I firmly believe we won’t all just be using MetaMask in a few years.
Let me explain why wallets are about to unbundle: 🧵👇
1/ We’re seeing the most varied distribution of user personas in crypto’s history. With each innovation cycle, more and more people were brought into the ecosystem. While all these groups overlap, they come with very different preferences.
2/ 2009 (the OGs 😎) attracted people interested in stateless money / innovative P2P computing. 2014 brought in high caliber software devs excited about the new design space of smart contracts.
3/ 2017 brought in tech-savvy finance people eager to experiment with DeFi. And the latest wave attracted more retail users buying their first and only NFT, online creators, digital artists, and gamers.
4/ All of these groups interface with entirely different types of applications. A logical extension is that they seek different things out of their primary, interoperable web3 UI, which is their wallet.
5/ For example, an NFT trader likely wants a wallet that displays their collection and tracks floor prices. A degen likely wants to see the health of their leverage positions across different protocols, status of their staking APYs, etc.
6/ And mass consumers interested in experimenting with web3 social likely want a sleek, clean UI with nothing I mentioned above to cloud their UX; it will also probably be educational. Mass retail also probably wants separate wallets to not share personal financial data.
7/ This trend largely mimics what happened to marketplace businesses in the early 2000s. Craigslist focused on initial discovery for online marketplaces to find PMF, then quickly saw new competitors offering more curated, verticalized experiences eat its market share.
8/ While not a 1:1 analogy, the trend is clear: when a wider base of users seek a very specific product experience, they have historically gone to a UI matching that particular need. Why would wallets be any different?
If you’re building a more verticalized wallet (or just wanna chat 😃), DMs are open.
Follow me (@derekmw23) for more updates on this trend. Always appreciate a rt too 🙃
Variant could not be more excited to back @eulerfinance. Here’s a deep dive on Euler’s permissionless lending pools and why we @variantfund believe it can become a leading decentralized lending protocol: 🧵👇
@eulerfinance@variantfund 1/ Zooming out, we are investing against the thesis that decentralized lending will be a “red ocean” - a competitive market with numerous dominant players.
@eulerfinance@variantfund 1.1/ Quite simply, this structure mimics lending markets in TradFi, which show low concentration and high competition (ex: commercial borrowing, credit unions, etc).
Token distribution today is unrecognizable vs a year ago. I’ve identified 3 main trends behind this 🧵👇
0/ as I’ve discussed before, token distribution can be thought of in two main buckets: 1) the initial exit to the community, where the token becomes liquid, and 2) ongoing emissions, which includes reward and incentive mechanisms over periods of time
1/ bottoms-up design process - token distribution is becoming increasingly governed by the community, rather than imposed by the initial team at the project’s launch
the key idea was that NFTs can be used to create meme-like, bottoms-up value using a wide base of owners economically incentived to promote the collection.
this behavior is essentially builds a franchisable, long-term brand in an entirely new way.
so where is BAYC now?
1/ token - this example is pretty obvious and is already expected from other top collections
Alright there needs to be some clarity on these terms… here’s my current thinking so please challenge it
1.1/ mechanism design - subset of economics that essentially inverts the logic of game theory
1.2/ instead of starting with the game setting and modeling potential outcomes and their likelihood, mechanism design begins with a desired outcome and attempts to create game-like settings that will theoretically result in that outcome in equilibrium
DeFi now vs then - where we’ve gone over the past year, what’s changed, and some trends to follow… 🙃👇
1/ multi-chain DeFi – mainnet had ~85% mkt share for TVL vs ~56% currently. Terra, Avalanche, Fantom, Polygon, and Solana saw explosive growth
1.2/ Alt-L1s will continue to grow, but as more projects deploy on L2s, winning chains will develop their own sense of community / purpose, ensuring devs stay loyal to the ecosystem and continue building top-tier native apps