Turning up every day
“One must be serious about something, if one wants to have any amusement in life.”
― Oscar Wilde, John Cooper, The Importance of Being Earnest
We launched Cakes On Solana back in April 2024. We were still at the start of the memecoin boom on Solana. We didn’t know that at the time though. We, like many others, felt like we were towards the end of the memecoin cycle at that stage. We were exhausted by the volume of completely meaningless tokens as were many others. Oh how naive we were back then!
It would be wrong to say things only got worse from that point onwards. Whilst the meaningless drivel being launched/vomited up on chain has well over 1000x from that point onwards, the tools are far better than they were before and it feels less overwhelming. It’s still not long term sustainable but it’s becoming less unsustainable over time and we think this trend will continue.
What hasn’t changed is the reasons we launched Cakes On Solana. We saw the tools that had been built and were being built and KNEW that starting a project would never be the same again. On chain projects are more frictionless and more transparent than anything else in human history.
That doesn’t mean they’re automatically good of course. In fact it means even more terrible ideas can see the light of day….which also means we’re going to end up with a heap more good ideas.
We just have to get more smart and interesting people trying things rather than the average “founder” in crypto or on Solana today.
We set out to try and build something that wasn’t anything like your average memecoin project. We wanted something that was both easy to get started and easy to build but also leaned away from the most successful design patterns that were repulsing every ‘new to crypto’ person we met.
The ‘degen culture’ has stunted Solana’s growth massively. A lot of “users” are fake.
Most volume is driven by a handful of professional operations running out of high fraud risk countries.
This is why scams are off the charts. The worst people in the world showed up on chain and mostly on Solana. Normally blocked from web2 apps and platforms to protect legit users, on chain apps and commerce have opened the door not to the unbanked but rather the world’s worst fraudsters and fraud driven cultures. Countries whose wrecked economies have resulted in dog-eat-dog societies have flooded on chain chasing both handouts via incentive schemes/grants and wealthy targets to defraud. The hunting has been good. REALLY good.
This is why volume is a mask. It’s largely volume (and users) that no one wants.
This is why we say Solana’s growth has been impacted negatively. No one can see the missed opportunities in the metrics.
You can’t see the legit users who were curious, looked inside, saw bulk spam and fraud, and went “no way”.
You just can’t accurately assess the good users and volume you didn’t get.
More and more though you can see the penny dropping for people in the Solana eco. They can’t defend metrics as sustainable if we’re seeing user numbers continually evaporate into thin air once the handouts dry up. Companies like Uber spent billions in subsiding rides to recurring revenue from long term customers. Crypto in comparison is spending a 1000 dollars to onboard 10c of recurring revenue from legit users. Sometimes it’s 1c.
It’s not a volume game; it’s a quality game. Crypto thought the “old rules” of UA (user acquisition) didn’t apply to them. They’ve been proved devastatingly wrong.
We think there’s still a light at the end of the tunnel. The tools are all here now. Just because they’ve been used by bad people doesn’t mean they can’t also be used by good people.
UA is hard and slow. There’s never any shortcut to sustainable growth.
Celebrating the wins
“Show, don’t tell” the saying goes. So here’s what we’ve done.
- We have our own web domain, cakesonsolana.com, which redirects to our Linktree. This wasn’t easy to do. Hot tip: If you’re going to redirect to a Linktree, pick your domain provider based on who can actually do that. We used Namecheap but there’s others. Just don’t use Hover. Or AWS.
- We have had an active DRiP account since October 2024 and a creator account since July 2025. We’re planning some big things for DRiP soon. Let’s just say it’s going to make you think of DRiP in a whole new way!
- We have two blogs. One native Solana (Bulb), and one traditional (Medium). We’ve published 8 blog posts all up (8 on Bulb, and 4 we’ve cross posted on Medium).
- We have a DeviantArt Core+ account (that’s a paid account) and we’ve published nearly 900 ‘deviations’ to that so far.
- We have a Google workspaces account with our own custom email domain.
- We have a Canva pro account, which has allowed us to do quality design quickly and easily e.g., https://t.me/cakes_on_solana/220
- We have had a team Discord since June 2024. In future, with more resources, we might open this up to the wider community.
- We have a Telegram group that’s been live, and regularly updated, since April 2024 https://t.me/cakes_on_solana/3
- Apart from Bulb and Medium we have 11 other social accounts. We manage these via Fedica and Firefly:
- Our Bluesky has nearly a thousand posts, and we are one of the few Bluesky accounts who have purchased a premium domain https://bsky.app/profile/cakesonsolana.com/post/3ltal3lhypk26
- On Threads we’ve been posting consistently since the start of Sept 2024 https://www.threads.com/@cakesonsolana/post/C_X7FVSSTRv?xmt=AQF0Ro5_wbvgOzpLG9g_1F-uFW-zGtP-UMNhDazpC4aGXQ
- We have a paid X account, though not a verified one (and we will, hopefully, never get one), which has over 3K posts.
- We have nearly a thousand posts on our Instagram account.
- Our Facebook page has been posting consistently since the end of May 2024 https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1F5Kc8TBMR/. Our first foray into Facebook ended with our account being banned. Not for anything bad, we just incorrectly set the page up as a business to start with and Facebook pulled it down after we didn’t complete all the extra details Facebook had bugged us for repeatedly for (and we didn’t have). The second time we configured it correctly and, as you can see, it’s been plain sailing.
- We launched on Farcaster at the start of September 2025. We’d decided not to launch there initially because it was an EVM only network (despite it being an excellent social media platform). When they announced support for Solana wallets in May 2025 and then proceeded to integrate more Solana native features we knew we had to be here. Having Firefly supporting cross posting to Farcaster helped make it an ever easier decision to set up on there https://farcaster.xyz/cakesonsolana/0xd2a0c6da
- We been actively engaged on Lens since September 2024 https://app.soclly.com/posts/cejg4w5p5tbf47ddyg, and have a Lens Score of 1754 (at time of writing). Lens may be an EVM wallet based social media platform, but much more importantly it is a truly decentralized platform. We’ve been able to use 3 different apps (Lenspeer, Hey, and now Soclly) as we own our data. That is as we own our followers, who we follow, and our content, we were able to pick up and go wherever we wanted in the broader Lens ecosystem.
- Pinterest is a reasonably recent addition to our social stable. It was an easy addition due to the Fedica integration. Our Everyday Cakes board has well over a hundred pins so far https://au.pinterest.com/cakesonsolana/everyday-cakes/
- Same goes for Tumblr which we added at the same time as Pintrest (July 6th 2025) https://www.tumblr.com/cakesonsolana/788327290282049536/bohemian-bloom-chai-dream-by-cakes-on-solana-on?source=share
- We started our Tribe.run group back in Jan 2025 (first cake we post https://i.imgur.com/09yGzRM.jpeg on there). We’ve posted fairly consistently here but, to date, we’ve not focused on finding a use case for it. That is on the roadmap though (of which we’ll have more details about soon). Ideally Tribe.run is what we’d like to have as an alternative to most of the use cases for Telegram/Discord. Technically $CAK, our Tribe.run token, was (and still is) the first Cakes On Solana token ever. Shout out to anyone who minted our Tribe.run launch Solarplex NFT: You’re a proper OG. https://x.com/CakesOnSolana/status/1884215077416673457
Our AI employees are here to help you humans
We see AI as an enabling technology, not a replacement one. Our view of the crypto space is that there is a coordination problem wrought by not enough technology being in the loop. Massive amounts of human energy is currently being wasted as it’s so poorly managed.
Image generation apps
We started Cakes with an AI focus. Specifically an area of AI, image generation, that had become written off by the usual suspects as “slop” and “threatening REAL artists” (at some point you need to stop listening to some people. They’re nothing but negativity all the way down). We instead chose to see something that could be interesting and fun, if you applied some consistent effort over time.
We use a few different image generation apps. We started using Bing’s Image Generator. From there we expanded to add Gemini, MetaAI, DreamUp (from DeviantArt), Canva AI, and Yupp.ai (https://www.bulbapp.io/p/997d011a-dc2d-48e1-bce0-68e73a1c52cd/create-your-own-cakes-with-yuppai-a-recipe-for-ai-art?s_id=c0e9c733-5c47-4893-8818-a960b531b472) to our stable.
Currently we mostly use a combination of Yupp.ai and DreamUp in our day to day, with Gemini being used for new ideas (at present mostly for video generation which we’re using to test a new app design).
Key to all of our use is to keep it at a level that is broadly accessible. We want to be able to share user guides that pretty much anyone can use to create content that leads to sustainable growth.
dev.fun
https://dev.fun/user/cakesonsolana
When dev.fun launched we saw another area of AI, vibe coding, similar to image generation, again both maligned by the same negativity merchants and offering something interesting and fun if effort was applied.
