🦐 what in the cinnamon crunch
ca$h me in the metaverse
You are cordially invited to this week’s brew of High Tea, your dispatch of 🔥 internet culture served piping hot. This week: clout chasing for crypto, NFTeases and cash us outside in the Suez Canal.
Drink up! 🐸☕️
“BIRTH OF BHABIE” by Serwah
p.s. if you’re not a paid subscriber, here’s what you missed from this week’s Bucks Fizz: our Thursday dispatch covering the best of TikTok’s unsigned and emerging talent.
🥂 Mike Posner, Charli XCX & Lily Williams
what we’ve been sipping on:
📈 Clout chasers welcome
Drum roll pls folks: there’s a new asset class in town. Ever discovered a creator before they blew up, but only have a couple of bookmarked tweets and TikToks to prove it? 🙋♀️ Now you can flaunt your badge of honor with BitClout, the new type of social network that allows you to buy into a creator’s potential via Creator Coins, a new crypto asset on its own custom blockchain directly tied to their reputation in the zeitgeist – did you get all that? Phew. For example, Kim K has her own coin (although she hasn’t claimed it yet, but we think she should) and the value will rise and fall in relation to her cultural relevance. And it’s not just Kim, the top 15,000 Twitter profiles have been uploaded to the platform, so even without the bigwigs knowing or caring, people are trading their worth online.
With BitClout on the blockchain, the difference is consumers can prove they were a superfan, long before their faves became a hot commodity. Imagine also the benefits for big time creators: they gain immediate visibility into their earliest stans (those with the largest amounts of their coin) and can reward them for their support. Ofc, it would be amiss for us not to highlight how some are incredibly wary of BitClout’s launch, especially in the way it asks for ‘forgiveness not permission’ to upload creators to its pseudo stock market, plus the way BitClout can only be paid for using BTC, and once users put their money in, there is no way to swap it back yet – awk. BUT despite the initial launch kinks we think this is a huge development in the creator economy space. One 👏 to 👏 watch 👏
👶 ETH ME OUTSIDE
My name Bhad Bhabie, bitch
Who is you?
If you were somewhat absent from the golden era of internet circa late 2016-17, you might have missed the birth of one of the biggest memes of the last decade, courtesy of one Danielle Bregoli. TL;DR then 13-year-old Danielle appeared on an episode of Dr Phil, coining her trademark phrase: “cash me outside, how bout that”. Following the entry of the now infamous meme into the zeitgeist hall of fame (2017’s most searched meme according to Google), Danielle was signed to Atlantic Records in 2017 as Bhad Bhabie, becoming the youngest female rap artist to debut on the Billboard Hot 100.
“ALIEN BHABIE” by Harriet Davey (via ethmeoutside.com/)
2 billion streams later, a cash me outside retrospective has landed to coincide with Danielle’s 18th birthday (yep, we feel ancient too). “ETH Me Outside” is a week-long NFT drop, in partnership with Flue Block Arts, happening across 3 platforms with the promise to “own a piece of internet history”. Claiming to be “the biggest meme ever auctioned as an NFT”, Bhad Bhabie’s collection is the latest drop in the ‘meme economy’ space, following the sale of Chris Torres’ “Nyan Cat” last month, for 300 ETH (~$590,000 at the time).
🦄 Rec Room to the moon!
Yes folks, you didn’t think we could go this dispatch without mentioning it did you 🐸☕️? This week, Rec Room announced its recent $100M funding round, making it one of the first VR platforms to hit unicorn status at a $1.2B valuation (!). Growing rapidly even before shelter in place, the gaming platform now boasts a 566 percent increase in revenue and over 1 million monthly active VR users, joining the likes of Roblox and Minecraft in stealing the hearts and the eyeballs of Gen Alpha and Zs. Oh and ICYMI, Rec Room is a career now (a la Roblox) and we can’t wait to see just how it engages its creators on the platform to support their growing in-game economy.
🚢 Miss boat, are you okay?
You already know it’s been *a week*. Like, a container ship longer than the Eiffel Tower getting stuck in the Suez Canal kinda week. And yes, we’re all thinking of that three-point turn scene from Austin Powers. Don’t @ us. If you can’t quite grasp the absolute enormity of the task to free the Ever Given vessel, let us help: we’re talking about a 220,000-ton ship blocking $7bn of goods per day from passing through the Suez. Yes, that’s 12% of global trade passing through a 120m canal. Help.
If that wasn’t bad enough, now there’s a traffic jam in the Red Sea of more than 150 huge shipping vessels, carrying everything from live cargo to crude oil, with no definite end in sight. Memes ofc have been a plenty, but our winning submission is High Tea fave and TikTok celebrity, Sophia Smith Galer with her Suez sea shanty, which has already blown up on TikTok with 2.1 million views in 24 hours:
🎤 Call me when you want, call me when you need
“I spent my entire teenage years hating myself because of the shit y’all preached would happen to me because I was gay. So I hope u are mad, stay mad, feel the same anger you teach us to have towards ourselves.” – Lil Nas X
If you’ve been MIA from the internet this week then you’re forgiven for missing the phenomenal release of “MONTERO (Call Me By Your Name)” by Lil Nas X, becoming his fastest song to hit one million likes on YouTube and securing #1 on iTunes and #2 on the US Spotify Chart. You also might have missed Addison Rae’s debut on Jimmy Fallon. Did someone say...lip sync? We can’t possibly comment without our legal team present. But, we do like to comment on music and TikTok...a lot. Subscribe to our Bucks Fizz newsletter here.
Okay, you made it, now you can join us in obsessing over this masterpiece:
ttyl,