody can win together.

↑HIGHER is a memecoin, similar to tokens like $WIF or $PEPE: they don’t represent any centralized entity, they don’t have any governance, there is no vesting or official team. The token was fully, fairly deployed at launch and no one has any control on the contract. There is no team.

So why would someone buy ↑HIGHER? To speculate on the meme’s future, yes, but also to participate in the network. The token is a tangible currency for incentivizing contributors and growing the Higher network. For example, artists have created NFTs (like Ripe’s Optimists) and open editions sold in ↑HIGHER, which serves a double purpose: limiting participation to participants of the network (token holders) and growing their own stack of ↑HIGHER.

The Higher Collective is also giving out grants for contributions in ↑HIGHER, incentivizing community participation and a long-term mindset. These all shift the mindset from “how can I buy and sell this token” to “how can I earn a stake in this community”. It would be a huge win for Higher if most participants earned their way into the community, rather than buying into it.

Further reading:

• Left-Curving DAOs and Higher??? by LGHT

• What happens when the creative class make their own currencies? by James Beck

• Headless Brands by Other Internet

I hope you enjoyed this. I’ll be sharing Part 2 (“How do I participate?”) shortly.