So we dove right in.
What is initially interesting here is there is a cost that rules out 99% of crypto users, the fake ones. So you are left with legit builders. Of those builders about 5% have any sort of creativity (lotta copy paste in crypto, like anywhere) or longer term thinking. Sadly this was on display in a recent SuperTeam Earn contest run by the dev.fun team which awarded prizes to https://earn.superteam.fun/listing/devfun-on-chain-app-jam copy paste apps (worryingly in one case a suspected wallet drainer..) with no usage past the contest rewards being announced (funny that….).
However this doesn’t rule out legit builders as ourselves. In amongst the sea of copy pasta crud, we see a way to speed run deploying apps directly to our users and testing their ability to grow our projects.
We’ve tried a few different ideas. Using on chain data (namely metadata) has proved difficult through dev.fun so a bunch of our on chain data driven ideas haven’t worked out.
So far we have two apps live that we are actively using ourselves.
- cakeit2makeit: A simple cake image prompt generator we’ve been using on a daily basis to help generate images and which has basic usage tracking against wallet addresses.
- sociallybakeful: a simpler version of the Gems we use to write social media posts. We don’t use this as often (weekly as opposed to daily) but it’s proved a solid app and we’ve been able to integrate a fun ‘cake fact’ feature.
As we start to scale up our project both apps offer an easy way for people to join and start providing value in the way of social media content, even at low volumes. Expect much more from us in this regard.
poof.new
We’ve been recently working on some poof.new apps. Poof.new offers far better on chain integrations than dev.fun, and so the app design space this enables is a lot different. However the platform is much less well developed than dev.fun which has limited its practical functionality to date. So far we’ve been happy with the support we’ve received from the team and are hopeful we’ll soon see the updates that will enable us to deploy our ideas to production.
Gemini Gems
We have developed (and continue to develop) a range of Gems for different tasks and projects. What makes Gems a winning strategy for us is that if you use Google Docs as their ‘brain’ you can share Gems with other teammates very easily and ‘push updates’ instantly.
In the future this is how we’ll onboard contractors, via bespoke Gems, and those will help us manage their engagement with us.
Using Gems in this way we’ll be able to onboard and offboard large numbers of contractors quickly and easily.
What pretty much every crypto project gets wrong about their community
So often we have seen community energy around a project wasted by poor leadership as to what kind of social media engagement/content will drive the project forward.
A Telegram Group with 10K+ members and constant chatter (that isn’t bots) might SEEM “bullish” until you dig in to see what it is generating as a measurable output. Often that output is close to zero. That’s a lot of wasted energy due to the extreme inefficiency of this model. This is a very common outcome yet talk to pretty much anyone in the space and they will tell you such outcomes are success! Crypto has a long way to go in terms of building for real growth.
In our experience most community members are eager, but have very limited initiative or creativity (at least initially), so having a way to guide their contributions to be the most effective (without needing constant human interaction) is key. With the right guidance and training most passive users can become active participants who contribute meaningfully on a regular basis. To access this outcome effort is needed from projects to find the right tools to convert enthusiasm into tangible growth. Too often projects invest little or no time working on this area, instead falling back on same old tired designs and ‘tricks’ to capitalise the community energy they’ve been gifted. This is a mindset that is holding back projects from accessing a heap of organic growth they’ve, up until this point, been leaving on the table.
Celebrating the failures
You can’t celebrate your wins without celebrating your failures. Often you’ll hear people talk about their failures having been the key drivers for their future successes.
We hope that is true as, based on our track record, we figure we have A LOT of success in our future.
- Kaichi: it’s not officially dead yet, but it’s on its last legs. We gave it a red hot go. We started posting on there end of September 2024 https://kaichi.xyz/@cakesonsolana/post/8852-heelllllooooooo-kaichi-we-re, https://x.com/CakesOnSolana/status/1840522668556337381 and we really liked the team, appreciated the support they gave users, but ultimately Kaichi is another in a long line of Solana socialfi casualties. Directionally correct, they had a Zora like creator token model over a year before Zora launched it (https://docs.kaichi.xyz/essentials/3-token-presets#id-3-memecoin-preset-supply-controlled-fair-launched-memecoin) and a more feature rich creator model than what pump is currently doing.
