Howdy!

We’re watching Berkshire Hathaway’s annual meeting in the office, and Warren Buffett is sitting up there with not one, but two cans of Coca-Cola. Don’t ever let the health overlords kill your vibe.

Today, we’ve got XP’s raise, DeGods selling off, and 10K’s launch:

Solana ticketing platform XP raises $6.2M

XP, a ticketing resale exchange built with Solana rails, has raised $6.2 million in a seed round led by Blockchange, the platform tells Lightspeed exclusively.

L1D and Reflexive also participated in the round. XP uses Solana rails for discounted ticket sales, but hints at grander ambitions surrounding fan experience down the road. 

XP is one of a number of upstart ticketing exchanges seeking to disrupt the popular but widely-disliked incumbents such as TicketMaster and SeatGeek. These ticketing titans caught the ire of the Biden administration, which just had a rule banning hidden so-called junk fees from ticketing platforms go into effect on Monday.

XP lists all-in prices by default. Its listed prices for tickets to upcoming New York Mets games roughly track with prices on TickPick, another popular resale ticketing app.

The Solana of it all comes from the ticketing codes, which are encrypted as NFTs. You wouldn’t know that from browsing the website, though — the only apparent crypto mention is the option to connect a crypto wallet and pay for tickets in USDC.

“XP has sold millions of dollars in annualized ticket sales to thousands of customers,” XP founder and CEO Mike Saunders said when I asked about the platform’s traction. He did not give a firm answer when I asked if XP would be launching a token.

Saunders has been around the block: His 1990s food ordering and menu website company was acquired by GrubHub in 2011. Saunders went on to found a tech development shop named Blueprint before starting XP, which is his first foray into blockchain. 

I actually met Saunders briefly at the Solana Boston conference in October, where I recall him saying he thinks about his startup constantly and obsessively. 

But whether all that thinking creates venture-scale returns following this fundraise may depend on XP’s coming expansion. Ticketing marketplaces are a crowded field, and with the Biden junk fees rule in effect, transparent pricing may become a bit less of a selling point. 

On its site, XP teases that the platform will soon be about “more” than just tickets. Saunders also added that XP has plans in the works for users to be able to list and resell their own tickets. 

“Fandom is deeply personal, and we believe blockchain unlocks a whole slew of opportunities for fans to be recognized, celebrated and rewarded,” Saunders said. “Our goal is to leverage verified fandom to provide access to special rewards, epic experiences and exclusive perks to members of the XP community.”

— Jack Kubinec

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A Month and a Half Out. The Most Important Builders in Crypto Are Headed to Brooklyn.

Permissionless IV is for the people, the teams shipping at the core of crypto’s next phase. Infra, stable primitives, real-world products.

Some of the world class founders and builders joining us in June:

• Keone Hon (Monad) pushing parallelized performance

• Guy Young (Ethena) redefining synthetic dollars

• Hayden Adams (Uniswap) still shipping at scale

• Uma Roy (Succinct) making ZK actually usable
  

June 24-26 | Brooklyn, NY

To be Frank, there’s a lot of selling going on over at DeGods:

The Solana NFT collection’s CEO — who has had an eventful past few months — announced he would be stepping down in an X post Monday.

There has been an 87% increase in the number of sales transactions over the past week, according to CryptoSlam.

— Jack Kubinec

10K just launched on Solana. The pitch: Get paid to watch short videos.

According to founder Alex Masmej, creators must raise a $10K presale. If successful, this unlocks a watch-to-earn coin that distributes 60% of its supply to viewers across their first 100 videos. Airdrops are time-gated and equally split among those who finish a video in the first 24 hours.

If you've been around a while, you'll recognize this as a fresh take on the attention economy. 10K's model revives a long-promised crypto use case, that being "earn-to-do-something.” Many such projects sort of fell by the wayside a few years back as we shifted away from utility plays and more toward the fairytale vibes-equal-value fever dream we currently find ourselves in.

But utility is making a comeback, and 10K joins a rising crop of apps reframing crypto as a background rewards layer rather than the product itself.

Takeaway: The challenge, as always, is sybil resistance. Watch-to-earn schemes have come and gone many times over crypto's history, usually collapsing due to an over-representation of bot engagement. But with proof-of-humanity networks gaining traction, engagement and attention projects might finally have a shot at real viability. To be clear, however, there is no indication that 10K has implemented any such measures.

— Jeffrey Albus

A message from Sebastian Kühne, co-founder and CMO of Phase Labs: