Brain dump of how I'm feeling about crypto:
1/ The value proposition of blockchains as technology feels more clear and well-adopted in the mainstream than ever.
2/ What crypto is actually useful for (payments, financial markets, RWAs) is not as exciting as what most people joined the space for.
3/ We should be proud that we're being recognized and used as superior financial rails - Ethereum, Monad, Polygon, Solana, Base, etc. all recognize this and are working to bring more assets onchain.
4/ There's still a big opportunity for crypto builders to tap into the audience of crypto-natives / crypto twitter and create fun speculative experiences for them.
5/ The most successful apps in this category have all been some variety of intellectual-gambling / money experiments that allow people to strategize in environments with asymmetric upside.
6/ The difficulty with these apps is that it's very difficult to hold people's interest over long periods of time; hence the wave of shutdowns recently.
7/ People naturally lose interest over time and want to go gamble on the new flashy thing that they feel provides more asymmetric upside. Yet, for some reason, when this inevitably happens, it's called a "slow rug" by the last remaining speculators.
8/ There's a very toxic culture on CT when this happens, which sadly prevents smart people and a lot of interesting experiments ever being launched.
9/ This is reflected in the crypto developer activity charts, which are bleeding badly - despite a massive increase in overall developer activity due to AI.
10) If you are here to work on building something crypto rails are actually useful for, (likely: speculation & financial use cases) it might feel depressing rn, but I expect this to turn around, and is likely worth sticking around for.
1/ The value proposition of blockchains as technology feels more clear and well-adopted in the mainstream than ever.
2/ What crypto is actually useful for (payments, financial markets, RWAs) is not as exciting as what most people joined the space for.
3/ We should be proud that we're being recognized and used as superior financial rails - Ethereum, Monad, Polygon, Solana, Base, etc. all recognize this and are working to bring more assets onchain.
4/ There's still a big opportunity for crypto builders to tap into the audience of crypto-natives / crypto twitter and create fun speculative experiences for them.
5/ The most successful apps in this category have all been some variety of intellectual-gambling / money experiments that allow people to strategize in environments with asymmetric upside.
6/ The difficulty with these apps is that it's very difficult to hold people's interest over long periods of time; hence the wave of shutdowns recently.
7/ People naturally lose interest over time and want to go gamble on the new flashy thing that they feel provides more asymmetric upside. Yet, for some reason, when this inevitably happens, it's called a "slow rug" by the last remaining speculators.
8/ There's a very toxic culture on CT when this happens, which sadly prevents smart people and a lot of interesting experiments ever being launched.
9/ This is reflected in the crypto developer activity charts, which are bleeding badly - despite a massive increase in overall developer activity due to AI.
10) If you are here to work on building something crypto rails are actually useful for, (likely: speculation & financial use cases) it might feel depressing rn, but I expect this to turn around, and is likely worth sticking around for.
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