(1/3) Some thoughts on a very thought provoking thread:
- the best businesses in crypto lean into financial degeneracy (Memecoins, NFTs of last cycle, Perps, Exchanges)
- A small percentage of the population is naturally drawn to this
- Efforts to break out of this cohort and attract new users is not working
- Our impact in this space is thus capped to degens, which wreaks havoc on builders asking existential questions like “Does the work I do matter?”
- The existence of competing “good enough” Tradfi products makes most of crypto’s use cases irrelevant for normies. In fact, crypto is currently “worse but different”, which means it is a discontinuous or disruptive innovation. Unlike AI though (another discontinuous innovation), the technology is not good enough. It’s still too expensive, too risky, and too clunky to compete with normie products
- imo, pursuing normies at this juncture is the Siren’s Song for builders in crypto. It will lead you astray 1 reply
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(2/3) instead, builders need to do two things:
- 1) be optimized for the users who are here today. That means the crypto natives (believers), the sharks (traders and former HFT), the farmers (low risk, want airdrops and yield) and the degens (gambling retail that onboarded to EVM in NFT era and Solana Memecoins in 2023/2024). If you do not, your revenue will be a fraction of its potential. Oh, and there are Stablecoin users not in the US
- 2) Stay on the cutting edge of technology. The tech simply is not good enough today. It’s too scary to self custody, too annoying to pay for gas, frequently too expensive (in times of gas spikes, which is effectively downtime for many users and app devs), not sufficiently private (everything out in the open). Infra exhaustion is real, but it is true that we are still not there yet. Being tired of grifters launching alt-L1s and L2s is real, but stay focused on the signal and not the noise 0 reply
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