Product

Challenge: Polymarket, the most robust PMF ethereum app, is stuck at $100m OI and ~20k DAU.

Where does the next 10x come from?

I've come to increasingly believe that there are only two kinds of scale businesses that can hit escape velocity in crypto: 

1. Trading supply chain tooling: exchanges, launchpads  
2. Making a boring existing workflow faster: stablecoins

literally everything else is TAM-constrained

This seems harsh, but it's just the reality of building in what is really a very small market. Only once you can see things clearly can you develop a strategy to build a scale business

Sometimes it feels insane that this is a 3T asset class when the reality on the ground feels like 200 companies, and 10,000 traders.

My contrarian take is that almost all of the following categories are sub-scale and can sustain 0–2 winners at best without a 100x expansion of their market: 

- Selling blockspace: L1s, L2s
- Infra / dev tooling: proving, security, oracles, explorers, 
- All SaaS targeted towards crypto native companies: nodes, index, audit, analytics, raas

tether, usdc, (now) bridge. granted, much of tether and usdc is also trading supply chain, but the usecase is starting to separate

somehow running up against the TAM walls feels worse than not having pmf to begin with

its not an impossible situation but when the industry at large is not cooperating youre taking on a battle 10-100x more difficult -- the sane choice is most often to do something else