When I joined Polygon, one of the first things I wrote was this document. It's incredibly important to me, because it's about what's important to me. I share it with every new member who joins my team. A User's Guide to Working with Mattie

The Epic/Fortnite conspiracy theories are silly. Name one time an accomplished developer made one of the most important games of all time, used it to build their digital store, then stopped making sequels because there is more money to be made running the store and selling hats

What I mean when I say "I kinda play a rushdown style"

Optimism is sponsoring $25K in bounties for @EthereumDenver hackathoners! Come build stuff. The bounties: Use Optimism's identity primitive to create an attestation tool, app, or visualization Full details: optimism.io/ethdenver Getting started kit: github.com/ethereum-optimism…

Dating in San Francisco is wild because people are generally cool when you tell them you’re trans but when you say you work in crypto, they act like you just placed a jar with a tiny preserved hand on the table

Really excited to share that I'm joining @0xPolygon as Head of Founders Community! The team's combining community, devrel, and grant operations to grow a thriving community of builders that includes dapp devs on @AggLayer, entrepreneurs spinning up new businesses, and established teams eager to grow onchain, cross-chain, and – ultimately – as their own chains.

If you’re over 30, here is how you can politely decline afters each night during Devconnect. Sunday: I just got in Monday: our big event is tomorrow Tuesday: our big event was today Wednesday: crazy week, I’m going to recharge Thursday: my flight is tomorrow Adjust as needed

“Here are a bunch of ingredients in my fridge. What are some recipe ideas?” I do this 2-3x per week and I love it. Lots of useful modifier and followup options. Often good, though some disasters. I now just buy whatever groceries look good and figure it out later.

I’ve worked at six tech companies in my career. There are, right now, more women in leadership positions at Optimism than there were in all the previous five *combined*. And it’s amazing.

The dream finally happened. Was at an SF house party. Someone asked if I’ve heard of prediction markets.

I am SO excited to share that I've joined @OPLabsPBC as Head of Developer Relations to grow the developer community for @OptimismFND.

I am incredibly proud to be in the Ethereum Ecosystem, even if Ethereum only sometimes considers me part of it

Got off the plane in Denver and a hipster-type dude handed me this very tiny little guy, and somehow he *wasn’t* here for the crypto conference

We are HIRING. If any of the phrases “build the beating heart of DeFi”, “seeing yields everywhere at the same time”, and “shitpost with purpose” resonate with you, I want to chat. If they ALL resonate, I *really* want to chat. DMs open. jobs.ashbyhq.com/polygon-lab…

I’m really frustrated by the mentality of “you did not support me, therefore my app/token/product failed.” Even more so by “you did not support me, therefore you don’t support anyone.” Protocols should work like hell to put founders in the best position to be successful. But the final result is always on you, the founder. You are responsible for building a business, which also means you are responsible for pivoting or changing when the business isn’t working. Sometimes this is interpreted as “x protocol doesn’t care about x industry anymore.” But if the only way your project will succeed is if the host blockchain promotes you, or invests in you, or buys you, then that is a problem. For everyone. It means you aren’t building a viable business. It means the protocol is throwing money at bad businesses. The thing that sucks most about being a founder is you might work like hell and make incredible sacrifices while doing everything “right”, and still fail. Maybe it was bad luck. Maybe it was unfair. But if all you do is yell at the system to change how they support you, then you are wasting time you could be spending building a better product. It’s tempting to look at other ecosystems and say “look what they are doing, just do that for me.” If what they are doing is actually better, you should launch on them! Don’t stay on a chain just out of loyalty. Force chains to be better by rewarding the systems doing it right. I say this as someone working at a protocol that has grappled with founder support in the past. But I also say this as a former founder. There’s nothing worse than shutting down a company because your business failed. It’s agonizing. It takes literal years to recover. I’ll never forget the day I had to tell thirty people that what we’d worked so hard on was over. The urge is to lash out. You want to blame the system, VCs, platforms. You worked hard, so it should have worked. Therein lies the trap. Hard work does not guarantee success. There is no award for “I should have won”. The sad truth is that 95 percent of startups die. It might seem like we want that to be lower, but a world where only 80% of a protocol’s startups die is probably one where the protocol goes bankrupt, ending the music for everyone. Instead of “you gave this team support and me nothing”, you need to ask: why didn’t I succeed at getting the attention I needed? Why isn’t my product resonating? Why is no one banging down the doors to promote me? Figure out what you need to change that is under your control. Otherwise, you are going to jump to a new chain and most likely go through the whole thing all over again. It is not you that failed, it’s all of Ethereum. It is not you that failed, it is crypto itself. Believe it or not, I find this problem optimistic. Some apps do succeed. We do have room to grow. Protocols *can* compete with one another on founder experience. Distribution matters, and Ethereum is bad at it. All of these are solvable. All of them are opportunities under our control. Where we start: - Protocols need to communicate clearly what they are looking for, and what they provide. - Protocols need to say “no” clearly and more often. - Protocols need to get way better at spotting winners and handing them jet fuel, rather than scattershot grants. - Founders need to clearly communicate what they need. “Base supports founders more” is meaningless. “Base helped me get 1000 paying users by tweeting and a Wallet ad” is clear. - Founders need to own their destiny. If your company isn’t working, change something. If it’s the chain’s fault, change chains. If it’s the market’s fault, pivot. It is a protocol’s job to create opportunity. It is a founder’s job to seize it. We have work to do on both.

