Happy Valentine's Day!

The memecoin for Changpeng Zhao’s dog, Broccoli, is soaring this morning and even Ethereum’s up slightly so far today. 

Though, admittedly, it’s perhaps a touch too early to hope for everything to come up roses this Friday. 

Either way, have a relaxing weekend and we’ll see you bright and early Monday.

— Katherine

🏗️ Building with purpose

You don’t need to understand it to use it. 

That’s Empire co-host Santiago Santos’ ideal situation in building Inversion Chain. 

Confused? Think about the 1990s. Businesses used “.com” and — outside of the somewhat ridiculous Homes.com commercial we saw during the Super Bowl — dot com isn’t really used anymore. If you don’t believe me — or Santos — bring it up to your local Gen Zer and you’ll quickly see how out of tune it is. 

Point being that the internet is just a part of doing business nowadays. And for Santos, crypto or crypto rails are following in the same path. He doesn’t need to market Inversion Chain to the masses. They won’t know of it unless they pay attention during transactions with potential projects like Helium. 

But let me back up: For you lot, my goal is to ensure you understand it — even if you don’t need to. 

Inversion Chain was announced by Santos this week, though he’s more or less been thinking about it since he left ParaFi over four years ago. Seven months ago, he started planning and now he’s hiring.

There isn’t a set timeline for launch just yet, though Santos told me the goal is “as soon as possible.” 

The L1 will be built on Avalanche because, as Santos noted, it’s one of the only places to truly customize the chain for specific use cases and support that covers the gambit. 

There are added bonuses, like permissioning your network at the validator, privacy, EVM compatibility and native interoperability as well.

Making his own chain was the clear path for Santos after looking around.

“Having our own chain lets us purposefully build a stack exactly to the specs of the businesses that we acquire and really allows us to go tailor-made,” he explained. “I believe in a multi-chain world.”

Right now, we’re not keeping users. As Santos pointed out to me, folks are coming on chain through an exchange with some sort of speculation in mind — and that’s not totally a bad thing, given that there’ll be room for speculation in crypto (just like there’s room for speculation in stocks), but the goal is to retain users and show them to use cases crypto has to offer. 

Which is where Santos hopes we end up, with people not having to think twice about the crypto of it all. 

“I think we’re selling ourselves short as an industry, and we can lead. The focus is very specific: You lead with a core service like mobile and FinTech — and when I say FinTech, it really is a stablecoin,” Santos explained. 

“My singular focus is to create an onboarding acquisition channel for the next 100, 200, 500 million users that will come onchain.”

Sounds pretty bullish to me.

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Six weeks until DAS NYC.

Big names. Big conversations. Big moves.

Mohamed El-Erian on the macro forces shaping global markets.
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One part of my conversation with Santos that we didn’t get to hit on above — and something he explained to co-host Jason Yanowitz on this morning’s Empire Round Up — was his idea of building Berkshire on-chain.

Santos explained that the analogy “would be what AOL did at the peak of the .com bubble. The stock was quite inflated, so what did they do? They go and acquire Time Warner, a real business,” he said.

“And I think the role [of] the foundations is to really accelerate the adoption of crypto, the uptake. I don't think they're being strategic enough. The opportunity here is to use, eventually, that Treasury value in a very strategic manner to go and acquire businesses and anchor them to the chain and activate that user base to come on chain,” he continued. 

If executed properly, then Santos thinks that the flywheel for the economic activity on that chain is one where you're going out and continuously acquiring more businesses, bringing on more users, and that generates” more and more activity. 

Bringing it back to Berkshire: For Santos it’s creating an operable base from which you can go and explore other ways to not only be profitable but also not be front and center for the userbase. 

If you’re not following along, think about how Warren Buffett does things (and put aside your thoughts about him from an anti-crypto perspective). He goes and finds potentially successful investments but it’s not like we necessarily interact with Berkshire itself on any given day as customers. 

They exist in the background, as necessary as your shadow.

And now you know. 

Outside of L1s, this was also a big week for token announcements. 

OpenSea teased SEA and a new platform, and Doodle’s plans to launch its own token. 

Does it mean that NFTs are back? Eh. But for The Drop’s Kate Irwin, it’s a vibes booster for people, one that’s perhaps necessary right now.

(ICYMI: The Drop is our newest newsletter, and I’ve been following Irwin’s reporting in Web3 and gaming for a few years now.)

She and I chatted about the tokens and OpenSea’s OS2 and she explained that there’s another part to this: XP, which is not a token but is earnable and is “core” to the OS2 rewards program. 

“There's a lot of other moving pieces as well, besides just the token, which is exciting, because then it's not a memecoin. It's actually a utility token that has a place in the OpenSea ecosystem,” she added. 

Phew. Nice to have an announcement not focused on memecoins.

My big thing is whether or not this comes a little too late. When Irwin and I chatted this through, she made the sage point that this could be simply because OpenSea was worried about the potential regulatory issues that could arise (they were served with a Wells notice after all) and now, well, that’s no longer a problem.

But, unfortunately for OpenSea, they are following in Magic Eden’s footsteps after it launched a token first. It, notably, hasn’t dulled the excitement around OS2 or SEA though. 

This could also be the beginning of a new wave of tokens, Irwin noted — especially because there is an appetite for tokens that have actual utility and not just speculation.

Last week, we asked if we’ve moved past Operation Chokepoint 2.0 and 50% of you have. We respect the one vote for “I will continue to hold a grudge.”

This week we’re wondering: