step 1: get milked by users.
step 2: get milked by apps.
when your infra serves no unique purpose, the apps have all the leverage. your desperation becomes their springboard.
see etherfi x @Scroll_ZKP , or kast x @movement_xyz
continuing this bd strategy is false hope
name a single structural reason any of these chains need to exist in 2026:
monad, berachain, megaeth, abstract, scroll, movement, sophon... & 50 more.
i'll wait.
We're hiring for a research & writing role at Sophon Labs.
The job: go deep on crypto, DeFi, AI, and consumer finance, form real opinions, and turn them into content that shapes how we build and how the world sees what we're building.
If interested, send us something you've written sophon-labs.notion.site/Stra…
ecosystem farming is a graveyard.
funding hobby projects and outsourcing pmf to others is an irresponsible business strategy. the teams running this playbook know it.
we stopped pretending 9 months ago.
if your first question as a founder is 'which chain', your second question is going to be 'why am i out of runway'
what you need: users, distribution, talent, liquidity, revenue.
a portal? a new vm? not on the list.
The next era belongs to chains that operate more like product companies than protocols.
Ecosystem growth models worked when infrastructure was scarce.
Now infrastructure is abundant, and attention isn’t.
2026 will be different.
BREAKING: @Sophon laid off half the team, currently slow rugging millions of money, token is down bad, and the team is on their 5th pivot.
here's what the founder said in 2025 vs now.
This couldn’t be farther from the truth.
Yes we let people go - their roles weren’t necessary or performance wasn’t meeting expectations. In addition we've recognized our gaps & have hired a pretty world class consumer team, which everyone will hear more about soon too.
And yes we’ve been quiet (too quiet I admit) as we’ve been very heads down building some new products.
I realise for investors it’s scary and feels like a rug, but this is not the case. Just been building quietly, that’s simply the truth.
In a few weeks you can expect to hear from us and discover Sophon 2.0 and new products we’ve built.
All I can say for now is that I think general blockchain ecosystems are cooked and all of them struggle to find pmf, so last year in Q4 we decided to take matters into our own hands and build consumer products ourselves we think are useful (hence the team headcount reduction).
Products are coming, top talent has joined, Sophon will be reborn.
What is new media?
Tomorrow we're joined by @pukerrainbrow to deep dive into how founders, creators, and brands are rewriting distribution and owning attention in 2026.
2pm UTC live on 𝕏