Thread by @BillyLuedtke

1) A quick thread on the evolution of the @ethereum landscape, why this bull run is different, and where we go from here:

2) From 2014 - 2017, we thought anything and everything was possible. The ecosystem's early visionaries saw the potential of a trustless, decentralized, permissionless 'world computer' and let their imaginations run wild.

3) Everything was brand new. Everything was a piece of the puzzle that needed to be built. Standards (ERC20, 721, etc), infrastructure, wallets, research - these are a topic for another time (& the #EF & @Consensys handled a lot of this work).

For now, we'll focus on dApps.

4) In dApp-land, although the infrastructure was still horrid and #buidling was a nightmare, we had a brand new hammer that was #Ethereum and were running around hitting everything with it.

Every use case was an Ethereum use case.

Everything needed to be decentralized.

5) Finance, politics, identity, government, governance, companies, processes, procedures, P2P marketplaces, prediction markets - the list goes on.

In our excitement, we attempted to boil the ocean.

6) This was the state of @ethereum during the last bull run - infinite yet simultaneously no product-market fit.

Very few people were building anything interesting - everyone was just theorizing about what could be built.

& raising hundreds of millions of $ with whitepapers.

7) And - whitepapers about the craziest of things.

The more buzz words, the better.

Couple "AI, machine learning, big data" (or "dentists") with "blockchain", and you were a multi-millionaire overnight.

8) Then, of course, every project overpromised and underdelivered.

And the bubble rightfully burst.

And the hype died.

And the price dropped.

And only the truest of believers survived - the people who knew that #ethereum was still going to change the world.

9) From this, we entered a new age - the age of underpromising and overdelivering.

Projects started finding real product-market fit.

Projects started building WITHOUT doing an ICO or raising any capital whatsoever.

Many didn't even incorporate a token.

9) And @MakerDAO emerged.

And people integrated with $DAI.

And then people integrated with those integrations.

And people integrated with the integrations of those integrations and their integrations.

And a new emergent system was born.

10) The unstoppable, composable ecosystem of DeFi blossomed like a phoenix from the ashes of a million ICO scam artists, a million failed projects, and a million hours of @1MillionDevs blood, sweat, and tears.

11) And governance tokens became a thing.

And DAOs.

And NFTs.

And here we are today - with products that actually make sense. With platforms that actually have positive cash flow. With tech that actually provides value and utility to society.

12) This is why this time is different.

Will prices get inflated? Sure.

But it's not a bubble.

It's a new paradigm.

And it's here to stay.

11) And this is just the beginning. #DeFi, DAOs, NFTs, games, governance tokens - these are all just the tip of the iceberg.

12) Remember all of those crazy ideas from the early days? Well, they will come back once the ecosystem and infrastructure is ready.

And they will change the world more than you think.

This is why @ethereum is the future.

And this is why I'm here to stay.

Welp I fucked up the numbering but that's okay 😅