Have I mentioned it’s my birthday? Because it’s my birthday, and getting to do this with @shefiorg and the panelists and the audience and @0xPolygon is so incredibly what I wanted

Major props to the @LunarAssets / Tesseract team for posting their impact report on founder support to the forums!

Happy Trans Day of Visibility. This thread has always been a happy one for me. I love today. But this year is also different: it’s much scarier. It’s the first I’ve seriously thought about “stealth”. Not for transition reasons, but for safety. I often say I want my transness to be the third or fourth most interesting thing about me. This is the first year I’ve wondered if it should be hidden from the list. I decided no. In this thread I’ll explain why.

Full house at @shefiorg 😁 if you’re here, say hi! And if you want to talk technical community growth, my panel is second up

Today is Trans Day of Visibility. I often strive for ‘trans’ to be the fourth most interesting thing about me. I don’t lead with it, but it’s there, and it’s one of the best things I’ve done. #TDOV is a day for sharing that, so here is a first for me: a transition timeline.

Happy Trans Day of Visibility ❤️ Something I’ve heard from a lot of friends this year, including some who’ve known me for decades, is they feel they’re meeting me for the first time. They always smile when they say it, and so do I.

We talked a little grants. They’re all in one place 👇 go have fun (or be really serious, which can also work)

People at the event keep saying “Polygon is back.” I wonder what that means

There’s no night like a @BoysClubWorld night

We love the one-year @Optimism swag box

Things I'm excited about coming online for @0xPolygon and @katana founders in Q3: - @Hadronfc Katana accelerator cohort live *now* accelerating 10 badass teams - Seed Liquidity program - DeFi incentives program - [ to be announced ] capital - Revamped Infrastructure support - Slick new founder support community - Live founder events in Dubai

SF techies will tell you Tucker is being ridiculous and then remind you "we're building a god from sand"

Finally bought Girl Scout cookies irl with crypto at ETHDenver! All it took was: - Scan QR code to open Coinbase wallet - Realize I don’t have base usdc - Get event wifi working because loading multiple pages on cellular was getting rough - Get usdc purchase rejected by Apple Pay - Bail out of stripe flow because it needed all new cc info - Ask @smokey_ to buy them for me - Venmo Smokey six dollars

Never in doubt. See y’all at Devconnect!

