Snapchat plus
Snapchat announced a premium version of Snapchat that will be giving early access to new features, as well other perks. This is another iteration of the same idea that pops up every couple of years. Twitter Blue is another attempt here. This offering has a bit more social FOMO than Twitter Blue, which goes largely unused on my end and would be canceled except for the $3 price point. Among the perks of Snapchat premium include nominating a ‘BFF’ and being able to see who rewatched your stories. I give them credit – at a certain age, I would have cared a fair bit about those sorts of features. This is a much more compelling offering than Twitter Blue.
Yet, as I have written about a few times, these ideas inevitably fall short. If the feature is compelling, the logic of extending it to all users to drive engagement seems like the right one. TikTok, Youtube, and Instagram all compete aggressively with Snapchat. If the features aren’t compelling, the offering has little value (which is the compromise that Twitter Blue seems to have arrived at). A few dollars a month price point is not enough to build a meaningful business for a core group of die-hards, nor is it enough to replace advertising revenue. I do think this idea makes more sense than Twitter blue, I could see the younger Snapchat audience FOMO’ing into subscribing, but I am skeptical of subscription social media. Subscription social businesses need to charge much more – like Soho House or Equinox.
SoLend debacle
Behind the curtain of the crypto price run-up, we are now learning that a lot of the action was driven by leverage in the system. Multiple lenders like Celsius are in dire straits. Those entities can at least attempt to negotiate with creditors, form plans, and freeze withdrawals. Decentralized protocols operating without human oversight have no such option. One protocol, SoLend, has a loan out that could threaten the entire Solana lending ecosystem. A prudent company would not have gotten to this point, but this protocol has now introduced systemic risk to the ecosystem.
One option would be to hope for the best and pray the price never reaches the automatic liquidation level. Another option would be to mutiny and override the code. The DAO running this protocol initially voted to seize the funds to execute a more orderly liquidation. The DAO later voted again and overturned the controversial decision.
This is egregious because it touches the very core of ‘Why Crypto’. Supposedly, you and you alone own your coins, your keys, and your decisions. While the precedent was quickly unwound, that no longer appears to be the case. Paired with last week’s DAO reneging, one has to wonder what sort of property rights actually exist in crypto. I suspect declining yields will hurt DeFi more than this in the short term, but the libertarian ethos of the bull run is folding under pressure.