artyst

I’m going to say what a lot of people are thinking… Despite the immense institutional adoption, Bitcoin almost certainly being on track to becoming a reserve asset globally and stablecoins shaping up to be the de facto unit of exchange in a few years, the industry feels a little jaded. I know a lot of people are crashing out, leaving the industry for good and questioning the last three years. The bear market was absolutely fucking brutal. If you experienced the fallout following FTX, UST and even the USDC depeg and you are still here you deserve a medal, or putting in a psyche ward… same thing. Anyway, as if that was bad enough, the 18 months that followed us coming out the depths of despair were, for some people, equally as brutal. Some tokens have never seen their previous all-time highs and never will. Some tokens that are fundamentally great assets on paper are so cucked it is unbelievable. This alone has contributed to what feels like a three-year bear market for some people. The problem is, the perceived sensible and rational thing to do is buy good assets at great prices. As a one-liner that sounds great. What it doesn’t explain is a deeply rooted issue with these assets. There is an oversupply problem across the board which isn’t going away until these ideas stop getting funded. - We have way too many products compared to actual users. - Despite this, ideas from incompetent teams continue to get funded. - There are more L1s than people on earth. - The L1 premium blueprint has been figured out and exploited to death. - Thankfully, this looks like it is reverting to the mean (which I can only assume is orders of magnitude lower than here). - The second-order effects of more adoption is that people want products that are better and not worse than their off-chain counterparts. - This is generally not the case yet. There is a general shift away from decentralisation maximalism towards some hybrid permissionless system that is more pragmatic. You can’t expect the same TAM for purely decentralised products vs products that leverage crypto rails but still have centralised components. DAOs categorically do not work and are a waste of time, money and resources. Funnily enough, there is a reason we converged over tens of thousands of years to having an elected system that has overarching say when it comes to decisions. And what? Now, some idiot who is unemployable in the real world by any other means gets to sit behind a laptop with no social, technical or business skills and decides how billions of dollars get spent? Behave… The best projects do not need a token, and the best tokens do not need a project. Both can coexist, but let's not confuse the two. If a token is for governance only, then what are we doing here? It is detrimental to everyone other than early investors and team members (and maybe really skilled DAO treasury raiders) to have a token that is under the guise of decentralisation. Let’s just call it pseudo-equity and excessive runway, a treasure chest for anyone who wants to stay long enough to ensure that the initial people who sold the token don’t go to jail for fraud. Tokenisation is great and I really love it, but let’s also not pretend we need to tokenize everything because we never need to do anything to everything. The world is complex and we should understand that talking in absolutes makes people think you are crazy, probably quite rightly so too. Now, my main issue… Venture capital firms that get paid a standard 2% yearly management fee on the notional sum plus a 20% performance fee on any profit raise way too much money. A16z has raised over $7.6bn alone since 2018 to invest in this space. They also charge a premium 2.5% management and 30% performance fee. 2.5% of $7.6bn is $190m per year… Show me where any fund can effectively allocate that amount of capital in the private crypto markets. The short answer is that it can’t. And this is just one firm, which I like and respect a lot, but it is still an issue. This is also known by many charlatans who have figured out that the funds raising way too much money have to actively allocate their LPs' funds. If not, people will come knocking and ask what they are actually doing with their money. This results in extremely over-competitive rounds with super-inflated market caps and way too much concentration in the hands of the funds. It also results in competitor funds that didn’t get their allocation taking the idea to dev shops and “incubating” this new novel idea they didn’t make the table on. It is a great response to any investor who asks why they didn’t get allocation to the next big innovation in the crypto space… So, yeah I am not naive enough to think this doesn’t happen in other industries too. The issue is when you sell people the dream of disrupting some of the largest total addressable markets in the world and you are doing it through a novel L1 that just so happens to have a token that every man/woman on the street can buy—that is a recipe for disaster. People get so jaded by the “good assets” that are only inflated so highly in the private markets because the big dogs need to eat. They don’t come back for more each subsequent cycle. This is why we had/have memecoins still catching a bid before everything else. Where will the funding come from?! Flat out... if a lot of mediocre ideas stopped getting funded, there would be adequate capital for the novel, innovative and groundbreaking ideas that never make it to market because of the noise. Now, I obviously appreciate it is a free market and people can do whatever the fuck they want but until people really begin to crash and burn from this set up, there will be no change. So, create and don’t destroy and all that... What do we do about it? Well, I fundamentally think this comes down to fair access funding. Without speaking to him, I believe @cobie is addressing this with @echodotxyz. If you continue to peel the layers back of this rather expensive onion, you arrive at the solution being funding. If we are truly saying, fuck it, everything and everyone should have a token, then there is the other side of that too. People who truly want to invest should be allowed the opportunity to do so on the same level playing field as the fat cats at the top. This isn’t a “fuck VCs” rage post, it is just an obvious clear issue that needs to be continually spoken about. The equal and opposite reaction is pumpfun. I am not saying that it is any better, but the truth and resolution surely lie somewhere in between. This results in a one-dimensional gamified system where supply gets put into the hands of the very few which is obviously dogshit too Lower allocation/proof of humanity (NOT KYC/AML, probs using zkTLS (I am too stupid to work it out)) plus transparent private, primary and secondary markets for anyone with the privilege to access these deals could be the way forward. A lot of the issue is that people have no idea when founding members have offloaded the majority of their bags prior to the token going live - I thought we were building a more transparent system? This is actively worse than traditional markets. If people continue to tell me you need $200m to build an L1 I will point to Hyperliquid every. single. time. And if you can’t do it on a reasonable budget, then maybe, just maybe… you shouldn’t.