My deep dive into the @0xPolygon roadmap

Yayy. For the first time ever, I'm badge official! 🥳🥳

Oh hey, it's an "in personal news" post 🙂 last week was my last at @OPLabsPBC, and I'm feeling thankful, wistful, excited, thoughtful, and proud. And, of course, *wildly* optimistic. While I'd jumped head-first into web3 with my previous gigs, it was at OP Labs that I found my first "full time crypto" spot. And it was so far beyond what I could have imagined. Optimism is by far the most mission-driven place I've ever seen. I got to jam with a HUGE number of amazing people - including a huge number of women! And the OP Stack offered rabbit holes upon rabbit holes of technical puzzles to careen through with the team and community. To modify one of my favorite quotes: "there are decades in which nothing happens, and there are months at OP in which decades happen, every three months, without fail." When I joined, we were just a month away from the BASE announcement. Six months would bring the Bedrock release. Another year saw 4844 to reshape user experience, and fault proofs to reshape security across the Superchain, every stage demanding new shifts in how we approached devs and operators. I'm so thrilled with how the team jumped in and owned it. Heck, when we started, onchain still had a hyphen! I'm tremendously grateful to @jinglejamOP, @kelvinfichter, and so many others for bringing me into such a badass group of people, places, missions, and values. Sunny's looking bright. As for what's next for me? A pause for breath, some time with my cats, obsessing over several personal projects, and definitely dabbling in the new interop tooling coming out. And if you're building something wild, want to relentlessly nerd out about building technical communities, or you're someone that gets really excited about nerd sniping, hit me up. To close things out, here's my favorite technical diagram from the past 18 months. We had a moment's notice to diagram the Superchain with nothing but stickers on hand. I think it worked out 🙂

Finally, officially, legally Mattie 🥳

Dear men, what’s preventing your crypto conference from looking like this?

Amsa and Zain announce deal to permanently swap mains

btw if you're one of the 3.6K+ new developers building on Polygon (and growing @ethereum), here are all the ways @0xPolygon supports founders. Start here: t.me/PolygonHQ

Bringing a certain energy to the @0xpolygon all hands today for a very important interview of @0xMarcB

The @BoysClubWorld podcast episode on rage bait taught me that pissing half of us off is the point. They won't pull the ad because this response is what they wanted. What I didn't expect, though, was how good it feels to see crypto twitter isn't as desolate on trans issues as it's felt these last few months. Rage bait made the opposing stance feel much less lonely today. Ready to run through a fucking wall for Eth.

Not a lot of people know this but Palace of Fine Arts is actually an exact model of where the Ancient Greeks launched their first memecoins

REALLY excited to share that I've joined Manticore Games as their Head of Developer Relations. @fdescamps and their team run possibly the best demo I've ever seen. Devs, modders, content creators, get at me, because this is going to be fun :)

I come from a family of crisis consultants. My Dad was who you call when you were summoned before 60 Minutes. My mom was who you call when a serial killer dumps bodies behind your frozen yogurt chain. I learned a career at the dinner table absorbing their stories. Here are the maneuvers they talked about most often. Answer where the controversy started. If it was a news article, write an op-ed for the same paper. (Or better, get a reporter to write it for you.) If it was a TV show, go on the TV show. Don’t repeat the charge. If a reporter asks you the question “why did you beat your wife?”, don’t answer “I don’t beat my wife.” Your denial becomes the headline rather than your side of the story. (Also, don’t hit your spouse.) Write reporters’ stories for them. Do the legwork for people who can get your word out. Send them a complete article and let them slap their name on it. Move quickly. The biggest mistake leaders do in a crisis is wait for it to blow over. Executives often take 7-10 days to even acknowledge the crisis. Once it’s clear it’s a crisis, you have hours, not days, to respond. You are paying a crisis consultant because they know the right people, not because they know a lot of people. Don’t dither on price just because it might be over in two days. You’re getting help *to make sure* it’s over in two days. Don’t allow liability to trump empathy. It is ok to say “sorry.” Crisis teams with too many lawyers will do acrobatics to avoid apologizing. They think about admitting fault when they should be thinking about the victims. “No comment” means “guilty” without a plan in place. Apologize for the right thing. Speak to the pains and fears of those affected. Show you clearly understand, then shift to the actions you’re taking. Show empathy, and then be direct and firm about how you are moving forward, not that everyone just *should* move forward. Be swift, empathize, respond in the right place, put in the legwork, write your own story instead of hand wave. If you do all of these you have a shot at turning a crisis into a problem.

when you violate the brand guidelines

Y’all you can’t just keep posting the same exact chart from last week and expect it to - oh, it’s a new one? Carry on then

I’m occasionally asked the best ways to use Discord, and more and more the answer is “don’t”

👉👉vapidwave

Wild that this is basically a bet that we a) hit a very fast singularity and b) humanity survives that fast of a singularity

The funniest thing about this meme is you can shuffle the three positions into any arrangement and it still works

It’s #TransDayOfVisibility and so here is my favorite pic from the past year. Even *having* a favorite pic feels unusual, but I love being out, visible, and a bit more seen each day. It’s a great feeling, and I hope everyone who wants it can experience it.

YouTube wants to figure out how to be Twitch before Twitch figures out how to be Discord before Discord figures out how to be Steam before Steam figures out how to be everything

Proof of outside

It's the last day of Pride month, so it's a good time to go ahead and change my social media name and pronouns to match what they are in my personal and work life: Mattie and she/her. 🙂 Handle @Scav is staying the same. New profile pic coming soon, though!

April Fools Day is broken. The jokes suck. The spirit is empty. But we can fix it: April Fools Day should be a costume holiday. A spring equinox celebration of tricksters and rebirth. Halloween’s vernal fraternal twin. One is All Hallows Eve. The other is All Fools Day. Where Halloween is death and the spirit world, All Fools Day is life, play, trickster gods, and mischievous Fae, drawing tradition from Mardis Gras, Purim, and Masquerade. It celebrates spring as it enters summer, with undertones of Wicker and eyes toward May. The cultural pieces are already there. All Fools Day brings costumes that don’t fit in the fall. Halloween is for the gruesome and the caricature; Fools is for the playful and the satirical. Both, of course, can be as sexy as you want. Great foolish costumes include: - Anything faerie, witchy, or mystical. Get as Pan as you want and bust out those Satyr horns. - Masquerade Ball formal and any mysterious masques. Concealed identity is a long-standing tradition this time of year. - Alice, Wonderland, and everything on the other side of the looking glass. - The circus and it’s bright pantaloons, suspenders and twirling ‘staches. - Any type of clown. Circus clowns yes, and also jesters, jokers, tricksters and mimes. So instead of posting a lame fake pregnancy announcement, celebrate spring’s rebirth with foolishness, fun, and frippery. Gather your friends, try on a new identity, and fool the night away.

If you’re at EthCC this week and building on @katana or @0xPolygon, or excited about @katana or @0xPolygon, or heck, feeling critical of @katana or @0xPolygon, then I want to chat! Look for the woman with red flower tattoos on her left arm. That’s me! Say hi.

Oh wow how did Money Rails get her??

A handy guide to stage selection in Melee

I would like to heartily thank @smokey_ for convincing me to do 1:1s outside

There’s already a 40+ in crypto group chat we call it email

If there are two or more @BoysClubWorld members at one event they WILL find one another every time

If anyone wants to talk about working with @0xPolygon and how to build with OP Stack, I know a thing or two 🙂

Y'all have no idea how excited I am about a hire we just made on the Community/DevRel team

2.7M POL for memecoins? In this economy?

It’s bullish for ETH that Stripe is trying to build Polygon

Redacted would be a beautiful name for a baby girl

On my way to Devcon! Haven’t been to a Devcon proper yet, but I was at Devconnect last year. My understanding is they’re similar, just one has hundreds of adorable cats spread all over the city and I’m assuming the other centralizes the cats in one place.

Some of Polygon’s best founders are getting a three-month intensive in founder-led marketing

Sounds like witch's business

All I want is for someone to create an ecosystem map of @Katana that works like a video game skill tree. "Hmm, I currently have USD, so I'm going to put all of my points into AUSD. Then I can unlock the @MorphoLabs Earn skill, where I'll put five points into LBTC and then dual-class into @SushiSwap..."

Just in the few weeks at @Optimism we've launched: New website and amazing brand: optimism.io/ Awarded 1M+ OP to 188 artists: optimism.mirror.xyz/I6g_dbBk… Announced $3M Superchain accelerator program w/ @thirdweb New super fast starter kit for devs: docs.optimism.io/builders/da… New marketing amplification: share.hsforms.com/1XHQ9Io_lT… First L2 with node snap sync: docs.optimism.io/builders/no… And massively reduced fees with 4844 nbd

Got to explain the Superchain architecture at @a16zcrypto’s crypto startup school with a very technical diagram

This is a most confusing and amazing headline

ETHDenver peeps, I’ll be at the @OptimismFND @OPLabsPBC booth today until 12:30 MST. Come say hi! Head down rainbow road until you see a wall of plants and flowers spelling OP (seriously ✨)

I have some important* business to attend to *pumpkin

Everybody’s talking about tier lists but DID YOU KNOW that the reason we have them in memeable form is because of the Super Smash Bros Melee community? The first true tier lists emerged in 2005, burnished in fires of vbulletin forums and irc channels. They argued whether Marth was better than Pichu (he is) or Mario was better than Donkey Kong (he was, but is no longer.) This created such rich internet debate that the release of a new tier list became a celebrated annual event, with a cabal of influential Melee players voting for the promotions and snubs we’d all yell about for the new year. The tier lists begot memes of its own, the largest of which made fun of those who insisted tiers don’t exist. “A sufficiently good pichu can beat any Marth”, they’d say, typically in all caps and usually misspelled. “Tiers don’t exist” became “TIRES DON EXITS” and for a while was the most popular way to deride an unserious player, right alongside “No Johns”. Tshirts were made. As melee kids grew up they exported tier lists to any community that wanted something to argue about, which is every community. This includes the colored-boxes-on-horizontal-lines png format, which is how it’s memed this day. But that came later. Back in the vbulletin era, everyone had a personal tagline. It displayed with your name and profile pic next to every post you made. Your tagline was inextricably linked with your persona. My tagline, as a member of the tier list cabal, was Tires Don Exits. I even bought the tshirt.

The best Ethereum meetups are @farcaster_xyz dev meetups

The Polygon community is rapidly evolving but will always stay true to its roots of pushing technology to the edges of human coordination 🫡

Yooooo @vex_0x parachuting into Lisbon and taking a top ten prize at @ETHGlobal Optimism projects made up a third of all finalists, too 😁 epic weekend, more wrapup soon

Things got HEATED especially when *validiums* came up

There’s no one in the arena who works harder than Winny

Officially at the age and aura where my gen z team members sometimes say "oh wow you're just like my mom" 💀

I booked a flight to BA with a tight one-hour layover, and my first flight is running 30 minutes behind. Currently doing calf stretches while feeling absolutely certain I am going to make my flight. My luggage, I give it a 50/50 chance. But it will catch up eventually.

It's been an emotional day to cap quite a year! Really honored for this and feeling thankful for my team, the @CoreGames creator community, @CMX, and to @DavidSpinks for the kind words. Calling it - 2022 is going to be an excellent year :)

“What’s going to get us from web2 to web3 is therapy” - @Sim_Pop @She__Fi Ok I love it here 😁

The best possible start to Devconnect involves a) @shefiorg and b) @arlery

1. Build something cool 2. ??? <——— RPGF 3. Profit

I am learning SO MUCH about our team by what they do on the Minecraft server @silkychicken: Turned spawn into a well-designed wonderland inhabited by every animal @Llama_Juice: created a people farm that mass produces people @renony: built a death pyramid @SmashGizmo:

Get in here, we’re aggregatin’!

The @BoysClubWorld party was something else.

Fridays are for Founders. I've started clearing space on Fridays to meet and chat with anyone building on @0xPolygon or @katana. If this is you, I want to talk about how we can help! Grab times here: calendly.com/mfairchild-poly…

I think my slide that reads “WHY DO WE DO THIS TO OURSELVES?” is staying in

Boys Club x Polygon has been my dream ship 💖

If you’re at Pragma SF / @ETHGlobal let’s say hi!

Top secret strategy, do not share: When the @katana Kaito board launched, we saw lift across nearly all sentiment metrics we care about on Katana... *and* on @0xPolygon. And it happened again as other partners brought their own boards online. There's an under-tapped multiplicative effect when boards work together, and I'm excited as hell to explore its nooks and boundaries.

Some priorities post-Denver: - Launch several kickass hackathons - Publish a few dozen Big Ideas for devs to hack - Scale the OPLabs devrel team - Establish April Fools as a spring equinox costume partying holiday because Halloween alone is not enough

I'll be on this! Or my doppleagent will. Either way, come hang and talk AI grant funding

.@smokey_ is an absolute beast. Thanks to him, Founders working with Polygon’s community team get a) community growth help b) meme help and c) tips to be healthier, happier, and after all that, wiser

The purpose of this post is to say that @0xthegipper is very, very awesome

Not a lot of people know this, but a big reason Texas fosters a culture of independence is it’s actually written into the Texas constitution that POL can succeed at any time

An @EthereumDenver hacker finalist is putting ordinals on Ethereum using OP Stack LFG!!!

I didn’t expect that I would desperately want hardware wallet that combines the design aesthetic of a credit card and a condom, but here we are

If you aren't listening to @smokey_ and @provenauthority on this Space you are missing the heck out nitter.app/i/spaces/1ynKOllpByzGR