#357: Boys Club's ETHDenver Event
PLUS: 💵 Branded stablecoins, Polymarket integrations
Boys Club's ETHDenver Event
Conference season has kicked off again, with NFT Paris underway this week and Consensus Hong Kong next week.
The North American circuit kicks off with ETHDenver in a couple of weeks (I’ll be there so holler if you want to meet up!) and the event invitations and Luma pages are flying around in group chats.
One event has taken a different approach to promoting their event though: Boys Club.
What’s Boys Club? It’s a startup founded in 2021 focused on bringing more women into crypto and web3 through events, content, and other activations with a healthy dose of humor and attitude.
While doing research for ETHDenver side events and RSVPing to dozens of them, I came across the Boys Club’s ETHDenver event, Tradwife Prom.
As you can tell, they do things differently and in a good way! Instead of providing a direct link to the event page, the thread directs prospective attendees to their website, boysclub.vip.
When I went to their website, I had a mix of emotions: surprise, amusement, and admiration. Their website was a GOOGLE DOC. Literally, and I loved it!
In a world of beautiful websites and no-code or AI website builders, Boys Club took a completely different approach to stand out.
Using the ETHDenver event as a hook
The Tradwife Prom event was a hook, bringing people to the website. And once they arrived, they probably did a lot more than click on the RSVP link.
Instead of viewing the page as just a transactional experience of signing up for an event, people who landed on the page took more time to learn about Boys Club with a chuckle or two.
Interactivity
Users can interact with the website through comments as a way to provide direct feedback and suggest improvements. For example, Zeynep added an industry-relevant meme (IYKYK) to the bottom of the page.
Comments are cleared at the end of every day to keep the site from getting too cluttered.
This wouldn’t work for everyone
Obviously, this isn’t something a Fortune 500 company like Coinbase would do nor would it work as effectively, but it is something for startups to consider when promoting themselves or their events.
There are hundreds of side events at every conference vying for attention and attendance. Free drinks and swag just don’t cut it anymore, and if executed well, the event page can be much more than just an event page.
Branded Stablecoins
The other day I came across an idea from Marty about the concept of ‘branded stablecoins’ that made me go 💡
At first glance, it sounds crazy, right? Fortunately Marty explains the idea in some more detail, with Taylor Swift as an example. And with a more pro-crypto administration the idea is not as far-fetched as it sounds.
If these branded stablecoins are pegged to the US dollar, they are 1 to 1 in value, unlike many digital assets we see today. 1 SWIFT = 1 USD.
What gets interesting is how it can be applied in a way that’s win-win for the consumer and the brand it’s associated with:
Users can earn yield (eg: Coinbase offers 4.1% for USDC) in the form of points within the brand stablecoin’s ecosystem
Certain products or access can be purchased with the branded stablecoin
Partnerships become more flexible, permissionless, and open. Users can redeem one branded stablecoin for another, receive cobranded incentives, or redeem cobranded promotions. This is already happening with the largest loyalty ecosystems and brands such as Doordash x Lyft, Uber x Delta, and more. As huge of a brand as Taylor Swift is, she doesn’t have the financial infrastructure to execute these partnerships the same way a company can. A SWIFT branded stablecoin changes the potential for that.
We’ve seen celebrities shoot their
shotgrift with celebrity memecoins, leaving a bad taste in our mouths. Branded stablecoins provide an alternate path that maintains trust while engaging fan bases in a different way that isn’t extractive or full of scams.Brands (especially smaller ones + celebrities) that don’t have loyalty programs will gain a new dimension of data that wasn’t available before to understand financial habits and behaviors
These concepts have been something I’ve pondered on for some time, and branded stablecoins may be a stepping stone for an open loyalty economy to become a reality.
And for those who are more skeptical of the idea, they’ve been around for decades, just in a different form factor: Gift cards.
Gift cards are essentially branded stablecoins. You redeem government-issued dollars for brand-issued Amazon, Apple, or Starbucks dollars physically or digitally. Why can’t this expand in a way that allows smaller brands or even people to do the same?
Polymarket continues to stay relevant
Although I haven’t been following them as closely since the US Presidential election a few months ago, I saw Polymarket markets while browsing the internet twice this week.
Deepnewz
The first time was on the AI-enhanced news site DeepNewz. Prediction markets show up at the bottom of each article with topics relevant to the article. For example, with an article on GameStop considering purchasing Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, several prediction markets on whether or not different companies will purchase Bitcoin by a certain date.
Meanwhile, as the news cycle is flooded with headlines about DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency) and its cost-cutting efforts, I came across a website tracking DOGE’s efforts and translating them in a quantifiable manner.
Right under the main dashboard, we see Polymarket prediction markets pop up 👀
I assume the Polymarket team is striking deals with these sites behind the scenes in an effort to acquire new users and stay top of mind, on top of their previously announced partnerships with Substack and Perplexity, so kudos to them. The advantage of these integrations is that they’re ads, but don’t feel like them.
And despite the expected dropoff in activity post-election, Polymarket seems to be transitioning into an evergreen platform with help from these partnership efforts.
See you next week!