My biggest takeaway from ETH Denver:

It's time to rediscover our WHY.

If we don’t… we risk becoming the loser stereotype we fought so hard to squash👇

getting /louder. creating @hume. @deathpixie @angelbaby @kai-wav. 

We’ve been building for a decade. 

Yet most crypto assets barely touched their previous ATH this last cycle. 

There’s still no breakout crypto app. 

Our biggest wins are stablecoins. 

Most traders would be better off holding gold.

Maybe that feeling was misguided. 

But the fact is trends no longer start onchain. 

24/7 mkts and fractionalized stocks were adopted by 
@RobinhoodApp and started onchain.

The promise of mainstream digital art started onchain.

We are no longer leading traditional financial markets or internet culture.

The good news? 

ETH Denver showed me builders still WANT to build. 

VCs still WANT to fund genuine innovation.

The rose-colored glasses are finally off. We’re clear-eyed. 

Less hype, more action.

I saw this clearly at the @tributelabs brunch. 

It was clear at the @privy event too. Makes sense that a company that built arguably the most important product in all of crypto would attract a group of s-tier innovators.

There are people here who still believe—but their voices and products are getting drowned out by the noise.

We entered crypto because we felt like we were ahead of a trend. 

We wanted to be at the frontier of tech and culture. And yes... make money along the way.

Most people didn’t join to get excited about ETFs or crypto strategic reserves.

Those are great steps — but what's our iPhone moment? Our Fortnite? Our ChatGPT?

We MUST rediscover our WHY.

ETH Denver was a wake-up call.

It's time to start building the future we promised ourselves.

Crypto conferences (this isn't just about ETH Denver) used to feel upstream from tech and culture. 

It felt like we were pioneers at the beginning of a new form of finance and internet culture.

You sound less optimistic than normal? 😉 
I still believe that collectibles have a demand. It's just not more demand only because there is blockchain tech involved. Rarity is useful and it necessarily means rather small numbers.

Most wallets apps *still* don't even support standard ERC721 NFTs well. A strong indicator that no one demanded it from them?
I read the wallet feature of Warpcast doesn't support sending a NFT so far. So no one thought it to be important? Account abstraction? Do mature apps already exist? Yes lots of shortcomings.

But then social graphs, which are not owned by platforms.  There is lens v2, one will see, this is maybe interesting.