- Solarplex: Another regrettable Solana socialfi failure. As with Kaichi, we loved the team and appreciated all the support they gave users. These NFTs were our first Cakes on Solana on chain assets of any kind https://www.tensor.trade/trade/cakes_on_solana.
- We became a creator and took advantage of their collections feature (Inner Circles) https://www.bulbapp.io/t/671ab653-d7f6-4fc0-a303-f05382d6b4eb?s_id=a3cd31d0-904a-46b1-997f-87853b7f8737. Once upon a time, being able to collect each social post felt like an NFT use case (it’s how the first iteration of Zora started) but time would prove that to be the wrong design. So it was the case with Solarplex. cNFTs were the right tool but this was the wrong, as Clay Christensen would’ve said, job to be done https://bsky.app/profile/cakesonsolana.com/post/3ln7i2sihoq2a
- Yup: Web3 focused cross posting tool very similar to Firefly in that they covered the same networks, Warpcast (as Farcaster was known back then), Lens, X, and Bluesky. They used the YUP token to encourage usage. The team ghosted the project. Service just stopped working one day. We still have some YUP tokens somewhere.
- Reddit: DOA. We started a sub-Reddit. It got banned immediately. We never found out why. Search Reddit and you find heaps of crypto content, including memecoins. Very weird, especially since Reddit themselves had only a couple of years previously very publicly launched NFTs on Polygon and that had run until June 2025 https://www.ainvest.com/news/reddit-nft-strategy-shift-implications-polygon-creator-economies-2509/, and even had (and still do have) a currency called MOON. Sidenote: Reddit really messed up their ‘reward engagement with crypto!’ program. Spammers/fraudsters took Reddit AND a bunch of legit users to the cleaners. Same people are currently rorting the heck outta the X creator rewards program…
- Mastodon & Pixelfed: A reminder that censorship is a constant threat to anyone. On the face of it Cakes On Solana is pretty well aligned with decentralised social media values. Unfortunately there exists very ideologically driven people inside some of these supposedly “freedom” enhancing projects. Thus, even though we are just posting pictures of cake and writing articles about using web3 social media, and had broken none of the published rules, our accounts were censored.
- We strongly suspect the ideological opposition these projects have towards crypto and AI was to blame.
https://mastodon.social/@cakesonsolana
https://pixelfed.social/cakesonsolana
No response to our appeal on Mastodon. No ability to appeal on Pixelfed.
https://mastodon.social/disputes/strikes/195723 
Our advice: avoid both places like the plague. Ideological censorship never ever works. It only ever ends up backfiring on you in the long term (as we’ve seen many, many times over) https://bsky.app/profile/cakesonsolana.com/post/3m2dqr6doec2z
- Griffain: Much fated AI agent project that did basically nothing. Support was non-existent. We tried to use it for some simple stuff and it never worked properly. The best it worked was to mint a very average NFT https://www.instagram.com/p/DE0c0TePomV/. Their X account hasn’t posted for 6 months or more. It’s criminal how much support such clearly inept projects get from the wider Solana ecosystem. Too many alcohol/drug fuelled conferences; too few actual deliverables.
- Zerebro: we didn’t do much with this, only used the ASCII generator for a bit (e.g., https://hey.xyz/posts/j20zqd3c1cxyy17az8). We were planning to explore doing more with it but then the crypto bro running it did what pretty much all crypto bros end up doing eventually: Fraud https://thedefiant.io/news/people/zerebro-co-founder-jeffy-yu-found-alive-after-faked-death-lljeffy-crashes-86-8-27ebbe06. If the people leading a project are referred to as ‘chads’, ‘degens’, or any other of the terms in crypto bro lingo, then you are going to lose your money at some stage. Nearly 100% guaranteed (though there are notable exceptions of course). If they’re also anon then it’s 100%.
- Lenspeer: not really a failure as much as a reminder why decentralised protocols (like Lens, Nostr, AT Protocol etc…) are the best future version of social media. We used to use Lenspeer as our main Lens app. It stopped working. We just switched to using Hey, then we switched to Soclly because it offered more features. Nothing changed as goes our followers, who we followed or all our content we’d ever posted on Lens. Everything came along with us to each app. Very different to our experiences in web2 (aka centralised) social.
What’s next?
The eagle eyed among you will have already noticed we have soft launched our token. We’ll have an official launch happening soon so stay tuned for that.
It will be OREsome.
