People are looking to brands for the sense of belonging, identity, and meaning that we used to look to religion for. But today’s brands have not stepped up to meet that demand, and largely continue to just focus on selling goods.

There is a huge opportunity for brands to move beyond commerce, merge with culture, and become social networks.

This is the future @slow_rodeo is building towards, and they’ve been calling them Full Stack Brands. I like that.

With the cost of content and software creation trending to zero, increasingly useful open social graphs and protocols, and the new value capturing properties of tokens, these brands will be able to serve their communities in shockingly expansive ways, and be more valuable than the brands that have come before.

The dominant brands of the future will be conglomerations of culture-infused social networks, banks, production houses, product studios, fashion houses, etc. All bundled together in a way that uniquely serves their type of person.

Trad brands will not be able to compete with the sense of belonging that Full Stack Brands will provide.

What do we mean when we say consumer crypto projects need to be strongly memetic?

We mean there’s a big viral idea at their core. The idea can be technological, cultural, or ideological, but it needs to be something a large group of people care about, believe the project can execute on, and want to participate in.

This has always been true of consumer products, but its importance is exaggerated in crypto due to the guiding light of ownership opportunities. No meme, no attention, no token demand.

A few examples:

Bitcoin - Digital Gold
Uniswap - DEXs
ArtBlocks - Generative Art
Zora - Onchain Media
WIF - Solana Mascot
Cabin - Network States

Pure mimetic value will only carry a project so far of course, and it needs to be followed up with products and experiences that reinforce it. But it’s important for attracting early attention and a critical prerequisite for points systems or tokens to be effective.

We’re moving from the “make something people want” era of the internet, to the “make something people want to be a part of” era. And memes will play a critical role in deciding new winners.